The Supreme Court hears arguments on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act during six hours of oral arguments spread over three days starting this coming Monday. What’s all the hoohah about, you ask? Can’t remember what caused the whole uproar? Your friends at NPR are here to help, with a brief and cogent summary of the issues at hand that even non-lawyers can digest.
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This one guy says the evil super PACs are SAVING democracy, others are less charitable
I’m not sure if he’s right or not, but he makes an interesting argument. Dave Weigel is an excellent political reporter who’s spent a lot of time chronicling the conservative movement. Today at Slate he makes the provocative argument—it was to me, anyway—that the political action committees fostered by the U. S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United decisionare a good thing, that they have been a force to strengthen democracy and have made this year’s Republican presidential contest fairer.
Huh? No, no, no, wait a minute: Citizens United is an evil thing, a twisted interpretation of dictionary English by the conservative members of the court so that now the godless, faceless corporations are considered “persons” for the purposes of political participation, and they can secretly donate as much of their giant piles of money as they like to PACs and buy elections and marginalize the little guy like me (I was going to say you and me, but I really shouldn’t presume to speak for you, should I?)…it’s already happened starting in Iowa this year, right? I mean, that’s what we’ve all been told, right?
But Weigel argues that the super PACs have had a leveling effect: the big money from super PACs is all that’s kept Mitt Romney from outspending his opponents into submission, and essentially buying the GOP nomination. And despite the concerns about the secretive nature of the super PACs, he notes that we seem to know more about the biggest of the big donors to super PACs than we do about the people making direct donations to the individual candidates’ campaigns. He writes, “The big fear about campaign money is that it corrupts the candidates who have to beg for it.”
But that worry applies better to the shadowy bundler than it does to the megabucks super PAC donor. Corruption can’t grow in the sunlight. The people giving big to super PACs are famous. I didn’t fully understand how famous until I tagged along with [Newt] Gingrich at a speech to Aloma Baptist Church in Florida, when a parishioner asked him to explain why he was taking dirty money from the gambling industry. Gingrich explained that he and [Sheldon] Adelson had a simpatico, guns-a-blazin’ view on Israel. Is it corruption if the candidate tells you what he’ll do for the donor?
(snip)
We know more about those guys than we know about the bundlers, who’ve been passing money under the table for years. So which of those systems is worse for our democracy?
I know what’s good for our democracy: satire and ridicule, and in the case of Citizens United it’s been coming most effectively from Stephen Colbert. The Comedy Central comedian started his own super PAC and has been using it to expose the ridiculous reality resulting from the court’s ruling.
The line between entertainment and the court blurred even further late last month when Colbert had former Justice John Paul Stevens on his show to discuss his dissent in Citizens United. When a 91-year-old former justice is patiently explaining to a comedian that corporations are not people, it’s clear that everything about the majority opinion has been reduced to a punch line.
The court fights aren’t over, and perhaps the coolest one is in Montana where the state supreme court has told the one in Washington to pound sand. The court voted 5-2 to uphold the constitutionality of Montana’s ban on corporate campaign contributions, finding justification for the ban that Citizens United does not consider. Beyond that, Justice James Nelson unloaded: “Corporations are not persons. Human beings are persons, and it is an affront to the inviolable dignity of our species that courts have created a legal fiction which forces people—human beings—to share fundamental, natural rights with soulless creatures of government.” And that from one of the two dissenters in the ruling!
More fundamentally, the majority and one dissenter seem to understand perfectly how much the American people resent being lied to about the burning need for courts to step in to protect the oppressed voices of powerless corporate interests. As Judge Nelson wrote in dissent, “the notion that corporations are disadvantaged in the political realm is unbelievable. Indeed, it has astounded most Americans. The truth is that corporations wield enormous power in Congress and in state legislatures. It is hard to tell where government ends and corporate America begins: the transition is seamless and overlapping.”
The war (that never should have been fought) is over
OK, I’d really like to put aside for a minute the ideological arguments about the beginning of the U.S. war in Iraq, in order to focus on good news: the war is over. Brave young Americans who have sworn to serve their country will always be subject to the whims of corrupt politicians, but today the war in Iraq is over and I’m thankful that those men and women are coming home.
There’s nothing contradictory or hypocritical about opposing the war while also supporting the men and women who were called on to fight it; we’ve learned that lesson since Vietnam. Driving to work this morning I teared up listening to this story about the return of soldiers of the 112th Cavalry 3rd Brigade First Cavalry Division to Fort Hood…this is what today is about.
Thank you all, and welcome home.
