Category: Politics

I must admit I’m a bit surprised to see the Supreme Court overturning the handgun ban (full ruling – PDF). I thought the court would have to take the position that gun ownership may be a right but one in which the state had enough of a compelling interest to regulate that bans like DC’s could stand. Any other decision would seem to suggest that the state couldn’t regulate weapons at all, thus overturning the 1934 automatic weapons ban and other restrictions on ownership of highly dangerous equipment for the hunting of today’s super deer.

However, as Ed Brayton discusses, they overturned the ban yet still found a middle-way. I tend to agree with Ed and with the typically-mercenary decision from Scalia. As usual Scalia is happy to pick up whatever legal tools are laying about that suit his fancy. Today it’s individual rights! Holy cow. I hope someone has the stones to throw that back in his face if gay marriage comes up in front the SCOTUS.

He writes for a 5-4 majority:
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Reading Ed Brayton’s discussion of the contrasting behaviors of our two presidential candidates with regards to law and Supreme Court decisions, I couldn’t resist comment.

One of the few advantages of medschool is that it keeps me from reading the news while I’m studying for exams, most recently my internal medicine shelf exam yesterday. Thus I’m protected from a state of constant fury from the idiocy of our dear leaders. This being a post-study day I unfortunately ended up reading this statement from John McCain from George Will’s article that giving Gitmo prisoners habeus rights was “one of the worst decisions in the history of this country.”

Wow. To his Will’s everlasting credit – he is a legitimate conservative and not a self-righteous hack serving a single political party – he follows this statement with what I immediately thought of in response to such an inane statement:

Does it rank with Dred Scott v. Sanford (1857), which concocted a constitutional right, unmentioned in the document, to own slaves and held that black people have no rights that white people are bound to respect? With Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which affirmed the constitutionality of legally enforced racial segregation? With Korematsu v. United States (1944), which affirmed the wartime right to sweep American citizens of Japanese ancestry into concentration camps?

And now I’m back to fury again. A candidate for presidency of this country states that a ruling that protects a right existing since the Magna-Freaking-Carta is one of the worst ever? On the level of Dred Scott?

Time to study some pediatrics. Politics in this country is just embarrassing when we can actually be debating a 800-year-old human right.

…because today, the first lobbying disclosure reports are due to be filed with Congress under new rules that flowed from the Jack Abramoff scandal. The new law requires quarterly reports, lowers the dollar amount of activity that triggers reporting requirements, and (my favorite), requires trade associations to identify their members in certain circumstances.

Let me expand on this last requirement–trade associations and coalitions (such as the American Chemistry Council, the Chamber of Commerce, and the like) now have to identify the actual companies behind lobbying efforts when their member companies contribute more than $5,000 and have some involvement in planning the lobbying activities.

This is very important because it is these trade association and coalitions that are chief purveyors of denialist tactics, and they mask the advocacy of their membership. As a result, it will be much easier to link companies with actual lobbying positions and tactics. This will make it harder for companies to hide behind their coalitions, which are often shameless and accountable to no one. It’s one more imperfect step towards more accountability in business lobbying, and you can download the filings here.

The financial services industry pumps a huge amount of money into politics. So much so that the industry has special status and gets pretty much what it wants. Things are a bit different now, because the downturn in the economy and mortgage screwup has given Washington some leverage to examine some of the industry’s worse practices, and look at what happens–

Imagine that you were invited to Washington DC to testify at a hearing on the “Credit Cardholders’ Bill of Rights.” You travel to Washington, probably on your own expense, to share your frustrations with the one-sidedness of credit card contracts and policies, only to learn that you can’t testify, unless you:

…would sign a waiver that would permit the credit card companies to make public anything they wanted to tell about their financial records, their credit histories, their purchases, and so on. The Republicans and Democrats had worked out a deal “to be fair to the credit card lenders.” These people couldn’t say anything unless they were willing to let the credit card companies strip them naked in public.

That craziness is Professor Elizabeth Warren, a Harvard Law faculty member who has been very critical of the financial services industry and their denialist lackeys. I’ve never heard of a legislative witness having to give up their credit card and bank statements to the public in order to discuss an issue.

In light of this requirement, Warren asked that the credit card companies be subject to similar terms!

…During the preceding 3 1/2 hours the credit card issuers had repeatedly made various factual statements about their practices, their customers, their revenues and so on (e.g., “College students have the same default rates as our other customers,” “98% of payments are made for free,” or companies raise interest rates “to control risk, not to increase profits.”) So I asked if the credit card companies were going to testify to such factual statements, would they be required to produce the data to back up the claims so that we could all see it and evaluate it. Katie, Adam, Larry and I all used public data and footnoted our work. Surely it wouldn’t be fair for the credit card companies to make factual assertions that no one could challenge because no one else had any access to their underlying data. If the new rule is that everyone has to release everything so others can challenge it, when the card issuers want to testify as to “facts,” shouldn’t hey have to back up their claims by showing us the numbers?

I never quite understood the Congressman’s reply. I’m still waiting to find out what fair-is-fair really means.

This is a great point. I was always a bit disappointed in industry testimony, because they make big points without bothering to provide a footnote, while proponents of reform write substantial critiques, fully footnoted. But when you have the big money that the banking industry has, that doesn’t seem to matter–to republicans or democrats!

