May 2012

Robert Novak has an interesting column in the Washington Post on the backroom politicking behind the SCHIP health-care bill that has passed Congress, but faces a Bush veto. He notes that although the program was originally designed to help poor kids, the bill would expand federal subsidies to give taxpayer-paid coverage to some adults and households earning up to $82,000 a year.

Analysts have said that the $1 a pack cigarette tax mandated by the bill would be insufficient to pay for the costs of the program, resulting in increased federal deficits and violating Congressional budget rules. Bush says it would result in socialized medicine.

Seems as though the FCC can’t get enough fining done within the bounds of its legal fining regime and is now fining arbitrary 3rd parties related to broadcasts. According to Yahoo! News:

The Federal Communications Commission is proposing a $4,000 fine against Comcast Corp. for airing a pitch for a sleep aid without telling viewers that the spot was financed by the maker of the product.

The story goes on to point out that:

The fine, while small, is significant for another reason: It is being assessed against a cable company. Comcast Corp. says cable programming is not covered under the statute cited by the FCC.

This remind me of the Onion story from either years ago that reported “Aging Pope ‘Just Blessing Everything In Sight.‘” It seems that now the FCC is ‘just fining everything in sight’ and spreading its ‘blessings’ just as capriciously.

GlobalWarming.org was relaunched two weeks ago by CEI and has enjoyed hundreds of thousands of views since.  I want to thank those who have linked to our new site and who have helped get the word out about this great new source for climate change information.  I’d especially like to thank Robert Bluey of the Heritage Foundation for giving my colleague Iain Murray and me the opportunity to speak to bloggers at Heritage about the new site.  Keep linking to the site everyone!

Playspan dubs itself “The Game Industry’s First Publisher-Sponsored In-Game Commerce Network.” What does that mean? To put it more simply, welcome to Wall Street for World of War Craft.

In the pre-web world, what I like to call “The Before Time,” people’s puny brains used to be limited to thinking of products as physical objects or services to be performed in the physical world. No more! Commerce now extends into the virtual world and is no longer limited to our crude meatspace.

In all seriousness, it’s great that more people are becoming entrepreneurs, even if it is in the weird new business of selling shields, potions, virtual plots of land, or the occasional level 45 cleric. This should serve to remind us that there are markets in everything.

The Wall Street Journal’s OpinionJournal aptly describes the cynical posturing of Lee Bollinger, Columbia University’s president, who first invited the oppressive Iranian despot Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to speak at Columbia, then criticized him only after Columbia was widely ridiculed for the invitation.

Commentators pointed out that his “free speech” rationale for inviting Ahmadinejad was specious and hypocritical, since Bollinger has turned a blind eye to campus harassment of conservative speakers, has supported campus speech restrictions and speech codes, and has been silent about the Iranian government’s brutal suppression of dissent.

Columbia was also ridiculed for saying that it would have been appropriate to invite Hitler to speak.

As the Washington Post observes, the Iranian ruler turned Columbia’s invitation to his advantage in the international arena, effectively using it as a soapbox for conveying his anti-American message to a global audience.

His Columbia audience approved of most of that anti-American message. His attacks on America and other western countries consistently drew applause.

When he accused the U.S. of supporting terrorism, he was applauded.

When he complained that the U.S. and other “monopolistic,” “selfish powers” were trying to thwart Iran’s nuclear program, he was cheered.

When he refused to answer whether he seeks the destruction of Israel, he was greeted with more applause.

Only when he denied the existence of gay people in Iran did he draw boos.

The Columbia audience’s anti-Americanism seems to be shared by Bollinger, albeit in a more subtle way. As president of Columbia, he barred the U.S. military from recruiting. As dean of the University of Michigan Law School, he barred the CIA. But he allows anti-American dictators to speak at his campus.

In his remarks before Ahmadinejad’s speech, Bollinger was narcissistic. As the New York Times noted on September 25, he used the opportunity to “praise himself.” That is something the pompous Lee Bollinger often does.

A startling Reuters article today was titled “Gorbachev warns Russians against rise of Stalinism.”

As reported, the former Soviet president made his remarks at a conference held 70 years after the beginning of Stalin’s Great Terror:

“We should remember those who suffered, because this is a lesson for all of us.”

“We must squeeze Stalinism out of ourselves, not in single drops but by the glass or bucket,” Gorbachev added. “There are those saying Stalin’s rule was the Golden Age, while (Nikita) Khrushchev’s thaw was sheer utopia and (Leonid) Brezhnev’s neo-Stalinism was the continuation of the Golden Age.”

