"Often those lawsuits add an unwanted deterrent against the sale of desperately needed drugs."

Posted on November 14, 2008, 5:44pm | Damon W. Root

In his latest Forbes.com column, Richard Epstein explains why the outcome of Wyeth v. Levine, which the Supreme Court heard this week, matters a very great deal:

Wyeth v. Levine...posed one simple question. Once the Food and Drug Administration has approved the warnings about drugs licensed for sale, may a plaintiff bring state law action for damages on the ground that those warnings are inadequate?

The principled answer to that question is a resounding "no." Concede—no insist—that the FDA is far from flawless. All too often, however, its extreme risk aversion keeps newer and safer drugs off the market—or requires strong, "black box" warnings that over-deter valuable use.

Against this backdrop, it is folly to act as if the private lawsuits attacking FDA warnings just backstop a porous and lax FDA. Often those lawsuits add an unwanted deterrent against the sale of desperately needed drugs. That risk is multiplied by hyperventilated state tort law that, in many instances, is lopsidedly pro-plaintiff.

[...]

The specter of heavy litigation expense and crushing liabilities by runaway juries could easily block the pharmaceutical industry from initiating life-saving changes.

Whole thing here. Ronald Bailey on "the FDA versus dying cancer patients" here, Todd Seavey on whether the FDA is even necessary here.

New at Reason: Anthony Randazzo on What the GOP Should Do Now

Posted on November 14, 2008, 4:30pm

In the wake of Barack Obama's massive win, writes Anthony Randazzo, the Republican Party is searching for a new direction. Which means that now is the time for the GOP to transform itself into something it has never been: a party of limited government based on explicitly libertarian principles.

Read all about it here.

New at Reason: Radley Balko on Why Obama Should Swear Off Executive Privilege

Posted on November 14, 2008, 3:00pm

President-elect Barack Obama has been fairly critical of the Bush administration's secrecy, lack of accountability, and executive power grabs over the last eight years. But if he's really serious about it, writes Senior Editor Radley Balko, he should make an early vow forbidding his staff from claiming executive privilege.

Read all about it here. 

Ron Paul 2012?

Posted on November 14, 2008, 1:19pm | David Weigel

Last week, Campaign for Liberty press guy and Ron Paul grandson-in-law Jesse Benton was driving to a constituent event with his boss and the subject of 2012 came up.

"He hasn’t closed out the idea of another run," said Benton today. "We have some time to decide whether he runs again, or whether he gets behind somebody else. But we don’t have tons of time. By the middle of 2009, the decision needs to be made."

Benton isn't pushing Paul one way or the other. "I could get behind either decision, but it needs to be made in the next six months or so," he said. "One thing we learned is that those voters in New Hampshire and Iowa expect, to see their candidates early and often." Paul entered the 2008 primaries in January 2007, about 11 months and two weeks before the Iowa caucuses.

I asked about the rumor that former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson might jump into the race (unclear in which party yet). "If he were to decide that he wanted to do that, he’d be a great guy to take the reins. But I don’t think that what Dr. Paul captured was 100 percent transferable to anyone else. I think the Bob Barr campaign assumed that and it didn't pan out."

Would Paul run as a Republican again or as a Libertarian? "We try not to ever deal in absolutes in politics," Benton said carefully. "But he would be very likely to be running as a Republican again." It's not just that "working within the system" gets more exposure for a candidate. It's that several Republican primary states include the caveat that candidates cannot run in their primaries and go third party if they lose. "To be frank, I got tired of the 'third party' question getting asked time after time, and I know that Ron did too."

Paul is almost exactly a year older than John McCain, and turned 73 in August.

Friday Mini Book Review: Kirby: King of Comics

Posted on November 14, 2008, 1:17pm | Brian Doherty

Mini book reviews of days gone by.

Kirby: King of Comics, by Mark Evanier (Abrams, 2008). Man, is this old fan glad he's lived to see the day when comic book artists get this sort of serious, impeccably reproduced and designed, respected artist giant art book treatment. This book is half coffee table art book and half a mini-bio of the most important superhero artist of all time, Jack Kirby, co-creator of everything from Captain America to the Fantastic Four to the Hulk to the X-Men to Darkseid; with that cosmic villanous creation now dominating the D.C. universe, it's fair to say that both major comic companies are now to a large extent still running on Kirby's fumes.

Kirby's story has its tragic aspects; the nature of work-made-for-hire in the comics industry meant that he never reaped the benefits of the enormous wealth his creations have thrown off over the past half-century; his poor treatment from the companies he built, and from his long-time writing partner Stan Lee, turned him into a somewhat bitter man, though one who always had time for his fans. Evanier writes from the inside; he was a personal assistant and then friend to Kirby for most of the last couple of decades of his life, and is working on a monumental pure biography of the man as well.

While the anecdotes and facts about Kirby's career and some of the sad details of his decline in skill and reputation are interesting and sometimes maddening, what makes this book a joy and a treasure and dominates the readers attention are the art reproductions, from pure pencils to inked pages to full color repros of Kirby's scintillating pages and covers--giant pen and ink Galactus heads! Page after page of pure uninked Kirby pencils! Giant lithe Captain America's bashing through walls! Page-sized sea monsters wrecking the Challengers of the Unknown's boat! Larger than life penciled Hulks leaping right in your face! Penciled Karnaks chopping Krazy Kirby machinery! Psychedelic full color Metron collages! Double-page-spread spaceships dominating the skyline! Va-Va-Voom Barda pinups!-- and the "King," as hardworking and dedicated an artist as we've ever known, wouldn't have wanted it any other way.

I'm enough of a fanatic for him to declare, dogmatically, that if you don't dig Kirby, you don't dig LIFE!!, man. As Kirby himself once said of the issue in which he introduced Don Rickles' twin Goody Rickles into Jimmy Olson's war against Darkseid and the anti-life equation, "Don't Ask! Just Buy It!"

"If You Love America, You Throw Money In Its Hole"

Posted on November 14, 2008, 12:02pm | Katherine Mangu-Ward

Exploring one of the vital issues of our day: "Should the government stop dumping money into a giant hole?"

In The Know: Should The Government Stop Dumping Money Into A Giant Hole?

For more on the bailout, go here.

New at Reason: Jacob Sullum on Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens

Posted on November 14, 2008, 12:00pm

From our December issue, Senior Editor Jacob Sullum explains why the accomplishments Ted Stevens brags about are worse than the crimes he denies.

Read all about it here.

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies; When a new planet swims into his ken*

Posted on November 14, 2008, 10:51am | Ronald Bailey

Below is a photo of a new planet discovered circling the star Fomalhaut 25 light years away. The newly discovered planet is thought to be 3 times the size of Jupiter.

Jet Propulsion Lab press release here. Don't expect an imminent invastion of Fomalhautians since the star is only 200 to 300 million years old, so there has probably been not enough time for life to arise in that system yet. 

*apologies to John Keats. 

"Hang Him By the Balls"

Posted on November 14, 2008, 10:42am | Michael C. Moynihan

Who knows if this is true—and there is plenty of reason to doubt it. After all, it was leaked by Élysée and it strongly implies that Sarko the Super Diplomat single-handedly prevented Russian troops from overrunning Tblisi. Regardless, the portrait of Vladimir Putin rings true:

With Russian tanks only 30 miles from Tbilisi on August 12, Mr Sarkozy told Mr Putin that the world would not accept the overthrow of Georgia's Government. According to Mr Levitte, the Russian seemed unconcerned by international reaction. "I am going to hang Saakashvili by the balls," Mr Putin declared.

Mr Sarkozy thought he had misheard. "Hang him?" - he asked. "Why not?" Mr Putin replied. "The Americans hanged Saddam Hussein." Mr Sarkozy, using the familiar tu, tried to reason with him: "Yes but do you want to end up like [President] Bush?" Mr Putin was briefly lost for words, then said: "Ah - you have scored a point there."

Full story from the (London) Times.

I discussed the Russian invasion of Georgia with author Andrew Meier here.

New Techniques Boost Healthy Mouse Lifespans to the Equivalent of 120 Human Years

Posted on November 14, 2008, 10:33am | Ronald Bailey

Spanish researchers are reporting that they have created mice that live the equivalent of 120 human years. How? By changing the expression of two genes. The first is a gene for telomerase which prevents chromosomes from unraveling as they age (making cells senesce) and the second boosts the activity of the cancer-fighting Par-4 gene. Making Par-4 more active is crucial because telomerase doesn't just slow aging. Cancer cells generally reactivate telomerase to help them proliferate and is a target for experimental anti-cancer vaccines.

According to the Telegraph: 

The researchers found that mice which had been created in this way had better muscle in old age, healthier skin tissue and fewer digestion problems.

"By simultaneously increasing the amounts of telomerase and the resistance to cancer we are able to delay ageing in mice and also to extend their life span by 40 per cent," said Maria A. Blasco, from the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO), who carried out the study with colleagues from Valencia University.

"These mice get to live for as long as the eldest mice in records of the same kind.

"If we were to parallel it to humans, then it would mean reaching 120 years of age and also to start ageing much later in life."

Despite this progress, it doesn't sound as though these mice would be eligible for the Methuselah Foundation's multimillion dollar Mouse Prize. 

Whole Telegraph article here. 

The Snake Oil Well, Running Dry

Posted on November 14, 2008, 10:26am | David Weigel

Via Instapundit, it seems that T. Boone Pickens is slowing down his plans to save America by getting us to buy wind power from him.

Over the past two days, Boone spoke at events where he said that the wind project is having trouble getting financing because of the credit crunch.

He was also quoted saying that falling prices of natural gas, used in power plants, are making his wind project less economical.

Another possible factor (albeit smaller) is the defeat of California's Proposition 10, a plan to provide rebates that was heavily funded by Pickens because of the potential windfall to his business. reason was critical of that set-up early this year, and Pickens spent a lot of his time dealing with criticism in a conference call I participated in last month. But the biggest problem I had with Pickens' year-long campaign was his populist angle that our purchase of oil from other countries was "the largest wealth transfer in the history of mankind." Steven Milloy put it best.

Contrary to Pickens' demagoguery, "wealth transfer" is a term generally used in the context of estate planning, where money is simply "gifted" to heirs.

Our purchases of foreign oil, in contrast, are more reasonably known as "trade" — and trade is good.

Americans are not simply petro-junkies who mainline crude oil for the masochistic high of watching gas pump numbers spin faster. We produce goods and services with imported oil more than any other people on this planet.

The Pickens TV and PR campaign was one of the most sophisticated I've ever seen: not only did he get Al Gore and the presidential candidates to give him cover, I remember an Ohio voter who said she didn't like McCain or Obama so she'd write in Pickens. (Pickens' gravelly Texas accent was a big help, I think: as Ross Perot could tell you, there's something more politically attractive about a plains tycoon than, say, a Silicon Valley billionaire.) But I'm not weeping that his $57 million campaign isn't getting him what he wanted this year.

Tips for Republicans

Posted on November 14, 2008, 9:46am | Jesse Walker

For those who came in late, the sole reason for the disarray of the GOP is apparently either

(a) that damn Palin woman and her barefoot fans, or

(b) those latte-sipping moderates who keep criticizing the People's Tribune.

Expel your base or retreat into an echo chamber: If those choices seem dispiriting, Republicans can take heart. They're the same false alternatives that the Democrats allegedly faced four years ago. Then a politician who hadn't fallen behind the bipartisan Iraq war -- but, unlike Howard Dean, actually wanted to be president -- came out of nowhere to beat his party's establishment and take the White House.

There's a lesson there. If I were a Republican, I'd ignore the inane Palin debate and start looking around for a politician who had the good sense to break with the bipartisan consensus and oppose the bailout bill before it passed. Then I'd start planning an insurgency.

On a Doctor's Moral Duty To Cut Off Limbs, or, It's a Szasz, Szasz, Szasz, Szasz World

Posted on November 14, 2008, 9:44am | Brian Doherty

Interesting report from Australia that triggered a big "Paging Dr. Szasz":

TO most people, the thought of amputating a perfectly healthy limb is unimaginable.

But for at least three Australians, possibly dozens more, cutting off their leg has felt perfectly normal.

These so-called "amputee wannabes" have a very rare condition in which they feel one of their limbs is not truly their own, and they become obsessed with cutting it off.

And people suffering from the bizarre body image disorder should be able to opt for amputation, a Sydney psychiatrist says.

Christopher Ryan, a psychiatrist at the University of Sydney, says there is a good argument for allowing patients with body integrity identity disorder (BIID) to have their unwanted limb removed.

"I am not saying we should unthinkingly cut off people's legs," Dr Ryan said.

