I'm on Inside Washington Weekly with esteemed Orange Line Mafia members Jamie Kirchick, Amanda Carpenter, and host David White. (I don't think any of us actually live on the Orange Line.) And if you live in or close to D.C., be sure to RSVP for reason's forum on the libertarian vote with Mike Gravel, Bobb Barr, Wayne Allyn Root, and Vern McKinley.
Unconvincing Quote of the Week "Conservatism is alive and well in America; don’t let anyone tell you differently. And by conservatism, I don’t mean the warmed-over 'raise your hand if you believe …' kind of conservatism we see blooming every election cycle." - Fred Thompson, making his... uh... comeback.
The Week in Brief - Bob Barr officially tossed his chapeau in the ring for the Libertarian Party nomination. - Hillary Clinton ground Barack Obama into dust in the West Virginia primary, carrying all 55 counties. - Republicans lost their third straight special election of the year as Democrat Travis Childers took Mississippi's first district—a seat whose voters went 62-37 for Bush over Kerry. - John Edwards endorsed Obama. (The only ex-candidates who haven't endorsed so far are, I think, Biden and Kucinich.) - The Senate passed the farm bill. - George W. Bush baited Barack Obama into a three-way battle on foreign policy with John McCain. One of these guys, of course, would pop Cristal if his approval rating broke 30 percent. - The Huckabee for vice president boomlet came to a thudding end. - Mike Gravel and Wayne Allyn Root debated on Fox Business:
Below the Fold - The people behind "Stop Her Now," claiming they've "cancelled her show," launch "Stop Him Now." - Congress's lone atheist endorses Obama. - RiShawn Biddle takes on the black church. - Bill Kauffman reviews Ron Paul. - Wayne Allyn Root, Bob Barr, and three other LP candidates get profiled (briefly) by Fortune. - J. Patrick Coolican talks with Rick Perlstein, author of the brilliant Nixonland. - FDR never talked to Hitler, except when he did. - Brian Beutler accuses McCain of selling out vets.
I couldn't find a copy of the Robert Fripp-produced and enhanced "Hammond Song" by the Roches, so he's a folkier version for Politics 'n' Prog.
SATURDAY UPDATE: Bob Barr responds to Mike Huckabee:
Mike Huckabee showed incredibly poor taste when he joked about a gun pointed at Senator Barack Obama. His words were reckless, callous and harmful to the sports men and women of America and to those of us who fully support the Second Amendment.
Every candidate for public office inflames the passions of people who fervently disagree with them. To suggest, as Governor Huckabee did, the misuse of a fire arm toward a political candidate is reckless. His attitude toward proper, legal and safe use of fire arms was demeaning to all of us who advocate the right to bear arms. His reprehensible use of a threatening and violent scenario involving a firearm at the NRA's National Convention was vile beyond belief.
I call on all supporters of the Second Amendment and all supporters of civil discourse in our political races to demand a public apology from Governor Huckabee.
In a speech to the National Rifle Association today, John McCain argues (accurately) that he's a much stronger defender of the Second Amendment than Barack Obama. A few excerpts:
For more than two decades, I've opposed efforts to ban guns, ban ammunition, ban magazines, and dismiss gun owners as some kind of fringe group unwelcome in "modern" America. The Second Amendment isn't some archaic custom that matters only to rural Americans, who find solace in firearms out of frustration with their economic circumstances. The Second Amendment is unique in the world. It guarantees an individual right to keep and bear arms. To argue anything else is to reject the clear meaning of our Founding Fathers....
But the clear meaning of the Second Amendment has not stopped those who want to punish firearms owners—and those who make and sell firearms—for the actions of criminals. It seems like every time there is a particularly violent crime, the anti-gun activists demand yet another restriction on the Second Amendment. I opposed the ban on so-called "assault weapons," which was first proposed after a California schoolyard shooting. It makes no sense to ban a class of firearms based on cosmetic features. I have opposed waiting periods for gun purchases.
I have opposed efforts to cripple our firearms manufacturers by making them liable for the acts of violent criminals....
Senator Obama hopes he can get away with having it both ways. He says he believes that the Second Amendment confers an individual right to bear arms. But when he had a chance to weigh in on the most important Second Amendment case before the U.S. Supreme Court in decades, District of Columbia v. Heller, Senator Obama dodged the question by claiming, "I don't like taking a stand on pending cases." He refused to sign the amicus brief signed by a bipartisan group of 55 Senators arguing that the Supreme Court should overturn the DC gun ban in the Heller case. When he was running for the State Senate in Illinois, his campaign filled out a questionnaire asking whether he supported legislation to ban the manufacture, sale and possession of handguns with a simple, "Yes."
I think McCain (who also notes some of his differences with the NRA, including his support for background checks at gun shows and for campaign finance regulations that muzzle groups like the NRA close to elections) is actually too easy on Obama here. As I've noted, Obama has cited the D.C. ban as an example of gun control that's consistent with the Constitution, which makes you wonder what it would take to violate the Second Amendment as he understands it.
McCain adds that, even if the Supreme Court overturns the D.C. law, federal judges will continue to play an important role in determining which firearm restrictions pass constitutional muster. Hence supporters of the right to keep and bear arms will still need to worry about judicial appointments. That much is certainly true, but McCain runs into trouble when he tries to explain why his criteria for picking judges are superior to Obama's:
In America, the constitutional restraint on power is as fundamental as the exercise of power, and often more so. Yet the Framers knew these restraints would not always be observed. They were idealists, but they were worldly men as well, and they knew that abuses of power and efforts to encroach on individual rights would arise and need to be firmly checked. Their design for democracy was drawn from their experience with tyranny. A suspicion of power is ingrained in both the letter and spirit of the American Constitution.
In the end, of course, their grand solution was to allocate federal power three ways, reserving all other powers and rights to the states and to the people themselves. The executive, legislative, and judicial branches are often wary of one another's excesses, seeking to keep each other within bounds. The framers knew exactly what they were doing, and the system of checks and balances rarely disappoints.
Quite rightly, the proper role of the judiciary has become one of the defining issues of this presidential election. It will fall to the next president to nominate qualified men and women to the federal courts, and the choices we make will reach far into the future. My two prospective opponents and I have very different ideas about the nature and proper exercise of judicial power. We would nominate judges of a different kind, a different caliber, a different understanding of judicial authority and its limits. And the people of America—voters in both parties whose wishes and convictions are so often disregarded by unelected judges—are entitled to know what those differences are.
Federal courts are charged with applying the Constitution and laws of our country to each case at hand. But a court is hardly competent to check the abuses of other branches of government if it cannot control its own judicial activism.
Real activists seek to make their case democratically—to win hearts, minds, and majorities to their cause. Such people throughout our history have often shown great idealism and done great good. By contrast, activist lawyers and activist judges follow a different method. They want to be spared the inconvenience of campaigns, elections, legislative votes, and all of that. Some federal judges operate by fiat, shrugging off generations of legal wisdom and precedent while expecting their own opinions to go unquestioned.
McCain wants his audience to believe he will appoint judges who will strike down gun control laws that conflict with the Second Amendment. At the same time, he condemns "activist judges" who override the will of the people, as expressed by their legislative representatives, in the process "shrugging off generations of legal wisdom and precedent." But that is exactly what the Supreme Court will be doing if it declares the D.C. gun ban unconstitutional. Furthermore, that is what it ought to do, because the legal wisdom that long prevailed in this area—the idea that the Second Amendment protects no individual rights that a legislature need respect—was wrong. In this case, as in many others involving "constitutional restraint[s] on power," the Court can be true to its obligations only if it is "activist," rejecting the considered opinion of elected legislators and thereby checking "efforts to encroach on individual rights."
Jeff Jacoby made a similar point about the inadequacy of McCain's judicial philosophy in a recent BostonGlobecolumn. A few years ago in reason, Damon Root made the libertarian case for judicial activism.
The foreign policy talk is, deservedly, getting all the attention, but John McCain's "2013: A Space Odyssey" speech went into an interesting place on health care. I don't think any Republican is optimistic about this issue: Post-Medicare Part D, the Democrats are clutching it tighter than a winning lottery ticket. But here's McCain's boiled-down pitch, from a future where "health care has become more accessible to more Americans than at any other time in history."
Reforms of the insurance market; putting the choice of health care into the hands of American families rather than exclusively with the government or employers; walk in clinics as alternatives to emergency room care; paying for outcome in the treatment of disease rather than individual procedures; and competition in the prescription drug market have begun to wring out the runaway inflation once endemic in our health care system.
I can see how this curbs inflation, even if, for a certain segment of the population this would be counteracted by the end of deductions on employer-provided health care. Michael Tanner has more on the benefits.
Schools have greatly improved their emphasis on physical education and nutritional content of meals offered in school cafeterias. Obesity rates among the young and the disease they engender are stabilized and beginning to decline.
The Schools of the Future have done this how? Does McCain plan a Huckabee-in-Arkansas mandate? I'm willing to listen to his plan, but this promise is pure vapor without it.
The federal government and states have cooperated in establishing backstop insurance pools that provide coverage to people hard pressed to find insurance elsewhere because of pre-existing illness.
Most states already have high-risk pools, and since the pre-existing illnesses we're going to start talking about as the Boomers start withering—heart disease, Alzheimers—I'd like to get a cost for this.
The reduction in the growth of health care costs has begun to relieve some of the pressure on Medicare; encouraging Congress to act in a bipartisan way to extend its solvency for twenty-five years without increasing taxes and raising premiums only for upper income seniors.
I'd sort of like to know how: McCain's only cost-saving solution thus far seems to be to change the scheme for reimbursements and to crack down on fraud. It seems, as with his spending solutions, to be change around the margins.
Target got into forensics as a way to combat shoplifting and such crimes but has taken its skills far beyond the department store. Its seven-person team of investigators, most of them former law enforcement officials, spend 70% of their time fighting theft, fraud and personal injury cases involving Target's 1,600 stores. But the lab is also frequently tapped by city, state and federal law-enforcement agencies, including the Los Angeles Police Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, to solve big cases....
Target installed cameras in most of its stores in the 1980s, but that wasn't enough to really make a dent in store thefts. "We had a volume of evidence from our cameras but no expertise," says Fredrick Lautenbach, the retailer's crime lab manager. He says the company also didn't want to rely on overburdened police departments to help it solve problems with theft. In 2003 the company created its lab...
[I]t decided to largely limit its volunteer work to cases involving murder, sexual assault or armed robbery. It doesn't charge for its services but asks police departments to donate a patch when it helps them out. It has 136 on display in its main office in Brooklyn Park, Minn.
As Jacob Sullum pointed out yesterday, Barack Obama hasn't exactly made crystal clear his position on medical marijuana.
Fortunately, the Republican National Committee has stepped forward to clear up any confusion. If you support ending the federal SWAT raids on cannabis stores and taking a federalist approach to medical marijuana, the RNC says Obama's your man.
If you think the president must continue paramilitary raids on convalescent centers in states that have approved medical marijuana, and that anything less wouldn't be keeping with his oath to uphold and protect the Constitution, well, then you should vote Republican.
If somebody wants to buy milk taken directly from a cow, should the government stand in the way? Jacob Grier explains why the state should play a minimal role in the barnyard.
Whatever qualms one might have about a semi-super secret defense agency with a mandate to invent "surprising" military technologies, you have to give the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) some credit. It's not like with the space program: All they can claim to have contributed to civilian life is Velcro and Tang (and even those claims are disputed). DARPA has given us the Internet, GPS, and faster wireless communications. They failed to give us telepathic spies.
New Scientist looks back at 50 years of DARPA, and comes up with a list of the good, the bad, and the promising. Of course, we'll probably never know about the really good stuff DARPA has managed to come up with.
Great success!:
GPS: We would be quite literally lost without today's global positioning system (GPS). But long before the current NAVSTAR GPS satellites were launched, came a constellation of just five DARPA satellites called Transit. First operational in 1960, they gave US Navy ships hourly location fixes as accurate as 200 metres.
Total failure (but awesome, and immortalized in science fiction):
Orion: Set in motion shortly after DARPA was created, Project Orion aimed to drive an interplanetary spacecraft by periodically dropping nuclear bombs out of its rear end.
The entire craft was designed like a giant shock absorber with the back covered in thick shielding to protect human passengers. Concerns about nuclear fallout and the signing of the Partial Test Ban Treaty ended the project in the early 1960s.
Promising:
Bionic Limbs: DARPA wants prosthetic limbs that are "fully functional, neurologically controlled and have normal sensory capabilities" and is funding scientists who are making serious progress.
In a recent New York Timesop-ed piece, foreign policy writer Robert Kaplan argues for forcibly aiding the Burmese victims of Cyclone Nargis (a proposal Kerry Howley discussed the other day). He also argues against doing so.
On the one hand, says Kaplan, "this is militarily doable," thanks largely to conveniently located U.S. ships. In fact, "an enormous amount of assistance can be provided while maintaining a small footprint on shore, greatly reducing the chances of a clash with the Burmese armed forces while nevertheless dealing a hard political blow to the junta." Furthermore, "we could do a lot of good merely by holding out the possibility of an invasion," thereby pressuring "Beijing, New Delhi and Bangkok to, in turn, pressure the Burmese generals to open their country to a full-fledged foreign relief effort."
On the other hand, "a humanitarian invasion could ultimately lead to the regime's collapse," "the collapse of the Burmese state," and interethnic civil war. In that case, "we would have to accept significant responsibility for the aftermath." To sum up:
It seems like a simple moral decision: help the survivors of the cyclone. But liberating Iraq from an Arab Stalin also seemed simple and moral. (And it might have been, had we planned for the aftermath.) Sending in marines and sailors is the easy part; but make no mistake, the very act of our invasion could land us with the responsibility for fixing Burma afterward.
