Category Archives: Politics

Alliance Defense Fund Still Around

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If you thought the folks at the Alliance Defense Fund took their ball and went home after taking the Forsyth County Commissioners' prayer case and running with it all the way to the US Supreme Court and losing, you'd be wrong. They've reappeared as an influencer of the controversial NC Amendment One on tomorrow's primary ballots. From the Fayetteville Observer:

The official explanation issued by the state Constitutional Amendments Publication Commission on next month's measure, written to help voters understand it, acknowledges the "debate among legal experts" over the possible effects. It concludes: "The courts will ultimately make those decisions."

Stam, the Raleigh lawmaker, said he wanted a more narrowly worded amendment but was "overruled" by "national experts" he identified as the Alliance Defense Fund, a Christian legal advocacy group.

Stam says the state needs the amendment to protect marriage from efforts to de-legitimize it. If unmarried straight couples want the benefits of marriage, he said, they should get married. 

Tax Expenditures – A Celebratory Post for CPA Liberation Day

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In celebration of CPA Liberation Day I bring you a link to a column by two professors at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School about how we might think differently about tax deductions if we (properly) identified them as government spending:

Here’s a way to see through the fog. Instead of looking at all the breaks for mortgage interest, health care, retirement savings and so on as deductions, picture the government writing you a check for each item. This equivalence between tax deductions and government spending leads economists to call them “tax expenditures.” Reformers have hit on an even more pointed description: spending through the tax code.

The tax system is also equivalent to a collection of individual mandates, like the one in the Obama health-care law, with penalties for Americans who fail to buy insurance. For many people, that’s how our system works. You and your neighbor might have the same income, but if, unlike your neighbor, you fail to have a mortgage or buy as much health insurance, then you have to pay higher taxes…

Here’s our proposal: Let’s replace all tax expenditures with explicit subsidies — that is, with actual federal payments — so we can really see the costs and debate all spending programs on an equal footing. Doing so would help us answer crucial questions, such as whether we get more bang for our buck by subsidizing homeownership or by spending more on schools.

There’s one more payoff to getting rid of the myriad breaks hidden in our byzantine tax code: It will be a lot easier to get your taxes done before midnight.

Americans Elect Gets on the NC Ballot

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This is an update to a February 19 post (Presidential Election 2.0) in which I wrote about a group called Americans Elect which described itself as: 

a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that is not affiliated with any political party, ideology or candidate. It is funded exclusively by individual contributions—and not from corporate, labor, special interest, foreign, or lobbyist sources. And we intend to repay our initial financing so that no single individual will have contributed more than $10K.

Ultimately, Americans Elect is the first nominating process that will be led directly by voters like YOU…

THE GOAL OF AMERICANS ELECT is to nominate a presidential ticket that answers directly to voters—not the political system.

According to the Raleigh News & Observer they've been successful in getting on the ballot in North Carolina and 20 other states so far for the 2012 election. This could get pretty interesting.

Freewheeling Hippies vs. Button Down Managers

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Some behavioral scientists studied the "top 155 political blogs" during the 2008 election year and compared the liberal and conservative blogs. From their abstract we learn:

Notably, the authors find evidence of an association between ideological affiliation and the technologies, institutions, and practices of participation. Blogs on the left adopt different, and more participatory, technical platforms, comprise significantly fewer sole-authored sites, include user blogs, maintain more fluid boundaries between secondary and primary content, include longer narrative and discussion posts, and (among the top half of the blogs in the sample) more often use blogs as platforms for mobilization…

The practices of the left are more consistent with the prediction that the networked public sphere offers new pathways for discursive participation by a wider array of individuals, whereas the practices of the right suggest that a small group of elites may retain more exclusive agenda-setting authority online. (Emphasis mine)

Gee, I'm just shocked that liberal blogs would be wordier and less centrally controlled than conservative blogs, or that conservatives would maintain a more hierarchical structure. I also like the term "more fluid boundaries between secondary and primary content"; I might use that in the future. As for the liberal blogs using the platform more for mobilization I think it's important that we remember this is a study of 2008's election in which it was pretty clear that Obama's team, and by extension the liberal online universe, cleaned everybody's clock. Since then the opposite side has played a great game of catchup as evidenced by the mid-term election in 2010 and I think this year's going to be much more of a horse race.

