Tim Masters To Go Free

Tim Masters was age 15 when he was arrested for the murder of Peggy Hettrick and is now 35.

Masters will be freed from prison tomorrow after serving 9 1/2 years for a murder he didn’t commit.

Via Jeralyn Merritt writing for Elevated Voices at 5280.com.

The Case

Masters was arrested in 1998 for the 1987 murder. The fact that this murder was a cold case, despite the fact that Masters was identified as a suspect almost immediately, is evidence of the weakness of the case, as is the fact that no new physical evidence or lay testimony appears to have been developed in the meantime. Masters was tried as an adult, convicted and sentenced to life in prison in 1999. The evidence in the underlying case was weak based largely on circumstantial evidence and character evidence. The Rocky states:

He was finally arrested and convicted largely on the basis of a forensic psychologist's conclusions about violent writings and drawings Masters had produced as a teenager - including one the doctor believed amounted to a recreation of the crime.

The conviction was affirmed by the Colorado Court of Appeals (in 2001) and the Colorado Supreme Court (in 2002 in a 4-3 decision) (the following press release by the prosecution followed the affirmance).

This is a classic case in which several features of the criminal justice system: the scrict proof beyond a reasonable doubt standard, limitations on the introduction of propensity and character evidence, limitations on expert testimony with a weak scientific basis, appellate review and the legal duty of the prosecutor to disclose exculpatory evidence should have worked in Masters' favor, but failed to prevent his conviction or vacate it promptly.

Justice Bender's dissenting opinion from the Colorado Supeme Court in that case began:

The majority approves the mass admission of over a thousand pages of the defendant’s writings and drawings, many of which are repulsive and antisocial and others which are a high school student’s routine notebooks, assignments and doodles. Most of these writings and drawings have nothing to do with this grisly murder but instead paint the defendant as a boy obsessed with violence. Although I believe that proof of some of the defendant’s fantasies is admissible, many are not. The sheer volume of the inadmissible evidence so overwhelmed the admissible evidence that the defendant could not have a fair trial.

In my view the majority’s opinion, which admits all of the defendants’ writings and drawings, does great injustice to the purposes of C.R.E. 404(b) and opens doors to impermissible character evidence that previously had been closed. Because there exists a substantial risk that the defendant was convicted not for what he did, but for who he is, I respectfully dissent.

Justice Bender also noted that "The tendency of juries to overvalue other acts evidence is supported by empirical studies."

Masters will be freed after a post-conviction proceeding that unveiled prosecutorial misconduct, mostly in the form of failing to disclosure exculpatory evidence to the Defense. An appeal of a ruling exonorating Masters is unlikely.

Who Did It?

There are other possible suspects whose guilt was not aggressively pursued in the case. The most likely of the suspects are (1) Dr. Richard Hendrick, a surgeon now dead after committing suicide in 1995 while under investigation for a sex offense, and (2) Donald Long (Department of Corrections Profile here), a serial killer who committed several women with similar M.O. while in the area and is now incarcerated for life without possibility parole (in theory there might be a parole date well past any realistic life expectency for him), who was incarcerated shortly after the Hettrick murder at which point the spree of similar killings stopped.

Neither man is a threat to the public now. Hendrick is beyond the criminal justice process. Securing a subsequent conviction for first degree murder and then a death penalty sentence for Long would be expensive and rather unlikely to produce an actual execution given the sketchy evidence in the case, absent a new confession. Also, the fact that there are two strong suspects in the case, and a third suspect who was convicted and then exonerated, would likely create reasonable doubt in any effort to prosecute anyone other than these two suspects.

Now What?

There is no word on what compensation, if any, Masters may receive for his tragic wrongful conviction and incarceration.

The case to get him released established that his constitutional rights were violated by the failure to the prosecution to reveal exculpatory evidence to the defense in a manner that resulted in the wrongful conviction. But, prosecutors have wide immunity from criminal prosecution, the statutes of limitations in civil rights cases are sometimes applied grudgingly, and the recoveries for wrongful convictions in cases in the absence of a successful civil rights suit is often pitiful.

From the Rocky:

Sunday, Masters and his attorneys continued making plans for Tuesday's court hearing. David Wymore and Maria Liu went shopping, picking out slacks, a white dress shirt, a tie and a sport coat, and making arrangements for him to change out of his jail jumpsuit and into the dress clothes before the hearing.

In Buena Vista, where Masters was moved into a secluded unit by Colorado Department of Corrections officials, he was packing, putting the belongings he wanted - including family photographs - in box that will be mailed to him. He's leaving his 13-inch television and coffee pot behind.

"I don't need any of that on the street and I don't need any DOC clothes," he said.

He heads outside owning a '69 Chevy in unknown conditions he owned before he was incarcerated -- he spent eight years as a Navy mechanic before he went to prison, leaving him some skills.

Now, he must rebuild a career for himself, he must rehabilitate his reputation (harmed by the material revealed in the trial and his long experience as a prison inmate, even though he has since been exonerated of the crime itself), and make up for lost time in lost experience, in lost financial standing, and in lost trust and optimism about life. The State of Colorado owes Tim Masters a great deal. What will it do to make good on this moral obligation and correct the harm caused by its own mistakes, some of which were not so innocent?

Other Colorado Juvie Lifers

There are 48 juveniles serving life sentences for crimes allegedly committed as juveniles in Colorado, many based on felony murder charges which amounts to guilt by association with people who commit murder. Masters was one of the youngest at the time the crime was allgedly committed. I assume, but don't know, that Colorado's direct file statute which allows prosecutors to prosecute juveniles as adults without a judge's approval, was an important factor in the adult status of the charges against Masters.

Blame Columbus For Syphilis

Examination of the genes of existing strains of the venereal disease syphilis show that the disease very likely made its way to Europe via Christopher Columbus or his crew from the New World.

The genetic evidence corroborates that historical fact that the first recorded Old World outbreak of syphilis appeared in 1494 or 1495, originating proximately in Naples, Italy, and spread across the continent by mercenaries from an invading French force of King Charles VII. Syphilis was long known prior to Columbus in the New World. Also relevant is the "virtual absence of syphilitic lesions from Pre-Colombian Old World skeletons." The role of Columbus, who returned from his first voyage to the Americas in March of 1493, as the source of this disease in Europe was hypothesized in writing as early as the early 1500s, but this study solidifies the claim. This outbreak went on to kill five million people in Europe.

Syphilis is caused by the bacterium Treponema pallidum subsp. pallidum and is related closely to a non-venereal version of the disease and an infectious disease known as "yaws". The current study was helped by the discovery of the full genome in 1998.

Syphilis (unless antibiotic-resistant) can be easily treated with antibiotics including penicillin. The oldest and still most effective method is an intramuscular injection of benzathine penicillin. If not treated, syphilis can cause serious effects such as damage to the heart, aorta, brain, eyes, and bones. In some cases these effects can be fatal.

In the United States, the recent trend is for syphilis to be found at very high rates (in relative terms) in minority men who have sex with men, and is rare for other populations (these are 2005 numbers many of which are updated here, but show the same general trends):

In 2004, about 64% of reported early-stage syphilis infections occurred among men who had sex with men, up from 5% in 1999, according to the CDC. . . .

In 2004, 41% of all cases of P&S syphilis reported to CDC occurred among African-Americans and 40% of all cases occurred among non-Hispanic whites. The 2004 rate for African-Americans was 6 times greater than the rate among non-Hispanic whites . . . .

In 2004, 16% of all cases of P&S syphilis reported to CDC occurred among Hispanics. The rate of P&S syphilis among Hispanic men increased 12% (from 4.9 to 5.5 cases per 100,000 population) between 2003 and 2004. The rate among Hispanic women remained essentially unchanged (0.7 cases per 100,000 population). The rate among Hispanics in 2004 was 2 times greater than the rate among non-Hispanic whites. . . .

Between 2000 and 2004, there was a 90% increase in the number of P&S syphilis cases among men and a 49% decrease in the number of cases among women.

In context, syphilis is still a rare disease in the United States with "about 8,000 cases reported in 2004." Reporting is quite complete for syphilis with the total number of cases believed to be under 10,000. In Colorado in 2005, there were 48 cases of sexually transmitted syphilis reported, all but two or three of which were men, and one case passed from mother to child (probably one of the small number of women with reportable cases in the state).

Infection rates for curable STDs including syphilis are far higher in the United States than in Europe.

Hat Tip: Science News.

See also on New World-Old World ecological exchanges: New World Worms, and New World Foods. Also, notably, there are no Old World marsupials (the Americas have opossums and about 250 species of marsupials as well as all of the world's monotremes are found in and around Australia).

God and His Dark Materials (Spoiler Warning)

Phillip Pullman's "His Dark Materials" trilogy, the first installment of which is the basis for the poorly done (but visually beautiful) film adaptation entitled "The Golden Compass" (the first installment was released originally in the U.K. under the title "Northern Lights"), has made headlines for the premise of the plot: Killing God.

From the perspective of someone like myself, an atheist who has read all of the books (and seen the movie), Pullman's trilogy hardly comes across as an atheistic screed, and his brazen interview comments come across as little more than hyperbole designed to fuel controversy and secure book sales.

