4/02/09
In this newsletter:
- NH House approves medical marijuana
- NH House votes to repeal the death penalty. The Governor promises to veto the bill is if it passes the Senate.
- NH House votes for gay marriage
- NH Senate approves a constitutional amendment to make the governor’s term four years, which makes great sense. No one political risks are taken in a election year. Two-year terms is too short for the executive to get a program into place before going back to the voters.
- The results of other bills before the NH House: ban texting while driving, no to abortion limits, reduce the interest rate on overdue taxes.
- An excellent rejoinder to George Will’s recent column pooh-poohing climate change.
- The Obama administration seeks new regulation of non-bank financial institutions. The goal appears to be to prevent the overleveraging of hedge funds, investment banks, and insurance companies.
- Diebold admits flaws in the software in its touchscreen voting machines.
- Health insurers offer to end discrimination against those with pre-existing conditions.
1. N.H. House approves medicinal marijuana; bill heads to Senate
http://www.keenesentinel.com/articles/2009/03/26/news/state/free/id_349119.txt
By DANIEL BARRICK
Concord Monitor
Published: Thursday, March 26, 2009
CONCORD — New Hampshire residents suffering from severe pain or debilitating diseases such as cancer, AIDS, Alzheimer’s and multiple sclerosis could use small quantities of marijuana for relief under legislation adopted Wednesday by the House. [click link above for the rest of the article]
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2. N.H. House repeals death penalty; Gov. John Lynch vows veto if Bill passes Senate
http://www.keenesentinel.com/articles/2009/03/26/news/state/free/id_349118.txt
By LAUREN R. DORGAN
Concord Monitor
Published: Thursday, March 26, 2009
CONCORD — Months after a New Hampshire jury sentenced a man to death for the first time in a half century, the House voted Wednesday to repeal the state’s death penalty law.
Gov. John H. Lynch swiftly vowed to veto the bill and uphold the state’s death penalty, telling reporters he believes “there are some crimes so heinous that capital punishment is warranted. If a bill to repeal capital punishment reaches my desk, I will veto that bill.” [click link above for the rest of the article]
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3. Published: Friday, March 27, 2009
NH House votes to legalize same-sex matrimony
http://www.nashuatelegraph.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090327/NEWS02/303279894/-1/news02
By KEVIN LANDRIGAN Staff Writer
klandrigan@nashuatelegraph.com
CONCORD – A bid to make same-sex marriages legal narrowly cleared New Hampshire House of Representatives Thursday.
The House passed the bill (HB 436), 186-179, and it goes to the state Senate where it faces an uncertain fate.
For a brief time Thursday, the issue tied up the House as its members initially turned down moves to pass it, kill it outright or table it.
The first attempt to pass the bill failed, 182-183. [click link above for the rest of the article]
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4. Published: Thursday, March 26, 2009
Voters may look at governor's term
http://www.nashuatelegraph.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090326/NEWS02/303269939/-1/news02
CONCORD – The State Senate wants to ask the voters whether the governor should serve a four-year term of office.
By a 19-4 vote, the Senate approved a proposed amendment to the state Constitution (CACR 9).
"It's time for New Hampshire to move into the 21st century with regard to good government. The four-year term would allow for better planning and more continuity from the executive branch," said Sen. Martha Fuller Clark, D-Portsmouth, who authored the proposal.
The bill needs a super-majority vote of at least 60 percent in the House of Representatives to get to the voters in November 2010. Amending the Constitution requires a two-thirds vote of the public.
If voters approved of the question, supporters agreed it would first apply in the 2014 election.
New Hampshire and Vermont are the only two states in the country that elect governors every two years.
Gov. John Lynch has said he likes the two-year system New Hampshire has, but governors have no direct role in adopting constitutional amendments.
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5. In Concord, abortion restrictions are defeated, a text-messaging ban is okayed, and other legislative action
http://www.keenesentinel.com/articles/2009/03/25/news/state/free/id_348972.txt
By Associated Press
Published: Wednesday, March 25, 2009
In other action Tuesday, the House:
--Declined to revive a disputed 2003 law that required abortion providers to notify a parent at least 48 hours before performing an abortion on a child.
