Roger Stone Says "Don't Crown Caroline"

Posted on December 19, 2008, 6:25pm | Nick Gillespie

Legendary political operative Roger Stone, who helped bring down the socks of Eliot Spitzer like a ton of bricks, implores New York Gov. David Paterson not to crown "well-meaning socialite" Caroline Kennedy as the next senator from the Empire State. For a Republican loyalist, Stone has got some kind words about other Dems whom he thinks are more legitimate selections:

Governor Paterson has much better choices. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has proven himself a fighter, advocate and problem solver in his environmental non-profit. He would be an excellent choice because he has proven himself and unlike his cousin, has earned it.

Although the Governor would have to convince Mayor Bloomberg to travel to Washington, Bloomberg's business expertise is required in the US Senate in our efforts to rebuild the economy. It would also guarantee the election of a Democratic Mayor in New York City. It is also a terrific platform for Bloomberg to launch a Presidential campaign if Obama crashes.

Attorney General Andrew Cuomo has shed the immaturity of his Gubernatorial bid and has exhibited more leadership and seasoning as AG after a stint as a Presidential Cabinet member. His appointment would mean paterson could stop looking over his shoulder at the Governor's son who has never hidden his ambition for the Governor's office. Andrew would be a strong pick.

More here.

Reason.tv caught up with Roger Stone right before the presidential election when he talked to an Interactive Media Studies class I co-taught at Miami University of Ohio this fall. Watch below (and go here for more details, links, and an audio podcast).

D.C. Hood Gets Checkpoints and Cameras!

Posted on December 19, 2008, 5:35pm | Mike Riggs

Radley Balko and others took D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty over their knees when the latter initiated checkpoints in the violent neighboorhood of Trinidad (while simultaneously diving at any and every loophole that would have allowed him to ignore the ruling in DC v. Heller), but it seems the criticism fell on deaf ears: Fenty and the MPD are blazing ahead with a plan to install 30 police cameras in Trinidad, using funding from Target and Sprint Nextel, and despite the objections of At-Large Councilmember Phil Mendelson. The best part of the whole ordeal? Mendelson's instistence that "[n]o crimes are solved [using police cameras] that couldn’t have been solved otherwise—that’s generally the rap.”

It's kind of refreshing to hear a D.C. politician speak out against potential abuses of police powers—even if only on the basis of utility.

Brian Taylor wrote a balanced reason piece on police cameras in 1997 (back before the cams were commonplace). And in case you missed it, Brian Doherty has the 411 on D.C.'s latest attempt at circumventing the Second Amendment.

Robert Reich Stands Tall for the Separation of Powers

Posted on December 19, 2008, 4:52pm | Jacob Sullum

Clinton administration Labor Secretary Robert Reich, who supports an auto industry bailout, nevertheless agrees that President Bush's unilateral loan plan is illegal and unconstitutional. This shows I'm right! Well, maybe not, but it's an example of a man standing up for a principle even when the principle is inconvenient. Too bad Obama couldn't muster similar courage.

Go here, here, and here for other examples of dissent, all from conservatives or libertarians who (like me) oppose the G.M./Chrysler "rescue" on other grounds as well. If you've noticed legal/constitutional criticism of the latest Bush bailout from people in Reich's ideological vicinity or to his left, point it out in the comments.

[Thanks to Ron Steiner for the tip.]

Ride Free, Free Like the Wind!

Posted on December 19, 2008, 4:30pm | Brian Doherty

I love L.A. more than Randy Newman, but this week's cold and rain combined with this grim report on the state of two-wheels-good liberty in my hometown makes me question my allegiance.

From the L.A. Weekly, here's the grim axle on which injustice rotates in the city of angels:

Until recently, Los Angeles Municipal Code 26.01 was little known. But then in August, the police department began to enforce its central tenet: All cyclists shall ride licensed bicycles; those who do not will be cited and fined. Upon learning of the LAPD’s accelerated enforcement, the city’s cyclists flooded bike blogs with outrage, saying that the code was “ridiculous,” designed “ultimately to prevent bikes in our car-obsessed city ... for harassing cyclists.”

The story goes on to tell of a particular bike-rights advocate bringing his complaint before the city's Transportation Committee. He had been ticketed under 26.01, and

fined in the amount of $160, payable only in person at the Los Angeles County Superior Courthouse...the ticket cannot be corrected with an online payment [and] only two stations in the entire city are authorized to sell bike licenses (Central Station, near Skid Row, and the Department of Public Safety, near USC), and only on certain days (Tuesday and Thursday), and only at certain times (10 a.m. to 8 p.m.). Bike licenses are not available online (as one bike blogger pointed out, even bingo halls can be licensed on the Internet), and many of the officers at the eligible stations are “reluctant to find the bike-license box” and “don’t even know what’s going on.”

Some bikers are planning a campaign of civil obedience to make the city think twice, involving

large coordinated excursions on successive Tuesdays and Thursdays to the LAPD’s Central Station — swamped as it is with reports of rape, theft and narcotics crimes — for riders to register their bicycles and purchase a license ... for $3. Said one participant: “The watch commander had to work pretty hard not to be pissed off that we were taking up his time with this petty B.S.”

A libertarian for over 20 years, and I can still get shocked by some of the incredibly petty things about which government's can claim the right to regulate and license. Thank you, L.A., for restoring that old fashioned sense of wonder--wonder at what goofass petty tyrants governments can be.

Now Playing at Reason.tv: Peter Wallison on the Roots of the Financial Crisis

Posted on December 19, 2008, 4:30pm | Nick Gillespie

At Reason's 40th anniversary event, held in Hollywood on November 14 and 15, the American Enterprise Institute's Peter Wallison analyzed the roots of the current market meltdown and explained how government policies directly caused or massively exacerbated the housing bubble and the subsequent bust at the center of things.

The Arthur F. Burns Fellow in financial studies and codirector of AEI's program on financial markets deregulation, Wallison is the author of several books including most recently, Competitive Equity: A better way to manage mutual funds.

Approximately 25 minutes.

Reason Writers Around Town: Doherty vs. Henwood in a Bloody Final Round

Posted on December 19, 2008, 4:21pm

At the Los Angeles Times, reason's Brian Doherty and the Left Business Observer's Doug Henwood wind up their duel over federal monetary policy and debt issues. Read it here.

From Doherty's conclusion:

Whether or not you agree that monetary and debt policies we've been hashing over risk ultimate crisis and collapse, as I fear they might, they and the government power and resource grabs to which they lead limit the spaces where we can make our own choices about our lives and the world around us. They ensure that more of those decisions are made -- and more of our and our children's money is spent -- the way a small gang of people in Washington and their friends want, not as Doug, or I, or you might want. And that's always worth worrying about.

Conor Cruise O'Brien, RIP

Posted on December 19, 2008, 4:02pm | Michael C. Moynihan

Irish author and politician Conor Cruise O'Brien has died at the age of 91. As usual, The Telegraph has a very good, comprehensive obituary. A few excerpts:

His views were as variable as his career. At one time responsible for Irish government propaganda which peddled an irredentist Republican policy on Northern Ireland, he later became a campaigning unionist and the bête noire of Sinn Fein and the IRA.

Critics charged that he was more interested in exercising his intellectual sinews than in resolving difficulties. But his recognition that the divisions in Ireland were rooted in two irreconcilable traditions led to increasing isolation within his own country, and required considerable moral - and occasionally physical - courage.

[...]

When Naim Attallah, the Palestinian businessman and writer, suggested that many of O'Brien's countrymen had come to regard him as a British stooge, O'Brien was unconcerned. "For 'a lot of people' read the IRA and their stooges, some of whom you have clearly been talking to. Give them my regards."

He was sure, too, that it was Catholicism, rather than Marxism, which lay behind the Irish Nationalists. "During the hunger strikes when men died," he observed, "you wouldn't have seen too many volumes of Das Kapital around, but you saw the missal, the rosary beads, the holy water, all the paraphernalia of Roman Catholicism. The Catholic clergy in Belfast encouraged the emergence of the Provisional IRA because they thought it meant saying goodbye to those bad old communists."

Growing up around so much vapid, lazy, fake Feinian, Irish-American Republicanism in Boston, it was quite a relief to discover that there existed both members of the Irish intellectual class (like O'Brien and journalist Kevin Myers) and former extremists (ex-Provos Eamon Collins and Sean O'Callaghan) that found the mutant violence of the Provisional IRA to be both morally indefensible and politically suicidal. It should be said too, as Myers recent memoir of "the Troubles" makes abundantly clear, that the psychopathic Protestant terror groups like the UDA and UVA—run by racist thugs like Johnny "Mad Dog" Adair—were equally as foul and worthy of full-throated condemnation. But there were no murals to those guys in South Boston.

Here is a sample of O'Brien's writing on the Provos, from a 1986 essay on Bobby Sands in the New York Review of Books (not online):

The holy war [in Northern Ireland] is an incipient reality. But it is not—at least not yet—a war between Catholics-at-large and Protestants-at-large. Most Catholics and most Protestants don't want to fight one another, and have no craving for martyrdom, or for the seventeenth century. But holy wars are brought on, not by the mass of people on either side, but by quite small numbers of fanaticized pacemakers. In the Irish case, the pacemakers, for more than fifteen years now, have been a minority on the Catholic side: the Pearsean Catholic/Nationalist fusionist fundamentalists of the Provisional IRA. The Pearseans have long-and well before the emergence of the Provisional strain in 1970-been a source of considerable embarrassment and confusion to the leaders, and many other members, of the Catholic Church in Ireland.

Over at The Atlantic, where O'Brien was a contributing editor, a few pieces from the vault.

Outside Agitators Now Welcome in Oklahoma

Posted on December 19, 2008, 3:33pm | Jacob Sullum

Yesterday the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit overturned Oklahoma's ban on signature gathering by nonresidents for ballot initiative campaigns. Four circuits have now held that such laws violate the First Amendment right to freedom of speech. "The 10th Circuit correctly affirmed the fundamental right of Americans to travel from state to state to advocate for political change and protected the free and open political debate that is essential to American politics," says William Maurer, an attorney for the Institute for Justice, which filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the case. The court rejected the state's argument that banning signature gatherers from other states was a reasonable safeguard against fraud.

The text of the decision is here (PDF).

U.N. Attempts to Outlaw Free Speech When It Comes to Religion

Posted on December 19, 2008, 3:27pm | Ronald Bailey

A "Defamation of Religion" resolution sponsored chiefly by Islamic nations passed yesterday in the United Nations General Assembly by a vote of of 86 in favor, 53 against and 42 abstentions. It declares that governments should:

"adequate protection against acts of hatred, discrimination, intimidation and coercion resulting from defamation of religions and incitement to religious hatred in general."

A specific example of "acts of hatred" that should be outlawed was the publication by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten of some of these cartoons of Mohammed:

The passage of this resolution properly alarmed free speech advocates. According to United Press International, Angela C. Wu, international law director of the Washington-based Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, declared: 

The U.S. State Department  notes that the "Defamation of Religion" resolution started out in 1999 as a "Defamtion of Islam" resolution introduced by Pakistan. Some salient points from the State Department's 2007 response to this noxious resolution:

The United States does not believe it should be illegal to express an opinion on a particular religion, including those which are highly critical. These resolutions carve out a special status for Islam, above concerns for other religions, and infringe on basic freedom of speech rights, such as the right to state opinions, publish books and articles, and freely express views in other ways which may be critical of religions. The U.S. Constitution would not permit any international agreement or treaty purporting to prohibit unpopular opinions and viewpoints to have legal effect in the United States...

The United States is deeply concerned with the use of the concept of “defamation of religions” to justify torture, imprisonment, abuse, and even issue execution orders against individuals and religious groups who do not subscribe to a particular “state” religion, or who wish to convert to another religion according to their conscience. The defamation of religions concept has also been promulgated into national legal systems in order to halt any public comment or dissent against political figures, and is now being promoted at the international level to promote and justify blasphemy laws in some countries. The United States believes that the employment of this concept jeopardizes freedom of religion, expression, assembly, association, and press.

Whole U.S. response to these U.N. defamation of religion resolutions can be found here. UPI report on the passage of th latest resolution here. 

The New Killer Weed

Posted on December 19, 2008, 3:15pm | Jacob Sullum

Ohio is about to become the sixth state to ban Salvia divinorum, a psychedelic member of the mint family native to Mexico, where it has been used for centuries as a medicine and aid to divination. This week both houses of the state legislature approved the bill by overwhelming margins, and Gov. Ted Strickland is expected to sign it soon. The ban was instigated by Rep. Thom Collier (R-Mount Vernon) after he was contacted by constituents in Loudonville who blamed their 12-year-old son's death on the drug. The boy was killed by a friend who apparently had tried salvia, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reports, "although it isn't clear whether the friend was on the drug when he shot and killed the 12-year-old." The Columbus Dispatch notes "there was no direct evidence...that the shooting was drug-related." Sadly, this is how drug policy is routinely made. Cf. marijuana in the '30s, LSD in the '60s, MDMA in the '80s, or ephedra in the '00s.

Previous reason coverage of the burgeoning crusade against salvia here.

New at Reason: Katherine Mangu-Ward on Rick Warren and Heartbreak

Posted on December 19, 2008, 3:00pm | Katherine Mangu-Ward

Obama's pick for the inauguration was a tough blow for his gay supporters. Associate Editor Katherine Mangu-Ward commiserates with Obama supporters. After all, who knows better than libertarians what it’s like to be in a long-standing lopsided love affair with a mainstream political party?

Read all about it here.

Obama's Doctrine of Necessity

Posted on December 19, 2008, 2:16pm | Jacob Sullum

In my column this week, I wondered what position President-elect Obama would take on President Bush's unilateral, legally unauthorized bailout of G.M. and Chrysler, given the former's criticism of his predecessor's above-the-law approach to terrorism policy. Now we know:

President-elect Barack Obama endorsed the plan, calling it a "necessary step" to avoid a major blow to the economy.

"The auto companies must not squander this chance to reform bad management practices and begin the long-term restructuring that is absolutely required to save this critical industry," Obama said in a statement.

Evidently Obama is only against unnecessary abuses of executive power.

This is All I'm Going to Say about Rick Warren and the Inaugural Invocation...

Posted on December 19, 2008, 2:10pm | Ronald Bailey

Let's just get rid of all invocations at presidential inaugurals. After all, the "tradition" was first introduced by Franklin Delano Roosevelt at his Second Inaugural in 1937. If George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and the 31 presidents before FDR could get along without the benefit of an inaugural prayer, so can the 44th. 

Disclosure: Yes, I am an atheist, just the same way I'm an a-unicornist. Show me a unicorn and I'll believe in them. Same thing goes for gods. 

Santa Claus, Sex Offender

Posted on December 19, 2008, 1:50pm | Jesse Walker

A sex panic shuts down Operation Santa Claus, a long-lived charitable tradition in which volunteers read poor people's letters to Father Christmas and then personally bring presents to Santa's supplicants:

The United States Postal Service abruptly shut down public participation in all the Operation Santa programs — in New York and other major cities across the country — at 1 p.m. Wednesday, without offering post offices or letter-seeking citizens any understanding of why.

A Postal Service official in Washington, after an initial, limited acknowledgment of a “privacy breach,” said that at one of the programs, not New York’s, a man whom a letter carrier recognized as a registered sex offender had “adopted” a letter. When postal officials confronted the man, the official said, he said he was sincerely trying to do a good deed, but postal inspectors nonetheless retrieved the letter and notified the family of the child.

