---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Wed, Nov 20, 2013 at 8:10 AM
Subject: re: F.C.C. Chairman Calls for Transforming the Technology Used by Phone Systems
To: "letters@nytimes.com"

To the Editor:

     Bizarrely, in 2013, U.S. law recognizes my expectation of privacy on "Plain Old Telephone Service" ("POTS") but not when I use a cellphone or when my signal is relayed by microwave. To tap the former requires a court order. To tap the latter does not because when I transmitted that message by radio to the cell-tower, I entrusted it to a third party and therefore surrendered any expectation of privacy.

   In this legal milieu, to take from me my landline telephone and replace it with a modern system of data streaming is to open all my 'phone conversations to search without warrant. If we are going to change the technology of telephony, we must first change the legal protections that go with it.

Barry Haskell Levine

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/20/business/media/fcc-chairman-calls-for-transforming-the-technology-used-by-phone-systems.html

F.C.C. Chairman Calls for Transforming the Technology Used by Phone Systems

By EDWARD WYATT

Published: November 19, 2013

Enlarge This ImageWASHINGTON — Americans could soon be one step closer to getting that videophone they were promised in the 1960s.

Mary F. Calvert for The New York Times

Tom Wheeler, the chairman of the F.C.C., said experiments would begin next year to set the transition in motion.

The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission said on Tuesday that the agency would begin “a diverse set of experiments” next year that would begin to move the nation’s telephone system from its century-old network of circuits, switches and copper wires to one that transmits phone calls in a manner similar to that used for Internet data.

The Internet-based systems allow more information to be transmitted at one time, making possible the addition of video to phone calls, as employed by services like Skype andVonage. While consumers can already use those services, most of the legacy telephone networks still use analog technology, employing an out-of-date system of physical switches that is expensive to keep operating.

Those old networks make possible what is known in the communications industry as Plain Old Telephone Service, or POTS, and they use types of switches that in many cases are no longer manufactured, telephone company executives say. The outdated switches limit the ability of companies to expand the networks to carry more traffic and impede a company’s ability to refurbish equipment.

The F.C.C. chairman, Tom Wheeler, who took over the post Nov. 4, announced in a blog post on Tuesday that he expected the commission to approve a plan in January to consider rewriting the legal, policy and technical issues that govern telephone service.

“This is what I call the Fourth Network Revolution,” Mr. Wheeler wrote. “History has shown that new networks catalyze innovation, investment, ideas and ingenuity. Their spillover effects can transform society — think of the creation of industrial organizations and the standardized time zones that followed in the wake of the railroad and telegraph.”

The transition from the old system, known as time-division multiplexing, to Internet protocol communication, or I.P., is both symbolic and substantive. Millions of Americans already have I.P.-based telephone service, which transmits packets of data and carries larger amounts of that data than is possible with the old system.

In addition to Skype and Vonage, I.P.-based services include VerizonFiOS and AT&T’s U-Verse.

AT&T petitioned the F.C.C. last year to begin the transition to the new system from the old by setting up trials of upgraded service. But some consumer advocates and public interest groups have warned that because the F.C.C. has limited authority over the Internet, telephone systems that use I.P. might not be subject to many of the rules that produced universal telephone service.

Those requirements include a regulation that one phone company in every geographic area serve as the carrier of last resort, so that anybody in the United States who wants telephone service in their home is guaranteed to receive it.

Jim Cicconi, AT&T’s senior executive vice president of external and legislative affairs, said the company welcomed Mr. Wheeler’s action.

“Our current infrastructure has served us well for almost a century, but it no longer meets the needs of America’s consumers,” Mr. Cicconi said in a statement. “The transition to broadband and I.P. services that has already begun is driven by consumers who are moving to the Internet and choosing to connect in ways not imagined just a decade ago.”

He added: “Like any change, it requires planning. The geographic trials directed by Chairman Wheeler will provide the real-world answers needed to ensure a seamless transition.” Mr. Cicconi said the company was committed to working “closely and constructively” with the F.C.C. and other groups with an interest in the conversion.

Public Knowledge, a consumer-oriented group, said Mr. Wheeler and the F.C.C. “must ensure that the policies and principles that have guaranteed that the telephone network is universal, accessible and reliable continue to apply to the communications networks of the 21st Century.”

