Another serious flaw in Campaign Finance Rules

Haven't we seen this before? In 2004, Soros couldn't give money directly to Howard Dean, so he gave the money to MoveOn.org and let them raise money for Dean. Soros again can't give the money directly to Hillary, so he is giving the money to someone this time who will raise money for Hillary and others. Wasn't Soros the big funder of the new campaign finance laws? How can anyone defend these rules?

A group of well-connected Democrats led by a former top aide to Bill Clinton is raising millions of dollars to start a private firm that plans to compile huge amounts of data on Americans to identify Democratic voters and blunt what has been a clear Republican lead in using technology for political advantage.

The effort by Harold Ickes, a deputy chief of staff in the Clinton White House and an adviser to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), is prompting intense behind-the-scenes debate in Democratic circles. Officials at the Democratic National Committee think that creating a modern database is their job, and they say that a competing for-profit entity could divert energy and money that should instead be invested with the national party.

Ickes and others involved in the effort acknowledge that their activities are in part a vote of no confidence that the DNC under Chairman Howard Dean is ready to compete with Republicans on the technological front. "The Republicans have developed a cadre of people who appreciate databases and know how to use them, and we are way behind the march," said Ickes, whose political technology venture is being backed by financier George Soros.

"It's unclear what the DNC is doing. Is it going to be kept up to date?" Ickes asked, adding that out-of-date voter information is "worse than having no database at all." . . .

Gun control "stalled" worldwide

From the January 13, 2006 issue of Foreign Policy magazine that discussed the recent referendum to ban guns in Brazil (the referendum was defeated by a two-to-one vote):

Gunning for the World
David Morton

". . . John Lott Jr., an American economist who caused a furor in the United States when he argued that the more guns there were in a society, the lower the crime rate. When his 1998 book, More Guns, Less Crime appeared in Portuguese, Brazilian gun rights activists adopted it as a sort of anti-gun control bible. One enthusiastic gun rights activist in São Paulo bought 1,500 copies and distributed one to each member of the Brazilian congress. Denis Mizne, executive director of Sou da Paz, a São Paulo-based gun control organization, says he has seen many Brazilian pro-gun materials translated directly from the NRA’s promoted materials. 'To adopt the line and the concepts, it’s easy,' he says. 'You just go to the [NRA’s] Web site.' . . ."

". . . the momentum for gun control has stalled . . ."

My comment: Sorry for the bit of self promotion. I think that this article gets much wrong, but it is still interesting. If there was some sense of balance, the author would mention that the gun control advocates are also copying what gun control advocates have done in the US. I would also mention that much of the ability to stop UN action stems from President Bush, specifically his appointment of Bolton to various positions over the last five years. All this could change radically if there is a change in government in the US. But the author seems more intent on demonizing the NRA than giving a full picture here.

Should states allow gun, ammo sales during state emergencies?

The National Rifle Association is pushing a measure at the state Legislature that would keep the governor from confiscating or placing restrictions on firearms and ammunition -- including sales -- during a state of emergency.

The bill was approved by the state Senate on Monday and has the backing of some leading Republican lawmakers, including state Senate President Ken Bennett and Senate Majority Leader Tim Bee. The measure prohibits the governor from curtailing the legal use, sale or transfer of firearms and ammo during a state of emergency. The measure now moves to the state House of Representatives.

The NRA is pushing similar measures in other states in the wake of Hurricane Katrina when civil disorder and rioting plagued New Orleans and some police officials sought to confiscate firearms and bullets in order to help restore order.

Arizona and a number of others states give their governors the ability to invoke emergency powers including additional police powers during natural disasters, riots, times of war and terrorist attacks . . .

Parental notification and Abortion

The New York Times has an article today arguing that parental notification has no statistically significant impact on the number of abortions. There is a paper by Jon Klick and Thomas Stratmann that argues that parental notification has a significant impact on sexual activity. They test this by looking at how the gonorrhea rate for teenage females varies relative to that rate for adult women before and after the adoption of these laws. To find their paper, click on the spring 2006 folder and then the paper entitled "Abortion Access and Risky Sex Among Teens: Parental Involvement Laws and Sexually Transmitted Diseases." They claim that "We estimate reductions in gonorrhea rates of 20 percent for Hispanics and 12 percent for whites. While we find a relatively small reduction in rates for black girls, it is not statistically significant."

