Edward Luce’s book has been widely praised as carefully balanced and filled with evocative analysis and reportage. With a cast of dozens of academic, business and governmental thinkers, it wrestles with America’s relative economic decline, how the global economy is increasingly siphoning away America’s ability to innovate and manufacture, and a wide range of U.S. policy failures from education to healthcare to reinventing government. Too often Internet-entranced readers like me look for distillations to digest quickly, rather than dwell on the fascinating interviews, anecdotal treasure chest, and hard-nosed analyses in Mr. Luce’s detailed yet highly entertaining book.

Private health insurance exchanges, like those created by the Affordable Care Act or in Medicare Advantage, have historically failed to control costs. Part of the reason is the basic economic issue of individuals lacking real market power and actually choosing the “best” insurance option, which is extremely complicated. Another problem is lobbying related. Whenever you needlessly create private middlemen you also create another layer of lobbyists.

Hat tip to Boing Boing for passing along this juicy bit of Sunlight Foundation news concerning Mike Rogers (R-MI) and his love of that sweet, sweet CISPA lobby money.

Chris Stewart, a Republican from Utah, was recently appointed Chair of the House subcommittee on Science.

This means that Congressman Stewart now has dominion over the EPA, climate change research, and “all activities related to climate.”

The power of the petroleum industry in California may be unparalleled in the states. Its lobbying machine is stupendously successful. For instance, California remains the only significant oil producer that does not tax oil extracted in the state. It has very weak–perhaps the weakest–regulation of oil and gas extraction, particularly hydraulic fracturing of deep deposits, known as “fracking.” State environmental laws are under constant attack.

There was a bit of controversy in southeastern Minnesota recently when it was discovered that Dennis Egan, the newly re-elected mayor of the City of Red Wing, had taken a job as a lobbyist for a recently-organized lobbying group backing frac sand mining. As Greater Minnesota chronicler Sally Jo Sorensen notes, this was such a boneheadedly unethical move that even the pro-mining Winona Daily News asked “What was he thinking?” (My guess is that he figured that, since his being a career lobbyist for firms with Republican ties, a lobbyist so dedicated to his trade that he started and ran his own lobbying firm, hadn’t apparently set off any alarm bells for the voters of Red Wing, he could get away with having as another boss an entity determined to turn the beautiful bluffs of Red Wing and environs into huge sand mining sites.)

The actual act of fracking isn’t the only controversial part of the fracking process. Mining the sand needed for fracking has its own problems, as Red Wing, Minnesota mayor and frac sand mining lobbyist Dennis Egan is discovering.

The National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) describes itself as “a bipartisan organization that serves the legislators and staffs of the nation’s 50 states, its commonwealths and territories. NCSL provides research, technical assistance and opportunities for policymakers to exchange ideas on the most pressing state issues.”

Affiliated with NCSL, is the NCSL Foundation which was created by NCSL as a “nonprofit tax-exempt 501(c)(3) corporation that offers opportunities for businesses, national associations, nonprofit organizations and unions seeking to improve the state legislative process and enhance NCSL’s services to all legislatures.”

While the descriptions sound benign, the access to legislators NCSL and the NCSL Foundation provide to fossil fuel interests and other corporate “sponsors” sounds a lot like lobbying.

Some tech reporters rightly noted that with the formation of the Internet Association, it looks like Google is getting the SOPA band back together again. But nobody asked the rather obvious question: why an industry that spent $129 million on lobbying in 2011 needed yet another lobbing shop, especially when the Net Coalition already exists.

Ahem. Allow Bytegeist to read the tea leaves.

The financial industry is taking another run at a plan to help homeowners, this time the proposed program in San Bernardino County that would use eminent domain laws to acquire underwater mortgages and then refinance them for borrowers at market rates. The financial services lobbying group SIFMA said they would exclude mortgages in San Bernardino and other localities that engaged in this tactic