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What’s Wrong Today:

No, there is no sausage. With limited access to the Internet today, here are a couple of items on the web that the Wrongologist will not have time to write about, but that are worthy of your consideration.

First, The Incidental Economist alerted about the Journal of the American Medical Association’s report: An Analysis of Campaign Contributions to Federal Elections, 1991 Through 2012. Here is a part of JAMA’s a synopsis of the report:

Objective: To analyze campaign contributions that physicians made from the 1991 to 1992 through the 2011 to 2012 election cycles to Republican and Democratic candidates in presidential and congressional races and to partisan organizations, including party committees and super political action committees (Super PACs)

Design, Setting, and Participants: We explored partisan differences in physician contributions by sex, for-profit vs nonprofit practice setting, and specialty using multiple regression analysis. We studied the relation between the variation in the mean annual income across specialties and the mean percentage of physicians within each specialty contributing to Republicans

Main Outcomes and Measures: Differences in contributions to Republicans and Democrats, for all physicians and for subgroups

Here are their key findings:

  • Physician contributions to campaigns went from $20 million in 1991-92 to almost $190 million in 2011-12. The percentage of physicians who contributed went from 2.6% to 9.4%.
  • The percentage contributing to Republicans has decreased over time. In fact, in both the 2007-8 and 2011-12 elections, more physicians contributed to Democratic campaigns than to Republican campaigns. Never mind that they worked significantly harder in the 2010 Congressional elections to elect Republicans.

The common meme is that most doctors oppose the ACA. If so, they didn’t seem to put their political money where their mouths were/are since 2010.

The report also shows that there are big gender differences among Doctors who contribute. About 52% of male physicians who contributed, gave to Republican candidates, while 76% of female physicians who contributed, gave to Democrats.

We will have to wait and see what the trends look like after the 2014 off-year elections. Perhaps the high point in opposition to the ACA by physicians was in 2010.

Second, Barry Ritholtz reported at his Big Picture blog about The Senate Committee on Foreign Relations hearing on March 21st regarding the renewal of the Authorization for the Use of Force (AUMF) in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Apparently, Senators repeatedly asked representatives from the Department of Defense which groups America is at war with.

Wait for it…

The DOD refused to answer! The ACLU’s deputy legal director and director of the ACLU’s Center for Democracy (Jameel Jaffer) was at the hearing and tweeted:

Senate: Which groups are we at war with? Admin: That’s classified. http://t.co/olW6B6Wy35

— Jameel Jaffer (@JameelJaffer) May 21, 2014

The implication is clear. DOD is saying to the Senate: Don’t ask who or why, just clap louder.  

The DOD says “that’s classified” because there can be no answer. We do not have a coherent enemy. We don’t really have a clue who we are currently at war with. Some days, it probably looks like everybody.

And whoever they are, we think they are going to be shooting at us real soon.

It is Congress’ Constitutional responsibility to declare war. So, the DOD’s answer should be: ‘no one’, because we have not declared ‘war’ on anyone.

The implication, by Senators asking the question, is that Congress has completely abdicated their Constitutional responsibility.

Hypocrisy rules!

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