Month: March 2001

NAACP Should Shut Up

Near the end of the 2000 political season, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People ran a controversial advertisement implying that George W. Bush was responsible for the murder of James Byrd. The ads features Byrd’s daughter, Renee Mullins, doing a voice over saying that after seeing Bush oppose hate crime laws, “It was like my father was killed all over again.”

Conservatives were outraged by the ad, they need not worry much longer, because ultra-liberal Democratic Sen. Paul Wellstone (Minnesota) has a solution — he wants to make that ad illegal.

The NAACP, like many such organizations, is incorporated as a nonprofit under IRS rules that forbid it from doing partisan political advocacy; if the NAACP itself had aired the ad, its tax exempt status could be jeopardized. To get around this limitation the NAACP exploited a “loophole” and created The NAACP Voter Fund. The Voter Fund is incorporated as a 501(c)(4) nonprofit. A 501(c)(4) nonprofit is defined by the IRS as a nonprofit that is devoted to some sort of social welfare issue. Such organizations can’t endorse candidates without risking their tax exempt status, but they can run the sort of issue ads that the NAACP ran directed at Bush.

For Wellstone and other extremist supporters of campaign finance reform, allowing the NAACP to take out such ads is an intolerable loophole in the law. As such Wellstone recently introduced an amendment to the campaign finance reform bill currently under consideration by the Senate which would forbid 501(c)(4) organizations from taking out any sort of ads within 60 days of a primary election.

Several opponents of any campaign finance reform, namely Republican Mitch McConnell, have actually signed on as supporters of Wellstone’s bill. Why? Because it is clearly an unconstitutional restriction of free speech, and there’s a good chance opponents of campaign finance reform will succeed in crafting any resulting bill in such a way that the Supreme Court will have to strike down the entire law rather than pick and choose to strike down just Wellstone’s amendment.

Wellstone, for his part, offers only the most pathetic of defenses in favor of his amendment. Despite the clear language from the Supreme Court on this matter, Wellstone thinks his amendment would survive legal challenge. And what about those NAACP ads? Don’t worry, Wellstone says, the Federal Elections Commission will be able to tell the good ads from the bad ads,

A comprehensive study conducted by the Brennan Center of ads run during the 1998 election found that only 2 genuine issue ads — out of the hundreds run — would have been inappropriately defined as a sham issue ad. Finally, in the event of constitutional problems, the Wellstone amendment is fully severable.

Hmmm. A sham issue ad, of course, is where the nonprofit claims to be just promoting an issue but, in fact, is really endorsing a candidate. Was the NAACP ad a sham issue ad? I would hazard a guess that it probably was. Moreover regardless of whether you think it was or not, the additional reporting costs and lawyers fees necessary to defend every advertisement would put everything back to square one — groups with large financial resources would still be in the game while the genuine grassroots efforts would get pushed out of the process entirely (Jesse Helmes once cleverly used the FEC to go after an ACT UP chapter that made the mistake of attacking him in a radio interview — few genuinely small groups can afford the risk of a protracted dispute with the FEC).

On Wellstone’s Senate web site there is some delightful Orwellian language with his office saying that these provisions are only fair,

Wellstone points out that limiting the issue ad ban just to corporations and labor will invite a shift in spending to non-profit groups in future elections, suggesting that in future years — even if this bill should pass — Congress will be forced to revisit sham issue ad regulation to close yet another loophole in federal election law.

Liberals used to trumpet this saying that the best response to speech with which they disagreed was simply more speech. Wellstone and others seem to have reversed this and decided that the less speech the better. It’s more than a bit weird to see a Democrat supporting efforts to outright ban political advertisements by labor unions. I guess they think that’s a small price to pay for an outright ban on corporate ads, but it seems like one immense Faustian bargain.

Hopefully the Supreme Court will still manage to save the soul of the country by invoking the ultimate loophole to this whole process, the First Amendment.

