Supreme Court strikes down limits on amount of total campaign donations by individuals

The New Neo Posted on by

Not the ceiling on each campaign contribution, mind you, but their total. The vote was the very familiar 5-4:

Wednesday’s decision in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission…did not affect familiar base limits on contributions from individuals to candidates, currently $2,600 per candidate in primary and general elections. But it said that overall limits of $48,600 by individuals every two years for contributions to all federal candidates violated the First Amendment, as did separate aggregate limits on contributions to political party committees, currently $74,600…

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., writing for four justices in the controlling opinion, said the First Amendment required striking down the limits. “There is no right in our democracy more basic,” he wrote, “than the right to participate in electing our political leaders.”

…The decision chipped away at the central distinction drawn by the Supreme Court in its seminal 1976 campaign finance decision, Buckley v. Valeo. Independent spending, the court said in Buckley, is political speech protected by the First Amendment. But contributions may be capped, the court said then, in the name of preventing corruption. The court added that aggregate contribution limits were a “quite modest restraint upon protected political activity” that “serves to prevent evasion” of the base limits.

Wednesday’s decision concerned only contributions from individuals. Federal law continues to ban contributions by corporations and unions.

Seems to me that the lines that are drawn are quite arbitrary. Leaving aside for a moment the dubiousness of asserting that the capping of campaign contributions actually “prevents corruption” (I maintain that where there’s a will to be corrupt, there’s a way), it seems just as arbitrary to limit those contributions to $2,600 per candidate as to limit them to $48,600 total every two years.

Why one party versus another would be squawking (Democrats) about this decision I don’t know—except of course as all-important theater (“we’re for the little guy, and against corruption”), because there are plenty of rich and mega-rich individuals on both sides that will take advantage of it. Corruption and the buying of candidates for favors will continue apace—as it probably always has, laws or no.

Corruption and power go hand and hand, and the best we can do to prevent the combination in our elected officials is to have an educated and aware populace willing to reject the corrupt (good luck, you say). The other way to reduce corruption would be to limit the power of those elected officials, which would involve limiting the power of government itself. Even that doesn’t stop corruption, of course; the most it probably does is to reduce it in the public sphere a bit and leave it more to the private sphere. Perhaps it merely shifts the balance, which leaves us with the following question: which is worse, public or private corruption? I maintain it’s the former, because the power of the government is greater. On the other hand, we can (at least theoretically) vote the bums out.

What are the previously uninsured doing about Obamacare?

The New Neo Posted on by

How many uninsured people there were in America prior to Obamacare has been a mystery wrapped in an enigma (see this for an analysis of the misleading figures), ready to be exploited for propaganda purposes. That confusion was not just limited to how many uninsured people there were, but included their demographics and reasons for remaining so, although all of it was continually estimated and discussed and analyzed.

One thing that was clear was that the ACA was supposedly designed to reduce this group’s numbers. You might say that was its stated raison d’éªtre, one that has since been almost lost in the shuffle of doublespeak that constitutes the left’s pep talks about the Obamacare signups.

Another thing that is clear is that, even if you take the administration’s propaganda at face value and put the most pro-Obamacare spin on it, the administration’s figures about the numbers of pre-ACA uninsured as compared to reported signup figures indicate that only a tiny fraction of those previously uninsured are now insured.

Bookworm writes:

As of yesterday [March 31, 2014], based upon the limited data the Obama administration has reluctantly released, only 1.7% of the previously uninsured have enrolled in Obamacare.

I’m not sure the number isn’t at least somewhat higher than 1.7%*, but it certainly is nowhere near the numbers originally predicted or supposedly desired (see the chart here, as well).

Bookworm also offers a reasonable-seeming explanation for the reluctance of at least some of those on the Obamacare fence:

I was speaking to my friend just yesterday about her healthcare and she offered a very interesting observation: She and her husband, the only middle class people in a sea of poverty, are the only people she knows, amongst both friends and acquaintances, who have signed up for Obamacare. The others have no interest in getting health insurance. Even with a subsidy, they don’t want to pay a monthly bill for health insurance. Even a subsidized rate is too onerous when they can get all the free health care they need just by showing up at the local emergency room. Additionally, the ER docs are usually better than any doc who’s willing to belong to whatever plan they can afford. Nor are these people worried about the penalties for refusing to buy Obamacare, since none of them pay taxes.