So according to Kaplan, the U.S. should stay out. Or go in, but carefully, with a plan. And whatever decision we make, we can't say he didn't warn us.
The spectacle of the pork-laden farm bill sailing through both houses of Congress with veto-proof majorities is disgusting enough if you imagine that its supporters are simply political hacks doing what they think is necessary to stay in power. They are, of course, but they don't necessarily see it that way. Since politicians would not be politicians if they did not believe the public interest coincided with their own ambitions, they have a remarkable ability to see blatant pandering, logrolling, and vote buying as not only necessary but noble. Hence Barack Obama's bizarre claim that passing the favor-filled farm bill is a way of standing up to "the special interests." Or consider the response from Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.), the ranking Republican on the Senate Agriculture Committee, to President Bush's veto threat:
Obviously, I have been very disappointed in the comments coming out of the White House. But we do have a strong vote in both the House and the Senate, and I think that shows you that in a complex piece of legislation like this, and it truly is because it touches so many different areas of so many different aspects of agriculture and food production, as well as nutrition and conservation and energy, that there is something in this bill for every member of the House and every member of the Senate.
If Congress passed legislation giving each representative and senator $1 million in taxpayer's money to spend as he saw fit, there would also be something in the bill for every member of the House and every member of the Senate. By Chambliss' logic, raiding the public treasury in this way would be clearly fair and justified. The scary thing is, I don't think he's faking it. He really is indignant about Bush's veto threat, because he really does believe that serving the public interest is a matter of doing favors for lots and lots of special interests.
A quick footnote to my short piece on the Flying Spaghetti Monster: In the time since that article appeared in the print edition of reason, the statue has been removed from the courthouse grounds, along with the other spiritual statuary. Apparently, faced with a choice of allowing every religion or no religion to have a place on public property, the local authorities have opted for a clean lawn.
In the Artifact from our June issue, Managing Editor Jesse Walker finds god—the noodle-god of the Pastafarians, anyway—outside the Cumberland County courthouse in Crossville, Tennessee.
One of Barack Obama's offhand YouTube debate answers from last year—that he would meet "without precondition" with the leaders of Iran, Venezuela and North Korea—has stuck to him ever since. Obama, who isn't much for admitting mistakes (assuming this was one), claims he's talking about a foreign policy in the tradition of FDR, Truman, and other presidents people liked. Clinton, McCain, and now Bush claim he's an easily-led appeaser. Yesterday McCain used a conference call with bloggers to attack Obama: "What do you want to talk about with him? President Ahmadinejad's statement that Israel is a 'stinking corpse'? That they want to wipe Israel off the map? That they continue to supply these terrible, most lethal, explosive devices that are killing young Americans? What do you want to talk to him about?"
Rubin rubs it in: "For some Europeans in Davos, Switzerland, where the interview took place, that's a perfectly reasonable answer. But it is an unusual if not unique response for an American politician from either party. And it is most certainly not how the newly conservative presumptive Republican nominee would reply today." But "conservative" isn't the right word for what McCain's doing. "Pandering," maybe. "Moronic swill that he doesn't believe." If McCain's going to cash this check, after all, he's going to... what? Break off all communications with Iran? If they're funding terrorism, and we don't talk to people who fund terrorism, wouldn't you have to? Is the most offensive thing about Iran is that its president called Israel a "stinking corpse?" You'd think so, given how much the campaign reiterates that... but I can hardly think of a stupider reason to break ties with a foreign power than "their leader made a threat he can't back up!"
Related, this clip from yesterday's Hardball, in which Chris Matthews de-bones a war-hungry talk show host, is good for five or six laughs.
MATTHEWS: You are talking about a critical point in American history, in European history, and you can't tell me what Neville Chamberlain did in Munich. What did he do in '39, '38?
JAMES: Chris, Chris, Chris, I wasn't the one that raised the Hitler comment. My point is -- my point is, what President Bush has done is, he has taken this shot across the bow, all right?
MATTHEWS: You don't know what you're talking about, Kevin. You don't know what you're talking about.
JAMES: ... know what I'm talking about.
MATTHEWS: Tell me what Chamberlain did wrong.
JAMES: Neville Chamberlain was an appeaser, Chris. Neville Chamberlain...
MATTHEWS: What did he do?
JAMES: Neville Chamberlain was an appeaser, all right?
MATTHEWS: What did he do?
JAMES: Neville Chamberlain, his -- but his policies, the things that Neville Chamberlain supported, all right energized, legitimized...
MATTHEWS: Just tell me what he did.
JAMES: ... energized, legitimized, and made it easier for Hitler to advance in the ways that he advanced.
MATTHEWS: What...
MATTHEWS: I have been sitting here five minutes asking you to say what the president was referring to in 1938 at Munich.
JAMES: I don't know what the...
MATTHEWS: You don't know. Thank you.
You have to assume this spat is less about foreign policy principle and more about peeling 10 or 15 percent of the Jewish vote from Obama. Hey, what could be better for Israel than more empty threats and destabilizing regional wars?
Found this today at the neighborhood 99-cent store, in the Bronx just across the Harlem River from Upper Manhattan. Have no idea what it means. It was mixed with a pile of other pink backpacks decorated with the identical Barbie face, but without the headscarf. The secular Barbies had the same plucked eyebrows, lipsticky lips and hyperMaybelline eyes. But no verbiage surrounded them -- not a word. Meanwhile, Muslim Barbie, as you see here, is trapped in a sea of "Are you happy?"...
But what really got me was, this backpack was Made in China. To me, there's something about 99-cent Asian shlock that seems mystically insightful when it comes to 21st-century American culture.
This is actually a contest. "If you have any ideas about its meaning," Nathan writes, "do tell. In fact, I'd be glad to pass my purchase on to you (postage paid!) in exchange for some inspired words."
I should probably throw in a link to this. And this. And this. And of course this.
People who truly cherish freedom see today's Supreme Court decision as a victory for liberty and common sense. There's no reason why consenting adults should not be allowed to marry so long as their arrangement doesn't interfere with any other individual's ability to live their life in any way they want to.
Many supporters see the decision as a repudiation of bigotry and narrow-mindedness. But Libertarians also see it as a step towards a revision of the larger public policy issue surrounding marriage. Californians should start asking their elected officials why government is involved in granting marriage licenses at all.
And here's Libertarian presidential hopeful Bob Barr (via Marc Ambinder):
Regardless of whether one supports or opposes same sex marriage, the decision to recognize such unions or not ought to be a power each state exercises on its own, rather than imposition of a one-size-fits-all mandate by the federal government (as would be required by a Federal Marriage Amendment which has been previously proposed and considered by the Congress). The decision today by the Supreme Court of California properly reflects this fundamental principle of federalism on which our nation was founded.
Last summer, when Barack Obama repeatedly distanced himself from the Bush administration's policy regarding medical marijuana, he stopped short of explicitly promising to let states go their own way in this area. But two recent interviews seem to have eliminated any wiggle room on that question.
Until now Obama's firmest stand was the one he took on August 21 in Nashua, New Hampshire. Asked if he would continue the Drug Enforcement Administration's raids on medical marijuana users and their caregivers, he replied:
I would not have the Justice Department prosecuting and raiding medical marijuana users. It's not a good use of our resources.
That statement still left open the possibility of prosecuting and raiding the people who supply patients with marijuana and are permitted to do so under state law. In a May 9 interview with Oregon's Willamette Week, however, Obama was specifically asked whether he would "stop the DEA's raids on Oregon medical marijuana growers" (emphasis added), and he said:
I would because I think our federal agents have better things to do, like catching criminals and preventing terrorism. The way I want to approach the issue of medical marijuana is to base it on science, and if there is sound science that supports the use of medical marijuana and if it is controlled and prescribed in a way that other medicine is prescribed, then it's something that I think we should consider.
That last part is rather vague: Who is "we," and what is it they're considering? The Obama campaign's response to questions from the Los Angles Times clarifies things a bit:
"Voters and legislators in the states—from California to Nevada to Maine—have decided to provide their residents suffering from chronic diseases and serious illnesses like AIDS and cancer with medical marijuana to relieve their pain and suffering," said campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt.
"Obama supports the rights of states and local governments to make this choice— though he believes medical marijuana should be subject to [U.S. Food and Drug Administration] regulation like other drugs," LaBolt said. He said the FDA should consider how marijuana is regulated under federal law, while leaving states free to chart their own course.
It seems to me that Obama now has unequivocally promised to back off and allow states to make their own policy decisions about the medical use of marijuana within their own borders. He also seems to be saying the federal government should consider rescheduling marijuana under the Controlled Substances Act so that doctors can legally prescribe it. Even if that second part never materializes, on this issue Obama is much better than John McCain, who (as the Times notes) has repeatedly flip-flopped between federalism and drug-war dogmatism, with the latter at this point winning out.
John McCain gave an interesting speech this morning dreaming out loud what the world will look like in January 2013, after the first four years of his administration. The headlines from it will mostly (and inaccurately) be about "Troops Home From Iraq by 2013: McCain," on which more from me here, but there are some more concrete, semi-radical promises of interest in the speech. For instance:
I will ask Democrats to serve in my administration. My administration will set a new standard for transparency and accountability. I will hold weekly press conferences. I will regularly brief the American people on the progress our policies have made and the setbacks we have encountered. When we make errors, I will confess them readily, and explain what we intend to do to correct them. I will ask Congress to grant me the privilege of coming before both houses to take questions, and address criticism, much the same as the Prime Minister of Great Britain appears regularly before the House of Commons.
Wowza! While I am a huge fan of Question Time With the Redcoats, I would worry somewhat that the Rolling Fireside Chat Revue would place even more "bull" in the Bully Pulpit, aggrandizing an already inflated office in which (as Gene Healy taught us in this month's cover story) presidents before Woodrow Wilson thought it a bit too presumptuous to deliver the State of the Union in person.
More from McCain today, on that question of executive power:
The powers of the presidency are rightly checked by the other branches of government, and I will not attempt to acquire powers our founders saw fit to grant Congress. I will exercise my veto if I believe legislation passed by Congress is not in the nation's best interests, but I will not subvert the purpose of legislation I have signed by making statements that indicate I will enforce only the parts of it I like.
Besides being a direct (and welcome) rebuke to George W. Bush and the Unitary Executive theory, this also somewhat contradicts McCain's long track record of supporting a line-item veto, which the Supreme Court ruled in 1998 gave the executive branch powers our founders did not see fit to include in the Constitution. And more relevantly, it would seem to be in contradiction of McCain's own longstanding belief that presidents have too little power vis-a-vis Congress in the planning of foreign policy and the waging of war. Here are some of his thoughts on that subject, from his 2002 political memoir Worth the Fighting For:
My disdain of congressional interference in the conduct of the war in Vietnam made all the stronger my natural antipathy to the notion of 535 self-styled secretaries of defense second-guessing and hamstringing the president's authority in national security matters.
*
At timies, my despair [about Bill Clinton's feckless foreign policy], and the disdain it provoked, caused me to doubt principles I had held for a lifetime about the president's preeminence over Congress in the conduct of foreign policy and the imperative that American power never retreat in response to an inferior adversary's provocation.
*
On October 14, 1993, eleven days after the ambush of our rangers in Mogadishu, I offered an amendment on the Senate floor restricting funds for American forces in Somalia to the purpose of their "prompt and orderly withdrawal." [...] [I]t was an encroachment on presidential authorrity and a retreat in the face of aggression from an inferior foe that I would never have contemplated in the past. [...] In hindsight, I wish I had not undertaken so drastic a step.
*
[Theodore Roosevelt] invented the modern presidency by liberally interpreting the constitutional authority of the office to redress the imbalance of power between the executive and legislative branches that had tilted decisively toward Congress in the half century since the Civil War.
McCain ain't no John Yoo, but he agrees with Dick Cheney that the War Powers Act is unconstitutional, and he won't lightly brook any shackles on his ability to move troops hither and yon.
Whether out of ineptness or malice, Dallas police officers sometimes add charges to a traffic citation after they've handed the driver his copy. The driver finds out after he sends in his fine (for a burned-out tail light, say) and later receives a notice threatening him with arrest if he fails to pay the fine for some other offense he did not even realize he'd been accused of committing (failing to wear a seat belt, say). This is not only irritating but unconstitutional: It violates the Sixth Amendment right "to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation." Although Dallas Police Chief David Kunkle toldThe Dallas Morning News "he does not believe the department has a widespread problem" with ex post facto ticket alteration, the truth is he has no way of knowing:
Several things can happen when people discover an officer has cited them with a violation that doesn't appear on their copy of the ticket.
Some complain to the courts and the additional charges are dropped, but don't file complaints with the police department. Some pay the fines without complaint, and some can't prove a ticket has been tampered with because they do not save their copies.
These things make it difficult to assess the scope of such ticket-writing practices...
"We write about 400,000 tickets a year," [Kunkle] said. "We don't know the numbers of these [illegally altered citations] because the tickets are going to look normal to us coming in."
"You're only going to see the problem if you try to look at the copy of the citation the citizen got vs. the one that went to the municipal court system," Chief Kunkle said.
Having received a speeding ticket in Dallas, I can testify that it's nearly impossible to decipher one of the city's citations (or figure out how big your fine is) even if the officer remembers to mark down all the charges. Here's a solution that might address both problems:
The department is also working on a long-range plan to move to a system where tickets are filed electronically, with a printout handed to the ticketed person, thereby limiting the chance of any errors or tampering.
