Mark Casey Online

Perhaps in honor of the late George Carlin, a federal appeals court has thrown out the over half-million dollar indecency fine it levied against CBS in the wake of the now infamous “wardrobe malfunction” incident during the 2004 Super Bowl, in which Janet Jackson’s breast was partially and momentarily exposed.

The court called the FCC’s fine arbitrary, and found that it was over the top and out of line with the FCC’s established history of handling indecency incidents.

Kudos to CBS, who could’ve simply paid the fine and been done with it years ago. Instead, it challenged the FCC in court, and found this happy outcome, which will have far-reaching implications. The huge fine came at the height of what many observers, including this one, thought was a campaign by the FCC to vastly overreach its bounds, inventing new definitions of “indecency” (and therefore new definitions of what was acceptable on TV), and attempting to over-regulate mediums it has no business regulating, such as cable television and the internet.

It may seem trite, a mere footnote in telecommunications legalese — but it’s an important precedent, for both innovative entertainment and for free speech.

So, I didn’t know that the government looked at human life in terms of a cost-benefit analysis, and frankly, I’m a little disturbed by it.

But really, is there a better way to do it? You can’t just pass a law related to the death of every single human being on the planet. So, what the EPA does is, they examine a situation like, say, rampant pollution in New Jersey. If they wanted to end a particular aspect of that pollution, such as Carbon Dioxide in the air or Mercury levels in the water, they would find out how much money it would cost to impose regulations over those activities, and they weigh it against the cost of human life lost if the activity continues.

Morbid as it may be, that means they have to assign a value to each human life. And they just decided that a human life costs $900,000 less than it used to, in a move that most analysts have decided is entirely political. The administration is just trying to give energy companies one last break before they have to clean out their offices, I guess.

Already, the new measurement is going to be put to the test, after a federal court ruled that East Coast pollution levels, which are expected to cause 15,000 premature deaths a year, aren’t allowed to be regulated by the federal government.

We should probably just remember that the government believes 15,000 people’s lives can be excused if Duke Energy can turn an equally valuable profit off of their death. And hey, I’m not a complete bleeding heart — I know that the financial success of a company also helps to improve and even save the lives of their employees or customers.

Or, at least they would… if the version of “government” we have right now didn’t also believe that it’s perfectly natural and reasonable for the CEO of a company to make hundreds of millions annually while gouging prices and laying off employees.

• An enterprising old racist at the Texas State GOP convention this past weekend sold some buttons which quaintly read: “If Obama is president… will we still call it The White House?” How transparently base. Luckily, the Texas Republican Party banned him from further participation in the party.
• I wrote briefly yesterday that the last two decades of deregulation have resulted in a self-destructive free market and a less effective economy. But if you don’t believe me because I’m not a millionaire, meaning I must be an idiot, Fortune has a good piece on the recent arrest of two Bear Stearns hedge fund executives, including analysis of what their company’s greed-induced collapse (and the massive shock waves it’s sent through our economy) means about the state of Wall Street.
• The House has OK’d yet another massive war spending bill. This one includes some positive points, though, including unemployment and troop benefits, and relief funds for flood damaged areas.

• A new Quinnipiac Poll says Obama now leads McCain by significant margins in the key swing states of Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Florida. 12 Year Old Newsweek reporter Andrew Romano says it’s all the women’s fault. And oh yeah, now that one side is honestly behind in the race for the first time, let the mud-slinging begin! Prepare yourself for a whole lot more of those “Obama is clearly, simultaneously, a terrorist and a person who does not understand terrorism” comments from the entire width and breadth of the right wing.
• How can Americans not be insulted by the clear orchestration so often crammed down their throats by political parties? This time it’s the GOP, with McCain, Bush, and every oil executive imaginable coming out in favor of offshore drilling. Under the false banner of reducing oil prices, they’re acting like they all suddenly got the idea to drill in the Gulf of Mexico (not where they’re already allowed to explore and choosing not to, but in the other places), and the Democrats want you to pay four hundred dollars a gallon because they hate America. Meanwhile, Democrats are actually taking on the cause of high gas prices: the artificial shortage created by unchecked oil speculation — also known as “The Same Thing Enron Did.”
• Speaking of offshore drilling, CNN and MSNBC both decided to interview the CEOs of oil companies to get their opinion on drilling for oil off the coast of Florida. Anyone want to guess what they said?
• Speaking of CEO’s, a third of them reported to a poll that they expect to cut jobs from their companies in the next year, even as they also reported that they expect sales to start rising again. Man, I sure am happy that weak-kneed politicians believe that an open market means an unregulated one, or else we wouldn’t currently be enjoying all the wonderful benefits of an unmonitored, self-destructive market economy.
• And finally, this last bit is a direct port from Melted Reel Online — and something I find hilarious. Tom Cruise and his Scientology goons are once again trying to bring down the entire psychiatric industry. This time, however, they didn’t start the fight. Celebrity shrink “Dr. Drew” did. For quotes and the full story, follow the links.

This was reported over the weekend, but I didn’t want any of my readers to have missed it, so I’m posting it here tonight. John McCain, his zillionaire wife, and a “dependent child” of theirs (what?) owe *at least* $250,000 dollars in credit card debt, according to the Senate personal finance report he just filed.

Talk about fiscal responsibility. Way to stimulate that economy!

It’s not as though they’re going bankrupt — they have millions in Budweiser cash — but I still think it’s funny. And according to this graph I just found on Google, credit card debt tends to increase with age, so maybe that’s the issue (thanks, I’ll be here all week.)

