Weekly Hit & Run Archive 2006 January 1-31

Yesterday, after Pat Robertson's inspired remarks about Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's stroke as divine retribution for giving up the Israeli settlements in Gaza, I asked if we can all finally agree that Robertson is beyond the pale. A lot of us, apparently, can: the White House has condemned Pat's remarks as "wholly inappropriate and offensive," and Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention's ethics and religious liberty commission, says he is "stunned and appalled that Pat Robertson would claim to know the mind of God concerning whether particular tragic events ... were the judgments of God." But tonight, I was pretty stunned myself when former Congressman-turned-Fox News talk show host John Kasich, subbing for Bill O'Reilly on "The O'Reilly Factor," offered a sort-of defense of Robertson, whom he judged to be guilty only of poor timing.

After offering some mild criticism of Robertson while questioning Christian radio talk show host Janet Folger, Kasich inquired of his other guest, Fordham University media studies chairman Paul Levinson:

John Kasich: Your feelings about this, Mr. Levinson? I mean -- is the media sort of grabbing onto everything Pat says and tries to blow it up? I mean, you saw his statement, right? It wasn't a statement out of some mean guy -- he claims that he was quoting the book of Joel, and if you read the Book of Joel and what it says here -- he's basically saying, it wasn't him, it was something he quoted out of the scripture.

Paul Levinson: I have an enormous amount of respect for the scripture, but when people in our modern age try to apply it literally in a fanatical way, it leads to graceless, absurd statements such as Pat Robertson made. If you think about the fact -- the only other public figure who' commented about Sharon's dying being appropriate in any way is the President of Iran, who's a fundamentalist Islamic nutcase.

John Kasich: (chuckles) You're not trying to compare Pat Robertson to the -- this lunatic over in Iran, are you?

Janet Folger: I hope not.

Paul Levinson: I'm comparing two people who are fundamentalists and who don't seem to have a modern view of the world -- who don't seem to understand that the Prime Minister shouldn't be judged according to scripture when he's on his deathbed.

John Kasich: So let me ask you this, then. I mean -- are you saying that what is written in the Bible cannot be applied today? You said that, you know, what we're doing is trying to apply things too literally -- don't you think that in America today, we don't apply it at all, too much of the time?

Paul Levinson: No, I think we apply it just fine in the United States.

John Kasich: Yeah, but when we look at --

Paul Levinson: We have a diversified --

John Kasich: Yeah, but when we look at problems of character, integrity -- whether it's professional athletes, pop culture, whatever -- aren't you basically saying that, you know, let's modernize the whole book? And I think what Pat Robertson is saying, rightly or wrongly, is -- that book shouldn't be modernized. It ought to reflect what that Old Testament says.

Paul Levinson: I'm not saying that the Old Testament is wrong. I'm saying that the literal application of it to a Prime Minister who is trying to bring peace to his region when he is on his deathbed is a very inappropriate statement.

John Kasich: Fair point. Now, Janet, what I need to know from you is, when Pat does things like this or says things like this -- and I think you would agree, it wasn't the appropriate time. Agree with that? It was just not the right time to be talking about this.

Janet Folger: Look, the time you make statements like that is when you can do something about it -- don't divide the land.

John Kasich: So, inappropriate time. The question is, does Pat sort of undermine the movement when he makes a statement like this -- that he might -- which he says was taken out of context or whatever -- does it undermine the movement, the Christian movement? People say, I'm not gonna listen to that.

Janet Folger: You know -- again, I'm not gonna be another voice to bully up or beat up on PR. He's free to defend himself and he's very capable of it --

John Kasich: Yeah, but I want to know what you think.

Janet Folger: -- but I don't think we should blame him for reading from the bible. And I'll be honest with you -- the way I read the Bible, it talks about -- nations that bless Israel are gonna be blessed, nations that curse Israel are gonna be cursed -- and I'll be honest with you, where I worry about the judgment being cast is that I think we need to look in the mirror -- because we're one of the groups, the nations that actually strong-armed the prime minister into giving up land, making Israel less secure. And --

John Kasich: I got you. Now -- People for the American Way, professor -- you know -- against flag desecration -- they're not like some mainstream group, you know -- they're way out there. It's like they grab everything that Pat says, they monitor everything he says. You're in communications -- have we gotten to the point now in America where, with the blogs and the 24-hour news cycle, you can't say anything? It's going to be analyzed, overanalyzed, taken out of context? Don't you think that's fair?

Paul Levinson: No. Criticism of what public figures say is a crucial part of dialogue in a democratic society, which we have. We don't live in a totalitarian state where religious or political leaders can say whatever they please and they're beyond criticism. Pat Robertson chose to say this in a public forum and I think that he's fair game for criticism. It's not the end of the world that he said it -- I don't think he should be executed, I'm not a fanatic myself --

John Kasich: Yeah, and I wouldn't compare him --

Paul Levinson: Well, it's an indication of what happens you apply in a fanatical, fundamentalist way --

John Kasich: Look, I don't think it's a fanatical way -- it's a reading of the Old Testament -- he has his view, to label it somehow, you know, off the deep end, I don't think is fair. Janet, what I'll say to you is, I know Pat, I like him very much, he's been a great leader. He's got to be a little more careful with how he says things and when he says things.

