Policy and Politics
tfk | May 1, 2007SCOTUSblog explains the excellent unanimous decision in KSR v. Teleflex. The Court overturned a lower court and invalidated a patent, strongly reaffirming the principle that patents must cover inventions that would not be obvious to a practitioner in the field based on existing inventions ("prior art"):
The Court’s decision has therefore called into question the validity of hundreds of thousands of claims in issued patents, and will likely lead to a dramatic change to the method by which the Patent Office, the courts, and the bar conduct their obviousness analyses.
This is excellent news,…
tfk | April 30, 2007The Lawrence City Commission will be considering a proposal to maintain a registry of domestic partnerships. The state attorney general has reviewed the proposal, and feels it's probably legal.
All the registry would do is provide a place for people (possibly restricted to Lawrence residents) to write down that they have made a lifetime commitment, and then their employers can check that registry to see which employees actually made that commitment. No employer would have to do anything, and the registry would not have any special meaning to the government or to anyone other than the…
tfk | April 29, 2007The inimitable John B. of Blog Meridian answered five questions posed to him on his blog, and I volunteered to do the same. His questions are above the fold, click through to see the answers:
1) Recall your first politically-sentient moment.
2) Tell a little about your research at KU in language even a liberal arts major who took his last formal science course 26 years ago (that would be me) can follow. I ain't too proud to be talked down to.
3) Ginger or Mary Ann?
4) Pick an actual or potential political candidate for any office (local, state or national). Poof! You've been asked…
tfk | April 23, 2007Via ThinkProgress, some thoughts on the flag at half-staff by Sergeant Jim Wilt, a piece titled "Why don’t we honor our fallen servicemembers?":
Following the deaths of 32 Virginia Tech students, the President of the United States ordered that all American flags be flown at half-staff for one week. …
But I find it ironic that the flags were flown at half-staff for the young men and women who were killed at VT yet it is never lowered for the death of a U.S. servicemember.
Is the life of Sgt. Alexander Van Aalten, a member of our very own task force, killed April 20 in Helmand province not…
tfk | April 21, 2007When Michael Moore tried to ask Roger Moore what responsibility he felt to Flint, Michigan, he got a simple answer. I'll get the same answer if I suggest that media companies like NBC ought to invest more heavily in public service programming (for instance by dropping Imus and his imitators), that major corporations ought to forego cheap foreign labor to keep Americans employed, that oil companies might legitimately be asked to pay some sort of windfall tax, or that Enron's real crime was not its financial chicanery but its abuse of California's energy supply. The answer is simple: business…
tfk | April 20, 2007Justice Kennedy conceded that "we find no reliable data" on whether plastic surgery in general, or facelifts and hairplugs in particular, causes men emotional harm. But he said it was nonetheless "self-evident" and "unexceptional to conclude" that "some men" who choose cosmetic surgery suffer "regret," "severe depression," "loss of esteem" and other ills.
Consequently, he said, the government has a legitimate interest in banning a particularly problematic surgical procedure to prevent men from casually or ill-advisedly making "so grave a choice."
(Text lightly edited from the coverage of…
tfk | April 20, 2007
It's an axiom of military life that no plan survives first contact with the enemy. It appears that our latest plans in Iraq couldn't survive contact with our allies:
Military planners have abandoned the idea that standing up Iraqi troops will enable American soldiers to start coming home soon and now believe that U.S. troops will have to defeat the insurgents and secure control of troubled provinces.
Training Iraqi troops, which had been the cornerstone of the Bush administration's Iraq policy since 2005, has dropped in priority, officials in Baghdad and Washington said.
No change has been…
tfk | April 19, 2007Jason objects to the claim that science is badly framed. He offers several examples in which he feels that:
it is the pleasantness of the message, not the slickness of the marketing, that is relevant.
That's the fatal flaw in the argument [by Nisbet, Mooney, etc.]. The problem isn't ineffective framing, it's having a message most people find unappealing. But there are other problems as well.
Which is to say, the problem is ineffective framing. Framing isn't about slickness. That's a misframing of framing. (Yes, I've now made myself sick of the term.) Framing is about finding a message…
tfk | April 17, 2007Zachary Moore attended the DI's Darwin vs. Design traveling show. He got an interesting insight while chatting with Todd Norquist, of the DI's Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture:
I asked him how many of these conferences were planned by the Discovery Institute, and he seemed hesitant, telling me that he didn't know if any more of them were going to be possible, since the costs were too high for the Institute to handle. ... He then told me (quite openly, also, which I thought was odd) that the financial situation of the Discovery Institute was grim, and that they were "bleeding…
tfk | April 17, 2007Stay Red Kansas couldn't write about guns yesterday because, well, there was a massive shooting:
Today, Stay Red had planned to discuss Governor Sebelius' unnecessary veto of the House's firearm legislation. Due to the previously referenced events, we felt it appropriate to move today's coverage to a later date.
