Ron Wyden, "The Culture of Misinformation"

Ron Wyden comments on the bill passed by the US Senate Intelligence Committee over his objections in an interview with The Oregonian yesterday.

After a dozen years on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Ron Wyden doesn't get surprised easily.  But Gen. Keith Alexander, director of the National Security Agency, recently managed it, by assuring the committee that the NSA planned to put bulk data it had collected on American citizens into a secure lockbox. 
Repeatedly, the Oregon senator recalls, Alexander had told the committee the NSA didn't hold data on American citizens.  "Now," says Wyden, "he said he's going to put into a lockbox the data that he's said he doesn't have."
"The culture of misinformation," he says, "has caused a lot of people to say, they're telling us stuff that just isn't true." Even the supersecret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court, Wyden points out, has ruled that NSA has sometimes exceeded its legal and constitutional authority.
Wyden is introducing his own bill, very different from the committee's, that would prevent bulk data collection on American citizens, create an independent counsel to respond to NSA surveillance requests to the FISA court and eliminate "backdoor" breaking into social media systems. Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has introduced similar legislation, and last week Leahy and Wyden formed an alliance, becoming co-sponsors of each others' bills.

Wyden also commented to The Guardian recently.

Ron Wyden said the bill maintains "business as usual" and "remains far from anything that could be considered meaningful reform".

Oregon Burning

Fires in Oregon are being created as fast as firefighters can contain them.  Most are in Southern Oregon, but newer ones are also springing up in Eastern Oregon.  The Oregonian is reporting over a thousand lightning strikes in a 24 hour period, alongside the huge fires in Southern Oregon that have been burning over a week.

Elsewhere, firefighters are battling four big complexes in southern Oregon, one large fire in central Oregon and two big fires in Washington.
The biggest concern is the Douglas complex north of Glendale, which has scorched nearly 43,000 acres. About 470 homes and 40 commercial buildings are under some form of evacuation alert. The fire has destroyed two commercial properties and two other buildings, Mills said. But no homes have been burned.
The Douglas complex is 28 percent contained.

The air quality in Southern Oregon has hit hazardous levels, with little relief in sight.

Smoke from wildfires burning across the state prompted the Oregon Health Authority Public Health Division and the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality on Thursday to warn residents about risks associated with increasingly poor air quality.

Let us now praise Brian Druker

Brian Druker is a cancer researcher at OHSU and was featured in this article in the Oregonian today.  He is hoping to generate a national dialog on pharmaceutical companies and their pricing of blockbuster drugs out of reach of most patients, many of whom will die without them.  One of those is Gleevec which Dr Druker helped develop for Novartis in the 1990's, and costs about $100,000 a year per patient.

Druker says he has long wrestled with the knowledge that the drug he helped develop is being priced out of reach for some.

While people have wondered if he made money off of the overpricing of Gleevec, Druker says he doesn't get royalties. "I've never gotten a penny of the sales of Gleevec."

Other countries' governments set drug prices, and Druker says while he thinks it's a good idea, he thinks what's more realistic in the United States would be government pressure to bring down the cost of life-saving medications.

He envisions a discussion that includes drug companies. "This is a debate that needs the attention of Congress."

He hopes other physicians join the fight. "There's strength in numbers. If we don't speak out, who will."

Good for him, and thank you Dr Druker. 

Update,  this issue was also highlighted in the NY Times.