(The complete transcript of the segment can be found here.)

So, let me see if I'm getting this straight. What Pat Robertson says cannot be labeled as fanatical or "off the deep end," because his views are rooted in his reading of the Old Testament. And, of course, you can't possibly compare him to "this lunatic over in Iran," whose views are rooted in his reading of the Koran.

And no, I'm not saying that there's no difference between Pat Robertson and fundamentalist Islamic fanatics. Pat isn't urging people to strap on explosives and go blow up the infidels, nor is he calling for unchaste women to be stoned to death. But, just out of curiosity, if Pat did call for the stoning of adulteresses, would Kasich consider that "fanatical" and "off the deep end," or not? After all, that's based on a very literal reading of the Old Testament.

There's been a lot of talk in recent years about how religiously based opinions have the same right to be heard in the public square as opinions rooted in secular ideas. That's all good and fine; I certainly don't think that someone's position on any given issue is illegitimate because it's influenced by religion, and I think that a lot of the time, secular liberals have been dismissive of certain conservative views for no other reason. But if religiously based ideas should have equal access to the public square, they should not be off-limits to harsh criticism and even ridicule, any more than secular ideologies. If you can spout vicious nonsense and then have it excused on the grounds that it's your interpretation of the Bible, then maybe you don't belong in a public forum.

And how pathetic that, instead of firmly repudiating the odious Pat Robertson, Kasich should try to shoot the messenger and bizarrely suggest that it's unfair for the statements of public leaders to be analyzed too much.

(Cross-posted at The Y Files)

The Drug War Chronicle reports that Tennessee has started treating meth offenders like sex offenders, entering their names and locations into an online database so they can be properly shunned. The main rationale for registering sex offenders, as opposed to other felons, is that they are especially likely to commit new crimes. As I've argued, there is little basis for that assumption, but at least the idea is to protect people (children in particular) from predatory criminals. The meth offender registry, by contrast, is simply "another tool to help fight the war on meth." It cannot even be defended as a way to identify neighbors who are apt to set up potentially hazardous meth labs in their homes, since it includes people convicted merely of possession.

Kerry Howley talks to blogger-cum-novelist Ana Marie Cox (AKA Wonkette) about D.C. scandals, the "special olympics of sex," and her new book Dog Days.

The Donald & Paula Smith Family Foundation

Present a debate

The Politics of Science:
Are politicians giving us the right prescriptions?

Featuring
Chris Mooney
Seed Magazine
Author: The Republican War on Science

Ronald Bailey
Reason Magazine
Author: Liberation Biology

Wesley J. Smith
Discovery Institute
Author: Consumer's Guide to A Brave New World

Moderator
Harvey Shapiro
Contributing Editor, Institutional Investor

From embryonic stem cell research to the fate of Terry Schiavo, science has given us a whole new set of political issues. Politicians are now compelled to have a position on everything from performance enhancing drugs in sports to global warming. In taking these positions, are politicians listening to the scientific community or are they responding to the interest groups essential to their election? Do politicians strike the right balance between the desire for progress and ethical implications of that progress? What role should elected officials and government play in encouraging desirable scientific research? Does science education accurately reflect the scientific consensus? Is science too important to be left to the scientists?

January 10, 2006
6:30 P.M. Prompt
(Free and open to the public - Reception to follow)

The Graduate Center
The City University of New York
365 Fifth Avenue, New York
(Corner of 34th Street & 5th Avenue)

RSVP by going here.

Ronald Bailey surveys the struggle for the soul (or at least brain) of science.

The always entertaining, if wacky, religious broadcaster Pat Robertson declared yesterday that God smote Ariel Sharon for giving away the Gaza Strip to the Palestinians. CNN reports:

"He was dividing God's land, and I would say, 'Woe unto any prime minister of Israel who takes a similar course to appease the [European Union], the United Nations or the United States of America,'" Robertson told viewers of his long-running television show, "The 700 Club."

"God says, 'This land belongs to me, and you'd better leave it alone,'" he said.

Robertson leaves unexplained why God didn't bother smiting the leaders of those Saracens and other Muslims that began occupying the eastern littoral of the Mediterranean Sea 12 centuries ago.

The Illinois Gaming Commission may start requiring casinos to card customers and check their names against a list of problem gamblers who have asked to be stopped from betting. People on the list who are caught gambling already can be tossed out, charged with trespassing, and stripped of their winnings, but casinos don't have to do systematic ID checks.

The problem with this policy is not so much that people are being prevented from gambling--they have, after all, volunteered for such paternalistic treatment--but that other people are being forced to do the preventing, which imposes costs on them and (given the bottlenecks that universal ID checks are apt to create) their customers. It's fine if someone wants to sign up for drug treatment or fat camp, in essence paying to put obstacles between themselves and their temptations, but no one should be legally compelled to provide those services. By the logic of the Illinois Gaming Commission, liquor stores, donut shops, and porn purveyors also could be forced to keep track of their customers to make sure none of them is prone to excess and regret.