That firearm legislation would have forbidden local communities from passing their own laws restricting concealed weapons. Concealed weapons were already banned on university campuses, courthouses and state facilities, but were not banned in municipal facilities like ballparks.…
tfk | April 17, 2007Matt Stoller is feeling good about Tax Day:
I am proud to pay taxes because I take pride in America, and paying some tiny burden to keep our society running is an extremely small price to pay for being able to call myself an American citizen. The old expression 'you get what you pay for' is apt for all sorts of situations. People tend to express what they value in how much they are willing to pay for it. I am willing and feel privileged for the right to pay for my country. The right-wing is embittered to do so, if they do so at all. And that, more than anything, says something about how…
tfk | April 16, 2007Juliet Eilperin reports :
Interior Department officials -- who have maintained for months that they did not analyze how human activities were affecting Arctic warming and endangering polar bears' survival -- completed a review examining studies of this very subject less than a week before proposing that the government list the bears as threatened with extinction, according to the department's own documents.
The report includes information about how the Arctic could be protected, discussions omitted in the document proposing that polar bears be listed as threatened. A major threat to polar…
tfk | April 16, 2007Tommy Thompson, former Bush HHS secretary and current presidential candidate, told the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism:
"I’m in the private sector and for the first time in my life I’m earning money. You know that’s sort of part of the Jewish tradition and I do not find anything wrong with that."
After this comment "caused a stir," Thompson stuck the other foot in his mouth:
What I was referring to, ladies and gentlemen, is the accomplishments of the Jewish religion. You've been outstanding business people and I compliment you for that.
Oy vey iz mir. The "accomplishments of the…
tfk | April 16, 2007Hate is a strong word, it goes beyond mere distaste and disagreement.
The people who left death threats and scared Kathy Sierra out of a planned appearance didn't just hate her. They had no reason to hate a person who writes a blog about computer interfaces. Their hate is for women, and their actions were driven by a hate for all women, and a desire to hurt all women.
The people who called a random pedestrian in Lawrence a "faggot," jumped out of their car and beat him to the ground may not have hated him personally. If the police charge of a hate crime bears out, it will be because of…
tfk | April 13, 2007Undergrads know more about politics than pop culture:
Half of the college students and 40 percent of the non-college students could name their respective members of Congress. Nearly two-thirds of college students and more than half of the non-college students could name at least one of their two U.S. senators. In contrast, only about 15 percent of the young people knew the name of the most recent winner of "American Idol" and about 10 percent knew the winner of "Dancing with the Stars."
I make no promises, but the Republic may have some life left in it yet.
tfk | April 11, 2007According to the Senate Rules Committee hearings on the governance of the Smithsonian, Dick Cheney has attended a total of 0 meetings of the Smithsonian Board of Regents. Now, I know Dick Cheney was in a secret location for a long time, but surely he could have made it to one of the 4 meetings a year they hold. The Chief Justice chairs that Board, and Rehnquist made it to all the meetings except when prevented by illness, as has Roberts.
I know Cheney has been busy exposing our nation's secret agents, secretly meeting oil executives to set national policy, and drumming up war with Iraq…
tfk | April 11, 2007After a leveraged buyout of a Texas utility put it on a greener path, the unanimous agreement of world governments that global warming is already changing ecosystems and affecting business, and reports that a new Dust Bowl may be forming, opposition to the construction of a new coal-fired plant in western Kansas, the largest west of the Mississippi, is growing. Just months ago, the company building it (to supply Colorado's energy needs) insisted they were full-speed ahead, but now they tell a different story:
The Colorado power company planning the construction of two coal-fired power plants…
tfk | April 10, 2007Newt Gingrich, while debating John Kerry, rejected Inhofe's intransigence and acknowledged:
the evidence is sufficient that we should move towards the most effective possible steps to reduce carbon-loading of the atmosphere.
Meanwhile, Drew Ryun, son of the former Congressman and current candidate Jim Ryun, thinks that we should ignore the conclusions reached by the National Academies of Science, the thousands of scientists who wrote the IPCC reports and the governments that unanimously approved them. On what basis does he say this? Because he was able to find one scientist who isn't so…
tfk | April 9, 2007Tom Delay explains how prosecuting him for breaking campaign finance laws is… well, let's let him explain:
It’s the same process. It’s the same criminalization of politics. it’s the same oppression of people. It’s the same destroy people in order to gain power. It may be six million Jews. it may be indicting somebody on laws that don’t exist. But, it’s the same philosophy and it’s the same world view.
Happy Pesach! Next year in Jerusalem.
tfk | April 9, 2007Knight Ridder reports changes since Senator Pat Roberts left the Intelligence Committee:
Sens. Jay Rockefeller and Christopher "Kit" Bond have joined forces to put the Senate Intelligence Committee back on track after a rocky few years by running it in bipartisan fashion.
The committee is holding more frequent and more robust hearings, engaging in aggressive oversight of intelligence agencies and issuing joint findings. Members are helping - rather than hindering - those of the other party in the crafting of legislation.
This is possible partly because Rockefeller and Bond agreed to merge…