So let’s say you are a leading multinational pharmaceutical company and you have a blockbuster cancer drug. You patent the drug, make tremendous profits, but now the clock is ticking and the patent is set to expire. What do you do?

If you are Novartis and your blockbuster cancer drug is Gleevec you are going to engage in a common practice in the pharmaceutical industry – as well as other intellectual property dependent industries – known as evergreening. A few tweaks here, a few tweaks there, and voila reset the clock. The patent is back in effect and the money can keep rolling in. Why spend money on developing new drugs when you can spend just a fraction of that cost on legal bills defending your tweaked patent?

Perhaps out of a combination of peevishness and thirst, John Boehner recently blurted out, “I need this job like I need a hole in my head.”  Of course, the job he was complaining about, Speaker of the House, third in line for the Presidency, happens to be well-paid, prestigious, and quite evidently can be performed, after a fashion, even when drunk.  That is, it’s decidedly not like the jobs that the vast majority of Americans toil away at, should they be lucky enough to have a job at all. 

Zoe Lofgren (D-CA, @RepZoeLofgren) and Anna Eshoo (D-PhRMA, @RepAnnaEshoo) add their names to the list of members of Congress telling the FTC to abdicate their responsibility to oversee antitrust activity and just let Google do whatever the heck it wants.

Jamie Love of KEI was in a high level meeting at the US Patent and Trade Office yesterday on intellectual property and access to medicines. When he tried to access his site to demonstrate something to the attendees, he found that the WiFi system that the USPTO provides to the public would not allow access his own KEI site.

It was first reported back in 2009 that the Obama administration cut a deal with the PhRMA to break specific campaign promises he made about health care reform in exchange for PhRMA spending money to politically support the bill.

Don’t get it twisted, the legalization battle is not about subculture. It is about Big Pharma’s market protection and providing a labor pool for the Prison-Industrial-Complex.

The more mainstream businesses that leave ALEC, the higher the concentration of those businesses known to be run by right-wing activists, such as Koch Industries, and the harder it is for ALEC to pretend that they aren’t a right-wing outfit.

National Public Radio told listeners that, “Like the U.S., Europe Wrestles With Health Care.” If the wrestling in Europe is anything like the U.S., then we must be talking about professional wrestling. (“Hit him over the head with a chair!”)

Dear Reader: What caused the members of Official Washington’s institutions, particularly those part of or linked to the institutional Democratic Party, to go after Jane Hamsher hammer and tongs? Answer: Her insistence on pushing for at least a public option in the health care bill — and her warnings that without a public option, the bill would become a deadly stinky rotting albatross of a millstone around the Democrats’ collective necks in November of 2010. She was right, she was proved right, and now Steny Hoyer’s finally admitted it.

The GOP is demonstrating their seriousness about the federal debt by holding the debt ceiling hostage, screaming “We’ve got to reform Medicare TODAY!” as a means for cutting government spending. But that’s talk — loud talk, to be sure, but talk nonetheless. How serious is the GOP really when it comes to trading cuts in Medicare spending for an increase in the debt ceiling?

One way to find out is simple: push for Medicare to be able to negotiate drug prices in the same way that the VA already does.

PhRMA might not like it, but we’ve all got to share in the sacrifices, right?