Not only are the people in my friend’s world refusing to buy Obamacare, they resent it. According to my friend, someone she knows abruptly announced that she’s getting involved in local politics, something she’s never done before. Until recently, this gal was one of those people who just floated along, getting by. Now, though, she’s fired up.

The reason for the sudden passion is unexpected: She’s deeply offended by a law that forces people to buy a product they don’t need ”” never mind that she might benefit from the product, that she would pay far below market value for the product, or that she’s too poor to be penalized for ignoring this government diktat. The mere fact that the diktat exists runs counter to her notion of individual liberty. Her view of government is that, while it’s fine if it hands out welfare checks and food stamps, it goes beyond the pale when the government uses its power and wealth to coerce activity.

Now that is interesting. I don’t know how many people are going as far as this newly-minted although quite compartmentalized libertarian. But it does seem that even with generous subsidies, Obamacare is too much for a lot of people to whom every single dollar counts, and who know that they can get absolutely free care in the hospital emergency rooms.

[NOTE: *For example, the numbers don’t seem to include the previously-uninsured who are newly signed up for Medicaid. Those are very hard-to-estimate numbers, too, because to do so one would need to separate out those new Medicaid enrollees who were only eligible because of Obamacare from the usual new enrollments that regularly occur anyway.

Of course, Medicaid enrollment does not mean a doctor will take the patient. But that’s another—although important and related—problem. Health insurance de jure is not the same as healthcare de facto.]

Department of no surprise at all: Israel/Palestine talks stall

The New Neo Posted on by

Surprise, surprise:

The Middle East peace talks verged on a breakdown Tuesday night, after President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority defied the United States and Israel by taking concrete steps to join 15 international agencies ”” a move to gain the benefits of statehood outside the negotiations process.

Mr. Abbas’s actions, which appeared to catch American and Israeli officials by surprise, prompted Secretary of State John Kerry to cancel a planned return to the region on Wednesday, in which he had expected to complete an agreement extending negotiations through 2015.

The whole thing seems to be a stupid charade. Why wouldn’t the Palestinians defy the US at this point? Why not take advantage of weakness?

New Hampshire needs room

The New Neo Posted on by

You may think that Vermont and New Hampshire are similar, but they couldn’t be more different. Yes, they’re both small, long, and thin, cold, and mountainous (Green vs. White). But Vermont is the most leftist state in the union, while New Hampshire is slightly libertarian.

Vermont is also a little bit larger than New Hampshire. Vermont has an area of 9,620 square miles, with only 626,630 people, whereas New Hampshire, with nearly double the population at 1,323,459, possesses only 9,304 square miles, a bit over 300 square miles less. So now, in a surprise move, New Hampshire’s Attorney General Marc Lebensraum has announced that this geographic area differential is unfair, and has revived a long-running border dispute between the two that was thought to have been settled back in the 1930s when SCOTUS ruled on the issue:

The border between New Hampshire and Vermont was set by King George II in 1764 as the western bank of the Connecticut River. The U.S. Supreme Court re-affirmed this boundary in 1934 as the ordinary low-water mark on the Vermont shore, and markers were set.

Ever since, the two states have been required by their respective state laws to formally reaffirm the boundary every seven years. Here’s a photo of the last time it happened, which was in May of 2012, and was obviously quite amicable:

boundary

Since that photo was taken, however, New Hampshire has had a turnover at the AG’s office, and new AG Lebensraum wants to re-open the old wound because he believes that New Hampshire’s larger population requires more territory, and he feels that the obvious remedy would be to take some width from its neighbor, width that, according to the AG, “Vermont neither needs nor deserves.”

You can see that Vermont, despite its smaller population (consisting mostly of cows), is actually a bit wider in its narrowest part than New Hampshire is in its narrowest part, which lends a bit of credence to his argument:

vt.nh.maine

Mr. Lebensraum elaborated on the reasons for the re-opening of the dispute:

After all, why should a king have been the one to set our boundary? Surely the people of Vermont would agree with me on that; they can’t possibly be monarchists. And what’s this “low-water mark” business? With global warming, these markers are about to change anyway. Clearly, the Connecticut River belongs wholly to New Hampshire rather than Vermont (and certainly not to Connecticut, despite its name). In fact, I’m going to proclaim that, at least in its New Hampshire course, the river will henceforth be known as the New Hampshire River.