The 2003 law was on the books for four years but was never enforced because of legal fights that reached the U.S. Supreme Court.
Two bills before the House would have reinstituted the two days’ notice requirement. Representatives killed one of the bills by a vote of 228-148 and a similar, more heavily debated measure, 216-160.
Also Tuesday, the House voted 222-146 to kill a bill to require girls 14 or younger seeking abortions to show notarized proof that she had received counseling from a parent, mental health or religious counselor.
Critics said the girls already get counseling and complained the notarized form would force girls and their families to make public a private decision.
--Approved and sent on to the Senate a bill to make it illegal for drivers to send text messages on cell phones or type on laptop computers or other electronic devices.
The House voted voted 222-137 Tuesday to pass the bill which would ban text messaging while driving and two-handed operation of electronic devices.
--Rejected imposing tougher penalties for utilities that don’t comply with orders to trim trees or take other safety measures.
The House killed a bill that would have lifted the $250,000 limit on fines. The new limit would’ve been 21/2 percent of their annual revenue.
--Voted to drop the rate for overdue property taxes paid to towns from 12 percent to 8 percent. The legislation also would drop the rate for overdue property taxes once the town places a lien on the property. That rate would drop from 18 percent to 12 percent.
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6. Climate Change Myths and Facts
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/20/AR2009032002660.html
By Chris Mooney
Saturday, March 21, 2009; Page A13
A recent controversy over claims about climate science by Post op-ed columnist George F. Will raises a critical question: Can we ever know, on any contentious or politicized topic, how to recognize the real conclusions of science and how to distinguish them from scientific-sounding spin or misinformation?
Congress will soon consider global-warming legislation, and the debate comes as contradictory claims about climate science abound. Partisans of this issue often wield vastly different facts and sometimes seem to even live in different realities.
In this context, finding common ground will be very difficult. Perhaps the only hope involves taking a stand for a breed of journalism and commentary that is not permitted to simply say anything; that is constrained by standards of evidence, rigor and reproducibility that are similar to the canons of modern science itself.
Consider a few of Will's claims from his Feb. 15 column, "Dark Green Doomsayers": In a long paragraph quoting press sources from the 1970s, Will suggested that widespread scientific agreement existed at the time that the world faced potentially catastrophic cooling. Today, most climate scientists and climate journalists consider this a timeworn myth. Just last year, the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society published a peer-reviewed study examining media coverage at the time and the contemporary scientific literature. While some media accounts did hype a cooling scare, others suggested more reasons to be concerned about warming. As for the published science? Reviewing studies between 1965 and 1979, the authors found that "emphasis on greenhouse warming dominated the scientific literature even then."
Yet there's a bigger issue: It's misleading to draw a parallel between "global cooling" concerns articulated in the 1970s and global warming concerns today. In the 1970s, the field of climate research was in a comparatively fledgling state, and scientific understanding of 20th-century temperature trends and their causes was far less settled. Today, in contrast, hundreds of scientists worldwide participate in assessments of the state of knowledge and have repeatedly ratified the conclusion that human activities are driving global warming -- through the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the scientific academies of various nations (including our own), and leading scientific organizations such as the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Geophysical Union and the American Meteorological Society.
Will wrote that "according to the University of Illinois' Arctic Climate Research Center, global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979." It turns out to be a relatively meaningless comparison, though the Arctic Climate Research Center has clarified that global sea ice extent was "1.34 million sq. km less in February 2009 than in February 1979." Again, though, there's a bigger issue: Will's focus on "global" sea ice at two arbitrarily selected points of time is a distraction. Scientists pay heed to long-term trends in sea ice, not snapshots in a noisy system. And while they expect global warming to reduce summer Arctic sea ice, the global picture is a more complicated matter; it's not as clear what ought to happen in the Southern Hemisphere. But summer Arctic sea ice is indeed trending downward, in line with climatologists' expectations -- according to the Arctic Climate Research Center.