If you troll atheist discussion forums for any length of time you will no doubt encounter the aphorism that God doesn't exist and if he did the person speaking would join the side of Satan against God. One of the lesser known arguments for atheism is the moral argument against God that states that God's conduct in scriptures is so immoral that surely no such being can be a true God worthy of worship and devotion. Pullman's trilogy is essentially an elaboration of that aphorism.

The theology of the books, while not in accord with Western Christian orthodoxy theology, is closely wed to that ideology and is not atheistic. This is a trilogy in the image of "Paradise Lost." Pullman's gods and souls are more real than many religious people in real life believe deep down. His religion is probably more orthodox than his science.

Pullman's Theology

Instead of a trinity, his series offers, at least, four gods, and that is without counting either Satan (or his successor in a second war with rebel angels), or Jesus. The original Satan is just an offhanded reference -- the current rebel against Heaven is not an angel but a human. Jesus is no where referenced or mentioned.

Logically, the first god is the "Creator", who by my favorite definition (a powerful non-human being acting with moral purpose in the universe) may not even qualify as a God because the Creator, like Newton's clockwork god, seems disengaged entirely from the universe.

Two more gods emerge in this theology 33,000 years before the present. One is the "Authority" who is a stand in for the Old Testament God the Father figure. He is described as the first created being, who lies to claim that he was the Creator to those who follow him. The other is "Dust" which is an omniscient, omnipresent karma-like, fate-like, Star Wars "Force"-like, trinitarian Holy Spirit-like phenomena of conscious subatomic particles that act with moral purpose in the universe and is intimately connected with sentient life force and people's souls. Dust may or may not have some identification with the Creator. The Neolithic revolution is roughly tied to an evolutionary development that allowed people to interface with Dust.

Finally, the fourth god, Metatron, a powerful angel who is a regent for the Authority who has lost his mental faculties and is aging a hair's breadth from death. Metatron, who has ruled for the last three hundred years, is connected with the particularly nasty, witch burning side of the church. Around the same time, people in an alternate universe devise a technology that starts to unravel the structure of the quantum mechanical many worlds, ravages their own world, and it appears that the leakage of Dust into the Abyss between those worlds as a result may be what has tipped the balance of moral forces in the world in the wrong direction, and may even be what has allowed Metatron to grow in power.

In Pullman's theology, every person has a living body, an intellectual self, and a soul (visible in some worlds as a Daemon who takes the shape of an animal familiar that represents a person's personality). Heaven and Hell are lies -- the land of the dead is instead a purgatory ruled by cruel Harpies. Most worlds with sentient beings have some cruel church, and in the world of Lyra, our protagonist, Calvin in Geneva was the last Pope and he abolished the office effective upon his death in lieu of a bureaucracy that secured the reigns of temporal power in much of the world and has been corrupted in the process.

The death of the gods

The Creator is never encountered, challenged, questioned or killed.

The Authority dies in the Amber Spyglass, amidst a war between the forces of Heaven and those rebelling against it, but quietly, as much of old age as anything, when Lyra and her companion innocently and with the best intentions free him from a crystal chamber that provided his frail being with what amounted to life support. God's death is more like the implementation of a living will than it is a homicide.

Many of the focal figures in the rebellion against God are hardly models of virtue. Lyra is a pre-teen, wild, selfish pathological liar who is nevertheless loyal to her friends and not actively malicious towards others. Her father, Lord Asriel, is a disgraced, ambitious Machiavellian aristocrat who leads the rebellion against god and has largely abdicated his parental duties to one of Oxford's colleges. Lyra's mother, Mrs. Coulter, is a psychopathic mad scientist and high church official who steals children from their parents so she can do unethical experiments on them to learn about Dust, who was denied an opportunity to raise her daughter, and who(contrary to the movie) does not reveal her parentage to her daughter until she is already aware of it.

Lord Asriel and his past lover Mrs. Coulter, acting together, vanquish Metatron, through a combination of a massive battle between Heaven and those rebelling against it, deception, and brute force applied to the point of self-sacrifice.

Lyra and her male companion (a boy named Will from our world, with a more pure heart) restore the structure of the many worlded universe, empty purgatory for the price of a loss of connection to their own souls, and restore Dust to its rightful place in the universe.

In short then, rather than killing god, our protagonists merely depose an illegitimate usurper and restore a true god, something of a trinitarian Holy Spirit, to its rightful place. A greater universal spirituality overcomes baser physical deities.

Pullman's Church

This isn't to say that the church of Lyra's world isn't condemned for its intellectual rigidity, its hypocrisy, its cruelty, its unearned righteousness, and its contempt for human pleasure and happiness. The Magisterium of Lyra's world shares all of those features, and it is implied that churches in other worlds are similar, and that some of this is Metatron and the Authority's doing. On the other hand, in Lyra's world, the Magisterium is the patron of science where that discipline is called "Experimental Theology" rather than a direct adversary of science.

But, the Magisterium is not monolithic. It is fraught with infighting. The only god who is killed in a homicidal fashion is killed by one of its own. The Magisterium is portrayed as almost, but not quite yet, having returned to the barbarity of the Spanish Inquisition. Its intellectual rigidity, while more vigorously enforced, is almost more a parody of the quasi-religious ideological battles that play out within the modern scientific establishment than those seen in the real world church. Its cruelty can be attributed in significant part to the rise cruel human beings to positions of power in parts of its Pope-less bureaucracy whose powers are amplified by their willingness to be ruthless. Rather than being strictly anti-Catholic, Pullman's series almost implies that having a single individual as a Pope at the helm helped the church retain a humanity that it lost when the papacy was abolished.

The Magisterium does suppress free inquiry, but comes across looking rather tame compared to many contemporary Islamic regimes or the kind of Dominionist visions of good government expressed by people like Republican Presidential candidate Governor Huckabee.

Unlike the Anglican Church that more than any other is a model for the Magisterium, it does not see its theology watered down as a consequence of becoming an established church.

Is Pullman A Threat To The Church?

The real theat to the modern Christian church in Europe is not rebellion, but apathy, or as our current Pope has described the phenomena, secularism. Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy is not a secularist screed. His world is one in which god's reality is undeniable, and god's power is real. If anything, the controversy over these books may help the church by creating a perception of threat and giving people a strawman to fight against.

The tradition of men arguing with god over perceived injustice is ancient and scripturally orthodox. Pullman's trilogy is more in the tradition of the biblical story of Jacob, at its climax even featuring humans wrestling with an angel, than it is an argument for atheism.

Perhaps the biggest threat to the church of all from the trilogy is Pullman's audacity. Surely, anyone who can write novels about killing god must be comfortable that there are no gods who would take offense at them. Pullman adopts the modern truism that morality is in the eye of the beholder. Pullman reduces Christian theology to the level of fairy tale and then twists it, much like Gregory Maguire does to the Wizard of Oz series in Wicked. Pullman's books are almost incomprehensible from a sincerely Christian worldview, and if you read it and get it, you may have sown the seeds of doubt by acknowledging that your root assumptions about the world aren't the only ones possible. 

But, few people in the modern world who read well enough to finish the books are innocent enough not to have had those assumptions challenged already. The scripture themselves already contain more than enough seeds of doubt when juxtaposed against the modern world, to put the church at risk of irrelevance.

The Case For Smart Bombs

In a nutshell, this commentator argues that more accurate bombs mean that fewer are needed.

JDAM (GPS satellite guided bombs) . . . entered service in time for the 1999 Kosovo campaign, and have been so successful, that their use has actually sharply reduced the number of bombs dropped, and the number of sorties required by bombers. . . . After the invasion of Iraq, the U.S. Air Force ordered a sharp increase in JDAM production, aiming for 5,000 JDAM a month. They ended up needing far less. In 2005, about 30,000 JDAM were ordered. That fell to 11,605 in 2006 and 10,661 in 2007. This year, only 5,000 are being ordered. Nearly all those ordered in the past few years are being put into the war reserve. Only a few thousand a year are actually being used, and this includes those expended during training. . . .

While guided bombs first appeared towards the end of World War II, they did not really become a factor until highly accurate laser guided bombs were developed in the 1960s. A decade later, TV guided bombs came into service. But these guided bombs were expensive, costing over $100,000 per bomb. Even as late as the 1991 Gulf war, only 16 percent of the 250,000 bombs dropped were guided. But analysis of the battlefield later revealed that the guided bombs had done 75 percent of the actual damage. But the guided bombs were still too expensive, and lasers were blocked by many weather conditions (rain, mist, sand storms). . . . The current price [of JDAMs] is still under $30,000 each.

[I]n the 1999 Kosovo campaign . . . 98 percent of the 652 JDAMs used, hit their targets. In 2001, JDAM proved the ideal weapon for supporting the few hundred Special Forces and CIA personnel the U.S. had on the ground in Afghanistan. The JDAM was more accurate, and effective, than anticipated. By January, 2002, the U.S. had dropped about half their inventory, of 10,000 JDAMs, in Afghanistan.

