Category Archives: National News

Do people do this stuff on purpose?

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Sometimes it seems that government officials get up in the morning and say, “Hey, what can we do today to make the average citizen mistrust us even more?”

Chipping children so they can be tracked electronically seems like a pretty good answer.

The George Miller III Head Start program in Richmond, California, is putting radio frequency identification chips in kids’ jerseys so that accurate Head Start statistics can be reported to the feds. (Head Start is a federal early childhood program.)

Wow, that seems like a pretty weak reason for taking such an invasive action. The Electronic Frontier Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union, in a letter to federal and local officials, raised some major concerns.

We have seen time and time again that RFID systems can be insecure, such as when the RFID chips in U.S. Passport cards were cracked and copied last year from a distance of 30 feet using just $250 worth of parts.4 The Real Time Location Service (RTLS) Active RFID chips embedded in these preschoolers’ jerseys can be read from up to 300 feet away.3 Children wearing these powerful tracking devices in school, on the playground, and off campus during field trips may be more vulnerable to stalking and kidnapping. If this system is insecure, someone could sit in a car the length of a football field away and track the children without anyone ever knowing that any information had been read. Once read, that information could then be copied to a duplicate chip — allowing someone to take a child off campus while RFID readers potentially show the child is still safely in school.

Nor does a child have to face stalking or abduction to be endangered by RFID tracking data. These RFID chips provide constant monitoring, potentially creating a detailed portrait of a child’s movements that could loom large over a youngster’s life, particularly if the chips replace direct adult monitoring and judgment. If RFID records show a child moving around a lot, might she be tagged as hyperactive? How long could this data — and the conclusions rightly or wrongly drawn from it — be stored in school records? Might the records be subpoenaed for use in family court or a custody battle?

The folks in Richmond and in the federal government need to rethink this one. Tracking children to enhance record-keeping is the very top of a very steep and slipper slope that we won’t want to go sliding down.

Obama’s $50 billion

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President Obama used a Labor Day appearance here to announce that he wants to spend $50 billion on infrastructure over six years.

Hold the applause, please, at least until we get the details.

First, Republicans don’t like the plan, announcing that it is dead on arrival. Republicans don’t like anything Obama does, so the opposition isn’t new. It still could be significant, though.

Second, it’s not really very much money. $50 billion nationwide over six years. The fine folks at the Southeastern Wisconsin Regional Planning Commission told us seven years ago that spending $6 billion in a small area of a smallish state to rebuild and unnecessarily expand freeways is such a minor consideration that it need not be mentioned in surveys measuring support for the $6 billion effort.

Just kidding. The SEWRPC freeway study planning process, as we all know, was a joke driven by road builders and HNTB (sponsors of the broken Marquette Interchange ramp) to justify a conclusion already reached by road builders and HNTB.  (See how it works? HNTB helps SEWRPC conclude that freeway expansion is needed and then grabs the design contracts for the resulting projects. Sweeeeet.)

What is serious is that $50 billion over six years over 50 states is less than it might first appear. Economist Dean Baker says it is 1.4% of the federal budget and adds:

It is also equal to about 4 percent of the $1.2 drop in annual demand (@ $600 billion in lost consumption and $600 billion in reduced construction) due to the collapse of the housing bubble.

Obama says the $50 billion, targeted at transportation, would be the first phase of an infrastructure bank. But adding $50 billion in spending is just wasting a lot of it if it isn’t spent well. And highway spending, in this country, isn’t done well.

According to the Government Accountability Office report, Highway Trust Fund: Nearly All States Received More Funding Than They Contributed in Highway Taxes Since 2005:

As we have reported, for many surface transportation programs, goals are numerous and conflicting, and the federal role in achieving the goals is not clear. Many of these programs have no relationship to the performance of either the transportation system or of the grantees receiving federal funds and do not use the best tools and approaches to ensure effective investment decisions.15 Our previous work has outlined the need to create well defined goals based on identified areas of federal interest and a clearly defined federal role in relation to other levels of government.16 We have suggested that where the federal interest is less evident, state and local governments could assume more responsibility, and some functions could potentially be assumed by the states or other levels of government.17 Furthermore, incorporating performance and accountability for results into transportation funding decisions is critical to improving results.

So major jobs program? Absolutely, yes. But spending large, but insufficient sums in the usual ways that don’t produce the desired results? Absolutely, no. Please. Let’s get it right.

The end of the combat mission

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I got an email from the White House yesterday about the end of the combat mission in Iraq:

We are at a truly historic moment in our nation’s history. After more than seven years, our combat mission in Iraq will end tomorrow.

As both a candidate and President, I promised to bring the war in Iraq to a responsible end. Now, we are taking an important step forward in delivering on that promise. Since I took office, we’ve brought nearly 100,000 U.S. troops home from Iraq, millions of pieces of equipment have been removed, and hundreds of bases have been closed or transferred to Iraqi Security Forces.

Our combat mission in Iraq is ending, but our commitment to an Iraq that is sovereign, stable and self-reliant continues. As our mission in Iraq changes, 50,000 U.S. troops will remain in Iraq to advise and assist the Iraqi Security Forces as they assume full responsibility for the security of their country on September 1. We will forge a strong partnership with an Iraq that still faces enduring challenges.

I am glad for the lives of soldiers still serving that the combat mission is over, but what a terrible, terrible terrible waste of lives and resources it was. What the hell did it accomplish?

And what happens to the Iraqi people now? Are we going to better for our friends there than we did for the Hmong people after the Vietnam War?

No health care for you!

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State Reps. Robin Vos (R-Caledonia) and Scott Suder (R-Abbotsford) are leading the charge to make sure that Wisconsin residents who would benefit under health care reform don’t.

(Republican gubernatorial candidates Scott Walker and Mark Neumann also favor financial ruin caused by medical bills.)

Vos and Scuder sent a letter, which they said is signed by 32 other state legislators, asking State Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen to take action to block the legislation in Wisconsin.

Suder comes up with an interesting read of the U.S. Constitution: “The 10th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution clearly grants the states the sovereignty needed to opt-out of federal laws such as this,” he said in a prepared statement.

Oh, really? The 10th Amendment says that “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

Where is that opt-out provision? Why hasn’t it been used before?

The scary possibility is, of course, is that the ideologues running the U.S. Supreme Court right now will endorse the Suders of the world and come up with a Constitutional interpretation worse than the one that gave corporations such a large financial say in the electoral process.

Van Hollen, meanwhile, is taking a cautious approach. Three conditions are necessary for his office to take action, the State Department of Justice said in a statement.

First, the President must sign the health care overhaul into law.

Second, Governor Doyle or either house of the state legislature must authorize
the Attorney General to bring or join such a legal action. Absent such
authorization, he is prevented from doing so by state law.

Third, should the Governor or either house of the legislature make such an
authorization, Attorney General Van Hollen must independently conclude that
claims have a sufficient legal basis.

Van Hollen’s staff are in contact with lawyers in other states interested in challenging the law, the statement said. Van Hollen doesn’t like a lot of what is in the law, but doesn’t sound like he will be first at the courthouse door:

The role of the state attorneys general and the courts is not to veto
those policy choices made by elected officials – that would be decidedly
undemocratic – but to appropriately examine, in the context of a case, whether
the law is consistent with the Constitution of the United States. Even if specific
provisions of the health care law are held to be unconstitutional, a court may
determine that the rest of this massive health care overhaul is constitutional and
remains in effect.