Significantly, the consumer group has championed the transition in recent months, agreeing that the technology needs updating. “It’s important that the F.C.C. show that this transition is not just about AT&T or any other carrier,” Harold Feld, a senior vice president at Public Knowledge, said. “It impacts the lives and well-being of every American.”

Mr. Wheeler said a task force would report at the commission’s December meeting on what needed to be done, and in January the commission would adopt an order to begin the process. That adoption requires a vote of a majority of the five commissioners, but Mr. Wheeler noted that the three commissioners with the longest tenure have supported moving ahead.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Mon, Nov 18, 2013 at 8:13 AM
Subject: re: Bloomberg News Suspends Reporter Whose Article on China Was Not Published
To: "letters@nytimes.com"

To the Editor:

    Matthew Winkler neatly summarizes "If we run the story, we'll be kicked out of China" why the corporate media--including this newspaper--cannot suffice to keep the electorate informed in the 21st century.  A news organization that has a corporate address is a news organization that can be leashed and muzzled. 

    We need alternative news sources not because they are intrinsically more credible in what they say, but because the corporate media are always suspect in what they cannot say.

Barry Haskell Levine

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/18/world/asia/reporter-on-unpublished-bloomberg-article-is-suspended.html

Bloomberg News Suspends Reporter Whose Article on China Was Not Published

By EDWARD WONG and CHRISTINE HAUGHNEY

Published: November 17, 2013

RelatedBEIJING — A reporter for Bloomberg News who worked on an unpublished article about China, which employees for the company said had been killed for political reasons by top Bloomberg editors, was suspended last week by managers.

• Bloomberg News Is Said to Curb Articles That Might Anger China(November 9, 2013)

• Bloomberg Says News Service Did Not Kill Articles on China(November 13, 2013)

The reporter, Michael Forsythe, was based in Hong Kong and has written award-winning investigative articles on China. He met with supervisors and was placed on leave, said two Bloomberg employees with knowledge of the situation, which was supposed to be private. The move came days after several news outlets, including The New York Times, published reports quoting unnamed Bloomberg employees saying that top editors, led by Matthew Winkler, the editor in chief, decided in late October not to publish an investigative article because of fears that Bloomberg would be expelled from China.

The article, about a Chinese tycoon and his ties to families of Communist Party leaders, was written by Mr. Forsythe and Shai Oster. Mr. Winkler has denied that the article was killed.

Last week, after the allegations of self-censorship were published, reporters and editors in the Bloomberg bureau in Hong Kong who had worked on the unpublished article were called into a series of meetings, Bloomberg employees said. They were asked questions about the news reports face to face and through conference calls with top editors and executives based in Hong Kong and New York, the employees said.

On Wednesday, Mr. Forsythe, who joined Bloomberg in 2000, was asked to go to the floor where human resources offices are, and he did not return to the newsroom, employees said.

Two representatives of Bloomberg News declined to comment on Sunday. Mr. Forsythe also declined to comment for this story.

At around 6:40 p.m. on Monday, he said on his Twitter account @PekingMike, “Thanks everyone for the incredible outpouring of sympathy and support. It has really helped me and my family get through this.” Around 8 p.m., he sent out the first line of that same message in Chinese.

The Times’s account of the unpublished article appeared online on Nov. 8 and cited Bloomberg employees who said that Mr. Winkler had conveyed his decision about the article in a conference call on Oct. 29 to Mr. Forsythe, Mr. Oster and two other Hong Kong-based journalists, after the text had already been through a series of late-stage edits in which no big objections were raised, and had been approved by a lawyer.

In the call, Mr. Winkler defended his decision by comparing it to the self-censorship by foreign news bureaus trying to preserve their ability to report inside Nazi-era Germany, according to the Bloomberg employees familiar with the discussion. “He said, ‘If we run the story, we’ll be kicked out of China,’ ” one employee said.

Mr. Winkler said in an email to The Times that “the stories are active and not spiked.” He would not comment on the conference call.