I have read the Klick and Stratmann paper, and overall it is solid. I suspect that the paper the New York Times discusses is not anywhere nearly as well done.

Law Professors Must be Regretting Even Bringing this Case

I have a feeling that the law profs who brought this case are regretting doing so. The law profs were upset about the ''mere presence of military recruiters" and now the court has gone on record that congress could require that the military be allowed to interview recruits even if there was no funding attached.

The Constitution grants Congress the power to “provide for the common Defence,” “[t]o raise and support Armies,” and “[t]o provide and maintain a Navy.” Art. I, §8, cls. 1, 12–13. Congress’ power in this area “is broad and sweeping,” O’Brien, 391 U. S., at 377, and there is no dispute in this case that it includes the authority to require campus access for military recruiters. That is, of course, unless Congress exceeds constitutional limitations on its power in enacting such legislation. See Rostker v. Goldberg, 453 U. S. 57, 67 (1981) . But the fact that legislation that raises armies is subject to First Amendment constraints does not mean that we ignore the purpose of this legislation when determining its constitutionality; as we recognized in Rostker, “judicial deference … is at its apogee” when Congress legislates under its authority to raise and support armies. Id., at 70. . . .

This case does not require us to determine when a condition placed on university funding goes beyond the “reasonable” choice offered in Grove City and becomes an unconstitutional condition. It is clear that a funding condition cannot be unconstitutional if it could be constitutionally imposed directly. See Speiser v. Randall, 357 U. S. 513, 526 (1958) . Because the First Amendment would not prevent Congress from directly imposing the Solomon Amendment’s access requirement, the statute does not place an unconstitutional condition on the receipt of federal funds.

Now I am sympathetic to one argument that the law professors made, but I would be a lot more sympathetic if they recognized that it applies whenever government funding has strings attached:

For the Faculty now to surrender to the Government's coercion--even to protect the University's finances--would inevitably erode all students' faith in the Faculty Members' commitment to treat them with equal respect and dignity.

The point that I would make is that if the government takes your money from you and then gives it back if you only use that money the way the government wants, that is coercion.

Possibly we won't run out of oil for a long time

This is sure to drive some environmentalists nuts:

Thomas Gold was not your typical radical. Far from being a mad scientist, he was a brilliant professor of astronomy at Cornell University, but he succeeded in driving many others mad with theories that flew in the face of conventional wisdom.

His most controversial idea was among his last, and geologists and petroleum experts around the world still rage against Gold for suggesting they were dead wrong in their understanding of how oil and gas are formed in the Earth's crust.

Now, a couple of decades after Gold first suggested that hydrocarbons are formed deep underground by geological processes and not just below the surface by biological decay, there is increasing evidence that he may have been on to something.

If he was wrong, he may have erred only in taking his idea too far. Gold argued that all hydrocarbons are formed in the intense pressure and high heat near the Earth's mantle, around 100 miles under the ground. If he was right, it means the finite limits of the resources that power our cities and our factories and our vehicles have been vastly overstated. . . .

The article goes on and discusses some experiments at Lawrence Livermore that have produced methane under conditions found 100 miles below the earth's crust. Livermore produced a news release that read: "These reserves could be a virtually inexhaustible source of energy for future generations."

Can Tougher Regulations for Obtaining a Car be Far Away?

I am partially joking, but given the way some react to these problems when they occur, who knows. It appears that it has dawned on someone that SUVs can be used for criminal attacks, possibly terrorist attacks.

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. (March 4) - The FBI has joined the investigation of a recent college graduate who faces attempted murder charges for allegedly injuring bystanders after driving a sport utility vehicle through a popular campus gathering spot. . . .

The FBI joined the case because 22-year-old Mohammed Reza Taheri-azar, a native of Iran, "allegedly made statements that he acted to avenge the American treatment of Muslims," said agent Richard Kolko, an FBI spokesman in Washington. "The ongoing investigation will work to confirm this."

Taheri-azar, who graduated in December after studying psychology and philosophy, was in the custody of campus police. They intended to charge him with attempted murder and assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill, said police Capt. George Hare.

Taheri-azar called police to surrender and then awaited officers on a street two miles from campus, authorities said. . . .

"I see everyone kind of part because there's a car coming through, and the next thing I know, I'm on his windshield," sophomore Jeff Hoffman, his arm in a bandage, told The Daily Tar Heel, the campus newspaper. . . .

