SCOTUS Most Conservative Since 1937

Four of the five most conservative justices to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court since 1937 are on the bench now. The other recently died. Justice Kennedy, the other member of the U.S. Supreme Court's conservative majority is one of the ten most conservative justices in that time period.

Denver's Primary Ballot Issue Title Deceptive

Damn! I have to remember to vote on August 12, 2008, Denver, Colorado's primary election date, despite the fact that there are no contested primaries in the Democratic party for voters in my precinct.

Why? Denver has an initiative on the ballot. Worse yet, the title that will appear on the ballot is deceptive.

The title (according to a link provided by At Large City Councilman Doug Linkhart) will be as follows:

Shall the voters for the City and County of Denver adopt an ordinance requiring that a motor vehicle operated by an unlicensed driver be impounded and that releasing such vehicle shall require that the owner post a two-thousand five-hundred dollar bond to insure no unlicensed driver operates such vehicle for a period of one year and pay a one-hundred dollar impoundment land acquisition fee?

This isn't an accurate statement of what the measure actually proposes. Some unlicensed drivers don't get their cars impounded under the measure, while others who have licenses which are valid for driving in Colorado do have their cars impounded. In fact, this is really an anti-immigrant measure with a deceptive title designed to slip under the radar by appearing on the ballot at a time when turnout is typically low. It really provides that:

(1) Definition. As used in this section “Illegal alien” means a person who has entered the United States illegally or is residing in the United States illegally after entering legally.

(a) Sec. 54-811 (10) is amended by an addition to subsection (10) to read: or when a driver of a vehicle is an illegal alien;

(1) A vehicle operator without a valid driver’s license but with convincing corroborating identification, vehicle registration, and a valid driver’s license of record may, at the discretion of the attending Police Officer, be issued a summons for driving without a license without impounding the vehicle. Such summons along with proof of a valid driver’s license shall be submitted within three working days to a Denver County Court for validation or such vehicle shall be ordered impounded.

(b) Sec. 54-811 is amended by the addition of a new subsection (20) to read: Sec. 54-811 (20) When a driver operating a vehicle registered in Colorado possesses a driver’s license from another country and does not possess proof that they are in the country legally, the owner of record, if ascertained, or any lienholder, if ascertained, shall be issued by certified mail, a notice of pending impoundment requiring proof that such driver was not an illegal alien or such vehicle shall be ordered impounded thirty days from the day the violation notice was issued.

(c) Sec. 54-813 is amended by the addition of a new subsection (c) to read:
Sec. 54-813 (c) The release of a motor vehicle impounded as provided in 54-811(10) or 54-811(20) shall require that a two-thousand five-hundred dollar bond be posted within thirty days of impoundment in favor of the City and County of Denver or the motor vehicle is subject to disposal by the city by auction or otherwise. This requirement is not applied when the operator of such vehicle is found to have had a valid driver’s license with such vehicle being released upon payment of towing and impoundment charges by owner. This bond shall be held for a period of one year and forfeited if such vehicle is operated by an unlicensed driver in Colorado within that time. For this section a one-hundred dollar impoundment land acquisition fee shall be paid to the city prior to the release of vehicle.

(d) Legislation may be enacted to facilitate the operation of this ordinance by the Mayor and City Council but in no way shall such legislation limit or restrict the provisions of this section or the powers herein granted.

Thus, Denver police are permitted but not required to give a driver with a suspended license (e.g., for DUI) a ticket rather than impounding a vehicle, but a Mexican tourist or Canadian or European tourist in Denver (all from places where one doesn't have to have a visa for tourism purposes) could have a car impounded despite having a driver's license from another country which is legal for driving in the United States.

Also, because this law regulations the exclusively federal province of immigration, and varies from comprehensive state rules on driver's licenses (which contains exemptions from having driver's license at Colorado Revised Statutes Section 42-2-102 for certain non-U.S. driver's licenses and for certain other persons), rather than confining itself to the issue of impounding vehicles driven by unlicensed drivers, it may very well be unconstitutional or pre-empted, under the federal and/or state constitutions or laws.