The Postal Service, indicating that the closing down of all of Operation Santa might be temporary, said that it felt it was wise to take the precaution.

The post office is now talking about a revised approach in which the recipients will be anonymous, the government will operate an elaborate matching system, and donors won't deliver their presents in person. Debbie Nathan argues that this won't work, pointing out that the charity "was always based on complex class relations and conflict, complete with reticulated fantasies that could only be satisfied by the letter reading, the name gathering, and those noblesse oblige home visits. Without all this, the program is kaput."

One of the These Things Is Not Like the Other Ones

Posted on December 19, 2008, 1:07pm | Katherine Mangu-Ward

As Bush once again "abandons free-market principles to save the free-market system," Ford distinguishes itself with a whispered "thanks but no thanks."

The deal would extend $13.4 billion in loans to General Motors Corp. and Chrysler LLC in December and January, with another $4 billion likely available in February. It also would provide the government with non-voting warrants, although the exact amount was unclear immediately. Ford Motor Co. has said it doesn't need short-term assistance.

While this isn't going to make me run out and replace my flawlessly functioning and very sexy maroon 1998 Toyota Camry, I'll raise a glass to Ford for making a go at (a tiny, piddling version of) self-sufficiency this time, especially self-sufficiency driven by good old-fashioned self-interest:

Observers around Detroit suggest that the Ford family's continuing control of the company has surely influenced the decision to not seek federal assistance. "Any dilution of equity has to be an issue for the family, and also the loss of dividends," says Brad Coulter, a specialist in bankruptcy and loan workouts with O'Keefe & Associates of Bloomfield Hills, Mich. (Any dividend payment would likely need the approval of a new "car czar," which the White House might appoint if it moves to provide aid.)

More on the bailouts here.

Matt Welch on Bloggingheads.tv: Boo on the Bailout and New Deal 2.0

Posted on December 19, 2008, 1:06pm

On December 18 at Bloggingheads.tv, Reason Editor in Chief Matt Welch spent an hour with The American Prospect's Mark Schmitt talking about bailouts, New Deals, and much more. Click below to watch.

The Case Against Card Check

Posted on December 19, 2008, 12:25pm | Damon W. Root

Legal scholar Richard Epstein has a great op-ed in today's Wall Street Journal detailing the constitutional problems with the Employee Free Choice Act, which would allow workers to bypass secret-ballot elections and declare their intent to unionize by signing cards:

It is commonly supposed that economic regulation is immune to constitutional challenge since the New Deal. That's not the case with this labor law.

Consider card check and the First Amendment. Under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) today, an employer can insist upon a secret ballot after 30% of workers indicate by card checks their interest in a union. The campaign that follows lets the employer air his views about the downsides of unionization before the vote takes place.

To be sure, the employer's free-speech rights are limited under the NLRA. He cannot threaten to move or shut down if workers vote for the union. Nor can he promise higher wages if they don't. But he can make predictions of what will happen if his firm is unionized, and he can point to the reversal of worker fortunes in other unionized firms.

The Supreme Court (unfortunately, in my view) has held that the peculiar labor-law environment justified these abridgements of ordinary speech rights. But it hardly follows that if the government can curtail speech rights, the EFCA can eliminate them. There is simply no legitimate government interest in promoting unionization that justifies a clandestine organizing campaign which denies all speech rights to the unions' adversaries.

Whole thing here. In reason's June 2008 issue, David Weigel explained why union activists are rubbing their hands at the prospects of card check.

New at Reason: Brian Doherty on the Story of Pixar Animation Studios

Posted on December 19, 2008, 12:00pm

From our January issue, Senior Editor Brian Doherty traces Pixar's dazzling rise from obscurity into one of the reigning titans of American pop culture.

Read all about it here.

More on Michael Mermel, DNA, and False Confessions

Posted on December 19, 2008, 11:55am | Radley Balko

Theocratic Health Care

Posted on December 19, 2008, 11:52am | Ronald Bailey

The Bush Administration is shoveling "midnight regulations" out the doors of agencies faster than a New Hampshire homeowner does snow off his sidewalk in January. One of the most egregious is a new regulation by the Health and Human Services Department that allows the morals of health care providers to trump those of patients. As the Los Angeles Times reports:

The Bush administration announced its "conscience protection" rule for the healthcare industry Thursday, giving doctors, hospitals, and even receptionists and volunteers in medical experiments the right to refuse to participate in medical care they find morally objectionable.

"This rule protects the right of medical providers to care for their patients in accord with their conscience," said outgoing Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt.

The right-to-refuse rule includes abortion and other aspects of healthcare where moral concerns could arise, Leavitt's office said, such as birth control, emergency contraception, in vitro fertilization, stem cell research and assisted suicide.

In addition, such "health care providers" may not have to refer patients to other practitioners who would respect the moral choices of patients. 

reason warned that this was coming:

Can pharmacies, stem cell labs, or abortion clinics refuse to hire people who believe their activities are evil? The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services doesn’t think so. The agency is circulating draft regulations that would outlaw employment discrimination on the grounds of religious and moral beliefs by any entity that receives the department’s money.

Since Washington’s subsidies are so ubiquitous, the rule would apply even to local pharmacies, because the feds pay for some prescriptions. In effect, the government’s money is serving as a Trojan horse for the administration’s moral agenda.

And reason noted that there was a simple solution for those whose consciences might be offended:

“Religious freedom is an important part of the history of this country,” Richard S. Myers, a professor at Ave Maria School of Law, told The Washington Post. “People who have a religious or moral belief should not be forced to participate in an act they find abhorrent.” Myers is correct. But why should the religious beliefs of others trump those of patients and employers? People who don’t want to participate in medical procedures they find abhorrent have a simple solution: They can choose to work elsewhere.

Whole LAT article here. 

Bumper Sticker Dissonance?

Posted on December 19, 2008, 11:20am | Ronald Bailey

My wife reported seeing a car with two interesting bumper stickers this morning. The first was the famously tolerant COEXIST bumper sticker (ubiquitous on the backends of Priuses here in the People's Republic of Charlottesville).  Example below:

Real Winter Solstice Holiday Trees Better for the Environment Than Artificial Ones

Posted on December 19, 2008, 10:46am | Ronald Bailey

At least, that's according to a study reported by Terra Daily:

A Canadian sustainable energy company in Montreal says real Christmas trees have less of an environmental impact than reusable artificial trees.

The company, which uses no capitals in its name, ellipsos inc., said its analysis in a Life Cycle Assessment found real trees generate 6.8 pounds of greenhouse gases compared with 17.8 pounds for an artificial tree per year.

"The results are astonishing", ellipsos President Jean-Sebastien Trudel said in a release. "Considering that the artificial tree is reusable for many years, one would think that this choice is best since the natural tree requires annual trips to purchase it."

Research process factors ranged from the extraction of raw materials to travel to marketing and purchase to disposal, the company said.

The study found an artificial tree would need to be kept for at least 20 years to be equivalent to a real tree, although consumers keep an artificial tree for six years on average, the report said.

Of course, a truly "green" person will mimic Ebenezer Scrooge and forego not only real and artificial trees, but also the orgy of eating, economic stimulus boosting, and other ecologically damaging festivities that go along with various winter solstice holiday celebrations. 

Disclosure: My wife and I buy and decorate a real winter solstice bush each year. We do recycle our decorations. 

Marine Ecologist Jane Lubchenco Joins Obama's Green Team

Posted on December 19, 2008, 10:26am | Ronald Bailey

Oregon State University marine ecologist and former president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Jane Lubchenco is rumored to be President-elect Obama's choice for head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Although formally housed at the Commerce Department, NOAA describes its mission as:

To understand and predict changes in Earth’s environment and conserve and manage coastal and marine resources to meet our Nation’s economic, social, and environmental needs. 

Subagencies under NOAA's umbrella include the National Marine Fisheries Service and the National Weather Service. Like earlier Obama appointments to the Green Team, Lubchenco is a strong proponent of rationing carbon dioxide emissions to control man-made global warming. Lubchenco organized the AAAS 2007 statement on climate change which declared:

The scientific evidence is clear: global climate change caused by human activities is occurring now, and it is a growing threat to society. Accumulating data from across the globe reveal a wide array of effects: rapidly melting glaciers, destabilization of major ice sheets, increases in extreme weather, rising sea level, shifts in species ranges, and more. The pace of change and the evidence of harm have increased markedly over the last five years. The time to control greenhouse gas emissions is now....

The growing torrent of information presents a clear message: we are already experiencing global climate change. It is time to muster the political will for concerted action. Stronger leadership at all levels is needed. The time is now. We must rise to the challenge. We owe this to future generations.

Happily, Lubchenco seems to favor using property rights to restore depleted fisheries. During a panel discussion in 2007, Lubchenco noted:

... I think one of the real challenges is with fisheries is that the economics of fishing right now is sort of stacking the deck against fishermen and against fish, both. And there are some very interesting new ways of reorganizing or restructuring fisheries that reward fishermen for being good conservationists, not just for being good exploiters. And some of those, some baby steps in that direction were included in the Magnuson Fisheries Reauthorization this last year and I am referring specifically to what economists call “Dedicated Access Privileges” or DAPs. Those are a variety of economic tools, one of which, for example, are known as ITQs, "Individual Transferable Quotas."

There are a lot of different variations on this thing, but the idea is that instead of every fisherman just fishing like crazy until the total allowable catch has been caught in any particular season, the idea is to guarantee or to allocate the total catch to individuals based on their history or some other rational way of doing it, so that they have a guaranteed fraction of the catch, regardless of what the total catch is and that, in fact, changes the dynamics because they then have incentive to make sure that there are enough fish to be caught next year, and the next year, and the next year. So it enables them to take a long term perspective and have the value of their portfolio grow through time not just to be exploited this year and so I don’t want to go into more detail about this except to say that there are some very innovative, new ways of restructuring fisheries to align fishermen’s interests with conservation interests that are economically profitable over the long term not just the short term and that that is being actively performed by science and that is actually a good thing, it’s a nice tool that has complimented marine reserves that I think will provide for hope for the future of oceans.

Whole AAAS climate change statement here.

Now Playing at Reason.tv: Do You Really Want to Live in a World Where Giant Inflatable Apes Are Banned?

Posted on December 19, 2008, 10:08am | Nick Gillespie

Reason.tv presents a review of 2008's really annoying Nanny State bans.

Created by Ted Balaker.

Related: Banned: Welcome to Nanny State Nation! and Food Fight: Battle of the Bacon Dogs.

Reason magazine on The Nanny State.

Put Chrysler Back In Christmas

Posted on December 19, 2008, 9:32am | Jesse Walker

It's official:

General Motors Corp. and Chrysler LLC will get $13.4 billion in initial government loans to keep operating in exchange for a restructuring under a rescue plan announced by President George W. Bush....

The money will be drawn from the Troubled Asset Relief Program and the automakers will get an additional $4 billion from the fund in February for a total of $17.4 billion in assistance, according to a statement from the Bush administration. The funds would allow GM and Chrysler to keep operating until March....

In exchange for the money, the automakers must provide warrants for non-voting stock, accept limits on executive pay, give the government access to financial records and not issue dividends until the debt is repaid. The government will have the authority to block transactions larger than $100 million.

Try to Relax Over the Few Weeks, Because Obama is Gonna Stimulate the Hell Out of the Country Come January

Posted on December 19, 2008, 7:33am | Nick Gillespie

From the Wash Post:

President-elect  Barack Obama and congressional Democrats have entered discussions over an economic stimulus package that could grow to include $850 billion in new spending and tax cuts over the next two years, a gigantic sum that some Democrats say could prove difficult to push rapidly through Congress.

A package of that size—which would include at least $100 billion for cash-strapped state governments and more than $350 billion for investments in infrastructure, alternative energy and other priorities—is a significant increase over the numbers previously contemplated by Democrats. It would exceed the $700 billion bailout of the U.S. financial system, as well as the annual budget for the Pentagon.

A dissenting voice from the past:

Concerns about the political viability of the package are compounded by fears that its economic effectiveness could be diluted. [Former Clinton administration budget director Alice] Rivlin said she would prefer quick approval of a much smaller package that contains only items that would rapidly push cash into the economy, such as aid to states and the poor and perhaps a payroll tax holiday. That could be followed, she said, by a larger spending package with investments thoughtfully crafted to achieve Obama's broader economic goals.

"Mass transit, the high-tech stuff, investment in health IT. Those are all good ideas. But they aren't stimulus," Rivlin said.

More here.

An incoming president whose party runs Congress who is giving everybody exactly what they asked for? Whoda thunk it?

Let's start the betting pool now to see exactly when Obama finally gets around to saying, "OK, we've gotten past the present emergency and we have to break the cycle of debt and stop spending like drunken Republicans sailors."

New at Reason: Friday Funnies

Posted on December 19, 2008, 7:00am

In the latest edition of Friday Funnies, Scott Stantis chronicles the newest twist in the Blagojevich affair.

Reason Writers Around Town: Doherty vs. Henwood on Federal Debt

Posted on December 18, 2008, 9:01pm

In round two of their Los Angeles Times dust-up, reason's Brian Doherty and the Left Business Observer's Doug Henwood debate the significance and dangers of our burgeoning (daily) federal debt. Read it here.

Don’t Mention the (Cold) War

Posted on December 18, 2008, 5:21pm | Michael C. Moynihan

Russian ships docking in Cuba and Venezuela, the rekindling of an alliance with Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega, the beating and arrest of dissidents in Moscow, military conflicts with its former colonies, the mysterious deaths of Kremlin critics. All sounds rather familiar, no? And while it still doesn't quite rise to the level of a "new Cold War," the parallels are, at this point, unavoidable. (Incidentally, I wrote a piece last year rather misleadingly titled "The Cold War's Return," though I did—and do—argue that there is a concerted effort on the part of the Putin/Medvedev regime to turn back the clock on Russia's relations with the United States, I don't think that the Cold War has "returned" just yet.)

And now the Duma is considering legislation that, according to Reuters, "broadens the interpretation of treason and espionage to include the vague definition of ‘acts against the constitutional order.'" "Russian liberals," the wire service writes, "have appealed to President Dmitry Medvedev to veto a set of new laws they say could lead to purges reminiscent of the Stalin era." The Times of London points out that "The measure also threatens to revive the Soviet-era habit of placing under suspicion anyone who has contact with foreigners. It gives warning that people could be guilty of treason for ‘rendering financial or material and technical or consultative support to ... a foreign organization.'"

Now member of Parliament and ex-KGB agent Andrei Lugovoy, who British intelligence accuses of murdering dissident Alexander Litvinenko with polonium-210 (the very Markovian case is neatly outlined in Alan Cowell's recent book The Terminal Spy), has told a Spanish newspaper that "If someone has caused the Russian state serious damage, they should be exterminated." They might have dropped all that nonsense about Stakhanovite workers controlling the means of production, about the dictatorship of the proletariat, but the Chekist spirit persists in today's Russia.

Also, a bunch of very, very good stuff on the situation in Russia over at reason Contributing Editor Cathy Young's blog.

Why are U.S.-Owned Auto Companies in the Crapper?

