April 20, 2005
Mayor “Are You Attacking My Manhood” Coleman
Recently talk radio host Glenn Beck has been covering the story of the 16 year old handicapped girl that was beaten and raped on videotape at Mifflin High School in Columbus, Ohio. (Audio can be obtained here. Registration required. Free audio avaliable here.)
While the actions of the students are obviously outrageous, what is even more appalling is that the administration at the school tried to convince the girl’s father to not call the police in order to “avoid media attention.” Surprise surprise, the father called the police anyway and now the school is getting even more media attention for that little gaffe.
But what is simply unbelievable is the fact that the school board decided to fire the principal, but only suspend the assistant principals and then move them to other schools. This, despite the fact that one of the assistant principals was the one that told the girl’s father not to call the authorities.
Glenn Beck was finally able to get Michael B. Coleman, the mayor of Columbus, Ohio on the phone today. (After he tried to back out of his promise to call in two days ago.) The conversation was quite interesting and perhaps indicative of why Columbus has such a problem with their school system.
Glenn attempted to talk to Coleman about the school board’s decision to keep the assistant principals on, and Coleman talked about the criminal side of the investigation and said that he was not allowed to reveal anything about it while it was open, but he was sure everything would be taken care of. Glenn kept trying to steer him back to the subject of the school board and their actions towards the assistant principals and Coleman kept insisting that he couldn’t talk about an open police investigation. About the only thing he said about the schools was that they had paid policemen there and that he, the mayor, had no control or influence over what the school board did.
The best part of the interview was when Glenn attempted to ask him a question, “Doesn’t it offend you as a man….” He didn’t get a chance to finish, but I’m assuming the end of that question was something like, “that the schools would allow something like this to happen to a girl and then do nothing to the people who allowed it to go on.” However, he didn’t get a chance because Coleman interrupted him with “Are you attacking my manhood?”
No wonder the Columbus school district is having so many problems, if no one in the city government is willing to get their hands dirty and deal with the problem. Sending the police over to patrol the schools is a good temporary first step, but it's not a solution. A little something more than that needs to be done, and it seems that the school board doesn’t want to do it and the mayor “can’t get involved.”
Apparently Coleman wants to run for governor of Ohio. I hope all you voters in Ohio remember this incident.
To end this article on a funny note, I’ll relate an exchange with a humorous man who called to say that this incident had nothing to do with Mayor Coleman, but instead was completely the fault of President Bush. When a stunned Glenn asked him why, he said “because Cameron Diaz said that if Bush was reelected, that rape would be legal.” Much laughter was enjoyed by all.
Update: Ohio for Blackwell has a post up on this also, and has the audio of the interview avaliable for free.
Update 2: I just spend a while talking about this with my husband. He listened to the entire Glenn Beck show, whereas I came in midway. Glenn was apparently ripping on the mayor the entire two and a half hours during which it seemed that the mayor was dodging the interview that he had previously agreed to. Glenn began the interview by apologizing for a scheduling mistake that Glenn, the mayor, and every single person in the audience knew that Glenn's staff had not made. Glenn was offering the mayor a way to save face for trying to dodge the interview.
However, my husband thinks, right or wrong, that Glenn treated his guest with hostility from the outset. My husband’s impression of the interview with the mayor was that Glenn had one major question to be answered and after the first time he asked it, the mayor stated concretely that he had no authority over the school board, but that his authority and duty was to the police department which was heading up an investigation into the matter and that to answer Glenn's question would most definitely compromise that case. Glenn persisted. The mayor never deviated from his insistence both that the police were doing all they could to investigate and that he was prohibited from compromising the case by answering Glenn's question.
The mayor did indeed say that he couldn’t talk about the police investigation, and it might be a possible interpretation of his words that the school board’s actions were included in the investigation, but I’m not at all convinced that that is the case. It can also easily be interpreted as him avoiding the issue. Plus, I don’t really see any reason why the school board’s actions would be part of the police investigation into the incident and thus covered by the mayor's inability to talk about an ongoing police investigation. My husband maintains, however, that when investigators initiate a media gag order, that they throw the net wide as to what can not be discussed to allow for possible unforeseen ramifications of information disclosure.
My husband also thinks Glenn, who he usually likes, was stupid and uninformed to be trying to talk to the mayor instead of the school board members. I agree. They are the ones who made this decision and should be anwering for it.