"I realise that the idea strikes almost everyone as lunatic when they first hear it. However, there are a small number of people who see themselves, and have always seen themselves, as amputees," he said.

........

Dr Ryan has examined the ethics of the issue in the international philosophy journal Neuroethics and says doctors have a moral duty to amputate for the health and safety of the patient.

He said one 30-year-old patient of his lived his whole life feeling he was truly an amputee, but was so ashamed of how he felt he did not tell anyone.

"Eventually he took the only step he thought he had open to him and placed his leg in a bucket of dry ice until it died and had to be removed," Dr Ryan said.

"Now, a year later, he is living happily as an amputee and getting on with his life."

The paper said the operations should be likened to plastic surgery, with elective amputation offered to BIID sufferers only.

That last sentence is my favorite--make sure you are only cutting off the limbs of those who are "BIID sufferers." How can you tell? Well, you know, they are the ones who keep asking you to cut off their limbs.

Thomas Szasz, a reason contributing editor, is famous, and infamous, for arguing that most of what is called "mental illness" in our culture is not in fact the result of an actually diseased organ, but merely an artifact of bizarre, difficult, or even stupid choices. (Some favorite Szaszian epigrams: "A berserk lunatic may claim to be Jesus or kill his wife. The point of such a person's behavior, I dare say, is to be revered like Jesus or be rid of his wife." "The patient's delusion is a problem to the patient's family, employer, and friends; to the patient it is a solution to the problem of the meaning(lessness) of his life.")

Szasz would point out that it gains us nothing to refer to people who express the desire to have healthy limbs cut off as suffering from a "condition" and medicalizing it and giving it a pseudo-scientific name--except for the cultural ratification of the desire, and the cultural and legal ratification of those professionals who want to help gratify it. (***And, as R.C. Dean points out in comment thread, it also gains the potential for private and public insurers to cough up for the procedure.***)

He'd say--and I say--if someone can find someone willing to help them cut off their limb as a commercial service, God bless 'em, I guess (the joke in a student skit at his old school had it that the only two categories in the "Szasz Diagnostic Manual" were "Crook" and "Bum," and I think the doctor would slot so-called BIID sufferers in the latter category, largely)--but that doesn't mean the rest of us have any duty to be supportive, understanding, or claim that weird desire should be dignified by being called a "medical condition."

As Szasz once wrote: "Without informed and uncoerced consent by the patient, no medical or psychiatric intervention is justified, while with consent every such intervention is justified, even if there is no illness and even if the intervention is considered to be harmful by its critics."

With that libertarian wisdom under his belt, Dr. Ryan could feel justified in cutting off (willing) people's limbs without the unnecessary multiplication of entities like the bogus "condition" of BIID.

Jacob Sullum interviewed Szasz in our July 2000 issue.

New at Reason: Friday Funnies

Posted on November 14, 2008, 7:00am

In the latest edition of Friday Funnies, Chip Bok looks at the proposed bailout of the Big 3.

Still Not Ready for Prime Time

Posted on November 14, 2008, 12:29am | Michael C. Moynihan

Via the indispensable Jake Tapper, a wonderfully incoherent distillation of what's ailing the GOP from the winkin' maverick, Gov. Sarah Palin. From an interview with CNN's Wolf Blitzer:

"Sitting here in these chairs that I'm going to be proposing but in working with these governors who again on the front lines are forced to and it's our privileged obligation to find solutions to the challenges facing our own states every day being held accountable, not being just one of many just casting votes or voting present every once in a while, we don't get away with that. We have to balance budgets and we're dealing with multibillion dollar budgets and tens of thousands of employees in our organizations."

But you simply must meet her. Only then will you coastal elites understand her deep intelligence and political acumen.

Obamania Nightmare (Sure to Be One in a Series)

Posted on November 13, 2008, 7:35pm | Brian Doherty

I've watched with growing distress this past week as many interesting cultural iconoclasts I admire for various reasons who can usually be counted on to be aware and skeptical of government power to at least some degree, from John Perry Barlow to Adam Parfrey to Oliver Stone, have swooned over the mighty Obama and his world-changing powers (my misery over this is maximized by many friends and acquaintances who are not public figures as well).

Being surrounded by a creepy-happy adoring Cult of the Great Leader makes me...uncomfortable, to be sure. Via Will Wilkinson comes a particularly awful example of Obamania, in which we are advised via Beatles lyrics both of our responsibility to not let Obama down, and also showered with the adoring love we must express for him.

The Aftermath of Guantanamo

Posted on November 13, 2008, 5:20pm | Brian Doherty

Lest we forget why quick action on Guantanamo is the right thing for our new president, see this book-length new report from U-Cal Berkeley's Human Rights Center (in cooperation with the International Human Rights Law Clinic and the Center for Constitutional Rights), Guantanamo and Its Aftermath: U.S. Detention and Interrogation Practices and Their Impact on Former Detainees.

Excerpts from their findings, as summarized in a press release:

based on a two-year study, [it] reveals in graphic detail the cumulative effect of Bush Administration policies on the lives of 62 released detainees. Many of the prisoners were sold into captivity and subjected to brutal treatment in U.S. prison camps in Afghanistan. Once in Guantanamo, prisoners were denied access to civilian courts to challenge the legality of their detention. Almost two-thirds of the former detainees interviewed reported having psychological problems since leaving Guantanamo.

..........
Researchers conducted interviews with released detainees in nine countries. The comprehensive study also includes in-depth interviews with key government officials, military experts, former guards, interrogators and other camp personnel.
.........

The authors call for an independent, nonpartisan commission to lift the shroud of secrecy from Guantanamo and other detention sites. They further argue that the commission should have subpoena power and, if applicable, recommend further investigations of those allegedly responsible for any crimes committed at all levels of the civilian and military chain of command.

The authors warn that such a commission should not be undercut by the issuance of pardons, amnesties, or other measures that would protect those culpable from accountability. President-Elect Barack Obama has called for the closure of Guantanamo. The UC Berkeley report asks for even broader remedies.

...............

Over half of the study respondents who discussed their interrogation sessions at Guantanamo (31 of 55) characterized them as "abusive." Detainees reported being subjected to short shackling, stress positions, prolonged solitary confinement, and exposure to extreme temperatures, loud music, and
strobe lights for extended periods-often simultaneously. The authors conclude that the cumulative impact of these methods, especially over time, constitutes cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment and, in some cases, rises to the level of torture.
.............

Of the more than 770 detainees who have endured Guantanamo since it opened in 2002, more than 500 have been released without formal criminal charges or trial. So far, of the 250 or more who remain in detention, only 23 have been charged with a crime. Two have been convicted and one has pled guilty.

Links for a plethora of reason Gitmo coverage options.

New at Reason: Ms. Wasilla Goes to Washington

Posted on November 13, 2008, 3:00pm

From the ashes of Hillary Clinton's campaign rose Sarah Palin as the Republican vice-presidential candidate—and now, some are blaming her for McCain's defeat. But was her candidacy, wonders Cathy Young, a step forward for women?

Read all about it here.

New Republic's Half Full Glass Dumped On Their Heads. Again.

Posted on November 13, 2008, 2:43pm | Katherine Mangu-Ward

Ah, New Republic. Life holds so many shocking disappointments for you. Like today, when you figured out that the bailout wasn't going to be a smooth transition to economic health guided by a selfless, rational public servant. Clay Risen writes:

At this point it’s hard even for supporters of the original bailout plan, like myself, to keep faith in Hank Paulson and the Treasury.

Is it too much to ask that a high-ranking government official who has been given essentially unlimited power by Congressional action to do what he wants should have to justify his motives?:

What’s wrong with buying troubled assets, and why is it better to buy stock directly? Why bailout AIG but not GM? There are perfectly persuasive answers, even obvious ones, but Paulson has yet to float any of them. He simply says, haughtily, “I will never apologize for changing the approach and the strategy when the facts change.” 

Lost faith in a hugely ambitious project about which you were recently optimistic? How sad. Worst of all, this plight is so darn familiar. It almost feels like this has happened before.

Reason Talkers Around Town: Nick Gillespie on "The Libertarian Dime"

Posted on November 13, 2008, 2:16pm

Earlier this week, the guys behind The Libertarian Dime, Shane and Jonathan, caught up via phone with reason's Nick Gillespie for a wide-ranging 30-minute conversation on gay marriage, the constitution, bailouts, Bob Barr, and much more.

From the show's description:

Shane and Jonathan had the great pleasure of interviewing Nick Gillespie, the current editor of reason.com and reason.tv, and past editor of Reason Magazine. Nick was gracious enough to come on to the Libertarian Dime and discuss the election and other libertarian issues.  It was a great interview, where Nick brought a level of intellectualism to the Dime that hasn't been on previosly. The second half of the show was the long running series of trying to convert Josh Brady, currently a Republican, to a Libertarian, or at the minimum a libertarian. A great show overall that one shouldn't miss!

To listen to the show and check out past episodes, go here.

Weigel: Live and In 3-D

Posted on November 13, 2008, 2:08pm | David Weigel

If you're in the D.C. area tonight, I'm appearing on an America's Future Foundation panel on the subject "Now What? An Election Postmortem."

With president-elect Barack Obama stepping into the White House, with expanded Democratic majorities in Congress, with public sentiment moving against free markets in the midst of the economic crisis, and with Virgina voters supporting a Democratic presidential candidate for the first time since 1964--now what? What does this mean for freedom and the free market principles that conservatives and libertarians fight for? Will this be the opportunity for the Republican Party to rebuild and come back to their roots of a smaller government? What lessons can be learned from this election and how do conservatives and libertarians move forward?

I'm stepping in for Evans-Novak reporter Tim Carney, so my remarks will be mostly exit poll and other data-driven with some suggestions of what libertarians in the GOP should do. The answer, obviously, is to ban gay marriage everywhere and ask Democrats hard questions then upload the responses to YouTube. Also, to run Sarah Palin for president every four years.

Weigel vs. Lilly: The Saga Continues

Posted on November 13, 2008, 1:37pm | David Weigel

In the L.A. Times, I go at it again with the Center for American Progress senior fellow on whether Hillary Clinton and Arnold Schwarzenegger should get jobs in the Obama cabinet.

Mormon Outed by Campaign Finance Laws

Posted on November 13, 2008, 12:35pm | Katherine Mangu-Ward

When reason.tv spoke with former FEC head Brad Smith earlier this year, he offered this through-the-looking-glass take on campaign finance requirements:

Imagine if George Bush were to announce here in the fading twilight of his presidency that in order to prevent terrorists from infiltrating American political parties and thus asserting control of American government, we needed to introduce the PATRIOT II Act. And the PATRIOT II Act would require citizens to report to the government their political activities. And the government would keep that in a database, which by the way they would then make available to private individuals like employers or maybe groups that might want to protest outside your home...

You know what, we have that law already, and it's called campaign finance, it's called the Federal Election Campaign Act. Which requires you to report to the government, or requires the campaigns to report to the government people who give them money and the government keeps that in a database, and they make that available, anybody can go online and look that stuff up on the Internet.

Ta Da! Meet Scott Eckern, the Mormon artistic director of the California Musical Theater (take a second to ponder that combo) was forced to resign yesterday after activists mining campaign donations publicized the fact that he had given money to the effort to ban gay marriage in California.

It is, of course, the perfect right of the theater to send him packing for any reason, and I personally think anyone who gives money to oppose gay marriage sucks nuts. 

But the whole episode is pretty unsavory. Eckern, who seems to have a decent relationship with his sister (a lesbian), and good relationships with his theater colleagues (lots of gay), was probably not spewing anti-gay bile at work. If he had been, it's hard to imagine he would have lasted for seven years in his current position.

Instead, Eckern's private, personal donation to a legal political cause he believes in was forced into the public eye by government-mandated disclosure. It seems unlikely that Eckern wanted the donation to be made public—he may not have even known that it would be. Though I hesitate to make this comparison for obvious reasons, Eckern was essentially outed by the state for his privately-held views. 

But wait, The New York Times says "the swift resignation was not met with cheers by those on either side." Whew. At least everyone realizes that this is a forced error, that everyone has been put into a terrible position by forces outside of their control.

Or not. Marc Shaiman, the Tony Award-winning composer, told the Times that the entire episode left him "'deeply troubled' because of the potential for backlash against gays who protested Mr. Eckern’s donation." [itals mine]

"It will not help our cause because we will be branded exactly as what we were trying to fight," said Mr. Shaiman, who is gay.

At worst, those who forced out Eckern are guilty of failing to give him the benefit of the doubt, and perhaps (as Shaiman can't quite bring himself to admit) a little hypocrisy. Imagine the situation reversed: A small non-profit that focuses on, say, education and happens to be culturally conservative, discovers that an employee has given money to protect gay marriage and fires him.