Barack Obama, by contrast, has no debt and he and his wife have put away over $200,000 dollars for the college education of their two young daughters.

 I’ve written before about the American auto industry’s serious mistakes in the production and marketing of their cars, but only in a grumpy “You should already know what I’m talking about” kind of way.

But there are still a lot of people out there who think that Escalades and Mustangs are, like, totally cool, man.  And worse yet, they think it’s a good idea for Detroit to keep focusing on the wasteful “cars as status symbols” strategy that has had their profits (and that sector of our economy) going straight down the drain.

In my home state of Indiana alone, hundreds of thousands of jobs have been lost thanks to massive factory closings — not because jobs are being shipped to Mexico, but because there are no more jobs when it comes to making bigger and bigger vehicles (read: the only kind of vehicles Detroit makes).  Now, with gas prices and environmental concern rising, their sales have flatlined.  Maybe that will finally light a fire under their ass.

For a quick primer on how it all happened, check out this Business Week article.  It’s light on substance and data, but correct about the chronology of failure among American auto companies over the past 15 years.

Here’s a snippet:

The biggest of these, obvious to anyone who has tried to fill up his sport-utility vehicle or pickup truck lately, is that General Motors (GM), Ford (F), Chrysler and, to lesser extents, companies such as Mercedes-Benz (DAI), Porsche (PSHG), and BMW (BMWG) continued to make fuel-inefficient cars for the U.S. market long after concerns about America’s dependence on oil, foreign or otherwise, became known. Like cigarette smokers, they continued puffing away, ignoring the mountain of evidence detailing the dangers.

[…]

As Detroit concentrated on trucks and SUVs, it effectively ceded the market for more fuel-efficient, though less profitable, sedans and coupes to companies such as Toyota (TM) and Honda (HMC). Now that light-truck sales have fallen off the cliff, Detroit is struggling to catch up, if it ever can. So, in an industry that has given the world such paradigms of disaster as the Edsel and the Pinto, the near-sightedness of the decision to ignore fuel-efficiency ranks at the top.

Oh, this is just too good to be true.

You know those LifeLock commercials? With the guy who has a semi-truck drive around with his social security number painted on it in gigantic size, while he hands out flyers advertising his social security number, all to prove that his identity is safe because he uses “LifeLock?”

Well, that guy’s identity wasn’t safe. And yes, he really was using LifeLock. He’s Todd Davis, the company’s CEO. But someone in Texas successfully used that social security number to secure himself a loan. More hilariously, the CEO admits that, even with LifeLock, plenty of people could already have “stolen” his identity by using his SS number to get a drivers license.

Best of all, Todd admits that LifeLock isn’t great at catching these things, calling drivers license fraud alerts “flimsy,” and saying this about the potential for people to take out loans in his name:

“There’s nothing on my actual credit report about uncollected funds, no outstanding tickets or warrants or anything. There’s nothing to indicate my identity has been successfully compromised other than the one instance.”

So, basically, LifeLock doesn’t do much unless you’ve already been sued or have a warrant out for your arrest. Nice.

Now, the company’s being sued by people in three states who allege that their service isn’t what it claims to be. Specifically, the lawyer responsible says that all LifeLock actually does is charge you 10 dollars a month to set up fraud alerts related to their credit report, which people can do for free.

Economist Jared Bernstein over at Huffington Post has written a great, well-referenced look at the successes and failures of conservative economic policy, which Bernstein calls “YOYO Economics,” with YOYO standing for “Your on your own.”

The data shows that Economic growth during the Reagan/Clinton/Bush era of deregulation is significantly smaller, more socially lopsided, and far more fragile than any other growth cycles since the end of the Great Depression.

Surely, Voodoo economists would retort that a flailing middle class, a highly volatile credit and consumer market, flagging industry investment, and economic growth being observed only in the top 1% of the population are signs of pure success.

I suppose it’s all a matter of perception.

College students need stimulation. In a lot of ways.

But college students are out of luck when it comes to the government “stimulus” checks that are raining down across communities all over America this week.

Why? Because if your parents can claim you as a dependent, as is the case with most college students in the world, then you don’t get the $600.00 that President Bush and Congress promised every American.

But never fear; there is a method to this madness. Allegedly. The cash theoretically meant for taxpaying young people is instead supposed to go to their parents, increasing their tax rebate by that much more, which is a fine idea.

More power to the parents. They shoulder a big load raising their children and helping them get through college, and I’m glad that the government had the foresight to reward them with extra cash.

That is, I would be glad that the government had that foresight. The only problem is, they didn’t. Instead, parents only get the extra money if their claimed child is less than 17 years old, which certainly doesn’t seem all that fair.

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One is good, the other is bad.

President Bush, obviously heartened by all the “principled” successes of his White House career thus far, is getting a little veto-happy in his last summer as president. Maybe he resents all those GOP congressmen who have distanced themselves from him in this election year, but after spending six years as the president who didn’t even know what the word “Veto” meant, constantly signing anything the Republican congress sent him, he now is threatening to veto anything he hears about.

Two examples, relatively bipartisan, couldn’t be further apart in terms of reason.

One is a recently passed mortgage crisis relief bill for families in jeopardy of losing their homes. This is right. After bailing out Bear Stearns, the sinking investment bank whose practices played a big role in creating the housing market crisis, it only makes sense to try to help the homeowners they swindled. A shrewd President Bush has smugly called the bill “a bailout,” which it is. It’s almost the exact same sort of bailout that Bear Stearns got.

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