Also, directly after the “don’t attack my manhood” incident, the mayor did finally say “I’m not offended” to Glenn’s question about the school board putting the administrators back to work. That makes me think that he’s OK with the school board’s decision and explains why he’s avoiding the issue elsewhere in the interview. My husband thinks, though, that the mayor was flustered because he thought Glenn was attacking him with schoolyard insults. The mayor lost his composure and didn't really understand the question. He thinks that the mayor was reassuring Glenn that he had not offended his guest and that they could continue the discussion.
I still think the mayor was skirting the issue to cover himself and his people and his town, so I’m just recounting all this for the purposes of full disclosure, since I don’t want to be one of those hysterical pajama people who don't tell both sides of the story. I’m curious, though, as to whether anyone else has any sort of similar reaction to the audio of the interview, or if you all think my husband is nuts too. :)
Posted by illuminaria at 12:09 PM | Comments (7)
March 08, 2005
More Useless Condescending Claptrap
The Democracy Project today pointed out an op-ed by Ellen Weintraub, one of the members of the FEC who voted against appealing a decision last year that required the FEC to regulate the internet in order to comply with BCRA.
The op-ed begins with the sentence “Bloggers of America, chill” and continues:
Reports of a Federal Election Commission plot to "crack down" on blogging and e-mail are wildly exaggerated.First of all, we're not the speech police. We don't tell private citizens what they can or cannot say, on the Internet or anywhere else. The FEC regulates campaign finance. There's got to be some money involved, or it's out of our jurisdiction.
BCRA is all about policing speech. And for pete’s sake, just because some reports may be exaggerated does not mean that they have no merit. People who did not even want campaign finance reform to begin with are obviously going to have issue with more regulations of that nature. You can’t just dismiss all of them as reactionary wackos.
And unlike what she asserts, money does not have to be involved for the FEC to be involved. The contribution merely has to have some monetary value. Bradley Smith said in his interview that, for instance, if someone were to spend some small amount of money sending out letters for a campaign, and those letters raise a large amount of money, that the FEC would consider the monetary value of the act to be equal to the amount of money raised. As I pointed out in my last post on this subject, with a little juggling of numbers, the value of a link on Instapundit to a candidate’s website could be well over $2000, even though it would probably only cost pennies in terms of time and bandwidth. As for email, if the FEC can value letters that are sent out, there’s no reason for it to not be able to value email.
Wizbang also points out that in 2004 when they donated the use of a BlogAd to a campaign, they were required to sign a disclosure stating that they were donating the value of that BlogAd to the campaign. Plus since the FEC already regulates paid ads on the internet, what else could new regulations be about but regulating unpaid ads and in-kind contributions.
I just can't wait to see the regulations these guys are going to come up with.
Update: Wizbang has more, including a link to the fisking of the statements of John McCain and Russ Feingold regarding this issue. La Shawn Barber has a round up of posts on the subject.
Posted by illuminaria at 04:15 PM | Comments (0)
John McCain: The Stuff of Regulatory Nightmares
Today I’ve been reading at Michelle Malkin, Captain’s Quarters, and the Democracy Project that Senator McCain, of the infamous BCRA, seems to be taking advantages of loopholes in his very own campaign finance reform bill.
Specifically the allegations are that his Reform Institute raises money to promote him; the institute pays a six figure “consulting fee” to one of McCain’s advisors; and the institute has received $200,000 from a company which McCain then began formally supporting politically. This was all very interesting, but what I found most interesting was the mention of McCain’s bill introduced in the Senate a few weeks ago entitled “Localism in Broadcasting Reform Act of 2005”
In McCain’s press release, he says that the reason for the act is that local broadcasting stations are not spending enough time on local elections. He seems to believe that this is responsible for recent increases in election related advertising. I’ll point out something to him that my father pointed out to me years ago: correlation does not mean causation. Just because local coverage decreases and advertising increases does not mean that the first caused the second. It could mean that the second caused the first, or that they were both caused by some third factor. Both of those options seem like plausible possibilities that should be explored. For instance, perhaps people are so sick of the advertising that they want to see less coverage, and the local stations are responding to this.
Furthermore, unlike what McCain seems to think, requiring local stations to provide more coverage of elections does not necessarily reduce the amount of money spent, even if you accept his premise that this would lead to less advertising. If campaigns are spending less money on advertising, then stations have to get that money from somewhere else. Either their advertising rates increase and other companies take on that burden, or the station makes less money, which means that the owners of and workers at the stations get less money. The last option seems far more likely, seeing as how stations tend to give viewers what they want and viewers don’t seem to want to see more candidates on the television, thus advertisers are less likely to buy advertising during those times and the station will be forced to charge less.