The Financial Times and Next Media Animation also reported independently on the accusations of self-censorship. The Financial Times published what it said were excerpts from emails from top Bloomberg editors in New York to the reporters that expressed strong support for the story in September. An email dated Sept. 18 from Laurie Hays, a senior executive editor, said the story was “almost there.” An email nine days later from Jonathan Kaufman, a managing editor, said: “The story is terrific. I am in awe of the way you tracked down and deciphered the financial holdings and the players. It’s a real revelation. Looking forward to pushing it up the line.”

The suspension of Mr. Forsythe was first reported on Friday night by The New York Post.

Last Thursday, Norman Pearlstine, who recently left the post of chief content officer at Bloomberg L.P. to rejoin Time Inc., was asked about the news reports at a public talk. Mr. Pearlstine said that he had spoken with Mr. Winkler and had heard that “the story was just not ready for publication and they’re still working on it.”

Bloomberg L.P., the parent company of Bloomberg News, receives much of its revenue from selling subscriptions for its financial-information terminals. After Bloomberg News published an article in June 2012 on the family wealth of Xi Jinping, at that time the incoming Communist Party chief, sales of Bloomberg terminals in China slowed, as officials ordered state enterprises not to subscribe. Officials also blocked Bloomberg’s website on Chinese servers, and the company has been unable to get residency visas for new journalists.

Mr. Forsythe was a lead reporter on the article about the Xi family and other articles in the 2012 “Revolution to Riches” series, which received a George Polk Award and awards from the Asia Society, the Overseas Press Club and the Society of American Business Editors and Writers.

Last Wednesday, Amanda Bennett, until recently the executive editor for projects and investigations at Bloomberg, said she was leaving the company. She told Talking Biz News that she was “most proud of the groundbreaking” article on the Xi family. Bloomberg employees said that the investigative unit Ms. Bennett had run would soon undergo major changes.

Edward Wong reported from Beijing, and Christine Haughney from New York.

The Art of Senate Stoppage

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/14/opinion/collins-the-art-of-senate-stoppage.html?hp&rref=opinion

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine <levinebar@gmail.com>
Date: Thu, Nov 14, 2013 at 8:27 AM
Subject: re: The Art of Senate Stoppage
To: "letters@nytimes.com" <letters@nytimes.com>

The U.S. had neither an embassy nor a consulate in Benghazi. That much is plain. What exactly we had there our Department of State has labored long and hard to obscure. It seems to have been a CIA spy base. Islamist militants attacked it, perhaps believing that the CIA was detaining or torturing their fellows there. We don't know if they were right.
All of which has nothing to do with the confirmation of a new chair of the Federal Reserve. There is no legitimate coupling of the one to the other. Janet Yellen deserves confirmation. And we deserve to know whether ambassador Chris Stevens was killed in performing his diplomatic mission, or in shilling for our CIA.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/14/opinion/collins-the-art-of-senate-stoppage.html?hp&rref=opinion

Lessons in a Surveillance Drama Redux

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/10/public-editor/sullivan-lessons-in-a-surveillance-drama-redux.html?pagewanted=2&_r=2&ref=opinion

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine <levinebar@gmail.com>
Date: Sun, Nov 10, 2013 at 6:41 AM
Subject: re: Lessons in a Surveillance Drama Redux
To: "letters@nytimes.com" <letters@nytimes.com>

To the Editor:

      When Bill Keller decided to quash the Lichtblau/Risen story of widespread illegal wiretapping, in one stroke he cheated the shareholders of the New York Times out of the scoop of the year (and the attendant boost in revenues) and cheated the American electorate out of the information on which we should have based our political choice in the national election.

   A fever of fear following the attacks of 9/11 can be no excuse.The very pressure that the White House brought to bear here should have screamed to any journalist that this was neither small nor trivial. As William Randolph Hearst put it "News is something somebody doesn't want printed; all else is advertising".  By kow-towing to "somebody", Bill Keller degraded journalism.

Barry Haskell Levine

By MARGARET SULLIVAN

Published: November 9, 2013 5 Comments

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IT was almost eight years ago that The Times published a blockbuster story by James Risen and Eric Lichtblau about a secret Bush administration program to eavesdrop on Americans without warrants. But for many Times readers, it still resonates deeply.

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The Public Editor's Journal

E-mail: public@nytimes.com

Twitter: twitter.com/sulliview

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The 13-month delay in publishing the article, a period that spanned a presidential election, continues to bother these readers. Why did The Times, at the urgent request of the administration, wait so long? What does that say about the relationship between the government and the press? Would the same thing happen today? I hear about it often in email and online comments. It crops up in newspaper columns, on Twitter, in journalism reviews.

