Thursday, May 31, 2007

Time for legislatures to act on behalf of women

Yesterday, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that gender discrimination must have occurred within 180 days of filing the complaint - even if the discrimination occurred gradually over years or decades. My fellow S&R co-blogger Robert Silvey blogged about this yesterday the decision was released (Women need not apply). Reading Justice Alito’s suggestion that corporations needed protection from lawsuits that are older than 180 days turned my blood cold, but at least the decision was made 5-4. And I was happy to see that Justice Ginsburg read her scathing dissent from the bench, something that should give the majority pause (it probably won’t, unfortunately).

And thus far, I can’t find any response from Congress about this. Maybe it’s too soon, but my inner cynic says that Congress is “too busy” to care about updating Title VII of the the Civil Rights Act of 1964 so that it makes this Supreme Court precedent moot. I wonder if Congressional Democrats just haven’t seen the political value of this Supreme Court decision yet.

Updating Title VII to be more inclusive of gender discrimination that has a profile similar to that of Ledbetter v. Goodyear (ie looks more like “hostile workplace” than direct discrimination of the “sleep with me or lose your job” variety) is one of those few political causes on which you just can’t lose. If Congressional Democrats take up the issue, anyone who votes against it (Republican or conservative Democrat) is anti-woman. The same is true of President Bush if he vetoes the bill. And either way, the Democrats have a legislative issue that they can use in the 2008 elections to energize the electorate, either trumpeting their victory or mudslinging at their opponents.

Unfortunately, recent Congressional history says that women who want real action on workplace discrimination might be better off taking their complaints to the states instead of to Congress.

After the Supreme Court ruled in Kelo vs. the City of New London that governments could “take” private property via condemnation with the express purpose of reselling the property to another private entity that would make the government more tax revenue, 34 states passed laws that limited the use of eminent domain and six others passed state Constitutional amendments that limited eminent domain in cases like these. The U.S. House of Representatives passed The Private Property Rights Protection Act of 2005 (House Resolution 4128), but it died in Senate committee.

In League of United Latin American Citizens, et al. v. Rick Perry, Governor of Texas, et al., the Supreme court ruled in another 5-4 decision that the Texas redistricting in 2003 was Constitutional, but remarkably unwise. In response, the states of California, Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania took up measures to change how their states redrew their congressional boundaries. Not all passed, and some are still pending. In addition, 12 states total have non-partisan commissions that redraw congressional boundaries instead of using the legislature, and several other states have laws or state Constitutional amendments that prohibit mid-Census redistricting (including my home state, Colorado). Following LULAC v Perry, the a committee in the U.S. House of Representatives took up a bill that addressed this issue too. And it died in committee.

We should put pressure on Congress to update Title VII as soon as possible. But we should also pressure the state governments to act on this issue even without Congress’ involvement. If we don’t, we may never see action.

Links to Congress:
Search for your Representative
Search for your Senators

[Crossposted: Scholars & Rogues, The 5th Estate]

Friday, May 25, 2007

The Micro-Pundit:  Silouhettes are not Trademarkable

I stumbled across a very amusing story today.  Apparently Apple Computer is taking exception to a new poster from UK adult store Ann Summers for their iGasm (story here).  And apparently, this isn’t the first time Apple got hot under the collar over someone swiping their “iBlank” and sillouhette advertising ideas.  They set the lawyers loose on the iPod iBuzz vibrator too (Story here).

As far as I know, sillouhettes are not trademarkable.  But even if they are, all Apple’s doing is making themselves look petty.  And I can speak from experience, there are a lot of people laughing at you over this one.

Monday, May 21, 2007

Bush wants to dilute the G-8’s statement on global heating

According to this Washington Post article, the Bush Administration is negotiating to weaken the G-8’s statement on global heating. Some examples of what they’re trying to do, quoted fro the WashPost article:

The documents show that American officials are also trying to eliminate draft language that says, “We acknowledge that the U.N. climate process is the appropriate forum for negotiating future global action on climate change.”

They also proposed striking one of the document’s opening phrases, which says, “We underline that tackling climate change is an imperative, not a choice. We firmly agree that resolute and concerted international action is urgently needed in order to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions and sustain our common basis of living.”