But the real culprit here is campaign finance laws. Not all political actions should be public actions, and this case illustrates why minorities of all kinds occasionally need privacy to be full participants in political life.

New at Reason: Katherine Mangu-Ward on Science Fiction Publisher Tor Books

Posted on November 13, 2008, 12:00pm

From our December issue, Associate Editor Katherine Mangu-Ward offers a guided tour of the anti-authoritarian universe of Tor Books, the world's most successful science fiction publisher.

Read all about it here. 

The Log Cabin Republicans get Feisty in California

Posted on November 13, 2008, 11:24am | Mike Riggs

The Orange County Register reports that California Log Cabin Republicans are fighting the passage of Proposition 8:

The Log Cabin Republicans, the nation’s largest gay GOP group, opposed Prop. 8 and is supporting lawsuits to have it overturned, according to Frank Ricchiazzi.

The Laguna Beach resident, who helped found the the Log Cabin club in the late 1970s, has a interesting take on Prop. 8 and the lawsuit - particularly since he thought it was a little early for gay marriage when the state Supreme Court gave it the green light in May.

“It was like a steak on the grill - it was still a little bit raw and needed more time,” he said of gay marriage. But a younger generation disagreed with him. “Others were ready to put it on the plate.”...

“The dams have been opened, the water has passed through,” said Ricchiazzi. “And now they want to bring it back? … How can you tell 1,000s of people who have gotten married that you’re going to take it back?”

I believe it was a Hit & Run commenter who said that Log Cabin Republicans are the wallflowers at every party; maybe this sort of activism will get them invited onto the dance floor.

reason on Prop 8 here and here. Radley Balko on the demographics of pro-Prop 8 voters here.

Palin Didn't Know Africa Was a Continent Source a Hoaxster

Posted on November 13, 2008, 11:17am | Brian Doherty

Turns out the most ridiculous and generic "dumb polack joke"-style accusation about the dimness of Sarah Palin's bulb--that she thought Africa was a country, not a continent--was probably from an interesting and amusing hoax advisor to the McCain campaign--from the nonexistent "Harding Institute for Freedom and Democracy"--going by the phony name (which is also the real name of another minor D.C. policy dude, unrelated to the hoax nope, there is a minor policy dude named "Michael Eisenstadt") of "Martin Eisenstadt."

The New York Times has the details, including some earlier lies he had told (and been caught up on).

The front "Harding Institute" site, with the brilliantly conceived line: "Welcome to the homepage of The Harding Institute for Freedom and Democracy. A Washington-area think-tank in the truest sense of the words...."

"Eisenstadt" on YouTube.

UPDATE: As I said, "probably." The New York Times story certainly reads as if Eisenstadt both was the original source of the Africa story, and recently admitted publicly being so. This AP story states--without any details backing it up, though one presumes he got the Fox reporter to say, no, his source was someone other than "Eisenstadt," and the only hoax was Eisenstadt claiming credit for it. Without a named source, I'm inclined to wonder about that as well. But if so, the mere claiming credit for the leak, as opposed to being the leak, is a pretty weak and lame finale to an otherwise interesting fake career.

Reason Writers Around Town

Posted on November 13, 2008, 11:00am

Managing Editor Jesse Walker's weekly freeform radio show, Titicut Follies, will be broadcast on WCBN-FM this afternoon from 12 to 3, eastern time. If you live in the Ann Arbor/Ypsilanti area, you can tune in at 88.3 FM; if you live elsewhere, you can listen online.

For more information about the show, go here. For podcasts of previous programs, go here and here.

I Don't Know What to Do Now That Pink Has Turned to Blue

Posted on November 13, 2008, 10:41am | David Weigel

This National Journal map doesn’t strike me as a particularly useful guide for the GOP's chances of taking back the House. It obsesses over which Democrats represent districts that voted for President Bush in 2004. But 2004 was, you know, four years ago. This year Barack Obama clobbered McCain in every Kerry state and all of the non-deep South, non-Great Plains, non-Arizona Bush states. As a result, outside the deep South, basically every Democrat is from a “safer” district now.

Look at Virginia. The first number is how much of the vote John McCain scored in this district. The second number is what George W. Bush scored four years ago, when he easily defeated John Kerry statewide. I’ve bolded the districts where the representative is now from the party whose presidential candidate lost the district. (VA-02, VA-05, and VA-11 all replaced Republicans with Democrats this year.)

VA-01: Rob Wittman (R) - 51% (60%)
VA-02: Glenn Nye (D) - 49% (58%)
VA-03: Bobby Scott (D) - 24% (33%)
VA-04: Randy Forbes (R) - 49% (57%)
VA-05: Tom Perriello (D) - 51% (56%)
VA-06: Bob Goodlatte (R) - 57% (63%)
VA-07: Eric Cantor (R) - 53% (61%)
VA-08: Jim Moran (D) - 30% (35%)
VA-09: Rick Boucher (D) - 59% (59%)
VA-10: Frank Wolf (R) - 46% (55%)
VA-11: Gerry Connelly (D) - 42% (50%)

See what happened? Only two of the state’s six Democrats are in McCain-voting districts, one of them in a squeaker (Perriello) and one whose southwest district is so safe for him that the GOP didn’t even field a challenger (Boucher.) Two of the state’s five Republicans are now in Obama-voting districts, even though their districts voted for Bush last time. And two of the three Democrats elected this year, Connelly and Nye, are in districts that swung from Bush to Obama.

Keep in mind, all of this happened in a state whose Republican governor and legislature started the decade by gerrymandering the districts for maximum GOP strength. Bush carried nine of Virginia’s 11 districts twice. McCain carried only five of them. Once we learn the full results from states like Michigan, Minnesota, Indiana, Iowa and Wisconsin, places where Obama dramatically outperformed in the suburbs, I think we’ll learn that most congressional districts went blue at the presidential level. In 2004, 255 congressional districts had gone red.

Fezzes and Leather

Posted on November 13, 2008, 8:15am | Jesse Walker

Middle Eastern metal has received a sudden wave of Western coverage this year. The latest example is an article in Coilhouse that covers the music itself, the subcultures surrounding it, and the crackdowns -- some successful, some not -- from above:

Iran's regime is among the most repressive, forcibly cutting metal fan's hair and crushing concerts outright....

It's easy to see what they're afraid of. If Egyptian metal musicians rave about Israeli band Orphaned Land, and Israelis about Lebanese metal, then the terminal dividing lines that benefit generals and dictators begin to blur. The fates of Eastern Europe's tyrants are not that far away in history: often change is only an anthem away.

The dividing lines between styles have also blurred. Middle eastern metal overlaps considerably with the hip-hop and punk scenes, especially in Palestine and Israel, encompassing everything from Massive Scar Era's symphonic rallying cries to Arthimoth's primal growls. It was, after all, late Afrobeat pioneer Fela Kuti who coined the "music is the weapon of the future" slogan that's become popular among [Lebanese musician Moe] Hamzeh and his friends.

The essay includes several samples of the metal itself, which among other things will be useful for anyone who has wondered what Cookie Monster vocals sound like in Arabic.

Elsewhere in Reason: Charles Paul Freund on Arab music videos and the liberating effects of vulgarity.

Ted Stevens, Walking the Bridge to Nowhere

Posted on November 13, 2008, 8:01am | David Weigel

All week, pundits have been assuming that Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens miraculously survived his re-election bid. No one knew how he did it.

We're starting to get an answer: He actually didn't survive the race. Alaska is big and weird and it takes ages to count early ballots from close races, and the state counted 53,000 ballots yesterday that put Democrat Mark Begich in the lead.

Mark Begich (D) - 132,196
Ted Stevens (R) - 131,382
Bob Bird (AI) - 11,315
Fredrick Haase (Lib) - 2086
Others - 1858

Markos "Daily Kos" Moulitsas, who's been following the numbers closely, claims that the remaining ballots come from Democratic-leaning districts. Nate "538" Silver has more. If Begich even builds a 0.51 percent lead over Stevens (he's at a 0.29 percent lead now), he escapes a recount and takes over the seat. This would, among other things, close Sarah Palin's escape hatch out of Alaskan politics. It would also lock down 58 Democratic Senate seats (counting Joe Lieberman), with the Minnesota Senate race looking better for them every day. (Democrat Al Franken has gained hundreds of votes as the state recounts ballots, and the Republicans have shown their panic with lawsuits and op-eds trying to cast doubt on the count.)

UPDATE: From the Anchorage Daily News:

Republican Party of Alaska Chairman Randy Ruedrich wasn't giving up hope for Stevens, saying Begich's advantage could lessen as the state finishes counting the early votes.

He said remaining mail-in absentee votes "should be much more favorable to Republicans" than the ones counted so far.

But state Democratic Party spokeswoman Bethany Lesser said Begich workers are cautiously optimistic the lead would hold. She noted that the election district based in Nome, which covers Northern and Western Alaska, has not counted any of its absentee ballots yet. Begich beat Stevens in that area on Election Day, just as he did throughout Bush Alaska, a traditional Stevens stronghold that relies on federal appropriations.

Begich also won the voting on all four of Alaska's military installations on Election Day. That makes the Begich campaign optimistic about overseas absentee ballots from service members.

New at Reason: Steve Chapman on Why Criminal Defendants Deserve Adequate Counsel

Posted on November 13, 2008, 7:00am

In a column that was originally published in May 2006, Steve Chapman looks at how Zacarias Moussaoui managed to avoid the death penalty.

Read all about it here.

Yes, He Can. Maybe. When He Gets Around To It.

Posted on November 13, 2008, 12:58am | Brian Doherty

Boy, I can't promise I won't have to recycle that headline a lot in the next four years.

At any rate, the Chicago Tribune reported the other day that we shouldn't rush to assume Obama will swiftly carry out his announced hope to close down Guantanamo Bay. Excerpt:

Denis McDonough, a foreign policy adviser to Obama, said the nascent administration would wait until its national security and legal teams are in place before determining how to proceed.

"President-elect Obama said throughout his campaign that the legal framework at Guantanamo has failed to successfully and swiftly prosecute terrorists, and he shares the broad bipartisan belief that Guantanamo should be closed," McDonough said in a statement. "There is absolutely no truth to reports that a decision has been made about how and where to try the detainees, and there is no process in place to make that decision until his national security and legal teams are assembled."

Now, fans could read this as a mere tautology; of course, he can't figure out exactly how he's going to go about doing something with some potentially complicated repercussions until he's got his team all a-working on it. But the fact that a high-up aide took the trouble to stress this to reporters on the record seems like a preemptive attempt to lower expectations on this matter.

The Washington Post on some Gitmo chatter that does stress that Obama really, really does want to do something about it, even if he's not quite sure yet what. The people on his team more adamant that quick Gitmo-closing action is just around the corner are, note, anonymous in this piece, since "they are not authorized to speak for the president-elect."

It somewhat makes you miss the days of Democratic administrations crowing about "stroke of the pen, law of the land." But Obama is a very smart guy, and very smart guys need to think very carefully about what they are going to do and how they are going to do it.

He's Fought the Penguin, Now He's Got to Take on Turkey

Posted on November 13, 2008, 12:46am | Brian Doherty

Riddle me this, caped crusaders: Why is a southeastern Turkish oil burg like a fictional orphaned vigilante with a flying rodent fetish?

In a disturbingly Boratesque move, the mayor of the Turkish city of Batman is, according to this Variety cover story, planning to sue filmmaker Christopher Nolan and Warner Bros. over, well, having a very lucrative film and publishing franchise based on a cowled crimefighter named, as you might recall, Batman. Mayor Huseyin Kalkan, in some indefinable way, thinks this infringes on his city's right to, as near as I can tell, get lots of free money from a very lucrative film and publishing franchise.

One wonders about this story, which seems to have come to Variety's reporter straight from the ranting politico Kalkan himself; Warner spokesperson claims they have not yet seen any actual legal papers on this suit. Foreign policy bonus: Kalkan is pro-Kurd! For some reason, I just see this whole silly mess as another argument for anarchism. But that might just be me.

When Markets Are In Trouble, Charity Is Too

Posted on November 12, 2008, 3:40pm | Katherine Mangu-Ward

From The New York Times:

In recent years, rapid wealth creation, particularly on Wall Street, has resulted in a surge not just in giving, but in a new, businesslike approach to giving that I call “philanthrocapitalism.” Now, people are asking whether the recent struggles of some of capitalism’s biggest winners, and the growing suspicion of some of capitalism’s core methods, including Wall Street’s use of leverage, mean that philanthrocapitalism is in trouble, too.

