Just say no to more predatory gambling.

Here's a follow up story by Doug Grow of MinnPost to the legislators' press conference opposing the expansion of gambling to fund a new Vikings' stadium.

He notes the suggested expansion of "charitable" gambling.

Best bet on a special session?

Dayton will call it. There will be a piece of legislation — calling for a myriad of user taxes to be applied to the stadium — and it will be voted down. There will be a series of amendments, proposing such things as gaming to fund the project.

A source for charitable gaming said today that he thinks that one form of gambling — pull tabs in bars and bar bingo — could slide through. The charitable gambling crowd believes it could substantially improve its business and therefore its contribution to the state if a bill allowing electronic pull tabs and bingo was passed.

Currently, charitable gaming puts about $40 million annually into the state general fund. Supporters of electronic forms of the old games believe that amount could double.

Even though this measure has support from a handful of powerful legislators, it seems unlikely it could wiggle through a special session.

Gambling interests want to expand gambling whether the Vikings stadium is in play or not. Again, Minnesota needs less gambling not more. Expanding gambling to pay for the stadium simply creates more social problems. Legislators should find some other revenue source if they want to help the Vikings build a new stadium.

Baby Trafficking and Surrogacy

CNN ran a story on designer babies and IVF/surrogacy. Two reproductive law attorneys were charged in an illegal surrogacy business.

CNN’s Anderson Cooper and Sandra Endo this week reported on the surrogacy business of Hilary Neiman and Theresa Erickson, two of the most prestigious reproductive law attorneys in the world, who impregnated surrogates before adoptive parents were found. If the baby survived to the second trimester, the attorneys auctioned him or her off to the highest bidder, up to $180,000 per baby.

Theresa Erikson was caught heading-up an illegal baby-selling ring.The line between legal and illegal surrogacy is not always clear: the CNN story notes that the attorneys offered “designer babies in race and gender,” an option advertised by several U.S. IVF clinics legally. The business’s only legal foul was its non-compliance with California law requiring adoptive parents to sign up before the baby - already created in a laboratory - was implanted in a surrogate, instead of after.

“Trafficking in human life without having a parent ahead of time is really, I think, quite troubling,” FBI agent Keith Slaughter told CNN.

The problem is with the underlying use of surrogacy and money which invariably involves "baby selling." Transfer of children from birth mother to another person for money.

But Jennifer Lahl, the founder and president of The Center for Bioethics and Culture Network, said the chilling aspects of Neiman and Erickson’s “baby trafficking” don’t only belong to illegal fertility operations. “Ms. Erickson and her co-conspirators violated a legal distinction without a difference,” said Lahl.

“Erickson broke the law by having the surrogate impregnated before the contracts were signed. But commercial surrogacy, whether done legally or Erickson’s way, is still selling babies. Just because something is legal doesn’t make it ethical.”

Lahl pointed out to LSN that the particular California statute violated by Neiman and Erickson was not universal, and that the loose network of surrogacy laws around the world “change[s] all the time.”

“Babies are being bought and sold. Women are being exploited. Non-traditional families are being made with no consideration for the children created by these technologies,” said Lahl. “And in this specific case, we see that greed trumps all.”

The IVF industry operates with a presumption that babies prior to viability are expendable, a viewpoint found in the CNN story: one surrogate mom complained that she wanted out of the deal, but could not end the situation because she was near viability.

“I wanted to separate myself form the situation and you can’t do that when you’re pregnant—with a baby that’s almost viable,” she said. “She’s kicking, she’s moving, she’s a constant reminder.’

Lahl is the creator of Eggsploitation, a documentary on the victims of underregulation in the fertility industry, a movie which Erickson had strongly attacked as agenda-driven against fertility treatments before she was arrested.

“She has hammered me personally again and again in her TV show, because she put herself forward as such an ethical, above-board person,” Lahl told LifeSiteNews.com in a telephone interview this week.

“The truth has now come out and as it turns out, it is Erickson who has been doing the lying,” she wrote in August. “The public relations damage to the industry has been done, and who better to do it than the industry darling.”