In 2003, 6,500 JDAM were used in the three week 2003 Iraq invasion. Since 1999, American aircraft have used less than 25,000. . . . The latest versions are even more accurate, putting half the bombs within ten meters of the aiming point. . . . With the ability to put a weapon within a meter of the aiming point (using laser guidance) or 5-10 meters (using GPS), smaller is now better, especially in urban areas where there are a lot of civilians about. But even without civilians around, smaller, more precise bombs and missiles are preferred, as that allows friendly troops to get closer to the target, and rush in right after the explosion, to finish the job. Troops have changed the way they fight because of this. There is more movement in urban warfare because of all this precision firepower, and fewer friendly fire casualties from bombs and artillery.

The article goes on to note the increasing use in the military of several kinds of small guided weapons by the Army, with tens of pounds of explosives. The author attributes this technology to a change in tactics by forces facing American troops:

In Afghanistan and Iraq, the enemy largely gave up trying to fight American troops head on. Ambush, roadside bombs and boobytraps became the preferred methods of attacking U.S. troops.

The impact of smart bombs on the number of aircraft required by the U.S. military isn't quantified, although the figures provided from the Gulf War suggest that the number of bombs that need to be dropped has fallen by about 94%. This number surely isn't a number that the Air Force is eager to publicize, nor is the fact that drones and various guided weapontry used by Army troops can now often substitute for aircraft in a way not previously possible. Also, smart bombs allow aircrft dropping them to be less sophisticated, because they don't have to get as close to their targets, which may have anti-aircraft weapons, and smaller, because the bombs that are being dropped can be smaller and fewer need to be carried per sortie. Likewise, the historical fact that the U.S. has had unquestioned air superiority for most of its recent combat experence, argues that there may be considerable room for less sophisticated bombers.

Clearly, the Air Force ought to be able to do more with less, which means that military procurement should assume a major drop in Air Force spending (or at least the number of aircrft in the Air Force fleet).

Towards A Healthier Economy

Politicians of all stripes see a recession coming and are hot to devise a stimulus package to fend it off or mitigate its effects. One proposal with bipartisan support is the bread and circuses approach of simply sending everyone in America a check for a few hundred dollars to boost consumer spending. Other common proposals include temporary tax cuts (greater latitude for businesses to treat capital expenditures as an expense is particularly popular), increased spending on public works, and having the federal reserve reduce interest rates.

There are many more things we could do, however. Here are a few, in no particular order:

(1) Loosen immigration rules for skilled immigrants. Brain drain is good for the American economy. A majority of the physicians in parts of upstate New York are immigrants. Skilled immigration doesn't steal jobs, it creates jobs. There is no reason that we should be turning away college educated or highly skilled immigrants at a time when our economy needs a boost.

(2) Increase staffing in the civil courts. The non-criminal part of the court system works more slowly than it could, because of a shortage of judges, and enforces judgments less swiftly than it could, because of a scarce supply of law enforcement officers charged with enforcing civil judgments. The delays increase the cost of credit and produce uncertainties that are a drag on the economy. One could double the staffing of the courts for a tiny cost in the overall budget picture while dramatically improving the speed at which civil cases move though the legal system and the supervision they receive from judges which can reduce the costs of litigation by forcing litigants to behave reasonably. The costs of these delays are hidden, but almost certainly are far in excess of the public costs involved in hiring more people in the judicial system. If our system can resolve serious felony cases in months, surely it should be able to handle large contract disputes and personal injury cases with similar speed.

(3) Disallow most non-competition agreements. Non-competition agreements are bad for the growth of the high tech economy because they discourage the interchange of ideas that on average is good for everyone.

(4) End the priority for tax debts in bankruptcy. The priority afforded to tax debts in bankruptcy is one of the main reasons that attempts to reorganize small businesses in bankruptcy courts fail. These debts are often the straw that breaks the camel's back and forces an end to an otherwise viable business. Why should the IRS have greater priority in bankruptcy court than, for example, trade creditors? I seriously doubt that small business bankruptcies are an important source of federal revenue, and the costs of this priority in terms of lost future revenue are real.

(5) Temporarily reduce public college tuition. Recessions are characterized by high unemployment. One way to mitigate that is to encourage people on the brink of deciding whether to go to college or enter the workforce to go to college. This eases unemployment in the short term, and increases the skill base of the labor force in the long term.

(6) End the "paperwork upfront" policy in bankruptcy. Until the 2005 reform of the bankruptcy laws, debtors could file their petitions first (preserving assets for the bankruptcy estate) and file paperwork later. Now, debtors must file paperwork and obtain credit counseling before filing for bankruptcy, even if these means a windfall to a creditor foreclosing on an asset with equity which could have been available to other creditors or the debtor. Allowing debtors to preserve assets before all the paperwork is done would allow more people to get their fair share out of the bankruptcy process, without changing the substantive changes enacted in 2005 to prevent abuse of the bankruptcy process.

(7) Give shareholders a meaningful vote in board of directors elections. Senior management in companies that are doomed to fail continue business as usual long after this makes economic sense. This wouldn't happen if senior management was more accountable to shareholder interests. The best way to align the two interests would be to give shareholders the right to much more easily nominate candidates for the board who are independent of management, rather than the Soviet ballot that prevails in director elections now.

(8) Create guaranteed jobs. Recessions are marked by period when there are lots of people who are able to work who can't figure out what to do. One of the classic response -- unemployment insurance -- involves a massive dead weight loss to society as hundreds of thousands of people fill out paperwork requesting benefits and thousands of government employees process it. No major municipal government I am aware of has a shortage of work that need to be done. Why not simply create a pool where any able bodies person can show up with little or no paperwork and do a day's work for a day's pay, at minimum wage, doing whatever the government can find for them to do? Unemployment is fundamentally a shortage of entraprenuership. In good economic times, there are few people who can't find work for more than the minimum wage, in bad economic times there are many. When the private sector fails to create jobs, the government could step in and do so. Even if worker productivity is so low that the program doesn't break even, it would probably be cheaper than a handout and involve far less deadweight loss. Also, on the "idle hands" theory, people who are working are less likely to engage in crime, fall into alcoholism, or become discouraged about their ability to work, if they have work made available to them.

(9) Create affordable alternatives to lenders of last resort. Small, short term lending involves a much lower default risk than most people assume that it does. A huge payday loan industry has arisen as a result. A non-profit program that offered similar loans at rates that reflect the real risk involved could put loan sharks out of business and allow people on the edge to use their money to get back on their feet rather than to pay off predatory lenders. It might have to be subsidized, but the subsidy would be modest, and the number of people who don't lose their jobs or their cars or don't feed their children well as a result, would make the cost well worthwhile.

(10) Shorten statutes of limitations for debt collection actions. Most states allow debt collectors (mostly representing big businesses like credit card companies and banks) to collect debts that defaulted six years or more ago, while allowing a much shorter period, often as little as two years, to bring suit for personal injury cases. Why should society protect creditors who sleep on their rights for so long, when they are usually in a much better position to be aware of a default than a personal injury victim who might not be aware of the extent of their injury until long after they are hurt?

(11) Speed processing of paperwork for new businesses. The months that it can take to get permits for a new business can make the difference between success and failure. Devoting more staff to those activities creates good jobs, while ending the hidden costs associated with delays in government services necessary to create new jobs. Often the regulations themselves aren't unreasonable, but the delay in getting through the process is unreasonable.

(12) Increase awareness of existing benefits. Many economists think that increased government spending helps the economy in a recession. But, why create new programs that do so at random, when existing programs that meet important needs exist and are underutilized? Among the programs often underutilized are Medicaid, children's health insurance, and the earned income tax credit. A little extra publicity for programs like these could go a long way without requiring a change in the law.

Colorado's Aerospace Industry in Trouble

Centennial Airport-based Adam Aircraft said it laid off about 300 employees — more than a third of its workforce — as it seeks more funding. . . . Adam's layoffs come after Aviation Technology Group, also based at Centennial Airport, in December suspended work on its Javelin jet and let go almost all of its employees as it seeks more funding.

"There's a lot of turbulence in the (very light jet) market right now," said Tom Cappalletti, president of Broomfield- based Professional Jet Aviation Consultants. "What you're seeing is a shakeout in the VLJ market" because large, established aircraft manufacturers, including Cessna and Embraer, are introducing very light jets that compete with those developed by startup companies.

"People like ATG and Adam probably will suffer," Cappalletti said.

From The Denver Post.

Earlier this month, Andrew Romanoff, Speaker of the Colorado House of Representatives, specifically hyped the growing industry that these companies represent in his opening day remarks stating: "we should support homegrown industries like aerospace, bioscience and renewable energy – industries in which Colorado is already gaining a competitive edge."

The Colorado General Assembly has also recently passed tax incentives for this industry.

Their collapse at the moment, therefore, while not huge in terms of absolute numbers of lost jobs, is a huge blow to the state's perception of its own economy. The news coincides with rising unemployment in Colorado, even though the absolute unemployment rate of 4.5% is not catastrophically bad.

Buffalo v Banks

Buffalo, New York is taking one of the best approaches that a municipality can to mitigate the impact of the current wave of foreclosures. It is strictly enforcing code requirements to keep properties in good repair against foreclosing banks.