The short term looks less promising:
After receiving inquiries from The News, police officials said they plan to issue a memo reminding officers that altering charges on a citation isn't acceptable.
Does Republican presidential hopeful John McCain really plan on withdrawing troops from Iraq by 2013? Editor in Chief Matt Welch wades into the quagmire to find out.
John McCain isn't the most popular Republican for Alaskans. On Super Tuesday he placed fourth in the state's caucus, behind Ron Paul. McCain's opposed to drilling in ANWR, a real political anomaly for a Republican in this state—even most state Democrats want to start the drills spinning. So I'm not surprised to see that a Research 2000 poll (conducted for Daily Kos) shows McCain leading Barack Obama by only 7 points, 49-42, even though George W. Bush beat John Kerry 61-36. Actually, I think McCain could lose the state. Two reasons.
1) The Republican brand is shattered in Alaska. Gov. Sarah Palin is popular, but she became governor by primary-ing the loathsome Frank Murkowski. Sen. Ted Stevens and Rep. Don Young, both on the ballot this year, are more in the Murkowski mold. And right now they're both losing to Democrats.
2) Alaskan voters, all 470,000-odd of them, are unusually amenable to third parties. In 2000, Ralph Nader crested 10 percent of the vote here. In 1992, Ross Perot got 28 percent. The Libertarian Party's best ever state result was Ed Clark's 12 percent haul in 1980—I'm pretty sure he knocked Jimmy Carter into third place in some precincts.
So a lot of the scaffolding is there that could make this state a Libertarian target. Bob Barr, for example, voted for drilling in ANWR, and could lace into McCain on the issue. A higher-than-normal number of Alaskans will be voting Democratic down the ballot, and might want to split it...and hey, there'll be another conservative candidate they can vote for if they can't stomach Obama. (The Constitution Party's Chuck Baldwin will be on the ballot, too.) If the LP shot for a 1980-sized 10 percent of the vote—around 30,000 ballots—it's possible to see Obama winning the state with 45 percent.
Caveats: I talked with 1992 LP candidate/former Alaska office-holder Andre Marrou few months back, and he was incredibly pessimistic about the LP's chances in the state because he thought the brand was so damaged. Also, Ralph Nader will probably make it on the ballot, but his total probably won't even match the 1.4 percent he got in 2004. But it's still something to watch if the race gets close. Obama will have the money to spend if the spirit moves him, although it would be a time-suck for either him or McCain to take a detour to Anchorage. (We all laugh at Richard Nixon's 1960 trip to Fairbanks, but he only won the state by 1,000 votes.)
In 2001 Regina McKnight, a 24-year-old South Carolina woman, was convicted of "homicide by child abuse" because she was a cocaine user whose baby was stillborn. She received the minimum sentence for that crime, 20 years, with eight years suspended. The conviction, the first of its kind, was outrageous for several reasons:
1) If McKnight had deliberately killed her baby by obtaining an illegal abortion, the maximum sentence she could have received would have been two years.
2) There was no solid evidence that McKnight's baby died as a result of her cocaine use, and even the general connection between cocaine and stillbirth had been called into question.
3) Although tobacco use is also associated with stillbirth, women who smoke during pregnancy are not prosecuted for homicide when their babies die (unless they smoke crack).
This week the South Carolina Supreme Court unanimously overturned McKnight's conviction, finding that her attorney had not made an adequate effort to present evidence on the latter two points and had failed to challenge confusing jury instructions regarding intent. The court said McKnight's lawyer should have introduced into evidence the autopsy report (which mentioned two factors in addition to cocaine as contributing to the baby's death), called an expert witness to question the state's conclusion about the cause of death, and questioned "the adverse and apparently outdated scientific studies propounded by the State's witnesses to find additional support for the State's experts' conclusions that cocaine caused the death of the fetus." The court said the defense should have presented testimony regarding "recent studies showing that cocaine is no more harmful to a fetus than nicotine use, poor nutrition, lack of prenatal care, or other conditions commonly associated with the urban poor."
Even if we accept the legal theory behind this prosecution, the government would have to show that cocaine use during pregnancy is independently associated with stillbirth, once confounding variables such as prenatal nutrition, health care, and use of other drugs are taken into account (the sort of problem that pervades the literature on the effects of prenatal cocaine exposure). Even if a general risk has been established, it is very difficult, if not impossible, to show beyond a reasonable doubt that a particular factor caused a particular stillbirth. Finally, the magnitude of the risk matters. If the risk to the fetus posed by the mother's cocaine use is comparable to that posed by various habits for which pregnant women whose babies die are not prosecuted, it's clear the government is irrationally discriminating against cocaine users.
Forget about cocaine for a moment. Do we want to accept, as a general principle, the idea that women who unintentionally cause harm to their fetuses by doing (or failing to do) certain things during pregnancy should not only be held criminally liable but prosecuted for homicide if the fetus does not survive? Such a rule is plainly inconsistent with the law regarding abortion, and it probably would deter many pregnant women from seeking medical care, thereby further endangering them and their babies. More to the point, a stillbirth is not a murder, and a woman who experiences this tragedy, even if her own behavior may have inadvertently contributed to it, deserves sympathy, not prosecution and prison. The fact that anyone needs to state this explicitly speaks volumes about the extent to which anti-drug hysteria has warped our system of justice.
The South Carolina Supreme Court ruling is here. The Drug Policy Alliance's press release on the case is here.
Bill Falk is editor in chief of The Week, the magazine that promises to "tell you all you need to know about everything that matters." Six years old and boasting a growing circulation of 500,000 subscribers, The Week has redefined the news magazine for the 21st century by offering wide-ranging and witty takes on the topics of the day. For each issue, Falk and his staff sift through thousands of newspapers, magazines, websites, and other sources to produce a concise and comprehensive gazette of news, opinion, and attitude.
Although The Week is a non-partisan publication, Falk has no shortage of opinions about the state of the media—and particularly the troubles facing old-style, mass-circulation print behemoths such as Time and Newsweek. Such mags are "clearly in a bad place," he says. "It's unclear what their role is in this new media landscape....They're fishing around for what their role is going to be."
In this 10-minute interview conducted and filmed by reason.tv's Nick Gillespie and Dan Hayes, Falk explains why he thinks The Washington Post is the best newspaper in America, why content will always be king across all media platforms, and why it may not be a bad thing that politics is starting to look more and more like a reality TV show in which contestants get voted off the island.
Click below to view. To add this video to your site and more reason.tv, go here.
NPR reports on a new call for "potty parity," this time from men.
Designers of a new arena in St. Louis thought they were doing a good thing by putting more toilets in the women's restrooms. But as architecture professor Kathryn Anthony explains, their modest effort is only one small step in a direction that will require broad legislation.
Some cities and counties already have laws requiring extra ladies toilets--sometimes as many as quadruple the number of available for men.
And then there's this:
[University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign architecture professor and board member of the American Restroom Association Kathryn] Anthony says the issue of restroom access is so important that the free market can't be trusted.
Indeed.
Personally, I've always favored the personal responsibility approach: I'll march right in and use a single stall men's room if it's empty and there's a lock on the door.
Robert Samuelson is disappointed with the level of debate among the presidential candidates thus far. "Let's imagine what a candidate inoculated with truth serum might say," he writes. Thus, we get one of those sad columns where the pundit in question tells us what he would say were Americans enlightened enough to nominate him, and then explains that he'll never be nominated because he is just so goshdarn candid. Here's a nice bit of straight talk:
"Finally, let's discuss poverty. Everyone's against it, but hardly anyone admits that most of the increase in the past 15 years reflects immigration -- new immigrants or children of recent immigrants. Unless we stop poor people from coming across our Southern border, legally and illegally, we won't reduce poverty."
The last line is nonsensical as stated, but I assume Samuelson meant to say "won't reduce the rate of poverty in the United States." So, to paraphrase our truth-teller: If you let more poor people into the United States, there will be more poor people in the United States. Well, yeah. But why should we care about the aggregate poverty rate as opposed to the well-being of the individuals within the aggregate? The rate tells us nothing about the average well-being of those Americans who were here before the migration takes place, and nothing about how much better off those immigrants are for having migrated. By Samuelson's logic, we should deny poor immigrants entry even if they make natives appreciably better off, because they'll affect a statistic he is oddly preoccupied with.
I tend to assume that people who tout this talking point are just confused, but it's worth considering the implicit worldview of someone who repeatedly states this kind of thing. The goal here has nothing to do with poverty alleviation; we already know that the quickest way to reduce poverty is to open labor markets. Rather, the goal is to reduce the number of people beneath a particular income level within a particular spatial area. To what end, I have no idea. But if that's what we're aiming at, why not just deport the poor?
One key fact: the ruling takes effect in 30 days - which means thousands of couples will be able to marry long before any initiative attempts to reverse it. So the initiative question becomes: do you want to divorce thousands of already-married couples? Or do you want to keep things as they now are? That's a big advantage for the pro-equality forces.
Politically, I suppose this is bad news for the Democrats, but not nearly as much as in 2004. For one, it's not coming out of a candidate's home state. (How lucky was John Kerry to come from Massachusetts in the year of Goodridge?) For another, John McCain voted against the Federal Marriage Amendment: He can't demagogue this, and he won't. And finally, the issue's simply becoming less volcanic as the issue is normalized. The way things are going, Mitt Romney will be leading a pro-gay marriage campaign by 2016 or so.
UPDATE: DOMA author Bob Barr chimes in:
Regardless of whether one supports or opposes same sex marriage, the decision to recognize such unions or not ought to be a power each state exercises on its own, rather than imposition of a one-size-fits-all mandate by the federal government (as would be required by a Federal Marriage Amendment which has been previously proposed and considered by the Congress). The decision today by the Supreme Court of California properly reflects this fundamental principle of federalism on which our nation was founded.
Indeed, the primary reason for which I authored the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996 was to ensure that each state remained free to determine for its citizens the basis on which marriage would be recognized within its borders, and not be forced to adopt a definition of marriage contrary to its views by another state. The decision in California is an illustration of how this principle of states' powers should work.
In this week's Village Voice, Chuck Eddy offers a spirited revisionist defense of the much-maligned (by liberals, anyway) country star Toby Keith. As you might recall, Keith topped the charts in 2002 with "Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue," a patriotic ditty that promised terrorists and other malfeasants, "we'll put a boot in your ass, it's the American way." While I can't say that I've ever cared for Keith's music, his feud with the self-important Dixie Chicks was fun to watch. And as reason contributing editor Charles Oliver noticed back in 2003, the famously pugnacious Keith was an Iraq War skeptic from the start.
Here's Eddy on why Keith is more than just a right-wing shock jock:
That handful of songs (a couple of which appeared on a surprisingly funky 2003 album entitled Shock'n Y'All, har har) is pretty much where Toby's editorializing ends, at least on record. His output is no more limited by his war-machine anthem than Merle Haggard's was by the comparably opportunistic "Okie From Muskogee" and "The Fightin' Side of Me" when Nixon was president. And not many country artists since Merle have managed a creative streak like Toby's these past few years-in fact, to my ears, his '00s output (six albums plus change, including half of 2006's Broken Bridges soundtrack and a few spare tracks collected on his new 35 Biggest Hits) just might stand up to anybody else's this decade, in any musical genre.
That's a bold statement. But the comparison to Hag makes sense. Read the rest of Eddy's article here. For the definitive take on the tangled politics of country music, however, look no further than reason's own Jesse Walker.
I've entertained the notion of updating the LP race standings every week until the convention, the way that multiple media orgs and blogs did when covering the Democratic and Republican races. But there doesn't seem to be a lot of fluidity in the race: Bob Barr, Wayne Allyn Root, and Mary Ruwart are bunched up at the top of the field, with delegates telling me they're swapping between Root and Barr but no one telling me they'd trade Ruwart for one of them.
So, a brief update on the frontrunners. Barr's fundraising has ticked up since he announced his run and got an unprecendented (for an LP candidate) flurry of coverage. Outright Libertarians, a gay rights group within in the party, quickly blasted him for his record on their issue. This is a signal of Barr's punching power at this point in the race: He engenders ire from his enemies like no one else running in the LP. William Hawkins accuses him of "turning against his country."
Wayne Allyn Root is ignoring the Barr media blitz and calling up delegates. Right before John McCain issued a TV ad predicting what the world would be like in 2013, Root did sort of the same thing, e-mailing supporters a future history of the Root campaign and the LP.
Imagine. The blizzard of media attention after the LP convention is over. Thank you Congressman Bob Barr and Jesse “The Body” Ventura. Media from across the country came to Denver because of you. But what they witnessed was Wayne Allyn Root pulling off the political upset (at least as far as the Washington D.C. press corp. is concerned). A star is born. Now the media will be more interested in the new face of the LP because of who he is…not who he was.
The important thing about media isn't getting it- it's what you do with it after you get it. Wayne is a dynamic media personality. He has proven he knows how to get media, and how to use it. He wins over even skeptical and cynical hosts. He gets them to say, “Wow, I could actually vote for you.” If Wayne Allyn Root gets the LP Presidential nomination, we'll have a future. With Wayne there is a huge (and long-term) upside.
It ends on an up note:
On election night 2008, Wayne Allyn Root outperforms the expectations of the political pundits and Beltway insiders, including a very close third place finish in his home state of Nevada... Wayne will build on his close third place finish in Nevada in 2008 to win Nevada as a Libertarian Presidential candidate in 2012.