Lebensraum added that Maine had better watch out, because the geographic inequity between Maine and New Hampshire is even worse than that between Vermont and New Hampshire. Maine is a rather large state with over 35,000 square miles, which makes it ten times the size of New Hampshire, and yet it has an almost identical number of people: 1,328,302 in Maine to New Hampshire’s 1,323,459.

Lebensraum says he finds this very suspicious, although he’s not sure there’s anything to be done about it except to call Maine a population copycat. Next on his agenda is a re-opening of this boundary dispute between the two states, which according to Lebensraum has some similarities to New Hampshire’s argument with Vermont:

The issue over the Maine/NH border (also a river) was only settled by SCOTUS on a technicality in 2002. Maine’s a big, greedy state, and it’s time that ended. And again, just as with Vermont, why should on earth should King George II get to set our boundaries?

Neither the Vermont nor the Maine AGs could be reached for comment.

I wonder how many…

The New Neo Posted on by

…of the Obamacare “enrollees” are illegal aliens?

The Obama administration has been helping to facilitate a series of events nationwide at Mexican Consulate offices to enroll people in Obamacare ”“ and a key activist says the efforts are “our responsibility” regardless of citizenship.

“Whether they’re Mexican nationals or whether they’re United States citizens or whether they’re in transition– and if they’re there it is our responsibility within all of America to educate on the Affordable Care Act,” Enroll America Field Organizer Jose Medrano told Breitbart News on Wednesday.

Under the Affordable Care Act (ACA), undocumented immigrants aren’t supposed to be receiving government-run health benefits or subsidized coverage. However, President Barack Obama told Latinos in early March that the Healthcare.gov website would not be used to find out about an individual’s immigration status.

“None of the information that is provided in order for you to obtain health insurance is in any way transferred to immigration services,” he said.

Wink, wink, says Obama; go right ahead, we won’t check.

Remember this?

It’s Obamacare deadline day—sort of

The New Neo Posted on by

And here are statistics about it—sort of.

You can find the articles nearly everywhere in the MSM on the success of the six million signups. Or enrollments. Or somethings. How many have paid or will pay, how many are well or ill or young or old, how many are largely subsidized, how many are only there because they lost their previous insurance through Obamacare, and how many are actually necessary for the success of the program? Only the Shadow knows, or at least the government’s not saying if indeed it does know, and what it says today may be quite different from what it says tomorrow.

In some ways it doesn’t matter. Obamacare is so central to Democrats’ plans that they will do whatever they can to continue it, and say whatever they need to say to make it sound successful. It’s no great trick to promise vast numbers of people free stuff (or nearly-free stuff) if you’re the federal government and you can print more money or take it from other people. And if your partners the insurance companies are hurting, you can cover for them for a while, too. You can do all of it for a while.

And it always has been clear that there will be many success stories to trumpet. I don’t think that even Obamacare’s harshest critics ever contended that it will be bad for everyone. But it has already been, and will continue to be, bad for many many people. It was completely unnecessary, too, in order to redress problems such as pre-existing conditions or portability, but it’s pretty clear that was not really the goal.

The PR campaign on both sides will almost undoubtedly feature a bunch of people citing dueling anecdotal evidence, most of which will be meaningless because a couple of stories one way or the other are meaningless. It will also almost undoubtedly be the case that all the success stories will involve subsidies of one kind or another, and the pro-Obamacare forces will act as though the money transfer involved is on the order of manna falling from heaven.

Plus, enrollment numbers are one thing. The actual insurance that people will receive is another, as well as how it all will affect the much larger employment-based health insurance market. My guess is that most people on the exchanges have no idea what they signed up for, and won’t know till they have to use the health care system. What doctors and hospitals will be covered? Do they understand how high their deductibles might be? For those newly on Medicaid (who would not be among the six million), will they be able to get care at all outside of the emergency rooms?

