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The great, unlamented mascot of Pets.com and the tech bubble, Sock Puppet, comes to Congress with a paw out for taxpayer money and inadvertently suggests a way forward through the current moment that doesn't involve massive giveaways.
Approximately two minutes and 20 seconds. For embed code, go here.
For Reason.tv's bailout coverage, go here.
For Reason magazine's bailout coverage, go here.
Our entire special 40th anniversary December issue is now available online! Don't miss Senior Editor Brian Doherty's look at reason's Second Amendment coverage from the past 40 years, an oral history of the nation's (and the world's) only magazine devoted to "Free Minds and Free Markets," Associate Editor Katherine Mangu-Ward's take on science fiction publisher Tor Books, Matt Welch and Nick Gillespie on "The Libertarian Moment," and and much more!
In July I wrote about Nashville police injecting unruly suspects with Midazolam, a "strong sedative" that caused short-term amnesia. I suggested that it was a bad idea (and in general, I still think it's a bad idea), but then three weeks ago, two DC police officers shot David Kerstetter to death in his own bathroom. His death brings up some interesting questions about the use of force. Jason Cherkis, a colleague at Washington City Paper, has the details:
Two cops arrived—a rookie and a master patrol officer with more than 20 years on the job. They were greeted by the Iowa employee and led to Kerstetter’s condo.
The veteran officer, Frederick Friday, says the employee called up to Kerstetter, asking him if he could come upstairs. Friday says Kerstetter shouted back that he knew he was lying—that he was with the police and refused to let him upstairs.
The employee pleaded with Kerstetter some more. But it was no use. Eventually, Friday and his partner went inside. “We have to check—that’s our job,” Friday says. “Can’t just leave him.”...
Allegedly, Kerstetter was holding a knife when he met the two cops.
Kerstetter was shot multiple times, according to his mother, who cites the death certificate. He was taken to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead a short time later.
In the coming months, the department will investigate the circumstances surrounding Kerstetter’s death, though D.C. Police Chief Cathy Lanier has already told the Washington Post her people acted in self-defense. She did not return repeated calls seeking comment.
What’s unlikely to come out of the investigation, however, is the answer to this straightforward question: How did a man who seemed to pose no danger to anyone besides himself end up being killed by the police in his own bathroom?
According to a police press release, officers were forced to use lethal force after “a struggle ensued.” The shooting occurred after officers “repeatedly ordered the man to drop the weapon.”
There's no doubt that Kerstetter had mental problems that made him unstable, if not dangerous (he suffered from bipolar disorder and extreme paranoia, seldom took his medication, and had a history of meth addiction), but there's also evidence—enough to spark a rigorous MPD Internal Affairs investigation—that the responding officers didn't make an adequate effort to engage Kerstetter before resorting to lethal force: the officers didn't suffer any injuries, nor were their clothes torn; the glass door leading into the bathroom wasn't damaged, nor was the vase that was on the floor just inside the door. Yet Kersetter, emaciated, half-naked, and armed with only a kitchen knife, was shot to death in a confined area.
D.C. has a poor record of responding to people with mental disorders (the day after Kerstetter's death, the Department of Mental Health sent a memo that it had been sitting on to the MPD detailing appropriate responses to mentally-ill suspects), so here's my question: If police officers find themselves face to face with a potentially dangerous and mentally unstable citizen, are inhumane methods for restraint preferable to lethal force? (For the sake of this particular thought experiment, let's pretend that police don't regularly abuse tools such as tasers, batons, etc., etc.)
In the latest edition of Friday Funnies, Scott Stantis profiles President-elect Barack Obama's future cabinet.
From our December issue, Science Correspondent Ronald Bailey digs deep into the archives to present both the hits and the misses of reason's science and technology coverage from the past 40 years.
A Georgia judge has allowed Wendy Whitaker to remain in her home while she fights her continued presence on the state’s sex offender list.
I blogged about Whitaker’s case last week.
Since the Supreme Court upheld the individual right to own guns last summer, writes Steve Chapman, one municipality after another has faced reality and eliminated their handgun bans. Then there's Chicago, which is being sued for violating the Second Amendment but refuses to confront the possibility that what the Supreme Court said may apply on this side of the Appalachians.
Happy Thanksgiving! According to a new study, you and your family are increasingly less likely to have cancer, and less likely to die of it, too:
Cancer diagnosis rates decreased by an average of 0.8 percent each year from 1999 to 2005, the last year for which data are available, according to an annual report by the National Cancer Institute, the American Cancer Society and other scientific organizations.
Death rates from cancer continued to decline as well, a trend that began some 15 years ago, the report also noted. It was published online in The Journal of the National Cancer Institute.
For all those who live in fear of GM foods, plastic water bottles, aspartame, food miles, and cellphones—relax, have a nice dinner, and call your Great Aunt Freida. Statistically speaking, you'll live.
In related news, the always-valuable American Council on Science and Health reminds us that all the components of a delicious Thanksgiving dinner are safe to eat, even if they cause cancer in the occasional lab rat.
And the always-entertaining John Tierney gives us a list of 10 things not to worry about over the summer. Revisit the list, and enjoy not worrying again this holiday season.
One of the most profound spillover effects of the current economic crisis, writes Leonard Gilroy, is that it has exposed a festering fiscal health crisis in state and local government. Today 13 states are staring at budget shortfalls in excess of $1 billion in fiscal year 2009, with California ($31 billion) and New York ($6.4 billion) leading the pack. Texas, on the other hand, is currently the envy of the nation with an $11 billion budget surplus. How did the state do it? By spending within its means and partnering with the private sector.
Not many details at the moment, but we do know that gunmen opened fire at various sites in Bombay in what appears to be a coordinated terrorist attack. According to BBC News, unconfirmed reports say that 80 are dead, 250 injured, and an unknown number are being held hostage in a "luxury hotel."
On Wednesday, gunmen opened fire in at least seven sites, including a train station, two five-star hotels, a hospital and a restaurant popular with tourists.