Giving off the impression that she's back on her heels, Mary Ruwartrolled out a YouTube message to her supporters claiming she's been "smeared, libeled and misquoted" by other candidates.
Some people think being tough is a matter of pointing fingers, getting angry, and in some cases, smearing your opponents... a truly tough person takes responsibility for his or her actions and would never smear an opponent. I think that's why my staff calls me the Velvet Hammer: Soft on the outside, tough on the inside.
On a side note: Alan Keyes has responded to his landslide defeat at the Constitution Party convention by humbly returning to a life of quiet scholarship and intellectual activism. Hah! No, seriously, he's founded his own third (fifth? sixth?) party. His organizers failed to get on the Texas ballot, but the California branch of the Constitution Party is trying to shove him onto that state's ballot.
The Alabama State Advisory Committee of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights recently held a public forum on eminent domain abuse. Here are Rev. John E. Smith and his wife Gail explaining what the authorities did to their Birmingham church:
When Drew Carey and reason.tv last checked in on San Tan Flat, a family-oriented restaurant in Pinal County, Arizona, the father-and-son owners Dale and Spencer Bell were fighting against a ridiculous, anachronistic, and anti-business ban on outdoor dancing. Check that video out here.
What a difference a video--and ongoing litigation courtesy of the libertarian public-interest law firm the Institute for Justice--makes! As The Arizona Republic reports:
Pinal County Superior Court Judge William O'Neil overturned a decision from the county Board of Supervisors that said the country-Western-themed restaurant was operating an illegal dance hall by allowing patrons to dance to live music on its back patio.
The judge's ruling brings closure to the conflict between the county and restaurant owner Dale Bell, who have been at odds for more than two years after San Tan Flat neighbors complained about noise coming from the property.
The saga of San Tan Flat drew national attention, prompting commentary from actor Drew Carey and conservative Washington Post columnist George Will. The case also received several comparisons to the 1984 Kevin Bacon film Footloose, in which a small town bans rock music and dancing.
At the time we released the video, one of the owners of San Tan Flat told the East Valley Tribune, "'This adds one more voice, and I think Drew Carey has a credible voice and he speaks with some degree of credibility to the public,' said Dale Bell, who owns San Tan Flat with his son, Spencer."
Congrats to the Bells for fighting for their inalienable right to host dancing in the Arizona desert!
For embed code to post the video to your own site and for more reason.tv, go here.
Push click on the image below to enjoy exclusive interviews with the Bells and footage from the victory party last Friday at San Tan Flat.
Fairleigh Dickinson Professor Roger Koppl argues for a significant overhaul of forensics in the U.S. in the current issue of Forbes.Forbes editor William Baldwin was alarmed enough at Koppl's examples of forensics malfeasance to write a sharply-worded editorial of his own.
Koppl wrote a study on forensics reform for the Reason Foundation, and wrote a summary of the study for the November issue of reason. Koppl and I have also co-written an article touching on similar themes that will appear in an upcoming issue of Engage, a journal published by the Federalist Society.
Koppl's work deserves more attention. Controlled studies have shown that the bias forensic experts absorb even by such seemingly innocuous interactions as speaking with police and prosecutors before running tests can have a disturbingly significant impact on their results. This bias exists even in well-intentioned, professional scientists. That's bias that's independent of the more egregious examples such as Dr. Hayne in Mississippi, or cases where prosecutors put ethically dubious pressure on forensics experts to tailor their findings to help the prosecution's case.
Koppl's proposals employ competition, proper incentives, and strategic manipulation of information (that is, separating information about the crime from the analysis of the evidence) to produce more accurate results—results less likely to be influenced by unintended bias, and that also would also go a long way toward uncovering the more egregious offenders. Koppl estimates that the cost of implementing his ideas would be less than the cost of just a couple wrongful convictions.
The most urgent of Koppl's reforms is the idea of giving forensic vouchers to indigent defendants. We need a Gideon v. Wainwright for forensics. Until defendants are given access to their own experts, far too many criminal cases will feature testimony only from state forensic scientists, and all the problems that come with that. When only one guy with letters after his name is testifying, jurors are going to tend to put quite a bit of faith in what he says. We've seen this even when what the expert is saying is absurd, and scoffed at by just about everyone else in the scientific community. When poor defendants aren't given access to their own experts, then, it calls into question whether we really have an adversarial criminal justice system.
Unfortunately, too many people think all of the country's forensic labs work like the ones they see on CSI. I'm not sure it's enough to merely ask that judges take a more aggressive approach to weeding out the frauds. First, judges can be duped, too. Second, even competent, professional forensic scientists can make mistakes. The changes need to be more radical. Another of Koppl's suggested reforms essentially applies the idea of peer review to the criminal forensics process. That would go a long way toward cutting down on mistakes, intentional and otherwise.
Former Washington, D.C., mayor and current D.C. Council Member Marion Barry comes out in favor of school vouchers, provided the money does not come from the existing public school budget. That proviso relieves much of the competitive pressure that otherwise might encourage public schools to improve, but at least Barry acknowledges the desirability of choice and diversity in education:
I support this package [$74 million in federal money for public schools, charter schools, and private school scholarships] because it provides much-needed financial support to all D.C. schools and because it offers parents a choice without hurting public schools. That's a win-win situation. We must make sure that children in the District are given every chance to attend schools that work for them. To do anything else is wrong.
Is it too much to hope that, if voucher-equipped students leave D.C.'s public schools in droves, the reduced enrollment will one day lead to a lower budget? The Cato Institute's Andrew Coulson estimates that "DC public schools are spending about $24,600 per pupil this school year—roughly $10,000 more than the average for area private schools."
This doesn't quite make up for Newsweek's anti-crack hysteria circa 1986 or its anti-meth hysteria circa 2005, but the magazine's latest issue includes a careful, balanced story about Salvia divinorum that could serve as a model for how the press should handle controversies involving psychoactive substances. Noting salvia's longstanding use as a Mazatec folk remedy, its modern use as an aid to introspection, and its medical potential, author Brian Braiker says media attention attracted by YouTube videos of teenagers smoking salvia "is spooking legislators and law enforcement" into banning the plant and arresting people for possession. A few excerpts:
Used in small amounts, salvia...contains no known toxicities. But when its extract is smoked in larger dosages, it can yield frightening results....
But is strict regulation the best way to deal with salvia? Obviously, any impairing agent could lead to accidents. But there have been no recorded injuries or deaths resulting from its use, as drug-reform activists like Ethan Nadelmann of the Drug Policy Alliance point out. "Most people who do it don't want to do it again," says Nadelmann. The salvia panic "is essentially an extension of the old drug-war debate in that there's this knee-jerk reflex on the part of legislators to criminalize first and ask questions later, if ever. There's no stopping to listen to scientific evidence, no cost-benefit analysis of the effect the law would have." California wants to ban the sale of salvia only to minors, a move that Nadelmann supports....
Condemning the drug to Schedule I status (the same class as heroin or cannabis), as some legislators have suggested, would make it virtually impossible for the medical community to obtain for research. It seems that sober thinking is needed on both sides of the debate.
My previous post on "the salvia panic" are here, here, and here.
[Thanks to the Drug Policy Alliance's Tony Newman for the tip.]
Marc Ambinder thinks he's uncovered the Mystery of Barack Obama's 6:30 p.m. "major endorsement." A top staffer is out of the office today. And...
What's Wendy Button, Edwards's longtime speechwriter, been doing lately? I hear she's been writing a secret speech... (Her facebook profile includes this entry for 3pm: "Wendy just finished writing the speech.")
How come Edwards's brain trust -- all of them -- are unreachable?
That's some pretty good reporting. A little while after Ambinder posts a link to a lear jet flightpath from North Carolina to Michigan, the Associated Press reports that Edwards will endorse Obama.
reason's coverage of Edwards, never very positive, is collected here. The network chatter right now seems to focus on Edwards' appeal to white voters, and indeed, Clinton's recovery of late has come from downloading Edwards rhetoric and booting it up on her system. Something that really drives a stake into Hillary: Edwards has delegates. He has a mere 19 left over from the four primaries he participated in, but he has, at the lowest estimate, 13 delegates from currently-disqualified Florida. If Clinton succeeds in seating all of Florida's delegates as elected in the state's non-contested primary, she'll net only 28 delegates more than Obama and Edwards combined. Joe Trippi's fantasy about his ex-client as a kingmaker isn't that far-fetched.
I think culture wars progress on a bell curve. A decade or ago conservatives ran Colorado from stem to stern and routed liberals on taxes, abortion law. In the late 90s and early 2000s the culture wars simmered down (we can argue about the role Columbine had in this) and the Democrats became more competitive. In 2004 the Democrats wrested a Senate seat and the state legislature from Republicans, and voila: the Ward Churchill scandal erupted. The fight is back in conservatives, but the stakes and gains are smaller.
Churchill's gone, and the University is poking around for a "professor of conservative thought." Tom Tancredo applies (with his tongue firmly in cheek):
I should be the clear favorite for the job, Tancredo said. Who doesnt want a slightly used Congressman, with a 98% lifetime rating from the American Conservative Union, educating their children?
As for his references, Tancredo listed conservative commentator Pat Buchanan as well as the entire Minutemen organization.
The Tancredo suggested curriculum would include Western Civilization and the threat of Islamofascism, English Only 101, and American Assimilation, which would replace Chicano and ethnic studies.
Tancredo also plans to secure the border around the CU campus with a 20 foot high fence.
Tancredo concluded, In addition to my experience as a teacher and politician, I promise to have immigration officials check every student prior to all my classes.
With Mayor Richard Daley running the vote, the Chicago City Council on Wednesday repealed its controversial ban on foie gras.
Over the shouted objections of Ald. Joe Moore (49th), the ban's sponsor, the council used a parliamentary manuever to put the ordinance on the floor for a vote.
The council voted 37-6 to repeal the two-year-old ban, which critics argued had made Chicago--and the City Council--a national laughingstock.
"National laughingstock" honors now fall on the entire state of California, which passed a fois gras ban set to take effect in 2012. Ald. Moore is apparently furious:
Moore, whose pleas for a debate were ignored by Daley, warned fellow aldermen "tomorrow it could happen to you."
I'm guessing Moore was referring to the parliamentary meneuver, and wasn't insinuating that America may one day crave the fatted livers of Chicago politicians over fava beans and a nice Chianti.
It isn't easy being green. Just ask Al Gore. But for one eco-friendly Canadian, the price is 15 hots and a cot. Via Breitbart:
Lee Breen, 25, was ticketed in August 2007 for skateboarding on Fredericton City streets in easternmost Canada, but refused to pay the fine, and so a judge ordered him jailed for five days.
[...]
"The city says it wants its citizens to find alternative forms of transportation, and so I did," Breen said by telephone from outside Fredericton city hall, prior to his arrest.
"I completely bought into the 'green lifestyle.' I run a gas-free lawn care company and I don't drive. And now, they're putting me in jail for actually embracing an alternative form of transportation that cuts down on (CO2) emissions."
Congress Daily reports that Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens, the ranking Republican on the Senate Commerce Committee, grilled Transportation Security Administrator Kip Hawley yesterday over his agency's plans for a 50-cent increase in airline passenger fees to pay for baggage screening equipment:
[Stevens was] adamant in opposing the 50-cent-per-flight fee increase, claiming that his constituents have to fly more intrastate than other Americans because of the size and difficult terrain of Alaska and are seeing none of the security improvements. "I don't know why we have to pay intrastate charges for security we don't get," he said.
And exactly what value would most Americans have gotten from the "bridges to nowhere" that Stevens notoriously championed a few years ago? With a price tag of $453 million, they would have cost every man, woman, and child in the country $1.50, three times the proposed TSA fee that riles Stevens. (Alaska ultimately got the money without explicit earmarks; one of the bridge projects has been canceled, while the other may yet proceed.) Even without those projects, Alaska excels at fleecing U.S. taxpayers, pulling in $1.84 for every dollar it sends to Washington, D.C., according to the Tax Foundation's numbers for 2005, when it ranked third by that measure, thanks largely to Stevens' tireless pork pulling.
Tracy Ingle is the Arkansas man I wrote about last week. He was shot five times during a no-knock drug raid on his home. Though police found no drugs, they charged him with running a drop operation, anyway, due they said to a scale and some plastic bags they found in his home. He's also charged with assaulting the police officers for pointing a broken gun at them when they broke into his bedroom and woke him. A few updates on his case:
• First, the good news. A couple of weeks ago while still researching the raid on Ingle's home, I called Arkansas defense attorney John Wesley Hall to get his thoughts on the case. This week, Hall agreed to represent Ingle. Hall is one of the best defense attorneys in the country. He's a former executive with the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, and argued the landmark no-knock raid case Wilson v. Arkansas before the U.S. Supreme Court. Ingle's defense (and possible lawsuit) is in good hands.
• I also spoke late last week with the prosecutor in the case, John Hout. Hout wouldn't go into the details of the case with me, but did confirm that (1) he plans to go ahead with both the drug and assault charges, (2) the officers who shot Ingle have been cleared of any wrongdoing, and (3) he can't release the affidavits from the raid despite the fact that they're public record, because the case is "an ongoing investigation." He did say the affidavits will be available to Ingle's attorney through discovery. I also spoke with the information officer of the North Little Rock Police Department. He also told me that the affidavits are off-limits.