Posted on December 18, 2008, 4:36pm | Nick Gillespie

As Chrysler plans to idle its plants for a month or more, it's worth puzzling over the various forces that have brought Detroit (Rock City!) to its knees. Over at U.S. News & World Report, Michael Barone has a thoughtful post which engages Slate's Mickey Kaus argument that the fault stems from the passage of the Wagner Act back during the Depression:

Mickey Kaus, pretty much alone among the commentators I've been reading, indicts "Wagner Act unionism" for the decline and fall of the U.S. auto industry. The problem, he argues, is not just the high level of benefits that the United Auto Workers has secured for its members but the work rules—some 5,000 pages of them—it has imposed on the automakers. As Kaus points out, unionism as established by the Wagner Act is inherently adversarial. The union once certified as bargaining agent has a duty not only to negotiate wages and fringe benefits but also to negotiate work rules and to represent workers in constant disputes about work procedures.

The plight of the Detroit Three auto companies raises the question of why people ever thought this was a good idea. The answer, I think, is that unionism was seen as the necessary antidote to Taylorism. That's not a familiar term today, but it was when the Wagner Act was passed in 1935. Frederick Winslow Taylor was a Philadelphia businessman who pioneered time and motion studies. As Robert Kanigal sets out in The One Best Way, his biography of Taylor, he believed that there was "one best way" to do every job. Industrial workers, he believed, should be required to do their job in this one best way, over and over again. He believed workers should be treated like dumb animals and should be allowed no initiative whatever, lest they perform with less than perfect efficiency.

The whole post, well worth reading, is online here. I think the UAW is a deadening organzation, but it has never been the problem in making cars. But to talk about the Wagner Act without discussing Taft-Hartley, which leveled the playing field substantially between management and labor, is dodging an obvious rejoinder to Kaus's claims. In any case, the UAW last year signed a contract that brings compensation for new hires into line with the amounts paid by foreign carmakers in the U.S. I can understand why the UAW isn't backing down right now—they know some sort of bailout, whether under Bush or Obama and despite public sentiment to the contrary, is coming.

The simple truth of the matter is that management signed every idiotic contract and that they never felt they really needed to confront anything because they thought they had a monopoly on car sales. Especially after World War II, when the Big 2.5 had long passed through their entrepreneurial days, they became classic lard-ass corporations who figured they would just raise prices whenever necessary. As Barone notes, they stuck to this plan even when Asian and European carmakers started to give them a run for the money in the 1970s. And they were never shy about using government to keep competition out (various tariffs on trucks and SUVs, etc. are one reason why domestic companies still dominate those markets). You can't blame unions for the slow death of U.S. carmakers any more than you can blame them for the Pontiac Aztek or the Ford Edsel. They may not be helping matters now, but unions are an add-on to a much bigger and systemic problem.

Reason Contributing Editor Mike McMenamin on the end of organized labor. And here's Contributing Editor Brink Lindsey on how the specter of Taylorism haunted American business.

New at Reason: Anthony Randazzo on Bernard Madoff's $50 Billion Ponzi Scheme

Posted on December 18, 2008, 4:30pm

Though some may try to bill Bernard Madoff's multi-billion dollar swindle as new evidence in the case against evil capitalism, writes Anthony Randazzo, it has little to do with exotic investment vehicles or over leveraged hedge funds. Madoff's con is just your every day, run of the mill Ponzi scheme—it just happens to have been run by the Frank Sinatra of Wall Street.

Read all about it here.

John Holdren to be Obama's Science Advisor

Posted on December 18, 2008, 4:19pm | Ronald Bailey

Eli Kintisch is reporting at the ScienceInsider blog that John Holdren, who is a Professor of Environmental Policy and Director of Program in Science, Technology, and Public Policy at Havard's John F. Kennedy School of Government will be tapped as science advisor by President-elect Barack Obama.

In his salad days, Holdren was a paid-up member of The Limits to Growth club. For example, in his 1971 Sierra Club book, Energy: A Crisis in Power, Holdren declared that "it is fair to conclude that under almost any assumptions, the supplies of crude petroleum and natural gas are severely limited. The bulk of energy likely to flow from these sources may have been tapped within the lifetime of many of the present population." More recently, Holdren has declared that the world is not running out energy and that even "peak oil" is debatable. 

Near the beginning of his career, Holdren introduced with his colleague, perennial population alarmist Paul Ehriich, the concept of the I=PAT equation. Human Impact on the environment is equal to Population x Affluence/consumption x Technology. All of which are supposed to intensify and worsen humanity's impact on the natural world. In the past Holdren has adhered to the common ecologist's disdain for insights from economics in helping solve environmental problems. See for example this excerpt from a co-authored 1995 essay on "The Meaning of Sustainability": 

The greatest disparities in interpretation of the relationships between the human enterprise and Earth's life support systems seem, in fact, to be those between ecologists and economists. Members of both groups tend to be highly self-selected and to differ in fundamental worldviews. Most ecologists have a passion for the natural world, where the existence of limits to growth and the consequences of exceeding those limits are apparent. Ecologists recognize that a unique combination of highly developed manual dexterity, language, and intelligence has allowed humanity to increase vastly the capacity of the planet to support Homo sapiens (Diamond 1991); nonetheless, they perceive humans as being ultimately subject to the same sorts of biophysical constraints that apply to other organisms.

Economists, in contrast, tend to receive little or no training in the physical and natural sciences (Colander and Klamer 1987). Few explore the natural world on their own, and few appreciate the extreme sensitivity of organisms -- including those upon which humanity depends for food, materials, pharmaceuticals, and free ecosystem services -- to seemingly small changes in environmental conditions. Most treat economic systems as though they were completely disconnected from the planet's basic life support systems. The narrow education and inclinations of economists in these respects are thus a major source of disagreements about sustainability.

Holdren and his co-authors later acknowledge ecological ignorance about the principles of economics, but don't express any urgency in learning about them. 

However, at least with regard to technology, Holdren now apparently sees technology as a solution to environmental problems and human poverty.Holdren in his 2006 inaugural lecture as the president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science noted:

Advances in technology help meet basic human needs and drive economic growth through increased productivity, reduced costs, reduced resource use and environmental impact, and new or improved products and services...

The considerable progress that has been made in some important respects (such as in life expectancy, which has been improving virtually everywhere other than sub-Saharan Africa and the former Soviet Union) has been the result of a combination of economic and social factors, but improvements in technology appear to have been the most important. Among other advances, widespread gains in the productivity of agriculture, which played a crucial role in improving nutrition and health in the developing world, were driven above all by investments in agricultural S&T that yielded, in strictly economic terms, enormous rates of return; and export-led economic growth, providing the means with which the public and private sectors in many developing countries have contributed to lifting portions of their populations out of poverty, has likewise been driven strongly by technology.

While Holdren makes rhetorical gestures toward the private sector, he still seems to think that new technologies arise full-blown from government agencies and university laboratories.

In any case, Obama is clearly signaling with the appointment of a Green Team, including Holdren as science advisor, Carol Browner as "energy/climate czar," Steven Chu as Secretary of Energy, and Lisa Jackson as EPA administrator, that he means to make a big federal push on alternative fuels and carbon rationing.

We Got Yer Bailout Right Here!

Posted on December 18, 2008, 3:14pm | Nick Gillespie

For a convenient and constantly updated list of bailout-related stories, videos, and policy analysis from the folks at Reason magazine, Reason.tv, and Reason Foundation, go here now.

Another Isolated Incident

Posted on December 18, 2008, 3:00pm | Radley Balko

But not a drug raid.  A prostitution raid.

It was a little before 8 at night when the breaker went out at Emily Milburn's home in Galveston. She was busy preparing her children for school the next day, so she asked her 12-year-old daughter, Dymond, to pop outside and turn the switch back on.
 
As Dymond headed toward the breaker, a blue van drove up and three men jumped out rushing toward her. One of them grabbed her saying, "You're a prostitute. You're coming with me."

Dymond grabbed onto a tree and started screaming, "Daddy, Daddy, Daddy." One of the men covered her mouth. Two of the men beat her about the face and throat.

As it turned out, the three men were plain-clothed Galveston police officers who had been called to the area regarding three white prostitutes soliciting a white man and a black drug dealer.

All this is according to a lawsuit filed in Galveston federal court by Milburn against the officers. The lawsuit alleges that the officers thought Dymond, an African-American, was a hooker due to the "tight shorts" she was wearing, despite not fitting the racial description of any of the female suspects. The police went to the wrong house, two blocks away from the area of the reported illegal activity...

So you'd think that after the police figured out they had the wrong house, they'd apologize, and possibly even compensate the girl and her family. According to the lawsuit, you'd be wrong:

After the incident, Dymond was hospitalized and suffered black eyes as well as throat and ear drum injuries.

Three weeks later, according to the lawsuit, police went to Dymond's school, where she was an honor student, and arrested her for assaulting a public servant. Griffin says the allegations stem from when Dymond fought back against the three men who were trying to take her from her home. The case went to trial, but the judge declared it a mistrial on the first day, says Griffin. The new trial is set for February.

I have a call into the Galveston district attorney and with Dymond Milburn's lawyer. We're going on a press account of one side of a lawsuit, here.  So it's possible—and I would hope—that there are some important details missing.

Otherwise, a police mistake leads to an innocent 12-year-old getting violently snatched up and roughed up by a group of plainclothes cops jumping out of a van . . . and they charge her for resisting?

Reason Writers Around Town: Brian Doherty on the Grimness of Inflation—and how to beat it down

Posted on December 18, 2008, 3:00pm

Over in the Los Angeles Times opinion pages, Reason Senior Editor Brian Doherty debates Doug Henwood of the Left Business Observer on the issue of hard versus soft money, inflation, and removing politics from the economic equation. From Doherty's first salvo:

Deflations can be grim, and inflations can be grim. As a way to help ameliorate—though not eliminate—these often damaging fluctuations in currency value, I'm going to speak up for a line of thought I've long been sympathetic to: the hard money school of economics (the Austrian variety is my favorite) which posits that the best way to "manage" the money supply is to remove from political authorities the ability to make more of it willy-nilly.

Read the whole thing here.

California Cops to DEA: Help Us Undermine State Law

Posted on December 18, 2008, 1:50pm | Jacob Sullum

Perusing material submitted by the DEA in response to a query from House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, marijuana reform activist Dale Gieringer catches the the California Police Chiefs Association actively subverting state law. The documents (PDF) received by Conyers, who is looking into the DEA's raids on medical marijuana dispensaries, include an October 2006 letter (page 18) in which Steve Krull, the association's president, urges DEA Administrator Karen Tandy to "become more actively involved in working with local law enforcement to close these [medical marijuana] distribution centers, seize their profits and all marijuana which might be located and to take these cases into the federal judicial system." Krull suggests that "a concentrated effort sustained over a period of time would send a strong message to local and county government that 'medical marijuana' is not allowed and that those who profit from the sales and distribution of marijuana under the guise of 'medicine' will face the consequences."

Under California law, of course, marijuana is allowed for qualifying patients and is considered a medicine. That's why Krull complains to Tandy about the "dangers and frustrations that law enforcement has experienced in California with trying to enforce marijuana laws." He reports, with apparent amazement, that "some situations have reached the point where state judicial officers (local judges) are ordering our members to return marijuana which has been lawfully seized"—i.e., instructing police to give back the medicine that patients are permitted to have under state law. Evidently Krull and many of his colleagues find obeying state law to be an intolerable nuisance, one they want the feds to help them avoid. The DEA has been happy to oblige, conducting 130 enforcement actions and making 365 arrests related to medical marijuana from 2004 through July 2008. Gieringer, coordinator of California NORML, notes that a state appeals court ruled last year that "it is not the job of the local police to enforce the federal drug laws." Both the California Supreme Court and the U.S. Supreme Court have declined to hear an appeal of that decision.

Here is the appeals court's ruling (PDF), which said (much to Krull's consternation, no doubt) that police who seize a patient's medical marijuana have to return it. Previous reason coverage of that case here and here.

Mississippi Supreme Court Justice Departs With an Anti-Death Penalty Flourish

Posted on December 18, 2008, 1:21pm | Radley Balko

Last week, Mississippi Supreme Court Justice Oliver Diaz, Jr. wrote what likely will be his last death penalty opinion.  Diaz, you may recall, is one of just two justices on that court to specifically say that the state should no longer certify former medical examiner Dr. Steven Hayne as an expert witness.

Diaz has also seen the criminal justice system from the other side. During his term he was twice tried—and twice acquitted—in federal court of taking bribes, charges critics have said were politically motivated, and part of the Bush administration's politicization of the Justice Department.  He lost his bid for reelection last November.

Mississippi actually has been surprisingly slow in executing people off Parchman Penitentiary's death row.  But it's not for a lack of trying.  The state has been repeatedly rebuked by the federal courts for adopting illegal jury instructions, providing insufficient and underpaid public defenders (by state law, they can receive no more than $1,000 per case), and other inadequate protections in death penalty cases. I suspect (and hope) we'll also soon see the federal courts sending scores more cases back for a new trial because of the improper testimony Dr. Hayne and Dr. Michael West.

In his dissent in this last case, Diaz lays out his case against the death penalty, drawing on his own experience as a criminal defendant, and on the cases he has seen cross his desk as a justice with the state's supreme court.

But my unique life experiences have shown me – to a greater degree, I submit respectfully, than any other justice voting today – the potentially oppressive power of government prosecution. For nearly two years . . . I have chosen to advocate for stricter adherence to the guidelines that we have established to limit arbitrary or disproportionate sentences.

I have concluded, though, that even this may not be enough to satisfy the demands of our state and federal constitutions that death not be meted out arbitrarily.

[...]

our courts are subject to fallibility no less than any of man’s institutions, and racial discrimination in the courtroom is no mere bit of ancient history. Only a generation ago, the U.S. Supreme Court addressed a case in which the defendant, a black man sentenced to death for murder, produced the most comprehensive, scientific study of its kind ever compiled to date and showed that the race of his white victim made his Georgia trial court 22 times more likely to impose a death sentence.

[...]

But even the specter of racially motivated executions pales in comparison to the most terrifying possibility in a system where the death penalty is dealt arbitrarily: innocent men can be, and have been, sentenced to die for crimes they did not commit. In 2008 alone, two men – both black – convicted of murders in Mississippi in the mid-1990s have been exonerated fully by a non-profit group that investigates such injustices.

One of these men, Kennedy Brewer, spent an astonishing six years on death row. Just as a cockroach scurrying across a kitchen floor at night invariably proves the presence of thousands unseen, these cases leave little room for doubt that innocent men, at unknown and terrible moments in our history, have gone unexonerated and been sent baselessly to their deaths.

I'm opposed to the death penalty not because I don't think there are some crimes so heinous that they merit death as a punishment.  I'm opposed to it because I don't think the government is capable of administering it fairly, competently, and with adequate protections to prevent the execution of an innocent person.

Three years of reporting on various aspects of Mississippi's criminal justice system have confirmed those concerns dozens of times over.

(Via Folo)

New at Reason: Robert J. Samuelson on the Lessons of the Great Inflation

Posted on December 18, 2008, 12:00pm

From our January issue, economist Robert J. Samuelson explains how Paul Volcker and Ronald Reagan's forgotten miracle created a quarter century of prosperity—and a dangerous bubble of complacency.

Read all about it here.

Awkward

Posted on December 18, 2008, 11:42am | Radley Balko

New Slate columnist and sex-for-hire hypocrite Eliot Spitzer was spotted at a swanky party the publication threw earlier this week.