Now, in light of the huge leak of classified information on government surveillance from Edward J. Snowden, the former contractor for the National Security Agency, the episode has a renewed currency.

Mr. Snowden has said that, because of this very episode, he chose to take his trove elsewhere (largely to Glenn Greenwald at The Guardian, to the video journalist Laura Poitras and to Barton Gellman at The Washington Post). Mr. Snowden recently told the journalist Natasha Vargas-Cooper that those who put themselves in danger to leak information “must have absolute confidence that the journalists they go to will report on that information rather than bury it.”

In recent weeks, I have interviewed some of the key players in that nine-year-old drama. The episode — much written about elsewhere, in New York magazine, in The Washington Post, in a book by Mr. Lichtblau and in a new one by Peter Baker of The Times — has gone largely unexplained in the pages of The Times itself.

The public editor at that time, Byron Calame, submitted a long list of questions to Times leadership but got no answers. He later wrote about one element of the situation, establishing that the article could have appeared before the presidential election of 2004, in which George W. Bush won a second term. More recently, HBO bought the rights and had a screenplay written. Certainly, there is cinematic material here: The reporters who fought to publish; the government officials who wanted to kill the story (even arranging a last-ditch Oval Office meeting where Mr. Bush made the case to the Times publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr.); the big-name editors weighing the decision.

Given the episode’s recent re-emergence, I thought it might be useful to examine it here, in order to give Times readers a deeper understanding of what happened and why, and to explore why it matters now and what the lessons might be.

Everyone involved sees the episode as inextricably linked with its moment in time — its proximity to 9/11 and all that followed. Some also say that a tumultuous era at The Times, after the Jayson Blair scandal and the flawed reporting in the run-up to the Iraq war, may have made editors more cautious.

“The whole confluence was pretty remarkable,” Mr. Lichtblau told me. Although he strongly believed, and still does, that the story should have run when it was first ready — the fall of 2004 — he sees the historical context as a major reason that it did not.

So does Bill Keller, then the executive editor, who — on the recommendation of the Washington bureau chief at the time, Philip Taubman — decided against running the original story.

“Three years after 9/11, we, as a country, were still under the influence of that trauma, and we, as a newspaper, were not immune,” Mr. Keller said. “It was not a kind of patriotic rapture. It was an acute sense that the world was a dangerous place.”

Michael V. Hayden, who was the director of the N.S.A. and later the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, told me in an interview that he argued strenuously against publication, right up until the moment when The Times decided to go ahead. His rationale: “That this effort was designed to intercept threatening communication” and to prevent another terrorist attack.

In the end, The Times published the story with a couple of guns held to its head: First, the knowledge that the information in the article was also contained in a book by Mr. Risen, “State of War,” whose publication date was bearing down like a freight train. Second, at the end, the word of a possible injunction against publishing, Mr. Risen said, provided a final push: “It was like a lightning bolt.” (Mr. Hayden said that would not have happened: “Prior restraint was never in the cards.”)

Like a game of chicken played on a high wire, it remains “the most stressful and traumatic time of my life,” Mr. Risen recalls. Although The Times later said that further reporting strengthened the story enough to justify publishing it, few doubt that Mr. Risen’s book was what took an essentially dead story and revived it in late 2005. “Jim’s book was the driving force,” Mr. Lichtblau said.

There was another important factor, he said. “The Bush administration actively misled us, claiming there was never a doubt that the wiretapping operations were legal.” That turned out to be “laughably untrue.” In fact, there was an imminent revolt on this very issue within the Justice Department.

What would happen now? What if Mr. Snowden had brought his information trove to The Times? By all accounts, The Times would have published the revelations — just as it did many WikiLeaks stories.

“I think our story broke the fever,” Mr. Risen said. “We’re much better now” about pushing back against government pressure. Jill Abramson, the executive editor (then managing editor), has not only defended the Snowden-related stories as squarely in the public interest but has had Times reporters and editors collaborating with The Guardian and ProPublica on Snowden-sourced stories.

