Archives for October, 2007
Senate votes to increase Amtrak subsidy
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So reports today’s New York Times (Oct 31, 07, p. A10). The Senate voted 70 to 22 to authorize $11.4 billion, or $1.9 billion a year, up from the $1.2 billion Amtrak received in recent years.
According to the Times, “The vote signaled a desire for a major investment in the money-losing railroad service when the Bush administration and other critics say it should be privatized.” You might think Amtrak wouldn’t need more taxpayer hand-outs because, “High gasoline prices and congestion on highways and at airports have helped increase demand for rail services.” But then you also might think ethanol wouldn’t need government support when oil is selling for more than $90 a barrel.
The landslide vote for a bigger Amtrak subsidy (like the earlier landslide vote in the Senate to quintuple the ethanol mandate) illustrates the “logic” that prevails on Capitol Hill: Throw good money after bad!
In the case of ethanol, we’re told, government must mandate and subsidize biofuels because “next generation” technologies are not yet “mature.” Well, Amtrak shows that maturity ain’t got nothin’ to do with it. Trains have been around longer than Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ), the bill’s chief sponsor. Corn may not always be King in Washington, D.C., but Pork will always wear the crown.
We don’t need no stinkin’ permits (or shouldn’t)!
The bloggers over at DCist are rightly concerned about proposed new rules for photography, filming and sound recording on federal lands that would require “commercial” photographers to get permits before shooting. A group of journalism organizations has complained to the Department of Interior complaining, among other things, about the definition of “commercial.”
In a release, Society of Professional Journalists President Clint Brewer said, “Public land should be safeguarded, but the rules the department is seeking to codify simply go too far.” Does he mean to say that prior restraint is OK, as long as it’s on federal land and the definition of journalism is narrow enough to ensnare commerical speech only?
Rather than trying to define what constitutes “commercial” speech vs. “journalism,” free speech would be far more secure if First Amendment protections were extended to the “commercial” speech as well.
Better yet, the less amount of land that is in federal hands, the less of a problem this would be. (Thanks to Megan McLaughlin for the DCist link.)
Supreme Court Reviews $2.5 Billion Punitive Damage Award Against Exxon
Jacob Sullum’s syndicated column describes Exxon Shipping Co. v. Baker, in which the Supreme Court will decide whether federal maritime law permits punitive damages against Exxon, and if so, whether the $2.5 billion in punitive damages it was ordered to pay for an oil spill was excessive.
Sullum notes that the punitive damages work out to $23,000 for each barrel of oil spilled, and that Exxon has “spent more than $3.4 billion on clean-up costs, fines, and compensation payments,” quite apart from the punitive damages awarded against it. Moreover, even the appeals court that set the punitive damages admitted “that Exxon acted quickly to mitigate and repair” the effects of the oil spill.
Yet, ironically, this excessive damage award is cited by trial lawyers (and commenters at liberal blogs such as DailyKos) as an example of a big company getting off too lightly (since the appeals court reduced the punitive damage award from the $5 billion awarded by the trial court to $2.5 billion, which is still an astronomical sum). They won’t be satisfied until unguided juries are permitted to redistribute the entire gross national product.
Update: FCC Can Void Cable Agreements
As I wrote about earlier in the week, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) had been talking about banning exclusivity deals between landlords and cable television providers. The FCC announced today that it now has the power to nullify contracts between these private parties, which represent a monopoly within apartment buildings. According Susanne Guyer of Verizon, (reported by CNN)
“Millions of consumers live in apartments, condos or other private developments, and, until now, many of them have been denied the benefits of video competition as a result of exclusive access agreements used by cable providers to shield themselves from competition.”
Applying that logic to its extreme, one would also have to say that apartment living denies tenants access to the competition between manufacturers of gutters or windows or any number of items that come “bundled” within the contract renters sign when they choose which apartment they want to dwell in.
Despite the fact that 18 states have already passed laws similar to what the FCC will now mandate, states have protested the FCC’s presumption of jurisdiction in this matter.
But even if they win, should any regulatory body, state or federal have the ability to void a contract between two willing parties? “Monopoly” is the word that has been used to justify such action, but to what degree does choice need to be limited in order to qualify something as a monopoly? Essentially, it is the landlords who control the monopoly — they are the only ones with choice over cable provider (among other things) and they choose to bar other competitors for a set amount of time.
Similarly, renters, by virtue of choosing to live in an apartment, choose to give up their right to make certain choices about their dwelling, such as the color of paint on the outside, landscaping, and even the type of pet they can have. But is this anti-competitive? Should renters have a right to demand choices in all aspects of their building? No, for the simple reason that it isn’t their building. And shouldn’t owners be allowed to have a monopoly over their own property? Clearly, the FCC doesn’t think so.