The venue?  A former "erotic massage parlor" turned trendy cocktail lounge called "Happy Ending."

Reason Writers Around Town

Posted on December 18, 2008, 11:30am

Managing Editor Jesse Walker's weekly freeform radio show, Titicut Follies, will be broadcast on WCBN-FM this afternoon from 12 to 2:30, 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 program, go here.

Newspapers Get Buggywhipped

Posted on December 18, 2008, 11:25am | Katherine Mangu-Ward

Slate's Jack Shafer takes on the cause of all those poor, over-chronicled unemployed journalists trying to find someone to blame for their predicament and give them a little advice:

I keep waiting for one of these distressed, failing newspapers to realize that it has nothing to lose and get a little crazy and create something brand new and brilliant for readers and advertisers. I keep being disappointed.

(My personal favorite candidate for newspaper slayer—and chief national pimp—is Craig Newmark of craisglist. He denied both charges, of course, when I interviewed him for reason.)

Anyway, those bought-out journalists are in good company. In addition to the oft-cited buggywhip makers, Shafer whips together a nice list of lost or soon-to-be-lost pursuits:

• Bank tellers
• Typewriters
• Typesetting
• Carburetors
• Vacuum tubes
• Slide rules
• Disc jockeys
• Stockbrokers
• Telephone operators
• Yellow pages
• Repair guys
• Bookbinders
• Pimps (displaced by the cell phone and the Web)
• Cassette and reel-to-reel recorders
• VCRs
• Turntables
• Video stores
• Record stores
• Bookstores
• Recording industry
• Courier/messenger services
• Travel agencies
• Print and cinematic porn
• Porn actors
• Stenographers
• Wired telcos
• Drummers
• Toll collectors (slayed by the E-ZPass)
• Book publishing (especially reference works)
• Conventional-watch makers
• "Browse" shopping
• U.S. Postal Service
• Printing-press makers
• Film cameras
• Kodak (and other film-stock makers)

Add your own! It's fun for the whole family!

Bailout: Still Not Popular

Posted on December 18, 2008, 7:32am | Matt Welch

After two months of relentless scaremongering by the nation's elite politicians and journalists, how's that whole bailout thing doing at the polls?

Washington Post, Dec. 16:

55 percent of those polled oppose the latest plan that Chrysler, Ford and General Motors executives pitched to Congress last week, on par with public opposition to earlier, pricier efforts. [...]

[T]hose who strongly oppose the measure greatly outnumber those who are strongly supportive.

Associated Press, Dec. 12:

Just 39 percent said it would be right to spend billions in loans to keep GM, Ford and Chrysler in business, according to a poll by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center. Just 45 percent of Democrats and 31 percent of Republicans supported the idea.

In a separate Marist College poll, 48 percent said they oppose federal loans for the struggling automakers while 41 percent approved.

Like Dick Cheney, I don't believe in governing by poll. But that won't prevent me from taking heart in the fact that, once again, Americans seem to have more instinctive faith in capitalism and less enthusiasm for government blank checks than their elected representatives.

New at Reason: Steve Chapman on Caroline Kennedy and the Lure of Royalty

Posted on December 18, 2008, 7:00am

Caroline Kennedy, writes Steve Chapman, is indistinguishable from many other rich folks who would never be considered for a seat in the nation's highest elected body. Indistinguishable, that is, except for her name, which in some minds confers magical powers denied to ordinary mortals.

Read all about it here. 

Names Can Never Hurt You

Posted on December 17, 2008, 7:15pm | Jacob Sullum

A New Jersey couple is complaining of discrimination after a local ShopRite refused to inscribe a birthday cake for Adolf Hitler. The Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania, Express-Times reports that Heath and Deborah Campbell, who live across the Delaware River in Holland Township, have "three children named for Nazism": Adolf Hitler Campbell, who turned 3 on Sunday; JoyceLynn Aryan Nation Campbell, who turns 2 in February; and Honszlynn Hinler Jeannie Campbell, who turns 1 in April and is named for SS honcho Heinrich Himmler. (Since my German is limited to a few words that overlap with Yiddish and a few more that I picked up from Hogan's Heroes, I'm not clear on why the mm became an n. Does that feminize the name?) The Campbells, who favor swastikas ("symbols of peace and balance," according to Heath) as a decorating motif, claim not to understand what the big deal is about their Nazi namesakes:

"I just figured that they're just names," Deborah Campbell said. "They're just kids. They're not going to hurt anybody."

Heath Campbell said some people like the names but others are shocked to hear them. "They say, 'He [Hitler] killed all those people.' I say, 'You're living in the wrong decade. That Hitler's gone,'" he said.

"They're just names, you know," he said. "Yeah, they [Nazis] were bad people back then. But my kids are little. They're not going to grow up like that."

"Other kids get their cake. I get a hard time," he said. "It's not fair to my children.

"How can a name be offensive?" he asked.

This story, which has been picked up by newspapers ranging from USA Today to The Australian, sounds too good to be true, like a below-average Onion article or an above-average Saturday Night Live sketch. But according to Robert M. Gordon, an Allentown psychologist consulted by the Express-Times, the Campbells are neither facetious nor stupid; they are mentally ill:

Any parent that would impose such horrific names on their children is mentally ill, and they would be affecting their children from the day they were born. Only a crazy person would do that.

Gordon's attitude is the only thing that made me sympathize with Heath and Deborah (as opposed to their kids). Must every anti-social tendency, every species of idiocy, every flavor of unreasoning hatred be reduced to a pseudomedical psychiatric label? Can't anybody be a neo-Nazi numbskull anymore?

For the record, Walmart, where the customer comes first, was happy to produce the birthday cake that ShopRite denied little Adolf. Do you think ShopRite would have flinched if the birthday wishes had been for Mao Tse-Tung?

New at Reason: Anthony Randazzo on Zombie Businesses and the Bailout

Posted on December 17, 2008, 6:00pm

Twenty years ago, Japan's economy was plagued by struggling markets, liquidity concerns, and frozen credit. In response, Japan tried bailing out its banks, investing in infrastructure, and propping up "zombie businesses," firms that would have failed without government intervention. And as the Reason Foundation's Anthony Randazzo writes, unless American policymakers learn from the failures of Japan's response, we will suffer the same zombie fate.

Read all about it here.

"The right to marry does not entitle me to a spouse"

Posted on December 17, 2008, 4:45pm | Damon W. Root

Economist Paul Moreno, author of the excellent Black Americans and Organized Labor, has a very good post at Liberty & Power explaining what's wrong with the idea of a "Second Bill of Rights," first proposed by Franklin Delano Roosevelt and recently championed by star law professor (and Barack Obama adviser) Cass Sunstein:

The second bill of rights idea derived from two famous speeches that Franklin Delano Roosevelt gave—one at the San Francisco Commonwealth Club during the 1932 campaign and his 1944 annual message to Congress. In the Commonwealth Club address, he spoke of the advent of "enlightened administration," which would redistribute resources in accordance with an "economic declaration of rights." In his 1944 message to Congress, Roosevelt said that "our rights to life and liberty"—the negative liberty to which Obama referred, had "proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness." He claimed that "In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights." This bill of rights included the right to a job, the right to food and recreation, the right to adequate farm prices, the right to a decent home, the right to medical care, and the right to a good education.

Of course, these are not "rights" at all—not in the sense that the framers and ratifiers of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution used the term—but entitlements. From the founding until the twentieth century, the American regime assumed that government's purpose was to secure pre-existing natural rights—such as life, liberty, property, or association. Everyone can exercise such rights simultaneously; nobody's exercise of his own rights limits anyone else's similar exercise. Your right to life or to work or to vote does not take anything away from anyone else. We can all pursue happiness at once. Entitlements, on the other hand, require someone else to provide me with the substantive good that the exercise of rights pursues. The right to work, for example, is fundamentally different from the right (entitlement) to a job; the right to marry does not entitle me to a spouse; the right to free speech does not entitle me to an audience.

The New Deal is often described as a "constitutional revolution." In fact, it was much more than that. It involved a rejection not just of the structure and principles of the Constitution, but those of the theory of natural rights in the Declaration of Independence—that, as Jefferson put it, governments are instituted in order to secure our rights.

Whole thing here. For more on the problems with the New Deal, don't miss reason.tv's Obama's New New Deal: As bad as the old New Deal?

The Reason.tv Talk Show: With Nick Gillespie, Michael C. Moynihan, Splice Today's Russ Smith, and the Washington Times' Kelly Jane Torrance

Posted on December 17, 2008, 4:30pm

Reason.tv's Nick Gillespie and Michael C. Moynihan sit down with alternative-newspaper legend and Splice Today chief Russ Smith and Washington Times arts and entertainment writer Kelly Jane Torrance to talk about old media, new media, why the left dominates the arts, the cultural geography of Canada, the bailout bonanza, and much more.

Approximately 25 minutes; filmed and edited by Dan Hayes.

For an audio podcast version, go here.

I Plead Guilty to Possibly Violating Your Ridiculous Gambling Laws

Posted on December 17, 2008, 3:35pm | Jacob Sullum

Yesterday Anurag Dikshit, co-founder of the Gibraltar-based online gambling company PartyGaming, pleaded guility to violating the U.S. Wire Act and agreed to forfeit $300 million to settle criminal charges against him for helping Americans play games of chance from the comfort of their homes. Dikshit's sentencing is officially scheduled for two years from now, and it seems unlikely that he will serve any time. PartyGaming, a publicly traded company that offers poker, casino games, and bingo, stopped serving the U.S. market after Congress passed the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006. Even in admitting his guilt, Dikshit alluded to the arbitrariness and vagueness of U.S. gambling laws, especially as applied to foreign companies that are perfectly legal in the countries where they operate:

I came to believe there was a high probability that the company's business was illegal under US laws. I acknowledge my actions and have come to believe that what I did was wrong.

Doesn't the rule of law require something more than the possibility of gradually realizing, after operating a business for years, that you are probably committing a crime?

Former BetOnSports CEO David Carruthers, meanwhile, is still awaiting trial in St. Louis. He could face up to 20 years in prison.

Rep. Robert Wexler (D-Fla.), chairman of the Europe subcommittee of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, responded to Dikshit's guilty plea by urging the legalization of online gambling:

It is of critical importance that we find an effective and immediate way to regulate and tax internet gaming in order to avoid a serious trade dispute with the E.U., which, in turn, could have global trade repercussions for the United States. The retroactive and discriminatory enforcement against E.U. parties, who ceased operating in the U.S. a long time ago, has directly led to an escalating trade dispute with the E.U.

I chronicled the federal government's crackdown on online gambling in the June issue of reason.

The "Senselessness and Injustice" of the Drug War

Posted on December 17, 2008, 3:01pm | Michael C. Moynihan

In the Wall Street Journal, Mary Anastasia O'Grady reminds readers of  the "senselessness and injustice" of America's "war on drugs" by revisiting the killing of the Christian missionary Veronica Bowers and her daughter Charity in a botched CIA drug interdiction operation. In conjunction with the CIA, a Peruvian Air Force plane shot Bowers (obviously unarmed) single-engine plane out of the sky when it suspected that it might be ferrying drugs out of the country.

Strict procedures were put in place to minimize the risks to innocents. But after viewing the IG report, Mr. Hoekstra -- the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee -- says that it is clear that those procedures had gone out the window long before the April 20, 2001 tragedy.

On that day the Bowers family was flying in a single-engine plane over the Amazon toward their home in Iquitos. Mrs. Bowers was holding the infant on her lap when a bullet fired by the Peruvian Air Force, under direction of the CIA, hit the aircraft, traveled through her back and into Charity's skull. The plane crash-landed on the Amazon River. Mr. Bowers, his young son and the pilot survived. Neither the plane nor its passengers were found to be involved in any way in the drug business and initial reports said that the mistaken attack was a tragic one-time error.

The IG report looked at the Airbridge Denial Program from its inception in 1995 until its termination in 2001 and took seven years to complete. In statements to the press last month Mr. Hoekstra said it demonstrates every one of the 15 "shootdowns" that the CIA participated in over the life of the program had "violations of required procedures." He also said that the report "found that CIA officers knew of and condoned the violations, fostering an environment of negligence and disregard for the procedures."

Ms. O'Grady's column on Latin America is the best in the business, and it is good to see her on the right side of the drug war debate (Perhaps this isn't news, but this the first anti-drug war column of hers that I've read). As she notes, "to honor the memory of Mrs. Bowers and her daughter and spare innocent lives in the future, a broader discussion in Congress about U.S. drug policy in the region is needed."

New at Reason: Radley Balko on Filling Obama's Senate Seat

Posted on December 17, 2008, 3:00pm

Radley Balko has a suggestion for the Democrats. Nominate former Illinois Republican Sen. Peter Fitzgerald to fill Barack Obama's seat in the Senate. Fitzgerald is principled, he's frugal with taxpayer money, and he has no tolerance for public corruption. That's why he retired from the Senate after only one term. And it's why now would a good time to bring him back.

Read all about it here.

Is There Something Smaller than a Baby Step?

Posted on December 17, 2008, 2:44pm | Katherine Mangu-Ward

...a mouse step? A Barbie step?

The D.C. metro system announced today that even though Inauguration Day is a holiday (and therefore fares are usually reduced and parking is free) they're debating considering the possibility of maybe, just maybe, charging peak rates and the usual cost for parking on a day when up to 4 million people are expected to pour into the D.C. area.

Holy supply and demand! This is actually decently rational behavior for a public transit system. Worried about a swell of users in a limited system? Most public systems simply brace themselves, run a couple of additional trains, and hope that no one gets pushed onto the tracks from a crowded platform. 

The price increase is so small it probably isn't enough to discourage many users. But at least the system will recoup more of the costs of carrying all the Obamaphiles, rather than passing on the costs to those of us who will be hiding in the suburbs somewhere, watching Obama's lips turn blue on HDTV.

Bonus: The city is also letting bars stay open until 4:00 a.m. If this is what Obama's America is like, perhaps I was wrong about the man.

Biofuels Bailout?

Posted on December 17, 2008, 2:39pm | Ronald Bailey

The U.S. biofuels industry already receives taxpayer subsidies worth more than $7 billion annually, but it still can't make a profit. So what to do? Well, everybody is looking for a bailout, so why not biofuels?

According to the Wall Street Journal, the biofuels lobbyists may now be looking for more handouts: 

The Renewable Fuels Association, a trade group for the U.S. ethanol industry, has spoken with staff members from Capitol Hill and President-elect Barack Obama’s team and “provided them with some ideas on how to craft the language of” an economic recovery package, said Matt Hartwig, a spokesman for the RFA.

Hartwig said RFA has suggested a number of steps including setting up a $1 billion short-term credit facility so ethanol producers could finance current operations; a $50 billion federal loan guarantee program to finance investment in new renewable fuel production capacity and supporting infrastructure; and a requirement that any auto maker receiving federal aid only produce new vehicles that can run on any blend up to 85% ethanol, beginning with the 2010 model season.

Apparently, the biofuels lobbyists insist that they are just offering ideas, not actually lobbying. Well, that's certainly a relief. 

Nevertheless, food and environmental groups are worried that these "ideas" might morph into a bailout. For example, environmentalist Lester Brown, (someone with whom I rarely agree) warns:

"The ethanol industry's claim that a bailout for their industry is justified by the creation of "green jobs" is truly a case of "green wash." The net energy yield of corn-based ethanol is marginal at best."