The Great Terror refers to a period under Josef Stalin’s rule from about 1937 to 1938, where historians estimate that many hundreds of thousands to millions of people in the USSR were killed by the government in purges against “enemies of the people,” and millions more sent to slave camps. Many mass graves with thousands of victims have only recently been uncovered.

The article noted some alarming signs of revisionist history about Stalin already taking place — in a children’s history book that portrays him as being the most successful leader of the USSR; in the cinema, where a documentary on Stalin portrays him seeking God in his final days.

The Reuters article also reported the results of a poll among young people about Stalin’s rule, where –

Fifty-four percent of Russian youth believe that Stalin did more good than bad and half said he was a wise leader, according to a poll conducted in July by the Yuri Levada Centre.

Those who would have lived through the Stalinist period in the USSR are in their seventies and eighties or older. Where is the outrage? It’s shocking if they let his bloody legacy be buried.

CEI analysts appeared twice today on CNBC (so far), enlightening the financially astute and debating their fellow guests.

First up, Editorial Director Ivan Osorio takes on the role of unions in the contemporary labor market and the General Motors/UAW strike.

Next we have Senior Fellow Eli Lehrer on why we shouldn’t fear investment from foreign “sovereign” capital funds.

Trade—voluntary exchange—is the essence of economic activity. Trade leads to specialization, which increases productivity. As trade expands so does the arena of economic competition, which spurs innovation. Greater trade also means more economic cooperation across distances, which makes societies less vulnerable to local crop failures and other shortages. Thanks to trade, a tiny island nation like Japan, with virtually no natural resources, can be a major economic power.

A long-standing worry of free-market advocates is that global warming will become a pretext for launching an era of green protectionism. Former French President Jacques Chirac called the Kyoto Protocol the “first component of an authentic global governance.” Governing without penalties, punishments, or sanctions is a fiction. A Kyoto without teeth is doomed. The treaty asks countries with mandatory emission limits to bear relatively large costs in the short term for relatively small or speculative benefits 80 to 100 years hence. Moreover, any county that cheats on its obligations or does not agree to limit emissions gains a competitive advantage vis-à-vis emission-limited countries in global trade.

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The District of Columbia is currently defending Washington, D.C.’s gun ban before the Supreme Court in District of Columbia v. Heller. It argues that the Second Amendment merely protects state and local governments’ collective right to arm a militia against federal interference, not an individual right to bear arms.

But it turns out that the District of Columbia’s own “constitution” contains a provision in its Bill of Rights identical to the Second Amendment in its language, providing that “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”

That language in the D.C. Constitution would be meaningless unless it secures an individual right to bear arms, contrary to the basic axiom of constitutional interpretation that no word or clause in a constitution should be treated as meaningless (see Holmes v. Tennison (1840)). If the gun-rights language only recognized the D.C. government’s collective right to arm a militia, it would serve no purpose, since (a) a local constitution can’t protect a local government against the federal government, which isn’t bound by local constitutions; and (b) the D.C. government needs no protection against itself. Moreover, the purpose of a Bill of Rights is to restrain, not expand, the power of the government to which it applies, so a Bill of Rights in the D.C. Constitution should not be read as securing “collective rights” for the District itself.

As David Kopel observes,

It is sometimes claimed (such as by DC lawyers in the [gun-rights] litigation) that the Second Amendment phrasing is merely a protection of state militias from federal interference. The DC Constitution demonstrates the absurdity of the argument; nothing in the DC Constitution could overcome the Supremacy Clause and prevent federal control (pursuant to the U.S. Constitution) of the DC state militia. The only plausible explanation for the placement of the right to keep and bear arms language in the ‘Bill of Rights’ section of the DC Constitution is that [it] has precisely the same effect as every other section of the DC Constitution’s Bill of Rights: to shield the individual rights of ordinary DC citizens from potential abuse by the New Columbia state government.

Accordingly, when DC lawyers argue to . . . the U.S. Supreme Court, that the language of the U.S. Second Amendment is not an ordinary individual right, they are making an argument which is decisively contradicted by the very constitution adopted by the government whom the lawyers are representing.

I have previously explained why the federal appeals court decision striking down the District’s gun ban (Parker v. District of Columbia) was correctly decided, and why it did not constitute judicial activism.