I am also disappointed that such a measure would be approved by the City Council with a deceptive title. While the City has a duty to place certain initiated matters on the ballot, it is not at all clear that inaccurate titles must be honored.

The initiative is a bad proposal and you should vote "No" when you go to the polls on August 12, 2008 (or on your mail-in ballot).

Denver's Foreclosure Report

The City and County of Denver has an eighty page report on foreclosures, which is full of detailed pertinent data. The data show that widespread availability of non-traditional mortgages, rather than general economic weakness was behind a rapid rise in foreclosures.

The recommendations of the report follow. I emphasize the recommendations that go beyond additional education, training and planning.

1. Reduce the incidence of foreclosure by mitigating the impacts of subprime loans:
* Combine downpayment assistance with interest-rate buy-down for qualified low- and moderate-income homebuyers
* Target the single family Mortgage Revenue Bond (MRB) program to areas with a high incidence of subprime loans
* Work with HUD and non-profit agencies to promote the use of FHA programs

2. Balance the goal of homeownership with the need for neighborhood stability and housing preservation:
* Improve the effectiveness of homebuyer education and counseling
* De-emphasize the widespread view of homeownership as a risk-free investment, especially for low-income households

3. Enhance the ability of homeowners to make informed refinancing decisions:
* Conduct intensive information campaigns or seminars about mortgage products and refinancing
* Provide up-to-date training for housing counselors
* Augment housing counseling services to include post-homebuyer counseling

4. Minimize the consequences of concentrated foreclosures:
* Stabilize housing prices through purchase of distressed properties
* Create a loan pool to assist homeowners who have survived temporary economic dislocations
* Step up enforcement of housing code violations

5. Develop a long-term foreclosure avoidance strategy:
* Data collection and analysis on a regular basis
* Create a Citywide Foreclosure Taskforce
* Intensify enforcement of consumer protection laws and disclosure requirements

The full report is worth reading.

In related news, rental vacancy rates are low in Denver, but rents are increasing only slightly and are about 25% below the levels needed to encourage new rental property construction at a time when construction material costs have soared.

Capital Gains Tax Breaks Still Wrong

The benefits of preferrential tax rates for capital gains and dividends go 70.4% to those in the top 1% of taxpayer income (average income $1.662 million) and 14.4% to those in the next 4% of taxpayers (average income $272,200). The next 15% of taxpayers receive 9.0% of the benefit (average income $121,900). The bottom 80% of taxpayers receive 6.2% of the benefit.

The cost of the tax break in reduced collections is $91.7 billion in 2005.

Also, those who benefit from these breaks say they wouldn't change their behavior if the rates were increased somewhat.

According to the annual Bloomberg/Los Angeles Times investor poll, 69 percent of upper-income investors say a raise in the capital gains tax to 20 percent from 15 percent wouldn't cause them to sell assets they would otherwise hold.

The capital gains tax break also greatly increases the complexity of the tax code and fuels countless elaborate tax reduction schemes by converting what would otherwise be ordinary income for tax purposes into capital gains.

Another Week, Another Primary

West Virginia held its primary election today. Delegates will be split roughly 20 to Clinton and 8 to Obama, precisely as I predicted the last time around. Obama has a 154 pledged delegate lead after West Virginia.

This leaves 189 pledged delegates to be allocated in five remaining contests over the next three weeks.

The remaining contests are:

* Kentucky (May 20) 51 Clinton strongly favored
* Oregon (May 20) 52 Obama favored
* Puerto Rico (June 1) 55 Clinton favored
* Montana (June 3) 16 Obama favored
* South Dakota (June 3) 15 Obama favored

In something on the order of the most favorable to Clinton plasuible scenario that I would foresee, the following delegate split from these contests:

KY 35C 17O (i.e. 67% for Clinton)
OR 21C 31O (i.e. 40% for Clinton)
PR 33C 22O (i.e. 60% for Clinton)
MT 6C 10O (i.e. 37% for Clinton)
SD 6C 9O (i.e 43% for Clinton)

Total pledged delegates: 101C 89O (net +12C)

Obama has a 12.5 delegate lead in superdelegates, a net gain of 24 superdelegates in the last week. There are 241.5 superdelegates who have not yet stated a preference.