Read the rest for namechecks of the X Prize and Cory Booker. The piece is by Matthew Bishop, who cowrote Philanthrocapitalism: How the Rich Can Save the World.

New at Reason: Damon Root on Why Libertarianism Matters in Obama's America

Posted on November 12, 2008, 3:00pm

Libertarian ideas, writes Associate Editor Damon W. Root, have long served as a crucial check against the illiberal impulses of progressive majorities. Which means that in Obama's America, libertarianism will matter more than ever.

Read all about it here.

The U.S. Continues to Come to Term Limits

Posted on November 12, 2008, 2:52pm | Brian Doherty

Term limits are still a beloved reform by me, even though they've lost some heat since the 1990s. This isn't because term limits really are furthering any larger libertarian goals of limiting government's reach or shrinking its size; I haven't seen much evidence of that.

But I do know term limits definitely further a secondary goal of mine: driving most politicians to apoplectic anger.

Anyway, somewhat below the radar, and 13 years after being shot down on the federal level by the Supreme Court (and with New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg steamrollering over two different citizen expressions of a desire to limit his office to two terms), the term limits movement marches on on the state and local level.

Herewith, an excerpt from a Nov. 11 piece by Steve Moore at the Wall St. Journal site's "political diary," alas not publicly available to non-subscribers:

In last week's election, limits on politicians' time in office were enacted or reaffirmed by enormous margins nearly everywhere they were on the ballot in what might have been the loudest referendum for term limitation by voters ever.

Louisiana voters said "yes" to term limits on elected state officials by a 70% to 30% margin, making the Bayou state the 15th with term limits. Meanwhile, South Dakota's lobbying community tried to overturn that state's term limits law, approved by voters 12 years earlier. Bad idea: 76% of voters said "hell, no." That was a bigger margin of victory than when term limits were originally instituted.

In localities ranging from State College, Pennsylvania to Tracy, California and Memphis, Tennessee, voters approved term limits by two-to-one margins. Eight of the ten largest U.S. cities now have term limits. The only setback was a slight one, when San Antonio voters approved an extension of term limits to a maximum of eight years in office from the current four years.

Greenpeace Says Genetically Modified Corn is a Contraceptive...

Posted on November 12, 2008, 2:42pm | Ronald Bailey

...for the 4th generation of mice, anyway. Greenpeace is trumpeting a new "study" that finds that mice fed a variety of pest-protected corn have fewer pups in the fourth generation. According to the organization's press release:

A study published today by the Austrian government identified serious health threats of genetically engineered (GE) crops. In one of the very few long-term feeding studies ever conducted with GE crops, the fertility of mice fed with GE maize was found to be severely impaired, with fewer offspring being produced than by mice fed on natural crops. Considering the severity of the potential threat to human health and reproduction, Greenpeace is demanding a recall of all GE food and crops from the market, worldwide.

With typical understatement, the Greenpeace spokesperson said:

"GE food appears to be acting as a birth control agent, potentially leading to infertility - if this is not reason enough to close down the whole biotech industry once and for all, I am not sure what kind of disaster we are waiting for," said Dr. Jan van Aken, GE expert at Greenpeace International. "Playing genetic roulette with our food crops is like playing Russian roulette with consumers and public health". 

Just a couple of quick observations: (1) This is classic case of "science by press release." The "study" may be valid, but it has not been "published" nor has it been peer-reviewed; and (2) Greenpeace backed similar controversial claims by other researchers that genetically modified soybeans harmed the fertility of mice that were later debunked. (For more details see also here.) 

When other researchers get a look at the study, I'll let H&R readers know what they find.

This just in: the study is now available here.

New Jersey Politician Takes His Job Description a Bit Too Literally

Posted on November 12, 2008, 2:17pm | Radley Balko

A Small, Tasty, Nutritious Victory Over Idiot Regulations

Posted on November 12, 2008, 1:25pm | Brian Doherty

The European Union will be dropping its aesthetically based bans on the marketing of oddly shaped vegetables and fruits--at least for 26 varieties of foodstuff.

Just because they are the E.U., they'll be keeping this intrusive and bad-for-consumers standards for 10 others, including apples and strawberries. But lovers of odd onions, baroque Brussels sprouts, and twisted chicory can rejoice.

Emanuel to Republican Drug Warriors: 'Thanks for the White Flag'

Posted on November 12, 2008, 1:20pm | Jacob Sullum

In today's column, I noted that Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.), Barack Obama's choice for chief of staff, has a history as a hard-line drug warrior. Here is another example of his tougher-than-thou rhetoric, from a 2006 press release "in response to reports that Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez' [sic] called the war on terror a real war, not like the war on drugs":

Thanks for the white flag. From the United States' most senior law enforcement official, the man who should be leading the war on drugs, this white flag of surrender will not be reassuring to the millions of parents trying to protect their kids. 

The excuse for Emanuel's attempt to position himself to the right of the Bush administration on drug policy is not just lame but alarming. The statement by Gonzales to which he refers was made during an interview with The Kansas City Star in which the attorney general defended the administration's unilateral, indefinite detention of suspected terrorists. Here's an excerpt from the Star article, which I found on Nexis (italics added):

[Gonzales] said that "just like in every other war," the American people will have to trust the government to protect the rights of those in custody while pursuing justice in secret. Pressed on how long extraordinary measures—for instance, the imprisonment of suspects without the filing of charges—might continue, he said they would last at least until the pursuit of al-Qaida and its accomplices has come to an end.

"First of all this is a real war," he said, drawing a distinction between the war on terror and "the war on drugs or the war on poverty or something like that. It's like the Cold War. At some point this conflict is going to be over. But today it is not over."

Instead of challenging the Bush administration's use of war rhetoric to justify chucking habeas corpus, due process, and the separation of powers, Emanuel faulted it for waging the war on drugs with insufficient enthusiasm. Not only does this not bode well for drug policy in the Obama administration; it further undermines the next president's claim to be better than Bush on civil liberties in general.

Could We Use a Man Like Herbert Hoover Again?

Posted on November 12, 2008, 12:05pm | Jesse Walker

Over at EconLog, Bryan Caplan gives one of Herbert Hoover's final campaign speeches a close reading. In a November 1932 address to about 15,000 people in St. Paul, the president declared that he had enacted 21 "long-view policies to cement [the economic] recovery and to stimulate progress in our country for the future." If anyone still believes the stereotype of Hoover as an apostle of laissez faire, Caplan will disabuse you of the idea: "out of 21 measures," he writes, "we have two matches with Hoover's stereotype, plus two partial matches. The remaining 17 measures directly contradict the stereotype. If liberal historians focused on policy instead of party, they would cast Hoover as John the Baptist to FDR's Jesus -- not Satan."

Elsewhere in Reason: In April I recalled the real story of the 1932 election. And in our January issue, Nick Gillespie interviewed Amity Shlaes about Hoover, Roosevelt, and the Depression.

Weigel vs. Lilly, Round Two

Posted on November 12, 2008, 12:02pm | David Weigel

My dust-up with Scott Lilly of the Center for American Progress continues here, with a back-and-forth about whom President Obama should and shouldn't put in his cabinet.

The No. 1 Libertarian Blog? You're Reading It.

Posted on November 12, 2008, 11:46am | Brian Doherty

A website dedicated to web entrepreneurship comes up with a thorough and useful list of "The Top 100 Libertarian Blogs." Why?

While we at WebPreneur typically try to steer clear of politics, it is clear that issues such as net neutrality and controlling the size and scope of government are of increasing importance to web entrepreneurs. Thus a growing number of web entrepreneurs are expressing new found interest in libertarian principles. So to assist those of you interested in educating yourselves further, we’ve sorted through thousands of sites and selected the best of the best for what we believe to be the top 100 libertarian blogs...

Coming in at number one is this very blog you are reading, reason's Hit and Run.

Hit and Run has been previously praised by Playboy as one of "five winning political blogs" and by Washingtonian as one of the "best political blogs." Of course, what we are proudest of is how every day we are able to earn the attention and readership of each and every one of you.

Cory Maye's Appellate Brief

Posted on November 12, 2008, 11:25am | Radley Balko

Just Can't Quit: How far will smoking bans go?

Posted on November 12, 2008, 11:00am

California became the first state to ban smoking in bars a decade ago. Since then, smoking bans have flourished in bars, restaurants, bowling alleys, universities—you name it.

Recently, the Bay Area city of Belmont passed a law that targets people who smoke in their own homes.

Smoking is one of the worst things you can do to your body, but how dangerous is second-hand smoke? Are banners saving lives or battering science? Are they progressive champions or plunderers of property rights?

Citing the proliferation of privately enforced bans, reason.tv host Nick Gillespie says, "I actually like smoking bans; I just don't like it when the government does the banning."

Indeed, smoking bans have already set the stage for all sorts of other nanny state policies to save us from ourselves. The nannies have already barged through our front doors. Just how much farther will the banners go?

"Just Can't Quit" was written and produced by Ted Balaker.

For related articles and to embed this video on your own web site, go here.

As a bonus double-feature, click below to see 2002's Talking Butts: A Smoking Documentary, which was made with the help of reason's Paul Feine, Jesse Walker, Jacob Sullum, and Charles Paul Freund. The 25-minute film explores why people smoke and why attempts to regulate and punish smokers have unintended consequences. And it features a cameo by filmmaker John Waters that is absolutely unforgettable.

To embed Talking Butts on your site, go here.

The Incredible Bendable Bailout

Posted on November 12, 2008, 9:54am | David Weigel

In a development that will surely come as a shock to everyone, the $700 billion bailout package isn't being spent like we were told it'd be spent.

Treasury is unlikely to conduct any auctions to purchase bad loans and other troubled assets -- the original intention of the $700 billion rescue plan. Instead, Treasury is expected to continue focusing its firepower on injecting capital directly into the financial sector, these people said.

There is good news:

Before launching its $250 billion capital-purchase program last month, Treasury toyed with requiring banks to raise matching funds alongside any government investment, but it thought that might discourage some firms from participating. It also worried that firms would not be able to raise private money in the current market environment.

Instead, Treasury structured its investment in a way that it believed would encourage firms to eventually raise private funds. But Treasury officials now think market conditions may have improved enough that companies could raise private capital.

Wrongful Conviction? Norfolk n' Way

Posted on November 12, 2008, 9:51am | Radley Balko

New at Reason: Jacob Sullum on Drug Policy Reform Under Barack Obama

Posted on November 12, 2008, 7:00am

Although President-elect Barack Obama portrays his pot smoking and cocaine snorting as behavior he regrets, writes Senior Editor Jacob Sullum, it would be hard for him to justify harsh treatment of drug users when he himself escaped punishment for the same actions and clearly is better off than he would have been had he been arrested. But will that experience translate into more sensible drug policies?

Read all about it here. 

Convergence in Action

Posted on November 11, 2008, 10:46pm | Jesse Walker

A socialist columnist writes a libertarian article for a conservative magazine.

Ayers Emerges from the Underground, Calls the Pigs

Posted on November 11, 2008, 6:00pm | Michael C. Moynihan

Many of those who viewed the introduction of Bill Ayers into the presidential campaign as a low, dishonest campaign tactic have now taken to the idea that the former Weather Underground leader and pretend revolutionary was himself somehow mistreated by the media. The most egregious example is perhaps New Yorker editor David Remnick, as pointed out and deconstructed by ex-New Lefty Ron Radosh.  As a confirmed Ayers-hater (I actually read Fugitive Days way back when), I refrained from commenting on Ayers during the campaign not only because I thought it not only a strategically silly line of attack—a position the election results seems to have vindicated—but the McCain campaign never got around to proving that Ayers and Obama were indeed "palling around." Nevertheless, I have to agree with New Republic's Leon Wieseltier that "I would not shake the man's dirty hand."

And now Ayers is attempting to defend himself—albeit unpersuasively. Writing in In These Times, Ayers talks about all the threatening emails he received in the past few months, which forced him to contact the hated Chicago pigs (an inverse of the "Days of Rage," I suppose), and "the serial assassinations of black leaders  [that] disrupted our utopian dreams" in the 1960s (he's talking about Fred Hampton, not MLK). Read the whole piece here. There is plenty of stupidity on display, but I particularly like this line, coming as it does from a supporter of the Cuban dictatorship: "In a robust and sophisticated democracy, political leaders—and all of us—ought to seek ways to talk with many people who hold dissenting, or even radical, ideas."