Lahl told LSN that prior to Erickson’s arrest, “everybody wanted her on their board, and the moment she was busted everybody pretended they didn’t know her.” “Needless to say, the fertility industry is reeling,” she said.

This issue has come up repeatedly at the state legislature. It started out years ago as an option for infertile married couples. It immediately morphed into a for money, hire by anybody not just married couples. I think it's problematic even for married couples where compensation isn't present. It breaks down the birth mother/child bond and injects a number of other problematic factors into the equation, like "embryo destruction" which another name for abortion.

Group of legislators say no to gambling expansion for new Vikings stadium.

A bipartisan group of legislators held a press conference to voice their opposition to an expansion of gambling to pay for a new Vikings stadium.

The group included Republican senators' David Hann, Warren Limmer and David Thompson, Democrat senators' Scott Dibble and Tony Lourey, and Democrat reps Ann Lenczewski, Diane Loeffler, and Frank Hornstein.

It attracted a lot of media attention because it's a hot issue, e.g. Vikings stadium, possible session on the issue and it brought together such an eclectic group of legislators.

It just goes to show how legislators one day will agree on one issue and the next will be on opposite sides of another issue.

Senator Hann pointed out that gambling revenues isn't free money but causes a lot of damage along the way.

In recent years, almost every budget challenge we’ve faced has been met with a call for more casinos,” said Sen. David Hann, R-Eden Prairie. “The proponents of gambling describe this as harmless fun, entertainment and, in effect, free money.

“None of that is true. In fact, casino gambling is highly destructive to individuals, [and] to families,” he said.

I think it will be hard to pass a new stadium funding plan in a November special session. Some legislators don't want a special session period. Others oppose the gambling. Others oppose the stadium. And others are nervous about spending hundreds of millions on a new stadium when the state is likely to face additional budget shortfalls.

Disclosure of names on controversial issues means less free speech

Here's a very good summary of why the Minnesota Campaign Finance Board's overreach with disclosure of donors on ballot issues will hinder free speech.

Anthony Sanders, earlier this summer points out that

The First Amendment protects anonymous speech. This is especially true when that speech is controversial. When a citizen comments on an issue, but fears retribution from those who disagree, it is that citizen’s right to be free from the government publicly “outing” her identity. That’s something the Supreme Court has repeatedly recognized, from the NAACP not having to disclose its donors in 1950s labama, to anonymous pamphleteers remaining anonymous in the 1995 case McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Commission. These cases follow from the obvious proposition that disclosure chills speech.

The Campaign Finance Board is now changing the rules of the game midstream.

The Minnesota Campaign Finance Board, unfortunately, has chosen the opposite view. The board had a long-standing policy of not requiring organizations who donate to ballot campaign committees (committees that spend money to support or oppose ballot issues) to disclose their donors. The organizations’ donations are already disclosed by the campaign committees they give to, but the donor—the organization—did not have to say where it got its money from.

Until now. The board just announced it will adopt a new approach where nonprofit corporations who donate over $5,000 to ballot campaign committees must disclose donors of over $1,000. It is not a coincidence that this accompanies a very controversial ballot issue that Minnesotans will vote on in the 2012 elections: whether to adopt a constitutional amendment limiting marriage to opposite-sex couples.

The rule will undoubtedly chill speech on both sides of the same-sex marriage debate. Many people may want to give to organizations who may in turn contribute to groups campaigning on the issue, but will chose not to because they don’t want their private political views broadcast on the internet (which is what disclosure means in this day-and-age).

And of course this raises the question of what purpose the rule services beyond a fixation with where individuals stand on the Minnesota Marriage Protection Amendment. None really.

What purpose does this rule serve? Voters can decide where they stand on the issue without knowing where others stand, and they have no more right to know who is financially backing speech about the amendment than they have a right to know which way anyone will vote on it. But that’s the whole point--outing people who disagree with you on the issue. Proponents of the disclosure law want to be able to demonize those on the other side, and they can’t do that without forcing them to disclose their identities.