At least two blasts, suspected to be grenade attacks, were reported alongside the shootings.
Police said the gunmen had fired indiscriminately.
At least 10 people were killed at the Chhatrapati Shivaji railway station, they said.
A man shows the wounds of another man injured in a gunbattle at Mumbai's Chatrapati Shivaji Terminus.
"The terrorists have used automatic weapons and in some places grenades have been lobbed," said AN Roy, police commissioner of Maharashtra state.
The Times (UK) reports that the terrorists were targeting foreigners.
UPDATE: The Hindustan Times provides a mercifully smaller death toll of 16.
The hardest problem for the authors of Spain's democratic constitution was to strike a balance between the central government and the claims of Catalonia, the Basque country and Galicia for home rule. The formula they came up with was known as café para todos, or coffee for all: Spain was divided into 17 "autonomous communities" (plus the enclave cities of Ceuta and Melilla on the Moroccan coast), each with its own elected parliament and government. This estado de las autonomías seemed a neat solution. Over the past 30 years more and more powers and money have been devolved. The regional governments are now responsible for schools, universities, health, social services, culture, urban and rural development and, in some places, policing....The same article says that "even as it has solved some problems, decentralisation has created others." I can't say those new problems strike me as terrible obstacles. Here's a sample:
The estado de las autonomías has several clear benefits. First, as Mr Zapatero says, "it spreads power and impedes its concentration," and in that way reflects "the best liberal thinking". Second, by bringing decisions about services closer to the people it has improved them. Third, it encourages competition between regions. The rivalry between Barcelona and Madrid may have acquired an edge of mistrust, but it is in essence a creative tension. And fourth, the system has reduced regional inequalities, or at least stopped them widening.
Now that the government employment service has been decentralised, José María Fidalgo, the general secretary of the Workers' Commissions, the largest trade-union federation, worries that jobseekers have to look at 17 different websites.[Hat tip: Paul Rako]
President-elect Obama's choice of gun control advocate Eric Holder to serve as his attorney general should come as something less than a complete shock, writes Damon Root. But will Holder, who was one of thirteen former Justice Department officials to sign an amicus brief on behalf of the D.C. government in the Heller case, respect the Second Amendment?
Following on to Michael Moynihan and Damon Root's blogging yesterday on some left-wing Obama regrets, Daniel Larison at American Conservative, spinning off of Glenn Greenwald's commentary on progressive laments about the mainstream nature of Obama's appointments, offers some reasons why non-centrist voters will inevitably live to be disappointed by supporting centrist candidates:
At every stage, the “impractical” purist hears that he should not withhold his support from the marginally preferable candidate under any circumstances. He is urged to be realistic, and so he and those like him do not insist that the candidate make strong commitments on policy positions that are deemed by someone to be out of the mainstream. The candidate pays some minimal lip service to the purist’s “values,” and this is supposed to count for something. In the name of pragmatism, the purist decides that he has to support the candidate, because the candidate represents the best chance of advancing his views, but even before the election is held the purist has already given so much away in the name of pragmatism and realism that he and those like him have no leverage at all. Having yielded and given away their support in exchange for nothing more than lip service, the purists are scarcely in a much better position than before. They can take satisfaction in being on the winning side, but for the most part this means that they will bear the burden if the public turns against the candidate after he is elected and otherwise they will scarcely get much of anything. The purists-turned-pragmatists will receive the blame for enabling the administration in whatever it does, but they will receive no credit or acknowledgement that their support was important enough to merit meaningful concessions to their concens. Having refused in the first place to exact a price for their support, they have made their support worthless and ensured that they will have no influence.
This applies to libertarian support of most Republican candidates as well.
The Washington Post is running an op/ed today by Karl E. Meyer and Shareen Blair Brysac urging that New York's Gov. David Paterson appoint former president Bill Clinton to replace his wife should she be apponted Secretary of State. The op/ed offers the following reasons for this stunning proposal:
Amid the blizzard of résumés blanketing Washington as the Obama era dawns, there is a superbly qualified candidate for full employment whose name has been overlooked. We refer, of course, to William Jefferson Clinton, America's 42nd chief executive and commander in chief. Yet now, by a wonderful combination of circumstances, comes an opportunity to harness his unquestioned political talents to benefit his country, the Democratic Party, New York state and his spouse...
Who in his party could question so historic and dazzling a choice? In a stroke, the appointment would provide Sen. Clinton's indefatigable husband with a fitting day job, serve the interests of a state beset by a meltdown in its most vital economic sector and offer a refreshing reverse twist on a tradition whereby deceased male senators, representatives or governors are succeeded by their widows...
In today's unusual circumstances, surely beyond the imagination of any novelist, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would not have to fret about suitable protocol for dealing with her spouse on foreign trips were he occupied, full time, with senatorial duties.
I, for one, am just worried sick about the "suitable protocol" issue. Am I the only one who thinks that this is a really bad idea?
The Telegraph (UK), and by extension the Drudge Report, are expressing wonder that, judging by the credit default swaps (CDS) market, "California is now priced as a greater bankruptcy risk than Slovakia 150."
As a former resident of both states, I can testify that this is an unfair slap...at Slovakia.
An economy that was widely predicted to fail at the time of Czechoslovakia's Velvet Divorce grew at a European Union-leading 10.7 percent last year. Unlike certain countries I could name, the domestic auto industry is booming. Inflation is at 7.5 percent, but trending heavily this past decade in a positive direction. And Bratislava's latest budget deficit figures look a damn sight better than Sacramento's $28 billion nightmare.
In the 1990s a common refrain among Americans journalists covering the great post-communist transitions was, "Would the U.S. ever tolerate economic austerity plans this severe?" In 2008, regrettably, I think we have found our answer.