Will also wrote that "according to the U.N. World Meteorological Organization, there has been no recorded global warming for more than a decade." The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) is one of many respected scientific institutions that support the consensus that humans are driving global warming. Will probably meant that since 1998 was the warmest year on record according to the WMO -- NASA, in contrast, believes that that honor goes to 2005 -- we haven't had any global warming since. Yet such sleight of hand would lead to the conclusion that "global cooling" sets in immediately after every new record temperature year, no matter how frequently those hot years arrive or the hotness of the years surrounding them. Climate scientists, knowing that any single year may trend warmer or cooler for a variety of reasons -- 1998, for instance, featured an extremely strong El Niño -- study globally averaged temperatures over time. To them, it's far more relevant that out of the 10 warmest years on record, at least seven have occurred in the 2000s -- again, according to the WMO.
Readers and commentators must learn to share some practices with scientists -- following up on sources, taking scientific knowledge seriously rather than cherry-picking misleading bits of information, and applying critical thinking to the weighing of evidence. That, in the end, is all that good science really is. It's also what good journalism and commentary alike must strive to be -- now more than ever.
Chris Mooney is the author of "The Republican War on Science" and co-author of the forthcoming "Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future."
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7. U.S. Seeks Expanded Power to Seize Firms
Goal Is to Limit Risk to Broader Economy
By Binyamin Appelbaum and David Cho
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, March 24, 2009; A01
The Obama administration is considering asking Congress to give the Treasury secretary unprecedented powers to initiate the seizure of non-bank financial companies, such as large insurers, investment firms and hedge funds, whose collapse would damage the broader economy, according to an administration document.
The government at present has the authority to seize only banks.
Giving the Treasury secretary authority over a broader range of companies would mark a significant shift from the existing model of financial regulation, which relies on independent agencies that are shielded from the political process. The Treasury secretary, a member of the president's Cabinet, would exercise the new powers in consultation with the White House, the Federal Reserve and other regulators, according to the document.
The administration plans to send legislation to Capitol Hill this week. Sources cautioned that the details, including the Treasury's role, are still in flux.
Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner is set to argue for the new powers at a hearing today on Capitol Hill about the furor over bonuses paid to executives at American International Group, which the government has propped up with about $180 billion in federal aid. Administration officials have said that the proposed authority would have allowed them to seize AIG last fall and wind down its operations at less cost to taxpayers.
The administration's proposal contains two pieces. First, it would empower a government agency to take on the new role of systemic risk regulator with broad oversight of any and all financial firms whose failure could disrupt the broader economy. The Federal Reserve is widely considered to be the leading candidate for this assignment. But some critics warn that this could conflict with the Fed's other responsibilities, particularly its control over monetary policy.
The government also would assume the authority to seize such firms if they totter toward failure.
Besides seizing a company outright, the document states, the Treasury Secretary could use a range of tools to prevent its collapse, such as guaranteeing losses, buying assets or taking a partial ownership stake. Such authority also would allow the government to break contracts, such as the agreements to pay $165 million in bonuses to employees of AIG's most troubled unit.
The Treasury secretary could act only after consulting with the president and getting a recommendation from two-thirds of the Federal Reserve Board, according to the plan.
Geithner plans to lay out the administration's broader strategy for overhauling financial regulation at another hearing on Thursday.
The authority to seize non-bank financial firms has emerged as a priority for the administration after the failure of investment house Lehman Brothers, which was not a traditional bank, and the troubled rescue of AIG.
"We're very late in doing this, but we've got to move quickly to try and do this because, again, it's a necessary thing for any government to have a broader range of tools for dealing with these kinds of things, so you can protect the economy from the kind of risks posed by institutions that get to the point where they're systemic," Geithner said last night at a forum held by the Wall Street Journal.
The powers would parallel the government's existing authority over banks, which are exercised by banking regulatory agencies in conjunction with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Geithner has cited that structure as the model for the government's plans.
washingtonpost.com
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8. Diebold admits voting system flaws
E-voting manufacturer says votes could be changed undetected
http://fcw.com/articles/2009/03/23/web-diebold-admits-voting-system-flaws.aspx
Mar 23, 2009
Critics of electronic voting systems have had their warnings vindicated by two recent announcements. An official with Premier Election Systems, formerly known as Diebold, admitted that its audit log system was flawed enough that it would be possible to delete votes undetected, and several elections officials in Kentucky were arrested on charges related to election fraud, including changing electronically recorded votes.
Wired reported that officials from Premier admitted in a hearing held March 17 in California that their tabulation software could miss significant events, including the deletion of votes on Election Day. They said the flaw is present in every version of the software.