Obama needs 142 more delegates to win, Clinton needs 308.5 more delegates to win.

A deal on Michigan or Florida seems less likely than it did a week ago. It seems increasingly likely that there will be no delegation seated from either state. Their saving grace may be that Obama's lead could be great enough to render these states irrelevant to the outcome reducing the incentive to exclude them for breaking the Democratic Party's rules.

Simply put, there continues to be no plausible scenario in which Hillary Clinton will be the Democratic nominee for President in 2008. The general election race, it is increasingly clear will be between Barack Obama for the Democrats and John McCain for the Republicans (who is struggling to secure 75% support in West Virginia even after all of the other candidates have dropped out of the race and he is the presumptive nominee). And, Obama is favored to win in the general election based upon current polling data and predictors like the "election futures markets."

Democrats also picked up another Democratic seat in Congress in what should be a safe Republican district (R+10) from Mississippi in a special election by a 53-47 margin.

Religion As A Multiple Choice Question

In the United States, every religion under the sun, Christian and non-Christian, has a foothold, and no nation on Earth with a comparable level of economic development is so religious in practice. Religion is a fill in the blank question. No multiple choice option is comprehensive enough to fit a simple survey accurately.

In most of Europe, in any given place, there tend to be three predominant religious identifications. One is the established or formerly established form of Christianity -- Anglicans in England, Lutherans in Scandinavia and Northern Germany, Catholics in France, Spain, Italy and Southern Germany. A second, increasingly the second most common faith in most regions of Europe, is Islam. A third is some form of secular, atheistic or non-religious identification.

For example, in France, in a 2003 poll, religious self-identification was "62% . . . Roman Catholic, 7% Muslim, 2% Protestant, 1% Jewish, 2% "other religions" (except for Orthodox or Buddhist, which were negligible), 26% 'no religion'" Moreover, a significant share of those who self-identify as Catholic or Muslim see this as a cultural designation rather than a theological one and simultaneously view themselves as atheist, agnostic or believers in a far more vague form of divinity than Catholic or Islamic doctrine describe (about 12% of the French come from Islamic countries, and historically, almost all of the French were considered Catholics).

In much of what we think of as the Islamic world, almost everyone is considered Muslim and the only real alternative, as a default, is a secular stance.

Globalization could play out a couple of ways. One would be for secularism to arise as a consensus alternative in a world where most societies are multiple choice or either-or in their universe of culturally acceptable religious roles.

The other would be for the exposure to multiple world religions to turn what had previously been multiple choice societies from a religious perspective into fill in the blank societies as more options appear. For example, this appears to be happening in London.

Time will tell which response predominates.

Wash Park Prophet Goes Hebrew

A Hebrew language site discusses a recent post at this blog. I have no idea what it says and there are few, if any, free automated online Hebrew-English translation services. Help from anyone who can explain the gist of the commentary/website "come from" in the comments to this post would be welcomed.

Sex Offender Residency Requirements Don't Work

Examining the potential deterrent effects of a residency restrictions law in Minnesota, this study analyzed the offense patterns of every sex offender released from Minnesota correctional facilities between 1990 and 2002 who was reincarcerated for a new sex offense prior to 2006. Given that not one of the 224 sex offenses would have likely been prevented by residency restrictions, the findings from this study provide little support for the notion that such restrictions would significantly reduce sexual recidivism.

From here.

Oil Prices Record High In Real and Nominal Terms

The previous high in real dollar oil prices (i.e. adjusted for inflation) was $103.80 a barrel set in April 1980. The nominal price at the time was $39.50 a barrel.

The $103.8 real-term record was calculated with crude prices posted on the Wall Street Journal and adjusted by the CPI.