McCain says that his bill will “reduce the license term for broadcasters from eight years to three years, thereby requiring broadcasters to provide the FCC with information every three years on why their license should be renewed” and “would require the full Commission to review five percent of all license and renewal applications, and would command broadcasters to post on their Internet sites information detailing their commitment to local public affairs programming.”
Let’s take a look at that bill, as politicians always seem to leave out pertinent things in press releases.
Here is the full text of the bill. This is my summary.
Sections 1&8: Title and definitions.
Section 2: Reduces the term of broadcast licenses from 8 years to 3.
Section 3: Requires the full FCC Commission to review at least 5% of the license requests every year.
Section 4: “Require[s] every broadcaster to file, electronically, a copy of its public interest issues and programs list and its children's programming reports … within 10 days after the end of each calendar quarter.” Also requires broadcast stations with websites and the FCC to provide this information to the public.
Section 5: States that in order to get a renewal of their license, a licensee’s other stations must also be reviewed.
Section 6: It’s already in the law that “parties of interest” may file a petition with the FCC to deny a license. This act designates that to be a party of interest, all a person must do is be a listener or viewer of the station (which is not dependant on where they live) and “assert an interest in vindicating the general public interest.”
Section 7: Gives the FCC 9 months to do certain things such as consider standardized forms for submission of reports.
Sections 2,3,7, and part of 4 were included in the press release. But what about the rest of section 4, which requires each station to submit their public interest/children’s programming every three months. I admit I don’t know what the current requirement for this is, but this is still a pretty important part.
Section 5 also seems like a biggie. Unless an owner has the licenses of all of their stations come up at the same time, they would have to pull together all of the pertinent information on all of their stations more often than every three years, which is already quite a change from every eight years. How much more work will this create for stations, not to mention for the FCC, who is already going to have more to do because of sections 2 and 3. Every government regulation you add creates more taxpayer spending to enforce it. And let’s not forget the question of why it should be legal for the FCC to require all of your stations to be reviewed to get a license for one. That’s like requiring a review of all of my children’s educations in order for one child to get into college. Why not judge each station on its own merit?
Section 6 also seems like a big deal. This opens the window for all sorts of people to attempt to deny a station a license. Just how many times does a person have to listen or view a station to be counted as a “listener” or “viewer”? Since residence does not matter, does that mean listening to a radio station a few times over the internet would count? Would we get local special interest groups claiming that the local station does not work in the public interest because they don’t give any coverage to their group? Would I be able to complain about a station because I listen a syndicated show of theirs from the other side of the nation? And of course, this would enable McCain to give trouble to just about any station every three years. After all, we already know he has “an interest in vindicating the general public interest.”
All this for whatever the government deems to be in the general public interest. There’s no question, of course, if this is something the general public actually wants or needs.
Posted by illuminaria at 03:13 PM | Comments (0)
March 04, 2005
Extremely Easy for Blogs to Violate BCRA
I’ve been quite interested in this new development of the application of the McCain-Feingold Act and how it will apply to the Internet, but I couldn’t find a lot of details as to how this happened. So here it is:
On September 18th, 2004, the United States District Court released a decision written by Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly. The complaint in this case was brought by Christopher Shays and Martin Meehan, who are members of the House, against the FEC. Their complaints regarded the FEC’s regulations that implemented BCRA (the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act). The part of the decision that addresses the Internet runs from pages 48-57.
In BCRA, the regulations were defined to apply to “a communication by means of any broadcast, cable, or satellite communication, newspaper, magazine, outdoor advertising facility, mass mailing, or telephone bank to the general public, or any other form of general public political advertising.” The FEC’s regulations were then defined to apply to “a communication by means of any broadcast, cable or satellite communication, newspaper, magazine, outdoor advertising facility, mass mailing or telephone bank to the general public, or any other form of general public political advertising. The term public communication shall not include communications over the Internet.“ Basically it was the same language, but exempted the Internet.
The decision said: “Congress, by the plain terms of the statute, clearly intended for the term “public communication” to capture all forms of “general public political advertising” and the FEC has provided no legislative history that persuades the Court to ignore the plain meaning of the statute.” (Read the whole thing for details if you’re interested.)
According to this interview with Bradley Smith, who is a member of the six-member Federal Election Commission, he and the other two Republican commissioners wanted to appeal the decision, but the three Democrats did not want to. Now the FEC is in the process of modifying the regulations to apply to the Internet.
Part of the issue is that in 2004 people were able to purchase Internet advertising for a campaign and it was not counted as a contribution, which would not be the case for television or newspaper advertising, and therefore there were no limitations on it. I can certainly see how changing that would be consistent with BCRA (although I will say now that I think BCRA is unconstitutional in this regard.)
