The first two ships in a new class of U.S. Navy warships call the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS), one each of two radically different designs, are finally deploying, one to the Persian Gulf and the other to the Pacific Theater, and hence crossing the road from R&D to military reality. One is a fairly striking trimaran design, while the other is a more conventional small warship design. The Navy was supposed to pick one design over the other after the early first in class ships, but chose instead to punt and order new ships of each design.
The ships are each about the size of the last few Oliver Hazard Perry class frigates in the existing U.S. Navy Fleet (about 3000 tons), but have about a third as many sailors for operation of the ship and a reconfigurable mission module combined, have a much higher peak speed and a much more shallow draft. They lack standard weapons systems of most existing U.S. warships like large cruise missiles, three inch naval guns, torpedoes and Aegis sensor suites. The ships have helipads, smaller mostly defensive missiles, and a cannon shooting grenade sized rounds. They are less heavily armored than traditional U.S. warships. The standard issue armament and weapons suite for the LCS class ships is closer to a large Coast Guard cutter than to existing surface combatants in the U.S. Navy.
The Module Concept
The new class of ships, intended to operate in shallow coastal waters (littoral means "coastal"), is intended to have a range of mission modules such as anti-mine warfare, anti-submarine warfare, anti-piracy/interdiction of small craft, coastal water fire support for ground troops on beaches, serving as a mother ship for drones, and so on, that can be changed out, realistically in a matter of something on the order of a day to a week (early proponents of the modular idea had suggested unrealistically that modules could be swapped out in a few hours). Still, the real point of the module is to allow the navy to change its priorities at a reasonable cost on strategic six month to several year deployment cycles, not to repurpose the ships in tactically relevant time frames.
Thus, if we have forty LCS in the fleet, of which eight are mine sweepers, and thirty-two have other purposes, and the Navy decides that it needs twice as many mine sweepers, it can swap out eight LCS modules over a year or three at a fairly modest manufacturing and design costs (perhaps $30 million to $50 million each, rather than $300 million to $500 million each), rather than having to design and build eight new purpose built mine sweeping ship designs from scratch, a process that could take a decade or two.
A Different Niche
Every other surface warship in the U.S. fleet (except the Zumwalt class megadestroyer and a few residual purpose built minesweepers) has as its principle mission serving as an escort to an aircraft carrier as part of an aircraft carrier group. Cruisers, destroyers, frigates, as well as a good share of our nuclear attack submarine fleet, all collectively act as linebackers protecting the aircraft carrier quarter back and its carrier aircraft who act a bit like wide receivers.
The LCS, in contrast, is expected to carry out missions that aircraft carrier groups don't, but that many world navies do have ships tailored to address. It, hovers between the kinds of littoral patrol ships and cutters used by the U.S. Coast Guard (which would be part of the navy proper in most countries), and the larger foreign war oriented warships of the U.S. Navy.
Continuing the sports analogy, the LCS is playing basketball while the rest of the U.S. fleet is playing football. They aren't even really engaged in the same enterprise.
The Question of Cost
A key attraction was supposed to be their affordability and minimal production delay, on the theory that the ships are not very technologically ambitious relative to the current standard. The ideas was that in a war of attrition, one needs to fight asymmetric challenges from Third World countries affordably.
So far, the ships are over budget and behind schedule, but less grossly so than many major new defense procurement projects. A new LCS is still cheaper than the new conventional, 1980s design (with upgrades) destroyers that the U.S. Navy is currently buying and offers capabilities not found in the current fleet. But, it is undeniably a smaller ship with less potent destructive capabilities. It isn't at all obvious that an Arleigh Burke class destroyer and an LCS can be compared on an apples to apples basis by anyone other than a blowhard politician intent on maximizing the number of ships in the U.S. Navy in order to make him sound tough in speeches (a la Ronald Reagan).
Strategic Criticisms
Critics of the program come from multiple directions. Some are concerned about technical kinks in the implementation of new prototype designs, rather than the strategic concept of the program itself, but most are bigger picture criticisms directed at the direction of the modern navy.
Too Big?
Some critics argue that the LCS is still too big to be effective in anti-piracy and riverine warfare missions, for example, against developing world tricked out speed boats and missile boats. A few decades ago, the Navy had ships as small as the Cyclone Class Naval Patrol Ships (launched from 1992 to 1994) at 331 tons each with crews of twenty-eight sailors each, that filled a conceptually similar niche to the LCS and had similar armanent. Ten remain in active service (five in the Persian Gulf and five at a U.S. naval base that rotate with each other) and three more are currently on loan to the Coast Guard. The LCS is nine times as large and much more expensive, but doesn't obviously offer all that much additional naval capability in that niche.
Too Little Tooth To Tail?
Other critics argued for a mother ship-combat boat design that wouldn't require every ship to be burdened by carrying around a house for its crews to live in for months at a time into hostilities where the extra weight and size is a liability.
Targets?
Some critics argue that all surface combatants are still slow moving, large, non-stealthy targets relative to submarines (particularly smaller, less expensive diesel-electric and air independent diesel-electric ones from models already in production for our allies) and aircraft (manned and drones) that could do most of the same jobs better, with the LCS being particularly vunerable due to its thinner suite of weapons and lighter hulls.
Even though the LCS is much faster than existing surface combatants, a minivan on a coastal highway would easily outrun an LCS moving as the crow flies in the coastal waters parallel to that highway, and it still isn't the fastest watercraft in coastal waters. All the real speed in the LCS concept comes from carrier helicopters and air based drones, for which the LCS can provide an important range expending role without leaving a big footprint from a major U.S. presence in a region. An LCS, like all other surface combatants, in addition to being relatively slow, is vastly larger than a tank or a fighter jet or an attack helicopter, for example.
Too Whimpy?
Some critics argue that the LCS is too much of a light weight, without the heavy weapons and heavier armor needed to address near peer threats like Russian and Chinese naval fleets in World War II style surface ship to surface ship combat in the "Battleship" paradigm. (Battleships themselves were phased out of the navy decades ago, although the very small run of Zumwalt class destroyers basically constitute a tiny number of de facto battleships in the modern U.S. Navy).
Never mind that it has been half a century since surface combants from countries who were adversaries in a war engaged in surface ship to surface ship combat with each other in earnest. You can fit every naval battle of any kind, anywhere in the world, between any two nations that was serious enough to produce casualties while anyone currently in active duty service in the navy was serving on the back of a business card. The naval combat experience of active duty American navy sailors is pretty much limited to training exercises and sophisticated war gaming.
The American navy has intervened in many conflicts as recently as the insurgency in Libya and anti-piracy missions within the last year, in capacities other than navy to navy warfare involving sovereign states, but the real demand for surface combants in practice is very different from what they were designed in the first place to accomplish. This absence of the kind of battles that the ships that comprise the bulk of the U.S. Navy were designed for is one of the main reasons to applaud the LCS program.