Senate Foreign Relations Committee sends Law of the Sea Treaty to the Senate floor
This morning, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee voted 17-4 to send the Law of the Sea Treaty to the Senate floor for ratification. The result was expected — though still disappointing — so now the real fight begins. The vote count was as follows:
Yes votes
Joseph Biden (D-Del.)
Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.)
John Kerry (D-Mass.)
Russell Feingold (D-Wisc.)
Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.)
Bill Nelson (D-Fla.)
Barack Obama (D-Ill.)
Robert Menendez (D-N.J.)
Benjamin Cardin (D-Md.)
Robert Casey (D-Pa.)
Jim Webb (D-Va.)
Richard Lugar (R-Ind.)
Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.)
Bob Corker (R-Tenn.)
John Sununu (R-N.H.)
George Voinovich (R-OH)
Lisa Murkowski (R-AK)No votes
Norm Coleman (R-Minn.)
Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.)
David Vitter (R-La.)
Jim DeMint (R-S.C.)
CEI Director of Energy and Global Warming Policy Myron Ebell said:
The Senate Foreign Relations Committee vote in favor of ratifying the Law of the Sea Treaty is disappointing, but grassroots opposition is still building against the treaty. The strong statements against LOST in recent days by Rudy Giuliani, Fred Thompson, and Mike Huckabee are an indication that their campaigns have already felt this movement against the treaty. The opposition of the Senate’s Republican leadership is another good indication. If Majority Leader Harry Reid brings LOST to the floor for a vote, it is going to be a real fight.
For more on LOST, see here. (Thanks to Ben Lerner.)
Costly Sugar Subsidies to Increase, Impoverishing the Poor
Congress is set to pass a bloated farm bill that will increase federal sugar subsidies, which have cost taxpayers billions of dollars, and prevent farmers in some of the poorest countries in the world from selling their sugar to the United States at low prices. Even The New York Times thinks President Bush is right to consider vetoing the bill.
In a letter to the House Agriculture Committee joined by public interest and consumer groups, Fran Smith explained that the sugar subsidies will harm the environment, cause job losses, and increase food costs. And in National Review, she explains the bizarre workings of the sugar subsidy program, while in the Monthly Planet, she describes how the program costs thousands of American jobs in the candy manufacturing industry.
In an earlier blog post, I explained how the farm bill as a whole is a big rip-off of American taxpayers, full of corporate welfare, criticized for contributing to pollution and obesity, and an obstacle to negotiating international trade deals that would create jobs in America for our exporters.
No Liability for Assisting in Fight Against Terrorism
Trial lawyers have brought lawsuits seeking billions of dollars in damages against telephone companies for assisting federal antiterrorism surveillance programs. In today’s Washington Post, Senator Jay Rockefeller, who is a critic of the Bush Administration, and usually sympathetic to the trial lawyers, explains why this is nevertheless fundamentally unfair to many telecommunications firms and an obstacle to important intelligence gathering.
He advocates giving the telephone companies a limited form of immunity from suit, if they cooperated based on plausible assurances by the Justice Department that the surveillance was legal. Effectively, that would end a legal double standard that discriminates against the telephone companies.
It’s worth noting that the federal officials who created a surveillance program already enjoy “qualified immunity” against having to pay damages, even if a court later declares the program illegal, unless their belief that it was legal was plainly unreasonable. (They can still be ordered by a court to stop operating the program, but they can’t be ordered to pay damages if the defense of qualified immunity applies). But private companies, unlike government officials, do not enjoy such “qualified immunity” against damages, exposing them to potentially huge liabilities and attorneys fees.
That is odd, since the government should be subject to a tougher standard of liability than private companies, not the other way around. After all, under the venerable “state-action” doctrine, it’s generally the government, not private parties, which is bound by the Constitution. And it’s the government that bears principal responsibility for making sure its surveillance programs comply with the Constitution, not private phone companies that are not privy to all the details about, or needs behind, such programs. Indeed, as Senator Rockefeller notes, since “the operational details of the program remain highly classified, the companies are prevented from defending themselves in court.”
But the phone companies and their employees, who acted in good faith, cannot rely on the defense of qualified immunity, since the Supreme Court refused to extend qualified immunity to private parties sued in constitutional lawsuits in its controversial 5-to-4 decision in Richardson v. McKnight (1997). So they face risks of liability even if they simply were trying to help out their country in fighting terrorism. Even if qualified immunity isn’t available to the phone companies, some other form of good faith immunity should be extended to them by the courts or Congress based on the country’s national security needs and the chilling effect of lawsuits on achieving those needs.
Are these the scariest movies?
