Category: Politics

Your DNA, Please

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The Economist:

Rapid advances in genetic testing promise to transform medicine, but they may up-end the insurance business in the process
“IF YOU can make a good soufflé, you can sequence DNA.” That assertion sounds preposterous, but Hugh Rienhoff should know. When his daughter was born about three years ago, she suffered from a mysterious disability that stunted her muscle development. After many frustrated visits to specialists, Dr Rienhoff, a clinical geneticist and former venture capitalist, decided to sequence a specific part of her genome himself. He discovered that her condition, which most resembled a rare genetic disorder known as Beals’s syndrome, was probably due to a new genetic mutation. “Without a lab and for just a few hundred dollars, you can contract or outsource almost all the steps,” he explains.
What a well-connected and highly motivated scientist in California can do today the rest of the world will be able to do tomorrow. Indeed, a number of firms are already offering tests for specific ailments (or predispositions to ailments) directly to the public, cutting out the medical middle-man. Dr Rienhoff, for his part, will soon launch MyDaughtersDNA.org, a not-for-profit venture intended to help others to unravel the mysteries of their family’s genes in the way that he unravelled those of his own.

Politicians “Hypocrisy on SUV’s”

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Arthur St. Antoine:

You can’t make this stuff up, folks. Last week, during a speech to a labor group in Lake Buena Vista, Florida, Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards told the crowd: “One of the things [Americans] should be asked to do is drive more fuel-efficient vehicles.” Asked if by saying that he was specifically telling Americans to give up their SUVs, Edwards replied, “Yes.”
t’s a wonder we Americans haven’t choked to death on all the hypocrisy we’ve been force-fed of late. Naturally, Edwards owns and drives an SUV himself — several, in fact. In Washington D.C. he often pilots his Cadillac SRX, while at his North Carolina spread — a 28,000-square-foot manse more than ten times the size of the average American home — one can easily spot several more those-aren’t-Priuses (click to enlarge accompanying photo). Asked at the labor-group speech how he can reconcile asking other Americans to sacrifice while he’s living so large, Edwards replied: “I have no apologies whatsoever for what I’ve done with my life. My entire life has been about the same cause, which is making sure wherever you come from, whatever your family is, whatever the color of your skin, you get a real chance to do something great in this country.”

Taxes & The Closing of Foreign Car Specialists

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Marv Balousek:

Beebe bought the business after working there a year and Lucey sold the building to the family of President Kennedy. Beebe said the Kennedys bought the building because they wanted a business reason to visit Wisconsin where the former president’s sister, Rosemary Kennedy, who was mentally retarded and lobotomized at age 23, spent decades at St. Coletta’s in Jefferson until her 2005 death at age 86.
Beebe bought the building from the Kennedy family in 1979 and recently paid off the mortgage

Google News Hypocrisy: Walled Off Content

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Mike Arrington:

TechMeme founder Gabe Rivera makes an interesting observation on the Google News story all over the blogosphere today.

One thing that bugs me: they’re now hosting original news content, yet they prohibit other aggregators from crawling it (per robots.txt restrictions and TOS). Of course Google News relies on the openness of other organizations with original news content.

On Earmark Reform

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Tyler Cowen:

Maybe not:

Eight months after Democrats vowed to shine light on the dark art of “earmarking” money for pet projects, many lawmakers say the new visibility has only intensified the competition for projects by letting each member see exactly how many everyone else is receiving…
The earmark frenzy hit fever pitch in recent days, even as the Senate passed new rules that allow more public scrutiny of them.
Far from causing embarrassment, the new transparency has raised the value of earmarks as a measure of members’ clout. Indeed, lawmakers have often competed to have their names attached to individual earmarks and rushed to put out press releases claiming credit for the money they bring home.

Community Broadband Act would overturn bans on municipal broadband

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Eric Bangeman:

A bill introduced into the House of Representatives this week will attempt to spur broadband development in the US by overturning existing state bans on municipal broadband deployments. Titled the Community Broadband Act of 2007, the bill (PDF) is cosponsored by Rep. Rick Boucher (D-VA) and Rep. Fred Upton (R-MI).
Currently, laws in Arkansas, Florida, Missouri, Texas, and a handful of other states prevent cities and towns from installing and operating their own broadband networks. Most of those laws were enacted in the wake of heavy lobbying from the telecommunications industry, which doesn’t want to see competition coming from local governments.
Last year’s attempted rewrite of the Telecommunications Act contained a similar provision but never made it to the floor of the Senate for a vote. With the state of broadband in the US a hot topic of discussion lately, both on Capitol Hill and around the country, Reps. Boucher and Upton may be able to find allies in Congress a bit more easily this time around. The congressmen are hopeful that, should it be passed, the Act would lead to more—and better—broadband options for US citizens.

Wisconsin Congressional Earmarks: Spending our Children’s Money via a Bloated Defense Bill

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Taxpayers for Common Sense posted a very useful and in some ways surprising look at $3,000,000,000 in Congressional Earmarks attached to a $459,600,000,000 defense appropriation bill (not the entire defense budget). This amount is $40,000,000,000 more than last year’s authorization (nice). Wisconsin congressional earmarks are lead by long time incumbent David Obey with $42,000,000, who also conveniently serves as Chair of the House Appropriations Committee. Obey’s earmark methods have been criticized recently: John Solomon & Jeffrey Birnbaum writing in the Washington Post:

Democrats had complained bitterly in recent years that Republicans routinely slipped multimillion-dollar pet projects into spending bills at the end of the legislative process, preventing any chance for serious public scrutiny. Now Democrats are poised to do the same.
“I don’t give a damn if people criticize me or not,” Obey said.
Obey’s spokeswoman, Kirstin Brost, said his intention is not to keep the projects secret. Rather, she said, so many requests for spending were made to the appropriations panel — more than 30,000 this year — that its staff has been unable to study them and decide their validity.

Here’s a list of all earmarks (.xls file) attached to this defense bill. Wisconsin delegation earmarks:

  1. David Obey 42,000,000 (Unique ID Column 837, 854, 874, 921, 947, 1053, 1093, 1165)
  2. Tammy Baldwin $7,500,000 (Unique Id Column 56, 740, 1334)
  3. Steve Kagen $5,000,000 (Unique ID 496, 561, 562)
  4. Ron Kind $4,000,000 (Unique Id 1033 and 1083)
  5. Tom Petri $4,000,000 (Unique Id 782)
  6. Gwen Moore $2,000,000 (Unique Id 575, 898, 978 and 1151)
  7. Paul Ryan $0.00
  8. Jim Sensenbrenner $0.00 (shocking)

HouseDefenseEarmarks.xls. Congress’s approval ratings (3%) are far below the President’s (24%), which isn’t saying much (Zogby Poll)
Much more on local earmarks, here [RSS Feed on earmarks]