Aurorafest issues: environment, safety, ethics

Here are three good reasons to boycott Aurorafest (this August in Polebridge).

1. Environmental: Festivals like this that are held in remote locales put an unnecessary strain on an area that lacks adequate infrastructure. The ecological footprint of hundreds of people traveling the North Fork Road, combined with the wear and tear placed on Polebridge and the surrounding wilderness damages the health of every living creature. The garbage, poo and overall sense of entitlement spills out of Polebridge into the North Fork where unpaid locals are forced to clean up. I assure you if we had wanted that responsibility we would have stayed in town.

2. Safety: Many North Forkers have heard and can recount stories of Aurorafest recklessness but here are a few of my favorites:

a. Unattended, raging campfires in the middle of the day, in the middle of fire season. Imagine the chaos that would ensue, including potential loss of life, when evacuation takes place.

b. A ruptured spleen that almost cost a musician his life when he drunkenly fell from a second story. Medical attention was not received immediately because there was no medical personnel present! Then there is the expense and vital response time of the trip back to the Valley.

c. Lastly, the amount of unregulated alcohol with little or no police presence puts all locals at risk. I would like to remind some of you old timers the outcry of locals when the Rainbow Festival was held here. And the Rainbow Family has a board of directors who take all of these issues into account and organize crews to contain and clean.

3. Ethics: I believe that inundating the population of Polebridge with party-goers is not only thoughtless, it's rude. Though it is often commented that Polebridgers are not North Forkers their quest for quiet and seclusion is evident. The only locals who voluntarily still attend Aurorafest are vendors.

There are great festivals held in Bigfork, Whitefish and Kalispell. The populations of those areas expect, maybe even anticipate, the tourist rush. They have areas designated for partygoers and police presence regulates their behavior. The amount of drunk driving is significantly lower than what is allowed to drive out of Polebridge. "It's just a dirt road" they say, "What's the big deal?" The big deal is the families, animals and children are out on that road, too.

While you are planning your summer activities I beg you take these issues — environment, safety and ethics — into account no matter where you are going. Travel to places that are designated to accommodate you.

Emily Walter is a third-generation North Forker for Peace and Quiet.

How do we reduce partisanship in U.S.?

There are times when Congress and much of the political class in Washington remind me of a child who can't resist sneaking a handful of cookies from the jar: They know that too much partisanship is getting them in trouble, but they can't help themselves. Politicians want one more maneuver to make the other side look bad; one more hunk of red meat tossed to the party's base; one more legislative stand-off to show their partisans they mean what they say. Then they'll reckon with the public's clear preference for political leaders who know how to work together.

I know that politics is a contact sport, and hard-hitting partisan competition is unavoidable, even desirable. It offers clear choices and different approaches to solving our problems, and it enhances the accountability of those in power when the other side is willing to point out weaknesses in their thinking or their performance.

Still, the country at large yearns for less polarization these days, and believes that partisan engagement has gone too far. Even Washington insiders acknowledge that the extreme partisanship of recent years has made it more difficult to govern productively, leading more often to stalemate than to policy advances. They go to great oratorical lengths to deplore how partisan the institution has become. Acknowledging the problem, though, is easier than knowing what to do about it.

For it's a tough one. As a nation, we remain closely divided in our political philosophies. The upshot in Congress is that party leaders assess each bill for how it will help or hurt chances to pick up seats; the lens through which they see legislation too often has to do with power, not effective policy making.

So what can we do? The first step, I believe, rests with American voters. However slowly, Congress responds to what its members hear back home. A drumbeat of dislike for mean-spirited partisanship and insistence on working through differences will eventually get through. Members of Congress must be held responsible for the kind of institution they inhabit.

There's a tougher nut to crack, too, which has to do with rebuilding the strength of the dormant center in American politics. On this front, there are any number of steps that might make little difference alone, but together could add up to a sea change in how Washington operates.

One of them is already happening: the rise of the Internet for fundraising. The ability to go over the heads of well-heeled special interests and fund a campaign through the small donations of ordinary Americans has the potential to rewrite political candidates' loyalties once they're in office. The less financial influence wielded by groups with a specific cause, the better the chance that our essential moderation as a nation will get reflected in Washington.

Equally important is a growing restlessness with how congressional districts get drawn. For the most part, district maps are designed by state legislatures, which often defer to the wishes of their congressional delegations. Somehow, these maps nearly always produce safe districts for one party or the other, instead of competitive districts that would produce candidates adept at forging coalitions of independents and moderates of both parties. Turning redistricting over to independent commissions charged with crafting districts based on commonality of interest and geographic compactness, rather than partisan affiliation, may not be a panacea, but it would make a difference.

It's important for members of Congress to look deliberately for issues that hold the hope of successful bipartisanship. Our nation's need for investment in its aging infrastructure — its roads, bridges and transportation networks — offers one such possibility. It's not a partisan issue; it's a good governance issue.

Lee Hamilton is director of the Center on Congress at Indiana University. He was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives for 34 years.

Don't mess with American ingenuity

What if I told you that labor unions, small-business associations, drug companies, physicians' groups, prominent academics, and the Bush administration were all lined up against a major piece of federal legislation currently winding its way through congress?

Would the convergence of these normally disparate interests make you suspicious of the legislation, sight unseen?

It should. All these groups have publicly opposed the Patent Reform Act, a bill that's supposedly aimed at modernizing America's patent system. Backed by several large technology companies, the measure passed the House last September and is currently under consideration in the Senate.

To be sure, the U.S. patent system is in need of change; it's costly, complicated and litigious. But the Patent Reform Act goes overboard with its overhauls, drastically weakening intellectual property protections and jeopardizing future innovation.

Take, for instance, a provision in the bill reworking the way that patent-infringement damages are calculated.

Currently, damages are based on the market value of the product as a whole, factoring in the patented innovation. Generally speaking, courts have asked how much money the patent holder would have made if the infringement hadn't occurred. The dollar answer is roughly equivalent to how much the infringer owes the innovator.

The bill would narrow that calculation to consider only the economic value of the patented innovation itself, not the value of the product on the whole.

That switch might make sense for, say, patented parts in mechanical products. It's relatively easy to appraise a particular kind of rudder, for instance, outside the total value of the airplane it's used in.

But the switch is illogical when it comes to other products, like pharmaceuticals. Active drug ingredients normally aren't worth a dime outside the context of the drugs they're in. What's more, it's effectively impossible to parse out the benefits of a particular patented portion of a drug.

Thus, the new standard would both drastically decrease the monetary value of a slew of U.S. pharmaceutical patents and reduce the damages for infringing on those patents.

Consequently, a chilling question arises: Would you invest nearly a billion dollars — the average cost to bring a new drug to market — on a new medication if a counterfeiter could copy it the second it went on sale and pay you only a small fraction of his profits as penalty?

If you wouldn't, do you think America's pharmaceutical companies would?

The benefits of medical innovation cut across party lines. Undermining the patent protections that drive that innovation is bad news for everyone. No wonder the Patent Reform Act is finding opposition across the political spectrum.

Douglas Schoen was a campaign consultant for more than 30 years and is the author of Declaring Independence: The Beginning of the End of the Two-Party System.