Imprisoned tycoon Conrad Black, like imprisoned tycoon Martha Stewart before him, has begun to see the light on drug policy. In an article excerpted by the London Times on Sunday, the former newspaper magnate, who is serving a six-and-a-half-year sentence for fraud in a federal prison in Florida, describes the war on drugs as "a trillion taxpayers' dollars squandered and 1m small fry imprisoned at a cost of $50 billion a year...as supply of and demand for illegal drugs have increased, prices have fallen and product quality has improved." He calls the plea bargain system "the barefaced exchange of incriminating testimony for immunity or a reduced sentence," involving "intimidation and suborned or extorted perjury, an outright rape of any plausible definition of justice."
[via the Western Standard]
Secession fans rejoice: Greenland takes another step away from the bloody repressive colonial grip of Denmark. As Agence France-Presse reports:
Greenland voted massively in favour of self-rule in a referendum that paves the way for independence from Denmark and gives it rights to lucrative Arctic resources, final results showed.
A total of 75.54 percent voted "yes" to greater autonomy, while 23.57 percent said "no."
A self-rule proposal hammered out with Denmark earlier this year gives Greenland, which was granted semi-autonomy from Copenhagen in 1979, rights to potentially lucrative Arctic resources, as well as control over justice and police affairs and, to a certain extent, foreign affairs.
The new status will take effect on June 21, 2009.
But there are some matters that will be considered just too important for the wet-behind-the-ears independent Greenland:
Home to the US Thule radar base, Greenland will also with its new status be consulted on foreign and defence policy, which are now decided by Copenhagen, but Nuuk would not have the final say and little is expected to change in that area.
Link via Rational Review.
Before it adjourned yesterday, the jury in the Lori Drew case (the subject of my column today) indicated it had reached unanimous verdicts on three of the four charges against her but was having trouble agreeing on the fourth. Since three of the four charges (PDF) involve using MySpace "without authorization" to obtain information—i.e., visiting MySpace on three different days as part of the "Josh Evans" hoax that apparently drove 13-year-old Megan Meier to suicide—it seems likely those are the three charges on which the jurors have reached a verdict. The fourth charge is that Drew participated in a conspiracy with her 18-year-old employee, Ashley Grills, and her 13-year-old daughter, Sarah, "to access a computer without authorization" and "obtain information from that computer to further a tortious act, namely, intentional infliction of emotional distress." Presumably that's the count the jurors are having trouble with.
But it's hard to see how they could find Drew guilty of unauthorized computer access in furtherance of a tortious act without also concluding that she conspired with others. It's undisputed that Drew, at the very least, knew about the hoax, did nothing to stop it, and in fact occasionally posed as the fictitious 16-year-old Josh Evans herself. The prosecution argued that she encouraged the prank from the beginning and kept it going when the others wanted to stop. And if the jurors have concluded that Drew is not guilty of unauthorized access, why would they struggle with the conspiracy charge, which includes the same intent elements?
One possibility is that jurors have decided Drew is guilty of unauthorized access to obtain information but not "to further a tortious act." That would make those three counts misdemeanors instead of felonies, punishable by up to a year in jail instead of five. And if her goal in obtaining information was not to commit a tort, the conspiracy charge falls apart, at least as it's phrased in the indictment. As I argue in the column, it seems pretty clear that, insofar as Drew sought to obtain information via MySpace, it was not to inflict emotional distress on Megan but to protect Sarah from rumors Megan reportedly was spreading about her.
The jurors resume deliberations today, so we should find out pretty soon whether I'm completely off base. But if they find Drew guilty of unauthorized access at all, even if it's only the misdemeanor version, the threat of criminal liability for Internet users who violate unread terms of use remains. Orin Kerr, the law professor who is serving as a pro bono attorney for Drew, explained the stakes this way in an October interview with Wired News:
If the government succeeds in this case, they can pretty much bring charges against anybody who uses the Internet. And Congress never intended that. This is a case with really important civil liberties stakes for anyone who uses the internet.
For more on the threat posed by broadly interpreted laws against unauthorized computer access, see Kerr's prescient 2003 NYU Law Review article and the Electronic Frontier Foundation's amicus brief (PDF) in the Drew case.
The new Mets stadium is called Citi Field thanks to a $400 million contract with ailing financial conglomerate Citigroup.
Now two New York City councilmen would like to amend that name to "Citi/Taxpayer Field." As the New York Times' city room blog reports:
In 2006, Citigroup signed a 20-year, $400 million contract to name the Mets’ new stadium in Queens Citi Field. As recently as last week, the troubled financial-services conglomerate said it had no intention of backing out of the deal for the new stadium — the replacement for Shea Stadium, which is being demolished.
Well now, with Citigroup getting a second multi-billion-dollar rescue from the federal government, two City Council members would like to see Uncle Sam get some credit.
The two councilman, Vincent M. Ignizio and James S. Oddo, both of Staten Island, called on Tuesday for the stadium to be renamed Citi/Taxpayer Field. The two men will soon be the only Republicans on the 51-member Council; the only other Republican, Anthony Como of Queens, was recently defeated in a special election.
“Perhaps a name change is in order, since it will be the taxpayers of the country who will foot the bill for not only part of stadium, but for the company itself,” Mr. Ignizio said. “The taxpayers are spending billions for this company to maintain its operations and deserve the recognition for their largess.”
Of course, as reason has pointed out, nearly every stadium's name could be amended to include recognition of the contributions from long-suffering taxpayers.
For the first time since the government began compiling records, the rate of cancer has begun to decline, marking a tipping point in the fight against the second-leading cause of death among Americans.
Researchers already knew that the number of cancer deaths was declining as the result of better treatment, but the drop in incidence indicates that major progress is also being made in prevention........
Incidence rates for all cancers combined and for men and women combined dropped by 0.8% per year from 1999 through 2005, with the rates for men dropping at about three times the rate for women. The only ethnic groups for which rates did not decline were American Indians and Alaskan natives.
The overall death rate declined by an average of 1.8% per year over the same period.
Currently, about 1.4 million Americans are diagnosed with cancer each year, and an estimated 560,000 die from it.
