Day: October 3, 2002

The FEC Ponders Whether Jay Leno Is Breaking the Law

Henry Hanks points out the absolutely insidious reality of campaign finance reform.

This Yahoo! story describes how the philosopher kings at the Federal Election Commission voted on whether or not monologues by comedians like Jay Leno are covered under the new campaign finance law . According to the story (emphasis added),

In its first vote spelling out how those restrictions will be applied, the FEC agreed 6-0 on Thursday to exempt some types of programming that broadcasters are not paid to air. Commissioner Karl Sandstrom said the move would keep public service announcements, late night comedy monologues and talk shows that mention or feature federal candidates from falling under the new law’s restrictions.

Commission lawyers said the exemption wouldn’t automatically keep those kinds of programming from being considered a campaign contribution. That would be considered case by case, they said.

Every time free speech objections to campaign finance reform are raised, they are dismissed as simply posturing by supporters of campaign finance reform. But here we have a bunch of un-elected bureacrats deciding whether or not Jay Leno can make fun of politicians on national television.

As Hanks puts it,

In other words – Dave, Jay, and especially you political talk show hosts out there (both the Godfathers and the Mike Malloys) – “Watch what you say.” Interesting how this doesn’t get quite the same reaction it did when it was Ari Fleischer.

My prediction — eventually the FEC will try to take action against weblogs. Look, for example, at all of the weblog-related activity centered around defeating Cynthia McKinney during her primary. Yes that was free speech but it was also electioneering, and campaign finance reform is predicated on the view that the latter is not protected by appeals to the former. And, it is not clear that courts will afford weblog-style sites the same consideration that newspapers receive (in fact in some cases they have clearly said that some guy in his bedroom updating a personal web site does not deserve the same legal rights as a newspaper doing the same thing from an expensive office building).

Is Frank Lautenberg Too Old?

Watching Crossfire and other shows last night as they discussed the New Jersey Supreme Court’s decision to let Frank Lautenberg replace Robert Torricelli on the ballot there, the Republicans on the shows kept hitting at one theme — Lautenberg is too old.

That is generally such a lame argument (and likely to be unsuccessful) that it was perplexing the Republicans were using it. Fortunately the Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz comes to the rescue in a look at whether or not Republicans might make Torricelli and the switcheroo the focus of their campaigns in much the same way that Democrats successfully made Newt Gingrich their focus a few years ago.

It turns out that when Lautenberg first ran for the Senate in 1982 (and won), he made incumbent Senator Millicent Fenwick’s age a major issue in his campaign. Fenwick was 72. Lautenberg is 78.

Along with continuing to hit on corruption and Democrati backroom deals, challenger Forrester should simply run TV ads featuring nothing but quotes from Lautenberg about Fenwick being too old.

Misleading WHO Study on Violence

Last week many news outlets reported on a study by the World Health Organization that blondes were becoming extinct — that turned out to be a hoax. No such study existed. But now WHO seems to be using a genuine report to distort the rate of homicides by intimate partners.

The New York Times summarizes the WHO report on intimate murder this way,

The study found that violence against women by their male partners occurs in all countries, regardless of economic class and religion. Data from Australia, the United States, Canada, Israel and South Africa show that 40 to 70 percent of female murder victims were killed by their husbands or boyfriends.

But the situation is not the same for male murder victims. In the United States, for instance, only 4 percent of men murdered from 1976 to 1996 were killed by their wives, ex-wives or girlfriends.

The problem with this statistic is that it makes it appear that the odds of a man being murdered by a girlfriend, wife or ex-wife is far lower than the risk that a woman will be killed by a boyfriend, husband or ex-husband.

But in the United States, the actual annual figures break out to something like 1,300 women killed by male intimates compared to about 600 men killed by female intimates. In most years, about 1/3rd of all murders by intimate partners are committed by women.

But at the same time, it is correct that only 4 percent of men who are murdered are killed by women they have an intimate relationship with. But this is because men are so much more likely to be murdered than are women. As WHO notes, men constitute approximately 3/4 of all homicide victims (in the United States, about 80 percent of murder victims are men).

Another major problem with WHO’s study on violence is that it lumps in suicide as an act of violence. Yes suicide is a problem and needs to be addressed, but somebody who wants to kill himself is not the same sort of social problem as somebody who wants to kill other people. Out of the 1.6 million victims of violence annually that WHO cites, well over 1 million of those deaths are the result of suicides.

Finally, WHO has lowballed the number of people who died as a result of violence at only 191 million in the 20th century. The complete report isn’t available online, but that figure is way too small unless WHO is playing with politics with who counts as a victim of violence.

Sources:

First ever Global Report on Violence and Health released. World Health Organization, Press Release, October 3, 2002.


War, Murder and Suicide: A Year’s Toll Is 1.6 Million. Sheryl Gay Stroberg, New York Times, October 3, 2003.

Worldwide Land Use Patterns: 1700-1990

NASA has produced a fascinating series of maps of the world illustrating changing land-use patterns from 1700 through 1990. NASA’s main reason for creating this series of maps is to advance a hypothesis about land use and global warming, but a quick look at the maps themselves reveals another interesting observation:


Land Use – 1700


Land Use – 1900


Land Use – 1990

Among environmentalists, it is a shibboleth that preservation of existing environments and ecosystems is a priori a good thing. But on this map the parts of the world that changed the least from 1700-1990 are among the poorest regions of the world.

Just take one long look at Africa — almost no land use change in 300 years, and nothing but vast tracts of unending poverty.

Source:

Landcover Changes May Rival Greenhouse Gases As Cause Of Climate Change. NASA, October 1, 2002.