Robots Teach Each Other to Sing, Argue About Who Is Off Key

Posted on November 11, 2008, 4:52pm | Katherine Mangu-Ward

OK, so they don't argue yet. But here's a pretty snazzy experiment in cultural development involving warbling robots:

Eduardo Miranda shuts the door of his study, leaving two "warbling" robots to their own devices. He has programmed them to blurt out sequences of random notes, and two weeks later, he returns to find that the robots are still cooing in their eerily human voices, but they have now "evolved" to sing a repertoire of 20 sounds together.

The robots have microphones for ears and cameras for eyes. One makes a series of sounds based on the human voice, and the other does too. If the first robot judges the sounds to be similar, it nods its head and they both add the sounds to their repertoire. Thus they learn to make beautiful(ish) music together. 

Since only those sounds that both robots know about are recorded, gradually their memories fill up with similar sounds Miranda likens this to the emergence of a very simplistic, shared culture.

Feeling replaceable yet? No? How about these nano Obamas (nanobamas?) to convince you that the Singularity is Near?

I Learned It From Shooting Prairie Dogs With You, Dad!

Posted on November 11, 2008, 4:20pm | Jacob Sullum

I have no particular insight into why an 8-year-old boy who apparently was not a victim of abuse would shoot his father and a boarder to death, "methodically stopping and reloading as he killed them." I doubt anyone does, since crimes of this sort are extremely rare:

Kathleen M. Heide, a criminology professor at the University of South Florida, said the odds of such killings "are so infinitesimal, it's really hard to even comprehend."

From 1976 to 2005, there were 62 cases in the United States in which a 7- or 8-year-old was arrested on murder charges, said Dr. Heide, who analyzed FBI data. Only two of those cases involved a child killing a parent.

Which is one reason this pseudo-explanation jumped out at me (italics added):

The boy in Arizona was no stranger to weapons—his father, an avid hunter, reportedly trained his son to shoot prairie dogs—and psychologists said that might have played a role.

Obviously, if this kid did not know how to operate a rifle, he would have had a hard time killing his father with one. But training children to handle guns is a pretty common practice in this country. (I do not come from a hunting family, but I was using a rifle just like the one involved in this case at my Jewish Community Center day camp when I was 10.) If a familarity with firearms creates a substantial risk of juvenile patricide, you'd expect this sort of thing to happen a little more often than seven times a century, wouldn't you? Maybe the step from shooting prairie dogs to murdering your father is a little bigger than the psychologists consulted by The New York Times allow. 

U.S. News & World Report Calls the 2012 Election For the GOP

Posted on November 11, 2008, 4:04pm | Brian Doherty

....with a prediction of four dark years of economic troubles bringing down the Mighty Obama, derived from our historical expeience with the early '90s recession.

From their money and politics blogger James Pethokoukis:

The "O" in "Obama" may stand for "One Term." For starters, there's a strong chance that when voters head to the polls on Nov. 2, 2010, they likely will still think the economy is awful......

Here's the political and economic math: Let's assume the current downturn turns out to be as painful as the 1990-91 recession. It's an apt comparison..... an imploding real estate bubble, a construction bust, a banking crisis, and a credit crunch. Sound familiar? The nation's gross domestic product fell 3.0 percent in the fourth quarter of 1990 and 2.0 percent in the first quarter of 1991. But even after the economy started expanding again, the unemployment rate kept rising until it hit 7.8 percent in June of 1992 vs. a low of 5.2 percent in June 1990. Recall that in January of 1992, President Bush, running for reelection, told New Hampshire voters that the economy was in "free fall" even though the economy was later shown to have grown at a robust 4.2 percent during the first quarter of that year.

See, it takes a while for people to really perceive that an economy has turned around, especially if unemployment is high. Bill Clinton won the 1992 election on the economy ("it's the economy, stupid") even though GDP had been growing for six full quarters. According to Gallup, 88 percent of Americans thought the economy was "fair" or "poor" in October 1992 with some 60 percent saying the economy was "getting worse." Two years later, it was the Democrats turn to feel the brunt of widespread economic anxiety as the Republicans captured both the House and the Senate. Even though the economy had then been growing for 14 straight quarters and the unemployment rate was down to 5.8 percent, 72 percent of Americans still thought the economy was "fair" or "poor" and 66 percent though the nation was headed in the wrong direction.

That's right. 3 1/2 years after the 1990-91 recession ended, the economy was still weighing negatively on voters and hurting the incumbent political party. Is it so hard to imagine, then, that three or four years from now voters will also be unhappy about the state of the economy and blame the party in power, the Obamacrats?

Monumental Terror

Posted on November 11, 2008, 3:24pm | Jacob Sullum

In a case the U.S. Supreme Court will hear tomorrow, followers of Summum, a 33-year-old sect that (per The New York Times) "contains elements of Egyptian faiths and Gnostic Christianity," are fighting for the right to erect a monument listing their Seven Aphorisms alongside a Fraternal Order of the Eagles monument displaying the Ten Commandments in a city park. Last year a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit ruled that Pleasant Grove City, Utah, violated Summum members' First Amendment right to freedom of speech by rejecting the monument they proposed to donate. The government "may not take sides in a theological debate," the church argues. Critics of the decision, including the Bush administration and various cities and states, say it would require governments that accept any donated displays on public property to approve virtually every other proposal, no matter how hideous, offensive, or idiotic. "Accepting a Statue of Liberty," the city says, should not "compel a government to accept a Statue of Tyranny." Tenth Circuit Judge Michael McConnell, who unsuccessfully urged the full court to rehear the case, has more in the same vein:

This means that Central Park in New York, which contains the privately donated Alice in Wonderland statue, must now allow other persons to erect Summum's "Seven Aphorisms," or whatever else they choose (short of offending a policy that narrowly serves a "compelling" governmental interest).  Every park in the country that has accepted a VFW memorial is now a public forum for the erection of permanent fixed monuments; they must either remove the war memorials or brace themselves for an influx of clutter. 

Significantly, the religious nature of the donated monuments is not relevant to the free speech question (though it would be to an Establishment Clause challenge). These cases happen to involve Ten Commandments monuments, but it could work the other way. A city that accepted the donation of a statue honoring a local hero could be forced, under the panel's rulings, to allow a local religious society to erect a Ten Commandments monument—or for that matter, a cross, a nativity scene, a statue of Zeus, or a Confederate flag.

The Summum church says governments that want to avoid such problems can decline to accept donated monuments (thereby creating a "public forum" where viewpoint discrimination is constitutionally suspect) or explicitly adopt the donors' message as their own (thereby transforming private speech into government speech). It does not mention park privatization as a third option. 

In the June issue of reason, Jesse Walker noted how a similar controversy in Crossville, Tennessee, led to just the sort of monument proliferation McConnell fears. 

A Potential Solution to Commons Tragedies in West Coast Fisheries

Posted on November 11, 2008, 3:21pm | Brian Doherty

West coast fisheries might begin in 2011 an experiment in assigning something more like property rights in the ocean commons, the LA Times reports. Excerpt:

The Pacific Fishery Management Council voted unanimously Friday to make a historic shift in strategy that encourages cooperation, rather than competition, among fishermen who drag nets to catch cod, whiting, rockfish, flounder and sole.

The new approach, often called "individual fishing quotas," will give commercial fishermen from Morro Bay on California's Central Coast to Puget Sound in Washington state the right to bring in their portion of the catch when the seas are safe and they can command higher prices.

........

Advocates of this approach, which has been used successfully in Alaska and elsewhere, believe that this can help turn around West Coast fisheries.....

The shift to individual fish quotas comes after recent scientific studies showing that the system has a way of encouraging fishermen to be better stewards of the resource. It tends to end the dangerous race to catch fish before another boat does and has helped stocks rebound.

Ron Bailey on individual fishing quotas from back in 2005.

New at Reason: Ron Bailey on Why the U.S. Does Not Need an "Energy Czar"

Posted on November 11, 2008, 3:00pm

Given that President-elect Barack Obama is going to try to address both climate change and energy security, writes Science Correspondent Ronald Bailey, the last thing he should do is add another layer of bureaucracy by creating a new "energy czar." That's a policy dead-end that we've been down before.

Read all about it here.

Beware of Brounshirts

Posted on November 11, 2008, 2:49pm | David Weigel

Yes, Rep. Paul Broun is the Constitution-minded Republican I profiled earlier this year. Yes, I've seen this.

It may sound a bit crazy and off base, but the thing is, he’s the one who proposed this national security force. I’m just trying to bring attention to the fact that we may — may not, I hope not — but we may have a problem with that type of philosophy of radical socialism or Marxism. That’s exactly what Hitler did in Nazi Germany and it’s exactly what the Soviet Union did. When he’s proposing to have a national security force that’s answering to him, that is as strong as the U.S. military, he’s showing me signs of being Marxist.

There are so many points in there at which Broun could have shut up. Maybe the phrase "exactly what Hitler did"? Maybe the totally baseless claim that Obama's mulled-over "civilian security force"--still not a good idea, by the way--would be some sort of Chavista unit "answering to him"? This extra excerpt of the Broun interview is illuminating.

Broun theorized that after Obama creates this national police force he'll ban gun ownership.

"We can't be lulled into complacency," Broun said. "You have to remember that Adolf Hitler was elected in a democratic Germany. I'm not comparing him to Adolf Hitler. What I'm saying is there is the potential."

That's another fringe position, but it's one egged on by the NRA, which warned gun owners that a President Obama would literally rip their firearms from their warm, living hands.

Jake Tapper, in that last link, calls this "Obama Derangement Syndrome." I think this is some of the first anti-Obama wackadoodlry that isn't specific to the candidate. This was the language used to scare the fringe right about the last Democratic president, too. It's incredible dumb and off-putting, not to mention wrong.

UPDATE: The Angry Optimist says:

If someone wants to make the comparison of pre-Reich Germany and Obama, Mr. Weigel, it is incumbent on you to say why it is dumb.

OK. First, the Democrats didn't seize power through violence and threats against their enemies. I'm sure someone can point me to isolated stories of Obama supporters bullying McCain supporters, but I doubt any conservative are nervous about stepping outside without their Democratic Party membership cards. Second, the Schutzstaffel (which Broun appears to be invoking) was created as a personal guard service for Hitler. Obama is proposing a new civilian force that he'd command as he commands every branch of the military.

New at Reason: Matt Welch on Saving Capitalism from the Bailout

Posted on November 11, 2008, 12:00pm

In his From the Top column from our December issue, Editor in Chief Matt Welch argues that it's time to get back to first principles and fight like hell to secure victories we'd long thought won.

Read all about it here.

Judge Wu Cuts Both Ways

Posted on November 11, 2008, 11:21am | Mike Riggs

As reason.tv intern Seth Goldin points out, Judge George Wu, who has decided to not let prosecutors inform the jury about Megan Meier's suicide, is the same judge who ruled that Owen Beck (a teenaged amputee with a medical marijuana prescription) couldn't testify in defense of Charlie Lynch, the now-convicted owner of a medical marijuana dispensary. Read Goldin's account of Wu's response to Beck here.

Any thoughts, commenters, on this bizarre paradox?

Barr/Root: A Point-Counterpoint

Posted on November 11, 2008, 10:50am | David Weigel

As I reported in my write-up of the Bob Barr election night party, VP candidate Wayne Allyn Root promised the crowd that he'd be back in 2012: "Maybe as your president-elect!" Root e-mailed me later to reflect on how the ticket had performed.

Barr/Root got the 2nd highest raw vote total in the 37 year history of LP, we did it in perhaps the worst environment for Third Parties ever (because of the hype, fear, and excitement over Obama)... and we did it on a virtually non-existent campaign budget. Obama won with almost $700 million. We did it with no money. Only nonstop media appearances... and IDEAS!

In all prior elections, the LP VP candidates were literaly MIA  and invisible for the entire campaign. They received zero media attention. In 2008 I changed all that with 800+ media appearances, including FOX News Channel nonstop in the last month of the campaign. What I accomplished is remarkable for a third party VP candidate. That is a SMALL sign of things to come.

I campaigned for over a year with one theme at every event, every media appearance, every debate, every speech, every conversation with voters: that Barry Goldwater had great ideas, yet still lost in a landslide. Reagan took the same ideas and won in two landslides. The only difference was his ability to communicate, educate and motivate voters. I'm a Reagan/Obama for the LP and the Ron Paul freedom movement. Obama's election proves a good communicator can change everything.

Now instead of running for President for a short period of time, or a spur-of-the-minute idea. I have four years to hit the ground running. Four years of nonstop media appearances. Four years of serious fundraising. Four years of contrasting my ideas for smaller government with those of our President Barack Obama, my college classmate, my Libertarian book out with one of the world's biggest publishers in May, and serious interest from major radio syndicators for my own national political radio show called (what else?) ROOT FOR AMERICA.