The lack of hard empirical evidence on what works and what doesn't in modern warfare seriously engaged by a reasonably developed country is one of the reasons that so much of a difference of opinion is possible. All sides of the navy procurement debate are operating on largely untested theories that are driving tens of billions of dollars a year in naval procurement.
22 May 2012
21 May 2012
Law and the Multiverse
If you want the skinny on how everyday law intersects with the world of superheros and supernaturals (in the vein of Carrie Vaughn's recent ready for big screen book "After the Golden Age"), then the Law and the Multiverse blog is for you.
Are ghosts pollutants? Do you need a permit to put arc nuclear power generators in New York City? The blog asks, and answers, these tough questions, and of course, reveals a lot about how lawyers think in the process.
Given that this is Zombie Awareness Month, today's post on Death, Taxes and Zombies might be a good place to start. It begins thusly:
While a zombie apocalypse may turn many property owners into zombies, few of them will have any death tax liability dead or alive, given that the life time reunified transfer tax exemption is currently $5,000,000 per person, per lifetime, and a zombie apoclypse would probably depress the fair market value of all sorts of assets from real estate to the stock market, without causing legislators to rush to adjust the cutoffs during the emergency (although hyperinflation during a zombie apocalypse could counteract a decline in inflation adjusted prices).
On the other hand, the issue is much more salient in the case of vampires, who appear to be much more affluent on average, at least according to many popular literary accounts. Vampires are particularly attractive as a tax source because many accounts relate that they repeatedly fake their own deaths to prevent their existence from being discovered, giving rise to multiple rounds of death taxation in a single undead lifetime.
Trust and estates scholars, furthermore, are already relatively well equipped intellectual to handle these issues. The legal standing of "the dead hand" was hotly debated in trusts and estates scholarship even before the advent of Addams Family television series popularized the concept, and laws students who bemoan irrelevance are already taught zombie control doctrines like the Rule Against Perpetuities, although a few reckless states like Nevada and Alaska have moved to disarm themselves unilaterally from legal tools to fight the zombie menance.
As a recent post by Seth at Enik Rising revealed, however, election law scholars and political scientists are not nearly so prepared and are just starting to consider the ramifications of the undead for the political process.
Are ghosts pollutants? Do you need a permit to put arc nuclear power generators in New York City? The blog asks, and answers, these tough questions, and of course, reveals a lot about how lawyers think in the process.
Given that this is Zombie Awareness Month, today's post on Death, Taxes and Zombies might be a good place to start. It begins thusly:
The U.S. stands on the brink of financial disaster, and Congress has done nothing but bicker. Of course, I refer to the coming day when the undead walk the earth, feasting on the living. A zombie apocalypse will create an urgent need for significant government revenues to protect the living, while at the same time rendering a large portion of the taxpaying public dead or undead. The government’s failure to anticipate or plan for this eventuality could cripple its ability to respond effectively. The time to prepare is now, before panic sets in, and it is too late. This post begins this critical task by considering whether someone who becomes a zombie should be considered dead for estate tax purposes.Later on, it gets right to the heart (and brains, brain, brains) of the matter:
the question isn’t whether zombies can be considered alive, but rather whether, if someone’s zombie is alive, the original person can still be considered dead. This hints at the far larger questions of how the law should treat resurrection generally and whether different types of resurrection should be treated differently. For instance, some, like Lazarus, return intact. Others may return as flesh-eating monsters. Shockingly, the tax code is silent on this issue, a silence that is even more surprising when one considers that most of our legislators purport to be devout Christians, for whom resurrection is a core belief.Zombies may be a fairly easy case from a death tax perspective - although if we decide that zombification triggers taxation, we may also have to conclude that people who are substantially zombies in economic substance might also have to be taxed as if they were dead, even if they are not yet formally zombies.
While a zombie apocalypse may turn many property owners into zombies, few of them will have any death tax liability dead or alive, given that the life time reunified transfer tax exemption is currently $5,000,000 per person, per lifetime, and a zombie apoclypse would probably depress the fair market value of all sorts of assets from real estate to the stock market, without causing legislators to rush to adjust the cutoffs during the emergency (although hyperinflation during a zombie apocalypse could counteract a decline in inflation adjusted prices).
On the other hand, the issue is much more salient in the case of vampires, who appear to be much more affluent on average, at least according to many popular literary accounts. Vampires are particularly attractive as a tax source because many accounts relate that they repeatedly fake their own deaths to prevent their existence from being discovered, giving rise to multiple rounds of death taxation in a single undead lifetime.
Trust and estates scholars, furthermore, are already relatively well equipped intellectual to handle these issues. The legal standing of "the dead hand" was hotly debated in trusts and estates scholarship even before the advent of Addams Family television series popularized the concept, and laws students who bemoan irrelevance are already taught zombie control doctrines like the Rule Against Perpetuities, although a few reckless states like Nevada and Alaska have moved to disarm themselves unilaterally from legal tools to fight the zombie menance.
As a recent post by Seth at Enik Rising revealed, however, election law scholars and political scientists are not nearly so prepared and are just starting to consider the ramifications of the undead for the political process.
SCOTUS Watching
Above the law has a nice post that captures what the reality of SCOTUS watching at the U.S. Supreme Court in person is like on a day when all of the opinions rendered are low profile cases.
One of the cases decided, Taniguchi v. Kan Pacific Saipan, Ltd. has previously been blogged about in this space as the lowest dollar SCOTUS case in recent memory. The U.S. Supreme Court in a 6-3 decision came down against what had previously been the rule in all but one U.S. Court of Appeals Circuit. Justice Alito writes the hack job of statutory intepretation majority ruling in the case, consistent with his characteristically crabbed approach to reading and interpeting statutes.
One of the cases decided, Taniguchi v. Kan Pacific Saipan, Ltd. has previously been blogged about in this space as the lowest dollar SCOTUS case in recent memory. The U.S. Supreme Court in a 6-3 decision came down against what had previously been the rule in all but one U.S. Court of Appeals Circuit. Justice Alito writes the hack job of statutory intepretation majority ruling in the case, consistent with his characteristically crabbed approach to reading and interpeting statutes.
20 May 2012
18 May 2012
Which Came First, Marriage or Divorce?
In Maryland, the state supreme court has recognized the authority of its courts to grant divorces to same sex married couples from other states several months before the law adopted by its state legislature to allow same sex marriages to be entered into within the state takes effect.
The Three Main Kinds Of Female Sex Offenders
There are salient differences between men and women when it comes to sex offenses. For starters, men are far more likely to commit sexual assault than women are, accounting for 96 percent of the total. They are also rearrested much more frequently.
The women who perpetrate this misconduct not surprisingly have serious problems. Like the men, they have poor coping skills and trouble showing empathy. This report by the Center for Sex Offender Management breaks female sex offenders into three types, based on clinical observations. The first group were coerced by men into abusing children, even their own. The second were themselves victims of incest or other sexual abuse — this kind of history is far more likely for women sex offenders than for men, and the women in this category also tend to victimize young children in their own families. The third type, [is] labeled “teacher/lover,” . . . They were “often struggling with peer relationships, seemed to regress and perceive themselves as having romantic or sexually mentoring ‘relationships’ with under-aged adolescent victims of their sexual preference, and, therefore, did not consider their acts to be criminal in nature.”From Slate.