Lovely, isn’t it? The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has come out with their reports that a) humans are causing global warming, b) the effects will be very, very unpleasant, and c) there are ways to mitigate the effects, yet the Bush Administration is undercutting the very conclusions that it itself signed off on - the rules of the IPCC reports state that the summaries for policymakers are consensus documents, so every government in the IPCC has approve them.

Well, now it appears that many committee chairmen and chairwomen in the House of Representatives have taken umbrage at the Administration’s attempted manipulations of the G-8. Fifteen different committee chairmen and chairwomen have written and signed a letter to President Bush that reads as follows:

May 18, 2007

Dear Mr. President:

We are deeply concerned about reports that the United States is seeking to weaken a proposed G-8 declaration regarding global climate change. We are writing to urge you to reverse course and strengthen the G-8 declaration. The United States must no longer delay action to address this major threat.

According to press reports, Administration officials are seeking to strike a pledge to limit the global temperature rise during this century to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, as well as an agreement to reduce worldwide greenhouse gas emissions to 50% below 1990 levels by 2050.¹

We have also learned that the Administration officials may be trying to delete sections of the declaration that call on the industrialized world to modify activities linked to recent warming and to delete one of the document’s opening phrases, which highlights the urgency of the necessary actions. This is a disappointing retreat after finally acknowledging the urgency of the issue just last month.

The scientific consensus tells us that it is too late to avoid some warming, but we may still have time to prevent dangerous warming. Preventing the global average temperature from rising more than 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit in comparison to pre-industrial levels must be a top priority. Scientific studies show that a 3.6 degree increase in global temperature could result in the extinction of nearly 30% of all living species, bleaching of much of the world’s coral, increased risk of the wider spread of diseases like malaria, more damage from floods and storms, and increased drought in already dry regions.² To prevent this from occurring, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recently suggested reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 50% to 85% below 2000 levels would be necessary.³

The G8 Summit should be an opportunity to galvanize international support for addressing this looming threat, not an opportunity to prevent and undermine international action. The leaders of the world’s largest economies must let the rest of the world know that they are serious about addressing the threat posed by global warming and are committed to meaningful action to reduce global warming pollution.

U.S. leadership is critical to tackling this global threat. Congress is now preparing to do its part. Support is growing for aggressive legislation to cap global warming pollution and cut it dramatically over the coming decades. But we need an Executive Branch that engages the rest of the world to solve this problem rather than stubbornly ignoring it.

Without strong leadership from our nation’s federal government, we will fall behind our economic competitors in the development of clean energy technologies and miss the economic opportunities to provide these technologies to world markets. We urge you to embrace these opportunities for economic growth and aggressive action, and to demonstrate America’s commitment to leading the fight against global warming by producing a strong G-8 declaration.

Sincerely,

1. U.S. Aims to Weaken G-8 Climate Change Statement, Washington Post (May 13, 2007).

2. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Climate Change 2007: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability, 13 (April 2007).

3. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Climate Change 2007: Mitigation of Climate Change, 23 (May 7, 2007).

And the letter is signed by the following: Henry A. Waxman (Oversight and Government Reform), Tom Lantos (Foreign Affairs), Charles B. Rangel (Ways and Means), George Miller (Education and Labor), Bart Gordon (Science and Technology), Barney Frank (Financial Services), James L. Oberstar (Transportation and Infrastructure), John Conyers (Judiciary), Nydia M. Velázquez (Small Business), Louise M. Slaughter (Rules), Stephanie Tubbs Jones (Standards of Official Conduct), Bob Filner (Veterans’ Affairs), Edward J. Markey (Energy Independence and Global Warming), David R. Obey (Appropriations), and John M. Spratt (Budget.)

Look at the committees represented - Ways and Means, Foreign Affairs, Rules, Judiciary, Appropriations, and Budget aren’t exactly wimpy in terms of offical power in the House. Neither, for that matter, is Oversight and Government Reform.

Do I really expect that this letter will change Bush’s mind on this? Of course not. I don’t think that the signers, all Democrats, believe that either. I think they’re just going on record as opposing Bush’s suggested changes, and while that’s purely a political move, in this case it’s still the right thing to do.

Let us not forget that Bush is “The Decider,” and that the Administration is creating reality, not studying it:

[a Bush aide said] ‘’We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.’’(Source: NYTimes Magazine: Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush)

UPDATE: The mayors of 46 of the world’s biggest cities are calling for the G-8 to take a stand on global heating. Here’s the actual communique to the G-8 nations.