Is that a mouse in your pocket? No, just a bug in your phone
The public service department here at HIPRB directs your attention to this story about the man who discovered software on Blackberrys, Nokias and Android-powered smartphones (but not iPhones) that he claims is logging nearly everything you
do on your phone, and sending off a report. The maker of the software, Carrier IQ, denies anything nefarious, says it is just diagnostic software to help its customers “deliver high quality products and services,” and at least one security consultant agrees.
I haven’t thrown my lot in with those who see conspiracies in everything (and you know who you are), and I’m not so naive that I don’t think that there are people already getting unauthorized access to one or another of the digital footprints each of us leaves as we go about our business. But that doesn’t mean that when presented a credible argument that our privacy is being violated we should just shrug our shoulders and hope for the best. Tim Worstall at Forbes makes the point:
But to be honest I think the part that worries me the most is, well, how hard is it to hack into this? To access that information if you’re not in fact the network? If it is possible to access this information (and I’d be absolutely astonished if it were not) then this means that absolutely every smartphone running it is vulnerable, to put it mildly, to data theft.
For yes, if you online bank from your phone then the application will be logging that data, pins, ID codes and all.
That’s really not something you want, is it? An application sitting on your phone that records all of these things specifically and exactly so as to broadcast them to someone else?
Here’s the link to Trevor Eckhart’s YouTube video showing what he found and how it works. Then think for yourself.
UPDATE Dec. 1: But wait, there’s more: Al Franken demands answers, and it’s learned that the suspect software is on more phones than was first believed–including iPhones, so stop gloating, Appleheads.
Photo from VintagePhone.com
Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice…
The “supercommittee” admitted defeat; it won’t have a blueprint for reducing the nation’s deficit (stories here, here and here). Is this a bad thing?
Some have argued, no: the first direct result of getting no plan from this committee is that the law which authorized it will now automatically cut $1.2 trillion from defense and non-defense spending over ten years starting in 2013, and that may end up giving us more deficit reduction than we’d have gotten otherwise. No way to know for sure, of course, but it makes sense.
I mean, there’s no reason to believe that the same members of Congress who thought nothing of threatening government default for political gain this past summer were likely to come to any agreement now, not when the party that controls the House (and virtually controls the Senate with the threat of filibuster) is still holding its breath threatening to turn blue rather than be responsible and discuss the best ways to increase revenue as part of the answer (along with spending cuts and overall economic growth) to getting the federal budget on a healthy path. None at all.
To believe otherwise would mean, first of all, believing that the sheep people lined up behind Speakers Boehner and Limbaugh have any goal more important that the defeat of President Obama. They don’t, unless it is the personal destruction of Obama, and anyone unlike themselves. Second, it means they would have to have the backbone to say no to the no-tax extremists and the campaign contributors.
I read an interesting article making the point that we’re foolish to think that our elected representatives will do anything that makes sense for us, because they’re in place to serve their bosses: namely, the minority of the population who actually vote in the primaries, and the even smaller percentage of the people who pay the bills through campaign contributions both above and below board. (By the way, read Michael Moran’s piece setting the stage for his blog The Reckoning.)
The other thing to watch out for right now, though, is the cowardly Congress finding a way to back out of the deal it made with itself! No Congress can pass a law that would prevent a future Congress from unpassing that law; just because it set itself this deadline and mandated future budget cuts as a penalty for failing to meet that deadline can’t prevent the next Congress from overriding all or some part of the threatened budget reductions, and that’s entirely possible for a group that already can’t say no to anyone (which is a big part of what got our budget in this mess to begin with).
Give some thought to Moran’s suggestion: in times of crisis, what if we take control away from politicians and give it to people who know what they’re doing?
A real super-committee – a real committee not only empowered to take the steps necessary to right the American economy, but competent to do so – would include 12 serious thinkers. They might include policymakers like former Fed Chairmen Paul Volker or (the suitably contrite) Alan Greenspan, economists of left and right like Stanford’s John B. Taylor, Yale’s Robert Schiller, NYU-Stern’s Nouriel Roubini, plus a few representatives of labor, small business and capital – let’s say Robert Reich, Joseph Schneider of Lacrosse Footwear, and Warren Buffett, just for kicks. No investment bank chairman, please, and no one facing reelection.
Can you imagine this group failing to come up with a solution? Can you imagine any of them worrying more about the next election than the future of the world’s largest economy? Certainly, they would clash – perhaps over the same tax v. spending cut issues. The difference: they would understand better than any member of Congress that no solution is far worse than a less-than-perfect solution.