Many types of sex offenders (e.g. serial rapists of strangers) at whom the most serious sex offense penalties are targeted are virtually never carried out by women in real life, even though they are somewhat stock components of erotic literature.
It is also notably that female sex offenders in all three categories are overwhelmingly alleged to have victimized minors with whom there is some sort of pre-existing relationship (except in fairly rare cases where they enable a male sex offender). Female sex offenders rarely pose a risk to either adults, or to children who are strangers to them.
The biggest issue in the third category is the issue of subjective victimization, and a related issue related to statutory rape. Simply put, our culture sees an adolescent woman who has sex with an older man in a position of trust to be more of a victim than an adolescent man who has sex with an older woman in a position of trust. Regardless of the theoretical equivalency of the acts in a gender neutral world, using the criminal justice process in a way that makes someone who hadn't previously felt victimized feel victimized and to punish someone harshly for a crime where the victim may not have felt like they were victimized is problematic.
The Statutory Rape Problem And Problems With Treating All Minors Equally
The reality is that sexual conduct is not gender neutral and that gender neutral rules should on that subject should be suspect. Likewise, apparently sexual conduct by prepubescent children has different sources, meanings and consequence than sexual conduct involving post-puberty minors.
The related statutory rape issue is that when it is undisputed that a minor below the age of consent(but post-puberty) has had sex with an sufficiently old adult (or an adult in a position of trust), the law conclusively presumes that the adult has committed the crime. While this conclusive presumption criminalizes some acts that would meet any standard of consent apart from the statutory presumption, it is exceedingly rarely the case that a minor girl will have sex with a much older man without his consent. In contrast, a case where an adolescent boy has sex with a much older woman without her consent is a far more plausible possibility, and in those cases, where a rape victim is conclusively presumed to have raped the true offender with far less proof than is necessary to prove an absence of consent on the part of the women to the boy's advances, the potential for injustice is much more troubling.
Part of this problem arises from the fact that statutory rape laws routinely apply to post-pubescent young people. The claims that a prepubescent boy's aggressive acts towards an older woman are distinctively sexual and deserving of more severe treatment relative to an assault or restraint of another person generally is doubtful, and a ten year old boy is almost as implausible as a rapist of an adult woman as a fifteen year old post-pubescent girl is as a rapist of a middle aged man.
Some of this is simple biology. The law, rightly, treats sexually contact is a less severe matter than sexual intercourse. And, biologically, it is much more straightforward for a man to have sexual intercourse with a non-consenting female than it is for a woman to have sexual intercourse with a non-consenting man. In theory both possibilities are possible, but the former happens much more often in real life than the latter. This is the basic reason why 96% of sex offenders are men and why our intuition about a minor girl raping a middle aged man is so different from our intuition about a minor boy raping an older woman.
The stated purpose of statutory rape laws - to address instances where the victim is genuinely incapable of consent - makes perfect sense in the case of prepubescent boys and girls, and exceptions and limitations to rules prohibiting sex with prepubescent boys and girls aren't necessary to advance justice.
But, many minors under the age of eighteen who have experienced puberty are quite capable of engaging in consensual sexual relationships and someone who is aroused sexually by a sixteen year old is not a deviant pedophile. The harm that statutory rape laws, child pornography laws, and child prosecution laws are addressing in these cases are less culpable because they involve the exertion of undue influence to procure consent from someone who has weak judgment but who is in fact capable of having consensual sexual relationships at least in the absence of someone employing undue influence, and real justice, as a result, requires considerably more nuance.
Likewise, the argument that someone who patronizes a prepubescent boy or girl as a prostitute or utilized a prepubescent boy or girl in making true child pornography holds water because someone with those sexual interests may very well be a real pedophile threat, and the case that the minor is being abuses is absolutely clear. A John who has sex with a ten year old prostitute is probably a menace. A John who has sex with a seventeen year old prostitute probably isn't meaningfully more culpable than a John who has sex with a twenty year old prostitute, and quite possibly a John having sex with a seventeen year old prostitute could do so legally but for the money exchanged. Colorado, however, and Colorado is hardly unique in doing so, punishes anyone involved in prostitution or pornography involving a sexually mature late teenager (perhaps even one who is married to someone or once was married to somone) with the same severe punishments that make sense in the case of prostitution or pornography involving ten years old victims.
The problem isn't limited to criminal law either. Treating sexually mature teen aged girls as children in matters of reproductive health is also problematic, in a way that it isn't for ten year old girls, for example. It invites improper meddling and imposes barriers to obtaining reproductive health services that are especially beneficial to teen aged girls and harder for them to overcome embarassment to utilize even in the absence of legal impediments to access because sexual activity by teenagers is viewed as inherently immoral by many adults even though most teens are sexually active before they are eighteen years old.
17 May 2012
Republicans Have Screwed Up Congress
"Congress is more dysfunctional than it has been since the Civil War, and they know who to blame."
One of the two major parties, the Republican Party, has become an insurgent outlier — ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political oppositionThomas Mann (senior fellow at the Brookings Institution), and Norm Ornstein (resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institution), It’s Even Worse Than It Looks, How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism (2012) via Brad DeLong.
Seth On Vampire Politicians
From a transcript of an interview with political science professor Seth at Enik Rising.Is the vampire a Democrat or Republican? Why?Republicans describe Democrats as sucking the life out of capitalism. Democrats describe Republicans as sucking the life from the working class. So either could probably be said to have some vampire-like qualities. However, given that vampires tend to be older, paler, and wealthier than most mortals, I would tend to think that he's a Republican.Would you vote Cullen/Dracula 2012?I haven't seen or read any of the "Twilight" series, so I couldn't adequately comment on Cullen's candidacy. Also, the issue of immortality makes the vice presidency somehow less important than it already is. . . . If we're talking about Gary Oldman's Dracula, there's a lot I like about him, but I'd really need to see his birth certificate before I could consider voting for him.
The interview is presumably inspired by the impending June 22 opening of the movie "Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Killer.", whose title pretty much says it all (and also argues for the case that 19th century vampires would have been Democrats, even if 21st century vampires might now predominate in the GOP instead).
16 May 2012
Special Session of Colorado General Assembly Ends
The 2012 special session of the Colorado General Assembly ended today after passing bills on three of the subjects it was convened to consider. Bills on the other items before the state legislature, including civil unions, were killed.
[T]he civil unions proposal failed in a Republican House committee, and many of the additional bills Hickenlooper asked lawmakers to consider perished, too.
From here.
The Senate rejected a proposal to set a blood marijuana limit for drivers. A bill to create "benefit corporations" died in the House. The Legislature passed just three bills—one on water projects, one on unemployment insurance and one on machinery regulation.