[Crossposted: Scholars & Rogues]

Friday, May 18, 2007

Governor Bill Richardson’s New Energy Plan

Bill Richardson, former Ambassador to the United Nations, former Congressman, former Secretary of Energy under President Clinton, now Governor of New Mexico, and one of many Democratic Party candidates for President in 2008, has an energy plan.  It’s agressive, it’s wide-ranging, it’s reasonably comprehensive, and it takes global heating seriously.

And Thursday, Governor Richardson presented that plan at a speech before the New America Foundation, a foundation that bills itself as a “nonprofit, post-partisan, public policy institute that was established through the collaborative work of a diverse and intergenerational group of public intellectuals, civic leaders and business executives.” (see their mission statement here) I’m actually looking forward to reading through the McKinsey Global Institute paper:  Curbing Global Energy Demand Growth: The Energy Productivity Opportunity (registration required) that was presented after Gov. Richardson’s speech and will post my thoughts when I’ve finished reading it.

What Gov. Richardson’s energy plan boils down to is this:

• Cut oil demand by 50% by 2020 through a combination of electric and plug-in vehicles, alternative fuels, and increasing MPG standards for vehicles to 50 MPG average.
• Generate 50% of our electricity via renewables by 2040 through a combination of geothermal, solar, wind, and clean coal.
• Cut greenhouse gas emissions by 90% by 2050 through renewable energy generation, reduced oil demand, carbon sequestration, and market-based cap-and-trade systems
• Leading the world in retooling our carbon economy and by negotiating with both developed and developing countries over global heating, creating a North American Energy Council with Canada and Mexico, and working with the UN and Persian Gulf nations on protecting the oil wealth in the Gulf from threats foreign and domestic.
• And do all the other things by carefully repealing subsidies, taxing carbon emissions via the cap-and-trade system, and ensuring that all the changes pay for themselves.

Now, as someone who’s studied this a decent amount, I’m not sure I understand his call for “low-carbon” liquid fuels, and he doesn’t explain what he’s talking about either in his speech or on his website.  Maybe he’s talking using more natural gas fueled vehicles, or hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, but those are the only two possibilities I can think of.  In addition, he doesn’t discuss nuclear power at all, focusing instead on clean coal, something I think is a significant error on his part.  Unfortunately, I can’t seem to find the detailed white paper he alludes to in his speech on Gov. Richardson’s candidacy website, because I’d really like to compare what he’s come up with to what I have come up with, and will be posting on the Dr. Slammy in ‘08 site before too long.

However, unlike too many people, Gov. Richardson says point blank that doing all these things will be difficult.  It will cause our economy to slow down slightly as we retool our energy supplies from carbon-based to non-carbon based and carbon-neutral.  But the threats to national security, public health, and even to our economy are too grave not to take global heating seriously.

You can check out his actual speech at PoliticsTV.com here.  In my opinion, he needs to get better about sounding natural with a teleprompter than he did in this speech, but that will (I hope) come with practice.

And what about the two supposed “front runners?” Hillary Clinton’s page on global warming is vaguely worded and very, very short on details.  Barak Obama’s energy and environment page has much better detail, but some of the details are obviously ploys to get the Iowa vote (namely corn ethanol, an idea that is simply rock stupid).  In fact, Sen. Obama’s page has more of the very details that I want Gov. Richardson to make available in that white paper he mentioned.

We’re powering our civilization with solar energy that was stored over millions of years by plants that have since turned into coal and oil.  We can’t keep doing this, and I’m glad to see the Democratic presidential candidates taking it seriously.

[Crossposted: Scholars & Rogues, The 5th Estate]

Thursday, May 17, 2007

Big bills and aggressive Congressional schedules makes for bad government

I was casting about the airwaves Wednesday night for something worth listening to when I stumbled upon Fresh Air.  Terry Gross was interviewing Boston Globe legal columnist and Pulitzer winner Charlie Savage about Regent University Law School (the Christian university founded by Pat Robertson). While I came into the middle of the interview, so many things I heard concerned me. For example, did you know that many of the key players in the U.S. attorney firing scandal were from Regent University Law School? Including Monica Goodling. That fact alone is probably worth several blogs from my fellow scholars/rogues.