Reduced Mental Effort Leads to Conservative Beliefs?

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So, I'm reading this Freaknomics post and thinking, "If I repeat this out loud in my neck of the woods I might get my butt kicked" which of course prompted me to post it on a blog with my name on it for the world to see:

New research(summarized in the BPS Digest) finds that “low-effort” thinking about a given issue is more likely to result in a conservative stance…

The BPS Digest places the research in a larger context: “The finding that reduced mental effort encourages more conservative beliefs fits with prior research suggesting that attributions of personal responsibility (versus recognising the influence of situational factors), acceptance of hierarchy and preference for the status quo – all of which may be considered hallmarks of conservative belief - come naturally and automatically to most people, at least in western societies.”

FYI, I'm definitely posting this to Facebook so I can watch all my conservative friends get all twitchy. It's been at least two hours since one of them has blamed "Godless liberals" for the end America so I might as well get them kickstarted.

State and Local is Where It’s At

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For those of you who think all the political action is in Washington, DC I have to tell you that the real action, at least in terms of entertainment value, is in the state and local arenas. A perfect example:

Presidential Election 2.0

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Fed up with the candidates the Democrats and Republicans are putting forward for POTUS? Not willing to throw your vote away on Libertarian or Green Party whack-jobs? There might be hope for you yet:

AMERICANS ELECT is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that is not affiliated with any political party, ideology or candidate. It is funded exclusively by individual contributions—and not from corporate, labor, special interest, foreign, or lobbyist sources. And we intend to repay our initial financing so that no single individual will have contributed more than $10K.

Ultimately, Americans Elect is the first nominating process that will be led directly by voters like YOU…

THE GOAL OF AMERICANS ELECT is to nominate a presidential ticket that answers directly to voters—not the political system.

American voters are tired of politics as usual. They want leaders that will put their country before their party, and American interests before special interests. Leaders who will work together to develop fresh solutions to the serious challenges facing our country. We believe a secure, online nominating process will prove that America is ready for a competitive, nonpartisan ticket.

Creative Legislating, Part II

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Last week we had the Virginia legislator who did this:

To protest a bill that would require women to undergo an ultrasound before having an abortion, Virginia State Sen. Janet Howell (D-Fairfax) on Monday attached an amendment that would require men to have a rectal exam and a cardiac stress test before obtaining a prescription for erectile dysfunction medication.

The amendment ended up being a symbolic gesture as it was defeated and the original bill was passed.  This week we have this story from Indiana:

Rep. Jud McMillin, a Republican member of the Indiana General Assembly, took back his drug-testing bill after one of his helpful Democratic colleagues amended it ever so slightly.

The Huffington Post says Rep. McMillin, the sponsor of the bill advocating a pilot program for welfare applicants to be drug-tested, decided to withdraw it once his colleagues made a few tweaks.

"There was an amendment offered today that required drug testing for legislators as well and it passed, which led me to have to then withdraw the bill," he said.

His reasoning is that it's currently considered unconstitutional to require drug testing for political candidates, and he wanted to make sure the bill wouldn't be struck down because of that. However, the precedent involved was for candidates, not those already in office.

 

 

Creative Legislating

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Who needs reality shows when you have politics? Virginia might have the best show going right now:

To protest a bill that would require women to undergo an ultrasound before having an abortion, Virginia State Sen. Janet Howell (D-Fairfax) on Monday attached an amendment that would require men to have a rectal exam and a cardiac stress test before obtaining a prescription for erectile dysfunction medication.

"We need some gender equity here," she told HuffPost. "The Virginia senate is about to pass a bill that will require a woman to have totally unnecessary medical procedure at their cost and inconvenience. If we're going to do that to women, why not do that to men?"

The Republican-controlled senate narrowly rejected the amendment Monday by a vote of 21 to 19, but passed the mandatory ultrasound bill in a voice vote. A similar bill in Texas, which physicians say has caused a "bureaucratic nightmare," is currently being challenged in court.