Women Like Sexy Men. Who Knew?
Previous research has shown in the week near ovulation women become attracted to sexy, rebellious and handsome men like George Clooney or James Bond. But until now it was unclear why women would ever think it's wise to pursue long-term relationships with these kinds of men.Kristina Durante, assistant professor of marketing at The University of Texas at San Antonio College of Business quoted here.
Clearly, somebody doesn't get out much. And a marketing professor no less. Isn't "sex sells" the lesson that they teach you on day one of Marketing 101?
Note to university reacher P.R. officers:
In the age of press release journalism, when you can choose any quote you want from a faculty member, do not choose quotes that make your faculty member sound like a prepubescent imbecile who has never experienced the human condition.
Ms. Durante's study actually answered a legitimate question.
Do women who fall for sexy unreliable guys make a conscious trade off between the genetic fitness of a mate and his reliability as a father, or do they deceive themselves into thinking that they aren't making a tradeoff because the man they are attracted to would treat them differently than other women?
The answer turns out to be that "ovulating women thought that the sexy cad -- but not the reliable dad -- would contribute more to childcare, but only if she were his partner." But, you wouldn't know that this was what the study was really about from her lede quotation.
Did Europe Just Postpone Trouble?
When the financial crisis, triggered by the collapse of a housing bubble in several important U.S. real estate market, hit in late 2007, the U.S. economy suffered, while European economies initially took a much more gentle hit.
At the time, it looked like those economies were going to avoid the economic pain of the financial crisis almost entirely, because a better regulatory system prevented European banks from making many of the mistake that were pivotal in the U.S. financial crisis.
Four and a half years later, the situation is less clear. The threat of sovereign debt defaults, or default by financial institutions that when push came to shove were backed by sovereigns, even if they had no legal obligation to do so, have brought down Iceland, Ireland, Greece and Portugal, and have Italy and Spain on the brink, and the United Kingdom is in a downturn worse than the Great Depression was for it. These countries are experiencing cuts to public services and unemployment at least as bad and often worse than the worst since the Great Depression hit that the United States experienced peaking a couple of years ago, form which the U.S. has still not fully recovered.
The situation has gotten so bad in Europe that it threatens to rebound back onto U.S. shores and trigger a double dip recession.
Japan is also greatly overextended in sovereign debt, and will not at a crisis point now, could easily slip out of control. The pain there is not as visible mostly because it has endured its "lost decade' followed by another long slump, so the status quo against which current conditions are being evaluated isn't nearly as rosy as it was for the U.S. or Europe.
The root causes of the European sovereign debt crisis are even more obscure than those of the American financial crisis. But, the only really obvious candiate is that they are delayed reaction to the U.S. finanical crisis.
If that analysis is right, then the benefits of financial regulation generally look a lot more suspect.
At the time, it looked like those economies were going to avoid the economic pain of the financial crisis almost entirely, because a better regulatory system prevented European banks from making many of the mistake that were pivotal in the U.S. financial crisis.
Four and a half years later, the situation is less clear. The threat of sovereign debt defaults, or default by financial institutions that when push came to shove were backed by sovereigns, even if they had no legal obligation to do so, have brought down Iceland, Ireland, Greece and Portugal, and have Italy and Spain on the brink, and the United Kingdom is in a downturn worse than the Great Depression was for it. These countries are experiencing cuts to public services and unemployment at least as bad and often worse than the worst since the Great Depression hit that the United States experienced peaking a couple of years ago, form which the U.S. has still not fully recovered.
The situation has gotten so bad in Europe that it threatens to rebound back onto U.S. shores and trigger a double dip recession.
Japan is also greatly overextended in sovereign debt, and will not at a crisis point now, could easily slip out of control. The pain there is not as visible mostly because it has endured its "lost decade' followed by another long slump, so the status quo against which current conditions are being evaluated isn't nearly as rosy as it was for the U.S. or Europe.
The root causes of the European sovereign debt crisis are even more obscure than those of the American financial crisis. But, the only really obvious candiate is that they are delayed reaction to the U.S. finanical crisis.
If that analysis is right, then the benefits of financial regulation generally look a lot more suspect.
15 May 2012
542 Genes Collectively Predict Schizophrenia
A new, wide-ranging effort has uncovered a set of DNA signatures that are shared by people with the disease consistently enough that the set can be used to reliably predict whether someone has the disease. . . . By analyzing a battery of 542 genetic variants, researchers could predict who had schizophrenia in a group of European Americans and African Americans. The confirmation of the result in people of varying ancestry suggests that the set of genes truly does detect the core features of the disorder, scientists report online May 15 in Molecular Psychiatry.From here, citing M. Ayalew et al. Convergent functional genomics of schizophrenia: from comprehensive understanding to genetic risk prediction. Molecular Psychiatry. doi: 10.1038/mp.2012.37.
This battery of genetic variants was compiled based on meta-analysis of a nearly comprehensive set of human and animal studies already in existence.
The list is surely not complete, and it probably has some false positives, since anytime you add that many degrees of freedom to a model, you will pick up some chance associations between otherwise unclassified cases. The study also doesn't squarely address models that assign a significant share of genetic causation in schizophrenia to non-specific accumulated volumes of mutations in relevant parts of the genome and to first generation mutations.
Applications
But, simply providing an order of magnitude estimate of how many genes go into this polygenetic trait has value, and this kind of objective genetic predictor of psychosis could be particular useful in contexts such as insanity defenses where the biases of the psychiatric experts and the defendant cloud the usefulness of more subjective measurements. This tool also opens the door to genotype based cluster analysis to subtype cases, which could be used to refine non-genetic diagnostic criteria and to personalize the process of prescribing medicines to treat schizophrenia which otherwise have a very large trial and error component.
Also, while biomarker tests are starting to emerge to confirm a schizophrenia diagnosis shortly before clinically definitive symptoms appear, a genotype test could be administered much earlier in individuals with a family history of psychosis - alleviating fears about the future for children in high risk families, while allowing for early treatment for children at high risk. An ability to know whether or not you are likely to develop a psychosis in your late teens or early twenties would have a practical value to
Another opportunity that genotyping on this model presents is the opportunity to identify individuals who have a schizophrenia genotype but are non-symptomatic, with an eye towards determining which, if any, environmental factors are part of a gene x environment interaction that gives rise to the syndrome (i.e. cluster of similar symptoms) that we called schizophrenia.
Finally, there is an emerging consensus that a significant share of the hereditary risk associated with developing schizophrenia is really a shared genetic risk of developing schizophrenia and/or bipolar disorder. One suspects, therefore, that the battery of genes necessary to develop a genotype test for bipolar may have a similar number of genes and that the genese in the two genotype diagnostic batteries may significantly overlap. For example, there might be about 270 schizophrenia specific genes, about 270 schizophrenia and bipolar genes, and 260 bipolar genes, for a total of perhaps 800 genes for psychosis generally.