Socialism sounds good…

The New Neo Posted on by

…until you experience enough of it, that is:

France’s governing Socialists have suffered big losses in municipal elections, with the opposition UMP claiming victory and the far right celebrating further gains.

These are local contests, but they indicate a dissatisfaction with the Socialists. The way voters have been going in recent years (including in this country), there’s a strong tendency for fickleness, though, and a “what have you done for me lately?” mentality that causes rather large and temporary pendulum swings. Only time will tell whether this is a more lasting change.

And, just as in the US, the very biggest cities tend to remain most strongly leftist:

The centre-right UMP was said to have captured a number of key cities, including Toulouse, Quimper, Limoges, Saint-Etienne, Reims, Roubaix and Tourcoing.

The Socialists retained control of Paris, with their candidate Anne Hidalgo due to become the capital’s first female mayor.

Remember, too, that left and right in Europe are not the same as in the US. For starters, the colors are reversed, with red for the left (as they used to be in the US). But more importantly, the entire apparatus is shifted to the left in general.

[Hat tip: Ace of Spades.]

Dust in the wind

The New Neo Posted on by

At least we in the US don’t have to deal with this:

When soggy, green Northern Ireland gets coated by red, Saharan dust, the locals get slightly perturbed.

The dust is being pumped northward into the United Kingdom as winds aloft flow from the south to southeast instead of the normal west-to-east direction, says weather.com senior meteorologist Jon Erdman. An expansive blocking area of high pressure is stretching from eastern Europe to southern Greenland, and that’s working in tandem with a strong southward dip in the jet stream centered just west of the Iberian Peninsula.

As a result, northern Europe has turned hazy with Saharan dust filling the air in some areas, according to a BBC report.

And of course, that made me think of this:

I tend to think of northern Europe and the Sahara as very, very far apart. But Europe is smaller than one might think, and the Sahara bigger. Actually, the Sahara and Europe are roughly equal in size. And winds can take stuff like sanddust really really far.

Speaking of climate change, the Sahara is a fairly recent phenomenon, a desert formed in an area that was once a larger desert but then became wetter before it became drier again:

A timeline of Sahara occupation:

22,000 to 10,500 years ago: The Sahara was devoid of any human occupation outside the Nile Valley and extended 250 miles further south than it does today.

10,500 to 9,000 years ago: Monsoon rains begin sweeping into the Sahara, transforming the region into a habitable area swiftly settled by Nile Valley dwellers.

9,000 to 7,300 years ago: Continued rains, vegetation growth, and animal migrations lead to well established human settlements, including the introduction of domesticated livestock such as sheep and goats.

7,300 to 5,500 years ago: Retreating monsoonal rains initiate desiccation in the Egyptian Sahara, prompting humans to move to remaining habitable niches in Sudanese Sahara. The end of the rains and return of desert conditions throughout the Sahara after 5,500 coincides with population return to the Nile Valley and the beginning of pharaonic society.

Although mankind has had some influence on the desert, it seems minimal compared to the ebb and flow of rain there, which appears to be connected to completely non-human factors, some of them unknown. Humans have been the beneficiaries or victims of the changes, but not usually the instigators of them.

Here is some speculation about what drove those changes:

About 12,000 years ago, slight changes in the Earth’s orbit around the sun brought the northern hemisphere into the limelight. Summers became warmer as more solar radiation hit the lands north of the Equator. Solar ”˜insolation’ levels were up to 8 percent higher than today.

With insolation driving monsoonal climates like a huge heat engine, rainfall increased. One climate model estimated that the 8 percent increase in radiation in North Africa resulted in a 40 percent increase in precipitation….

We know what caused the greening of the Sahara: a complex interaction between solar insolation, vegetation cover, and ocean temperatures.

What is even more interesting for today’s civilizations is the speed at which these changes occurred.

Peter deMenocal, an expert at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, argues that it started and ended very abruptly””within a few decades to centuries””triggered largely by summer insolation crossing the threshold of 470 Watts per meter squared, 4.2 percent higher than today.

He speculates that there could be an insolation tipping point “whereby subtropical African climate flips abruptly between humid and arid”.

However, other evidence suggests a more gradual transition. Layers of sediment drilled from the bottom of Lake Yoa in northeastern Chad hint that the environment changed in phases from trees and bushes to shrubs and grasses and finally to nothing but sand.