IS it ever appropriate for the press to hold back information at the government’s urging? It depends on whom you ask. Mr. Hayden would answer that one way; Mr. Greenwald quite another. (And even Mr. Hayden told me that he can’t prove any harm to national security from the publication of the eavesdropping stories — then or now.) I like Mr. Risen’s answer: “Very rarely.”

More Public Editor Columns

The Public Editor's Journal

E-mail: public@nytimes.com

Twitter: twitter.com/sulliview

Phone: (212) 556-7652

Address: Public Editor
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Mr. Keller and Mr. Taubman say that they made the best decisions they could at the time, after a great deal of consideration. “If people knew everything, different people would reach different conclusions,” Mr. Keller said. As for whether publishing the article in the fall of 2004 would have changed history, it’s impossible to know.

“It’s become an unexamined article of faith” on the left, he said, that early publication might have given John Kerry the presidency.

One thing is certain, Mr. Keller said. The story (published in December 2005, it won a Pulitzer Prize in 2006) “looks prescient,” he said, adding: “We know now that people with noble intentions can run way out of bounds. Risen and Lichtblau were on to that a long time ago.”

What’s more, the reporters were working without the cache of classified documentation that a whistle-blower might have. They based their story on the patient development of confidential sources.

Mr. Taubman remembers his fateful recommendation not to publish as “an agonizing one.” He dismisses any role played by his relationships with members of the Bush administration, including Condoleezza Rice, with whom he shares longstanding and close ties to Stanford University (where they both now teach). As national security adviser in 2004 and secretary of state in 2005, she opposed the article’s publication, he said. But “that did not affect my thinking,” which was that national security would be harmed by publication.

What if he knew then everything he knows now, in light of the Snowden revelations? “I would have made a different decision had I known that Jim and Eric were tugging on a thread that led to a whole tapestry,” Mr. Taubman said.

Given the law of unintended consequences, and a fair helping of irony, the publication of the warrantless eavesdropping story resonates now in quite another way: The furor it caused prompted the Bush administration to push hard for changes in the laws governing surveillance.

“Our story set in motion the process of making all this stuff legal,” Mr. Lichtblau said. “Now it’s all encoded in law. Bush got everything he wanted on his way out of office.”

There may be public outrage over the latest wave of surveillance revelations, but the government has a helpful defense: Hey, it’s legal.

Mr. Taubman now teaches a course at Stanford — titled “Need to Know” — about the tension between government and the news media. He recently brought Mr. Hayden in as a guest speaker.

What is the major lesson, then, of the drama in which Mr. Taubman played such a crucial role?

“The old adage, which we violated, is still a good one,” he said. “Always err on the side of publishing.”

Hollywood Donors Set to Cast Hillary Clinton in Top Role

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Fri, Nov 8, 2013 at 8:55 AM
Subject: re: Hollywood Donors Set to Cast Hillary Clinton in Top Role
To: "letters@nytimes.com"

To the Editor:

   As long as U.S. law privileges political donations as protected symbolic free speech, moneyed elites--whether in Hollywood or on Wall Street--will presume to crown our "leaders" for us. We will never truly know the "voice of the People" while the voices of the rich are permitted to dominate the public discourse.

Barry Haskell Levine

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/08/us/politics/in-hollywood-clintons-a-star.html?hpw&rref=politics&_r=0

By AMY CHOZICK and ADAM NAGOURNEY

Published: November 7, 2013

LOS ANGELES — In the prelude to the 2008 Democratic presidential primary season, the split between the Hollywood mogulDavid Geffen and Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton represented an early and embarrassing sign of trouble for Mrs. Clinton.

Mr. Geffen, previously one of the Clintons’ most generous benefactors, criticized the former first lady as overly ambitious and called the former president “a reckless guy.” Hollywood divided, quickly and sharply, between Mrs. Clinton and Barack Obama, then a senator.

When Mrs. Clinton arrives here on Friday to accept an award at an A-list charity event organized by, among others, the producer Jeffrey Katzenberg, she will find a decidedly more embracing climate.

Conversations with a range of Hollywood figures suggest that there is widespread — if not so starry-eyed — support for Mrs. Clinton should she decide to run for president in 2016, a stark contrast with 2008, and an important early indication of Mrs. Clinton’s standing with some of the biggest donors in the Democratic Party.