However, Bradley Smith says:
The real question is: Would a link to a candidate's page be a problem? If someone sets up a home page and links to their favorite politician, is that a contribution? This is a big deal, if someone has already contributed the legal maximum, or if they're at the disclosure threshold and additional expenditures have to be disclosed under federal law.Certainly a lot of bloggers are very much out front. Do we give bloggers the press exemption? If we don't give bloggers the press exemption, we have the question of, do we extend this to online-only journals like CNET?
…
Corporations aren't allowed to donate to campaigns. Suppose a corporation devotes 20 minutes of a secretary's time and $30 in postage to sending out letters for an executive. As a result, the campaign raises $35,000. Do we value the violation on the amount of corporate resources actually spent, maybe $40, or the $35,000 actually raised? The commission has usually taken the view that we value it by the amount raised. It's still going to be difficult to value the link, but the value of the link will go up very quickly.
It seems, then, that this would be pretty easy to measure the value of a link on a blog, in fact. Let’s refer to Michelle Malkin’s recent article on site statistics, and assume that her numbers are right. Assume then, that Instapundit gets about 25,000 hits a day, equal to 175,000 a week. Let’s also assume that a link to a political campaign would generate 4,000 hits, and that on average Instapundit premium advertisers get about 2% of Instapundit's traffic. This would extrapolate to 3500 hits for advertising, and 4000 hits for a link in the content. A week of premium advertising costs $2000. That would mean that Instapundit linking to a political campaign would be worth about $2285. Watch out Instapundit, you’re already above the limit!
What can we do? Contact the FEC commission and ask them to appeal the decision and/or attempt to write the regulations to prevent any (more) trampling of the first amendment. Contact your representatives in Congress and ask them to exclude the Internet themselves. Above all, let’s talk about this more. The comments of some people that this would never happen are, unfortunately, not particularly reassuring.
For much much more, see Michelle Malkin, Wizbang, Captain's Quarters, Powerline, and, well, everyone.
Posted by illuminaria at 05:28 PM | Comments (0)
February 17, 2005
Surprise - Governments Out For Money Too
I saw a very interesting piece at Coyote Blog today. Basically it points out the effect that taxes on certain things, such as cigarettes, that are meant to suppress “socially harmful” behaviors have on the government. Eventually the government comes to depend on the income from those taxes, so they either change the tax so that it no longer suppresses those behaviors, or just resist a reduction in those behaviors.
All of a sudden that 17-cent tax on BOTH plastic and paper bags in San Francisco makes more sense. On first glance, I thought, “why would they tax both, since they say plastic bags are the ones that are much more responsible for environmental harm?” Duh, it wasn’t because “paper was added so as not to discriminate,” which I thought was an incredibly lame excuse by the way. It’s because they want the money.
In the same vein, Vodka Pundit points out this CBS story that says
[Buying a fuel efficient hybrid] saves [Jayson Just] almost $300 a month in gas. It's great for Just but bad for the roads he's driving on, because he also pays a lot less in gasoline taxes which fund highway projects and road repairs. As more and more hybrids hit the road, cash-strapped states are warning of rough roads ahead.Officials in car-clogged California are so worried they may be considering a replacement for the gas tax altogether, replacing it with something called "tax by the mile."
…
"Drivers will get charged for how many miles they use the roads, and it's as simple as that," says engineer David Kim.Kim and fellow researcher David Porter at Oregon State University equipped a test car with a global positioning device to keep track of its mileage. Eventually, every car would need one.
"So, if you drive 10 miles you will pay a certain fee which will be, let's say, one tenth of what someone pays if they drive 100 miles," says Kim.
The new tax would be charged each time you fill up. A computer inside the gas pump would communicate with your car's odometer to calculate how much you owe.
The system could also track how often you drive during rush hour and charge higher fees to discourage peak use. That's an idea that could break the bottleneck on California's freeways.
What a great idea! Let’s require every car to install a GPS device so that the government can pull in more tax revenues. I’m sure there won’t be any abuse at all of that technology. Why I’d love to be required to have a GPS unit in my car that the government has access to. And goodness knows, making the tax structure even more complicated than it is now is a wonderful idea too.
Oh, and I really loved the quote from "Jim Whitty, administrator of the [Oregon's] Road User Fee Task Force" in this piece.
However, Whitty noted one perk that would accompany the elimination of the gas tax. "The price of gas will come down," he said.
*Sigh* Seriously, is anyone stupid enough to buy that?
Update: Wizbang has a story on this. Ravenwood's Universe has a story about IBM installing car tracking equipment for the government.
Posted by illuminaria at 07:11 PM | Comments (0)