Criticizing those who disagree with you is perfectly valid in a free society. What’s not is the government forcing people to disclose information, including their identities, that they’d rather keep private.

Protest groups and "Railing Against Reality"

Here's an interesting piece "Railing Against Reality" by Victor David Hanson on the protests taking place around the world and in the US in response to our current economic malaise. While the situation is certainly more complex than can be addressed in a short article, he does make a number of interesting points.

He suggests there is a common denomination among all the protest movements. Frustation.

In the current left and right anger — somewhat analogous to the upheavals of 1848 or the 1930s — the common denominator is frustration that Western upward mobility of some 60 years seems to be coming to an end. In response, millions want someone or something to be held accountable — whether Wall Street insiders, or wasteful and corrupt governments, or the affluent, who have more than others.

He notes the inability of politicans to address the problems.

Unfortunately, political leaders — unwilling to risk their careers by irking the people — have offered few explanations for the root causes of all the various unrest. Instead, they assure us that Social Security is solvent, or that pensions and wages can remain sacrosanct, or that billionaires and millionaires are alone culpable. Sometimes they exploit race and class divisions in lieu of explaining 21st-century realities.

His explanation suggests government and people have lived beyond their means and the bills are now coming due.

So here goes an explanation for the multifaceted unrest. For the last six decades, constant technological breakthroughs and growing government subsidies have given a billion and a half Westerners lifestyles undreamed of over the last 2,500 years. In 1930, no one imagined that a few pills could cure life-threatening strep throat. In 1960, no one planned on retiring at 55. In 1980, no one dreamed that millions could have instant access to civilization’s collective knowledge in a few seconds through a free Google search.

Yet, the better life got in the West for ever more people, the more apprehensive they became, as their appetites for even more grew even faster. Remember, none of these worldwide protests are over the denial of food, shelter, clean water, or basic medicine.

None of these protesters discuss the effects of 2 billion Chinese, Indian, Korean, and Japanese workers’ entering and mastering the globalized capitalist system, and making things more cheaply and sometimes better than their Western counterparts.

None of these protesters ever stop to ponder the costs — and ultimately the effect on their own lifestyles — of skyrocketing energy costs. Since 1970 there has been a historic, multitrillion-dollar transfer of capital from the West to the Middle East, South America, Africa, and Russia through the importation of high-cost oil and gas.

None seem to grasp the significance of the fact that, meanwhile, hundreds of millions of Westerners were living longer and better, retiring earlier, and demanding ever more expensive government pensions and health care.

Something had to give.

And now it has. Federal and state budgets are near bankrupt. Countries like Greece and Italy face insolvency. The U.S. government resorts to printing money to service or expand entitlements. Near-zero interest rates, declining home prices, and huge losses in mutual funds and retirement accounts have crippled the middle classes.

Bigger government, marvelous new inventions, and creative new investment strategies are not going to restore the once-taken-for-granted good life. Until “green” means competitive renewable energy rather than a con for crony capitalists, we are going to have to create and save capital by producing more of our own gas and oil, and relying more on nuclear power and coal.

Westerners will have to work a bit longer and more efficiently, with a bit less redistributive government support. And they must confess that venture capitalists, hedge funds, and big deficit-spending governments are no substitute for producing themselves the real stuff of life that millions now take for granted — whether gas, food, cars, or consumer goods.

Otherwise, a smaller, older, and whinier West will just keep blaming others as their good life slips away. So it’s past time to stop borrowing to import energy and most of the things we use but have given up producing — and get back to competing in the real world.

He sees rising energy costs as an important factor. I'm not sure about that. I'd accent the rising debt and ballooning size of government and unsustainable rising cost of government programs.

Will the violent protests in Europe come to America? Certainly, if the economy stays in the doldrums, unemployment remains high, and people with an entitlement mindset start seeing their government social, welfare benefits cut back. This will cause people to lash out.