Source:

Wellstone Pushes to Close Sham Issue Ad Loophole In McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Reform Bill. Paul Wellstone, Press Release, March 26, 2001

That IBM-Holocaust Book

ArsTechnica recently linked to one of the better (though short) reviews of Edwin Black’s IBM and the Holocaust. Reviewing the book for The New York Times‘s, Gabriel Schoenfeld wwrites of the book,

The key question, in any case, is not whether I.B.M. sold Germany its equipment but whether, as alleged, it made the Final Solution part of its ”mission” and whether its relationship with Germany in any way ”energized” or significantly ”enhanced” Hitler’s efforts to destroy world Jewry. On the first point, Black never even attempts to substantiate his accusation — a scandalous omission considering the gravity of the charge. As for the second, his shaky evidence leads him to oscillate between two completely irreconcilable positions.

On the one hand, Black argues that I.B.M., through its German subsidiary, ”designed, executed and supplied the indispensable technological assistance Hitler’s Third Reich needed to accomplish what had never been done before — the automation of human destruction.” On the other hand, he maladroitly hedges, noting that even if Germany had completely lacked I.B.M.’s efficiency-enhancing tools, ”the Holocaust would have proceeded — and often did proceed — with simple bullets, death marches and massacres based on pen and paper persecution.” But if that is so, in what sense were the punch cards and the tabulating machines ”indispensable”?

Since When Does Marvel Own Batman?

This UK Guardian story is all messed up unless things have changed drastically in the past few months.

The obvious problem is that although Mark Millar does indeed work for Marvel, where he is responsible for the Ultimate series of books, Marvel doesn’t own Batman or Superman. Marvel and DC are planning a JLA/Avengers crossover book, but there’s been no mention of Millar’s involvement that I’ve heard of.

On the other hand, a Soviet Superman would be a great idea, though DC has already went through several reinventions of its characters. Didn’t the Guardian reporter read Kingdom Come?

FedEx Beats the FAA

For literally decades now the Federal Aviation Administration has been promising it is going to do something about the long outdated air traffic controller system. About the only thing it has accomplished, however, is its skill at coming up with excuses why the system is still not ready. Meanwhile private companies are concluding they can’t wait for the FAA any longer and FedEx Corporation recently went ahead and deployed its own high tech system in use at a private airport it runs.

The New York Times reports that FedEx is actively testing an air control system that relies on Global Positioning System to make landings much more efficient. Using a specially-equipped Boeing 727, the GPS system is able to tell the plan where it is at any given moment to within three feet, resulting in landings that are basically on the same spot every time. As FedEx’s Robert L. Ranchor told The Times, “All the tire rubber is all going to be in the same spot. They’re going to have to scrub it off more often.”

Currently the system is being tested only in clear weather daytime landings, but once FedEx is certain about the precision of the landings, the GPS-based system could revolutionize air flight. Today airplanes can only make straight ahead landings and inclement weather conditions such as fog typically shut down airports. Not only would the GPS system allow perfect landings even in thick fog, but it would allow for a variety of landing paths allowing for arrivals to occur more efficiently.

Moreover the system is extremely cost-efficient. The actual price for using a GPS system is about the same as a standard radar system, but a GPS system serves an entire 25-mile radius compared to a radar system which serves only a single runway.

Where FedEx has enjoyed a great deal of success, however, the FAA has crashed and burned. In 1995 the FAA announced a $475 million project to create a super-GPS system that would be have an accuracy of 7 meters and be in operation by 1998. That system is still in the ubiquitous “under development” stage, and apparently FAA contractors have had problems writing the software to manage the system.

Leave it to a private company to take existing resources, like the now aging GPS system, and design a solution that drastically outperforms what a government bureaucracy with a bloated budget can do.

Source:

FedEx Is Moving Ahead of U.S. to Improve Airport Landing. Matthew L. Wald, The New York Times, January 21, 2001.