The California Secretary of State's office discovered that audit logs from Diebold machines in Humboldt County, Calif., did not record known ballot deletions, according to Wired. Justin Bales, general sales manager for Premier's western region, told a state investigator that the software does not record deletions and never has.
The office was originally investigating the deletion of 197 votes in Humboldt County when its investigators discovered that the audit logs provided no information on the event.
The software also does not record timestamps on the events it does document, and it includes a "clear" button that allows the easy deletion of the audit logs, according to Wired and GovTech.
Such audit logs have been at the heart of the electronic voting machine controversy. Critics of the machines have long charged that it would be possible to change the recorded votes undetected, and they have urged that, at a minimum, the machines should generate a paper receipt that the voter would confirm was an accurate record of the vote. Elections officials would keep the paper records and use them to verify the accuracy of the electronically tabulated results in the event of a challenge. Voting machine makers have generally responded to such criticisms by saying that the combination of audit logs and capable elections officials following protocols would prevent fraud.
In Clay County, Ky., the FBI arrested several county elections officials on a variety of election fraud charges, including changing votes already recorded on the electronic voting machines, according to a Lexington, Ky., NBC affiliate. They have pleaded not guilty, the Associated Press reported.
According to the indictment against the eight defendants, some of the fraud also included instructing others on how to change votes on the machines and identifying voters who had sold their votes.
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9. Insurers Offer to Stop Charging Sick People More
Tuesday 24 March 2009
by: Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090324/ap_on_he_me/insurers_sick_people
Rep. Henry Waxman questioning President Obama during a health care forum. (Photo: Michael Reynolds / European Pressphoto Agency)
Washington - The health insurance industry offered Tuesday for the first time to curb its controversial practice of charging higher premiums to people with a history of medical problems. The offer from America's Health Insurance Plans and the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association is a potentially significant shift in the debate over reforming the nation's health care system to rein in costs and cover an estimated 48 million uninsured people. It was contained in a letter to key senators.
In the letter, the two insurance industry groups said their members are willing to "phase out the practice of varying premiums based on health status in the individual market" if all Americans are required to get coverage. Although the letter left open some loopholes, it was still seen as a major development.
"The offer here is to transition away from risk rating, which is one of the things that makes life hell for real people," said health economist Len Nichols of the New America Foundation public policy center. "They have never in their history offered to give up risk rating."
"This letter demonstrates that insurance companies are open to major insurance reform, and are even willing to accept broad consumer protections," said Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., a moderate who could help bridge differences on a health care overhaul. "It represents a major shift from where the industry was in the 1990s during the last major health care debate."
Insurers are trying to head off the creation of a government insurance plan that would compete with them, something that liberals and many Democrats are pressing for. To try to win political support, the industry has already made a number of concessions. Last year, for example, insurers offered to end the practice of denying coverage to sick people. They also said they would support a national goal of restraining cost increases.
The latest offer goes beyond that.
Insurance companies now charge very high premiums to people who are trying to purchase coverage as individuals and have a history of medical problems, such as diabetes or skin cancer. Even if such a person is offered coverage, that individual is often unable to afford the high premiums. About 7 percent of Americans buy their coverage as individuals, while more than 60 percent have job-based insurance.
"When you have everyone in the system, and you can bring (financial) assistance to working families,
then you can move away from health status rating," said Karen Ignagni, president of America's Health Insurance Plans, the leading trade group.
The companies left themselves several outs, however. The letter said they would still charge different premiums based on such factors as age, place of residence, family size and benefits package.
"If the goal is to make health care affordable, this concession does not go far enough," said Richard Kirsch, campaign manager for Health Care for America Now. "It still allows insurers to charge much more if you are old." His group, backed by unions and liberals, is trying to build support for sweeping health care changes.
Importantly, insurers did not extend to small businesses their offer to stop charging the sick higher premiums. Small employers who offer coverage can see their premiums zoom up from one year to the next, even if just one worker or family member gets seriously ill.
Ignagni said the industry is working on separate proposals for that problem.
"We are in the process of talking with small-business folks across the country," she said. "We are well on the way to proposing a series of strategies that could be implemented for them.”