What I’m going to focus on is a little peice of legislation that was slipped into the reauthorization of the USA PATRIOT Act. Specifically, Congress voted to give the Justice Department the authority to replace U.S. attorneys without the usual Congressional review, ie Senate confirmation hearings. Since this fact has come out publically, according to Mr. Savage, no Congressperson has acknowledged that they knew about this part of the PATRIOT Act when they voted for the reauthorization and both houses of Congress have overwhelmingly (ie veto-proof majorities) voted for repeal of this little bit of the Act.

What bothers me is not so much that Congress might have voted to do something stupid like this. No, what bothers me is that the language was inserted into the reauthorization bill by a Congressional staffer on the request of the Justice Department, and that no-one who voted for the reauthorization apparently knew that it had been added.

The average length of bills has been growing steadily over the years.  Between the 1947-48 and 1995-96 Congressional sessions, the average length of legislation increased from 2.5 pages to 19.1 pages.  It’s probably reasonable to suggest that the average length has grown since 1996 as well, especially with our Congress’ apparent love of omnibus bills (for some of my thoughts on omnibus bills, see here and here).  If we use a linear extrapolation fro 1996 to 2006, we’re at approximately .35 pages per year, or 22.6 pages per bill in the 2005-2006 session.  (NOTE: I searched all over the web for good data instead of using extrapolated data, but couldn’t find any.  If somone has better data, I’d love to update this post with the corrected data.)

At the same time, the pace of legislation has stayed more or less constant (measured by the number of bills introduced).  In the 80th Congress (1947-48), 12,090 bills were introduced, of which 4,152 were passed.  In the 108th Congress (2005-06), 10,670 bills were introduced of which 2,674 were passed. (source:  Resume of Congressional Activity) If we assume that all passed bills were read, that’s 10,380 pages for the 80th Congress and 60,432 pages (estimated) for the 108th Congress.  Do we really belive that, with all the travel, debating, press conferences, hearings, etc. that Congresspersons do, they have time to read 60,432 pages over their 2189 hours they were in session?  That’s an average of 27.6 pages of legislation read per session hour.

And if we up the number of bills to the number actually introduced (and that’s probably a more accurate number), then we’re looking at a whopping 241,142 pages, or 110 pages every session hour.

Now, I realize that this is a big part of what Congressional staffers are for.  So lets add the staffers into the mix, but let’s also use the number of bills introduced.  And, since Representatives usually have fewer staffers, let’s look just at the House of Representatives.  The average number of staffers per House member is 17, of which not all are going to be expected or able to read and comment on legislation.  So let’s assume (generously) that 12 are able to do legislative reading and summaries for their boss.  This means that there are 13 people reading every piece of introduced legislation, for 8.5 pages of legislation per person per session hour.  Again, I ask, do we really believe that Congresspersons and their staffs combined have the ability to read every word of every piece of legislation?  Especially when you consider that these numbers are averages, and that legislation doens’t flow through Congress at an even rate of 120 pages of legislation per session hour.

Since it’s unreasonable to expect that Congress actually reads every word of every bill that is introduced (and it’s highly unlikely that every Representative and Senator reads every word of every bill that passes), and since we know that bits of legislation have slipped through Congressional oversight, what’s the solution?

First off, I think we should force Congress to clean up their collective act on omnibus bills.  Force every bill to be single topic.  This will dramatically cut down on the length of bills and will require every bill that is put before Congress to addressed on its merits.  No more attaching ANWR drilling provisions to defense appropriations or sneaking Congressional pay raises into health care bills.  As a side benefit, Presidents calling for line-item vetos would probably become a thing of the past.

Secondly, I think we should require that no legislation is taken up before the whole House or Senate without every member present having at least read the legislation themselves.  Since every bill would be single-topic, they’d all be a lot smaller and easier to read, and they’d also be quicker, on average, to debate.  Similarly, all bills that come out of conference comittee must be re-read by all members of both the House and Senate before they’re voted on.  We’ve seen too many examples recently of provisions being added in closed conference comittees that were in neither the House nor the Senate versions of the bills but that the House or Senate leadership wanted and couldn’t get any other way.