Andrew Moylan from the National Taxpayers Union agrees:

"Since corn ethanol boosters have never known a day when they weren't benefiting from government largesse, it's sadly predictable that their response to times of economic distress is to push for more handouts rather than consider reality-based business models. Ethanol lobbyists won't call their latest loan and mandate schemes 'bailouts,' but after seeing so many other interests line up for federal cash recently, taxpayers know when they're being shaken down. Americans should be outraged that yet another industry, especially one that is already dependent on the government, has the gall to ask them for even more of their hard-earned money."

Amen.

See press release featuring statements against a biofuels bailout here. 

Get in On The Ground Floor of the Next D.C. Gun Lawsuit

Posted on December 17, 2008, 1:41pm | Brian Doherty

D.C.'s City Council continues its constantly shifting reaction to the Supreme Court's Heller decision that overturned its gun ban. (See here and here for some of their post-Heller scramblings.) This week, they vote to enforce "safety training" before a gun can be legally registered in D.C. D.C.'s City Paper with the details. The key part for the future:

At the last council meeting, Councilmember Mary M. Cheh had proposed the measure as an amendment to the bill governing the regulation of handguns. Since then, the mayor’s office raised concerns about the possibility that such a requirement, shared with very few other jurisdictions, would attract new litigation from the gun-rights crowd. Phil Mendelson, the at-large councilmember who chairs the judiciary and public safety committee and has taken the lead on writing the city’s new gun laws, agreed with that assessment and opposed Cheh’s amendment.

Cheh tried again this week, and won with a 10-3 vote. Mendelson, who rightfully fears a lawsuit, was one of the three. The extent to which the now-Supremes certified right to own handguns in the home can be circumscribed by these sort of safety regulations will be the subject of many suits in the future--especially when/if the incorporation question (that is, does Heller apply to states and localities?) is settled. This move by the D.C. Council will doubtless trigger one of the more important such suits.

For aaaaall the background on this, see my new book on the Heller case and gun control, Gun Control on Trial.

Well, He Had Ignored the Unspoken Warning

Posted on December 17, 2008, 1:35pm | Jacob Sullum

Last week a British inquest jury refused to exonerate the police who killed Jean Charles de Menezes, a 27-year-old Brazilian electrician mistaken for a terrorist, on a London subway train in 2005. Sir Michael Wright, the coroner overseeing the inquest, had instructed the jurors that the evidence did not support a finding that the shooting was unlawful, so the most they could do was issue an "open" verdict, meaning they could not reach a firm conclusion about the circumstances of De Menezes' death. But they rejected key elements of the government's case backing the police:

They concluded that one of the two officers who shot Mr. de Menezes had not shouted "armed police," as they testified, when they stormed the stationary subway car where Mr. de Menezes was sitting. A total of 17 civilian passengers on the train testified they heard no such warning before the officers fired.

The account of the two armed police officers, identified in court only by their code names, Charlie 2 and Charlie 12, was that the warning was ignored by Mr. de Menezes, who they said had stood up and walked toward them with his arms and hands in a position "consistent with someone who may be about to detonate a bomb hidden on their person or in a belt." They said his actions left them with no option, consistent with police procedures, but to shoot Mr. de Menezes in the head.

The jurors, in their answers to the judges' questions, said they had concluded that Mr. de Menezes had stood up, but that he had not moved toward the firearms officers, a finding that also tallied with the testimony of other passengers aboard the train.

Police shot De Menezes seven times in the head after following him as he left home for work in the morning, having mistaken him for a man suspected of trying to bomb a subway station. The jury faulted police for using fuzzy images to identify the suspect instead of the high-quality photographs in his immigration file and for failing to stop De Menezes before he entered the train.

Previous reason coverage of the case here, here, and here. 

Vilsack for Ag Secretary; The Good and the Bad

Posted on December 17, 2008, 12:42pm | Ronald Bailey

President-elect Barack Obama named former Iowa governor Tom Vilsack as his Secretary of Agriculture. First, the good news. Vilsack's appointment drives some progressives nuts because he apparently supports biotech crops. The Organic Consumers Association asserted:

Vilsack has a glowing reputation as being a schill for agribusiness biotech giants like Monsanto.

On the other hand, both Obama and Vilsack have been enthusiastic supporters of federal subsidies for ethanol produced from corn. However, turning food into fuel contributed substantially to steep increases in global food prices earlier this year. In addition, recent scientific studies have shown that subsidizing corn ethanol causes more land to be plowed up which actually boosts greenhouse gas emissions. Mr. Obama has declared that "my administration will value science." Let's hope that means that he will direct his new Secretary of Agriculture to ask Congress to cut wasteful and environmentally-damaging corn subsidies.

Putting science ahead of ideology and politics on both issues would be a nice change.

Rumsfeld vs. Blagojevich, Cheney vs. Spitzer

Posted on December 17, 2008, 12:23pm | Brian Doherty

Salon's Glenn Greenwald wonders at the press corps reaction to two ongoing examples of political crookery and malfeasance:

The bipartisan Senate Armed Services Committee report issued on Thursday -- which documents that "former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other senior U.S. officials share much of the blame for detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba" and "that Rumsfeld's actions were 'a direct cause of detainee abuse' at Guantanamo and 'influenced and contributed to the use of abusive techniques ... in Afghanistan and Iraq'" -- raises an obvious and glaring question: how can it possibly be justified that the low-level Army personnel carrying out these policies at Abu Ghraib have been charged, convicted and imprisoned, while the high-level political officials and lawyers who directed and authorized these same policies remain free of any risk of prosecution?

..........

This Report was issued on Thursday. Not a single mention was made of it on any of the Sunday news talk shows, with the sole exception being when John McCain told George Stephanopoulos that it was "not his job" to opine on whether criminal prosecutions were warranted for the Bush officials whose policies led to these crimes. What really matters, explained McCain, was not that we get caught up in the past, but instead, that we ensure this never happens again -- yet, like everyone else who makes this argument, he offered no explanation as to how we could possibly ensure that "it never happens again" if we simultaneously announce that our political leaders will be immunized, not prosecuted, when they commit war crimes. Doesn't that mindset, rather obviously, substantially increase the likelihood -- if not render inevitable -- that such behavior will occur again? Other than that brief exchange, this Senate Report was a non-entity on the Sunday shows.

Instead, TV pundits were consumed with righteous anger over the petty, titillating, sleazy Rod Blagojevich scandal, competing with one another over who could spew the most derision and scorn for this pitiful, lowly, broken individual and his brazen though relatively inconsequential crimes. Every exciting detail was vouyeristically and meticulously dissected by political pundits -- many, if not most, of whom have never bothered to acquaint themselves with any of the basic facts surrounding the monumental Bush lawbreaking and war crimes scandals....

The auction conducted by Blagojevich was just a slightly more flamboyant, vulgar and reckless expression of how our national political class conducts itself generally....But Blagojevich is an impotent figure, stripped of all power, a national joke. And attacking and condemning him is thus cheap and easy. It threatens nobody in power. To the contrary, his downfall is deceptively and usefully held up as an extreme aberration -- proof that government officials are held accountable when they break the law.

The whole piece by Greenwald contains many more damning examples of high-level Bush administration complicity in some horrible acts and prisoner deaths. He does a similar comparison of the dreadful vs. the petty when it comes to political crimes with Dick Cheney (war, illegal wiretapping, torture) and Eliot Spitzer (consensual prostitution purchase), and sees who gets honored and who gets disgraced.

New at Reason: Michael C. Moynihan on Bernard-Henri Lévy and the State of the European Left

Posted on December 17, 2008, 12:00pm

From our January issue, Associate Editor Michael C. Moynihan reviews Bernard-Henry Lévy's Left in Dark Times, which argues that the European left has traded its principles of human rights for a cheap anti-Americanism and an inconsistent and often incoherent anti-imperialism.

Read all about it here.

How Is Barack Obama's Choice for Education Secretary, Arne Duncan?

Posted on December 17, 2008, 11:48am | Matt Welch

Reason Foundation education whiz Lisa Snell, writing over at the Foundation's Out of Control blog, sees cause to be optimistic about the Chicago public schools chief.

There are really two reasons to like Duncan. On the one hand Chicago public schools have only shown moderate improvement during Duncan's tenure. On the other hand, Duncan embraces two public school ideas that have the potential to revolutionize public schools in the United States.

First, Duncan is a robust supporter of charter schools. [...]

The second reason to like Arne Duncan is that he understands and embraces the idea that per-pupil funding should follow students into schools. Chicago has been experimenting with a pilot weighted student formula-type program under Arne Duncan's seven-year tenure.

Whole thing here. Read Snell's reason archive here.

Speaking of Obama's appointments, I had flung some poo the other week at the reported consideration of L.A. political hack Xavier Becerra as U.S. trade representative, but now it looks like Becerra is withdrawing from consideration.

An Assortment of Links

Posted on December 17, 2008, 9:00am | Jesse Walker

* Foreign Policy picks the worst predictions of the year.

* Bill Kauffman visits a secessionist conference.

* Various animators remix the Bush Shoe Incident. This one's my favorite.

* Is maritime piracy increasing or decreasing?

* The apes revolt.

* Finally, apropos of nothing, I'd just like to quote a little rant about Ken Burns I found in a comment thread last night:

[L]ike a lot of people I was fortunate that The Civil War was the first Ken Burns film I saw. The elegiac air of nostalgic rue (to take a phrase a writer for The New Republic used) seemed perfectly pitched to the subject matter. It was only later that we found out that he probably applied that style to his wedding video. It's the way he does everything. The trouble with Baseball is that one game of baseball is a lot like another, and hour after hour of it gets numbing, the monotony broken every 20 minutes or so by another trip to the woodshed to be scolded about the color bar. One tries in vain to think of the conceptual equivalent of the Ken Burns history of Jazz -- the Margaret Dumont history of whorehouses, perhaps. As for The War, if you're going to show how World War II affected four different cities you really ought to choose at least one where the war was actually fought.

Full disclosure: I haven't watched The War and I've only seen a smidge of Baseball. But I did sit through all of Jazz, carefully counting the number of times in 19 hours that PBS's golden boy allowed a whole song to be played without interruption. The final total: 1.

Recently at Reason.tv: Obama's new New Deal--as bad as the old New Deal?

Posted on December 17, 2008, 8:52am | Nick Gillespie

Nobel laureate economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman says he wants President-elect Barack Obama to enact "something like a new New Deal." Historian Douglas Brinkley has said that Obama could come to office with a "sweeping legislative agenda which will be Johnson-like or New Deal-like." An aide close to Obama told New York magazine that "A lot of people around Barack are reading books about FDR's first hundred days."

On the cusp of a deep economic recession, and with a staggering amount of bailout money being offered to struggling industries, pundits and political advisers are advocating that the incoming Obama administration construct a new New Deal. 

But is the popular narrative about the old New Deal-that Keynesian economics and top-down planning rescued America from the Great Depression-accurate? Reason.tv's Michael C. Moynihan talks to UCLA economist Lee Ohanian, who argues in work written with colleague Harold Cole, that the New Deal's massive intervention into the economy actually prolonged the economic crisis by seven years. 

"Obama's New New Deal" is written and produced by Michael C. Moynihan. Director of Photography is Dan Hayes.

Emdbed code and related links available here. Podcast available here.

Prosecutor Unimpressed by Fancy-Schmancy DNA Tests; He'll Stick With Hunches

Posted on December 17, 2008, 7:23am | Radley Balko

Michael Mermel, chief of the criminal division for the Lake County, Illinois state's attorney's office, is rather unimpressed by the value of exonerating DNA evidence, especially when it conflicts with good ol' eyewitness testimony, confessions, even bite-mark evidence.

For example, six years ago, Mermel dismissed DNA tests showing that the semen found in the underwear of a 68-year rape victim didn't belong to the man convicted of the crime.  Bernie Starks had been serving time for the rape since 1986.  Now if the DNA had come from the woman's vagina, Mermel argued at the time, "I would be standing over there advocating the side that the defense has in the case." 

Actually, no he wouldn't.  Three years later, a missing rape kit from the case turned up.  It included a vaginal swab containing semen, and a DNA test on the semen again excluded the man convicted of the crime.  Mermel again refused to concede, this time arguing that the woman must have had consensual sex with another man at about the same time of the rape.

When DNA testing on an 11-year-old rape and murder victim excluded his suspect, Mermel said the more likely explanation there too was that the girl had been sexually active—not that he could possibly be charging the wrong guy.

But this one beats all:

And, just recently, when lawyers for the man charged in the killing of his 8-year-old daughter and her 9-year-old friend said in court that DNA evidence from semen excluded him as the perpetrator, the Lake prosecutor had another explanation.

Mermel said DNA may have gotten inside the 8-year-old's body as she played in the woods at what became the crime scene—a place where Mermel said some couples go to have sex. The girl was found fully clothed.

That's some mighty potent semen.

Howard Dean: "We Cannot Continue to Spend 16 Percent of Our GNP on Health Care. Period."

Posted on December 17, 2008, 7:14am | Nick Gillespie

Talking on the generally excellent and substantive Morning Joe today, DNC head Howard Dean, an M.D., former governor of Vermont, and legendary presidential screamer says, "We cannot continue to spend 16 prcent of our GNP on health care. Period."

He added that he "thinks the decisions should be made at the individual level."

And that he's against "corporate care."

Confused? I am, and it's not just the corporate prescription pharmaceuticals. Just wait until the hard-core health-care reform roposals start hitting the ground in late January.

Also on Morning Joe: Co-host Mika Brzezinski, whose former National Security Adviser father Zbigniew appears on the show from time to time, avers that there's "something slightly distasteful" about the Kennedy name opening doors for Lady Caroline to become the next carpet-bagging senator from New York.

New at Reason: Jacob Sullum on Bush's Illegal Plan to Bail Out the Automakers

Posted on December 17, 2008, 7:00am

Under the U.S. Constitution, if Congress approves legislation the president doesn't like, he can refuse to sign it, in which case the law can be enacted only by a two-thirds vote of each chamber. But as Senior Editor Jacob Sullum writes, President Bush's plan to aid the auto industry relies on a more obscure maneuver: If Congress rejects a bill the president likes, he can act as if the vote went the other way.

Read all about it here. 

"I've abandoned free-market principles to save the free-market system"

Posted on December 16, 2008, 10:34pm | Matt Welch

That's my Bush!

Agence France Presse adds the inaccurate context:

Bush's comments reflect an extraordinary departure from his longtime advocacy for an unfettered free market

If by "unfettered" AFP means "most fettered since Richard Nixon," etc.

More from our lamest duck:

"I am sorry we're having to do it," Bush said. [...]

"I feel a sense of obligation to my successor to make sure there is not a, you know, a huge economic crisis. Look, we're in a crisis now. I mean, this is -- we're in a huge recession, but I don't want to make it even worse." [...]

In the interview, Bush said that a "disorganized bankruptcy" of the carmakers could create "enormous" economic difficulties.

One reason that this series of events, starting with Bush's four-paragraph white flag of Sept. 24 and on through a bailout season that may climb to $10 trillion before Barack Obama even shows up for work, has driven some of us near-crazy with apoplexy, is that every last detail has been straight out of the classic playbook of reluctant central planners everywhere. It's not the bankruptcy, it's the disorganized bankruptcy. Messy! Heedless risk-takers deserve to fail, but, c'mon, Goldman Sachs!  Theory X is great, but we've got a crisis here!