A little while later I heard from Steve Kubby, the medical marijuana activist who narrowly lost the party's VP nomination to Root and beseeched LP "radicals" not to bolt the party. (Given how few people voted for the breakaway Boston Tea/Personal Choice Party, I think Kubby succeeded.) Kubby has put out a public statement on this year's LP campaign.

The bottom line for this ticket is that they promised $30 million in campaign contributions and a popular vote of 5%. Instead, they raised just over $1 million and failed to break 0.5% of the vote, landing them a 4th place finish for LP presidential campaigns. Barr and Root received a record amount of media coverage and they are celebrities in their own right, but it didn’t work out the way we were told it would.

So much for media and celebrity.

The Barr/Root campaign was an honest test of media and celebrity and the results are clear. Media and celebrity is not the answer. Our ideas and our ability to communicate those ideas, is what sets us apart and earns us serious attention. The hunger for new ideas has never been greater and our ideas, about limited government, ending personal income taxes and upholding personal freedom are more mainstream than ever.

If we dilute our message and rely upon celebrity, it gets us nothing but empty rhetoric. On the other hand, if we transmit a pure signal and only a handful get it, but they totally and earnestly get it, then that is revolutionary.

I think the poor showing of Ralph Nader—on more ballots than ever, but registering his lowest vote totals ever in most states—is the best evidence that this was just a bad third party year, as Root suggests. But there were two other directions the LP could have gone in. One minor change would have been the selection of Kubby instead of Root as VP. Kubby would have soothed most of the people who went online and agitated against Barr/Root, and given the campaign an extra media hook (the drug warrior and the drug war victim!), but it's unlikely Kubby would have done as much media as Root or appealed directly to conservatives.

A major change would have been the nomination of Dr. Mary Ruwart over Barr. Ruwart might have secured the endorsement of Ron Paul. She certainly wouldn't have spooked him into endorsing Chuck Baldwin. But the low vote totals of the Baldwin campaign don't suggest that Paul could have boosted any candidate that much, given that his endorsement wasn't backed up by campaign appearences or fundraising. And Ruwart would have alienated Barr supporters (and Root) to the degree that they might have sat the election out. With no media profile outside of the movement, she would have gotten a level of coverage comparable, probably, to Cynthia McKinney. There was no one "right" way to boost the LP in 2008.

Revolving Doors and Midnight Lawmaking

Posted on November 11, 2008, 9:26am | Radley Balko

Up until March of this year, Washington lobbyist William Wichterman was registered with the D.C. law firm Covington & Burling.  While there, he represented the National Football League in the successful effort to push through the Unlawful Internet Gaming Enforcement Act (UIGEA), which will force banks and other financial institutions to block their customers from placing bets at online poker, sports wagering, and other gaming sites.

(It's worth noting that despite its protestations that online gambling fosters addiction and threatens to corrupt the spirit of competition, the NFL was able to win an exemption to the bill to allow for pay-for-play fantasy football leagues over the Internet.)

According to the Politico, in March, Wichterman was hired on as a White House aide.  His main responsibility?  Help the Bush administration write the rules of the UIGEA.  Wichterman and the White House are now trying to push the new rules through "before Nov. 17, in the narrow window before the new administration could make any changes, according to people familiar with these deliberations."

Wichterman's short leap from chief UIGEA lobbyist to top UIGEA enforcer (before his gig at Covington, Wichterman worked for Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, where he also worked to ban Internet gambling) has raised the suspicions of Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.). 

Cohen posed a series of questions in a letter to White House Counsel Fred Fielding, including whether the White House knew of Wichterman's lobbying for the UIGEA on behalf of the NFL; if so, why they allowed him to work on the enforcement of the Act, anyway; how much time the White House requires to lapse before lobbyists hired into the administration can go to work on the issues they were lobbying for; and if Wichterman plans to go back to representing the NFL after he leaves his stint in the White House.

Winter Companions, Old Men Lost in their Overcoats

Posted on November 11, 2008, 8:37am | David Weigel

Newsweek's Tale of Genji-length wrap-up of the presidential campaign has been picked over pretty well for McCain and Obama secrets and the thinking behind decisions like "hey, that Alaska woman with the Fargo accent can be president one day." I was struck by how much time McCain spent with South Carolina Sen. Lindsay Graham, whom if only scattered fragments of this story are available in 100 years would be remembered as a modern Joshua Speed. He brainstormed the "celebrity" ad. He urged McCain to pick Vinegar Joe Lieberman as a running mate to "match history with history." And basically they hung out all the time.

Somewhere on the 14-hour plane ride back, McCain said to Graham, "You know we got to keep going; we can't let those guys down." Graham replied, "That's right, John. If they can do it, we can do it."
...
The weather in Charleston was awful—sleeting rain—and McCain seemed caged, cooped up with his friend Lindsey Graham, who was annoying him by trying to "visualize" victory. By 7 p.m., Cindy and Graham were ready to "jump out the window," Graham later recalled. McCain's 95-year-old mother, Roberta, tried to lighten the mood by cracking jokes about how she wanted to marry Lindsey.
...
McCain could look hot or riled up (his traveling buddy Lindsey Graham particularly affected his moods, for better and for worse).
...
Piper, the governor's 7-year-old, thought nothing of crawling across Joe Lieberman's lap to get to her mother. Lindsey Graham mischievously enjoyed getting the child hopped up on Mountain Dew, a beverage to which he was mildly addicted.
...
McCain had been too wound up to get to sleep, calling Graham at 1 a.m. ("What'd ya think, boy?" "Home run.")
...
As Lindsey Graham told the story, he had been awakened at 4:30 on the morning of the final debate. It was McCain on the phone. "I can't sleep," said the candidate. "Well, now neither can I," said a sleepy Graham.

There's nothing quite so... Adam West and Burt Ward about the magazine's Obama reporting. If anything, he comes off as eerily calm and equally eerily dorky.

During one of the debate preps, the lights blew, flickering on and off like a strobe light from the 1970s disco craze. Obama stood behind the podium, quietly singing the song "Disco Inferno," last popular in the heyday of "Saturday Night Fever."
...
"That's an interesting belt buckle," he said to Michelle, mischievously. She feigned offense and said, "I am interesting, next to you. Surprise, surprise, a blue suit, a white shirt and a tie." Obama grinned and bent down until he was almost at eye level with her waist. He jabbed a playful finger toward her belt buckle, and let loose his inner nerd. "The lithium crystals! Beam me up, Scotty!" Obama squeaked, laughing at his own lame joke as Michelle rolled her eyes.

That's what you had to choose between, America: a man who calls Lindsey Graham when he can't get to sleep and a man who still quotes The Trammps.

New at Reason: Greg Beato on Ridding the News of Spin

Posted on November 11, 2008, 7:00am

Is it possible to produce a news story on some controversial subject that is so devoid of bias that everyone from Noam Chomsky to Michael Savage finds it sufficiently fair and impartial? In this article from our December issue, Contributing Editor Greg Beato looks at whether anyone really wants news without a point of view.

Read all about it here.

Judge Forbids Mention of Meier's Suicide in Lori Drew Trial

Posted on November 10, 2008, 9:22pm | Mike Riggs

This just in:

The trial of a Missouri woman who's accused of creating a phony profile on News Corp.'s MySpace social-networking Web site that led a teenage girl to kill herself may not include evidence of the suicide.

U.S. District Judge George Wu, at a hearing today in Los Angeles, indicated that allowing jurors to hear about the suicide would be too prejudicial, according to H. Dean Steward, a lawyer for Lori Drew, who had asked for the evidence to be excluded. Wu asked the government to file additional arguments and will make a decision at a Nov. 14 hearing, Steward said.

"Without the suicide, they don't have a case,'' Steward said in a telephone interview.

Read the whole thing here. 

It'll be interesting to see what U.S. Attorney Thomas P. O'Brien comes up with to justify mention of Meier's suicide. 

More on Lori Drew here, here, here, and here.

Reason Writers Around Town: Dave Weigel on Obama's Future Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel

Posted on November 10, 2008, 5:30pm

In the first installment in a week-long L.A. Times dust-up with Scott Lilly of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, Associate Editor David Weigel examines Barack Obama's selection of former Clinton official Rahm Emanuel for evidence of a "new tone" in Washington.

Read their exchange here.

Lionizing Old Hickory

Posted on November 10, 2008, 5:05pm | Damon W. Root

Writing in The New York Times, Janet Maslin gives the thumbs up to Jon Meacham's new American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House, noting that Meacham "dispenses with the usual view of Jackson as a Tennessee hothead and instead sees a cannily ambitious figure determined to reshape the power of the presidency during his time in office." As Maslin notes:

In its cogent fashion this book illustrates how Jackson’s more polished political rivals, like Henry Clay and John C. Calhoun, were unable to look past Jackson’s confrontational style to see the president’s true agenda. At the time of the Compromise of 1833, when Jackson found ways to satisfy the conflicting interests of both nationalists and states’ rights advocates while asserting the power of the presidency, he displayed the fine political art of projecting while looking for a way out.

John Yoo, the former Justice Department attorney and author of the Bush administration's notorious "torture memo," recently made a similar argument, claiming that Jackson's successes as president all stemmed from his "vigorous exercise of his executive powers." That's true as far as it goes, but as I argued in my article on Yoo's Jacksonian conservatism, Old Hickory offers a truly terrible model of presidential behavior. His bullying politics see-sawed from decentralist to nationalist, held together only by his own considerable sense of self-righteousness and, as Maslin points out, his calculated efforts to expand the powers of the presidency. Meacham, it appears from Maslin's review, is on Yoo's side, arguing that Jackson's aggressive behavior held the country together and "kept the possibility of progress alive." Ah, progress. Tell that to the Cherokee.

Now He Tells Us

Posted on November 10, 2008, 4:21pm | Matt Welch

Remeber when Arnold Schwarzenegger was a Milton Friedman-quoting fiscal conservative out to clean up the irresponsible budgets of Singapore Gray Davis? Ah, memories:

"I think the important thing for the Republican Party is now to also look at other issues that are very important for this country and not to get stuck in ideology," the governor said in an interview broadcast on CNN. "Let's go and talk about healthcare reform. Let's go and . . . fund programs if they're necessary programs and not get stuck just on the fiscal responsibility."

reason on Schwarzenegger here.

Bailout Transparency: Not So Much

Posted on November 10, 2008, 2:13pm | Radley Balko

Nick Gillespie noted earlier today the escalating costs of D.C.'s bailout bonanza.

Just as troubling are early signs that the government has no interest in disclosing to taxpayers how it's spending the money.

Bloomberg reports:

The Federal Reserve is refusing to identify the recipients of almost $2 trillion of emergency loans from American taxpayers or the troubled assets the central bank is accepting as collateral.

Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said in September they would comply with congressional demands for transparency in a $700 billion bailout of the banking system. Two months later, as the Fed lends far more than that in separate rescue programs that didn't require approval by Congress, Americans have no idea where their money is going or what securities the banks are pledging in return.

 [...]

The Bloomberg lawsuit argues that the collateral lists ``are central to understanding and assessing the government's response to the most cataclysmic financial crisis in America since the Great Depression.''

The Fed has lent at least $81 billion to American International Group Inc., the world's largest insurer, so that it can pay obligations to banks. AIG today said it received an expanded government rescue package valued at more than $150 billion.

The central bank is also responsible for losses on a $26.8 billion portfolio guaranteed after Bear Stearns Cos. was bought by JPMorgan.

``As a taxpayer, it is absolutely important that we know how they're lending money and who they're lending it to,'' said Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Arlington, Virginia- based Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.

[...]

The Fed's collateral ``absolutely should be made public,'' said Mark Cuban, an activist investor, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks professional basketball team and the creator of the Web site BailoutSleuth.com, which focuses on the secrecy shrouding the Fed's moves. 

Back in September, I warned that no matter how bad the behavior on Wall Street, it's laughable to think the debt-saddled, asset-hiding federal government has the wherewithal to properly identify and fix the problem.

Prior posts on bailout transparency here and here.

The Corporation and the State

Posted on November 10, 2008, 2:00pm | Jesse Walker

The latest debate at Cato Unbound is devoted to the topic "When Corporations Hate Markets." The lead essay, by the libertarian philosopher Roderick Long, argues that

Corporate power depends crucially on government intervention in the marketplace. This is obvious enough in the case of the more overt forms of government favoritism such as subsidies, bailouts, and other forms of corporate welfare; protectionist tariffs; explicit grants of monopoly privilege; and the seizing of private property for corporate use via eminent domain (as in Kelo v. New London). But these direct forms of pro-business intervention are supplemented by a swarm of indirect forms whose impact is arguably greater still....