“If she ran, I would support her — no question,” Mr. Geffen said in an interview. “I think she’s the best candidate currently available for either party.”

Mr. Katzenberg, who joined Mr. Geffen and Steven Spielberg in arranging a $1.3 million fund-raiser for Mr. Obama at Mr. Geffen’s Beverly Hills estate in February 2007, also said he planned to throw his weight behind Mrs. Clinton the next time around.

“If Secretary Clinton makes the decision to run, I expect she’ll have near-unanimous support here,” Mr. Katzenberg wrote in an email. “Hillary represents our best chance to win in 2016, build upon the successes of the Obama administration, and keep the country moving in the right direction.”

The shift reflects enthusiasm about Mrs. Clinton’s prospects for winning the election, but it also highlights the less rose-colored view of Mr. Obama now held by some of his most loyal supporters. “The Hollywood community really came together in the last election and raised an awful lot of money and supported him,” said Felix Schein, a Los Angeles-based political strategist. “I wouldn’t say that’s gone, but the mood is sour.”

In his first run for president, Mr. Obama offered Hollywood not only a new leading man but an irresistible story line: The idea of electing the first black president electrified the industry. And he was an antiwar candidate in a part of the country where the war in Iraq was highly unpopular. Mrs. Clinton, by contrast, seemed like a sequel, a wooden Washington insider.

Disenchantment with Mr. Obama in Hollywood has grown over the years, over such issues as eavesdropping and the perception that he has been weak in dealing with Republicans in Congress.

There is little suggestion, however, that this is the major factor driving the embrace of Mrs. Clinton; several figures here said they were at this point more frustrated with Republicans in Congress than with Mr. Obama.

Given “how poisoned the atmosphere is,” said Rob Reiner, the actor and director, “I don’t think he could have done any better.”

The Clintons have always had a close, if complicated, relationship with Hollywood. Bill Clinton had an ease with the world of pop culture, fostered by his fun-loving mother, Virginia, who revered Elvis Presley. After a speech at the 1988 Democratic convention that most pundits considered political suicide, Mr. Clinton used an appearance on “The Tonight Show” to poke fun at — and ultimately redeem — himself.

In 1992 he played the saxophone on “The Arsenio Hall Show,” and it was his television producer friends Harry and Linda Bloodworth-Thomason whose video, “The Man From Hope,” introduced many Americans to the future president’s small-town-boy-made-good biography.

Last week, at a charity gala at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel Richard Plepler, the chief executive of HBO, told the story of the time he and the actors Billy Crystal, Sam Waterston and Christopher Reeve dropped in unannounced on Mr. Clinton in the Oval Office as he pored over Supreme Court briefing books.

“I hope HBO will soon come again to the White House and there will be another President Clinton sitting at that desk,” Mr. Plepler said. “But next time, I promise to knock first.”

Since leaving the State Department, Mrs. Clinton has reconnected with old Hollywood friends like the agent Casey Wasserman, and her schedule has been peppered with Hollywood-related events.

Last month, she headlined a $25,000-per-couple luncheon in Beverly Hills hosted by the entertainment entrepreneur Haim Saban to raise money for Terry McAuliffe’s Virginia governor’s campaign.

Before Mrs. Clinton picks up an award at the International Medical Corps gala in Beverly Hills on Friday, she and her daughter, Chelsea, will attend a discussion about early-childhood development moderated by Mr. Reiner. And the political action committee Ready for Hillary plans to hold two Hollywood fund-raisers by the end of the year, one of which will be hosted by Howard Gordon, the executive producer of the hit TV shows “Homeland” and “24.”

The changed climate does surprise some of Mrs. Clinton’s crucial 2008 supporters. Antonio R. Villaraigosa, the former mayor of Los Angeles, who was a prominent figure in Mrs. Clinton’s 2008 campaign and Mr. Obama’s re-election campaign in 2012, said he was struck by the shift.

“There’s a lot of support and excitement about the prospect of Hillary as a candidate,” Mr. Villaraigosa said. “People feel like she would be tough to beat. She’s a proven commodity.”

