SHUT IT DOWN

Supreme Court Roundup:
Filing a false tax return (a/k/a the great american hobby) was held to be a deportable offense. Kawashima v. Holder.

Miranda update: Who doesn't believe that a prisoner serving a sentence is NOT in custody for purposes of Miranda? (Hint: six of them work in Washington, DC). 
Why it's our old friend  Justice Alito and his gang of Roberts, Thomas, Kennedy, Scalia and Kagan who comprise  perhaps the only six people on earth who don't believe that being in prison is being in custody. All the fun is  here in Howes v. Fields. 


SHUT IT DOWN:
When Republicans gleefully talk about slashing the budget and shutting the government down, here is a real life and death practical consequence of that kind of nonsensical rhetoric: children dying because of a shortage of a cancer drug according to the NY Times:


Dire shortages of two critical cancer drugs — shortfalls that have threatened the lives and care of thousands of patients — should be resolved within weeks, federal drug officials said....

There is a years-long backlog of applications for new generic drugs at the F.D.A. because the government does not have the money to hire enough reviewers to analyze the applications or inspectors to visit the facilities, many of them abroad. The generic drug industry tired of waiting for Congress to fully finance the F.D.A.’s generic drug office and this year proposed providing the agency with $299 million in annual fees to finance the review process...


[T]he pharmaceutical company Hospira is rushing 31,000 vials — enough to last the entire nation a month — of preservative-free methotrexate from its plant in Australia to the United States. Hospitals began receiving the drug, which is vital in the treatment of a common form of childhood leukemia, on Tuesday. The F.D.A. has also hastened the approval of an application by APP Pharmaceuticals to manufacture methotrexate, an application that has languished since 2010.


“Children are at such risk from drugs in short supply that it doesn’t give me a whole lot of comfort that we’ve moved past one or two of these shortages,” Dr. Adamson said. “What about the next one? And the one after that?”


But here's the thing, and maybe Justice Scalia can assist us, but we have checked the Constitution and do not see any mention of the FDA anywhere. What gives? Shut it down; defund it (cue large applause of tea party morons sitting in the audience; check that-cue large applause of  "healthy" Tea Party morons, because it's amazing how quickly you understand how the FDA works when you have cancer).
So the next time you see a bunch of yahoos clapping like mad while one of the Republican lunatics  candidates talks about not funding government agencies, scan the crowd to see if any them look sick or are wearing a hat because they've lost all their hair to chemotherapy. Odds are the crowd cheering are a healthy bunch of sons of guns. 




See You In Court.