The Victim-Victimizer Duality

In a surprisingly large number of cases, the profile of people most likely to commit crimes and the profile of people most likely to be victims of crimes, is similar.

Young, underclass black men who were members of gangs committed a disproportionate share of the murders that took place at the peak of the drug war a couple of decades ago, and were also the typical victims of those murders. Less narrowly, the vast majority of murders are intraracial.

Mentally ill prisoners are both disproportionately likely to break prison rules by fighting and to be victims of prison assaults.

The severely mentally ill are both disproportionately represented in prison populations, and victimized by others at much higher rates than the general population.

The homeless are both much more likely to end up in jail, and much more likely to be victims of crimes.

A school yard bully is likely to have a very troubled life himself.

The poor are both more likely to be property crime victims and more likely to commit property crimes.

Substance abuse is intimately connected with crime. An overwhelming majority of people convicted of serious crimes (even non-drug crimes) have substance abuse problems (about a quarter of property crimes are committed for the purpose of getting money for drugs), and in many cases, the harm these individuals do to others is almost incidental to the self destruction they inflict upon themselves as a result of their addictions.

A large percentage of mass murderers end up killing themselves.

Cause and effect run both ways. Childhood abuse victims are particularly likely to abuse others or seek out lives of prostitution when they become adults. Victimization can make criminals out of victims, just as victimizers can find themselves becoming victims.

Prisons (particularly state prisons) are full of men who are either repeat felony offenders or commit serious, usually violent crime. These men, overwhelmingly, were not successful before their criminal careers commenced. A large percentage were high school dropouts. Only a tiny percentage attended even some college, and an even smaller percentage were college graduates. A highly disproportionate share were unemployed when they committed their crimes. People who are even moderately economically successful are extremely unlikely to commit serious crimes, relative to those who are clearly socio-economic failures. Again, there are mixed cause and effect issues present. Violent and dishonest tendencies themselves make one unfit for most careers. But, it is also true that extreme economic failure pushes people to consider extreme measures to survive.

People prone to commit traffic offenses, like teenaged boys, also tend to be accident victims at disproportionately high rates.

There are exceptions to this notion, of course. White collar criminals are often quite unlike their victims. Domestic violence, on average one sidedly involves male perpetrators and female victims. The elderly tend to be vulnerable to victimization in certain kinds of crimes, but rarely commit crimes themselves.

But, the victim-victimizer duality is common enough to make one reconsider that philosophical underpinning of our criminal justice system. While victims often are to blame for harming others, real justice in their cases may be impossible without recognizing that the perpetrators are themselves victims and finding a way to use that observation to motivate a more compassionate response to an individual who has committed a crime than a recitation of the crime itself would suggest.

Michigan Results

The Republican nomination is a three man race, after today's win for Romney in Michigan, unless Giuliani can overcome a string of dismal performances in Florida, which is unlikely.

With 93% of precincts reporting, the results are as follows:

Romney 39 321543
McCain 30 243972
Huckabee 16 132105
Paul 6 51276
Thompson 4 30445
Giuliani 3 23380
Uncommitted 2 16793

Romney has second place finishes in Iowa and New Hampshire, and a first place in Michigan. McCain has a fourth place finish in Iowa, a first place finish in New Hampshire and a second place finish in Michigan. Huckabee has a first place finish in Iowa, a third place finish in New Hampshire, and a third place finish in Michigan. Huckabee seems weakest, but may seem stronger after South Carolina and Florida.

Thompson's third place finish in Iowa didn't translate into top three finishes in either New Hampshire or Michigan. Likewise, neither Paul nor Giuliani have managed to make it into the top three in any race.

Who knows what to make of the Democratic results, in a race where the major candidates didn't campaign and only one of the three major candidates was on the ballot?

Democrats

Clinton 55 302611
Uncommitted 40 216925
Kucinich 4 20478
Dodd 1 3584
Gravel 0 2223

The large vote for uncommitted does probably improve the Michigan delegation's odds of being seated, as it belies the notion that primary voters simply voted for the only candidate on the ballot.

Still prior analysis and polls in place now make Clinton and Obama each seem well ahead of Edwards, and put everyone else out of contention.

Super Tuesday Predictions

Three weeks from today, is Super Tuesday, the most important day of the Presidential nomination process and the day that Colorado will be holding its caucuses.

Diarist Poblano at Daily Kos has made elaborate predictions with a disclosed factual basis regarding the February 5, 2008 Democratic primary and caucus results. Bottom line:

In Colorado, Clinton will get 36% of the Colorado delegates, Obama 45%, and Edwards 18%.

Only Oklahoma and Tennessee rival Colorado in predicted support for Edwards, and Oklahoma is the only predicted second place finish for Edwards by delegates (other than the Iowa race already completed), with all other states having him as a third place finisher.

In all Feb. 5 races, Clinton will get 48.9% of delegates, Obama 45.6%, and Edwards 5.5%. Once those races are completed, a majority of the total number of delegates should be allocated.

Thus, if events proceed in this fashion, Edwards would need something more 90% of the remaining delegates to win a majority, which would be essentially impossible, given his prior performance. He could stay in, however, in hope of forcing a brokered convention and becoming a compromise candidate.

So far, Obama has won Iowa and Clinton has won New Hampshire.

State by state Poblano's first place finish predictions are as follows:

Clinton: California, New York, New Jersey, Arizona, Connecticut, Arkansas, New Mexico, Delaware, North Dakota

Obama: Illinois, Massachusetts, Georgia, Missouri, Tennessee, Colorado, Alabama, Kansas, Utah, Idaho, Alaska

Clinton-Obama Tie: Minnesota

Poblano also sees the states in the two weeks that follow February 5 as mostly being favorable to Obama. Thus, Poblano foresees a virtual tie between Clinton and Obama on February 20 when the dust settles, with Edwards effectively out of the race with his delegates therefore effectively uncommitted.

The race on the Democratic side is stable enough to give these predictions considerable credit, although I'd hate to try to make any sense of the Republican race on Super Tuesday, as it has been far more fluid.

Doug Denounced

"[A]s the state chairman of Colorado Republicans I must strongly denounce the behavior of State Representative Douglas Bruce. . . . Representative Bruce was absolutely wrong in literally kicking a Rocky Mountain News photographer on the floor of the House. Representative Bruce does owe that photographer and the entire House of Representatives an apology."

- Dick Wadhams (January 15, 2008 entry).

Colorado Registered Voters

Democrats 875,650
Unaffiliated 994,575
Republicans 1,008,541

Democrats need 57% of unaffiliated voters to win statewide.

Total Registered Voters 2,878,766 as of Decemeber 2007.

About 59% of the total population and 77% of the voting aged population is registered to vote in the state (see here and here for sources from which I have extrapolated).

Via Colorado Confidential (citing Colorado Public Radio which in turn relies upon the Colorado Secretary of State).

Equity Builder Loans

How do you encourage home ownership without repeating the mistakes of the current subprime mortgage market bust?

One fundamental flaw that caused the subprime mortgage collapse was over-optimistic loan underwriting. In other words, lenders agreed to loan money to people on terms that it was unrealistic to believe that they would be able to pay in the long term. Some of the related common sins (short of actually dishonest ones like appraisal fraud and kickbacks) were:

* Low down payment loans. Low down payments increase the risk to the lender and reduce the incentive of the borrower to find a way out of default such as selling the home or refinancing. They also show that the borrower has a poor history of saving.

* Pre-payment penalties. These prevent borrowers from getting a better deal when they learn that they can't handle their current deal, or have proven their better than anticipated credit by making regular payments.

* Adjustable interest rates. These take a payment that was affordable and increase that payment if interest rates go up after a certain time period (or often even if they don't in "teaser rate" loans).

* Negative equity, interest only, and very long amortization period loans. These types of loans all prevent equity building. A negative equity loan increases your debt during a teaser period, which is only offset in booming real estate markets at risk of subsequent bubble collapses. An interest only loan creates equity only from rising housing prices. A very long amortization period loan (e.g. 40 and 50 year loans) reduce principal payments but not quite to zero.

* Weak verification of earnings. Lenders assumed that current incomes would be there forever, increase and remain uninterrupted, an unreasonable assumption for working class and middle class workers in a rough economic moment.

* High interest rates and private mortgage insurance payments. Borrowers most at risk of not being able to make their payments are given the msot difficult to make payments of all through high interest rates and the requirement that they purchase private mortgage insurance for the benefit of the lender at their expense.

Suppose that you aren't all about short term profits for a mortgage company, and instead want to increase home ownership rates, decrease default rates, and encourage wealth accumulation. How would you design loan terms then? In other words, would kind of loan would you write for you financially struggling nephew or grandchild? I think you might consider something like what I will call an "equity builder loan." These would have the following terms:

* Fixed interest rates similar to those available for conventional mortgage loans.

* No private mortgage insurance requirement.

* No pre-payment penalties. Indeed, borrowers would be receive communications encouraging them to refinance at the actually transaction costs to the lender if interest rates fell, from the same lender.