The newfound support is welcome, but it also brings back memories of the rifts between the Clintons and Hollywood donors in 2008, the most notable of which was Mr. Geffen, who aired his grievances with the Clinton “machine” in an interview with Maureen Dowd of The New York Times. He criticized Mrs. Clinton for her 2002 vote to authorize the use of force in Iraq. “It’s not a very big thing to say ‘I made a mistake’ on the war, and typical of Hillary Clinton that she can’t,” he told The Times.

Mr. Geffen had raised about $18 million for Mr. Clinton in 1992 and 1996 and slept in the Lincoln Bedroom twice, which he told Ms. Dowd was “not as nice as my bedroom.” The falling-out between Mr. Geffen and the Clintons attracted widespread news media attention and entered political lore as one of the most acrimonious donor-politician rifts.

In the interview this week, Mr. Geffen acknowledged his past critical words of the Clintons, but added: “I think Hillary is an extraordinary, smart, accomplished woman.” In July, he told Fortune magazine he would “absolutely” support Mrs. Clinton.

“I supported Obama because when I heard his speech at the Democratic convention, I told him I would support him for president if he ran, and this was before anyone announced,” he said. “And I’m a man of my word.”

Mrs. Clinton’s support here also highlights a concern in the Democratic Party that should she decide not to pursue the presidential nomination, there is no obvious fallback candidate. The Hollywood power brokers interviewed for this article agree that other potential 2016 candidates, including Andrew M. Cuomo, the governor of New York, Joseph R. Biden Jr., the vice president, or Elizabeth Warren, a Democratic senator from Massachusetts, would not generate the same kind of unity.

“Last time, the community was really split down the middle between Obama and Hillary,” said Mr. Reiner, a steadfast supporter of Mrs. Clinton’s. “This year I think everybody is going to be rallying around Hillary.”

Asked why, Mr. Reiner said that in addition to Mrs. Clinton’s record: “There is nobody else.
”

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Sat, Nov 2, 2013 at 2:03 PM
Subject: re: Doctors Fear Losing Leukemia Drug Deemed Risky
To: "letters@nytimes.com"

To the Editor:

  The FDA's approval of Gleevec for CML in 2001 changed chemotherapy. Until then, we had attacked any cell that tried to replicate and hoped to kill the cancer faster than we killed the patient. Since then, we target the biochemical signals that drive the malignancy.  Gleevec was wonderfully effective--initially--against both early and late-state CML. But while the cases that were treated early, when there was only one mutation remained in remission for years, those that had progressed further ("blast crisis") rapidly developed resistance to Gleevec. 

   Ponatinib was developed and launched to defeat the most common resistance mechanism to Gleevec. But the larger lesson--that cancer should be pre-empted, when the mutations are few, without waiting to tick off all the "hallmarks of cancer" has been lost on both clinicians and on the FDA. Only dermatologists reach for the scalpel (or the cyrogenics) to remove pre-cancerous lesions. And only the dermatologists are winning. For other tissues, pre-cancerous conditions aren't even called diseases, and treating them can't be remunerated under current American health insurance policies.

Barry Haskell Levine

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/02/health/doctors-fear-losing-leukemia-drug-deemed-risky.html?_r=0

Doctors Fear Losing Leukemia Drug Deemed Risky

By DENISE GRADY and ANDREW POLLACK

Published: November 1, 2013

People with fatal diseases may be willing to try risky treatments that have a chance of saving their lives. But when is the risk too high?

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Brian Lee for The New York Times

Dr. Brian Druker, of the Knight Cancer Institute at Oregon Health and Science University, said, “My patients are panicked.”

That question was at the heart of a decision announced Thursday by theFood and Drug Administration to suspend sales of a leukemia drug, Iclusig, that was keeping patients alive but also significantly raising their odds of heart attacks, strokes,blindness, death and amputations.

Despite the potential consequences, several doctors who treat people with the disease, chronic myeloid leukemia, said there were patients for whom nothing else works, and whose lives depend on the drug.

“My concern is that I have patients right now who are benefiting from this medication with very few side effects, and if they’re on the end of a one-month prescription, what’s going to happen when their medication runs out?” said Dr. Brian Druker, the director of the Knight Cancer Institute at Oregon Health and Science University. “Without this medication, they won’t have long to live. My patients are panicked.”

The drug agency has said that patients who need the drug will still be able to obtain it, but that doctors will have to file applications for each patient, a process that some say is cumbersome and might leave patients tangled up in red tape, with no pills.