The decline in both incidence and death rates was due in large part to declines in the five of the six most common cancers -- lung, colorectal and prostate in men and breast and colorectal cancer in women. The sixth most common form, lung cancer in women, leveled off.
Our science writer Ron Bailey back in our June 2001 issue was explaining how environmentalist fears of an increasingly artificial world allegedly leading to increased cancer were off the mark, and how right he was.
I talk about my new book Gun Control on Trial and the aftermath of the Supreme Court's Second Amendment milestone Heller case in this new podcast from the book's publisher, the Cato Institute.
The December reason has a nifty excerpt from the book.
This week a federal jury in L.A. is deliberating whether to convict Lori Drew, 49, of violating a law aimed at computer hackers for her role in a MySpace prank that apparently provoked a 13-year-old girl to kill herself. Yet as Senior Editor Jacob Sullum writes, Drew is not a hacker, and the charges against her had very little to do with the behavior for which she was widely reviled.
Americans love to be middle class. In fact, 53 percent of us consider ourselves part of the middle class, including pretty much all of the rich people, and quite a few of the poor.
For example, four-in-ten Americans with incomes below $20,000 say they are middle class, as do a third of those with incomes above $150,000. And about the same percentages of blacks (50%), Hispanics (54%) and whites (53%) self-identify as middle class, even though members of minority groups who say they are middle class have far less income and wealth than do whites who say they are middle class.
An additional 19 percent call themselves upper middle class, with another 19 percent calling themselves lower middle class. That leaves a big 8 percent of people who are willing to boldly go without the word middle. No wonder promising "no tax increases for the middle class" is such an effective strategy.
A man used a hydrogen-peroxide powered jet pack to travel 1,500 feet across the Royal Gorge near Canon City on Monday...The Royal Gorge, cut by the Arkansas River in southern Colorado, is more than 1,100 feet deep.
Katherine Mangu-Ward wondered in our October 2007 why we don't all have our jetpacks, or other signifiers of the future of the past (or the past of the future).
A Google Buck Rogers timeline.
UPDATE: CNN footage, for them that must see to believe.
What explains the disorder that has plagued New York and other American cities? Science Correspondent Ronald Bailey reports on a new study that may vindicate the broken windows theory, which holds that if people look around and see other people violating social or legal norms, they will tend to violate them as well.
Another very important group was the Knights and Daughters of Tabor, founded by ex-slaves in the late 19th century. Among other accomplishments, this group established a hospital that opened in Mound City, Mississippi, in 1942. The doctors and staff were black. They provided good medical care for people who would not be admitted at other hospitals. Taborian members could purchase medical insurance for $8 per year in 1942, entitling them to up to 30 days of hospital care.Whole thing here. Beito's classic reason article on "the dangerous fallacies of Confederate multiculturalism" here.
The chief surgeon at the Taborian hospital was Dr. T. R. M. Howard, who was not only an accomplished doctor, but also a remarkably successful businessman. By the early 1950s, he had begun numerous businesses in Mississippi and built the first swimming pool for blacks and had even started a zoo. In 1951 Howard formed the Regional Council of Negro Leadership with the goal of promoting thrift, entrepreneurship, equal treatment under the law, and voting rights. Beito comments that Howard's approach combined that of Booker T. Washington (who was primarily oriented toward success through the free market) and of W.E. B. DuBois, who advocated more emphasis on politics.
Howard's group held a very large rally each summer, drawing thousands of supporters. The rallies were in rural areas of Mississippi where violence by the Klan would certainly have been possible. There never was any, however, because Howard made sure to post armed guards all around. Howard himself usually went around armed and his home was an arsenal. Two crucial elements in Howard's success: the freedom to acquire and profitably use property, and the right to defend himself.
…electing public defenders.
Imagine the perverse, overly law-and-order sentiment that pervades the elections of judges and prosecutors now applied to the selection of who will represent the indigent accused.
Witness Matt Shirk, a Republican recently elected public defender in Jacksonville, Florida. Shirk, who was backed by the local chapter of the Fraternal Order of Police, has never defended a homicide case. His campaign promises included a vow not to oppose funding cuts to the office he was running for, and a promise to squeeze as much money as possible out of indigent defendants, including a proposal for hte postponed billing of acquitted defendants who might later be able to find some employment.
Shirk also promised during the campaign not to make drastic changes to the staff of the public defender office. But last week, he announced he’d be firing ten senior-level attorneys and three administrators.
As it turns out, several of the fired attorneys Shirk fired worked on the high-profile case of Brenton Butler, a 16-year-old wrongly accused of the robbery and murder of an elderly tourist. The Butler case was a huge embarrassment for Jacksonville’s sheriff’s department. Trial testimony suggested Butler’s confession had been beaten out of him by detectives with the department. Butler’s case eventually became the subject of the Oscar-winning HBO documentary Murder on a Sunday Morning. The sheriff’s department apologized to Butler, and reopened its investigation into the murder.
You’d think the kind of attorneys who could expose that kind of injustice (and, of course, expose the fact that the tourist’s real killer was still on the loose) would be exactly the sort of people a public defender would want on his staff.
Pat McGuiness, one of the fired public defenders who worked on the Butler case, says Shirk hasn’t even had the time to interview or review the personnel files of the people he fired. McGuiness alleges that Shirk’s axing of some of the office’s most skilled and experienced attorneys was a favor, in exchange for the police support he received during the campaign.
Shirk has yet to respond to those allegations, or explain his rationale for the firings.
(Hat tip to Bobby G. Frederick)
From our December issue, Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch explain why despite all leading indicators to the contrary, America is poised to enter a new age of freedom.