* Higher up front "equity account" payments. Borrowers would be required to pay bigger payments than a 30 year amortization (perhaps the amount due under a 15 year amortization) until the down payment plus principal payments were equal to 20% of the purchase price of the property, typically about three and a half years with a 5% down payment or about two years with a 10% down payment. The excess over principal and interest, taxes and insurance would be credited to an equity account which would have the same effect on interest amortization under the loan as additional principal payments in a conventional loan. After the initial period, the excess payment would be optional but would not be changed without an affirmative request to lower it.

The initial up front payments, on the order of $400-$500 a month in a purchase of a $150,000 house for the first few years, would be comparable to the premium over a conventional loan paid for private mortgage insurance and the higher interest rates typical in a subprime loan. But, unlike a subprime loan, the additional payments would benefit the borrower, and not the lender, if payments were made as agreed.

* Low but not zero down payments. Down payments lower than those for other kinds of loans, but never zero (probably a minimum of 5% down with sufficiently good credit) would be allowed, because high early payments on the loan would build equity in the residence to more conventional levels in the first few years when borrower income and circumstances are most predictable. The minimum down payment would show at least some demonstrated ability to accumulate cash and get a few paychecks ahead.

* Stricter underwriting. Lender ability to pay would be based on the initial higher payment, rather than the long term minimum payment, using criteria apart from downpayment similar to those applied to a conventional 30 year fixed rate loan with that monthly payment. Thus, equity builder loan borrowers would have to finance a lower priced home relative to their income than a conventional borrower.

* Equity account funded grace periods. A missed payment would trigger mandatory (free of charge) credit counseling, but would not result in a default authorizing a foreclosure or a credit rating hit until the accumulated interest, late fees and other non-principal amounts owed exceeded the "equity account" on the loan. This would forestall debtor paralysis while preventing a borrower with a good payment history who is facing a slight hiccup from seeing their situation snow ball out of control.

* Low late fees (e.g. $10, rather than 5% of a monthly payment) and no default interest rates. The goal would not to make a bad situation snowball into something worse, making it possible to recover from a missed payment.

* A sell back option. Financially stressed borrowers would have a right to sell their homes to the lender for 90% of appraised value as determined by an appraiser selected by the lender, at borrower expense plus a modest processing fee (perhaps $100-$200), even in the absence of a default and in any case at any time prior to a foreclosure sale. Exercise of the option itself would not be reported as a default on credit reports. The lender would apply the proceeds dollar for dollar against the amount owed on the loan. Any surplus would be promptly paid to the borrower. Any deficiency would automatically be financed by the lender on terms comparable to those available from a credit card company for a borrower in good standing (e.g. 1.5% interest per month and a minimum payment of 4% of the outstanding balance). This would provide a framework to allow the borrower and the lender to extricate themselves from loans about to go bad with minimal time and dead weight transaction cost losses. Debtors who had just lost jobs, for example, might promptly exercise this option so they could downsize, without losing time and money to hiring real estate agents or trying to refinance the loan.

* Small loans. The loans might be made available for properties selling for not more than 150% or 200% of the median or average single family house value in the area and no cash back would be allowed. This would limit the room for losses from appraisal frauds and keep the program focused on the target social objective.

The lender would be a government agency, non-profit or mutual company. It would partner with an unsubsidized non-profit or for profit building company to develop affordable housing which would be financed with equity builder loans.

This might very well not be profitable. But, it would be at least very close to a break even operation and I suspect that the subsidy could be quite modest, relative to the benefit created. I would expect default rates that while probably no better than conventional loans, would be much better than those on subprime loans entered into by comparably credit worthy people.

The Denver Radio Market

The Denver area supports a large number of radio stations, with a number of different formats, mostly owned by a small number of big companies.

The top 30 commercial radio stations and the top 3 public radio stations, combined, have a listener share of about 80% of radio listeners (the commercial radio numbers are from the March 2, 2007 Denver Business Journal, the public radio numbers are interpolations from some separate but comparable sources found on the internet). No individual radio station has more than a 6.0% share of listeners.

Radio that caputures more than two-thirds of Denver's radio listeners (68.6%+) comes from the 23 stations owned by five companies: Lincoln National Corp. (KYGO 98.5, KQKS 107.5, KJCD 104.3, KCKK, KKFN), Entrercom Communications Corp. (KOSI 101.1, KALC 105.9, KQMT 99.5, KEZW 1430), Clear Channel Communications (KOA 850, KBCO 97.3, KBPI 106.7, KRFX 103.5, KHOW 630, KTCL 93.3, KPTT 95.7, KKZN 760), Entravision Communications (KXPX 96.5, KJMN 92.1, KMXA), and CBS Radio (KXKL 105.1, KIMN 100.3, KWLI 92.5).

Three other companies own another eight Denver area radio station: NRC Broadcasting (KJAC 105.5 and KCUV), Salem Communications (KNUS 710, KRKS (AM and FM), and KBJD) and The Denver Radio Co. (KTNI, KSYY 107.1). At least one station, KBNO 1260 is owned as a sole proprietorship and, of course, several public radio stations (KCFR, KCFN and KVOD among them) are owned by non-profit entities, as are many Christian radio stations.

A meeting of representatives from each of the companies with any meaningful market share in the Denver radio market could be held comfortably in any decent sized conference room. Michael's Iron Law of Oligarchy is alive and well, as is the observation that markets where oligopolies prevail tend to compete based upon product offerings rather than price.

One suspects that the economies of scale associated with consolidated advertising sales departments and in obtaining financial capital to buy the rights to broadcast on particular channels are the key factors in industry consolidation. The equipment and day to day operating expenses for a radio station are very modest compared to the cost of the station itself and advertising related sales expenses. Royalties themselves generally track listenership which in turn generally tracks per minute advertising revenues, so royalties are only a factor for stations that can't sell ads, not a major determinant of the economics of consolidation.

Lots of viable radio stations don't necessarily translate, however, into an immense variety of programming options.

There is not a single radio station (not even a public radio station) with a predominantly news or talk format on the FM dial in the Denver radio market. This isn't due to an inability to attract listeners. More than 13% of combined AM/FM listener based market share goes to talk/new/sports formats on AM radio, even before one adds in listeners to public radio. KOA 850 AM, the king of the talk/new/sports radio market in Denver is the fourth most listened to radio station in the market, and several others have listener bases comparable to FM stations.

Country music has one FM dial giant (KYGO), the most popular radio station in the region, only also ran on the FM dial (KWLI 92.5), and a number of AM radio stations, none of which are dominant.

Spanish language radio, once exiled to the AM airwaves, currently has three reasonable successful FM stations, in addition to several of the more successful (in terms of listeners) AM stations.

Public radio stations offer jazz that isn't elevator music, classical music and other kinds of music that commercial stations basically aren't offering. There is also one commercial jazz station that offers the smaltzier stuff. They don't show up in my commercial radio figures, but there are also a number of reasonably successful Christian radio stations in the area, on both FM and AM bands, which, like the public radio stations, aren't entirely beholden to advertising sales for their ongoing operations.

At least fourteen stations are playing some subset of the larger rock genre. The second most popular station in the region (KQKS 107.5) has a monopoly on Hip Hop and R&B genre. KTCL 93.3 shares the "alternative rock" market with a small college radio station on the AM dial out of Boulder. KBCO's "world class rock" format, KBPI's metal leaning rock format, and KALC top 40 format now called "Modern adult contemporary" are the only other rock stations with anything recently released with any edge to them. There are at least nine stations that play some species of oldies or easy listening or soft rock with a formidable 23.4%+ market share as measured by number of listeners. The market rewards mushy moderate consumer tastes in a way that politics does not.

Several efforts to bring new genres including techno and reggatone into the Denver radio market have been attempted in the last decade, and failed dismally, apparently for lack of commercial support. The jury is still out on whether a couple of new entrants: liberal talk radio and kid oriented rock on Radio Disney, both supported by national syndications, will survive.

Satellite radio is thriving now, in large part, because even though it is far more consolidated, with only two provider companies and a 100% provider monopoly on any given satellite radio due to compatability issues, it offers far more diverse programming and far more channels than broadcast radio. Satellite and internet radio may also be undermining new format commercial broadcast radio by serving programming niches that might support small new broadcast radio stations, if the needs of the niche were met in no other way.

A few of observations:

1. Except when companies refuse to sell advertising for candidates, political speech is an almost indifferent issue in the radio market because commercial FM radio stations have very little meaningful political news coverage, with or without consolidation. By comparison, local TV news, which is pretty bad itself, looks like paradise. Political news apparently does not sell widgets.

2. IMHO, AM is already deeply immersed, for a variety of reasons, into a conservative subculture. Country music, talk/new/sports radio formats, and Christian radio are natural allies with overlapping audiences. There are a few holdouts in the Denver area (Radio Disney, a couple of NPR news stations, an alternative college station, some rebroadcast stations and some Spanish language radio) that are the exceptions to the rule. But, the migration of Spanish language radio to FM in Denver and the history of AM NPR in Denver (juxtaposed against the overwhelming FM to AM ratio of such stations nationwide) suggest that this state of affairs is temporary and ideosyncratic.