Examining the functional differences between the shared risk factors and the condition specific risk factors might help researchers to better understand the neuroscientific basis of both conditions and how the brain works more generally even in normal as opposed to abnormal psychology. It is entirely likely that we will discover entire new systems that are out of whack in these conditions that we previously hadn't been aware existed in the brain. And, every new system within the larger organ of the brain that we discover provides a new potential target for new classes of drugs. This has recently happened in the efforts to find genotypes for anxiety disorders.
Same Sex Marriage Support Varies By Region
Popular support for same sex marriage has increased dramatically since 2004 (in large part because a few early adopter states permitted same sex marriage, and the sky has not fallen there and the existence of actually married same sex couples has humanized the concept). From the link below:
Despite the defeat of the Civil Unions bill this year in Colorado, every Democrat in the Colorado General Assembly, at least five state house Republicans, and several state senate Republicans supported the bill. The percentage of legislators willing to vote for the bill is within the margin of error of the percentage of voters who support it. Its defeat this session was a product of the imperfections of parliamentary procedure in translating the will of individual legislators into enacted legislation.
Interestingly, and supporting the trend of same sex marriage support as a regional issue, as much as a partisan issue, there is majority support for same sex marriage in the Republican stronghold of Alaska. In general, same sex marriage opposition seems to track Evangelical Christianity (including Mormons) more than partisanship.
My estimate is 16 percentage points. Nate Silver estimates perhaps two or three percentage points a year and, according to a leaked memo, Republican pollster Jan van Lohuizen finds support rising one point a year until 2009 and 5 points a year since.But, support varies dramatically from state to state.
Opposition to SSM varies widely by state. Seong Soo Oh and I [Gregory P. Lewis] concluded that support was 30 points higher in Massachusetts than in Mississippi in 2006. Jeffrey Lax and Justin Phillips found a 40 point split between Massachusetts and Utah in 2009. My most current estimates find nearly a 50 point division between Massachusetts and Mississippi.As of 2011, Colorado was third in the nation in the percentage of the voters supporting same sex marriage (behind Rhode Island, which also does not have same sex marriage, and Massachusetts, which does have it). In part, this is due to the "present company excluded" norm of interpersonal etiquette. Denver has sent at least three openly gay legislators to the Colorado General Assembly in recent years: Jennifer Veiga, Mark Ferrandino and Pat Steadman (I've been represented at one point or another by all three), and we have an openly gay member of Congress, Jared Polis (CO-2 which includes Boulder, Colorado). It has hard for legislators to vote in favor of discrimination against the colleagues and that trickles down to the entire political elite in the state. Major political and civic contributions from affluent gay Coloradans like Tim Gill, have also had an impact.
Despite the defeat of the Civil Unions bill this year in Colorado, every Democrat in the Colorado General Assembly, at least five state house Republicans, and several state senate Republicans supported the bill. The percentage of legislators willing to vote for the bill is within the margin of error of the percentage of voters who support it. Its defeat this session was a product of the imperfections of parliamentary procedure in translating the will of individual legislators into enacted legislation.
Interestingly, and supporting the trend of same sex marriage support as a regional issue, as much as a partisan issue, there is majority support for same sex marriage in the Republican stronghold of Alaska. In general, same sex marriage opposition seems to track Evangelical Christianity (including Mormons) more than partisanship.
14 May 2012
Child Psychopathy
The New York Times, in a vivid and lengthy article spells out the case for callous-unemotional type discipline problem kids (i.e. kids with "conduct disorder") being kids on a path to adult psychopathy, absent interventions that haven't been really worked out yet.
The case for adult psychopathy almost universally having roots no later than in early childhood is compelling. But, it isn't yet clear if childhood diagnosis is reliable. Many kids who are terrible discipline problems as children grow out of it, but ordinary "hot blooded" anti-social activity and the kind of impulsivity associated with ADHD are different in kind than than distinct subtype who are callous and unemotional (really just codewords for behaviors assocaited with psychopathy as adults). Multiple researchers in the field are making the case (for example, in the study discussed in this February 23, 2011 blog post) that this subtype of much more predictive of adult psychopathy than ordinary anti-social behavior which has multiple causes and behavior syndromes encompassed within the broader definition. They are also starting to understand its neurological basis.
A particularly pertinent question the finds pose is whether it really makes sense to keep juvenile delinquency records confidential. A huge percentage of adult offenders who go on to become recidivist serious offenders are continuing a pattern of conduct that began when they were children. Not disclosing juvenile records and not considering those records in setting permissible sentencing ranges exposes large numbers of offenders who offend for the first time as adults and are likely to reform themselves to the same risk of a very long and harsh punishment as offenders whose juvenile records make them high risk candidates for serious reoffending. And, the confidentiality of the process, in addition to making it very difficult to determine if the process is proceeding fairly, also prevents private individuals from effectively limiting their exposure to risk for young adults who do not yet have adult criminal records but pose a highly elevated risk to the people whom they are around.
The case for adult psychopathy almost universally having roots no later than in early childhood is compelling. But, it isn't yet clear if childhood diagnosis is reliable. Many kids who are terrible discipline problems as children grow out of it, but ordinary "hot blooded" anti-social activity and the kind of impulsivity associated with ADHD are different in kind than than distinct subtype who are callous and unemotional (really just codewords for behaviors assocaited with psychopathy as adults). Multiple researchers in the field are making the case (for example, in the study discussed in this February 23, 2011 blog post) that this subtype of much more predictive of adult psychopathy than ordinary anti-social behavior which has multiple causes and behavior syndromes encompassed within the broader definition. They are also starting to understand its neurological basis.
A particularly pertinent question the finds pose is whether it really makes sense to keep juvenile delinquency records confidential. A huge percentage of adult offenders who go on to become recidivist serious offenders are continuing a pattern of conduct that began when they were children. Not disclosing juvenile records and not considering those records in setting permissible sentencing ranges exposes large numbers of offenders who offend for the first time as adults and are likely to reform themselves to the same risk of a very long and harsh punishment as offenders whose juvenile records make them high risk candidates for serious reoffending. And, the confidentiality of the process, in addition to making it very difficult to determine if the process is proceeding fairly, also prevents private individuals from effectively limiting their exposure to risk for young adults who do not yet have adult criminal records but pose a highly elevated risk to the people whom they are around.
Do We Want Him As President?
Mitt Romney was a privileged asshole who viciously bullied his classmate John Lauber because of claims that Lauber was gay, when Romney was a seventeen year old prep school student.
Now that Romney is the presumptive Presidential nominee, he's publicly apologized for his actions.
Do we really want someone with that moral character in charge of a nuclear arsenal and maintaining discipline in the military now? I simply do not believe that Romney has changed, or that his life experiences have prepared him for the profound moral responsibilities to all Americans that a President must take on.
Now that Romney is the presumptive Presidential nominee, he's publicly apologized for his actions.