• Finally, members of Ingle's family say the North Little Rock SWAT team visited Tracy Ingle again last week. This time, they came to his house asking for a man named Shawn Anthony Turner. Turner is Ingle's cousin, and has had frequent problems with the law—he has actually served time on drug charges. When Turner was released from prison several years ago, Ingle's mother agreed to have him released into her custody, mostly, she says, because no one else in the family would take him. For a short while, Turner lived in the home Ingle's mother (Turner's aunt) owned, along with Ingle and a few other roommates who came and went.. This is the same home the police raided in January. When Turner didn't clean up his act, the family threw him out. Turner continued to pester Tracy Ingle about letting him move in, the family says, and Ingle continued to refuse to allow it.
Tracy Ingle's family members now speculate that Turner somehow factored in to the January raid on Ingle's home. Ingle's house is Turner's last known address, though he hasn't lived there since mid-2006. Ingle's sister and mother believe either the police mistakenly raided the house while looking for Turner, or that Turner told the police Ingle was making methamphetamine in retaliation for Ingle's refusal to let Turner live in his home. Tracy Ingle's name doesn't appear anywhere on the search warrant for the raid.
Last week, when the police saw Ingle, they apparently recognized him, realized this was the same house they had raided months ago, realized Turner no longer lives at the address, and left.
My friend and former colleague Johan Norberg has just produced a devastating, 20-page debunking of Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine, a book he rightly calls "hopelessly flawed at virtually every level," with a thesis that rests on a "malevolent distortion" of Milton Friedman's views. The full report, released as a Cato Briefing Paper, is available here. A representative sample of Norberg busting Klein on bowdlerizing Friedman's writing:
When Klein talks about Friedman's suggestions to reduce inflation, she writes, "Friedman predicted that the speed, suddenness and scope of the economic shifts would provoke psychological reactions in the public that ‘facilitate the adjustment.'"
Klein gives the impression that Friedman was brutal and wanted to inflict pain to disorient people and push his reforms through. The use of the words "psychological reactions" is also important, because Klein tries to associate liberal reforms with psychological torture and electrical shocks. But the quote in its entirety shows that Friedman had something very different in mind. He actually wrote that if a government chooses to attack inflation in this way: "I believe that it should be announced publicly in great detail . . . . The more fully the public is informed, the more will its reactions facilitate the adjustment."
In other words, if the people are not ignorant, and not disoriented, but fully informed of the reform steps, they would facilitate the adjustment by changing their behavior when it comes to negotiations, saving, consuming, and so on. Friedman's view was the complete opposite of what Klein pretends it is.
I wrote previously about Klein's book here and here. Matt Welch on "disaster capitalism" here.
Domenico Salerno, a 35-year-old Italian lawyer, comes to Virginia several times a year to visit his American girlfriend, Caitlin Cooper, a 23-year-old copy editor he met a couple of years ago in Rome. Evidently that travel pattern triggered the suspicions of a Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agent, who stopped him from entering the country when he arrived at Washington Dulles International Airport on April 29. Although visitors from Italy do not need visas, CBP agents have the discretion to deny them entry—and exit. Instead of being sent back to Rome, Salerno was turned over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which shipped him off to a jail in Virginia, where he was detained for 10 days, still officially not in the United States and therefore without legal recourse. The CBP agent claimed he thought Salerno would turn out to be an asylum seeker because he expressed a fear of being killed if he returned to Italy. Salerno, whose English is spotty, told Cooper he never said anything of the kind. ICE kept Salerno on ice despite the intervention of Sen. John Warner (R-Va.) and the efforts of two former immigration prosecutors hired by Cooper's family. After Cooper contacted The New York Times,he was finally released and driven to Dulles, where he caught a flight back to Rome on Friday. Cooper is thinking of following him there, and staying.
Salerno had the benefit of affluent, well-connected American friends. Other visitors who are arbitrarily detained are not so lucky:
"We have a lot of government people here and lobbyists and lawyers and very educated, very savvy Washingtonians," said Jim Cooper, Ms. Cooper's father, a businessman, describing the reaction in his neighborhood, the Wessynton subdivision of Alexandria. "They were pretty shocked that the government could do this sort of thing, because it doesn't happen that often, except to people you never hear about, like Haitians and Guatemalans."
Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) and Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) both have new books out. But while Paul's has raced to the top of the charts, Hagel's is already long forgotten. Associate Editor David Weigel explains why.
Anne Applebaum, David Cameron, and others are calling for the rest of the world to ignore the junta and just start blanketing the country with aid from the air. It's certainly tempting; orphaned kids are getting sick as planeloads of medication wait a short trip away, and it's ludicrous that anyone should have to ask a bunch of barely educated thugs permission to deliver food and water. Still, its probably wishful thinking to envision a happy middle ground between submissively awaiting permission and full scale humanitarian intervention. No one has good enough information to know where, exactly, to dump a bunch of pallets, and Oxfam appears to think an air drop would make matters worse:
Air dropping aid does not guarantee food and other relief supplies reach the people most in need. In many cases it's the strongest and fittest who get to the aid first and not the sick or injured who most need help and assistance. In a natural disaster such as Cyclone Nargis or conflict like Dar-fur it's not only food that's needed but also sophisticated equipment such as clean water and sanitation systems weighing tonnes as well as highly skilled staff to operate them, all which cannot be dropped from the sky.
“If there isn't an aid operation on the ground to distribute the aid the air-drops can exacerbate any tense relations within communities with only the fittest and fastest benefiting,” said Brian Scott.
While I doubt that sprinkling the delta with a bunch of high-energy biscuits is going to hurt cyclone victims in the short term, there is reason to worry about the junta's response to what it will call "invasion by Western Imperialists." Burma is isolated, but it is no North Korea; there is ample room for the generals to become more insular by cutting off Internet access and throwing all foreign workers out of the country.
This is a country that's always in crisis, and at any given time, dozens of well-funded foreign NGOs are operating within Burma. The United Nations Children's Fund, WorldVision, and the Japanese International Cooperation Agency have big aid operations, and Doctors Without Borders has a longstanding program that distributes anti-malarial drugs in remote regions. A military that will steal food from hungry people won't hesitate to rid itself of foreign doctors, teachers, and agronomists, and that's going to leave a lot of people much worse off. At the very least, the junta will respond by banning all authorized aid, which means that the teams waiting outside Burma now will never make their way over the border and on the ground.
More than half of Americans now take prescription meds to treat chronic health problems, according to a new study out today. The study is being played as bad news, with the wire services quoting doctors proclaiming that "things will get worse instead of getting better" and chalking the problem up to our "couch potato culture."
But digging deeper into the study reveals that much of the increase is the result of good preventive treatment for diseases that were once debilitating or fatal, like the use of allergy medication and steroid treatments to prevent asthma flareups in kids, and higher rates of antidepressant use, especially among young women.
(For more on the latter topic, re-read reason contributor Will Wilkinson's excellent article on whether an epidemic of depressive disorder is sweeping America. Answer: Not really)
There's no doubt Americans have brought many cases of diabetes and hypertension on themselves by being lazy fatties. Chronic medication use is growing fastest among young people, but the real heavywights continue to be the oldsters. Drug use grows steadily because as we live longer the ol' bod just starts to experience wear and tear, as in the case of arthritis.
Plus, we aren't just a nation of unreflective pill poppers: Rates of use for hormone replacements fell by half in 2007 when news broke about potential side effects. People are, at least in many cases, educated consumers of all those meds.
One doctor, at least, saw a "silver lining": "People are receiving treatment which can prevent more serious health problems down the road."
The big election news out of last night was the victory of William Faulkner impersonator Travis Childers (D) in the blood-red first Misssissippi House seat. A district that voted 63-37 for Bush over Kerry (up from 59-40 for Bush over Gore) went for the Democrat by eight points. The excuses for Republican loser Greg Davis just aren't there.
After losing special elections in Illinois and Louisiana, the House GOP conference already expects a bad year for their party. But those two districts voted for President Bush by eleven and nineteen points, respectively, not by a whopping twenty five points. "People are going to want change," said a top aide to a leading House Republican. "The excuses, that [Davis] didn't have the resources or that he wasn't from the right part of the district, that's just not going to hold up."
The party's official statement is actually pretty bleak:
Tonight’s election highlights two significant challenges Republicans must overcome this November. First, Republicans must be prepared to campaign against Democrat challengers who are running as conservatives, even as they try to join a liberal Democrat majority. Though the Democrats’ task will be more difficult in a November election, the fact is they have pulled off two special election victories with this strategy, and it should be a concern to all Republicans.
There's still some lame spin buried in there. Of course Democrats running in conservative districts are running as conservatives. For starters, they're conservatives. Childers is going to join the Blue Dog conference in the House and vote against his party on basically every social issue. Republicans don't run stone-cold conservatives in northeastern, Democratic-leaning districts, and the people they do elect are like Chris Shays and Linc Chafee—reliable votes for a Republican speaker, reliable back-stabbers on a bunch of other stuff.
A fun footnote: In 1989, Trent Lott was serving his first term in the Senate when Larkin Smith, the Republican elected to his old House seat in southeast Mississippi, died in a plane crash. Lott forced Smith's widow out of the race and installed his aide Tom Anderson, who blew the election by 30 points to still-Rep. Gene Taylor. How did Mississippi's first district open up this year? Trent Lott quit his Senate seat and the GOP elevated MS-01 Congressman Roger Wicker to fill his slot.
So, Trent Lott: He turned two of Mississippi's House seats blue.
I became intrigued by an oddity that I came to think of as the end-of-the-world trade. The trade is the purchase of insurance against what would in effect be the failure of the modern capitalist system. It would take a cataclysm -- around a third of the leading investment-grade corporations in Europe or half those in North America going bankrupt and defaulting on their debt -- for the insurance to be paid out.
I asked one investment banker what might cause half of North America's top corporations to default. No ordinary economic recession or natural disaster short of an asteroid strike could do it: no hurricane, for example, and not even 'the big one', a catastrophic earthquake devastating California. All he could think of was 'a revolutionary Marxist government in Washington'. That's not a likely scenario, yet the cost of insuring against it had shot up ten-fold. Normally one can buy $10 million of end-of-the-world insurance for between two and three thousand dollars a year. By early last November, the prices quoted were between twenty and thirty thousand, and even then it was difficult to buy in quantity -- at least, said the banker, 'not from anyone you trusted'.
Via Ken MacLeod, who comments: "You can insure against the revolution? Who knew?"
Ron Paul won't be moving to Paulville, reportsPolitico:
The founders of Paulville recently announced the purchase of the first 50 acres in West Texas on which they plan to build one of their "gated communities containing 100 percent Ron Paul supporters and or people that live by the ideals of freedom and liberty."
One man who won't be moving there anytime soon: Ron Paul....
[D]ropping out and creating an isolated community isn't the answer, says Paul, a congressman from Texas. "You don't want the ideas to be centered in one place," he says. "But it shows how desperate people are for freedom."
Consistent with his beliefs in liberty, however, he doesn't outright oppose Paulville. "I don't see that as a solution, but it can't hurt anything either," he says.
My position on Paulville is the same as my position on every libertarian intentional community: I don't want to live in a town filled with ideologues, even (or especially) if they're ideologues I agree with. That said, better a thousand Paulvilles than a single McCain Nation.
It's not clear, incidentally, that Paulville will appear at all. From the same article:
On Monday, just days after the announcement of the land purchase, the Web site Paulville.org went out of existence. No contact information had been on the site when it was live; phone calls and e-mails to the site administrator over the last several days have gone unreturned.
Has the dream died already? Or, like Brigadoon flashing briefly in the mist, have they already gone off the grid?
Bonus exercise: Imagine life in Edwardsville, Bidentown, the Dodd District, Port Romney, Huckabee County, Tancredo Township, or any other community devoted to the principles espoused by a failed presidential candidate. (Except Giuliani City. We already know what that one looked like.)
With food prices and farm incomes on the rise, Senior Editor Jacob Sullum wonders why America's farmers need yet another multi-billion dollar government bailout.
The New York Timesnotices that the bill authorizing the Food and Drug Administration to regulate tobacco products bans every cigarette flavor but menthol. Not coincidentally, Philip Morris, the only cigarette manufacturer that supports the bill, sells mentholated brands, while those other flavors are used by its competitors. But instead of wondering whether a bill that seems designed to reinforce the advantages of the industry leader is good for consumers, the Times suggests menthol should be banned too. It offers three reasons:
1) Menthol cigarettes are "the most popular cigarette choice of African-American smokers," who account for a disproportionate share of the market for brands such as Newport and Kool. The Times never explains why this is troubling, but the concern is of a piece with the anti-smoking refrain that it's especially reprehensible for tobacco companies to "target" blacks because they, like women and children, are a "vulnerable group."
2) "Menthol smokers may be exposed to higher levels of dangerous compounds than nonmenthol smokers." If so, the greater hazard could be due to chemicals produced by burning menthol or to menthol's cooling, anesthetic effect, which might encourage smokers to take bigger or deeper puffs or hold them longer. But there's no firm evidence that mentholated brands are in fact more dangerous. The Times cites a CDC scientist who refers to "multiple lines of evidence, generally consistent, suggesting that there's reason for concern," while conceding "there are few definitive answers about the health impact of menthol cigarettes." A 2002 review by the CDC and the National Cancer Institute, the Times reports, "said the research up to that point had been inconclusive," and "in five large studies of menthol to date, only one has found higher rates of cancer among menthol smokers than nonmenthol smokers, and only in men."
3) Menthol "may make it harder for the addicted to kick the smoking habit." How so? "One theory suggests that menthol in cigarettes, by providing an additional pleasurable sensory cue to smokers, reinforces addiction." This is just another way of saying that people who smoke menthol cigarettes like the way they smell and taste.