In a free market, firms would be smaller and less hierarchical, more local and more numerous (and many would probably be employee-owned); prices would be lower and wages higher; and corporate power would be in shambles. Small wonder that big business, despite often paying lip service to free market ideals, tends to systematically oppose them in practice.

Not content to criticize lefties and conservatives who conflate the corporate state with laissez faire, Long argues that many libertarians have only added to the confusion:

If libertarians are accused of carrying water for corporate interests, that may be at least in part because, well, they so often sound like that's just what they're doing (though here, as above, there are plenty of honorable exceptions to this tendency). Consider libertarian icon Ayn Rand's description of big business as a "persecuted minority," or the way libertarians defend "our free-market health-care system" against the alternative of socialized medicine, as though the health care system that prevails in the United States were the product of free competition rather than of systematic government intervention on behalf of insurance companies and the medical establishment at the expense of ordinary people.

The whole article is here. Watch the Cato Unbound site for response essays by the liberal writer Matthew Yglesias, the leftist writer Dean Baker, and the libertarian writer Steven Horwitz.

Creeping Socialism in Communist China

Posted on November 10, 2008, 1:26pm | Jesse Walker

Time reports:

China announced a huge economic stimulus package on Sunday, pledging to spend some 4 trillion renminbi — or around $586 billion — on a wide range of moves designed to boost an economy starting to feel the effects of the world financial crisis....

Xinhua, China's official news agency, reported that the package's spending over the next two years would be aimed at ten major areas, including "low-income housing, rural infrastructure, water, electricity, transportation, the environment, technological innovation and rebuilding from several disasters, most notably the May 12 earthquake."

"The Fiat Bosses Killed You, Ron...."

Posted on November 10, 2008, 1:24pm | Brian Doherty

David Boaz at Cato's blog notes the Onion's Tom Joadesque elegy to the Ron Paul movement, and begins composing, in that great folk tradition of appropriation, lyrics to the tune of the old lefty anthem "I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill" to honor the libertarian congressman. Note to all perpetually angry Paul fans: I quote because I care. I assume someone will soon record themselves actually performing these lyrics and have it up on YouTube.

I dreamed I saw Ron Paul last night,
Still running on TV.
Says I “But Ron, you lost ‘em all”
“I’ll never quit” said he,
“I’ll never quit” said he.

“The Money Power beat you, Ron,
they beat you, Ron” says I.
“Takes more than Fox to beat ideas,”
Says Ron “I didn’t quit”
Says Ron “I didn’t quit.”

“In South Carolina, Ron,” says I,
“You stood up to the war.
Then Rudy knocked you back again.”
Says Ron, “But I was right.”
Says Ron, “But I was right.”

From Baghdad back to Main Street,
In every funeral hall
Where grieving moms inter their sons,
it’s there you find Ron Paul,
it’s there you find Ron Paul!

And taking on the Fed Reserve
and smiling with his eyes,
Says Ron, “The bailout cannot work,
It’s time to privatize.
It’s time to privatize.”

From Texas up to Washington,
in every lecture hall,
Where working men defend their gold,
it’s there you find Ron Paul,
it’s there you find Ron Paul!

I dreamed I saw Ron Paul last night,
Still running on TV.
Says I “But Ron, you lost ‘em all.”
“I’ll never quit” says he,
“I’ll never quit” says he.

Toothless in Appalachia

Posted on November 10, 2008, 12:14pm | Mike Riggs

The Washington Post is running an excellent video series called "The Healing Fields," about the Remote Area Medical Volunteer Corps in Wise County, Va.:

Hundreds of uninsured and underinsured Americans flock to Wise County, Va., every year to seek treatment at a makeshift field hospital operated by the Remote Area Medical Volunteer Corps. For three days in this isolated corner of Appalachia, a small army of health-care professionals offers medical attention to patients who are not likely to see another doctor or dentist all year. The annual clinic saves lives and alleviates suffering, but in the face of a growing national health-care crisis, it may not be enough.  

Be warned: The video features a kid with a mouthful of abcessed teeth and other horror stories.

Part of this crisis, as I argued in July, is the monopolistic licensing influence of the American Dental Association. The ADA has effectively discouraged lawmakers from licensing alternative dental practitioners in every state but Alaska, where the ADA lost its suit against the Alaskan Native Tribal Health Consortium. The consortium continues to send high school graduates to New Zealand for a two-year program in basic dental health care, which allows them to provide low-cost care in remote tribal areas of Alaska. Dental therapists, as well as denturists (who can legally practice in a handful of states, despite the ADA's smear campaign) could have a profound effect on health care in poverty-stricken areas, both rural and urban. Sadly, neither group can legally practice in areas like Appalachia, where they're needed most.

Why aren't politicians batting around the idea of comprehensive licensing reform, the quickest route to affordable health care? According to this excellent Cato paper, abandoning the medical rent-seeking model is "politically infeasible." The paper does, however, outline some intermediate steps towards reform, such as more skepticism on the part of state politicans in response to medical groups' requests for stricter legislation.

On the other hand, maybe foreign alternatives are the way to go.

Miriam Makeba, RIP

Posted on November 10, 2008, 12:03pm | Jesse Walker

The South African musician Miriam Makeba, who just died at age 76, was an anti-apartheid activist, Guinea's delegate to the United Nations, and Stokely Carmichael's first wife. She was also a hell of a good singer, one of the first figures to bring African pop to an American audience:



From The New York Times's obit:

Widely known as "Mama Africa," she had been a prominent exiled opponent of apartheid since the South African authorities revoked her passport in 1960 and refused to allow her to return after she traveled abroad. She was prevented from attending her mother's funeral after touring in the United States....

For 31 years, Ms. Makeba lived in exile, variously in the United States, France, Guinea and Belgium. South Africa's state broadcasters banned her music after she spoke out against apartheid at the United Nations. "I never understood why I couldn't come home," Ms. Makeba said upon her return at an emotional homecoming in Johannesburg in 1990 as the apartheid system began to crumble, according to The Associated Press. "I never committed any crime."

She finally returned to South Africa in 1990, as apartheid was overthrown. A wide selection of her music has been posted on YouTube; start here, here, or with the song posted above, then keep clicking.

[Hat tip: Saramin.]

First They Came for World of Warcraft...

Posted on November 10, 2008, 12:02pm | Katherine Mangu-Ward

...and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Rank 14 High Warlord Tauren Warrior.

Not to, you know, reflexively assume the worst about China, but this wire story does set off some alarm bells:

China could become the first country to classify Internet addiction as a clinical disorder amid growing concern over compulsive Web use by millions of Chinese, state media said on Monday....

A top Chinese legislator said in August that about 10 percent of China's Web users under the age of 18, or four million people, were addicted to the Internet, mainly to "unhealthy" online games, state media said at the time. 

The story is written straight, as if the major interest of this development is the change in China's mental health diagnostic practices.

But China does have a habit of taking extreme measures to keep political dissidents offline. It's not hard to imagine that troublemakers might spend a significant amount of time online, and the Chinese government might decide that they need to be hauled off for "treatment" of their "Internet addiction."

And then there's this little note at the end of the article:

In 2006, [the Chinese government] ordered all Chinese Internet game manufacturers to install technology in their games that demands players reveal their real name and identification number. 

The increase in harmful Internet use in China is probably real (see here, for instance), but as reason contributing editor Thomas Szasz has often noted, diagnosis of mental illness and subsequent imprisonment can be a powerful weapon in the arsenal of an oppressive state. 

New at Reason: Read Our Entire November Issue!

Posted on November 10, 2008, 12:00pm

Our complete November issue is now online! Check out Daniel McCarthy on "the Republican civil war," Jim Henley on the "kinder, gentler intervention" of the Democrats, Mike Riggs on Mexico's anti-emo riots, our Citings and Letters sections, and much more.

Read our entire November issue here. 

Barack Obama: Stealth School-Choice Supporter?

Posted on November 10, 2008, 11:36am | Nick Gillespie

Mother Jones has a letter from a Washington, D.C. resident pleading with President-Elect Barack Obama that he "seriously consider sending your kids to DC public schools—and not a charter school, either, but a full-on traditional neighborhood public school."

Stephanie Mencimer notes in passing (and with strange forgiveness) that Obama's kids attend private school in Chicago, and she grants that D.C.'s public schools are "crappy" and complains about lack of resources without mentioning that the schools spend more money per pupil than just about anywhere else in the country. "I understand," she writes, "that choosing a school is fraught with anxiety and it's the most private of decisions."

In an update, she says:

At Barack Obama's first press conference as president-elect, Chicago Sun-Times reporter Lynn Sweet asked whether Obama would be sending his children to private or public schools in Washington. He replied that no decision has yet been made and that he and Michelle would be "scouting out schools."

More here. Which is another way of saying, Hello Sidwell Friends! or one of the other ultra-exclusive and ultra-expensive D.C.-area private schools.

Which is to say that Obama (as he has already demonstrated via his own kids) is in favor of school choice, at least when it comes to his family (he has said a variety of phoney-baloney platitudes about not "walking away" from public schools and creating more charters, etc.)

With that in mind, and as a parent with two kids in public schools, I'd like to write a letter to Obama too:

I understand that choosing a school is fraught with anxiety and it's the most private of decisions. Please extend and expand the same educational choice you and your family exercise with ease by giving school-age children more and better options. Making every school voluntary by giving vouchers equal to the current average spending per pupil that can be cashed at any educational institution you would be willing to send your own kids to.

This is, of course, not going to happen. Indeed, look for the Obama administration to follow in the footsteps of the Bush administration and further centralize and federalize control of the K-12 system. In fact, Obama has spoken repeatedly about the need for universal, taxpayer-funded preschool, which will have the added bonus of straitjacketing a thriving and decentralized and choice-driven industry. For more on that, watch below:

Governors Know Best? When It Comes to Leasing Money-Losing Assets, They Do

Posted on November 10, 2008, 11:25am | Nick Gillespie

The Wash Post's David Broder has an interesting column about a pack of GOP governors who are doing pretty well both electorally and policy-wise. At the top of the list is Mitch Daniels, the governor of Indiana who was reelected with 60 percent of the vote after a pretty nasty campaign (full disclosure: Daniels has written for publications published by Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes this website; analysts at the foundation's research division have advised his administration as well).

A snippet:

"One thing we have learned [says Daniels] is that fiscal restraint works. We dug out of a deficit and now we have a triple-A bond rating for the first time. Market principles work. We have begun to insure our uninsured, with health savings accounts, paid for with a higher tobacco tax. And I had no trouble supporting that, because I remember what Ronald Reagan said: When you tax something, you get less of it.

"We've learned that effective government works. We expanded our child welfare efforts to protect more children, and we reduced the waiting time in our license bureaus to an average of 7 1/2 minutes. We leased our tollway, and now we're improving roads all over the state without raising taxes or fees."

Daniels said he has traveled constantly for four years, listening to Hoosiers, and "I make a point of naming the voter who first alerted me to a problem." Governing seems abstract, he said, so it behooves officials to be very specific.

As for social issues, Daniels said, "I try to live traditional values and affirm them, but not impose them on others. I'm trying to bring the state together to do hard things— not look for ways to divide us."

Does it work? Daniels was reelected with almost 60 percent of the vote, and exit polls indicate that a third of the people who voted for Barack Obama on Tuesday also voted for Daniels. His share of the black vote topped 20 percent.

There's more here.

About the most controversial thing Daniels did in his first term was leasing the Indiana Toll Road. Under his direction, the state received $3.8 billion upfront to lease the operation of a money-losing asset to a (horrors!) consortium of Spanish and Australian companies.

I really don't understand why, but opposition to the lease ran something like 2-to-1, and for a while it looked like Daniels would get bounced over it. Yet it makes obvious sense: The state no longer has to deal with the hassle of running the roadway and it got enough money to undertake various transportation infrastructure projects it wouldn't have been able to do otherwise. As Len Gilroy of the Reason Foundation wrote in August:

The lease payment is funding permanent assets to serve the needs of current and future Hoosiers. Further, the concessionaire has spent over $88 million in 2008 so far on construction contracts for work on the ITR itself. Over 97 percent of this work went to Indiana businesses, well exceeding the 90 percent target specified in the lease contract for the roughly $4 billion planned in ITR construction work over the 75-year term. That's $4 billion in addition to the $3.8 billion upfront payment that will remain in Indiana.

Without the toll road lease, these projects would likely have never materialized, or they would have necessitated tax increases to move forward. And Indiana has also earned over $360 million in interest on the upfront payment in just two years (over $185,000 per day, at current rates), which will be used to fund additional state and local transportation projects for decades.