Ruffini, 30, is a veteran online political operative who worked for President Bush before heading the RNC's Internet department and advising Rudy Giuliani. "Maybe I'm being too optimistic here," he says, "but I think this period we're going through right now will be seen as a reawakening of not just the rightroots but also the Republican Party."And the user-generated "Ideas" section of the site is... a jungle of comments by Ron Paul supporters. These would be the Ron Paul supporters whom RedState.com's Erick Erickson purged from his site, because clearly they were the only thing standing between the GOP and utter electoral triumph. The top three ideas are from Paul supporters, the fourth is the Fair Tax, the fifth and sixth are from Paul supporters, the seventh is the Fair Tax.
"The Republican Party cannot reboot if it's viewed only as a party of old, crusty white guys," adds Finn, who started a Washington-based online consulting firm with Ruffini last summer.
In the on-again, on-again dramedy that is the Bush Bailout (soon to become known as the Obama Bailout), the government, in the guise of the Federal Reserve, is now ready to buy up $600 billion in bad mortgage-backed securities:
The Federal Reserve said Tuesday it will buy up to $600 billion in mortgage-backed assets in another attempt to deal with the financial crisis.
The Fed said it will purchase up to $100 billion in direct obligations from mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as well as the Federal Home Loan Banks. It also will purchase another $500 billion in mortgage-backed securities, pools of mortgages that are bundled together and sold to investors.
The $600 billion effort on mortgages came as the Fed also unveiled a new program to help unfreeze the market that backs consumer debt such as credit cards, auto loans and student loans.
The program on consumer debt will lend up to $200 billion to the holders of securities backed by various types of consumer loans. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson had said recently that the government was working on the new program, which will be supported by $20 billion of credit protection provided by the $700 billion bailout fund.
Run for the hills—which, I hasten to add, have become a lot more affordable lately.
What worries me the most about these seemingly endless string of actions is that they replicate the absolute worst part of the FDR's response to the Depression: an undending string of generally misinformed attempts to fix things.
As Amity Shlaes documented in her excellent history of the New Deal, The Forgotten Man, it was precisely Roosevelt's ethos of "bold, persistent experimentation" that kept everyone guessing about what intervention might come next and how it might completely undermine the previous reform. The net result is to freeze people's actions rather than get back to anything like business as usual or adapt to a new normal (however bad that new normal might be). Within pretty broad limits, certainty—even a very ugly, harsh certainty—is much better than continuing uncertainty and drift when it comes to restarting economic activity, investment, and the like. Between the Bush administration's stutter-start actions and what is almost certain to be a whole start-over once Obama takes office, all manner of problems are being strung out longer and longer.
reason.tv on the bailout here and below, where UCLA economist Lee Ohanian, coauthor of a new paper that explains how the New Deal prolonged economic misery by seven years, discusses the current "bailout puzzle":
In an article that originally appeared in The New York Post, Associate Editor Michael C. Moynihan reviews Ira Stoll's new Samuel Adams: A Life, which restores the often-overlooked founder to his proper place in the American Revolution.
"We thought Hitler was a bad fella ... these guys could show him a thing or two—and they're creeping up on us quietly without guns or anything like that, but the poison is there."
Who might "these guys" be? Terrorists? Detroit auto execs? Nope: Companies that make genetically modified canola. According to Margaret Fulton, in an official Greenpeace edition of her True Food Guide, these guys will soon "control the world."
Of course, the word canola itself is a whitewash. It's really oil made from rapeseeds. And you know what Nazis sometimes did? They raped people. Coincidence? I think not.
Michael Moynihan chronicled Naomi Wolf on the best of all reductios just last week.
Via CCF and Leo Strauss
Over the course of a six-month campaign, Libertarian presidential candidate Bob Barr spent more time than he might have liked dealing with intra-Libertarian squabbling, lower-than-expected fundraising numbers, and what his running mate Wayne Allyn Root called "the ghost of Ron Paul." In an interview with Associate Editor David Weigel, Barr hashed out how he got the nomination, what went right and wrong, and what he's doing now.
Some residents whose homes were saved in the recent blazes thank response teams dispatched by their insurers. But public firefighters express uncertainty about the private sector.Juicy conflict! Let's hear why firefighters paid by the state feel uncertain about those paid by insurance companies and homeowners who live in fire zones:
Santa Barbara County Fire Capt. Eli Iskow said the companies can be a valuable resource, but they tend to exaggerate the number of homes they save and sometimes get in the way.To briefly sum up: Private firefighters....
On a more philosophical level, he questions the social benefit of for-profit firms providing services only for some.
"When firefighters battle flames," he said of public crews, "they don't make a distinction between a $50-million Oprah mansion and a tract home."
Ventura County Fire Chief Bob Roper, who is vice chairman of Firescope, a statewide panel that makes recommendations on firefighting policy, believes there is a place for private contractors. But their best use, he said, is early in the fire season when they visit homes and suggest ways to reduce fire risks.
"We have found some very reputable contractors and others that are less than reputable," Roper said. "It's a hazard if they block an access point or if we end up having to rescue them."
Roper said he's seen private trucks using flashing red lights and sirens, violating laws that allow such devices only on public emergency response vehicles.
The problem with private crews, Roper said, is that they are largely unregulated.
Today the California Supreme Court ruled (PDF) that people who merely provide marijuana to patients for medical use do not qualify as "primary caregivers" under the Compassionate Use Act, which means they are not allowed to grow or possess the drug. The act defines a "primary caregiver" as the "individual designated by the [patient] who has consistently assumed responsibility for the housing, health, or safety of that person." According to the court, that definition implies "a caretaking relationship directed at the core survival needs of a seriously ill patient, not just one single pharmaceutical need." Hence "a defendant asserting primary caregiver status must prove at a minimum that he or she (1) consistently provided caregiving, (2) independent of any assistance in taking medical marijuana, (3) at or before the time he or she assumed responsibility for assisting with medical marijuana."
