My own interpretation mirrors Mr. Volokh’s; I do not believe that there is any situation in which the First Amendment protects the anonymity of petition signers.  It is my hope that the Supreme Court with affirm the Ninth Circuit’s decision with clarification on the reasoning.  Even if there is no clarification of reasoning, however, a simple affirmation would still be a defensible position in my mind.

That a president who is currently presiding over two wars and who is seriously considering sending an additional 40,000 troops into battle in Afghanistan can be awarded a prize for peace is shameful and those who cannot see this obvious absurdity are blinded by the same ideological biases as the Nobel Committee.

One could just as easily take the exact same poll and just a truthfully say: “90% of doctors oppose government control of healthcare.”

The article is playing fast and loose with wording. 63% of doctors favor the inclusion of a public option while keeping private insurance available. 10% favor the exclusive use of a government plan. It is inaccurate to say that 73% support the inclusion of a public option because that 10% don’t support an “inclusion”, they support exclusivity of the governmental system. There’s a big difference between those two viewpoints and it’s bad statistics to lump them into the same group.

Ultimately, this is the issue with statistics.  People need to remember to check on the underlying data before immediately regurgitating what some news article claims the data “find”.  Even more of an issue than the sloppy statistical analysis in the article, however, is the unproven premise upon which the article’s implication rests.

The article implies that, because physicians favor the inclusion of a public option, such an inclusion is a good idea.  This implication requires that there be two separate logical fallacies in play.  First is the fallacy of appeal to authority in which it is assumed that physicians, whose task is healing the physical body, are qualified to judge the economic and metaphysical desirability of a public option.  Unfortunately there is no solid evidence to suggest that physicians, as a group, are any more equipped to judge the economic or metaphysical wisdom of such plans than any other group.  The second fallacy in play is the appeal to popularity.  Even if physicians were, as a group, more able to evaluate the consequences of a public option (which they are not), the mere popularity of a public option among physicians would not be sufficient proof that a public option was a good idea.

As has been said many times, “what is popular is not always right, and what is right is not always popular.”

Airline Miles Earned:  110,244
AmEx Charges:  $28,882.35
Total Days YTD:  229
Days on Road YTD:  136 (59.4%)
Days on Road During Current Project:  136 (80%)

This is not so much a “thing” in the sense of a named event or entity, but it’s still a situation that baffles me:

For the past several years, I have been receiving E-mails intended for someone else due to a similarity in our addresses.  Mildly annoying because the majority of these misdirected E-mails have been the result of this other person mis-typing her own E-mail into form subscriptions or contact lists, so it’s not like strangers are making the typos; she should know her own E-mail address.  Yesterday she enrolled in online banking through Wachovia.  Using my E-mail address.  Ponder the consequences of that for a moment.

All of that, however, is mere background to the upcoming absolutely stunningly illogical event that is about to occur.

Being a (relatively) nice guy, I forward the welcome message to Wachovia’s customer service department notifying them that I did not have an account with their company and that I should not be receiving information about someone else’s bank accounts.  (It might just be me, but I don’t think it’s a particularly good thing for strangers to receive each other’s banking information.)  I received the following response from Wachovia:

Unless you are a customer, we are unable to de-enroll your e-mail address.

That’s right.  Because I was not a customer, they refused to stop sending me E-mails containing someone else’s account information.

In the meantime, while waiting for their reply, I received a “daily balance notification” letting me know how much money was in an account that didn’t belong to me.

I notified Wachovia again.  Same response.

Unless you are a customer, we are unable to de-enroll your e-mail address.

After receiving several more E-mails from Wachovia containing information about an account that did not belong to me (and notifying Wachovia each time), I finally received a reply from a higher-level customer service manager.

I have contacted the customer who had your e-mail address on file. I have found that there was a typo in the e-mail address. I have taken care of this issue.

A few minutes later, I received an E-mail from Wachovia’s automated online banking system:

Our records indicate that you recently added or made a change to one of your email address(es). This notification is to confirm that you initiated this change.

All it took was repeated pushing on my end to get them to correct the issue.  If I had given up after the first response, I would still be receiving information about an account which I do not own.

It should not take repeated notifications on my part for a bank to stop sending me the account information for a stranger.  They should have suspended the account’s automated E-mails immediately after my initial notification to them and then contacted the account holder about the mix-up rather than doing nothing until I harassed them enough to get it kicked up to an upper-level representative.

Wachovia, I have a suggestion for a new slogan:

Online banking security; we’re doing it wrong.

If you’re female, it’s pretty much a dead cert that you aren’t Dagny Taggert.

Really.  I mean it.  At best you might be Eddie Willers or Cherryl Brooks, but you’re not motive power.  If you were, you wouldn’t be striking up  superficial conversation with someone in an airport strictly on the basis of the book he’s reading.

Just saying…

While ostensibly enacted to combat what the town feels to be a waste of resources (in bottling and shipping water that is more efficiently delivered straight from the tap), it should be clear to any thinking person that the ban’s true motivation is simply good, old-fashioned, selfish NIMBY-ism.  A few years ago, a bottled water suppler proposed to build a water extraction plant near the town and, like all good bedroom communities fearful of industrial developments harming their presious property values, Bundanoon has resisted the proposal tooth and nail.  The supplier’s proposal is still fighting Bundanoon’s obstructionist legal challenges and the passage of this new law ultimately represents little more than petulance on Bundanoon’s part.

The fact that this “ban” is ultimately a mere “feel-good” measure is patently obvious to anyone who reads far enough to see that it carries no penalty whatsoever for non-compliance.  That’s right boys and girls, compliance with this so-called “ban” is entirely optional.  The same people who got on a moral high-horse about the inefficiencies and wastefulness of bottled water have, in their woefully misguided zeal, gone through the inefficient and wasteful process of creating an unenforceable law when the same outcome could have been obtained more efficiently simply by going door-to-door and asking the businesses to stop carrying bottled water.

Well done lads.  You’ve wasted everyone’s time and spent taxpayer dollars to do something that could have been done for free in less time.  *golf-clap*

Editor’s Note:  I was away from the blog and did not see this in my publishing queue until today; the delay is entirely my own fault and not that of Mr. Nebulosa.