Back when the subject was still the War on Islamo-jerkoffs, I called this phenomenon "Women's Shoe Libertarianism"–fun to wear on a sunny day, but useless in a storm. Same goes for the Women's Shoe Capitalism of George W. Bush, the modern Republican Party (until we see any proof otherwise), and the playground scheming of would-be kingmakers from the once-proud intellectual Right. They blinked, tightened the screws, and embraced big government when 19 hijackers killed 3,000 people on that terrible day, and they're blinking, tightening the screws, and embracing big government before handing off the reins to the alleged "party of Big Government."

All this doesn't mean, despite the fervent wishes of feeble anti-libertarians, that those of us who on balance prefer less government refuse to acknowledge when private actors in the market royally fuck up, or when the government does its regulatin' badly. Quite the contrary–as Katherine Mangu-Ward ably demonstrates in our dynamite January issue (would you people subscribe, already?), the failure to create a clearinghouse for credit default swaps, among other financial instruments, was a critical mistake.

But the real failure here is one of nerve, of imagination, of historical memory. You cannot save something by destroying it, or abandoning it, or even giving it a few stiff raps in the kneecaps. "Paternalism" is too mild a word for the mentality that produces such a sentiment, let alone the disastrous policies to back it up.

Here's the Abandoner in his own words:

More Pictures of "Change"

Posted on December 16, 2008, 9:15pm | Mike Riggs

Back in September, Michael C. Moynihan asked, "What happens to political art if Obama wins?", and worried—after a taste of what Obama supporters were producing months prior to the election—"that the dull and sophomoric political art of the Bush years will be replaced by the dull and hagiographic work of the Obama years." In light of an email I received today from Matthew Cook, the publicist at Say It & See It Productions, LLC, I would argue that we won't see much of a break between pre-election and post-election "political art":

From the press release:

Christopher Shannon Art today announced the release of the limited edition of his latest work "Change in America". This limited edition drawing takes the theme and slogan of the most significant event in American political history and presents it in a most literal sense.

 Change in America is a striking and realistic portrait of President-Elect Barack Obama delivering one of his most moving and impactful speeches. President Elect Obama is centered in the middle of The United States of America that unanimously elected him as their 44th President. Displayed throughout the drawing are American currency in the form of coins or change that amplify the overall message that led record numbers of American voters to the polls and united American people of every race, religion and political affiliation. This limited edition portrait is extremely realistic and simply breathe taking.

"Obama's eyes literally look as if they will blink at you at any moment," says Jason Scott, DC area resident and private art collector. This particular work being introduced here has been in secret development for a long time and is the first in a series of portraits dedicated to the historical presidency of Barack Obama. "He may not be the best in the World, but he is the best I've every [sic] seen..." says R&B singing artist, celebrity and art collector Ginuwine.

Christopher Shannon captures not only the spirit of this historic event but also the literal meaning of change. "I just want people to feel the emotional significance of this event..." says Christopher Shannon. "There are lots of depictions of Obama out there; my goal is to not just present the man; but the message in a way that provokes thought and reflection on what this really means."

This email came after a different publicist offered me an "early shot" at a gallery opening with new stuff by "Shep Fairy" [sic], the street artist who turned Obama's headshot into a paint-by-numbers poster, inspired countless Tall tees themes, and did underdressed former-anarchists proud by making GQ's "Men of the Year" list.

I wonder if a disappointing First 100 Days will be enough to crust the brushes of Obama artists? After all, it's one thing to paint torture and war, and quite another to paint someone not doing everything he promised. And if the schmaltzy Obama art keeps up, will the rest of us find ourselves eventually pining for a return of  those smug yet subtle "W" stickers?

No, Not Ray Carney...

Posted on December 16, 2008, 5:45pm | Jesse Walker

Veep-elect Joe Biden has picked Jay Carney, Time's Washington bureau chief, to be his communications director. This inspired the historian-pundit Rick Perlstein to dust off a New Republic piece he wrote last year about Carney's conflicts with blog commenters:

On Time's new blog, "Swampland," D.C. Bureau Chief Jay Carney posted a pre-assessment to the State of the Union Address comparing President Bush's political position to Bill Clinton in January of 1995. Like Bush, "President Clinton was in free fall....His approval ratings were mired in the 30's and seemed unlikely to rise."

Moments later, a writer identfiying himself as "Tom T" pointed out an error in Carney's "nut graf" that would have earned a failing grade for a first-year journalism major: "Clinton's approval rating in January of 2005 was 47 percent. It was not mired in the 30s." At 9:12, the blogger Atrios, also known as Duncan Black, alerted his readers to the gaffe, and they descended on the Time blog like locusts--and, to mix the Biblical metaphor, served Jay Carney's head up on a charger. They tabulated several more boneheaded errors: Carney wrote that 1995 was Clinton's first State of the Union "with Newt Gingrich and Bob Dole seated behind him as Speaker and Senate Majority Leader"; but, of course, it is the Vice President, not the Senate Majority leader, who sits behind the president. He also wrote of Clinton's "recovery...during Monica, in 1999"--but, as a commenter reminded him, "Clinton never had to 'recover' from Monica, unless polls in the high 50s and 60s are something you have to recover from."

Then the commenters unraveled the entire foundation of Carney's argument. He had said that, because "Americans reward presidents who, even in the face of enormous distractions, focus on issues that matter to them...Bush won't spend much time tonight talking about surging troops in Iraq or the Global War on Terror." But, as writers identifying themselves as "jjcomet," "dmbeaster," and "Newton Minnow" pointed out, the issue of greatest concern to the nation "is far and away the war in Iraq, at 48% the only issue in double digits." Another made a similar point, shall we say, more qualitatively: "The Iraq War is a DISTRACTION?? Are you serious? Am I wrong or did he compare the Lewinski scandal to Iraq??? What is the matter with you!?!?"

At which Carney snapped back so churlishly ("the left is as full of unthinking Ditto-heads as Limbaugh-land") that, for a moment, it was hard even to remember--why was it, again, that we were supposed to defer to the authority of newsweeklies (and the mainstream press) in the first place? Carney was rude and wrong. The barbaric yawpers of the netroots were rude and right.

On one point, I think Carney's controversial comments were defensible: Given the strain that Monicagate put on his presidency, I don't think it a stretch to say that Clinton had to "recover" from it, whatever his poll numbers might have been. Otherwise, though, the netrootsers ate him for lunch. For Perlstein, the event "inaugurated a rough week for those who still wish to uphold a model of cultural authority in which the fact that someone is a professional with a famous name--credentialed by other professionals with famous names--can serve as a reasonable proxy for trustworthiness. It marked one more step in the arrival of our new, more uncomfortable media world--one in which, to judge a piece of writing, we must gauge not the status of the writer, but his or her words themselves, unattached to the author's worldly rank."

Which means, I suppose, that Carney has made a smart career move. If you like to confuse rank with trustworthiness, there's no better job than political flak.

Elsewhere in Reason: Our editors praised Perlstein's books here and here, while attacking his views on firefighting here.

D.C. Ink

Posted on December 16, 2008, 5:10pm | Damon W. Root

Confronted with the news that nearly 25 percent of Americans under the age of 40 have some sort of tattoo, The Weekly Standard's Gary Andres jokes that maybe GOP-themed body art should be "the new litmus test for Republican presidential hopefuls as the party aims to improve its dismal performance among younger voters." Why not? Andres suggests an elephant tattoo for presidential hopefuls, but I'm wondering if reason's readers can't come up with some better ideas than that.

(Image via Roger Stone's Stonezone) 

New at Reason: Bill Steigerwald on Repealing the Ban on Human Organ Sales

Posted on December 16, 2008, 4:30pm

There's a beautiful thing President-elect Obama could do on his first day in office to prove he's serious about being an instrument of real change, writes Bill Steigerwald. All Obama has to do is call for the repeal of the National Organ Transplant Act, the terrible federal law that criminalizes the buying and selling of human organs for transplant operations.

Read all about it here. 

New at Reason: Ron Bailey on Climate Change and Obama's "Green Team"

Posted on December 16, 2008, 3:00pm

On Monday, President-elect Barack Obama revealed the "Green Team" that will guide his energy and climate change policies. And as Science Correspondent Ronald Bailey explains, they have their work cut out for them. Obama and his team must persuade American citizens that they will have to start paying substantially more to heat and cool their homes, drive their cars, and run their factories in order to avert the indeterminate threat of man-made global warming.

Read all about it here. 

The Price Is Right?

Posted on December 16, 2008, 2:26pm | Katherine Mangu-Ward

If you're going to sell a Senate seat, Blagojevich (if that's even your real name), at least try to get the right price for it. Leigh Caldwell of Knowing and Making offers several methods for determining the correct price.

From Method #2: Market Price:

We believe that one candidate was offering $500,000, another was offering $1 million and a third was offering “nothing but appreciation”. We don’t know what the President-Elect’s appreciation is worth, but apparently it’s less than $1 million. Given that there is a monopoly supplier of this position and a limited number (1) of the commodity available, the highest price offered by any buyer is the one that will clear the market. So on this method, $1 million is the answer.

The Good Marijuana News of 2008

Posted on December 16, 2008, 2:23pm | Brian Doherty

The cock-eyed and blurry-eyed optimists at the Marijuana Policy Project lay out the good news for marijuana policy in 2008. Highlights:

MARIJUANA DECRIMINALIZED IN MASSACHUSETTS:.....

MICHIGAN BECOMES 13TH MEDICAL MARIJUANA STATE: The 63 percent majority racked up by Proposal 1 was the largest ever for a medical marijuana initiative and exceeded Barack Obama’s vote total in the state by six points.

A NEW PRESIDENT PLEDGES TO END FEDERAL RAIDS IN MEDICAL MARIJUANA STATES: During the campaign, president-elect Barack Obama repeatedly promised to end federal attacks on individuals obeying state medical marijuana laws....

NEW RESEARCH VERIFIES MARIJUANA PAIN RELIEF: For the third time in less than two years, a published, peer-reviewed clinical trial demonstrated that marijuana safely and effectively relieves neuropathic pain, a notoriously hard to treat type of pain related to nerve damage, and often seen in illnesses such as multiple sclerosis, HIV/AIDS and diabetes...

FEDERAL REPORTS DOCUMENT FAILURE OF CURRENT POLICIES: The Monitoring the Future survey, released Dec. 11, found that more 10th-graders now smoke marijuana than cigarettes, with teen marijuana use rising while teen use of cigarettes (which are legally regulated for adults) has dropped.

The bad news remains, hanging over our head from 2007, the last year for which figures are available: marijuana arrests were at an all-time high, with one citizen denied liberty for his harmless choice every 36 seconds.

Ryan Frederick Update

Posted on December 16, 2008, 12:17pm | Radley Balko

Lots of interesting new information came out at a pre-trial hearing yesterday in Chesapeake, Virginia for Ryan Frederick, the man charged with capital murder for killing Det. Jarrod Shivers during a botched drug raid on Frederick's home last January.

To briefly catch you up: Police were acting on an informant's tip that Frederick was growing marijuana in his garage.  They found no plants, and only a misdemeanor amount of marijuana, which Frederick concedes was for personal use.  Both I and the Virginian-Pilot newspaper have since reported that the informant in the case, "Steven," and another man who also says he was a police informant, Renaldo Turnbull, illegally broke into Frederick's home three nights before the raid to look for probably cause, likely with the consent or at least the knowledge of the police.

Here's what we learned yesterday:

• The State is now conceding that the police informant in the case illegally broke into Frederick's home three nights before the raid.  Until now, they had either denied the connection or refused to comment.

• Frederick's attorney released an audio recording taken in a police car shortly after the raid.  In it, Frederick tries to explain that he was confused and frightened because someone had broken into his home earlier in the week.  A police detective replies, "We know that."  In a second recording, the detective says again, "First off, we know your house had been broken into. OK?"

• Yet according to the Virginian-Pilot, the State still insists that, "there is nothing whatsoever to suggest police knew at the time who broke in or who was involved. They said police learned months later that the parties involved included one of their informants." (Emphasis mine.)

This doesn't make any sense.  The affidavit the police filed to obtain the warrant notes that the police informant was in Frederick's home three nights before the raid.  That's exactly when the burglary happened.  The State is trying to argue that even though (a) the police knew their informant was in Frederick's house three nights before the raid, and (b) the police knew someone had broken into Frederick's home three nights before the raid, they apparently believed at the time that these two incidents were entirely coincidental, which is why they didn't include on the search warrant affidavit the fact that their informant illegally broke into Frederick's home to obtain probable cause. 

There are two options here.  The Chesapeake police are either corrupt, or they're naive to the point of incompetent.  The State apparently believes its case is better served by arguing the latter.

But there's one other niggling detail that throws the State's argument into a tailspin: Ryan Frederick never reported the break-in.  How, then, could the detective who questioned Frederick the night of the raid have known about it? 

• Despite all of this, Judge Marjorie A.T. Arrington still denied a defense motion to suppress the warrant.  Which if nothing else I guess gives Frederick an early issue to put in his appeal should he be convicted.

• There's now more than enough evidence to suggest that Chesapeake police had knowledge that the probable cause for the search warrant to Frederick's home was obtained illegally.  Moreover, Turnbull's interviews with me and with the Virginian-Pilot also raise the possibility that this wasn't the first time a Chesapeake police informant burglarized a private residence to search for probable cause.  According to Turnbull, this was common practice.  And the police encouraged it. 

It's past time for an outside investigation, preferably from the Justice Department.

• Special Prosecutor Paul Ebert subpoenaed Virginian-Pilot reporter John Hopkins, the other journalist to speak to Turnbull. Ebert never called Hopkins to the stand. But the possibility that he could have caused Judge Arrington to bar Hopkins from the courtroom.  Hopkins—who has covered this case as well as I've seen any journalist cover one of these raids—now won't be able to attend next month's trial, either.

• The plants the informant Steven claimed to have found in Frederick's home were never turned over to the police, and thus were never tested to confirm that they were actually marijuana. For all we know, they could still have been Japanese Maple saplings.  Turnbull says Steven turned the plants over to the police.  The State is either arguing that the police didn't know Turnbull and Steven removed the plants, or that they were aware, but never got around to asking Steven to turn them over.  Again, the choice here is corruption or incompetence.

That also means that this entire raid was conducted solely on the word of the informant Steven, a shady character who at the time was facing his own criminal charges for credit card fraud.  There were no controlled buys, and no significant surveillance.  The only corroborating investigation the police did were a few drive-bys of Frederick's home. According to the affidavit, that should have lessened their suspicion, because they noted no unusual activity.

Prior posts on the Frederick case here.

MORE: Chesapeake-area blogger Rick Caldwell writes:

Ryan Frederick is being harassed by the city of Chesapeake, through code enforcement. His sister has recently moved back to the area, having lived overseas for several years. Since her arrival, she has received numerous notices from the city's code enforcement division, regarding siding in disrepair, the condition of the pool in the back yard, and demanding the removal of two signs expressing support for Ryan from the front yard. The city has been sending these notices to Ryan at the jail as well, and is even threatening to sue over the pool.

Nice touch.

Now Playing at Reason.tv: Obama's New New Deal—as bad as the old New Deal?