The upshot, says California NORML Coordinator Dale Gieringer, is that only patients themselves or people directly involved in their day-to-day care, such as friends, relatives, nurses, or attendants, are permitted to grow and possess marijuana for medical purposes. That means dispensaries that claim to be "primary caregivers" because they supply marijuana to patients are now illegal, although cooperatives through which patients produce marijuana for their own medical use are still permitted. The court's reading of the law seems reasonable to me, but Gieringer is right that it "highlights the inadequacy of California's current medical marijuana supply system." He argues that "the law needs to allow for professional licensed growers, as with other medicinal herbs."
Not a single, solitary, actual dyed-in-the-wool progressive has, as far as I can tell, even been mentioned for a position in the new administration. Not one. Remember this is the movement that was right about Iraq, right about wage stagnation and inequality, right about financial deregulation, right about global warming and right about health care. And I don't just mean in that in a sectarian way. I mean to say that the emerging establishment consensus on all of these issues came from the left.
Hayes is being sectarian—and reductionist. God knows what it means to be "right" about health care, for instance, when The Nation's solution to America's problem (a single-payer model) hasn't been attempted. This magazine has addressed the problems of American health care at great length and has acknowledged that the current system is, in many respects, broken. Does that mean that libertarians have also been "right" about the issue, that we too should expect representation in the next administration's "team of rivals?" Does one only have to diagnose a problem to be "right," or must we also provide an effective prescription? It is amusing, though, to watch young folks like Hayes, who came of age during the George W. Bush presidency, discover that Obama will not simply ascend to the presidency, pull out of Iraq and Afghanistan, close Guantanamo, disassemble the NSA spying program, and create a Department of Peace, headed by Ramsey Clark. There is a reason that Obama's first term is starting to look like a third term for Bill Clinton.
Update: My indefatigable colleague Damon Root blogged Hayes earlier today. Check it out (and the hundred plus comments) here.
James Pethokoukis and Tyler Cowen point to newly minted Obama CEA chief Christina Romer as an advocate of tax cuts, and a skeptic that tax cuts will lead to spending cuts, a theory often beloved of market-leaning economists and sometimes known as "starving the beast."
Here's the money quote from the paper Pethokoukis points to on her tax cut bonafides:
Our estimates suggest that a tax increase of 1% of GDP reduces output over the next three years by nearly 3%. The effect is highly statistically significant.
I wrote about the latter study by Romer and her husband in the February 2008 issue of reason. An excerpt:
A new study by University of California at Berkeley economists Christina D. Romer and David H. Romer, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, indicates that the beast is thriving despite the tax cuts of the last three decades. Government spending seems to march on regardless of revenue or tax rates.
The economists studied the effects of four major legislated changes in U.S. tax rates and policy since World War II, choosing episodes where the “starve the beast” motivation was most conspicuous. After looking at the data every which way, with multiple regressions and time lags, and accounting for wars and military spending, they found that the one thing most clearly connected to tax cuts was not spending cuts but future tax increases.
“Although a tax cut leads to a sharp fall in revenues in the short run, it does not have any clear impact on revenues at horizons beyond about two years,” the economists write. “Between one-half and four-fifths of the tax cut is offset by legislated tax increases over the next several years.” And spending cuts? “In no episode [of postwar American tax cuts] was there a discernible slowdown in spending following the tax cut,” the economists conclude.
Is it significant that the 63 questions would-be Obama appointees have to answer include a query about gun ownership? Question 59, which comes right after one about "any websites that feature you in either a personal or professional capacity" and right before one about the applicant's medical condition, reads:
Do you or any members of your immediate family own a gun? If so, provide complete ownership and registration information. Has the registration ever lapsed? Please also described how and by whom it is used and whether it has been the cause of any personal injuries or property damage.
Some Second Amendment advocates have taken offense at this question, which appears to be unprecedented and which they think reflects Obama's lack of enthusiasm for gun rights. But an Obama aide told Politico "the intent of the gun question is to determine legal permitting." In other words, just as the questions about "domestic help" do not imply that anyone who has ever paid someone to clean his house can forget about working in the Obama administration, the question about firearms does not mean gun owners are automatically disqualified. Obama's transition team just wants to make sure all legal niceties have been observed, so there aren't any embarrassing surprises.
Although that sounds plausible, there are many other things an applicant might possess that raise issues of legal compliance and of damages to others but are not specifically mentioned in the questionnaire, including cars, boats, pets, swimming pools, and trampolines. The selection of guns out of all the dangerous and/or regulated things people own is telling, I think, and suggests that gun ownership itself might be deemed an embarrassment, at least past a certain threshold. Note that the question assumes no one applying for a job in the Obama administration would own more than one gun. It also assumes gun-owning job candidates would be subject to registration requirements, which apply in only a small fraction of the country.
Here (PDF) is the complete list of questions.
Google settled a controversial copyright case by agreeing to pay tens of millions in licensing fees to authors and publishers, with more to come....Whether or not that's how the Google barons have been thinking about the subject, it's a fair description of the settlement's likely consequences. Once again, economic regulation -- in this case copyright law -- is serving as a barrier to entry, helping established companies at the expense of upstarts.
[T]he settlement looks like a setback for Google. In the game of brinksmanship, Google blinked -- losing its nerve like so many copyright defendants do. In reality, however, settling probably puts Google in a better position than it would have been if it had won its case in court.
Here's why: Google's concession has made it more difficult for anyone to invoke fair use for book searches. The settlement itself is proof that a company can pay licensing fees and still turn a profit. So now no one can convincingly argue that scanning a book requires no license. If Microsoft starts its own book search service and claims fair use, the courts will say, "Hey, Google manages to pay for this sort of thing. What makes you so special?"
By settling the case, Google has made it much more difficult for others to compete with its Book Search service. Of course, Google was already in a dominant position because few companies have the resources to scan all those millions of books. But even fewer have the additional funds needed to pay fees to all those copyright owners. The licenses are essentially a barrier to entry, and it's possible that only Google will be able to surmount that barrier.
Bill Clinton is the self-proclaimed Comeback Kid of American politics. Indeed, every time it seems that he is finally out of public view, he comes back with a vengeance, the electoral equivalent of a herpes infection that can be managed but never quite fully eradicated.
With Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) rumored to be named as President-elect Barack Obama's secretary of state, how should we evaluate the legacy of Bill Clinton? The latest book-length treatment of the is John Gartner's In Search of Bill Clinton, a heavily researched psychological profile of the former president that, among other revelations, names Clinton's likely biological father. (Go here to read a review of the book by reason's Nick Gillespie that originally ran in The New York Post.)
Unabashedly positive toward Clinton, Gartner, a practicing psychologist and author of the best-selling The Hypomanic Edge, nevertheless reveals what makes Bill Clinton tick—and explode with a disquieting regularity. Given the current situation, will Bill Clinton be able to stand a situation in which he is near the White House once again but playing a supporting role at best?
Earlier this fall, Gartner sat down to talk with reason.tv. Click above to watch a seven-minute interview that discusses Clinton's relationship with Monica Lewinsky, his foreign and domestic policies, and more.
And click below to watch Gartner, along with Alternatives to Marriage's Nicky Grist, mix it up with reason's Michael C. Moynihan and Nick Gillespie on the reason.tv Talk Show.
From our December issue, Contributing Editor Veronique de Rugy tracks the growth of government and the growth of freedom over the past 40 years.
Foreskins have long been treasured by cosmetic dermatologists because they are rich in fibroblasts, tiny cells that play a crucial role in healing wounds and generating collagen and connective tissue. (One foreskin can be bioengineered into a piece of lab-grown skin the size of a football field.) The makers of Vavelta extract them by finely dicing the foreskins and treating them with enzymes. Then the fibroblasts are suspended in a proprietary cell storage medium and injected into "problem areas" with a fine gauge needle. In preliminary studies, Vavelta has worked well at eliminating wrinkles and scars without any side effects other than mild redness and itching (and the weirdness of knowing that you've got a foreskin in your face).
Insert "dickhead" joke, here.
In all seriousness, as the PopSci article points out, this does raise some interesting ethical issues. Who owns your son's foreskin? If you leave it with the hospital, or with your rabbi, can they then sell it to a pharmaceutical company to be diced, treated, and injected into Joe Biden? If so, should they be required to notify you first? Is it in a kid's best interest to allow his parents to sell off his foreskin, given the fierce debate over the possible health benefits/drawbacks of circumcision?
Kerry Howley delved into some of these issues in her terrific feature from our March 2007 issue, "Who Owns Your Body Parts?"
Thanks to Tom Hynes for the . . um . . . tip.
If you've successfully managed to keep your breakfast down for this long, don't read this Bloomberg News analysis of the bailout extravaganza. Your lead paragraph:
The U.S. government is prepared to lend more than $7.4 trillion on behalf of American taxpayers, or half the value of everything produced in the nation last year, to rescue the financial system since the credit markets seized up 15 months ago.
Gulp. Ignore the misuse of the word "rescue," and the challengable assertion that you couldn't get credit in August of 2007, and plow ahead into one of the most gruesome tabulations since the Jonestown Massacre (or the Brian Jonestown Massacre, for that matter):
The bailout includes a Fed program to buy as much as $2.4 trillion in short-term notes, called commercial paper, that companies use to pay bills, begun Oct. 27, and $1.4 trillion from the FDIC to guarantee bank-to-bank loans, started Oct. 14. [...]
President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal of the 1930s, when almost 10,000 banks failed and there was no mechanism to bolster them with cash, is the only rival to the government's current response. The savings and loan bailout of the 1990s cost $209.5 billion in inflation-adjusted numbers, of which $173 billion came from taxpayers, according to a July 1996 report by the U.S. General Accounting Office.
The 1979 U.S. government bailout of Chrysler consisted of bond guarantees, adjusted for inflation, of $4.2 billion, according to a Heritage Foundation report.
In other words, comparing the other government interventions during our lifetimes to what we've seen in the Late BushCapitalism era is like comparing fleas to an elephant. Well, at least they're being transparent about it!
Bloomberg has requested details of Fed lending under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act and filed a federal lawsuit against the central bank Nov. 7 seeking to force disclosure of borrower banks and their collateral.
Collateral is an asset pledged to a lender in the event a loan payment isn't made.
"Some have asked us to reveal the names of the banks that are borrowing, how much they are borrowing, what collateral they are posting," Bernanke said Nov. 18 to the House Financial Services Committee. "We think that's counterproductive."
reason on the bailout here.
Bailouts, it seems, are like potato chips. You just can't have one:
Rushing to rescue Citigroup, the government agreed to shoulder hundreds of billions of dollars in possible losses at the stricken bank and to plow a fresh $20 billion into the company.
Regulators hope the dramatic action will bolster badly shaken confidence in the once-mighty banking giant as well as the nation's financial system, a goal that so far has been elusive despite a flurry of government interventions to battle the worst global crisis since the 1930s.
Wall Street investors appeared encouraged by the effort. The Dow Jones industrials were up around 90 points in morning trading, and stock markets in Britain and Germany gained more than 4 percent in afternoon trading. Citigroup shares themselves climbed 49 percent to $5.62 in morning trading.
"If they didn't help, the damage would be beyond imagination," said Teck-Kin Suan, economist at United Overseas Bank in Singapore.
More here. Indeed, this isn't even the first bailout for Citi:
The $20 billion cash injection by the Treasury Department will come from the $700 billion financial bailout package. The capital infusion follows an earlier one—of $25 billion—in Citigroup in which the government also received an ownership stake.
As part of the plan, Treasury and the FDIC will guarantee against the "possibility of unusually large losses" on up to $306 billion of risky loans and securities backed by commercial and residential mortgages.
I await the coming war between renters and on-time mortgage payers and the rest of America.