Leasing toll roads really gets under the skin of conservatives (if the leasee is a furrin company) and liberals and leftys (for an infinite number of reasons, none of which is particularly compelling).

It will likely be controversial forever (see the struggle over the deal Gov. Ed Rendell is trying to ink for the Pennsylvania Turnpike) but it's not just a good way to deal with transportation issues. It provides a model for strapped state governments to get out of certain businesses altogether and get some cash at the same time.

Gaming for Columbine

Posted on November 10, 2008, 10:35am | Jesse Walker

reason contributor Henry Jenkins has posted a three-part interview [1, 2, 3] with Danny Ledonne, the creator of the controversial Columbine video game Super Columbine Massacre RPG! The whole thing is worth reading; I'll quote just one of Ledonne's comments:

The controversy around SCMRPG is largely one of the subject matter and not its execution. Only when I give talks at game design schools am I taken to task for my design choices. For example, the Associated Press, Christian Science Monitor, or Parents Television Council were not complaining with:

"Why did you hide a book in the upstairs classroom that you need to complete the last part of the game? I had to start over!"

"The hallway is really hard to sneak through. I couldn't even tell those were security cameras until my friend showed me!"

"The graphics suck, noob."

Instead, the mainstream press attacked the very notion that a game like SCMRPG could exist! Heavens, we can have a film or book or magazine article about Columbine but a VIDEO GAME? This was the tone of much of the initial reporting.

The newshook for the interview is Ledonne's film Playing Columbine, a documentary about the controversy. I haven't seen the movie. Nor, for that matter, have I played the game: It's only available for Windows and I use a Mac. But those of you with the appropriate OS can download the game for free and decide for yourself whether it's exploitative trash, a compelling work of art, or an ambitious artistic failure.

More from Reason: Nick Gillespie reacted to the Columbine shootings here, and I reacted to the media reaction here. Brian Doherty reviewed Bowling for Columbine here, and I reviewed it here.

That Bailout Just Keeps Getting Bigger and Bigger...

Posted on November 10, 2008, 10:12am | Nick Gillespie

What's new on the bailout front? If it's Monday, it's got to be time for more taxpayer support:

The U.S. Federal Reserve hiked its support for insurer American International Group Inc to about $150 billion on Monday after an initial bailout attempt failed to stem massive losses.

What about the automakers (didn't we already bail them out a little while ago)?:

The press for a federal bailout of the auto industry increased over the weekend.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said in a letter to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson that the Bush administration should consider expanding the $700 billion financial rescue to include car companies.

"A healthy automobile manufacturing sector is essential to the restoration of financial market stability," they wrote.

Maybe, says Paul Krugman, a World War II-size jobs program will turn the trick:

F.D.R. did not, in fact, manage to engineer a full economic recovery during his first two terms....

What saved the economy, and the New Deal, was the enormous public works project known as World War II, which finally provided a fiscal stimulus adequate to the economy's needs.

This history offers important lessons for the incoming administration.

One upbeat sign: Kansas banks are wary of signing up for government injections:

The head of the Kansas Bankers Association says the state's banks are reluctant to take part in the capital injection program included in the financial bailout.

Association president Chuck Stones said "banks are very wary of the program" that Congress approved last month as part of the $700 billion bailout. The Troubled Asset Relief Program injects capital in the form of preferred stock.

The Topeka Capital-Journal reported that Capitol Federal Financial of Topeka and UMB Financial Corp. of Kansas City, Mo., have both declined to participate.

Capitol Federal CEO John Dicus said the bank already has sufficient resources to continue lending money to home buyers. Dicus said the program's preferred stock requires payment of a 5 percent dividend rate, and that his bank would have to lend at 8 percent to cover the required rate.

All of this leaves me wondering: Where's My Bailout?

The Palin Wars

Posted on November 10, 2008, 10:02am | Matt Welch

It was clear within the first few days of her nomination as vice president that can-do Alaska Governor Sarah Palin was a peculiarly divisive political figure. But who knew she would become a one-woman Republican civil war?

Here's George Will, in a Sunday Washington Post column that I shall decorate with a few reason hyperlinks:

Some of the Republicans' afflictions are self-inflicted. Some conservatives who are gluttons for punishment are getting a head start on ensuring a 2012 drubbing by prescribing peculiar medication for a misdiagnosed illness. They are monomaniacal about media bias, which is real but rarely decisive, and unhinged by their anger about the loathing of Sarah Palin by similarly deranged liberals. These conservatives, confusing pugnacity with a political philosophy, are hot to anoint Palin, an emblem of rural and small-town sensibilities, as the party's presumptive 2012 nominee.

These conservatives preen as especially respectful of regular -- or as Palin says, "real" -- Americans, whose tribune Palin purports to be. But note the argument that the manipulation of Americans by "the mainstream media" explains the fact that the more Palin campaigned, the less Americans thought of her qualifications. This argument portrays Americans as a bovine herd -- or as inert clay in the hands of wily media, which only Palin's conservative celebrators can decipher and resist.

These conservatives, smitten by a vice presidential choice based on chromosomes, seem eager to compete on the Democrats' terrain of identity politics, entering the "diversity" sweepstakes they have hitherto rightly deplored.

Meanwhile over at RedState and Michelle Malkin's blog, there is, well, Operation Leper.

An intriguing subplot in all of this has been the role of certain magazines of opinion, and what that might say about a conservative moment that once embraced a distinct style of intellectualism. Here's Mark Lilla writing about "Populist Chic" in the Wall Street Journal:

John McCain's choice was not a fluke, or a senior moment, or an act of desperation. It was the result of a long campaign by influential conservative intellectuals to find a young, populist leader to whom they might hitch their wagons in the future.

And not just any intellectuals. It was the editors of National Review and the Weekly Standard, magazines that present themselves as heirs to the sophisticated conservatism of William F. Buckley and the bookish seriousness of the New York neoconservatives. After the campaign for Sarah Palin, those intellectual traditions may now be pronounced officially dead. [...]

Over the [last] 25 years there [has grown] up a new generation of conservative writers who cultivated none of their elders' intellectual virtues -- indeed, who saw themselves as counter-intellectuals. Most are well-educated and many have attended Ivy League universities; in fact, one of the masterminds of the Palin nomination was once a Harvard professor. But their function within the conservative movement is no longer to educate and ennoble a populist political tendency, it is to defend that tendency against the supposedly monolithic and uniformly hostile educated classes. They mock the advice of Nobel Prize-winning economists and praise the financial acumen of plumbers and builders. They ridicule ambassadors and diplomats while promoting jingoistic journalists who have never lived abroad and speak no foreign languages. And with the rise of shock radio and television, they have found a large, popular audience that eagerly absorbs their contempt for intellectual elites. They hoped to shape that audience, but the truth is that their audience has now shaped them.

I am not now and will never be a Republican (nor any other kind of political tribesman), but I have an active interest in seeing the two dominant political parties in this country embrace the maximum amount of freedom. Which, these days, isn't very maximum at all. What's particularly curious to me about this whole "We need new ideas to connect with those Sam's Club voters we never hang out with" meme is that I've seen very little enthusiasm for adopting a policy that has real juice out there in the grassroots of both parties–opposition to the ill-planned, panic-brokered, $2 trillion-and-counting bailout. The effects of which will be with us long after we remember the cruise-ship habits of star-struck opinion journalists.

Melissa Etheridge, Tax Protester

Posted on November 10, 2008, 8:36am | Nick Gillespie

Singer Melissa Etheridge, a California resident who's in a now-non-legit relationship with a "lady friend" after the passing of the Golden State's Proposition 8 (which defined marriage as between one man and one woman), is taking her place in history alongside Lady Godiva, Henry David Thoreau, Gandhi, and Wesley Snipes:

[My spouse] and I are not allowed the same right under the state constitution as any other citizen. Okay, so I am taking that to mean I do not have to pay my state taxes because I am not a full citizen. I mean that would just be wrong, to make someone pay taxes and not give them the same rights, sounds sort of like that taxation without representation thing from the history books....

Come to think of it, I should get a federal tax break too...

Whole thing here at the Daily Beast.

When it comes to celebrity tax protesters getting away with it, action hero (and cross-dressing star of To Wong Foo Thanks for Everything) Snipes can tell you personally, "Always bet on black."

Other rebels are not so lucky.

Why State Budgets Are in the Crapper (Hint: It's Not the Economy)

Posted on November 10, 2008, 8:23am | Nick Gillespie

Author's update: An astute reader, which is to say one who, unlike me, had had some coffee before perusing the screen and can tell the difference between a 3 and an 8, points out that this story I posted here is actually five years old. Apologies for that mistake, but in the interest of openness, I'll leave it up while I see if I can find any current stories on the same matter. 

USA Today has analyzed why so many states are in serious budget meltdowns. The answer, it turns out, is not that the national economy has tanked, or even regional economies have hit the skids:

The financial problems racking many state governments this year have less to do with the weak national economy than with the ability of governors and legislators to manage money wisely.

That is the key finding of a USA TODAY analysis of how the 50 states spend, tax and balance their budgets—or don't.

The National Governors Association says states are suffering their worst economic crisis since World War II. But for many states, the analysis shows, the fault is largely their own.

Some states that have enjoyed handsome growth in tax revenue nonetheless have huge budget shortfalls. At the other extreme, some of the best-managed states suffered sharp declines in tax collections but promptly took painful steps to balance their books.

Utah, Georgia and Delaware are the best financial stewards, according to the USA TODAY analysis of the states' financial performance. The key to their success: restraint. During the economic boom of the late 1990s, these states limited both spending growth and tax cuts. After the economy weakened in early 2001, they acted swiftly and decisively to keep their finances sound.

California, the worst-performing state in the analysis, did the opposite.

Don't expect the current situation to change the way most states do business.

State spending keeps growing.

It went up 6.3% for the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2002, and it's on track to rise about 5% in the 12 months that end June 30. The number of people on Medicaid, which pays for health care and nursing homes for the poor, remains at a near-record 40 million. That number is up 30% since 1998, the result of efforts to sign up people who qualify. And despite anecdotal reports of layoffs—Oregon furloughed 130 state troopers, for example—state governments have added 74,000 workers (an increase of 1.5%) in the past two years while the private sector has registered a net loss of 2.6 million jobs (a decline of 2.4%).

Whole thing here.

New at Reason: Steve Chapman on Whether Barack Obama Will Be Another Bill Clinton

Posted on November 10, 2008, 7:00am

What Barack Obama's admirers and his enemies have in common, writes Steve Chapman, is overestimating how much change he would, or can, bring about. Obama is an inspiring figure, but also a shrewd conventional politician who leaves the windmill-tilting to others. Sound familiar?

Read all about it here.

Should Meier's Suicide be Allowed as Evidence in Lori Drew's Myspace Case?

Posted on November 9, 2008, 5:04pm | Mike Riggs

On Wednesday, Lori Drew, the Missouri woman whose "cyber-bullying" led to the suicide of 13-year-old Megan Meier, learned that her motion for a bench trial was denied, and that despite her wishes to the contrary, she'll face a jury when her trial starts on Nov. 18.  It's hard to imagine Drew suffering less under a jury, but as the Wall Street Journal's Law Blog noted when Drew initially motioned for a bench trial, the judge didn't know enough about Myspace to have a sound opinion either way:

[U.S. District Court Judge George Wu] is still confused on a few points, according to [Drew attorney Dean Steward], with whom we spoke yesterday. “My sense,” Steward told the Law Blog, “is that Judge Wu still wants to hear some actual testimony regarding the MySpace terms of service and the way MySpace works. Much of the discussion at the hearing focused on whether you have to agree to the terms of service if you’re simply visiting the site [but aren’t a member]. My sense is that the judge wants someone on the witness stand that can tell him exactly how the technology works.”

Drew's lawyers are now asking the court to exclude Meier's death as evidence, but as Jacob Sullum pointed out in May, conspiracy is one of the charges U.S. Attorney Thomas P. O'Brien brought against Drew, which means Meier is fair game. My guess is that the jury will hang Drew out to dry if Meier's death can be submitted as evidence, despite the fact that O'Brien used a bastardized interpretation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act to charge Drew in the first place (and only after prosecutors in Missouri declined to charge Drew, arguing that she didn't break any laws). Drew's legal team has argued that Meier's death has nothing to do with the charges brought against Drew:

The defense has asked the judge to exclude mention of the death because the charges — that Drew violated a federal anti-hacking law by misrepresenting herself on the California-based MySpace site — do not involve Meier's death. The defense says use of it would be prejudicial and play to jurors' emotions.

I'll post an update as soon as Judge Wu decides whether the prosecution can tell the jury about Meier's suicide. In the meantime, read reason's coverage of the case here, here, and here.