"He slowly came in, and I thought he was going to stop or something," sophomore Scott Wilson, a candidate, told the newspaper. "But then he sped right through."

Five students and a visiting scholar were treated for minor injuries and released from UNC Hospitals, the university said in a statement. Three other people declined treatment at the scene, police said.

New National Association of Chiefs of Police Survey

The National Association of Chiefs of Police have released their new survey results for 2005. 93.6 percent think that "any law-abiding citizen [should] be able to purchase a firearm for sport or self-defense." On right-to-carry ("Will a national concealed handgun permit reduce rates of violent crime as recent studies in some states have already reflected?"), 63.1 percent said "yes." 88.1 percent view the death penalty as a deterrent. 93.2 percent do not view the media as impartially reporting the news. 67.3 percent say that their department has a policy against racial profiling. There are other interesting results on the survey.

Looking down this list of questions, police chiefs, as a group, certainly seem extremely conservative.

"Hunters give deer to hungry"

It's healthier than beef, it's good in a stew or in chili, you can make jerky with it, and the Virginia Hunters for the Hungry have hundreds of thousands of pounds to give away every year.
"From jerky to jambalaya from stew to chili, there's a lot -- a lot -- of things deer meat can be used for," said Gary Arrington, senior project manager for the Virginia-based organization, which last year donated a record 340,173 pounds of venison to the hungry. . . .

A surprising fact on congressional corruption

John Fund wrote in Opinionjournal's Political Diary today that "Just under a dozen of the nearly 10,000 individuals who have served in Congress have ever been convicted of bribery." I assume that he means the number is eleven. I guess that I would have thought the number was a little higher. The one other fact that I would like to know is how those eleven cases are distributed over time. Are most of them relatively recent?

The Internet and Freedom in Iraq

Jonathan Rauch has an interesting new column out:

Odd though it may sound, somewhere in Baghdad a man is working in secrecy to edit new Arabic versions of Liberalism, by the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises, and In Defense of Global Capitalism, by the Swedish economist Johan Norberg. He is doing this at some risk of kidnap, beating, and death, because he hopes that a new Arabic-language Web site, called LampofLiberty.org -- MisbahAlHurriyya.org in Arabic -- can change the world by publishing liberal classics.

Odder still, he may be right.

Interviewed by e-mail, he asks to be known by a pseudonym, H. Ali Kamil. A Shiite from Iraq's south, he is an accomplished scholar, but he asks that no other personal details be revealed. Two of his friends have been killed in the postwar insurgency and chaos, one shot and the other "slaughtered." Others of his acquaintance are in hiding, visiting their families in secret. He has been threatened for working with an international agency.

Now he is collaborating not with foreign agencies but with foreign ideas. He has made Arabic translations of all or parts of more than two dozen articles and nine books and booklets. "None," he says, "were previously translated, to my knowledge, for the simple reason that they are all on liberalism and democracy, which unfortunately have little audience and advocators in the Middle East, where almost all publishing houses and press outlets are governmental -- i.e., anti-liberal." . . .

The Mainstream Media Must Really Hate George Bush

For whatever it is worth, I just saw an excellent report on the recent Katrina coverage on Brit Hume's show. (A very small part of that coverage can be found here.) The August 28th discussion never mentions the word "breach." There is a brief discussion that no one can really say whether the water will top the levies, but that they expect "minimal flooding." Bill Sammon calls the reporting on this "journalistic fraud." Mort Kondracke said that the tape was "not a smoking gun" despite what the MSM was trying to claim.

The media is really out of control right now, on Katrina, the push poll done by CBS on Bush's popularity, and other issues.

Here is a CBC version of the AP story, but remember in reality there was no mention in the discussion of the word "breach" with respect to the levies and while the storm would be destructive, the belief was that the flooding in New Orleans would be "minimal." It is amazing how distorted this news coverage was.

The tape is of a briefing on Aug. 28 – just one day before Katrina roared ashore, unleashing its fury and destruction on the city of New Orleans and along the U.S. Gulf Coast.

The video shows Bush and his federal disaster officials being warned that the levees in New Orleans could be breached.

A hurricane expert is seen and heard warning about his "grave concerns" of imminent danger and destruction of the storm.

"I don't think any model could predict whether it'll top the levees, but that's obviously a grave concern," said Max Mayfield, the Director of the U.S. National Hurricane Centre.