Do we really want someone with that moral character in charge of a nuclear arsenal and maintaining discipline in the military now? I simply do not believe that Romney has changed, or that his life experiences have prepared him for the profound moral responsibilities to all Americans that a President must take on.
Denver City Council To Criminalize Homelessness
The Denver City Council supported a measure, called a "camping ban," a euphemism for the criminalization of the fact that someone is homeless and living on the streets (i.e. a vagrant) by a 9-4 margin in a preliminary vote a couple of weeks ago. I am deeply disgusted (but not tremendously surprised) to learn today (the efforts of the Denver Post to prominently make clear who is and isn't supporting the measure on the non-partisan city council has not been impressive) that my city council representative, Chris Nevitt, backed the measure.
The ordinance marks a stark departure from the more positive and constructive approach to dealing with the homeless that Mr. Hickenlooper had advanced when he was the Mayor of Denver.
The measure is expected to receive final approval this evening.
I have no idea why Mayor Hancock and more than two-thirds of the current city council think that this approach is wise. Yes, vagrants have never been known to wield much political power, and they are an annoyance to much more powerful business interests. But, how does this in any way address the underlying problem or make it possible for the people criminalized here to comply with the law? It is abundantly clear that the City of Denver simply does not have anywhere near the resources it needs to provide every vagrant on its streets with a place to stay right now, using the city jail to serve that purpose is an absurdly expensive and wasteful way to bridge that gap, and the Council has shown no signs of eliminating the need that has put so many people out on the street as it is today. The measure smells like something out of "The Little Prince" or fable, "The Emperor Has No Clothes," where a narcisstic leader imagines that by decreeing that unpleasant things are forbidden that they will magically stop happening.
UPDATE: As expected, Denver's City Council has criminalized homelessness in the city by the same 9-4 margin as in its original vote. Maybe its time to haul out the recall rules and see what we need to do to throw the bums out. If signed tomorrow by the Mayor, as expected, the ordinance will take effect on May 30, 2012.
The ordinance marks a stark departure from the more positive and constructive approach to dealing with the homeless that Mr. Hickenlooper had advanced when he was the Mayor of Denver.
The measure is expected to receive final approval this evening.
I have no idea why Mayor Hancock and more than two-thirds of the current city council think that this approach is wise. Yes, vagrants have never been known to wield much political power, and they are an annoyance to much more powerful business interests. But, how does this in any way address the underlying problem or make it possible for the people criminalized here to comply with the law? It is abundantly clear that the City of Denver simply does not have anywhere near the resources it needs to provide every vagrant on its streets with a place to stay right now, using the city jail to serve that purpose is an absurdly expensive and wasteful way to bridge that gap, and the Council has shown no signs of eliminating the need that has put so many people out on the street as it is today. The measure smells like something out of "The Little Prince" or fable, "The Emperor Has No Clothes," where a narcisstic leader imagines that by decreeing that unpleasant things are forbidden that they will magically stop happening.
UPDATE: As expected, Denver's City Council has criminalized homelessness in the city by the same 9-4 margin as in its original vote. Maybe its time to haul out the recall rules and see what we need to do to throw the bums out. If signed tomorrow by the Mayor, as expected, the ordinance will take effect on May 30, 2012.
The Greater Chinese Legal Tradition
Teemu Ruskola has a decent overview at SSRN (in a pre-print of a chapter of a new comparative law text) of the Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Northern Vietnamese pre-Western legal traditions, all of which are derivative of China's legal system to some extent I recall studying basically the same concepts and materials, with slightly less historical detail, fewer Latin terms of comparative law, and less geographic specificity when I was in junior high school, and that perspective has been largely confirmed by what I have learned since then.
Key concepts include a Confucian hiearchical foundation to international tributary relationships, domestic political philosophy and personal relationships, supplemented by legalistic harsh penalties for violations of moral codes. In general, there were only weak distinctions between judicial and legal spheres, and more general administrative and governmental duties. Law per se, we not starkly distinguished from ruling a territory or a group of people, in general. Relationships were primary over rationally formulated rules applicable to all which had more of a customary or non-state character within families and guild. A lack of a clear line between conduct that is discouraged and conduct that is "illegal" in many cases, also supports are more gradual approach to escalating community/state intervention as individuals grow gradually more distant from ideals of moral conduct. The focus was on obligations that arose out of enduring and unequal relationships rather than on the rights of individual persons who were equal in legal dignity to each other.
The situation in China was somewhat akin to the very early days following the Norman Conquest in England when general purpose feudal lords presided in a general capacity to resolve disputes between their subjects on the basis of reason and local custom. And where, these aristocrats ruling from their place within a feudal hierarchy held places recently assigned to them by merit because their fiefs were awarded to them based upon their military service (or necessity for pacifying the locals) during the recent conquest, even though that ideal would be short lived and was soon replaced by a more specialized and bureaucratized legal order in which the hereditary principle would become pre-eminent.
Regional variation within this intellectual sphere hinged mostly on issues of centralization and meritocracy.
Korea was the most centralized of these East Asian states, followed by China which had a strongly centralized core with declining levels of control as one reached the fringes of its influence (and in practice, it recognized greater regional diversity that its ideological basis supposed), with Shogun Japan and Vietnam exaulting their feudal and decentralized system of small states as more reflective of the early Chinese environment in which Confucianism arose. The distinctions are somewhat analogous to those between Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian political ideologies in American history.
China was the most meritocratic of the four states, followed perhaps by the Vietnamese, while Korea retained a significant degree of aristocratic privilege apart from examination determined merit, and Japan also retained significant decrees of aristrocratic caste concepts.
Somewhat disappointingly, Ruskola does not discuss how this deeper legal tradition has managed to meld and subvert what are superficially Western communist, common law, and civil law legal and political regimes in a manner distinctly molded by this shared deeper legal tradition. South Korea, Vietnam and Japan all have statutes modeled primarily on European civil codes, with some Anglo-American glosses in the criminal justice area and a few other legal subjects in Japan and South Korea, and a Chinese communist gloss in Vietnam. But, the way that those systems work in practice is dramatically different from either the European civilian or American models. And, the form of communism practiced in China and Vietnam is likewise only barely recognizable as having shared roots with the political and legal system of the pre-Cold War Soviet block of Eastern Europe.
The Chinese political legacy was in many ways a more natural fit the the political theory that self-described communists tried to implement in Russia and Eastern Europe where it originated. Singapore and Hong Kong, both of which share both traditional Chinese and English common law roots, produced dramatically different results in their respective city states: Singapore produced a totalitarian dictatorship friendly to organized business; while Hong Kong produced a non-democratic yet libertarian leaning free for all of lassiez-faire economics with rulers who were content not to be fully in control of their domain. None of these systems wholeheartedly embrace the sort of singleminded zealous advocacy in legal disputes that is so characteristic of the American legal and political culture.