Dr. Michael Mauro, a leukemia specialist at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, said that 23 leukemia specialists and three patient advocacy groups had sent the drug agency a letter saying they were concerned that the sudden withdrawal of the drug would interrupt treatment for patients with no other good options.

Iclusig, also called ponatinib, was approved in December 2012 to treat patients who had chronic myeloid leukemia that did not respond to other drugs. The disease is a relatively uncommon form of leukemia, with about 5,000 cases a year and 600 deaths in the United States. The wholesale price of the drug was $115,000 a year.

Iclusig was given accelerated approval by the drug agency under a program that allows some important drugs to reach the market quickly, without the full evidence of safety and efficacy that the agency usually requires but subject to further studies to confirm the drug’s benefit. 

Critics might say Iclusig’s approval is a sign that accelerated approval can allow dangerous drugs on the market. But supporters of the program say the fact that marketing of Iclusig is being suspended is a sign that the system is working as intended.

Iclusig is part of a new generation of “targeted” drugs that act against specific biochemical defects that fuel the explosive growth of certain types of cancer. The first of these drugs for chronic myeloid leukemia was Gleevec. (Dr. Druker was one of its developers.) It revolutionized the treatment of the illness and transformed it from a death sentence into a chronic disease that people could live with for many years.

Iclusig is one of several drugs developed for patients who did not respond to Gleevec, or who became resistant to it.

But even though these powerful new drugs are specifically designed to fight cancer cells, they also find their way to other targets, including the cardiovascular system.

In a bulletin on Thursday, the drug agency said that 24 percent of patients taking Iclusig who were studied for a median of 1.3 years, and 48 percent studied for a median of 2.7 years, had suffered “serious adverse vascular events.” Those figures are unusually high, and higher than what was reported from the initial studies done before the drug was approved.

The events included blockages in blood vessels that led to heart attacks, strokes, blindness and lack of blood flow to the extremities. Some of the patients were young, in their 20s, and some had no risk factors for heart or artery disease.

A spokeswoman for the drug agency, Stephanie Yao, said that in studies of the drug to date, which involved 530 patients, at least 14 had died from cardiovascular problems.

Dr. Frank Haluska, the chief medical officer of Ariad Pharmaceuticals, the Cambridge, Mass., company that makes the drug, said the company was working with the drug agency to analyze the problems and hoped to return the drug to the market. Over all, he said, about 2,000 people have taken the drug.

In an article published Friday by The New England Journal of Medicine, Harvard researchers said that the reports of cardiovascular problems linked to ponatinib and other newer drugs (not Gleevec) lacked the kind of details that doctors need to figure out whether side effects could be prevented.

One of the authors, Dr. Javid Moslehi, a co-director of the cardio-oncology program at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, said in an interview that if, for instance, the problems were known to occur because of excessive blood clotting from a cancer drug, then patients could also be given another medication to prevent clots. Or, if the cancer drug were causing plaque to build up in the arteries, patients might be given a statin to try to prevent it.

“What we don’t want to have happen is for a good drug, ponatinib, to be killed and not given to patients,” Dr. Moslehi said.

The setbacks for the drug have also shaken its maker. Ariad’s stock has lost about 85 percent of its value since Oct. 9, when it first announced that the drug agency had halted further enrollment in clinical trials of Iclusig because of the safety concerns.

On Oct. 18, it canceled a clinical trial aimed at winning approval for the drug as an initial treatment for chronic myeloid leukemia, rather than as a treatment used only after other drugs have failed. Such an approval could have greatly expanded sales of the drug.

Some Wall Street analysts say they think that the drug can remain on the market, but might be only for those whose cancer cells have a particular mutation for which other treatments do not work.

“We expect a meaningful delay for the drug to potentially return to the market and a more modest opportunity if this were to occur,” Jonathan Eckard, an analyst at Citigroup, wrote in a note Thursday.

Analysts expect that Ariad will have to sharply cut expenses, including its work force, to preserve cash.

On Friday, Ariad’s board approved a poison pill defense apparently aimed at preventing the acquisition of additional shares by Sarissa Capital, a hedge fund that might seek to change the management. Ariad said the move was designed to preserve its ability to use accumulated losses to offset future taxes.