As I noted a few years ago, when an earlier version of this tobacco bill was introduced, anti-smoking activists consider good taste inherently objectionable, ostensibly because it appeals to minors. Former Sen. Mike DeWine (R-Ohio), a co-sponsor of that bill, tells the Times, "We were able to eliminate the use of flavored cigarettes, strawberry, mocha, and all this stuff that is clearly targeted at young kids...to start them smoking tobacco." As usual, this argument goes unchallenged, but it is patently absurd to claim that luring underage smokers is the only possible reason for adding flavor to tobacco products. People over the age of 18 have been known to smoke clove cigarettes, vanilla-flavored cigars, and cherry-infused pipe tobacco. Instead of pretending that it's all about the kids, the advocates of FDA regulation should admit that they want to make the smoking experience as boring and unpleasant as possible, the better to deter everyone, whether 16 or 60, from consuming tobacco products.
My most recent column on the tobacco bill is here.
West Virginia (7:30 p.m.) Barack Obama is lucky, damn lucky, that he convinced the punditocracy of his inevitability last week. If he had lost Indiana by a landslide and North Carolina by a little, West Virginia's primary would be getting more attention than it is. And even the little attention it's getting is focusing on Obama's crippling weakness with a certain segment of white voters. The Politico's roundup of the primary includes this wonderfully depressing facts for Obama:
- He's trailing by 49 points in Morgan County, the state's reliable swing county. - His positive-negative numbers are 44-41, compared to Clinton's 70-21. - One pollster, reading this, says "Obama may have to write off West Virginia come November."
The good news for Obama? The states he's losing aren't worth as much as the states he's winning. I discussed this with Eric Dondero on BlogTalkRadio last night. Dondero was crowing that the Democrats were losing Southern whites forever with their foolhardy Obama nomination, and I argued that they could afford to, because the electoral power of those voters is vanishing. West Virginia's a good example. From 1913 to 1963, the state had six congressmen and eight electoral votes. Now it has three congressman and five electoral votes. It's the 10th slowest-growing state: A political party would get far more out of locking down Hispanic votes in Nevada (5 electoral votes, set to become 6 electoral votes in 2012) than locking down poor whites in West Virginia or even Kentucky. Congressional re-districting is going to pulverize these states.
Look at it this way. Say the Democrats win the White House with the states Al Gore won in 2000 plus West Virginia. In 2000, they would have been worth 271 votes. In 2008, they will be worth 269 votes—enough to toss the election into the House of representatives. In 2012, they will be worth only 259 votes, as the rust belt and mid-Atlantic states lose clout to the West and sun belt. The smart thing for either party, then, is to win those latter states. The GOP would gladly give up its West Virginia surge if it could stop bleeding support in Colorado and (to a much lesser but more worrying extent) Texas.
So, having argued that West Virginia doesn't matter much... Clinton will beat Obama like a country drunk who's walked in on his wife and the milkman. It will be called within one tenth of one nanosecond of the polls closing. Obama could well lose all 55 counties: The only places I'd give him a chance are Cabell (home of Marshall University) and Monongalia (home of Morgantown and WVU). There's a little mystery about how many votes the still-on-the-ballot John Edwards will get, but not much mystery. I'd predict Clinton 67 percent, Obama 30 percent, with Clinton netting 8 delegates. Mississippi-01 (8 p.m.) - The Democrats have a good chance at winning this open U.S. House seat tonight, vacated by Rep. Roger Wicker (R) when he replaced Trent Lott in the Senate. They came within 400 votes of doing that in the first round of the primary, but Democrat Travis Childers fell below the 50 percent mark, and Republican Greg Davis rallied his troops for this runoff. It's gained national attention for two reasons. First, if the GOP loses, it would be its third straight special election loss after blowing Dennis Hastert's Illinois seat and the Baton Rouge-area seat of Richard Baker. Second, if the GOP wins, it will be the first time a candidate rode to victory by linking a Democrat to Barack Obama. A series of TV ads accused Childers of being endorsed by Obama (not technically true). The Democrats have outspent the GOP, their local machine is pretty good, and Childers only needs about 27 percent of the white vote to win, but I feel like Davis will hold on.
Inspired by the comments, one more video...
UPDATE 7:50: Clinton wins by 2 to 1, at the higher end of expectations. A week of "check out this rube who hates black people!" stories comes mercifully to an end.
Could Obama have kept it closer? He's losing groups he's won before, like under-30s (by 16 points), college graduates (by 11 points) and people making more than $100,000 (by 6 points). Mystifyingly, he does better with white Catholics than Protestants. But the numbers of people who think he ran a dirty campaign and isn't trustworthy blows away anything we've ever seen before. It's incredible that his campaign once hoped for a 12-point loss.
The number of whites who said race mattered in their vote was almost as high as the number in Mississippi. It's a bit too much for Obama to write off. So, here's a question: What would have happened had the DNC juggled the states and made West Virginia, not Iowa, the first contest? Would Barack Obama have managed to recreate his appeal in that state? Would he have hit a wall and come in third to Edwards and Clinton, maybe in that order? With black voters convinced that they had no shot at electing a black president, would they have stuck with Clinton and helped her beat Edwards? That's how I see it playing out.
One possible preview of the fall: John Kerry lost this state handily to George W. Bush. Yes, 50 percent of those voters were Democrats... but Bush won one in three Democrats. Compare that to Pennsylvania, where only 15 percent of Democrats voted for Bush. This is one state where those voters promising to drop out and vote McCain in November are going to stick to that.
UPDATE 8:15: No numbers from Mississippi, but apparently DeSoto County -- Davis's strongest county -- had to request extra ballots.
UPDATE 8:28: Wow. I expect these numbers to shift through the night, but the protest vote in WV is enormous. With barely anything in, 7 percent of the vote is going to neither Clinton nor Obama. In the GOP race, 11 percent is going to neither McCain, Huckabee or Paul. This won't matter delegate-wise for either party, though. The Democrats re-weight their votes, discounting anyone who doesn't hit the 15 percent threshhold.
UPDATE 8:43: Are the days of Obama underperforming exit polls over? CNN has gently massaged its poll, and now shows Clinton getting closer to 64 percent of the combined vote... down from about 67 percent earlier. I'd be shocked if an electorate so anecdotally Obamaphobic lied to pollsters about this.
UPDATE 8:48: I think the GOP will hold MS-01. Childers is underperforming, and he only won by 49-46 last time.
UPDATE 9:10: Every time the Clinton camp breathes heavily about "no Democrat winning the White House without West Virginia," keep in mind that Dukakis, Carter (in 1980), Humphrey and Stevenson all won the state and lost the presidency.
UPDATE 9:13: Maybe I was wrong about MS-01. About 1/3 of Davis's base county, DeSoto, is in. He won it by 65 points last time, and is winning it by 45 now. If that margin holds (admittedly a dubious proposition) it's 1000 votes or so in Childers' pocket. Also, those DeSoto turnout predictions seem fishy... so far it's casting about as many votes as last time.
UPDATE 9:17: Good news for Childers. Last time, Yalobusha County cast 1,161 votes and broke 48-46 for Davis. This time, it cast 2,239 votes and broke 59-41 for Childers.
If the Democrats pull this off, expect to see Paul Begala mocked for this quote:
[What Howard Dean] has spent [the DNC's money] on apparently, is just hiring a bunch of staff people to wander around Utah and Mississippi and pick their nose. That's not how you build a party. You win elections. That's how you build a party.
If the GOP loses, not so much.
UPDATE 11:34: Childers won by 8 points, after winning the first round of the election by only 3. To recap, here was one of Davis's ads against him.
Mixed message for superdelegates tonight. On the one hand, Obama's still hopeless in Appalachia. On the other, Republicans tied a Democratic candidate to him and failed... in Mississippi.
From last Thursday's Wall Street Journal, here's the great reactionary radical (and reason contributor) Bill Kauffman on Ginger Strand's intriguing new book Inventing Niagara:
Ms. Strand's populist defense of the glorious disorder of the private Niagara Falls Museum is of a piece with her appreciation of the falls as God and nature intended them to be. But just as the five-story museum was leveled by the New York State parks authority and replaced by a parking lot, so have the falls, in Ms. Strand's words, been "manicured, repaired, landscaped and artificially lit, dangerous overhangs dynamited off and water flow managed to suit the tourist schedule." One can't help noticing that the "improvements" Ms. Strand deplores were almost entirely the work of government. Those overhangs were blown off by the Army Corps of Engineers, which has trimmed, blasted, dammed and fortified this natural wonder and its river. State, not commerce, was unable to leave well enough alone.
As an American patriot, I've long been ashamed of the fact that Niagara's greatest attraction, the uncanny Criminals Hall of Fame Wax Museum, rests on the Canadian side of the falls. And as Kauffman notes, we can thank the bulldozers of the vile Robert Moses, among other government villains, for the destruction of "the carnival-barker spirit that once gave the city brass, if not class."
Ancient humans started down the path of evolving into two separate species before merging back into a single population, a genetic study suggests.
The genetic split in Africa resulted in distinct populations that lived in isolation for as much as 100,000 years, the scientists say.
That's one possibility, anyway; the reporter adds that "other scenarios could also account for the data." The paper, published in the American Journal of Human Genetics, is available here.
Last week, Vladimir Putin pretended to hand power to Russia's new puppet president, the amiable former chair of Gazprom's board of directors Dmitry Medvedev. Reuters reports that Medvedev—by which they mean Putin—has "appointed three of Vladimir Putin's closest aides to run his administration, ensuring Putin retains his strong grip on power despite leaving the Kremlin." Breaking with protocol, Putin demonstrated who was in charge before the announcement. As The Moscow Timesexplains, Putin "not only remained in the left-hand seat, but also spoke first when presenting Medvedev with his new Cabinet." The paper declares the former president "the big winner" in the cabinet sweepstakes, though they reassuringly note that Putin's phalanx of liberal advisors were the "other winners," while a handful of anti-western hawks—the siloviki—were demoted.
And while this is all good news for the Russian economy, Putin continues to bully his critics in the media. Last month, the Associated Press reported that "Russia's lower house of parliament voted...to widen the definition of slander and libel and give regulators the authority to shut down media outlets found guilty of publishing such material." And today, the Timesfollows up on the case of Russian curator Yuri V. Samodurov, whose controversial exhibitions attacking the church and military have been consistently defaced by nationalists and religious extremists. Back in 2003, the Times explains, "a group of men raided Mr. Samodurov's museum, defacing many of the 45 works in another exhibition critical of the Orthodox Church called 'Caution, Religion!' While charges against most of the men were dropped for a lack of evidence, Mr. Samodurov was convicted of inciting religious hatred."
And so it is again. In an unsurprising move, prosecutors have now charged Samodurov with "inciting religious hatred" for the staging of his 2007 show "Forbidden Art." I am sure, though, that the prosecution is entirely unrelated to Samodurov's recent denunciation of the Putin government as "Stalinist" in its attacks on the pernicious influence of "foreign culture."
Ronald Bailey looks at the search for a morally unproblematic source of stem cells and wonders if a cell can be imbued with a soul by turning a single gene on or off.
Via Breitbart, I submit the following without comment:
The Vatican's chief astronomer says that believing in aliens does not contradict faith in God.
The Rev. Jose Gabriel Funes, the Jesuit director of the Vatican Observatory, says that the vastness of the universe means it is possible there could be other forms of life outside Earth, even intelligent ones.
In an interview published Tuesday by Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano, Funes says that such a notion "doesn't contradict our faith" because aliens would still be God's creatures.
Storybook pirates need no defending. What’s not to love about Captain Hook?
But copyright pirates are often blamed for all manner of social ills, from the low quality of the music those whippersnappers listen to these days, to Hollywood’s troubles at the box office. In the Guardian, pop culture guru Matt Mason makes a plea on their behalf:
When an online copy of Scrabble called Scrabulous appeared on Facebook, it quickly amassed 2.3 million fans who played it every day. It was an amazing user-generated ad campaign, and sales of real Scrabble boards increased. All Hasbro and Mattel (the owners of Scrabble) had to do was swoop in with their cheque books and make it legit; instead they treated Scrabulous as a simple case of piracy and threatened to sue. It may have been smarter to cut a deal rather than anger potential customers. Thousands signed up to the "Save Scrabulous" Facebook group. One fan threatened a hunger strike. Hasbro and Mattel are still talking tough, but if the backlash continues they may be forced to eat their words.
Managing directors take note! Don't let your legal department make a decision about pirates without talking to marketing first, because pirates can sometimes refresh the parts other ad strategies cannot reach.
The same piece also has a story about how remixers have saved us from “rubbish trainers” (that’s “crappy sneakers” to Americans) by tarting up Nike’s classic Air Force 1 on their own dime, and under their own brands.
The complete Citings from our June issue are now available online. Should British Olympians keep their mouths shut about China this summer? Should the U.S. follow Iran's example and make kidneys available for sale? And if the Supreme Court upholds the Washington, DC gun ban, will that give Montana the right to secede from the Union?
The list of things the Burmese government has bungled over the past two weeks includes its own propaganda campaign:
AS HUNDREDS of thousands of refugees waited for emergency relief yesterday and for their leaders to act, the Burmese junta went ahead with a national referendum aimed at keeping its members in power.
The Burmese generals were visible all right. State television showed them handing out boxes of the small amount of aid allowed in from neighbouring Thailand. Unwittingly, it also showed that the Burmese leadership had plastered their own names over the true origins of the food aid to fool their own people into believing that the emergency relief supplies had come from them.