Key concepts include a Confucian hiearchical foundation to international tributary relationships, domestic political philosophy and personal relationships, supplemented by legalistic harsh penalties for violations of moral codes. In general, there were only weak distinctions between judicial and legal spheres, and more general administrative and governmental duties. Law per se, we not starkly distinguished from ruling a territory or a group of people, in general. Relationships were primary over rationally formulated rules applicable to all which had more of a customary or non-state character within families and guild. A lack of a clear line between conduct that is discouraged and conduct that is "illegal" in many cases, also supports are more gradual approach to escalating community/state intervention as individuals grow gradually more distant from ideals of moral conduct. The focus was on obligations that arose out of enduring and unequal relationships rather than on the rights of individual persons who were equal in legal dignity to each other.
The situation in China was somewhat akin to the very early days following the Norman Conquest in England when general purpose feudal lords presided in a general capacity to resolve disputes between their subjects on the basis of reason and local custom. And where, these aristocrats ruling from their place within a feudal hierarchy held places recently assigned to them by merit because their fiefs were awarded to them based upon their military service (or necessity for pacifying the locals) during the recent conquest, even though that ideal would be short lived and was soon replaced by a more specialized and bureaucratized legal order in which the hereditary principle would become pre-eminent.
Regional variation within this intellectual sphere hinged mostly on issues of centralization and meritocracy.
Korea was the most centralized of these East Asian states, followed by China which had a strongly centralized core with declining levels of control as one reached the fringes of its influence (and in practice, it recognized greater regional diversity that its ideological basis supposed), with Shogun Japan and Vietnam exaulting their feudal and decentralized system of small states as more reflective of the early Chinese environment in which Confucianism arose. The distinctions are somewhat analogous to those between Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian political ideologies in American history.
China was the most meritocratic of the four states, followed perhaps by the Vietnamese, while Korea retained a significant degree of aristocratic privilege apart from examination determined merit, and Japan also retained significant decrees of aristrocratic caste concepts.
Somewhat disappointingly, Ruskola does not discuss how this deeper legal tradition has managed to meld and subvert what are superficially Western communist, common law, and civil law legal and political regimes in a manner distinctly molded by this shared deeper legal tradition. South Korea, Vietnam and Japan all have statutes modeled primarily on European civil codes, with some Anglo-American glosses in the criminal justice area and a few other legal subjects in Japan and South Korea, and a Chinese communist gloss in Vietnam. But, the way that those systems work in practice is dramatically different from either the European civilian or American models. And, the form of communism practiced in China and Vietnam is likewise only barely recognizable as having shared roots with the political and legal system of the pre-Cold War Soviet block of Eastern Europe.
The Chinese political legacy was in many ways a more natural fit the the political theory that self-described communists tried to implement in Russia and Eastern Europe where it originated. Singapore and Hong Kong, both of which share both traditional Chinese and English common law roots, produced dramatically different results in their respective city states: Singapore produced a totalitarian dictatorship friendly to organized business; while Hong Kong produced a non-democratic yet libertarian leaning free for all of lassiez-faire economics with rulers who were content not to be fully in control of their domain. None of these systems wholeheartedly embrace the sort of singleminded zealous advocacy in legal disputes that is so characteristic of the American legal and political culture.
Discrimination Down In Elite Professions
In 1960, 94 percent of doctors were white men, as were 96 percent of lawyers and 86 percent of managers. By 2008, these numbers had fallen to 63, 61, and 57 percent, respectively.
From here.
The trend is expected by anyone familiar with 20th century American history. The economic conclusions that follow from it discussed in the related academic paper has all of the limits of economic models generally, although it is hard to discount the conclusion that this had some economic benefit to the U.S. economy. But, the raw numbers are pretty much indisputable and worth noting in a blog post for easy reference.
Also, of course, it is worth noting the percentage of people who are white men who are twenty-five to seventy years old (whch is about 35%-40%). This overall demographic percentage is still much smaller than the percentage of white men who make up those professions today.
Part of this is a matter of old demographics working their way through people's careers.
Law school graduation rates, for example, weren't gender neutral until around the early 1980s and many people who graduated from law school earlier on are still practicing lawyers. The percentage of older lawyers who are women is smaller than the percentage of younger women who are lawyers. Boundaries of gender at the higher educational level have also equalized more completely than boundaries of race, for the most part. Much of the gender imbalance of the makeup of these professions today arises from career patterns after the members of the professions complete their higher educations.
Racial imbalances in participation in these professions, in contrast, is mostly attributable to pre-higher education participation disparities.
In Greece, most cops really are fascists
More than half of all police officers in Greece voted for pro-Nazi party Chrysi Avgi’ (Golden Dawn) in the elections of May 6. This is the disconcerting result of an analysis carried out by the authoritative newspaper To Vima (TheTribune) in several constituencies in Athens, where 5,000 police officers in service in the Greek capital also cast their ballot.From here. In Germany, the number of people killed by police gunfire, however, is far less than the U.S. (six in the most recent year, compared to more than a hundred in the United States which has roughly three and a half times as many people as Germany).
Encore
The Colorado General Assembly is back for its first day of the 2012 special session called by Governor Hickenlooper after the Republican state house majority went into recess for the last few hours of May 8, 2012 (the last day before the end of the regular session and deadline for passage of bills on second reading), in order to kill a civil unions bill that had cleared three committees and had the votes to pass on the floor of the house, and took dozens of other bills down with it.
The special session will consider civil unions and several other topics related to bills that died as a result of that procedural move. The other six issues before the Colorado General Assembly in the special session, in addition to civil unions are:
All of the bills were heading for passage at the end of the session. Bills without a prayer don't clear one of the two houses of the bicameral state legislature and all of the committees that they come before in the other house and don't head to the full house for a vote on a day when they can still be considered for passage. And, Governors don't bring legislation that they would like to veto up for reconsideration in a special session.
The trouble is that the process does start over in the special session. There is a clean slate and the special session, while restricted to the seven topics on the agenda, otherwise employs the same process used in a regular session of the general assembly.
The leadership of the state house, knowing precisely which 37 legislators were ready to vote for civil unions a week earlier, could tinker with the process in some way that sends a civil unions bill to a "kill committee" preventing it from making it to the House floor where it would pass. But, rejiggering committee assignments or changing the committees that a bill must clear to pass, would make the state house Republican leadership look even dirtier than it already does going into an election. [UPDATE 5-14-12: Republicans have indeed done just that and may kill the civil unions bill in a committee it was not required to clear in the general session as soon as this afternoon (see also here)].
The special session also postpones the point in the political season when Republican are able to talk about their own agenda, instead of one that the Governor have given them to address, less than five months from the point in time at which votes will start to be cast in Colorado by mail and at early voting centers in a Presidential election year where increased voter turnout already puts Republicans at a disadvantage. And, it only takes a little shift in public opinion for the state house to move from being controlled by Republicans 33-32, to being controlled by Democrats who manage to also hold onto the state senate where Democrats already have a safe majority and only half of the seats are up for reconsideration in November. There are no indications that Republicans gained any real advantage in state legislative redistricting based on the 2010 census that takes effect this year. Indeed, judging by the fact that the Republicans tried to have the map that was adopted overturned in Court, it is fair to say that redistricting gave Democrats a slight edge at the state level.