And thirdly, I think we should require that staffers not be allowed to slip bits of new legislation into bills without their Representative or Senator boss knowing about it.  If a Congressperson wants to have help from a staffer, that’s fine, but if that staffer adds something, the Congressperson must personally sign off on the addition.  This way we have accountability for BS like stripping the Senate of it’s authority to hold confirmation hearings for U.S. attorneys.

---

There are groups out there working to force Congress to read every word of every bill they pass.  One is DownsizeDC.org, and they have a Read the Laws Act that has already been circulated throughout Congress.  It basically calls for every Representative and Senator to read every word of every bill that is voted on.  Another is the Council on Foreign Relations, who have put out a study saying, among other things, that the length of bills and the pace of legislation are both part of the problem in international relations

[Crosspost:  Scholars & Rogues, The 5th Estate]

Thursday, May 10, 2007

Time to Revamp the Federal Poverty Threshold

According to a study from the Colorado Fiscal Policy Institute (CFPI) (and reported in the Rocky Mountain News), 20% of Colorado families are struggling. Two-thirds of these families are not below the federal poverty line, but are married couples with children where one or both parents are working full time to support the family. While only 7% of families were below the poverty line, an additional 13% were below the “self-sufficiency standard” used by the CFPI.

Self-sufficiency was defined by the CFPI as a measure the cost of housing, food, health care, child care, transportation, and other factors (the actual publication isn’t yet available on line at the CFPI’s website, or I’d detail the factors more accurately). According to the Census Bureau’s description of how the official poverty thresholds are calculated, the thresholds are calculated largely using a method developed in 1963 and ‘64 using Dept. of Agriculture food budgets and the estimated percentage of income spent on food.

The difference between 20% of families truly struggling vs. 7% according to the official federal tallies is perhaps the most damning evidence that the way we’ve calculated poverty in the United States is out of date. According to the Census Bureau, the threshold is flat across the country, yet anyone who has moved between California, Colorado, Connecticut, or Alabama knows that the standards of living vary radically between different regions of the country (and can vary widely within a single state). Food and transportation cost more in rural areas, housing costs less, child care costs a lot everywhere, etc.

The disparities between standards of living are so extreme that, when I was unemployed for nearly 6 months, I was still turning down offers in California simply because my wife and I couldn’t afford to live there without a raise so massive that no company in their right mind would ever pay it. And going the other direction, I know people who left California for Colorado, bought a house with cash and took a year off from work just on the profits they made from selling their house in California.

Additionally, the Census Bureau’s measure of income doesn’t include things like non-monetary income (like food stamps) or tax-related income in the form of credits and taxes paid to various government entities. Including factors like the costs of housing, transportation, child care, health care, taxes, and the income from tax credits or food stamps would create a much more accurate picture of poverty nationwide.

The Public Policy Institute of California produced a study in 2006 that compared the official poverty threshold for 2004 (the latest year for which data was available at the time) vs. a regionally adjusted measurment that included housing alone. The differences were stark: the housing cost-adjusted numbers put 16.1% of Californians below the poverty threshold, as opposed to 13.3% according to the official federal figures. This amounts to an increase of 1 million Califorinians living in poverty. The same study looked at some other regions of the country and found that only Washington D.C. and New York would have had higher rates of poverty than the state of California over the period of 2001-2004. To put this in more concrete terms, the official poverty threshold nationwide for a family of 4 in 2004 was $19,157, but the “fair market rent” for a 2 bedroom appartment in San Francisco was over $21,000 per year. (Link to the complete study)

Given that the study for California included only the additional factor of housing, the disparity including transportation, child care, etc. would probably be significantly higher. After all, anyone who has road-tripped from outside of California can tell you that the cost of gasoline in California is usually much higher than it is nearly anywhere else in the country.

So, if the official poverty threshold is so obviously inaccurate, why hasn’t the federal government updated it since 1963? To be fair, the government has updated it some. The poverty threshold originally wasn’t indexed for inflation, an error that was corrected in 1969. Minor changes (like eliminating gender as a category) have been implemented since, but that was really the last major change to the calculation. The problem is that updating the official poverty threshold to include more people isn’t politically popular for a variety of reasons. Moving people off the rolls of welfare (an idea that most people agree with, so long as they’re moved into jobs instead of off the radar) has become such a huge issue that defining more people as poor could be political suicide for any politician who dared to suggest it.