After the hurricane struck, Bush later went on television saying: "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees." . . .

Note from Switzerland

A friend of mine, Ben Zycher, is in Geneva, Switzerland for the week. He was telling me about a shop sign that read: "Tax Free Shopping for Diplomats." He said it basically summed up what being there was like.

When is a majority-minority district not a majority-minority district?

Apparently, a majority-minority district is not a majority-minority district unless there is a big majority.

Justice Kennedy, addressing R. Ted Cruz, the Texas solicitor general, called the new district "a serious Shaw violation," a reference to the court's landmark 1993 case, Shaw v. Reno, that opened such oddly shaped districts to challenge as racial gerrymanders. The removal of the Mexican-Americans from the Laredo district, leaving the Latino population a bare statistical majority there but not numerous enough to control electoral outcomes, was an "affront and an insult," Justice Kennedy said. . . .

Texas violated the Constitution by "the excessive use of race," Ms. Perales said, particularly "to craft a razor-thin 50.9 percent Latino majority" in Mr. Bonilla's 23rd Congressional District. She said the Legislature chose to retain the narrow majority, down from 63 percent, to protect Mr. Bonilla and "give the false impression of Latino support." . . .

Possibly Bonilla's district should be referred to as a minority-majority-minority district, but what they want is a majority-majority-minority district. Or is it the reverse? I trust that I am no more confused than the Justices. You have to protect Hispanics from not all Hispanics agreeing with each other.

New Jersey going after Law-abiding gun owner

Second Amendment supporters have filed a lawsuit stemming from the wrongful arrest of a Utah man who was detained at the Newark, N.J., airport because he had a gun in his luggage.

As required by federal law, the firearm was unloaded, locked and stored in a case inside Gregg Revell's luggage. Although federal law protects law-abiding citizens who travel with firearms, Revell nevertheless was arrested for possessing a firearm without a New Jersey state license.

Federal law should have trumped state and local law in Revell's case, said the Association of New Jersey Rifle & Pistol Clubs, Inc.

The Association said it is suing the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and one of its police officers for wrongfully arresting and imprisoning Revell, who spent five days in jail before his family raised the required $15,000 cash to bail him out. . . .

Justice Ginsburg falls asleep during oral arguments

Everybody falls asleep on the job sometimes, but if this had happened to Scalia or Thomas, does anyone believe that their behavior would have been excused?

The Supreme Court had put the Texas cases on the fast track, scheduling an unusually long two-hour afternoon session.

The subject matter was extremely technical, and near the end of the argument Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg dozed in her chair. Justices David Souter and Samuel Alito, who flank the 72-year-old, looked at her but did not give her a nudge. . . .

By the way, I think that Ted Cruz, who argued the redistricting case for Texas, won.

Do you know the constitution, the Simpsons, or American Idol the best?

Here are some questions about the first amendment, the Simpsons TV show, and American Idol. I got only 2 out of 5 questions right about the Simpsons and 2 out 5 right about American Idol (and even then I was guessing and the first question was a gift). Well, at least I got all the first amendment questions right.

New Op-ed in WSJ on Texas Redistricting Case

I have a new op-ed on the case that will be heard today before the US Supreme Court on the Texas redistricting case: "Don't Mess With Texas." The first paragraph is:

Just three years ago Texas Democratic legislators made national news when they fled to New Mexico and Oklahoma to avoid a quorum in the state's House of Representatives. Today the Supreme Court reviews the partisan congressional redistricting that they failed to stop. Yet despite all the angry words spoken, the Republicans' gerrymandering has proven to be much less partisan than the Democratic gerrymandering it replaced. It is also less biased than gerrymandering in other states, making it hard for the Supreme Court to strike down the new district lines as unconstitutional. . . .

The New York Times takes the opposite position from me (surprise), but they provide no numbers on the gerrymandering in Texas and their emphasis on national numbers doesn't talk about what caused the lack of competition there (namely, the one-person-one-vote Supreme Court decisions from the 1960s).

Canadian government on track to eliminate long gun registry

Canada's new minister of public safety says the government has no plans to back off on its intention to scrap the controversial long gun registry.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced his plan to kill the registry during the election campaign, and Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day told CTV's Question Period the plan hasn't changed.

"We're not backing away at all," Day said on Sunday. "We're moving ahead on this. It was an election promise. It's something we've been talking about for years." . . . .

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