Zyprexa was created to treat schizophrenia, but it wound up being used on depressed moms and misbehaving kids. How one of the nation’s biggest pharmaceutical companies turned a flawed and dangerous pill into a multi-billion-dollar bonanza — and who paid the price.

Read the full feature here:

• Bitter Pill

And a Q&A with writer Ben Wallace-Wells here:

• Behind the “Miracle” Drug Story: Q&A With Ben Wallace-Wells

Newspapers online, circa 1981.

(via Kos)

Concerns of waning demand for T-Bills are — at least for now — overblown:

Treasury easily sells record $40 billion in two-year notes | Los Angeles Times

John Updike dead at age 76.

If Ahnold had never repealed the $4 billion “kar tahx” in 2003, California would be about $20 billion closer to bridging its budget gap.

Photo: Loeb/AFP/Getty

So this is what it’s like to have a Reagan of our own.

How much confidence and sense of purpose does it take for a man who was pilloried by the fever-swamps as a “secret Muslim” throughout the primary and general elections to give his first Presidential interview not to the liberal loyalists at MSNBC, but to Al-Arabiya, an Arab TV network with a reach of 23 million viewers. (UPDATE: and to talk about his Muslim family members[!])

This is public diplomacy, my friends. This is a man who is serious about winning back hearts and minds. This is the power of Barack Hussein Obama’s celebrity at its height, leveraged to speak to the Arab Street.

What’s “smart power”?

This is smart power.

Part II

Part I

The Gray Lady was to Bill Kristol a succubus that sapped him of his neocon superpowers, writing ability.

Photo: cc:Wiki Commons

Looks like Obama will at last allow California — and another dozen or so states who follow the Golden State’s rules — to regulate auto greenhouse emissions through the backdoor by boosting fuel economy standards to 35 mpg.

(NYTimes.com story here)

My suspicion is that this is how we’ll see Obama handle climate in the early days of the administration. The Bushies bottlenecked so much scientifically driven regulation that there’s a lot of meaningful reform already in the pipeline.

Getting rid of Bush opened the valves. Obama merely has to stand back and let the existing regulatory frameworks relieve the built up pressure.

California can regulate cars. Other states can implement regional cap-and-trade systems. EPA has a Supreme Court mandate to regulate greenhouse gasses under the Clean Air Act, slowing new coal-fired power plants. This change is coming quickly. And fortunately for Obama, it shouldn’t require much political capital on his part in the first 100 days.