Posted on December 16, 2008, 12:00pm

Nobel laureate economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman says he wants President-elect Barack Obama to enact "something like a new New Deal." Historian Douglas Brinkley has said that Obama could come to office with a "sweeping legislative agenda which will be Johnson-like or New Deal-like." An aide close to Obama told New York magazine that "A lot of people around Barack are reading books about FDR's first hundred days."

On the cusp of a deep economic recession, and with a staggering amount of bailout money being offered to struggling industries, pundits and political advisers are advocating that the incoming Obama administration construct a new New Deal. 

But is the popular narrative about the old New Deal—that Keynesian economics and top-down planning rescued America from the Great Depression—accurate? Reason.tv's Michael C. Moynihan talks to UCLA economist Lee Ohanian, who argues in work written with colleague Harold Cole, that the New Deal's massive intervention into the economy actually prolonged the economic crisis by seven years. 

"Obama's New New Deal" is written and produced by Michael C. Moynihan. Director of Photography is Dan Hayes.

Rolling Stone: Have you heard about the midnight regulations?

Posted on December 16, 2008, 10:07am | Nick Gillespie

Rolling Stone lays into George Bush for his "final F.U.," the passage of policies at the close of an administration known as "midnight regulations." Here's a nut graf, which includes a quote from reason columnist and Mercatus Center economist Veronique de Rugy, the leading scholar of the process:

Under the last-minute rules, which can be extremely difficult to overturn, loaded firearms would be allowed in national parks, uranium mining would be permitted near the Grand Canyon and many injured consumers would no longer be able to sue negligent manufacturers in state courts. Other rules would gut the Endangered Species Act, open millions of acres of wild lands to mining, restrict access to birth control and put local cops to work spying for the federal government.

"It's what we've seen for Bush's whole tenure, only accelerated," says Gary Bass, executive director of the nonpartisan group OMB Watch. "They're using regulation to cement their deregulatory mind-set, which puts corporate interests above public interests."

While every modern president has implemented last-minute regulations, Bush is rolling them out at a record pace—nearly twice as many as Clinton, and five times more than Reagan. "The administration is handing out final favors to its friends," says Véronique de Rugy, a scholar at George Mason University who has tracked six decades of midnight regulations. "They couldn't do it earlier—there would have been too many political repercussions. But with the Republicans having lost seats in Congress and the presidency changing parties, Bush has nothing left to lose."

More here.

In case you're wondering about the intellectual integrity of OMB Watch, return now to the thrilling days of yesteryear (2001), when Bill Clinton was setting a record for the number of midnight regulations. Did OMB Watch get its knickers in twist? Not exactly:

As the Clinton presidency winds down, industry groups and their allies in Congress are angrily accusing the administration of "midnight rulemaking" for a number of major new regulatory initiatives designed to protect public health, safety, and the environment. This criticism, however, is nothing more than propaganda—which unfortunately has generated a number of misleading stories by the press.

The whole idea of "midnight regulations" should seem ridiculous to anyone who understands the rulemaking process. Agency rulemakings are guided by a legislative framework, requiring various analyses, public notice and comment, etc. These requirements are extremely time-consuming; it is not unusual for major rules to take more than 10 years to develop. If an agency ignores its legislative requirements in developing a rule, it is sure to face a court challenge, and the rule will be thrown out.

Undoubtedly, the Clinton administration is trying to wrap up work before the president's term expires. But the regulations cited by industry have been worked on for years, and are a surprise to no one....

More here.

Which isn't to say the midnight regulations aren't a pernicious use of the system. In fact, that's precisely why they should be stopped, whether you agree or disagree with the outcome in any given case. As de Rugy explains in a Mercatus paper, virtually no midnight regs are repealed or substantially altered.

We should absolutely care about midnight regulations. While some midnight regulations may provide real benefits that exceed costs, most result in more harm than good and cater to special interests rather that the public interest. That is why they are hurried into effect without the usual checks and balances.

More on that here.

Why Are Traders the Last To Know When a Bubble Is Bursting?

Posted on December 16, 2008, 9:36am | Nick Gillespie

Former reason Editor in Chief Virginia Postrel has a fascinating column up at The Atlantic about how experimental economics helps to clarify why bubbles and crashes happen in the stock market. She concludes with two bits of sage advice as we look forward to a thousand years of bad returns:

For those of us who invest our money outside the lab, this research carries two implications.

First, beware of markets with too much cash chasing too few good deals. When the Federal Reserve cuts interest rates, it effectively frees up more cash to buy financial instruments. When lenders lower down-payment requirements, they do the same for the housing market. All that cash encourages investment mistakes.

Second, big changes can turn even experienced traders into ignorant novices. Those changes could be the rise of new industries like the dot-coms of the 1990s or new derivative securities created by slicing up and repackaging mortgages. I asked the Caltech economist Charles Plott, one of the pioneers of experimental economics, whether the recent financial crisis might have come from this kind of inexperience. "I think that's a good thesis," he said. With so many new instruments, "it could be that the inexperienced heads are not people but the organizations themselves. The organizations haven't learned how to deal with the risk or identify the risk or understand the risk."

More here.

Back in 2002, reason interviewed Vernon Smith, who won a Nobel Prize in economics for helping to create the field of experimental economics. Read all about it here.

Even Easier Money on the Way

Posted on December 16, 2008, 7:54am | Nick Gillespie

Central bank policymakers conclude a two-day meeting, with their decision on interest rates expected at 2:15 p.m. ET.

Economists believe the Fed to lower its benchmark funds rate to 0.5%, which would be the lowest level on record, from its current level of 1%.

"The Fed is going to throw everything they have to not only reverse market psychology, but reverse the downward decline in economic activity," said Peter Cardillo, analyst for Avalon Partners.

More here. Twas easy money that got us into this mess, say the experts, and it'll be even easier money that gets us out:

We've lived through an era of easy money, in which we were allowed and even encouraged to spend without limits; to borrow instead of save....

Once we get past the present emergency, which requires immediate new investments, we have to break that cycle of debt.

More here. Any sort of short-term stimulation has given way to something like high-voltage massage, and a huge chunk of that is still in the pipeline (hold out until January 20 or so).

Our long national nightmare of inflationary pressures, unemployment, and nationalization of key industries is just starting. In the meantime, transfer those credit card balances to 0 percent cards for as long as possible.

Update: Via Bloomberg comes this story outlining the Fed's strategery, including a fight within the organization itself:

The Fed's Open Market Committee will probably cut the benchmark rate in half, to 0.5 percent, according to the median of 84 forecasts in a Bloomberg News survey. The central bank may also signal plans to channel credit to businesses and consumers by further enlarging its $2.26 trillion of assets....

Fed policy makers disagree over the primary cause of the credit freeze. Central bank plans to buy $200 billion in consumer and small business loans and $600 billion in mortgage-backed securities suggest they consider rates remain high on home loans and credit cards because banks are unwilling to lend....

"My reading of current conditions is that bank lending is constrained more now by the supply of creditworthy borrowers than by the supply of bank capital," [Richmond Fed head Jeffrey] Lacker said in his [November 19] speech at the Cato Institute in Washington.

More here.

New at Reason: Jeffrey Rogers Hummel on the Federal Reserve's Monetary Binge

Posted on December 16, 2008, 7:00am

From our January issue, economist Jeffrey Rogers Hummel explains how the Fed engineered the most dramatic peacetime experiment in monetary and fiscal stimulus in U.S. history—without anyone noticing.

Read all about it here.

Reason Writers Around Town: Jesse Walker on Country Soul in the American South; Cathy Young on the Anti-American Russian Movie Strangers

Posted on December 15, 2008, 7:45pm | Nick Gillespie

Over at the University Bookman, reason Managing Editor Jesse Walker takes a look at Say It One Time for the Broken Hearted: Country Soul in the American South, Barney Hoskyns' look at the porous border between country and soul music. Read all about it here.

And over at The New Republic, Contributing Editor Cathy Young reviews the new Russian movie Strangers, a film every bit as anti-American as anything coming out of certain precincts in Hollywood. Read all about it here.

Matt Welch on Fox News' "Red Eye" Tonight, 3 A.M. Eastern

Posted on December 15, 2008, 6:59pm | Matt Welch

Topics under possible consideration for tonight's Greg Gutfeld show include Milorad "Don't Call Me Nick Gillespie" Blagojevich's hair, George "Still President" Bush's shoe-ducking skills, and David "Don't Call Me a Blind Coke-Lover" Paterson's sense of humor.

New York's Alright (If You Like Saxophones)

Posted on December 15, 2008, 6:59pm | Damon W. Root

Buried within Matt Harvey's long, slightly rambling New York Press feature, "The East Village Isn't What It Used to Be...And It Never Was," is an interesting little fight between lefty music critic Robert Christgau and fellow East Village resident Phil Hartman, the owner of the Two Boots pizza chain and the Two Boots Pioneer movie theater, which recently closed its doors. Hartman is an old punk rocker upset that the neighborhood has gone yuppie. Christgau agrees, but takes a shot at Hartman in the process:

"Mythology of the old East Village? Phil Hartman, the guy that owns Two Boots?" Robert Christgau, "Dean of Rock Critics," growls at me over the phone as if I just told him Kiss was the greatest band ever.

[...]

"What a load of horseshit," Christgau says. "I'm not putting him down. I like the theater, and it's all fine with me, but he's not protecting anything." I've touched a raw nerve in the old curmudgeon-who maintains a "militant anti-nostalgia" stance-and he presses on. "That kind of bohemian territoriality is always nonsense. People who lived in the Village in the'20s were actually nostalgic about the Village of the pre-World War I period. Look it up."

That's a good point. For every dozen partisians of late 1970s CBGB's, for instance, you'll find more than a few of us who argue that CB's saw its greatest days in the late '80s. Either way, it's nostalgia for a romanticized past. But for all the sense that Christgau made, he promptly ruined it with this:

"No, I'm much more interested in real estate than I am in this mythology shit." He wants the mom-and-pop stores back, the newspaper and coffee in its blue Greco container. "The economy, absolutely," he says. Believing the crash might help bring things around, he adds, "But Marx is my man, and that's what I believe."

Talk about "a load of horseshit." Here's a guy who has spent his career writing about pop music—an art form that particularly thrives in market-friendly societies—apparently hoping that an economic catastrophe will make New York a better place to live. Maybe he should talk to Cuban jazz legend Paquito D'Rivera, who explained to reason.tv that he had to leave Communist Cuba in order to pursue his dream of being a musician:

Free Speech for Clunky Writers!

Posted on December 15, 2008, 6:12pm | Michael C. Moynihan

Sherry Jones's historical novel The Jewel of Medina, whose main character is Mohammad's (PBUH) nine-year-old bride A'isha—discussed on Hit and Run here, here, and here—was withdrawn by Random House earlier this year after a University of Texas academic raised concerns that its depiction of the girl was "pornographic" and might offend Muslims. Well, it has now been published in the United States by Beaufort Books, a small, New York-based publishing house, and the author has received nothing but a bad review from the New York Times. Here is Lorraine Adams, quibbling with an interview Jones gave about her interest in Mohammad's wives:

In a Q. and A. included in "The Jewel of Medina," Jones explains that she first became interested in A'isha in 2002 after the American invasion of Afghanistan. "I discovered that the Prophet Muhammad had multiple wives and concubines. Being unable to find very much information about any of them made me want to tell their stories to the world." Most Muslims would be surprised to hear that these women's stories were little known - they've been an object of scholarly debate and political maneuvering since the seventh century. They're also firmly entrenched in contemporary Muslim popular culture.

It seems clear that Jones is explaining that this information was not well-known in the West, and I suspect she would acknowledge that many, if not most, in the Muslim world are familiar with the story. But this doesn't satisfy Adams, who seems unaware that The Jewel of Medina is a novelization of A'isha's story. Thus, the review focuses on the book's "inaccuracies":

Jones alters early Islamic versions of A'isha's life - the first of which was written 150 years after Muhammad's death - in relatively few aspects. She transforms A'isha into a sword fighter. She makes her a precocious military strategist. She depicts her kissing a man she was briefly engaged to prior to Muhammad, her accused partner in the adultery episode. The record doesn't mention kissing, and the man was not engaged to A'isha. Jones also inserts a Turkish custom - the choosing of a harem's premier wife, or hatun - unknown in seventh­-century Arabia. 

To Adams, Jones's book is pulp fiction—she cites two clunky sentences to bolster her case—and is, therefore, unworthy of our attention. Fine. But she then takes this argument further, arguing that because she considers it a bad book, one that moderately transforms the Islamic version of A'isha's life for the purposes of a novel, one that doesn't "enlighten the Western reader," it should also be ignored by "free-speech advocates." Seriously:

An inexperienced, untalented author has naïvely stepped into an intense and deeply sensitive intellectual argument. She has conducted enough research to reimagine the accepted versions of Muhammad's marriage to A'isha, thus offending the religious audience, but not nearly enough to enlighten the ordinary Western reader. Should free-speech advocates champion "The Jewel of Medina"? In the American context, the answer is unclear. The Constitution protects pornography and neo-Nazi T-shirts, but great writers don't generally applaud them. If Jones's work doesn't reach those repugnant extremes, neither does it qualify as art. It is telling that PEN, the international association of writers that works to advance literature and defend free expression, has remained silent on the subject of this ­novel. Their stance seems just about right.

Red Star Over Bethlehem

Posted on December 15, 2008, 5:32pm | Jesse Walker

Merry Christmas, comrades.

The Litigatable Lightness of Cigarettes

Posted on December 15, 2008, 3:14pm | Jacob Sullum

Today the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Federal Cigarette Labeling and Advertising Act does not pre-empt a Maine lawsuit that accuses tobacco companies of misleadingly touting "light" cigarettes as safer than regular cigarettes. The 1965 law, which required cigarette manufacturers to put health warnings on their packages, also barred any other "requirement or prohibition based on smoking and health...imposed under State law with respect to the advertising or promotion of any cigarettes." The five-justice majority concluded (PDF) that the Maine Unfair Trade Practices Act, as applied to the marketing of "light" cigarettes, does not amount to such a requirement or prohibition.

As I've said before, the "light" cigarette fraud (assuming it does in fact amount to that) is one in which the federal government has been entangled from the beginning. This case also illustrates a problem created by the labeling law: Both the warnings themselves and the clause that has been read to shield the cigarette manufacturers from liability have encouraged them to be less honest than they otherwise would have been compelled to be.

Damon Root noted the oral arguments in this case a couple of months ago.

New at Reason: Brian Doherty Interviews Conservative Strategist Richard Viguerie

Posted on December 15, 2008, 3:00pm

Over the past 40 years, conservative strategist Richard Viguerie has had a hand in everything from the Moral Majority to the development and success of right-wing direct mail advertising. Senior Editor Brian Doherty recently spoke with Viguerie about what the near future holds—and should hold—for American conservatism.

Read all about it here.

Is Selling People Porn Worse Than Robbing Them?

