A recent article (via Reuters, via Hacker News) says that the US Congress should spend more time working and less time vacationing. I could go on and on about what Congress actually does when it is working, but that would go in the rants section of this blog. Here I just want to comment on one particular thing that struck me about the article.

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Fire Dog Lake is angry about the recent Senate vote that killed the Toomey-Manchin background check amendment to the latest gun control bill. However, the anger is not directed at the Democrats that voted against the amendment, but at those who voted for it.

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Some interesting items have come out of yesterday's oral arguments before the Supreme Court on the Defense of Marriage Act case. Since I've blogged about this case before, I wanted to take a look at the Court's handling of it.

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This is just a quick note to confirm that it's official: the media industry is lame. YouTube recently deleted more that 2 billion fake video views that were created by Sony, Universal, RCA, and other media companies. This violates YouTube's terms of service, of course, which is why the fake views were deleted. But that's a minor point compared to the big question: how lame do you have to be to generate fake views to make your videos appear to be more popular than they actually are? Remember we're not talking about a few teenagers shooting home videos; we're talking about the biggest media companies in the world.

But even that isn't the full extent of the lameness. Remember that these are the same companies that complain loudly about "pirated" videos being posted on sites like...YouTube. As I have blogged a number of times before, the reason these companies are having these problems is that they are either unwilling or unable to change their business models to give their customers what they actually want. If this is their attempt to try and fix that, they need to think again.

This is my obligatory blog post about the "fiscal cliff". One can't expect to maintain one's blogging credentials without making some comment on an issue like this, but I have been hesitant even so because there didn't seem to be anything worth saying that hadn't already been said many, many times. Then I came across this op-ed from yesterday's New York Times:

As the nation teeters at the edge of fiscal chaos, observers are reaching the conclusion that the American system of government is broken. But almost no one blames the culprit: our insistence on obedience to the Constitution, with all its archaic, idiosyncratic and downright evil provisions.

My take is exactly the opposite: our government is broken because we don't obey the Constitution, or indeed any coherent system of rules, if we think we can get our way by breaking them. And the fiscal cliff gives a perfect illustration of how this works and why it's a problem.

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I've posted a few times now about the Supreme Court, and at one point I noted that I had labeled myself a "strict constructionist". Now that the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) and California's Proposition 8 are going to the Supreme Court for review, having been found unconstitutional in a number of lower court cases, I have a chance to swing the pendulum back the other way somewhat.

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The New York Times' "Bits" blog has a post today arguing in favor of digital voting.

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Now that the 2016 campaign has officially started, I thought it would be a good time to take another look at campaign finance reform. This is a very frustrating subject for me, as I'm sure it is for many; every scheme I've seen so far, from what I can tell, is just an attempt by some special interest groups to give an advantage to their method of buying politicians over other methods of buying politicians. But I have a proposal to cut through all the posturing and get to the root of the problem:

The only entities who can make political contributions are those who can vote. In other words, only individual voters.

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I recently came across a blog post proposing a rather novel solution to what it calls "the shortage of technology talent in the United States".

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As reported by the Volokh conspiracy, the Pacific Legal Foundation is now asking a Federal court to rule that Obamacare violates the Origination Clause of the Constitution.

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