And, as someone who has credit card debt, a mortgage, and a freaking 1999 Buick in the driveway (and is a frequent flier to boot), I continue to ask, Where's My Bailout?:
I have no problem with Eric Holder. I know him. I disagreed with him on some issues when he was with the Clinton administration and I was in the Congress... but, to me, Eric is somewhat different than the Clinton administration holdovers getting some of the other big posts. Being a lawyer and working at the Department of Justice—he’s not a Clintonista policy type. Yes, he was associated with the Clinton administration as the U.S. attorney here in D.C, and then as deputy attorney general, but I wouldn't call him a Clintonista.This is striking because Barr was one of the congressmen grilling Holder over the Marc Rich pardon in early 2001. Fast forward to 1:49 in this video.
Not a single, solitary, actual dyed-in-the-wool progressive has, as far as I can tell, even been mentioned for a position in the new administration. Not one.Does this mean the honeymoon is over already? Or maybe Obama just figured out what's wrong with calling yourself a progressive.
Wendy Whitaker, 29, has been on Georgia's sex offender list for more than 12 years. Her crime? She performed oral sex on a high school classmate just after turning 17. The boy was just shy of his 16th birthday. Both were sophomores. Whitaker is now suing, claiming that given her crime, her sex offender status is cruel and unusual punishment.
After the international uproar associated with the Genarlow Wilson case (Wilson, you'll remember, was convicted of a similar crime—having consensual oral sex with a 15-year-old while he was 17), Georgia's legislature clarified state law to prevent these sorts of cases—what Whitaker did 12 years ago is no longer a crime in Georgia. But because some Georgia lawmakers stubbornly wanted to keep Wilson in jail, the legislature took a separate vote to keep the law from applying retroactively. Wilson and Whitaker are still convicted felons. Whitaker's suit cites the Georgia Supreme Court's ruling in Wilson's case, which found that Wilson's 10-year sentence and mandatory sex offender status amounted to cruel and unusual punishment.
The question is whether the court will consider the registration requirement in and of itself cruel and unusual punishment for people convicted of consensual oral sex as minors before the law was changed.
Whitaker is also involved in a second lawsuit—this one to keep her house. In 2006, she and her husband scoped out neighborhood surrounding the Harlem, Georgia home they eventually purchased to be sure they were in compliance with Georgia's sex offender law at the time. That law prohibited offenders from living within 1,000 feet of any area where children congregate. Despite their efforts, local authorities ordered Whitaker and her husband to vacate shortly after they moved in. They had overlooked a nearby church, which was running an unadvertised daycare service.
That law was struck down by the Georgia Supreme Court last year, giving Whitaker a brief reprieve. But Georgia's legislature then passed a revised law earlier this year, one lawmakers apparently believed is in compliance with the state supreme court's decision, but that still manages to rope in Whitaker. Last week, she was told she has to move out of her home by Thanksgiving. If that happens, she'll likely have to foreclose.
reason's Jacob Sullum wrote on Georgia's sex offender law here and here. Kerry Howley wrote on sex offender exile laws here.
The proposed bailout of GM, Ford, and Chrysler overlooks an important fact. The US has one of the most vibrant, dynamic, and efficient automobile industries in the world. It produces several million cars, trucks, and SUVs per year, employing (in 2006) 402,800 Americans at an average salary of $63,358. That's vehicle assembly alone; the rest of the supply chain employs even more people and generates more income. It's an industry to be proud of. Its products are among the best in the world. Their names are Toyota, Honda, Nissan, BMW, Mercedes, Hyundai, Mazda, Mitsubishi, and Subaru.
Despite what his biggest detractors claim, writes Steve Chapman, Barack Obama is no socialist. But that doesn't mean we have no reason to worry. His biggest shortcoming is a common one in his party: the assumption that every problem can be solved by government intervention, and that if a little intervention is good, more is better.
Amero is the 40-year-old Connecticut substitute teacher convicted in January 2007 of four felony "corrupting a minor" charges when the computer she was using in front of her middle school class began opening a loop of pornographic pop-up windows. She faced a possible 40-year sentence. I wrote a short piece about her in our May 2007 issue:
As she tried to close the ads, the loops only intensified. She says some sort of adware or malicious software on her computer caused the pop-up ads to appear; such infections were indeed found on the computer later, including the Web address of a seemingly innocuous hairdressing site that spun off the loop of porn ads that Amero described in her defense. The school had filtering software on all of its computers but had let the software licenses expire, rendering the filters useless. The prosecution later conceded that Amero’s computer was never even tested for malware.
The state’s expert witness, a computer crimes investigator with the Norwich Police Department, testified that because the URLs for the offending sites were “highlighted,” Amero must have deliberately clicked on them. Yet none of the major Web browsers requires a mouse click to highlight a link; any address that has been loaded by the browser, which happens whenever a pop-up window opens, will show up as “visited.”
When Amero's case hit the Internet early last year, tech experts across the country quickly recognized what had happened, and dozens volunteered to aid in her defense. A state judge granted her a new trial in June of last year after he was presented with evidence from actual experts (as opposed to the Norwich Police Department's badly misinformed computer crimes investigator) that the computer had been infected. Yet the state's prosecutors stuck to their guns.
Finally last week, the state of Connecticut dropped the four felony counts against Amero. But her vindication isn't quite complete. As part of the plea, Amero still had to plead guilty to a misdemeanor, pay a $100 fine, and will have to forgo her teaching license in Connecticut. She has also been hospitalized from stress and a heart condition brought on by the whole ordeal. Incredibly, some public officials in Connecticut still insist she's guilty of knowingly corrupting minors with porn. Here's Hartford Courant columnist Rick Green:
Another state's prosecutor, David Smith, apparently also said at the hearing that, "the State felt that they had enough of a case, but that due to Julie’s declining health, that he and William Dow had agreed to a lesser charge." How generous of them.New London County State's Attorney Michael Regan told me late Friday the state remained convinced Amero was guilty and was prepared to again go to trial.
"I have no regrets. Things took a course that was unplanned. Unfortunately the computer wasn't examined properly by the Norwich police," Regan said.
"For some reason this case caught the media's attention,'' Regan said.
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