I'd rather consider this the work of a disgruntled MRTV employee. Endless MRTV-3 segments featuring officials shaking hands in celebration of their bang-up job on cyclone relief are here and here.
Meanwhile, the government is holding a vote on its 194-page constitution, available only in languages 40 percent of the population cannot read. According to the New York Times, officials have pushed cyclone refugees out of schoolhouses in order to use them as polling places. In this, too, the regime has managed to gum up its message machine. The country's "roadmap to democracy" is widely regarded as Than Shwe's attempt to soften criticism of his government, and the constitutional referendum is probably a ploy for international legitimacy in response to pressure from the region. It...doesn't seem to be working at the moment.
Barack Obama, trying to stitch back together his reputation with Jewish voters, gives a hearty interview to Jeffrey Goldberg. They talk about Israel and the settlements.
BO: Look, my interest is in solving this problem not only for Israel but for the United States.
JG: Do you think that Israel is a drag on America’s reputation overseas?
BO: No, no, no. But what I think is that this constant wound, that this constant sore, does infect all of our foreign policy.
It is truly disappointing that Senator Obama called Israel a ‘constant wound,’ ‘constant sore,’ and that it ‘infect[s] all of our foreign policy.’
Warbloggers respond (it's at Little Green Footballs, so I won't link it):
Obama: Israel is a "Constant Sore."
Look: You have to be a liar, idiot, or both to think Obama was referring to Israel with that. How can a country be "constant"? A struggle can be constant, as can a conflict, or a "problem." That's the antecendent of Obama's "constant sore" comment. If the Republican strategy to turn Jewish voters against Obama is to prey on their lack of basic reading skills, well, good luck.
The irony is that Obama provides plenty of grist for honest skeptics, and David Frum goes over them here:
Notice what is embedded here:
(1) a condescending assumption that the so-called hawkish position on the Arab-Israeli dispute is "blind" and adopted by US politicians only because they seek political safety - there's no acknowledgement that the dovish position was ever tried or that it in fact produced a terrible war in 2000-2003;
(2) the attitude, common on the Democratic left, that real friendship to Israel consists in compelling Israeli governments to do things that most Israelis regard as dangerous;
(3) acceptance of the red herring that it is "settlements" that are the source of the Arab-Israeli dispute;
(4) enormous and unexplained confidence that he can solve a problem through his personal intervention.
The Washington Post reports on a new study revealing the quicker and quicker adaptation of immigrants to American norms.
In general, the longer an immigrant lives in the United States, the more characteristics of native citizens he or she tends to take on, said Jacob L. Vigdor, a professor at Duke University and author of the study. During periods of intense immigration, such as from 1870 to 1920, or during the immigration wave that began in the 1970s, new arrivals tend to drag down the average assimilation index of the foreign-born population as a whole.
The report found, however, that the speed with which new arrivals take on native-born traits has increased since the 1990s. As a result, even though the foreign population doubled during that period, the newcomers did not drive down the overall assimilation index of the foreign-born population. Instead, it held relatively steady from 1990 to 2006.
"This is something unprecedented in U.S. history," Vigdor said. "It shows that the nation's capacity to assimilate new immigrants is strong."
What left-wing, Soros-and-la-Raza-funded "think tank" belched this out, anyway?
Obviously, a large school of restrictionists believe in restriction as a means of assimiliation. This is an old Peter Brimelow hobby horse: The immigration waves before the 1920s were so successful because the "time out" between then and the 1965 Immigration Act stopped flooding cities with new arrivals who would have retarded the assimiliation of the old arrivals. But if assimiliation is quickening without a strategic pause...
A man ordered by a judge to make sure his daughter hit the books has found himself in jail because she failed to earn a high school equivalency diploma.
Brian Gegner, of Fairfield, was sentenced last week to 180 days in jail for contributing to the unruliness or delinquency of a minor.
He was ordered months ago to make sure his 18-year-old daughter Brittany Gegner, who has a history of truancy, received her GED—something that hasn't happened yet.
Brittany Gegner, who said Monday that she plans to take a required GED test this month, said her father shouldn't be blamed for her failure because she has been living with her mother.
"It was my wrongdoing, not his," said Brittany Gegner, whose fiance and 18-month-old daughter also live at her mother's home in nearby Hamilton. "He shouldn't have to go to jail for something I did."
Her mother agrees.
"Brittany is almost 19 years old now and I think it's unfair to put her father in jail," said Shana Roach. "She's an adult now, and it's not right to rip an innocent man from his home."
Earlier this year, police in Tallahassee, Florida raided the home of college student Rachel Hoffman, who friends say was a bit of a hippie-ish free spirit, and concede that she shared and sold small amounts of marijuana and MDMA within her social circle. Hoffman was at the time undergoing state-forced drug treatment after police found 20+ grams of marijuana in her car during a traffic stop. The raid turned up another five ounces of marijuana, plus six ecstasy pills and assorted pot-related paraphernalia.
From this, Tallahassee police apparently threatened Hoffman with prison time, then agreed to let her off easy if she'd become a police informant, and set up a deal with her supplier. They never informed Hoffman's attorney or the state prosecutor of the arrangement. They wired Hoffman, and asked her to arrange to purchase 1,500 ecstasy pills, cocaine, and a gun—a deal that would have run well over ten thousand dollars. Hoffman's friends and family have told me that all three purchases would also have been drastically out of character for her. Which means the dealers she was buying from were almost surely on to her.
Tallahassee police found Hoffman's body last week. The first thing they did was call a press conference in which they blamed Hoffman for her own death, stating that the arrangement she made with the police was consistent with department protocol, and that she agreed to meet with the dealers in a different location than the one previously agreed upon.
After public outrage, the city is now walking that back a bit, and has asked Florida's attorney general to look into the Tallahassee Police Department's procedures for dealing with drug informants.
Chalk it up as collateral damage, and add Hoffman's name to that of Isaac Singletary and Anthony Diotaiuto, three deaths of non-violent, non-threatening Floridians in just the last few years, thanks to the drug war.
No, not really. Besides the ideological problems, there's the small fact that it hasn't bothered to nominate a presidential candidate since 1976. But I must admit I admire one plank in its program:
The Socialist Labor platform called for abolishing the presidency, and party electors were instructed to vote "no president" in the comet-striking-earth chance that the SLP carried a state.
That's from Bill Kauffman's thoughtful review of Daniel J. Flynn's A Conservative History of the American Left. There's more to the article than entertaining asides about the presidential platforms of semi-syndicalist sects; read the whole thing here.
Writing in the spring issue of the Manhattan Institute's City Journal, Gerald Russello, author of The Postmodern Imagination of Russell Kirk, offers a provocative review of Steven M. Teles' new The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement in America. In Russello's view, despite a number of clear victories—most prominently the Supreme Court appointments of Justices Scalia, Thomas, and Alito—conservative legal activists have largely failed in their endeavors. Here's why:
Perhaps the very strategy that enabled such conservative successes has also limited it: conservative groups adopted some of the premises of judicial liberalism, pushing for activist federal courts and the use of rights language to achieve their goals. Conservative lawyers, like their liberal New Deal forbears, flocked to Washington to take posts in presidential administrations, too often leaving state legal systems at the mercy of liberals (like New York's Eliot Spitzer). Instead of developing a truly conservative legal philosophy based on decentralization and the rights of local communities, the conservative legal movement often became merely a moderate opposition to the trend of centralized government and heavy reliance on the courts to achieve political goals.
One of my problems with this is that Russello's "truly conservative legal philosophy" lets state and local governments off the hook for various assaults on individual rights. I'd also distinguish more carefully between the various groups under discussion. For instance, elsewhere in the article Russello describes the great Institute for Justice (IJ) as conservative, when in fact they're libertarian, probably the single best example of what a truly libertarian legal philosophy might entail.
But Russello is undoubtedly correct that the rights-based IJ approach has taken a beating in recent years, most notably in the double-whammy of 2005, when the Supreme Court came out in favor of eminent domain abuse (Kelo v. City of New London) and against medical marijuana (Gonzales v. Raich). Should we abandon hope and retreat to the states, or stick with IJ and keep fighting the good fight?
Amazing that anyone would flee Cuba now that the benevolent Raul Castro legalized DVD players and computers (though both DVDs and Internet connections are still out of the question and the average monthly wage remains around $19), but it appears that 2004 Olympic bronze medalist in judo Yurisel Laborde has defected to the Empire. Despite the supposed liberalization measures undertaken by the new Jefe, Cubans keep disappearing when visiting the U.S. Last month it was four ballet dancers from the National Ballet of Cuba, in March seven members of Cuba's under-23 soccer team, a steady stream of baseball players and doctors, and, of course, the thousands of boat people that set sail every month. The Associated Press on the missing judo star:
The Cubans checked in for their flight lugging new mountain bikes, televisions, espresso machines and other purchases made during their historic stay in Miami. It was the first time in 40 years that a Cuban Olympic team in any sport had competed in this city, a hotbed of anti-Castro sentiment.
As she waited for a bike to be wrapped in plastic, tournament gold medalist Idalys Ortiz said she was proud of her team's performance. Like her teammates, Ortiz declined to talk about Laborde, who won gold in the 78-kilogram division.
"Of that, I don't know anything," Ortiz said.
Coach Ronaldo Veitia Valdivie said he trusted Laborde, whom he had trained since she was 12. He said he had worked hard to enable her to compete in Miami, since she was already qualified for this summer's Beijing Olympics.
"She wasn't thinking it through. You know how youth is," he said.
In the 1990s, New York State's tourism board let the trademark on its "I ♥ NY" slogan lapse, encouraging a flood of unlicensed souvenirs carrying the famous logo. Since then the state has renewed its trademark and, in an attempt to rejuvenate the "brand," plans to crack down on what The New York Times calls "unlicensed fakes." But what exactly is inauthentic about T-shirts, towels, salt and pepper shakers, beer can holders, and paperweights that declare "I ♥ NY" without state authorization? Surely they clothe the torso, dry the hands, dispense the seasonings, keep the beverage cold, and hold the paper down at least as well as their licensed counterparts. Is the sentiment itself less sincere because it's not officially certified? Although it's easy to understand why the state wants its license fees, it'd hard to see how consumers are shortchanged by unofficial souvenirs.
In addition to the revenue from licensing, the state wants to control the types of merchandise associated with Empire State love. Ashtrays and lighters, for instance, are right out. The desire to control the messages linked to "I ♥ NY" has gone to decidedly unlovely extremes. The Times reports that the Pataki administration threatened to sue Milton Glaser for trademark infringement over his post-9/11 "I ♥ NY More Than Ever" logo. Who is Milton Glaser? The graphic designer who developed the "I ♥ NY" symbol in 1977 and let the state use it free of charge.
NPR's On the Media did a long segment over the weekend about Ayn Rand's continuing popularity and influence. Among the folks they interviewed was reason's Nick Gillespie. Snippets here:
BROOKE GLADSTONE: That's Gary Cooper playing Howard Roark, the tall, angular architect of tall, angular buildings in The Fountainhead. That book has sold something like six million copies since it was published in 1943. Ron Paul should be so lucky.
Rand died in 1982 - but Rand lives!
NICK GILLESPIE: Let's put it this way: Ayn Rand's work, I think, is popular for the same reason Prometheus has always been popular with humans. It's about somebody who dares to struggle against great odds and, you know, steals fire.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Nick Gillespie is the editor of Reason.com and Reason TV and former editor of Reason Magazine, a Libertarian journal whose name is a nod to Rand's favorite wordreason, above all - reason above conventional pieties, reason above religion, above especially collectivist societies and command economies, the horrors of which she witnessed as a child in St. Petersburg during the Russian Revolution - reason that finds its purest expression in capitalism.
NICK GILLESPIE: Virtually every CEO of every major company will list Ayn Rand as a major influence. A bevy of Hollywood stars, ranging from Brad Pitt to Angelina Jolie to Vince Vaughn - a director like Oliver Stone, who is fond of Castro, says that Ayn Rand is one of the most important figures in his intellectual life. Martina Navratilova, Billie Jean King, Hugh Hefner - I mean, the reach of this author is pretty astonishing....
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And I don't think that influence derives from her persuasive argument against command economies.
NICK GILLESPIE: She gives egoists a positive case for why the world should revolve around them and around their efforts. If you are the person who is creating value, if you are the star, the sun really does revolve around you. And not only should it be that way, but that's the moral order of the universe....
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Nick Gillespie, of Reason, says he was never wowed by Rand's novels but that the attacks on them are often swipes by people who would rather not seriously engage her ideas.
NICK GILLESPIE: How many characters from Saul Bellow novels, how many characters from Don DeLillo novels, inarguably great writers, how many of them have penetrated the American cultural consciousness in the way that a Howard Roark or a John Gault [sic] has, to a degree where these are shorthands for an entire system of ideas?
I think that that speaks pretty highly of her power as a writer. She is a great author because she has a phenomenal audience, including a lot of people who go through a worshipful phase with her. And, you know, here we could be talking about Alan Greenspan, the former head of the Federal Reserve, as well as any number of pimply-faced adolescents who decide to grow beyond her.
A week ago, I had a lengthy conversation with Mike Gravel about his run for the LP nomination. To my knowledge, this was before he cut the "Obama Girl" video, but it makes an interesting contrast... if you were told "a former Democratic senator has entered the Libertarian race on a platform of direct democracy and radical civil rights expansions," you'd probably thoughtfully stroke your goatee. When you're told "wacky video guy Mike Gravel said something," you laugh and move on.
I've uploaded the whole 90-minute talk here, and I'm taking my sweet time transcribing it but want to make it available before a coming reason event with Gravel and other Libertarian candidates.
Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) has a new book out titled The Revolution: A Manifesto (it's currently No. 8 on Amazon's bestsellers list).
Here's Glenn Reynolds, a.k.a the Instapundit, on it:
[The Revolution is] important because Ron Paul's candidacy has interested a lot of people in libertarian ideas who probably haven't read those other books, and because their exposure has come not in the context of academic dissatisfaction with the status quo, but in the context of political action. The book benefits from many of the Paul campaign's virtues, in the form of accessibility, clarity, and straightforwardness. On the other hand, it also suffers from some of the Paul campaign's vices, about which more later.
My biggest disagreement, and that of many libertarians with Paul, involves national security. Paul and I are both libertarians, but of different varieties. Paul is an old-fashioned Rothbardian. I'm more of a Heinleinian libertarian and we, like the Randian libertarians, tend to view national defense as more important than the Rothbardians do. Paul's view, essentially, is that if we quit sending troops abroad, other people and countries would quit wanting to kill us. I'm not particularly persuaded by this. First, even during the minimal-government era of Thomas Jefferson we wound up at war with the Barbary Pirates (in many ways, the spiritual antecedents of today's Islamic terrorists). And second, Paul is not an isolationist—he favors much more commercial and cultural engagement with foreign countries, something which, if experience is any guide, is as likely to anger Islamic fundamentalists and other varieties of terrorists and tyrants as is the establishment of foreign bases....
The main shortcoming in Paul's book, as with his candidacy, is in the follow through, the transition from critique to action. Although he does include a chapter entitled "The Revolution," about reducing the size of government, it's a pretty skimpy plan. Were we to see a Ron Paul Administration, with a House and Senate made up of, well, Ron Pauls, it might have a chance of succeeding, though even so he's a bit timid in places - proposing a freeze on the budgets of cabinet departments instead of their outright abolition, for example, despite noting that only State, Defense, and Justice have clear constitutional mandates. But given the unlikelihood of a Paul Administration, and the even greater unlikelihood of a Paul Congress, his policy prescriptions aren't likely to bear fruit. But those who want to see liberty progress right here and right now will look in vain for suggestions on what they might do, right here and right now, to make progress.
Rome didn't fall in a day, and today's monster government didn't spring up overnight. It was the result of incremental expansion. Given that we're not likely to see an opportunity to downsize the federal government overnight, or even in a single Presidential term, those of libertarian inclinations might well look to incremental approaches to reining in Big Government. They will be well advised, however, to look elsewhere than Revolution: A Manifesto. Still, if Fabian Libertarianism is to have a future, it will owe much to the consciousness-raising of the Paul campaign. Socialist candidate Eugene Debs, after all, never got elected President either, but within a few decades much of his platform was adopted by the Democratic Party. May Paul enjoy similar influence on the future of national politics.
Former reason intern Robert Pollock has been the editorial features page editor at The Wall Street Journal for more than a year. The Buffalo native sat down recently with reason.tv to talk about how he came to his libertarian beliefs; how the mainstream media is toeing the Journal's line on capital gains taxes; why The Washington Post is the Journal's toughest competition and why The New York Times' editorial pages have a "hectoring" tone; how the GOP turned its back on its small-government philosophy; why America needs more immigrants; and much more.
This 10-minute interview was conducted by reason.tv Editor Nick Gillespie and filmed by reason.tv's Dan Hayes.
This is old--the data set ends in 1998--but the basic idea is forever true: News tends to miraculously happen in places where there are lots of people, and perhaps more importantly, lots of reporters. Go figure.
Researchers extracted the dateline from about 72,000 wire-service news stories from 1994 to 1998 and modified a standard map of the Lower 48 US states (above) to show the size of the states in proportion to the frequency of their appearance in those datelines (below). Some notable results:
* Washington DC accounts for a huge proportion of the news stories - not surprising, since it is the nation’s capital, and the home of Congress, the Presidency and other political news generating institutions. But still: DC (pop. 600,000; metro area 5.8 million) generates more news than the most populous state, California (pop. 36.5 million)....
* News stories from Texas (pop. 20.8 million) seem overly scarce, especially when compared to, say, Georgia (pop. 8.2 million), which seems to get a bigger share. Could this be due to the fact that major news organization CNN is headquartered in Atlanta?
* The Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, Montana, Wyoming and Idaho, with a combined population of under 9 million, are all but invisible. No people, no news? Colorado alone, with a population of under 4.5 million, is responsible for a much larger chunk of news than those states combined. Could this be because the other states lack large cities, while Colorado has Denver (pop. 600,000; metro area 2.5 million)? No cities, no news?
Last week, the city of Cleveland was pursuing criminal charges against a bar manager for operating pool tables without a permit.
This week, Washington Post columnist Mark Fisher reports on the heroic Frank Winstead, whose moral crusade has purged Washington D.C. of the threat of an un-permitted ping pong table.
The smallish room Bob Barr booked for his presidential announcement was overflowing with journalists. I've seen every Ron Paul 2008 event held at the venue, and they never drew this sort of interest: There were, I think, four working reporters at the press conference announcing the haul from the first moneybomb. But Barr's announcement drew live reporters from the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, and The Washington Post (even if it was the famously snarky "Sketch" author Dana Milbank). Barr foreign policy pal Doug Bandow stood by him at the podium, and foreign policy maven Jim Bovard sat in the audience.
I doubt the interest will keep up unless Barr's promises come true and he becomes a "credible candidate" for the White House with a chance to win a plurality of the vote. The press corps wanted to know two things: Could Barr be stumped on any policy questions? Did he explicitly want to spoil the election for McCain? The answers were no and no, although Barr's "spoiler" answer wasn't entirely credible. "The thought has never crossed my mind," he said. Well, sure it has. After the conference, Barr's political adviser Russ Verney told me that Barr had tested the waters with an exploratory committee because he didn't want to run if he couldn't win. "There are substantial risks," Verney said. "We're talking about alienating life-long friends. We're talking about putting your credibility on the line." The main thing that would cause Barr to lose friends would be, of course, if he Nadered McCain.
So the media attention puts to rest the claims of rival candidates, like Christine Smith, that Barr is anything but the biggest publicity draw in the race. He was notably less dry than the figure the Washington press remembers from the Clinton impeachment. Ralph Z. Hallow of the Washington Times framed a question about immigration in terms of public "compassion." Barr filibustered a little. "No one's ever accused me of being a compassionate conservative," he said. "Am I compassionate? You could ask my wife." A bit after Barr said he opposed a specific timetable for withdrawal from Iaq, Sean Higgins of Investor's Business Daily asked if Barr knew which states he'd be targeting. "Yes." Higgins asked him to elaborate. "Just as it's not strategically sound to tell the enemy your timetable for withdrawal..." Barr explained.
Is Barr picking up the Ron Paul vote? He acrobatically avoided tying his campaign to Paul, but I talked to a few familiar Paulites in the audience. Ron Paul Rider Michael Maresco, who staged a 60-day bike ride across the country to support Paul, shook hands with Barr then told me he would back him. Brad Jansen, a ubiquitous DC organizer for Paul and manager of one of the Ron Paul Republicans' campaigns for the House (Vern McKinley, in the DC exurbs), talked to Barr about writing a follow-up to his 2002 Liberty article defending him against attacks by the then-leadership of the LP.
The audio of the press's questions is here. The reporters are hard to hear, but Barr's voice should be clear.
New research indicates that Britain's massive CCTV surveillance system isn't particularly good at either solving or preventing crime. So, sorry about doing away with that whole "privacy" thing. Guess it was for naught.
The Get Out Clause, an unsigned Manchester band who could not afford a camera crew for their video, 'performed' in front of a load of CCTV cameras, requested the footage from the camera operators under the Data Protection Act and then stitched the results together for their music video.
Here's the result:
reason's seminal 2004 covers story on the benefits of the surveillance state here.
In the cover story from our June issue, Gene Healy explains how the president has gone from a limited constitutional officer to an imperial overlord expected to solve every problem—real or imagined, large or small—facing America.
Last month I mentioned that the conspiracy theorist Carrington Steele, author of Don't Drink the Kool-Aid: Oprah, Obama, and the Occult, wasn't the first person to worry that a Church of Oprah was rising. But I didn't realize just how unoriginal Steele was. The Christian outfit Lighthouse Trails Research reports:
Upon reading Steele's work ourselves, our editors discovered that the 80-page book was filled with verbatim passages copied from other writers material, which was presented as Steele's own authorship....
While we regret to issue this finding because we do believe that Oprah Winfrey's efforts to convert the public to her New Age beliefs must be exposed, we fear that Steele's book could negatively reflect upon and misrepresent long-standing and reputable ministries. In addition, because the author also plagiarized some secular sources (such as CNN, Fox News, and Rolling Stone magazine), we believe this book may, in addition to being a poor Christian testimony, be legally problematic.
There's a political angle:
Because the chapter on Obama did not contain any documentation that he was involved in the occult or the New Age, Lighthouse Trails asked Steele if there was political motivation involved. What's more, the chapter on Obama did not seem to fit in with the rest of the book. Steele said she was not politically motivated.
Fuel for future conspiracy theories:
When Lighthouse Trails spoke with Carrington Steele, she stated she had done both the writing and the research on the book without help or support from others. However, it was pointed out to her that she often said "we" and "us" in her interviews, and we wondered to whom she was referring. At this point, Steele said she could not answer that question, saying she was not at liberty to say. We found this response to be curious and disturbing.
Ralph Z. Hallow has the latest on Bob Barr's presidential bid: Republicans are grabbing him by the collar and begging him not to run. Figuratively speaking.
Mr. Barr says even people who have tried to dissuade him understand why he thinks it important to raise issues from what he calls a "genuinely conservative" perspective and to offer alternatives to the positions of the two major-party candidates.
"In the month since we formed our exploratory committee, not a single Republican who has spoken with me to try and convince me not to seek the Libertarian nomination has disagreed with my reasons for considering a run," Mr. Barr told The Times yesterday in an e-mail exchange before leaving London on a flight to Atlanta. ... Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich told The Times yesterday that "Bob Barr will make it marginally easier for Barack Obama to become president. That outcome threatens every libertarian value Barr professes to champion."
I don't see a lot in Gingrich's ever-shifting "real change" agenda (last week, it featured a temporary gas tax cut. Real! Change-y!) to prove Barr wrong. Stacy McCain simply laughs at the re-packaging of John "political free speech is overrated, anyway" McCain as a vessal for libertarian values.
Barr's announcement comes at 11 a.m. in downtown D.C., and I'll have a report afterward.
L.A. Times political blogger Andrew Malcolm, one of the most active Ron Paul-watchers in the EmmEssEmm, sees a quiet revolution brewing on John McCain's libertarian flank:
[Q]uietly, largely under the radar of most people, the forces of Rep. Ron Paul have been organizing across the country to stage an embarrassing public revolt against Sen. John McCain when Republicans gather for their national convention in St. Paul at the beginning of September. [...]
The last three months Paul's forces [...] [have] been fighting a series of guerrilla battles with party establishment officials at county and state conventions from Washington and Missouri to Maine and Mississippi. Their goal: to take control of local committees, boost their delegate totals and influence platform debates. [...]
They hope to demonstrate their disagreements with McCain vocally at the convention through platform fights and an attempt to get Paul a prominent speaking slot. Paul, who's running unopposed in his home Texas district for an 11th House term, still has some $5 million in war funds and has instructed his followers that their struggle is not about a single election, but a longterm revolution for control of the Republican Party.
Whole thing here. McCain jokes here that he hopes his opponent come Novemeber is the good Dr. Congressman. Brian Doherty's "Scenes from the Ron Paul Revolution" here.
My voice will travel the ether twice today, packaged for delivery into your home—if you want it. At 11:35 a.m. I'll be on the Mark Carbonaro Show (listen here) discussing Big Labor's coming power grab with the Employee Free Choice Act. At 8 p.m. I'll be on Blog Talk Radio talking aout the Libertarian Party nomination fight.
Friend of reason Steven Pinker plows into the mushy category of "human dignity"—routinely invoked to argue against advances in science and medicine that will enliven and lengthen our lives—like nobody's business here:
Many people are vaguely disquieted by developments (real or imagined) that could alter minds and bodies in novel ways. Romantics and Greens tend to idealize the natural and demonize technology. Traditionalists and conservatives by temperament distrust radical change. Egalitarians worry about an arms race in enhancement techniques. And anyone is likely to have a "yuck" response when contemplating unprecedented manipulations of our biology. The President's Council has become a forum for the airing of this disquiet, and the concept of "dignity" a rubric for expounding on it. This collection of essays is the culmination of a long effort by the Council to place dignity at the center of bioethics. The general feeling is that, even if a new technology would improve life and health and decrease suffering and waste, it might have to be rejected, or even outlawed, if it affronted human dignity.
Whatever that is. The problem is that "dignity" is a squishy, subjective notion, hardly up to the heavyweight moral demands assigned to it.
USA Today asked the three remaining major-party candidates how they feel about Title IX and about performance enhancing drugs.
Refreshingly, all three said neither steroids nor gender participation are any of the government's business, and that, being private entities, sports organizations should be free to set their own rules free of meddling from the federal government or grandstanding congressmen.
Just kidding. All three favor using the federal government to bend pro and amateur sports to their liking.
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Storybook pirates need no defending. What’s not to love about Captain Hook? 
NPR's On the Media did a long segment over the weekend about Ayn Rand's continuing popularity and influence. Among the folks they interviewed was reason's Nick Gillespie. Snippets here:
Last month I