3. While the Catholic church is finally attempting to play catch up in religious radio offerings (Colorado Springs has a Catholic station and Denver has been trying, although I don't know if it has succeeded), the term "Christian radio" is decidely overinclusive. Virtually all Christian radio is of the conservative Evangelical protestant variety. Mainline churches have largely eschewed evangelization via their own radio and TV stations or programming (a few mainline churches rebroadcast their services in order to fill Sunday morning slots on smaller commercial stations or public radio or television without creating mass media specific programming), and the Catholics have done so only recently and are far, far behind the Evangelicals.

Texas Worse Than Ohio

Texas is worse than Ohio when it comes to voting rights.

Intelligence Oversight

Balkin's blog notes the current problems with oversight of intelligence agencies. This has been an open secret for a long time.

The 9-11 commission got it fundmentally wrong when they urged a national intelligence czar. Connecting the dots isn't something that happens at the senior management level. It requires massive sharing of information, so that people who know something share information that they don't realize is important to people who need to know something.

In my view, the key step is to bifurcate the intelligence community, so that the bulk of the intelligence community, the analysts and spy satellite operators and the like, who have less opportunity to engage in egregious conduct and deal with a large volume of material that isn't "life or death secret," from the smaller group of human intelligence operatives who are in a position to misbehave and also have much more sensitive methods and practices information.

The former should operate in a much more open, less secrecy obsessed environment (to the extent possible in the same agency as the diplomats who are their primary customers) and should be permitted to operate with less direct oversight from the political branches. This agency might have 90% of the employees and budget authority (the details are secret, these are just illustrative numbers) and 10% of the oversight effort. The latter can't afford to have such an internally open agency culture, but needs to compensate for that by having far more intense political supervision because their activities are much more susceptible to abuse. One can do some very good big picture intelligence without relying on covert sources whose identities and methods are highly sensitive. Huge CIA failures like its inability to see the impending collapse of the Soviet Union didn't have anything to do with a lack of undercover agents able to describe the contents of senior officials' desk drawers and hard drives.

The smaller, more covert, part of the operation is in a poor position to share intelligence within the agency because methods and practices concerns are so vital. So, this agency ought to have a very flat hierarchy. Regional or country managers should be Presidentially appointed and Senatorially approved officials who report findings directly to the White House office and Congress, with a thin head office handling H.R. and inevitable agency management functions, while mostly insuring the orderly succession of regional agency managers. By and large, the head of this smaller agency should not be in charge of filtering information flow aimed at policy makers, a job better sued to a senior White House office official. It is much harder to dodge responsibility for misconduct and poor results in a very small bureacracy than in a large one. Also, this kind of structure would reduce the likelihood of an inevitable bad apple in one component of the agency tainting another part of the agency.

Opening Arguments

The politicians have spoken.

Speaker of the Colorado House of Representatives Andrew Romanoff (D-Wash Park) offered his agenda for the 2008 legislative session on Wednesday. Denver Democrat and President of the State Senate Peter Groff made an opening day speech in the state senate as well. The leaders of the Republican minorities in each house also spoke and the text of those speeches is available in the respective journals of each house of the Colorado General Assembly for January 9, 2008.

Governor Ritter, a Democrat, offered his State of the State Speech on Thursday. Incidentally, I am pleased by Colorado's tradition of having the legislative branch offer up its agenda for the year before the executive branch does.

The Process

The intense deadlines of the session are set forth here. The session ends May 7, 2008, unless in a signature political tactic of Colorado Democrats, the work is done sooner.

Legislators were required to start the process of drafting three of the five bills they are each allowed to introduce by December 3, 2007, and the first 300 bills (three per legislator) that count against the five bill be member limit must be introduced by Monday. The remaining 200 bills must be introduced in the next three weeks. Every bill that is going to become law (with some narrow exceptions) must clear its house of origination by February 27.

Most bills that die do so in committee in the house of introduction, and that is also the forum in which the most sweeping amendments tend to be introduced and considered.

With some small exceptions, rest of the session will be spent considering bills that passed their house of origination and the state budget. The K-12 funding bill has to be completed by March 14 and bills creating new judgeships are also on the fast track.

Analysis

Now we ask "which bills will survive to become law, and which will fail?"

The agendas of every player in the state legislative process is now on transparent. This comes after months of behind the scenes secrecy and negotiations over proposed bills, with minimal and imperfect information. There are now a flood of proposals that must be digested quickly by players in the process, legislators, staffers, lobbyists and anyone else who wants to influence the legislative debate.

This also means that by the time ordinary citizens are thinking about legislation because the state representatives and state senators are in Denver, it is far too late to propose any ideas not already covered by an introduced bill in the current year.

One has to be extremely nimble to participate in the process during the month and a half between the time the public is made aware of a bill's introduction, and the end of each bill's more formative period in its house of origination. Most of the formal action in take place in a brief committee hearing (normally part of a single day or two) open to the public, and a brief floor debate usually on a single day in which members of the public may not speak.

Legislators have small paid staffs, although some have volunteer staffers and interns to help in addition. Every legislator has to have someone consider every bill that makes it to the floor in their chamber, usually several hundred bills. The short time frame and small number of staffers for legislators means that lobbyists can gain power, not with campaign contributions, but by providing information that there is no time to rebut even if some of it may be false or misleading.

Of course, committee members have more time to consider bills that come before them and the system relies upon them to weed out the worst bills in their area of expertise. Also, not every bill is a matter of great moment. No one's political future is going to rise or fall based upon the action taken with regard to House Bill 08-1048 concerning the size of the state seal, or House Bill 08-1017 to make the Western Painted Turtle the state reptile, and there will be no one lobbying hard against House Bill 08-1095, to ratify the text of the 2007 version of the codified statutes of the state.

Other bills like House Bill 08-1066 designed to extend Colorado's "Make My Day" law to include places of business, as well as homes, while backing off from last year's abortive efforts to include vehicles within its ambit as well that produced massive opposition from law enforcement officers, will no doubt produce mountains of spilled ink on the op-ed pages. So will Senate Bill SB 08-040 providing for online voter registration.

Some of the most intense lobbying in the session will revolve around bills like House Bill 08-1064 to regulate naturopathic doctors, a matter of no importance to the vast majority of people in the state, which is central to the livelihood of a small number of people in the state and to the health of the small percentage of people in the state who obtain services from naturopaths. The bill arose mostly because an incompetent person holding himself out as a naturopath killed someone in Wheat Ridge, Colorado with a treatment not accepted as proper medical treatment by either the alternative health naturopath community, or conventional medical practice.

Other issues, like education and health care reform will have a wide impact.

Teen Pregnancy and Statutory Rape

I was surprised to come across a study (using 1988 data, teen pregnancy has fallen greatly since then and this could have a big impact on the mix of data) which concluded that "Only 8% of all births to 15 to 19-year-olds are to unmarried minors with a partner five or more years older." A significant share of teen pregnancies involving much older men are to married teens. This suggests given recent teen birth rate data that the number of unmarried teen mothers who give birth in relationships with men at least five years old is on the order of 3 per 1000 teenaged women. This would be about two cases per year of teen births arising from statutory rape in a high school the size of the one I attended growing up.

A New Genetic Model For Autism

In 2007, I made a link filled comment about autism at Colorado Confidential summing up the key points about what we know and do not know about the causes of the condition. I was going back over some of those links, and one of the papers I'd cited to earlier had been cited to by a number of other articles later.

Of particular interest was a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (a very reputable scientific body) setting out a hypothesis that would comprehensively explain a large share of all autism cases. In a nutshell, here is what is proposed (except as noted this comes solely from the paper cited as explained by me as an educated layman):

1. People receive genes in pairs, one part of each pair from a father and one from a mother. (This statement defines the term "gene" as I am using it in this post.)

2. There is probably a single primary "autism gene" and this gene is probably not on either the X or the Y chromosome. A single copy of an autism gene in a boy results in a near 100% chance that the boy will have an an autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The exact manifestation rate depends upon the assumptions made and the model used. It is likely is that the chance of developing ASD if the autism gene is present is close to high end of that range, and that there is little or no environmental impact on whether or not a boy develops some form of ASD.

3. Other genes, called "modifier genes" determine, at least to some extent, how severely the autism will manifest in that boy, but do not prevent a boy from having some sort of ASD. Full fledged autism, therefore, as opposed to a more mild ASD, is due both to the presence of an autism gene, and the absence of modifier genes. There isn't enough data in this study to understand the nature of these modifier genes in boys.

4. It is also entirely possible that some modifier genes in boys are environmentally triggered, or the environmental can impact the severity, but the the mere presence or absence of ASD is not greatly impacted by environment. (This is from my own general understanding of this area of genetics.)

5. Sometimes a mutation in a parent's particular sperm or particular egg cell will cause a parent who does not have an autism gene to pass an autism gene onto a child. These mutations in autism gene free parents account for about two-thirds of all autism cases. About 6.7-7.7 in one thousand newborn girls are autism gene carriers with no autism symptoms, about 2.3-3.3 in one thousand newborn girls have an ASD and about 1% of newborn boys have an ASD.