On the eve of All Hallow’s Eve, the Boston Globe’s list of the “Top 50 scariest movies of all time” is worth a look. Any you want to add – or subtract?
“Citizens” for Global Governance
As the Senate Foreign Relations Committee prepares to take up the Law of the Sea Treaty (LOST; also known as UNCLOS, for United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea) tomorrow, National Review Online editorializes against the treaty, in today’s lead item, taking the Bush administration and the Navy to much-needed task for their misguided support.
[E]nough has surely been written to demonstrate that the selling of UNCLOS is a white-collar crime that has the fingerprints of the Bush administration all over it. Yes, the White House has allies — the usual suspects in fact: the Democrats and some Republicans, the U.S. State Department, the NGOs of the Left, international civil servants, law professors seeking another treaty as pretext to read their own opinions into law, and above all what Hudson Institute scholar John Fonte has called “transnational progressives” (or, for short, Tranzis).
So why is the Bush administration strongly urging passage of UNCLOS?
The reason has little or nothing to do with the value of UNCLOS to the U.S. Its codification of existing maritime law, while modestly useful, grants the U.S. no rights it does not already possess under earlier and customary law. Those who argue, as U.S. Navy lawyers do, that it will help the Navy assert American rights over North Pole oil (always supposing such oil exists in large quantities) must explain (a) why UNCLOS would be certain to support the American case once we had accepted its authority by joining the treaty; (b) who would enforce a favorable UNCLOS ruling over Russian or other objections apart from — the U.S. Navy; and (c) if other powers would be required to help the U.S. enforce a favorable decision under (b), exactly why the U.S. Navy would not be similarly required by UNCLOS to enforce decisions favorable to third parties in other disputes of no concern to the U.S.
So who are these “Tranzis”? Chief among LOST’s NGO boosters is Citizens for Global Solutions, which grew out of something called the World Federalist Institute, and whose stated mission is to empower global bureaucracies like the U.N. — but don’t take it from me; take it from their own history:
The World Federalist Institute (WFI) serves as Citizens for Global Solutions’ think tank by promoting debate, discussion and sharing research on the principle of federalism and its applicability to resolving global problems nations cannot solve alone. One goal of the WFI is to develop pragmatic proposals ultimately leading to the creation of a democratic global political system with a federal structure…
When the World Federalist Association merged with the Campaign for UN Reform in January, 2004, to become Citizens for Global Solutions, the World Federalist Institute was created to carry on the tradition of studying and advocating world federation.
Need I — or they — say more? “Star Trek” this ain’t.
Government Won’t Save You
In Today’s Washington Post, Cindy Skrzycki reports on Devra Davis’s book The Secret History of the War on Cancer. According to Skrzycki, Davis asserts that “10 million cancer deaths could have been avoided over the past 30 years had it not been for industry opposition to good science and regulatory inaction by the U.S. government.”
Wow! There’s the answer we all have been looking for! If we want to get rid of cancer, we simply need to cede more power to bureaucrats in governments around the world! Not really; if only it were that easy. Governments are as likely (actually much less likely!) to save us from cancer as they are likely produce world peace.
That is, of course, a key problem with Davis’s assumptions, but it isn’t the only one. An epidemiologist by trade, Davis should do better with her science. According to the renowned biochemist Bruce Ames, Davis’s “has gone completely overboard” and Elizabeth Whelan of the American Council Science on Science and Health rightly describes the book as “fringe.” As Whelan explains, Davis would perform a much greater service if she focused educating people on known cancer risk factors such as poor diets and smoking.
Good News: How to Profit from the Coming Nuclear Holocaust
How you can profit from the coming nuclear holocaust will likely be the next publication by the conservative site Newsmax. After all, it just sent out a message from Jarrett Wollstein of Intelligent Options:
Iran War Danger Creates Huge
Investment OpportunitiesIn the last few days, the danger of expanded war in the Middle East has greatly increased.In Northern Iraq, Turkish troops intensified attacks on Kurds, creating a new danger of intense warfare in this previously largely peaceful area. Also, just yesterday, the Bush administration announced major new sanctions against Iran which make war more likely.
The new U.S. sanctions against Iran include the U.S. freezing Iranian assets in U.S. banks, blacklisting three Iranian state-owned banks and companies controlled by the Iranian defense ministry, and reiterating that the U.S. regards several branches of the Iranian government — including the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. (IRGC) and Iran’s elite Quds Force as terrorist organizations responsible for the deaths of U.S. soldiers through their support of insurgents in Iraq.
The new U.S. sanctions will make it much more difficult for Iran to transact business in the U.S., but more importantly make it unlikely that the U.S. and Iran will peacefully settle their differences over Iran’s nuclear enrichment program — which the U.S. insists is a prelude to Iranian nuclear weapons, and which Iran insists is only for the peaceful production of nuclear energy.
