MUTH'S TRUTHS 05/21/2013

"NO INTERNET TAX!" LETTER SENT

Thanks to everyone who signed Citizen Outreach’s letter to Reps. Joe Heck and Mark Amodei in opposition to Congress’ effort to force out-of-state retailers to collect “use” taxes from YOU on your online purchases from out-of-state companies. 

The letter was sent to both representatives earlier today.  If you’d like to see the final letter with the names of everyone who signed it, click here

TAXE HIKES BY ANY OTHER NAME STILL STINK

From this morning’s Ralston Reports: Nevada Gov. Brian “Artful Doger” Sandoval (R&R-Partners), “has seeded his budget with plenty of fees, some of which grow from old ones and some are brand new ones that can grow in future budgets. … So how much in fees did Sandoval put in his original budget as he declared ‘no new taxes’ to the world? About $60 million – not huge, not insignificant. And as lawmakers are about to approve his budget essentially intact, it’s worth looking at exactly what they are.”

• Newborn Screening Fee:  $390,000
• Cost sharing for certain Medicaid recipients: $2 million
• New Per Month Per Member fees for Silver State health Exchange: $14.3 million
• ACA-mandated fee to support PCOR: $288,000
• Assessment on all employers to pay interest on Unemployment Insurance loan: $31 million
• DPS Rap Back Program: $45,000
• New admin fine from fire marshal: $2,000
• Increase for the fee for Motorcycle Safety Program: $4,000
• DMV fee to fund new license plate factory: $3.7 million
• New fee for decals for special fuel users: $90,000
• Increases annual special tax on livestock heads: $109,000
• Outreach fee for education on aquatic invasive species: $250,000
• Another fee from wildlife for aquatic invasive species outreach/inspection: $900,000
• Another aquatic invasive species fee: $70,000
• Increase in water resources fees: $730,000
• New water resources fees: $730,000
• New fire protection fees: $3.5 million
• Increase to per-employee fee for EMRB: $375,000

ONLY 2 GOP CHAMPIONS OF CONSTITUTION IN CARSON CITY

When all was said and done and the dust settled yesterday, only two Republican state legislators voted against the bill allowing DNA samples to be taken from a personACCUSED, not convicted, of any felony, violent or otherwise in direct contravention of the alleged’s 4^th and 5^th Amendment rights: Assemblywoman Michele Fiore and Assemblyman James Oscarson.

Seven Assembly Democrats also had the political courage to stand up in the face of heavy emotional pressure to do the wrong thing. They were: Paul Aizley, Richard Carillo, Lesley Cohen, Dina Neal, James Ohrenschall, Ellen Spiegel and Heidi Swank.

The bill already passed in the Senate 21-0, and now only awaits the governor’s rubber stamp.

Although this is a done deal, I think it’s still useful to reflect on exactly why this feel-good bill should have been killed, as outlined by our friend Durk Pearson four years ago when the proposal first made its debut before the Nevada Legislature.

First, as I did four years ago, let me share with you Mr. Pearson’s bona fides…

“Durk Pearson was born in 1943 and grew up on a farm in Illinois. He was reading by the age of four, and decided to become a scientist at that early age.

“While a student at MIT, he was a member of the MIT Science Fiction Society and one of the writers for the early underground comic God Comics. He took a triple major at MIT in physics, biology, and psychology, with a triple minor in electrical engineering, computer science, and chemistry, graduating with a B.S. in physics in 1965. His score on the Graduate Record Exam was the highest in the nation for that year.

“Durk has patents in the area of oil shale and tar sands recovery, lasers, holography, supplement formulations. He worked on all of the manned aerospace programs from Project Gemini to the Space Shuttle and won numerous awards, including an award from the International Society for Testing and Failure Analysis for his penetrating quality control and safety analysis. He wrote much of the safety manual for the Materials and Processing Laboratory on the Shuttle.”

And here’s Mr. Pearson’s argument against the DNA bill…

“Dear Chuck.  I want to warn you about a terrible unintended consequence of testing the DNA of everyone accused of a felony. The obvious problem of the $6+ megabuck cost is just the tip of the iceberg. The greater part of the iceberg is hidden from view in the complexities of statistics.

“If a woman says that I am the father of her child, a DNA test can determine with very high accuracy whether that is the case. Note that the DNA from one person, the child, is being compared to the DNA of one other person, the purported father.

“The situation is radically different when the DNA from tens of thousands of crime scenes is being compared against a database of the DNA of tens of thousands (or many millions at the national level) of felony arrestees. The difference is the statistical risk of a false positive.

“In the one-on-one paternity case, the risk of a false positive is vanishingly low. But the risk of false positives becomes nearly 100% when tens of thousands of samples are compared against millions of samples – hundreds of billions of fishing expedition comparisons, not one attempt at a match.

“If the risk of a laboratory mistake causing a false positive is 1 in 100,000, that risk is acceptable in a paternity case. It is acceptable where the DNA of one particular suspect is compared to the DNA left at one particular crime scene. It is NOT acceptable when there are billions of promiscuous fishing attempt matches being made between large DNA databases. Many innocent people will be arrested and almost certainly convicted for felonies that they did not commit.

“Please contact the Nobel Prize winning biologist whose work made these DNA tests possible. He created the Innocence Project where one on one DNA comparisons have freed over 200 wrongly convicted people.

“The proposal to take DNA samples from all persons arrested for felonies is a horror show of false convictions waiting to happen.

“One final note: When a prosecuting attorney says that the odds are a million to one that the DNA match proves guilt, he is either grossly ignorant or lying. Those huge odds do not consider the error rate (such as mixing up samples and cross-contamination) of the testing laboratory which is never as good as one error per 100,000 samples. This means a nightmare of false positive matches when every felony arrestee’s DNA is matched against every crime scene DNA.”

Let me repeat Mr. Pearson’s main point: “The proposal to take DNA samples from all persons arrested for felonies is a horror show of false convictions waiting to happen.”

Republicans who run campaigns purporting to be champions of the Constitution will rue the day they voted for this bill.  And by the way, because the bill also raises a new fee, it required a 2/3 vote to pass.  In other words, this very bad bill could have been killed if just two additional Republicans, out of 13, had voted to uphold and defend the Constitution.

Sad.  Very sad.