Put all of that, and the fact that public opinion is slowly but surely shifting in favor of civil unions in Colorado, and any win that Republicans manage to secure on civil unions in the special session, if they can manage it at all, has a good chance of being reversed in 2013.
UPDATE May 14, 2012:
So far, according to the Colorado General Assembly website, the following eleven bills have been introduced in the Special Session which began today:
*HB12S-1001 Water Conservation Bd Construction Fund Projects BAUMGARDNER--(NONE)
*HB12S-1002 Unempl Ins Revenue Bonds LISTON & ...--JAHN
*HB12S-1003 Special Mobile Machinery Registration Fees BRADFORD--(NONE)
*HB12S-1004 Medical Marijuana Fund Transfer MCCANN--(NONE)
*HB12S-1005 Penalties For DUIs Involving Drugs WALLER & ...--KING S.
*HB12S-1006 Authorization Of Civil Unions FERRANDINO--STEADMAN
*HB12S-1007 Benefit Corporations LEVY--ROBERTS
*SB12S-001 Registration Fees Special Mobile Machinery CADMAN--(NONE)
*SB12S-002 Water Conservation Bd Construction Fund Projects SCHWARTZ--SONNENBERG
*SB12S-003 Benefit Corporations BACON--MASSEY
*SCR12S-001 Repeal Unconstitutional Provisions State Const STEADMAN--FERRANDINO
Strategically, the notable issue is that the Civil Unions bill has been introduced first in the State House, rather than the State Senate, preventing any impediments to passage put in the way of the bill to be brought up at the last minute as they were in the regular session. Three of the subjects for consideration (water projects, mobile machinery, and benefit corporatioons) were introduced in parallel versions in both houses of the Colorado general assembly. Unemployment, Civil Unions and the two marijuana bills have no house counterpart. The constitutional amendment proposal was introduced in the state senate and lacks a house counterpart.
UPDATE TWO May 14, 2012: The House State, Veterans and Military Affairs Committee has killed civil unions by a party line 5-4 vote, despite the fact that it is supported by a majority of members in that chamber. Republican Rep. Don Coram, whose son is gay even betrayed his son to vote the party line against the bill.
The special session will consider civil unions and several other topics related to bills that died as a result of that procedural move. The other six issues before the Colorado General Assembly in the special session, in addition to civil unions are:
Bills relating to a variety of interim study committees and related to the management of public schools were not revived for special session consideration.• Funding $55 million in water projects.
• Penalties for driving under the influence of alcohol or drugs.
• Stabilizing unemployment-insurance rates.
• Creating "benefit corporations" in Colorado.
• Registering "special mobile machinery fleets."
• Asking voters to amend the state constitution by repealing provisions deemed obsolete, including a measure that barred local governments from prohibiting discrimination against gays [this was held unconstitutional in the U.S. Supreme Court case Romer v. Evans].
All of the bills were heading for passage at the end of the session. Bills without a prayer don't clear one of the two houses of the bicameral state legislature and all of the committees that they come before in the other house and don't head to the full house for a vote on a day when they can still be considered for passage. And, Governors don't bring legislation that they would like to veto up for reconsideration in a special session.
The trouble is that the process does start over in the special session. There is a clean slate and the special session, while restricted to the seven topics on the agenda, otherwise employs the same process used in a regular session of the general assembly.
The leadership of the state house, knowing precisely which 37 legislators were ready to vote for civil unions a week earlier, could tinker with the process in some way that sends a civil unions bill to a "kill committee" preventing it from making it to the House floor where it would pass. But, rejiggering committee assignments or changing the committees that a bill must clear to pass, would make the state house Republican leadership look even dirtier than it already does going into an election. [UPDATE 5-14-12: Republicans have indeed done just that and may kill the civil unions bill in a committee it was not required to clear in the general session as soon as this afternoon (see also here)].
The special session also postpones the point in the political season when Republican are able to talk about their own agenda, instead of one that the Governor have given them to address, less than five months from the point in time at which votes will start to be cast in Colorado by mail and at early voting centers in a Presidential election year where increased voter turnout already puts Republicans at a disadvantage. And, it only takes a little shift in public opinion for the state house to move from being controlled by Republicans 33-32, to being controlled by Democrats who manage to also hold onto the state senate where Democrats already have a safe majority and only half of the seats are up for reconsideration in November. There are no indications that Republicans gained any real advantage in state legislative redistricting based on the 2010 census that takes effect this year. Indeed, judging by the fact that the Republicans tried to have the map that was adopted overturned in Court, it is fair to say that redistricting gave Democrats a slight edge at the state level.
Put all of that, and the fact that public opinion is slowly but surely shifting in favor of civil unions in Colorado, and any win that Republicans manage to secure on civil unions in the special session, if they can manage it at all, has a good chance of being reversed in 2013.
UPDATE May 14, 2012:
So far, according to the Colorado General Assembly website, the following eleven bills have been introduced in the Special Session which began today:
*HB12S-1001 Water Conservation Bd Construction Fund Projects BAUMGARDNER--(NONE)
*HB12S-1002 Unempl Ins Revenue Bonds LISTON & ...--JAHN
*HB12S-1003 Special Mobile Machinery Registration Fees BRADFORD--(NONE)
*HB12S-1004 Medical Marijuana Fund Transfer MCCANN--(NONE)
*HB12S-1005 Penalties For DUIs Involving Drugs WALLER & ...--KING S.
*HB12S-1006 Authorization Of Civil Unions FERRANDINO--STEADMAN
*HB12S-1007 Benefit Corporations LEVY--ROBERTS
*SB12S-001 Registration Fees Special Mobile Machinery CADMAN--(NONE)
*SB12S-002 Water Conservation Bd Construction Fund Projects SCHWARTZ--SONNENBERG
*SB12S-003 Benefit Corporations BACON--MASSEY
*SCR12S-001 Repeal Unconstitutional Provisions State Const STEADMAN--FERRANDINO
Strategically, the notable issue is that the Civil Unions bill has been introduced first in the State House, rather than the State Senate, preventing any impediments to passage put in the way of the bill to be brought up at the last minute as they were in the regular session. Three of the subjects for consideration (water projects, mobile machinery, and benefit corporatioons) were introduced in parallel versions in both houses of the Colorado general assembly. Unemployment, Civil Unions and the two marijuana bills have no house counterpart. The constitutional amendment proposal was introduced in the state senate and lacks a house counterpart.
UPDATE TWO May 14, 2012: The House State, Veterans and Military Affairs Committee has killed civil unions by a party line 5-4 vote, despite the fact that it is supported by a majority of members in that chamber. Republican Rep. Don Coram, whose son is gay even betrayed his son to vote the party line against the bill.
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