But I think it’s more than that. The poverty threshold determines how many people get access to federal money - money like Medicaid funds. Medicaid is currently about 1.5% of the entire federal budget, but without any changes to the eligibility threshold, it’s projected by the Congressional Budget Office to grow to 5.3 percent of the federal budget by 2075. Imagine how fast Medicaid would grow if you increased the number of people who qualified by making the definition of poverty more inclusive instead of less.

There’s another factor I think is in play here. According to the PPIC study, the largest single factor contributing to the adjusted poverty threshold in California is the disparity in income growth between the highest and lowest income levels. Because California’s income disparity grew faster than the national average, the income growth drove up California property values faster and thus the very factor used to calculate the adjusted poverty rate. Growth in income disparity between the wealthiest and the poorest members of society is an issue that the Republican-dominated presidencies since the 1970s have conveniently ignored or, more recently, actively and (IMO) intentionally accelerated. Income disparity has been a significant issue with the Bush Administration, and so there was no way that the wealthy Republicans in power for the last six years would have given their critics more leverage to harp on a ostensibly Democratic issue - poverty.

And finally, if you read the study closely (and go through Ms. Reed’s presentation on the subject), you find that only New York and Washington D.C. had higher poverty levels than the state of California under the more inclusive number calculated in the study. In fact, the 3-year average of housing-cost adjusted poverty has the following:

• Washington D.C.: 21.0%


• New York: 16.3%


• California: 15.7%


• Texas: 15.0%


• Louisiana: 14.5%

Notice anything interesting about the states? Of the four states with the highest poverty level, two of them almost always vote Democratic, and combined they carry 86 electoral votes vs. the other two (Texas and Louisiana) carrying 43 electoral votes. Essentially, updating the federal poverty thresholds to include housing costs (and maybe other costs as well) would send more money to the most populous, highly urbanized states, which tend to be Democratic states, and the Republicans don’t want to give the Democrats any more money than they have to. The cynic in me can’t help but wonder if part of the push to move people off the welfare rolls is also a political drive to strip money away from traditionally Democratic districts as much as it is to drive down welfare spending.

Politics isn’t fair, and playing politics with the poor is nothing new - both major parties can be, and regularly are, fairly accused of instigating class warfare. But, as with so many issues these days, some issues should be beyond politics. Addressing poverty is one of those issues. It’s impossible to truly address the problem of poverty with public and/or private resources without first having good data, and it’s quite obvious that the current method of calculating poverty is unable to provide accurate data. For that reason it is time to revamp how the federal government calculates the poverty line.

Unfortunately, changing how poverty is calculated is unlikely over the next two years. The expanded threshold would benefit Democrats both practically (by directing more federal money into generally Democratic districts) and politically, and so it will almost certainly draw a veto from President Bush. The Democrats don’t have enough seats and Republican allies on this issue to override a veto. However, guaranteed failure doesn’t mean we shouldn’t pressure Congress to raise this issue - the attention a veto would garner could only be good for the country by way of educating people about this problem.

Crossposted: Scholars and Rogues and The 5th Estate

Tuesday, May 08, 2007

The Micro-Pundit - The Latest on Melamine

It’s official - the FDA, the CDC, the DHS, the USDA, and the EPA all worked together to determine that the chickens and pigs that were fed melamine-contaminate feed are safe to eat (link here).  In fact, you can probably eat nothing but melamine-affected meat and still be at 1/2500th the official danger dose.  This is such a large margin that even if we find in 10 years to have been off on the toxicity of melamine by a factor of 100, we’re still 1/10th the new danger dose - and that’s assuming you eat nothing but melamine-fed meat.  Unfortunately, it now appears that the spiked gluten products were also sold to a Canadian company that converted it into fishmeal that is fed to farmed fish, but based on the same information above, I’m not worried.

Realistically, I think it’s a safe bet that every commercial meat in the U.S. that isn’t organically raised has been fed melamine-contaminated feed.  Beef, chicken, pork, fish - it’s probably only a matter of time.  So I’m not going to worry about melamine in the human food supply any longer (the pet supply, however, is another thing entirely) unless some new evidence surfaces that says melamine is a more potent carcinogen than dioxin.

Which, by the way, you get a lot of out of your grill.  Probably more than you get melamine from the steak or chicken breast your grilling.