Other methods of calculating the real price back in 1980 suggest a $90 peak. Prior to 1980 the previous peak was when: "A barrel of oil once reached $20 in 1859, shortly after oil was found in the United States . . . . That translates into a real-term price of over $400[.]"

Oil reached about $120 a barrel this month. It has done so without the dramatic embargo or supply interruption seen in previous oil price surges (although, of course, there are always less dramatic supply interruptions in the oil market).

Federal Judges By The Numbers

According to the U.S. Federal Judicial Center, there are only 13 vacancies on the 179-member federal courts of appeal and only 35 openings among the 674 district or trial judges.

The number of openings may increase by Inauguration Day -- a few seats are vacated each month -- but they could be offset if the Democratic-controlled Senate is persuaded to fill a few appellate seats and perhaps as many as 10 district court seats. . . . The next president will find the federal bench solidly controlled by the GOP, with about 100 Republicans in appeals court seats, compared with approximately 66 Democrats. Republicans have a 56 percent majority at the trial court level. . . . Forty-six of the 53 longest-serving appeals judges are GOP appointees. . . . [A] bill just proposed by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) . . . would create 12 appeals court seats and 38 district court seats. . . .

The senior liberal [on the U.S. Supreme Court], Justice John Paul Stevens, just turned 88, although he's still golfing and, we hear, maybe playing a little tennis.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg . . . is 75. . . . Antonin Scalia [is] 72, and Anthony Kennedy [is] 71[.]

From here.

FLDS No Longer Controls Own Assets

The religious leaders of the nation's best known polygamous sect, which was the subject of a massive raid in Texas (a raid which Arizona and Utah officials have made clear that they do not intend to repeat in a public meeting at St. George, Utah), do not control the trust which owns almost all of the community's assets. The trustee was replaced with a receiver, and the trust was reformed, in recent charitable trust litigation brought by the relevant state attorney general (the state attorney general generally has standing to bring actions regarding all charitable trust as a trust protector of last resort).

Military Commissions Still Rotten

The presiding judge at the Military Commission trial pending in Guantanamo Bay has rebuked the administration for excessive political pressure on the process, and has banned a top Pentagon official and his staff from involvement in the process.

The Homeless and the Vagrants

According to the Denver Post this past Sunday (infographic, page 5E), there are 12,050 homeless people in Colorado, of whom about a third live in Denver. This includes 600 "chronically homeless" in Denver (and presumably on the order of 1,200 elsewhere in the state). Chronically homeless is a euphemism for vagrant and defined as "single people who sleep outside and in shelers."

The graphic reports (seemingly with regard to the homeless as a whole, although I suspect that the reference might actually be to vagrants), that 25% of mentally ill, 40% are alcohol or substantive abusers and 15% are both (which I suspect means that the total number of mentally ill, alcohol or substance abusers is 50% not 80%, although the phrasing is ambiguous).

Something like 95% of the homeless are basically down on their luck -- people who have lost a job, can afford a place to live, have had a family break up, often single mothers or families with children, a substantial minority working.

According to a related story, Denver's efforts have brought down homlessness 11% overall and reduced "chronic homelessness" by 36%. Boulder has also seen drops. The city says it saves $1000-$4000 a year (excluding federal and Medicaid savings) by finding people homes. Panhandling on the 16th Street mall is allegedly down 92%.

Together with statistics from our prison population, homelessness illustrates the high price we pay for poor behavioral health services (most notably deinstitutionalization a generation ago), and the price we pay for having a weak safety net.

The numbers also suggest that vagrancy is not an intractible problem. The vast majority of the homeless do not fall into vagrancy, and there is good reason to believe, given the concentrated mental health and substance abuse problems behind vagrancy, that helping the couple thousand who are in this state will not cause others to fall into the same trap. This costs money. Vagrants, almost by definition, have serious problems. But it isn't insanely expensive and the experience of "housing first" efforts has been that people allowed to get on their feet and given the help that they need can do so. The trouble is worth the effort, for those in that dire state and for the rest of us.