Despite my usual cynical nature, I had a favorable brush with politics last night. I was up in my kid’s bedroom, getting her bathed and ready for bed, when the phone rang. When my hands are full of soaking wet toddler I don’t usually answer the phone, but for some reason I picked it up. To my surprise it was my Congressman—he was holding a phone conference with his constituents. I did not vote for this guy, and I’m pretty certain I never would, but he is my representative, so I joined the conference (by failing to hang up).

The district I live in is quite mixed. Economically it runs from moderately wealthy to not-doing-so-great. There are a huge number of home foreclosures, and people are losing auto industry-related jobs. Within a square mile of my house there is a Korean market, two Indian markets, a Halal butcher, a Kosher butcher, an Israeli restaurant, a Lebanese restaurant, a Chaldean market, a Jain Temple, two Synagogues—you get the idea.

The calls that came in were a mix. One of the things that politicians are usually good at is responding to individuals when given the opportunity. I’ve written to representatives on behalf of patients and gotten wonderful responses. Many calls were from people about to lose their homes, and the rep gave them contact numbers, etc. A few calls complained about illegal immigration, although I’m not sure why—Michigan had a hard time bringing in the crops last year, a folks from my area weren’t heading Up North to do field and orchard work.

Most of the calls were handled without the usual political lip service (most—not all). Some callers were clearly disturbed, and he handled them very well.

All in all, I was very impressed with the job my Congressman did communicating his ideas, even the ones I think are idiotic. I was even more impressed with the way he dealt with his constituents. He seemed to be in politics for all the right reasons (and, no, I don’t think I’m being credulous).

So, despite my dislike of this individual’s politics, I felt a renewed sense of optimism about American democracy. Plus, I got two loads of laundry folded and one poopy diaper changed while participating in my government. Woo-hoo!

Obama has created a lot of excitement among young people. On Tuesday, young people waiving Obama signs were all over the Berkeley campus and downtown San Francisco. Hillary’s supporters were rarely seen, it seemed.

You’ll note that I didn’t call these supporters “young voters.”

Why?

Because young people don’t vote. What’s my evidence of this (well-established) rule?

Even Obama Girl, the young woman who has spent the last year making videos about Obama’s campaign, didn’t vote! So sad.

Suzanne Sataline reports in today’s Journal about the intense spotlight that has been focused on the Mormon church as a result of the Romney campaign. The criticism has been so intense that the church has hired a public relations firm to battle it, and has encouraged young Mormons to blog about their religion. Perhaps what’s most interesting is this poll:

This is somewhat surprising, and I think good news. It’s about time that deciding in adulthood to be a member of a cult brings one more criticism than being born a certain sex or race!

I came across this statistic the other day while doing some research on marketing fraud:

In recent years, despite the creation of a national “do not call” registry, the legitimate telemarketing industry has grown, according to the Direct Marketing Association. Callers pitching insurance plans, subscriptions and precooked meals collected more than $177 billion in 2006, an increase of $4.5 billion since the federal do-not-call restrictions were put in place three years ago.

This all sounds very unlikely. And I recall from years of working on telemarketing regulation that the DMA used suspicious revenue numbers in order to influence the FCC and FTC, and prevent the creation of the Telemarketing Do-Not-Call Rule. You’ll note that many of their numbers concern 2001, the year before Do-Not-Call was being considered by the FTC.

So, tonight I did a quick search of the DMA’s website, noting all the times they they made a claim to regulators or in a press release about revenue from telemarketing. The result? Not only are the numbers suspiciously high, they seem to change…in the same year:

• “Telemarketing Sales” 1996: $63,100,000,000
• “Telemarketing Sales” 2000: $86,900,000,000
• “Telemarketing Sales” 2001: $93,800,000,000
• Sales to consumers in 2001: “nearly $270 billion”
• Sales to consumers in 2001: $296,000,000,000
• “Telephone Marketing Generated $668 Billion in 2001 and Employed Six Million”
• “The teleservices industry employs more than four million people and provides product offerings directly to consumers that resulted in $275 billion in sales in 2001.”
• “In 2001…customers purchased $661 billion in goods and services – accounting for almost six percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP).”
• Sales to consumers in 2001: $274,200,000,000
• Sales to businesses in 2001: $390,000,000,000
• “Telemarketing Sales” 2002: $100,000,000,000
• “We will protect the integrity of the American teleservices industry, which generated over $700 billion last year [2002] for the U.S. economy, by respecting consumer preferences.”

Having been busy and a bit out of the loop for the past month, I think it’s time I stop and point out what a great job Chris Mooney and other have done in generating a real movement behind making this happen. In particular note the supportive essay from the Editor-in-Chief of Science and the addition of the AAAS to the list of supporters that we’ve seen in the last week.

This is a gratifying turn of events because it shows me a few things. For one, I think it shows blogs like the Scienceblogs can make a huge difference in the real world. Second it shows that enough people care about science to make it a priority in this election.

So often in the last decade the reins of power have been in the hands of rank ideologues or outright denialists who reject science, rationality, and reason, and the results have been disastrous. The reason I have supported this effort from the start is that I believe that whatever the implementation of such a debate, the real victory is making people who value science a constituency that must be courted and respected. It’s about acknowledging the importance of science not just as a critical part of our country’s R&D and infrastructure, but as an enterprise that can inform and improve all aspects of government.

So, a big salute to Chris and the others for all their hard work. I’m impressed, and wish time had allowed me to do more (I’m still doing what I can).