Crossposted:  Scholars and Rogues

The Daily Mantra:  Golden Rule of Politics

I think I’ve said this before, but it’s important enough that it bears repeating.

The Golden Rule of Politics is:  Use no political tactics against your opponents that you wouldn’t want used against you, for you will not always be in power.

Tuesday, May 01, 2007

New Hope for an Alzheimer’s Cure

After my sophomore year of college, my father and I took my aging grandfather on a week-long road trip to Yellowstone National Park.  We stayed in a beautiful old hotel on Lake Yellowstone and did day trips around the park, visiting my sister one day, going to Old Faithful another, watching bison and grizzly bears and wolves, etc.  It was wonderful and beautiful, and it is one of the best times my dad and I have ever had.  Unfortunately, my grandfather was suffering from Alzheimer’s at the time, and he thought he had traveled to Yellowstone not as a vacation and a chance to look at natural beauty in the springtime, but as a trip to doctors for yet another round of tests.  I’ll never forget his surprise at seeing my aunt come out of our house when we got back from the trip (she had flown with him because he wasn’t safe to fly alone).  It was heartbreaking.

A few years ago my old Toyota Camry started to click as I turned and accelerated.  This is a sure sign of problems on a front wheel drive car, so my wife and I decided to donate it.  After much discussion, we decided that we should find some non-profit in the Colorado area that could really use the money from the donation, and I went hunting on-line to see who would accept cars.  Eventually I stumbled across the Colorado Chapter of the Alzheimer’s Association.  And when I saw that they accepted cars, I immediately knew two things.  The first was that they were going to get my Camry.  The second was that my Yellowstone experience with my dad and grandfather (who had died in the interim) had affected me more profoundly than I realized at the time.

Ever since then, I’ve been attuned to health news about Alzheimer’s disease.  There are genetic components to the disease (something that scares the crap out of me), there are environmental components, and while there is significant agreement as to the biological cause (plaques on neurons and fewer dendrite connections between neurons in the brain) there is no consensus on what causes those plaques to develop in the first place.  And the research emphasis has been on figuring out ways to delay or prevent the onset of Alzheimer’s and on slowing its advance through the brain, not on curing Alzheimer’s once it’s damaged the brain.

Thankfully, “research emphasis” doesn’t mean that no-one was doing research on a cure, and new research is showing promise in reversing the main effect of Alzheimer’s – memory loss.  A new study out of MIT and published in the current issue of Nature describes how mice with intentionally atrophied brains were put into an “enriched environment” specifically designed to exercise the mice’s minds and bodies recovered some mental functioning and memory (tested by putting the mice in a maze) that the mice in bare cages did not.  In addition, an experimental class of drugs known as histone deacetylase (HDAC) inhibitors appeared to have the same effect as the enriched environment.

What this tells us is that physical exercise and an enriching, interactive environment appears to help reverse the brain atrophy associated with neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s.  It also tells us that a class of drugs historically used to fight cancer may also aid in reversing the effects, effectively curing the memory loss by enabling the brain’s neurons to regrow and reconnect to some amount of lost memory.

Experiments with mice are not experiments with people, and there are probably millions of things that could go wrong in transitioning from experiments with mice to human trials.  The fact that some of the HDAC inhibitor drugs are already used to fight cancer means that transitioning to human trials may be quite a bit simpler than for a totally unknown class of drugs.  And the experiments point to keeping the brain active (in ways similar to the adult-targeted video games described in this Discover Magazine article) as another way to stave off, or even reverse, neurodegenerative diseases.

Until now, all I have had was hope – hope that my grandfather’s genes had been diluted over two generations and hope that my environment was different enough from his that the two factors wouldn’t combine to consign me to a fate of memory loss and eventual dementia.  Now, though, I know that the physical exercise I need to control my high blood pressure and high cholesterol will also help my brain.  And I know that activities that keep my brain active too will also help stave off Alzheimer’s.  And, if all of that isn’t enough, that there may be pharmacological ways to prevent and/or cure Alzheimer’s.

I’ve been hoping for a medical advance in the treatment of neurodegenerative diseases in general (my grandmother had Parkinson’s disease) for a long time now, with little to show for my faith in medical progress.  Now my hope has been partly answered.

[Crossposted at:  The 5th Estate, Scholars and Rogues]