Posted on December 15, 2008, 1:56pm | Jacob Sullum

The Justice Department's Obscenity Prosecution Task Force proudly announces that it has obtained a 33-month prison sentence for Loren Jay Adams, an Indianapolis man who was found guilty of "transporting obscene matters through the U.S. mail" for "sale or distribution by means of interstate commerce"—a.k.a. selling consenting adults videos featuring consenting adults having sex. The story comes courtesy of Nicolas Martin, who notes that it appeared in the Indianapolis Star the day after an article about Scott Fross, a former Westfield, Indiana, police lieutenant who confessed to bribery—a.k.a. shaking down decidedly nonconsenting Hispanic motorists. Fross stole a total of $1,000 by stopping drivers and threatening to arrest them unless they gave him money. He was originally charged with several counts of armed robbery in addition to bribery, but prosecutors dropped those charges as part of a plea agreement. On Friday, Fross was sentenced to one year of "home detention" (during which he will be allowed to leave home for work and school), followed by five years of probation. Fross, his lawyer explained, had no criminal record and showed "remorse for the shakedowns." By contrast, Adams, the proprietor of Hard2Find Videos, had been convicted on state obscenity charges in 2003 and was an unrepentant smut peddler.

Second Amendment Book Bomb Day

Posted on December 15, 2008, 1:25pm | Nick Gillespie

From the Independent Institute:

December 15 marks America's Bill of Rights Day, the anniversary of the ratification of the Bill of Rights of the U.S. Constitution. To commemorate this event, we have created the Second Amendment Book Bomb, a unique and powerful way to communicate the importance of the Bill of Rights' Second Amendment for the protection of liberty. With your help, we can launch constitutional rights to the top of national book bestseller lists, making a loud and clear statement that Second Amendment rights are inalienable!...

Let's make the Second Amendment Book Bomb a publishing phenomenon so great that even the mainstream media will have to take notice. Let's spread The Founders' Second Amendment so far and wide that Americans across the political spectrum, and all walks of life, will be discussing the Second Amendment in every possible venue.

With your help, we can make Stephen Halbrook's book #1 on the New York Times bestseller list. To make this happen, please pledge to buy at least one copy of the book before or on the December 15th Second Amendment Book Bomb date (or even afterward, if this is your only option), and then spread the word to others. Let's make this the most amazing and explosive event ever on the right to bear arms, and declare in no uncertain terms that the Second Amendment will be around for a very long time to come.

For more information, go here.

And if you're ordering books about the Second Amendment, make sure to snag a copy of Brian Doherty's excellent Gun Control on Trial.

New at Reason: Dave Weigel on Libertarian Politics in Obama's America

Posted on December 15, 2008, 12:00pm

From our January issue, David Weigel looks at how Washington's libertarian activists and think tankers plan to fight for liberty during the Obama administration.

Read all about it here.

Unmutual at UC Irvine

Posted on December 15, 2008, 11:41am | Matt Welch

Remember the case of UC Irvine professor Alexander McPherson, the refusenik who lost his lab-supervisory duties because he refused to submit to California's mandatory-by-law sexual harassment training? Now it turns out that university officials are going the extra mile by notifying his funders that the protein crystallization specialist is officially noncompliant.

"The point is it's an inanity, and they're trying to kill my grant because I won't participate in that inane process," McPherson told The Scientist. "Does that make sense? Not to me."

The Scientist also unearthed this nifty letter [PDF] from a UCI provost detailing all the marvelous punishments that await all managers who refuse to be trained.

* Removal of supervisory responsibilities over TAs, RAs and Postdocs (already in place at the Irvine campus).
* Delaying implementation of merit increases or promotions, without changing the effective date (i.e., once training is received the merit increase or promotion would be retroactive).
* Reporting the names of non-compliant faculty to Chancellors, EVCs, Deans and Regents.
* Freezing budgets of departments with non-compliant faculty.
* Denying internet access.

Exarchist Autonomous Zone

Posted on December 15, 2008, 11:39am | Jesse Walker

After more than a week of street fighting, the riots in Greece have subsided but have not yet ended. The violent protests, set off after a cop shot a teenager, have been led by the "make total destroy" wing of the anarchist movement, which apparently is headquartered in the Athens neighborhood of Exarchia.

I don't have much to say about the riots themselves, other than the obvious comments (police brutality is bad, retaliation against innocent people and their property is bad, "anarchists" should not be doling out collective punishment, etc.). Instead I'll highlight the curious things I'm reading about Exarchia, described here by Reuters' Dina Kyriakidou:

Exarchia is a haunt of artists and left-wing intellectuals. Favoured by lawyers, architects and publishers, is it one of the city’s most charming neighbourhoods.

It is also one of its most violent, a stomping ground for anarchists, drug addicts and anyone who likes to challenge authority -- a tradition many say stems from the opposition to the 1967-1974 military junta.

"What others call a riot, we call a street party," one of my neighbours once said.

About two years ago, a public order minister acknowledged it was too dangerous to send officers into the area, which has defied decades of attempts by socialist and conservative governments alike to bring it under control.

Hold on. Scroll back. Anarchists, artists, and lawyers?

The BBC claims that "Greece's anarchists regard the quarter of Exarchia as their fortress and they frequently lure police into ambushes so they can attack them with rocks and fire bombs." The Christian Science Monitor calls the neighborhood a "dense warren of concrete apartment buildings" where "clashes between police and radicals are common."

I don't know how much of this is exaggeration. Roderick Long, who visited the area earlier this year, chuckles at the phrase "dense warren of concrete," noting that "if all that means is that there are lots of narrow streets criss-crossing between tall concrete buildings, okay, that would describe most of the city." Here's the description of the place he wrote in June:

I then walked through Exarkheia/Exarhia, which is supposed to be the "anarchist" neighbourhood of Athens; I don't know much about Greek anarchism (at least subsequent to Diogenes of Oinoanda), but the shops did seem marginally more bohemian and the appearance of the residents exhibited a mild hippie or punk or goth sensibility (though far less so than in, say, the Little Five Points area of Atlanta). Surely there's more to it than this?

Apparently so.

Big Apple Tax Bite

Posted on December 15, 2008, 11:23am | Katherine Mangu-Ward

Growing up, there was a policy in the Mangu-Ward household known as the "tax bite." When mom or dad—mostly dad—helped a kid open a package or bottle, they'd take a cut. A single potato chip, a sip of Coke, a bite of ice cream—each vanished as part of the brutal "tax bite" regime. This is probably why I became a libertarian.

This week, New York is discussing instituting its own tax bite:

Gov. Paterson, as part of a $121 billion budget to be unveiled Tuesday, will propose an "obesity tax" of about 15% on nondiet drinks.

This means a Diet Coke might sell for a $1 - even as the same size bottle of its calorie-rich alter ego would go for $1.15.

People. How many time must we go over this? Soda doesn't make you fat. Calories make you fat. Yes, soda contains calories. But so do all other foods. The fine folks at Coca-Cola are powerful indeed, but they are not single-handedly making Americans chunky, and it's absurd to pretend that they're somehow more culpable than the makers of all-natural peanut butter, or high-end truffles. Or, you know, hot dogs.

Sen. Tom Coburn on Goverment Waste, Including Loan Guarantees to Spanky's Liquor World and Pistol Pete's Beef 'n Beer

Posted on December 15, 2008, 11:15am | Nick Gillespie

As the budget deficit soared, infrastructure crumbled and the economy tanked, the federal government this year spent $300,000 for a California skateboarding park, $188,000 to research Maine lobsters and $3.2 million on a spy blimp the military doesn't want, according to a new report by the Senate's self-styled spending scourge.

The report, to be released today by Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., lists more than $1.3 billion of what it calls wasteful projects in 2008....

• Various federal agencies spent $167,290 for portrait paintings of Cabinet officers.

• The federal Institute of Museums and Library Sciences awarded a $3,905 grant to the public library in Westfield, Ind., for the purchase of a Nintendo Wii console, a television, a camcorder and games.

• The Agriculture Department gave $298,068 to an Idaho farmer to help him advertise and market his specialty potatoes sold mainly to high-end restaurants.

• The Small Business Administration guaranteed $82 million in loans for 331 liquor stores, including Spanky's Liquor World and Pistol Pete's Beef N' Beer.

• Five members of Congress spent nearly $22,000 to stay three nights at a luxury hotel on the Galapagos Islands, the South American archipelago where Charles Darwin mulled his theory of evolution. That figure doesn't include the cost of the Air Force jet placed at their disposal.

More here.

Go here for the spending-tracking site Coburn and then-Sen. Barack Obama created in 2006.

And click below to watch Coburn talk to Reason.tv about how earmarks destroy the integrity of the Congress and the federal government:

Recently at Reason.tv: Where's Sock Puppet's Bailout? and Other Tales of D.C. Largesse

Posted on December 15, 2008, 10:35am | Nick Gillespie

The auto bailout may be dead for the moment, so in the meantime watch the late, unlamented mascot of the tech-bubble crash coming begging to Washington for some free money.

Businessweek has a fun wrapup of poetry, video, and more related to the bailout(s) here.

Reason.tv on what you need to know and fear about the bailout.

Ain't That a Shame

Posted on December 15, 2008, 10:20am | Radley Balko

Pat Boone, "descendant of the legendary pioneer Daniel Boone, top-selling recording artist, star of his own hit TV series, movie star, Broadway headliner, and best-selling author," says America should be be on alert, because the hate-fueled violence we saw in Mumbai last month could happen here.  And not necessarily just from militant Islamists, but also from . . . the queers.

Have you not seen the awful similarity between what happened in Mumbai and what's happening right now in our cities?

Oh, I know the homosexual "rights" demonstrations haven't reached the same level of violence, but I'm referring to the anger, the vehemence, the total disregard for law and order and the supposed rights of their fellow citizens. I'm referring to the intolerance, the hate seething in the words, faces and actions of those who didn't get their way in a democratic election, and who proclaim loudly that they will get their way, no matter what the electorate wants!

Hate is hate, no matter where it erupts. And hate, unbridled, will eventually and inevitably boil into violence.

[...]

What troubles me so deeply, and should trouble all thinking Americans, is that there is a real, unbroken line between the jihadist savagery in Mumbai and the hedonistic, irresponsible, blindly selfish goals and tactics of our homegrown sexual jihadists. Hate is hate, no matter where it erupts. And by its very nature, if it's not held in check, it will escalate into acts vile, violent and destructive. 

I suppose that would explain all the recent news stories about roving gangs of homosexuals beating straight people to death because of their sexual preference.

And This Time We Didn't Even Get New Orleans!

Posted on December 15, 2008, 9:13am | Matt Welch

How big is the $8.5 trillion bailout? According to James Bianco of the Chicago-based analysis firm Bianco Research, when you adjust previous mammoth Washington expenditures for inflation, the 2008 bailout dwarfs them all. Combined.

• Marshall Plan: Cost: $12.7 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $115.3 billion
• Louisiana Purchase: Cost: $15 million, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $217 billion
• Race to the Moon: Cost: $36.4 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $237 billion
• S&L Crisis: Cost: $153 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $256 billion
• Korean War: Cost: $54 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $454 billion
• The New Deal: Cost: $32 billion (Est), Inflation Adjusted Cost: $500 billion (Est)
• Invasion of Iraq: Cost: $551b, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $597 billion
• Vietnam War: Cost: $111 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $698 billion
• NASA: Cost: $416.7 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $851.2 billion

TOTAL: $3.92 trillion

Hat tip: Fred Unger.

UPDATE/EXPLAINER: Re: this comment, by quoting Bianco's numbers I am not claiming that each one of them is accurate. Also, if you follow that first link, you will get to this Nov. 30 chart, which breaks down the $8.5 trillion by "maximum commitment" and "tapped so far." A further, link-rich breakdown of the bailout so far can be found over at the Reason Foundation's Out of Control blog.   

Bush Shoe-wn a Good Time in Baghdad

Posted on December 15, 2008, 8:02am | Nick Gillespie

I'm not sure this incident is any worse than simply having to talk to Helen Thomas, but here's the 411 on the Baghdad shoe-throwing incident:

Iraqi journalist hurled his shoes and an insult at George W. Bush, without hitting him, as the US president was shaking hands with the Iraqi premier at his Baghdad office on Sunday.

As the two leaders met in Nuri al-Maliki's private office, a journalist sitting in the third row jumped up, shouting: "It is the farewell kiss, you dog," and threw his shoes one after the other towards Bush.

Maliki made a protective gesture towards the US president, who ducked and was not hit.

The journalist, Muntazer al-Zaidi from Al-Baghdadia channel which broadcasts from Cairo, was frogmarched from the room by security staff, an AFP journalist said.

Soles of shoes are considered the ultimate insult in Arab culture. After Saddam Hussein's statue was toppled in Baghdad in April 2003, many onlookers beat the statue's face with their soles.

Some Iraqi journalists stood up to apologise.

The White House said Bush ducked to avoid the first shoe, while the second narrowly missed the president.

Bush said: "Thanks for apologising on behalf of the Iraqi people. It doesn't bother me. If you want the facts, it was a size 10 shoe that he threw".

Playing down the incident, the president later added: "I don't know what the guy's cause is... I didn't feel the least bit threatened by it."

One question: Did the guy throw the very shoes he was wearing? Or had he brought a spare? I suspect that footwear will be the least of his problems for a while.

More here.

The Only Problem Being a Real Estate Broker for Squatters Is That 6 Percent of Nothing Is Nothing

Posted on December 15, 2008, 7:47am | Nick Gillespie

If this guy had been doing this in the Bowery in the 1970s, there would be whole punk operas (granted, lasting only six minutes total) written about him: 

Max Rameau delivers his sales pitch like a pro. "All tile floor!" he says during a recent showing. "And the living room, wow! It has great blinds."

But in nearly every other respect, he is unlike any real estate agent you've ever met. He is unshaven, drives a beat-up car and wears grungy cut-off sweat pants. He also breaks into the homes he shows. And his clients don't have a dime for a down payment.

Rameau is an activist who has been executing a bailout plan of his own around Miami's empty streets: He is helping homeless people illegally move into foreclosed homes.

"We're matching homeless people with people-less homes," he said with a grin.

More here.

Hat tip: Michelle Shinghal

New at Reason: Steve Chapman on Why Obama Took So Long to Renounce Blagojevich

Posted on December 15, 2008, 7:00am

"I was appalled and disappointed by what we heard in those transcripts," President-elect Barack Obama said Thursday about the documented misconduct of Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich. That's right. He was appalled. So why did it take him 48 hours to realize it?

Read all about it here. 

Recently at Reason.tv: Bjorn Lomborg explains how to get our priorities right on climate change and other global issues

Posted on December 14, 2008, 10:34am | Nick Gillespie

At Reason's 40th anniversary event, held in Hollywood on November 14 and 15, "Skeptical Environmentalist" Bjorn Lomborg kicked things off with an engrossing 30-minute presentation about man-made climate change and the best ways to prioritize and solve global problems ranging from water shortages to poverty to malaria.

The author most recently of Cool It, Lomborg is also the force behind The Copenhagen Consensus, a path-breaking approach toward effecting efficient solutions to the planet's most pressing issues. "At the end of the day," says Lomborg, "this is about saying, Yes, global warming is real. It's often massively exaggerated, which is why we need smarter solutions.... Let's pick them smart, rather than stupidly. And also, let's remember that they are many other problems in the world that we can fix so much cheaper and do so much more good....If this is really a question about doing good in the world, then let's do real good-and not just make ourselves feel good about what we do."

Go here for Reason magazine's recent interview with Lomborg, who has been named one of the "100 the most influential people on the planet" by Time, a "global leader for tomorrow" by the World Economic Forum, and "one of the 50 people who could save the planet" by The Guardian.

For Reason's coverage of Lomborg, go here. For our environmental coverage, go here.

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For an audio podcast, go here.