Wednesday, April 10, 2019

A disturbing look at 'model bills'

Detained drug smuggler thought importing more drugs would 'improve' situation

LT. COL. RICHARD COLE, THE LAST DOOLITTLE RAIDER, DIES AT AGE 103. “Cole deserves a salute from all Americans today. An American hero in the truest sense of the word has passed,” J. Christian Adams writes.

Why The Slowpoke In Front Of You On The Sidewalk Or In The Checkout Line Drives You Nuts


Blame evolution. “Impatience made sure we didn’t die from spending too long on a single unrewarding activity. It gave us the impulse to act. But that good thing is gone. The fast pace of society has thrown our internal timer out of balance. It creates expectations that can’t be rewarded fast enough — or rewarded at all.” – Nautilus

From bingo to Ocean's Eleven: man behind firm eyeing Packer's Crown


We were AFRAID OF THIS: The robocall crisis will never totally be fixed. “Like spam, we’ll be able to manage it but not eliminate it.”
Even with a constantly-updated spam-blocker installed on my phone, several calls a day still get through. Although it’s always worse around tax season, so I’m hoping for a drop-off in spam over the next couple of weeks.


MLI - SYNTHESISED TEXT OF DTA WITH SLOVAKIA RELEASED
On 5 April 2019, the ATO released a synthesised text of Australia's DTA with the Slovak Republic to outline the modifications made to the DTA by the Multilateral Convention to Implement Tax Treaty Measures to Prevent Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (MLI).


The ATO is progressively publishing synthesised texts of DTAs modified by the MLI. The ATO previously released synthesised texts of Australia's DTAs with the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Japan and Poland.

‘Netflixbut not STP’: 1 in 10 small biz STP ready
Just one out of 10 small business clients are ready for the rollout of single touch payroll. A survey of 780 respondents has revealed that just 11.7% of small business clients are ready for single touch payroll, despite the regime set to begin in three months’ time


A disturbing look at 'model bills'



Courtesy USA Today

Who is writing our laws? You might not like the answer.

It’s supposed to be lawmakers. But in a disconcerting report published today by USA Today, laws are being introduced in states all across the country that were written by corporations, industry groups and think tanks for the purpose of advancing their own agendas.

This exhaustive two-year investigation was conducted by more than 30 reporters from USA Today, The Arizona Republic and The Center for Public Integrity. The heart of the investigation: examination of nearly 1 million bills using a computer algorithm developed to detect similarities in language. It found at least 10,000 bills in the past eight years that were nearly identical to more than 2,100 signed into law. In addition, tens of thousands of bills had identical phrases.

These so-called “model bills” or “copycat bills” have resulted in laws that have: made it harder for injured consumers to sue corporations, implemented taxes, limited access to abortion and restricted the rights of protestors.

The report, written by USA Today’s Rob O’Dell and Nick Penzenstadler, claim that these copycat bills “amount to the nation’s largest, unreported special-interest campaign, driving agendas in every statehouse and touching nearly every area of public policy.”




Susan Smith Richardson is the Center for Public Integrity's new CEO — You can get to know her more on our site, listen to her chat with Kyle Pope or read the story on Columbia Journalism Review and Nieman Lab.

"One of many areas Richardson has pledged to amplify is the work we've done in covering state politics, especially as local news outlets' ability to do so dwindles. It was fortuitous, then, that the announcement came the same day as the launch of our major investigative project with USA TODAY and The Arizona Republic: Copy, Paste, Legislate. 

Each year, state lawmakers across the U.S. introduce thousands of bills dreamed up and written by corporations, industry groups and think tanks. Disguised as the work of lawmakers, these so-called “model” bills get copied in one state Capitol after another, quietly advancing the agenda of the people who write them.

Our joint investigation reveals for the first time the extent to which special interests have infiltrated state legislatures using model legislation.

More than 30 reporters across the country were involved in the two-year investigation, which identified copycat bills in every state. The team used a unique data-analysis engine built on hundreds of cloud computers to compare millions of words of legislation; a related analysis by the Center identified thousands of bills with identical language, then traced their origins. The Center hopes to publish its data-analysis tool within weeks so that the public can search for copycat bills as well.