6. These mutations most commonly appear in the sperm of older fathers, with the risk rising greatly by paternal age 40, when they are 5.75 times as likely as for fathers under age 30. Advancing maternal age is not linked to ASD after adjusting for paternal age. Advancing paternal age was also associated with some of the male-female sex ratio in autism. The sex ratio in the offspring with autism of fathers younger than 40 years was noticeably higher than the sex ratio of the offspring with autism of fathers older than 40 years. (This statement integrates data from a separate source.)

7. About 6.6 per 1,000 children whose parents both lack the autism gene (i.e. two thirds of children who either have autism or are carriers for the gene) receive one as a result of a mutation on a gender neutral basis, rather than inheriting it from a parent who has the gene.

8. The number of autism gene mutations rate per 1000 births to fathers in the appropriate age group is about 2.9 for fathers 15-29, about 5.7 per father aged 30-39and about 25.8 for fathers 40+.

These numbers from the the Israeli Israeli data in the "separate study" cited above (including a few details from outside the abstract available here), with some adjustments. I attributed part of each age group's to genes directly inherited from a parent by reducing the autism rate for each age group by the one-third of the total population autism rate. This provides a mutation rate for fathers 30-39 that is double that of fathers aged 15-29, and a mutation rate for fathers age 40+ that is roughly nine times that of fathers aged 15-29. Then, I fitted this data to the American autism incidence rate which is about 25% higher than in the Israeli study. In doing so, I used data from the National Vital Statistics Reports for 1980-2004 and census bureau population figures that shows that currently about 50% of newborns have fathers 15-29, about 40% have fathers 30-39, and about 10% have fathers age 40+.

9. My calculations above in connection with other information in this post, suggest that about a third of autism cases are due to non-age related mutations of in sperm or egg cells of parents who don't have an autism gene, about a third of autism cases are due to age regulated mutations in sperm cells of fathers aged 30 or more who don't have an autism gene, and about a third of autism cases are a result of inheriting an autism gene from a parent, usually a carrier mother or a mild ASD symptom parent of either sex.

10. My calculations also suggest that age based autism gene mutations are becoming more common due to the aging demography of fatherhood. In 1980, this model would suggest that 39% of mutatation based autism was attributable to parental age, in 1990, it had risen to 47%, in 2000 to 52%, and based upon the latest data available (2004 fatherhood rates and 2006 population figures), about 54% now. Put another way, older fatherhood can account for an approximately 33% increase in overall autism incidence rates since 1980 to the present, even disregarding entirely autism caused by girls who become carriers for autism because of a mutation in a parent's gene line and then have autistic children as a result. This is nothing near the epidemic increases in autism incidence that have been reported, but autism was only added to the standard diagnositic pyschiatric manual in 1980, and Asperger's syndrome was only separately added in 1994, so there are serious measurement and diagnosis issues associated with surging autism levels (which isn't to say that real prevalance isn't changing, only that we can't be sure from the data that we have now.)

11. It is possible that autism causing mutations in the sperm of older men reflect vulnerability to a sperm mutation only in certain situations, and that the mutation itself will not happen very frequently, in the absence of some environmental exposure experienced by the father that has the mutation. (This statement is based upon my own general understanding of and reading about how genetics and the environment interact.)

12. Girls can also have an autism gene. But, there is probably a "modifier gene" or "modifier genes" that prevent autism from arising at all in about 70% of girls. Thus, in girls, autism arises from both the presence of an autism gene and the absence of a modifier gene or genes.

13. The main modifier gene that protects girls from autism is probably on the X chromosome, and one probably needs to have two copies of this X based modifier gene to prevent autism from arising at all. About 70% of females (some studies would put the number closer to 77% which in turn would impact the other numbers) have two anti-autism modifier genes. About 84% of men, and 13.5% of women have a single anti-autism modifier gene. About 2.5% of women and 16% of men have no anti-autism modifier genes. (I have created in this paragraph the simplest model of a modifier gene that would fit the modifier gene model and data they described in the paper which was a matter that they did not explore. More complex mechanisms with similar effects are possible alternatives.)

14. We don't know whether or not the modifier genes that prevent autism when present in pairs in girls have any impact on the severity of an ASD in either boys or girls.

15. It wouldn't be surprising if the presence of a single anti-autism modifier gene was quite important in determining how severely an ASD would manifest (e.g. producing Asperger's syndrome rather that full fledged autism.) If true, one would expect only 12-16% of both boys and girls with an ASD to have pure autism cases, and would expect sibling studies and family studies to show patterns of heritability for severe v. less severe versions ASD in families with multiple cases. In fact, the percentage of ASD individuals with pure autism is on the order of 16%-25%, consistent with this theory, and the sibling and family studies do show the sibling and inheritance effects in autism severity when multiple people in a family have an ASD. (This theory is my own, although obvious from the suggestion of the paper.)

16. The anti-autism gene that prevent autism from manifesting in many women is probably not the only modifier gene relevant to ASD severity in either boys or girls.

17. About one-third of all autism cases involve a parent who has the autism gene and passes the gene they have onto a child. Usually, this parent is a mother with no autism symptoms, but more rarely, they could also involve a parent with a ASD condition, usually one that is mild or even subclinical (i.e. autism like symptoms too subtle to diagnose as even a mild ASD spectrum condition). In the usual case, where the mother has one copy of the autism gene, and the father has none, about half of the boys born to the mother (regardless of the father of the particular child) will have an ASD, and on average, about 15% of the girls born to parents with this genetic profile will have an ASD.

Analysis

While this hypothesis is based only upon a medium sized study (a few thousand children with autism in family relationship), its relatively simply hypothesis is a compelling and plausible explanation consistent with inheritance patterns that are well established in many vaguely similar genetic conditions. We won't have proof positive until a particular gene is found in almost everyone with autism, but this study points a clear finger at what we should be looking for and explains neatly how it can persist despite the fact that it impacts the future reproductive abilities of those who have the gene and manifest its effects.

The first place to look for a cause of rising autism incidence is in paternal age trends. A rise in the percentage of fathers over age 40 would strongly point towards that as an important cause of rising ASD incidence. Moreover, this would happen in two ways. First, older fathers would be having more sons born with ASD than younger fathers. Second, older fathers would be having both more daughters born with ASD than younger fathers, but also more daughters carrying the ASD gene have have sons of their own who are much more likely to have ASD. Modeling the projected incidence rise based upon increasing numbers of older fathers would be quite a precise and easy exercise, that would make it quite easy to determine the magnitude of ASD incident due instead to either changes in diagnostic standards or changing environmental exposures, or both.

Second, if there is an environmental impact on ASD prevalence, exposures to parents and not to children is the place to look. There are multiple known environmental mutagens. If older fathers have had increased exposure to these mutagens, that would be a very plausible culprit.

Jury Out On Organic Health Benefits

According to Ecologist online, there is precisely one scientific study, as of September 2007, that shows "a direct positive health impact from eating organic food." The benefit is in a fairly narrow circumstance and the health harm fairly modest.

The research showed that infants fed organic dairy products, and whose mothers had also eaten organic dairy during pregnancy, had a 36 per cent lower incidence of eczema than those who consumed conventional dairy products.

Of course, the best health choice for an infant is not to use any dairy products other than breast milk at all, a proposition for which there is very strong evidence. Also, pregnant women are a natural place to look for health benefits, as the hypersensitivity of pregnant women to environmental factors is well established.

The study, as it is narrow, however, does not determine more broadly if there are health risks, as well as benefits, to organic food. Recent cases of food poisoning from organic spinach make clear that organic doesn't mean risk free. Fertilizers are used to encourage healthy growth in plants and pesticides are meant to prevent insects from harming plants. Insect infected plants (as a result of not using pesticides) could also pose health risks, and the fact that something is "natural" doesn't mean that it is safe. Nature is full of poisonous plants and pathogens every bit as bad as those we devise ourselves. In the same vein, "herbal" does not mean safe, it means "not proven to be safe and effective."

This doesn't mean that there aren't health benefits from eating organic, and there isn't any evidence of which I am aware that eating organic is on average less healthy than eating conventional food. There is suggestive evidence that shows that there are real differences, at a statistical level anyway, between organic and non-organic food that one can plausibly imagine might have health benefits. But, the same study makes clear that the evidence that health benefits actually result from these differences is inconclusive. Certainly, the evidence of health benefits is surprisingly slim to form a basis for what is a several decades old major agricultural industry whose marketing has been based to a great extent upon the personal health benefits of eating organic food.

On the other hand, in part, the lack of proof arises from the difficulty in proving the health benefits of something like eating organic foods and the lack of an obvious sponsor for such an expensive study. No one small organic farmer can afford that, and even associations of organic farmers tend to be small and cash strapped. Any study attempting to prove that there are health benefits from eating organic food also runs up against the usual confounding difficulties involved in any study of large populations of human subjects.