It’s hard to imagine the Sahara as anything but sand. But could global warming prompt another greening of the desert? Not likely. Solar insolation is still too low, the monsoon is shifting southwards, and vegetation cover is decreasing.

So: the change was enormous, probably relatively sudden, and had much much more to do with changes in the earth’s orbit than anything else. And it drives home how little we know about the complex interplay of factors that cause climate change, which has been occurring as long as the earth has been here.

Art, royal children, and time

The New Neo Posted on by

Yesterday I wrote a post featuring this charming photo of the young and growing royal family:

family

What do I like about the photo? It’s not really the subject matter; I’m not so much into the royals, although I think this particular crew seems unusually likeable as well as photogenic. For me, it’s more about the picture: I like the framing in the window.

But the thing that I find most engaging about it is the interplay between the baby and the dog, in contrast with the usual formality of an official royal portrait. What is the dog thinking? Is it loyally and steadfastly standing guard? Is it ignoring the baby and looking past him to something interesting in the distance, a squirrel perhaps?

The baby’s fascination, though, is clearly with the dog itself.

And the whole thing reminded me of another, somewhat darker portrait, one by Goya. Goya was a court painter known for being remarkably unflattering to his royal sitters, but this portrait of the very young Manuel Osorio Manrique de Zué±iga is different, and far gentler:

goya

Like many children of the time (late eighteenth century) the boy did not live to adulthood; he died around the age of eight. The portrait foreshadows this in the lower left of the picture, where the animals are carrying on their own drama:

The sitter is the son of the Count and Countess of Altamira. Outfitted in a splendid red costume, he is shown playing with a pet magpie (which holds the painter’s calling card in its beak), a cage full of finches, and three wide-eyed cats. In Christian art birds frequently symbolize the soul, and in Baroque art caged birds are symbolic of innocence. Goya may have intended this portrait as an illustration of the frail boundaries that separate the child’s world from the forces of evil or as a commentary on the fleeting nature of innocence and youth.

There’s also this:

…[Y]ou sense “Goya’s awareness of how contingent life is,” to quote the critic Robert Hughes.

That awareness is certainly heightened by…our knowledge of Goya’s own losses. (At least seven of his offspring died in infancy.) Although the dark mood of later Goya is much in evidence here, the painting has talismanic properties, as if the image of Manuel could somehow warn or protect other children.

Children and animals are cute, but they are much more than cute. They are extraordinarily precious and also vulnerable, and artists (be they painters or photographers) know that, as do parents.

The fastest generation

The New Neo Posted on by

I was on an airplane recently that was completely full—as almost all airplanes I ride seem to be these days.

I was seated on the aisle next to two female college students who were clearly friends of each other. Maybe half the time they spent doing their homework. The one directly next to me, whose work I could see, first did some sort of trig-ish assignment, and then turned to peruse a textbook with a chapter that summarized the work of Freud by applying his theories to Kurt Cobain’s suicide—demonstrating the futility of attempts at cultural relevance on the part of textbook writers, because the event occurred in 1994, probably before those girls were even born.

But what I noticed most wasn’t their homework. The rest of the time they were doing two things: talking, and scrolling through their photos on their cell phones. I was deeply impressed by the speed with which they could do both.

Their speech rate was phenomenal. I’m no slouch myself in the talking department, and I have friends with high speech rates, but I’ve never heard anything remotely like these girls. And their fingers flew across their cellphones in similar fashion. They were the hummingbirds of talk and of phone photo galleries—and, I’d imagine, of texting.

I have a feeling they are hardly alone. The newer generations have developed skills we can only dream about.

Which gave me the idea that perhaps on YouTube there are proud videos by young people showing how fast they can text. Instead, I found something even more organized: speed texting competitions. And apparently this has been going on for quite a few years.

Here’s a video about one of the biggest contests, which is held in NY and has a prize of $50,000:

These kids are focused and serious. You can mock or revile what it is they happen to be serious and focused about (which, by the way, includes not just straight speed texting, but blindfold texting and behind-the-back texting), but at least it’s better than a lot of other things they could be doing with their time.

I don’t text, by the way. By the time I’m finished blogging for the day, a keyboard is the last thing I want to deal with.