Why it matters: The impact of these measures can at times be a matter of life-or-death, as we saw from Center for Public Integrity reporter Rui Kaneya's look at a bill pushed by auto dealer trade groups that lets them continue to sell recalled used cars, even if they're a risk to drivers. 
What you'll also find in this package: The group Newt Gingrich called ‘the most effective organization’ for conservatives,'  5 controversial bills borne from model legislation, and the story in 9 charts. 




 'I'll miss the stage the despatch box gives you': Christopher Pyne farewells Parliament
Defence Minister and "fixer" Christopher Pyne has bid farewell to Parliament, and the member for Sturt could not resist the lure of the audience in front of him.

Kottke is aware of the tragedies in Easter Europe: I’ve spent the last few years fascinated by the Chernobyl disaster. This fascination partly grew out of my interest in the Flint Water Crisis, which was directly compared to Chernobyl in a story I wrote about it. (One of the things people forget is that Chernobyl poisoned the water table for a huge region.) 
The similarities with Flint start in the opening paragraph: 

Catastrophes happen when a large system gets so out of sync with its environment that a tiny tweak can crash it to the ground. It’s happened to oil rigs, spacecraft and mines. Afterward, committees blame the people who did the tweaking. But what matters is how the system became unstable and crashed, the atmosphere that caused it and the aftereffects. In these two books about the April 1986 explosion of the No. 4 reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, “Midnight in Chernobyl” focuses on the first and second, “Manual for Survival” on the third.

Even colors have histories, and what vibrant histories they are. French historian Michel Pasteureau’s Blue: The History of A Color(he’s also done histories of red, green, and black) is capably reviewed by Jesse Russell in the Claremont Review of Books in an essay called “The Colors of Our Dreams.” Russell offers the following luminous details.
Blue was once little-known in the Western palette. Homer’s sea was “wine dark”; blue would not be used as water’s color until the seventeenth century. It has evolved from its original association with warmth, heat, barbarism, and the creatures of the underworld, to its current association with calm, peace, and reverie. Like the unruly green, the Romans associated blue with the savage Celtae and Germani, who used the woad herb’s rich leaves for their blue pigments. These northern barbarians also painted themselves blue before war and religious rituals. The ancient Germans, according to Ovid, even dyed their whitening hair blue.


I love The Washington Post video series, How To Be a Journalist, which gives viewers a behind-the-scenes look at the work reporters do. The latest episode is about how to be an art critic with host Libby Casey talking to Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Philip Kennicott. It’s a beat, unfortunately, that might have a dicey future.


In the video, Kennicott said, “It’s hard because you know newspapers have gone through a lot of crisis recently and they’ve cut their critics. That’s one of the first places when times get lean, it tends to be the arts critics that are among the first on the chopping block. So you have to really, really want to do this to go into the profession. It’s not going to be an easy path. Mainly, I think you need to develop a kind of insatiable curiosity about the field that you’re going to criticize and the desire to write. And just do it. And maybe that means doing it for yourself. Maybe that means doing it on your personal web page or Facebook entries until you feel the confidence to go out and offer your services to people who will pay to do it.”


By the way, Poynter has an upcoming workshop called “How To Cover The Arts On Any Beat.” It will be at Poynter in St. Petersburg, Florida, from May 5-7. Deadline to sign up is today.


Poynter’s Mel Grau did a Q&A with Tom Huang, assistant managing editor at the Dallas Morning News and Poynter editing fellow who will lead the training. Huang told Grau, “We will showcase ways to help beat reporters across all disciplines cover some of the arts.”

Anti-Semitism Is Back, From the Left, Right and Islamist Extremes. Why? - The New York Times: “Swastikas daubed on a Jewish cemetery in France. An anti-Semitic political campaign by Hungary’s far-right government. Labour lawmakers in Britain quitting their party and citing ingrained anti-Semitism. A Belgian carnival float caricaturing Orthodox Jews sitting on bags of money. And that was just the past few months. The accumulated incidents in Europe and the United States have highlighted how an ancient prejudice is surging in the 21st century in both familiar and mutant ways, fusing ideologies that otherwise would have little overlap. The spike is taking place in a context of rising global economic uncertainty, an emphasis on race and national identity, and a deepening polarization between the political left and right in Europe and the United States over the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.“There’s an ideological pattern that is common,” said Günther Jikeli, an expert on European anti-Semitism at Indiana University. “The world is seen as in a bad shape, and what hinders it becoming a better place are the Jews.”…”

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