Further sanctions against Iran and U.S. insistence that Iran abandon all nuclear enrichment programs make a diplomatic settlement with Iran less likely. That’s because Iran’s nuclear program is a source of national pride (as well as a major investment), and any Iranian leaders who surrender to the U.S. on this issue would likely be signing their own political death sentence.
The bottom line is that war with Iran is now much more likely before Bush leaves office, with enormous effects on world oil and gold prices, and the U.S. economy.
Of course, whatever one thinks of going to war with Iran, it makes sense to be prepared for the economic consequences. Still, this message has a ghoulish feel to it. It’s almost as if people want war so that they can profit from it.
Such is the world in which we live.
Sea Treaty Fallout
Today one presidential aspirant joined a growing list of senators in opposing U.S. ratification of the Law of the Sea Treaty. Taking as long as the opposition has to assert itself, this clearly was a difficult decision for these political leaders to step out on this matter, flying as it does in the face of one of President Bush’s “to do” items before he leaves office. The latter have an actual vote on the matter which appears likely (though by no means certainly) headed to the Senate floor this year. The former merely would have to live with LOST’s constraints and other fallout. If LOST is implemented as its opponents fear, this fallout will include a replication — only worse — of what we saw after Bush snubbed the International Criminal Court and Kyoto Protocol upon taking office, both of which were signed by President Clinton though only the former was unsigned by Bush (his treatment of the latter was for all legal and practical purposes no different than his predecessor, if rhetorically in stark contrast).
Whatever the motivations and difficulties underlying these decisions, they are the right ones. Much has been written about the principal reasons that LOST should remain among the more than 400 treaties signed by the U.S. but never ratified. In brief, these remain that: 1) LOST cedes far too much sovereignty to supranational governance, 2) this includes taxation, euphemized as “fee collecting”, authority, 3) elevating the level even of eco-governance to which we subject ourselves, specifically including sweeping authority to govern “land based pollution”, and 4) a binding tribunal and other dispute resolution ensuring that by the front door or back, the Kyoto agenda will be imposed upon the U.S.
The voting begins this week at the Senate subcommittee level.
D.C.’s Drug Price Ceilings Bite the Dust
The full Federal Circuit Court of Appeals has just rejected a challenge to an earlier ruling that the District of Columbia’s Prescription Drug Pricing Act is preempted by federal patent law. D.C. drug price-control law bans “excessive prices,” a vague term for which there is no specific statutory definition. It does, however, include a provision declaring that a drug price is presumptively excessive when it is “30% higher than the comparable price” charged in Australia, Germany, the United Kingdom, or Canada.
It also authorized lawsuits against pharmaceutical manufacturers by any organization claiming to act “in the public interest;” “any person” claiming to be affected by excessive drug prices; any organization that represents such persons;” and “the District of Columbia” itself. In such lawsuits, lawyers for the prevailing parties would receive “attorneys’ fees,” while the plaintiffs would receive “treble damages,” and the D.C. Government would receive monetary “fines.”
The judges denied D.C.’s petition for rehearing en banc, with concurring and dissenting justices arguing about the intricacies of the Supreme Court’s preemption jurisprudence. Additional coverage of the case, called Biotechnology Industry Organization v. Pharmaceutical Research Manufacturers of America, can be found here and here.
The modern Tyrannosaurus rex
Eli–Re your post on the Robosaurus, I like these better. The one above weighs about 104,000 lbs. and the one below 123,459 lbs. Just add a propane torch.
Federal Court Veers Further to the Left
The moderately conservative Judge Thomas Meskill has died, eliminating one of the few non-liberal judges on the New York-based Second Circuit Court of Appeals.
This is a court still dominated by liberal Clinton appointees. And even some of the Bush appointees on the court are not moderate or conservative, but rather very liberal (like Barrington Parker, who believes that the Constitution provides elaborate protections for foreign terrorists, and who ruled that companies can be penalized by bureaucrats based on unproven accusations of environmental wrongdoing) or RINOs (like Peter Hall, an ideological heir of the party-switching Vermont Senator Jim Jeffords). Many of the Bush appointees were selected to appease liberal lawmakers in the region like Senator Chuck Schumer of New York. That may have an effect on terrorism-related cases and global-warming nuisance suits, since it cements the liberal judges’ en banc majority on the Second Circuit. In much of the country, Bush’s judicial appointments have been far less liberal than Clinton’s judges were, but in the Second Circuit, the difference is fairly small.
I earlier discussed Judge Meskill’s evenhanded approach to racial and sexual harassment law.
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