Organic dairy product use, for example, normally isn't an independent variable from other plausible lifestyle issues with important health impacts. For example, it is safe to guess that people who make an effort to buy organic produce, on average, eat more fruits and vegetables than those who do not. Likewise, in the American context, at least, an "organic lifestyle" is also correlated with affluence, access to health care, and individuals who pay attention to their own personal health and exercise regimes. In our current economy it takes more time and money to buy organic, involuntarily excluding the poor and those with little leisure time. It is, of course, uncontroversial that eating more fruits and vegetables, getting more exercise, and being able to access health care when appropriate, and for that matter, on average, affluence (which, for example, makes it less likely that you will live near a toxic chemical emitting industrial facility or in a home with lead pipes), is good for your health. Even if organic foods were actually, on average, slightly worse for you from a health perspective than conventional foods, we would expect people who follow the American version of the "organic lifestyle" to be healthier.

There are proven benefits of organic farming that do not involve personal health. Most importantly, organic farming is far less reliant upon petroleum based fertilizers, reducing the oil dependency of our economy. As oil prices rise, organic food should actually become cheaper than conventional food (of course, a century ago, almost all food was organic). Likewise, there is evidence that pesticides and fertilizers are harmful to the natural environment, and may pose health risks to farmers. But, the main solidly fact based reasons to buy organic are altruistic and environmental in nature, not personal health based.

Vaccines Do Not Cause Autism

The evidence that vaccines do not cause autism is overwhelming. Also, measles is no joke. It is not a merely uncomfortable childhood experience. In 2002, there were 600,000 children who died from the disease.

The death rate is far lower in the developed world than the third world due to widespread vaccination (a 96% vaccination rate for kindergarteners in the United States) which prevents the disease from spreading in isolated breakouts usually from contact with non-U.S. persons from places that have lower vaccination rates. Of course, even in the majority of developed world cases where measles infections do not kill, the infection is nothing anyone would wish on a child. It is not a major killer in the United States (on average about ten deaths per year distributed unevenly in connection with epidemic outbreaks), but it is almost completely avoidable with a safe and effective shot.

Independent research has found no link between the childhood MMR vaccination and either autism or Crohn’s disease (a chronic inflammatory bowel disease). This should encourage parents to follow the advice of their family doctor and have their children immunised with the triple dose vaccine.

Measles, mumps and rubella can be serious diseases with potentially fatal consequences. Using single dose vaccines would leave children exposed to the risk of infection for longer periods.

A colossal amount of work has been done by GPs and their primary health care teams to convince parents of the value of vaccination. MMR is an extremely safe vaccine and has been used worldwide for nearly 30 years. Over 500 million doses have been used in over 90 countries. . . By protecting their own children, parents are also protecting other people’s children from the serious health risks associated with the illnesses of measles, mumps and rubella.

Vaccination levels for MMR fell following adverse publicity in 1998 after the publication of a paper suggesting an association with the MMR vaccine and autism and inflammatory bowel disease. Dr Andrew Wakefield suggested that if there was a link between MMR and these conditions, the risk might be avoided by giving three separate doses one year apart.

No independent studies, however, have been able to find any evidence of a link between the MMR vaccine and autism or bowel disease.

From the British Medical Association.

Switchgrass

Switchgrass is apparently better for ethanol than corn.

New Hampshire Redux

The New Hampshire results are in, Clinton a poll defying first, Obama second, Edwards a distant third, on the Democratic side. On the GOP side, McCain, then Romney, then Huckabee, then Giuliani who was just a nose ahead of Ron Paul.

My take: Put the Edwards campaign on a death watch. If Edwards isn't in first place in South Carolina, I don't see how he can win the nomination, and right now he is in a distant third place in the polls there. Also, the weak Edwards campaign reduces the odds that there will be a brokered convention this year. If Edwards hopes look bleak on February 5, voters will chose Clinton or Obama instead. Richardson and the rest of Democratic field are also now clearly out of contention for anything but the VP slot.

Similarly, Giuliani's campaign is on very thin ice. He performed dismally in both Iowa and New Hampshire. I suspect that positive poll results in the next few states will dissolve in the face of this poor performance. Everyone else in the GOP nomination race is done except for the concession speeches.

There are just two Democrats and three Republicans left with anything more than a long shot at become the next President of the United States. Clinton's win in New Hampshire evens the odds between Clinton and Obama. McCain, Romney and Huckabee have roughly evenly matched strengths and weaknesses creating another close race.

Forced to guess today, I'd favor Obama and Romney slightly as most likely to win their respective nominations. Obama is likely to pick up more of the Edwards vote. Romney balances the economic conservative and Christian conservative wings of the Republican party. But, those are mere guesses. Also, as it stands, either Democrat is likely to defeat any of the Republican nominees. Obama is probably the most likely person to be the next President of the United States, but the race among the top five candidates in the race is far from over.

Taxpayer Advocate Legislative Recommendations

The National Taxpayer Advocate, a ombudsman for taxpayers dealing with the IRS, makes legislative recommendations each year.

First, one from prior years that was adopted when I wasn't looking. The law has been changed (I don't have the effective date) to allow married couples who co-own businesses to use Schedule C or F (normally used for non-farm sole proprietorships and farm sole proprietorships respectively), and allocate self-employment income between them.

Now, onto this year's thoughtful recommendations:

* De minimus Apology payments:

[T]he National Taxpayer Advocate recommends that Congress enact a Taxpayer Bill of Rights setting forth the fundamental rights and obligations of U.S. taxpayers. Congress should require the Secretary to publish these fundamental rights and obligations in a document that also links specific statutory protections to the Taxpayer Bill of Rights. The National Taxpayer Advocate also recommends that Congress grant the National Taxpayer Advocate the discretionary, nondelegable authority to compensate taxpayers where the action or inaction of the IRS has caused excessive expense or undue burden to the taxpayer, and the taxpayer meets the IRC § 7811 definition of significant hardship. Discretionary payments should be excluded from gross income and range from a minimum of $100 up to a maximum of $1,000, indexed for inflation.

* Cash economy compliance:

1. Increase use of the IRS’s electronic payment system for estimated tax payments;
2. Authorize voluntary withholding agreements;
3. Eliminate the corporate exception to information reporting for small corporations, if the IRS’s National Research Program shows significant noncompliance;
4. Accelerate the taxpayer identification number validation process;
5. Provide for withholding on payments to noncompliant contractors;
6. Require information reporting by financial institutions on credit and other “payment card” receipts; and
7. Require financial institutions to report all accounts to the IRS by eliminating the $10 minimum on interest reporting.

* Home office deduction:

[C]reate an optional standard home office deduction. The legislative provision would direct the Secretary of the Treasury to draft regulations which calculate the deduction by multiplying an applicable standard rate, as determined and published by the Commissioner of the IRS on a periodic basis, by the applicable square footage of the portion of the dwelling unit described in IRC § 280A(c).

* Eliminate tax strategy patents.

* Provisional non-profit status: Extend provisional status as a public charity for organizations that have applied for an IRS determination of their status which the IRS has delayed in ruling upon, to give charities at least an eight month lead time period before their provisional charity status expires.

* Small non-profit compliance:

More than 73 percent of public charities reported annual expenses of less than $500,000 in 2004. Approximately half of all exempt organizations have all-volunteer staffs and another third have fewer than ten employees. The National Taxpayer recommends that Congress lessen the burden on these small exempt organizations by: amending the Code to provide that non-private foundations with gross receipts not normally more than $25,000 may submit a short-form application for recognition of IRC § 501(c)(3) status (i.e., a Form 1023-EZ), requiring the IRS to continue to offer a separate short-form (“EZ”) version of Form990 that may be filed by small exempt organizations in lieu of the long-form Form 990 or parts thereof, and requiring the IRS to create a broad-based, formal, and ongoing voluntary compliance program for exempt organizations similar to those offered in the areas of employee plans, tax-exempt bonds, and Indian tribal governments by September 30, 2008.

* Increase regulation of third parties responsible for paying withholding taxes to address the growing problem of payroll service embezzlements from clients.

* Allow identity theft victims assigned temporary tax ID numbers to obtain tax benefits contingent upon providing a taxpayer identification number.

* Allow the IRS to issue regulations imposing civil but not criminal penalties for minor violations of disclosure laws by tax preparers. The status quo has discouraged the IRS from issuing regulations that have both civil and criminal penalties.

* Expand access to innocent spouse protections, for example, allowing them to be raised as a defense in collection suits.

* Allow the IRS to refer people to certain low income taxpayer clinics.

* Limit disclosure of tax returns obtained for a specific transaction to use in that transaction.

* Treat government funded home care service workers who help disabled or elderly persons with personal care or household chores as government employees, rather than as client employees, for tax compliance purposes.

The "old business" of recommendations that are in the legislative process but have not been adopted at this time include:

* Simplify the alternative minimum tax so that it doesn't impact taxpayers with no unusual deductions or exemptions.

* Require "brokers to keep track of an investor’s basis, transfer basis to a successor broker, and report basis information (and proceeds generated by any sale) to the taxpayer and the IRS."

* End the private debt collection of tax debts. The results of the current private debt collection efforts are unimpressive.

[P]rivate companies were paid $6.3 million to pursue delinquent taxpayers in the first year of the program and collected $29 million in back taxes (3.7% of the $787 million in back taxes assigned to the companies by the IRS).