[Thanks to Mike Alissi for the link.]

Slate's Jack Shafer says don't bother asking the Wall Street Journal op-ed page, even though the section ran a scathing "Who Is...?" series pillorying Clinton administration cronies large and small back in the day.

All the traditional themes that populate an outraged Journal editorial can be counted. An out-of-control majority party; dishonest lobbyists; a president who looks the other way; kickbacks and bribes; "shells" laundering political money; influence peddling; corrupt members of Congress; self-dealing; campaign flimflammery; questionable junkets; colorful scoundrels; principals in the scam copping pleas (Abramoff and Michael Scanlon); well-known politicians and political operators being implicated; and tendrils reaching into the White House.

Alas, no scathing "Who Is Jack Abramoff?" editorial has appeared on the Journal page.

Whole thing here.

My question re: Abramoff is whether he represents business as usual or whether he's a mutant lobbyist, a homo superior among homo sapiens (to use Marvel comics lingo). Is he Magneto or, say, Batroc the Leaper, a dime-a-dozen superbaddie with a cheesy mustache and the embarrassing "power" of kicking people really hard?

For info on who Abramoff was throwing money at, go here.

Update: As bubba notes below, the Journal did run an anti-Abramoff editorial today. A snippet:

the Abramoff scandal wouldn't resonate nearly as much with the public if it didn't fit a GOP pattern of becoming cozy with Beltway mores. The party that swept to power on term limits, spending restraint and reform has become the party of incumbency, 6,371 highway-bill "earmarks," and K Street. And it's no defense to say that Democrats would do the same. Of course Democrats would, but then they've always claimed to be the party of government. If that's what voters want, they'll choose the real thing.

Whole thing here.

This week the D.C. Council gave final approval to Washington's smoking ban, which applies to restaurants right away and to bars beginning in January 2007. Hookah bars and any business that gets 10 percent or more of its revenue from tobacco sales (not including cigarette purchased from machines) are exempt. So in the city of Washington, unlike the state, people will still be able to smoke cigars in cigar lounges.

In New Jersey, meanwhile, a smoking ban that has already been passed by the state Senate is likely to win approval from the state Assembly on Monday. The ban does not apply to casino floors, cigar lounges, or tobacconists. Bar owners are upset about the casino exemption. "Essentially," one told A.P., "the smokers are being bribed: If you want to smoke, you have to gamble."

The Warren Commission said it was a lone gunman, the Rolling Stones sang that it was you and me, Oliver Stone pretty much fingered LBJ.

Now a German filmmaker claims it was Castro:

"We found direct witnesses, former officers of the Cuban state security, who knew about the contacts with Lee Harvey Oswald," [Wilfried] Huismann, who spent three years researching the film, "Rendezvous With Death," told Deutschlandfunk radio in an interview on Wednesday.

(Note: German Funk Radio? Is that available via satellite?) Whole thing here.

But wait, in the recent Kennedy assassination book, A Farewell to Justice, Joan Mellen digs through recently declassified docs and presents compelling evidence that Oswald was a CIA, FBI, and Customs asset--and a hyper-anti-commie in deep cover. (Full disclosure: Mellen is a former professor of mine.)

So which is it? Oswald as patsy or gunman? And what did Peter "I want to send a Candygram" Lawford know?

Just as he leaves office, Virginia's Governor Mark Warner finally got around to ordering that the DNA of a man executed for murder be retested by modern methods to see whether or not he did it. The executed man, Roger Coleman, maintained his innocence up until his death. Reason argued that this testing should have been done long ago.

The Washington Post reports:

Virginia Gov. Mark R. Warner has ordered DNA testing that could prove the guilt or innocence of a man executed in 1992, marking the first time a governor has asked for genetic testing of someone put to death.

The analysis, which began last month, comes in the case of Roger K. Coleman, a convicted killer whose proclamations of innocence -- including on the night of his execution -- raised concern nationwide over whether the wrong man died in the electric chair.

Warner's decision marks a dramatic turnaround in Virginia, where officials and judges have routinely refused to reexamine evidence in criminal cases after a defendant's conviction and have been steadfast in their denials of post-execution requests. Results of the Coleman tests, which are being conducted by scientists in a Toronto laboratory, could be announced before Warner (D) leaves office next week.

Justice needs to be done whatever the fallout for the national debate over the death penalty. Shame on those who stood in the way of this step for so long.

An anti-gay Baptist pastor in Oklahoma has been arrested for "offering to engage in an act of lewdness" after propositioning a plainclothes cop for oral sex. (He was, he says, "in the area pastoring to police," which may suggest a novel interpretation of that whole "eat of my body" line.) Sure, there's a certain amount of poetic-justice schadenfreude here, but my first thought was: "What kind of sick dystopia makes it a crime to offer someone a hummer?"

I'm second to none in my enjoyment and praise of the Washington Times, which is not only inexpensive (like $20 a year for home delivery) but always filled with offbeat, under-reported, and interesting stories. When it's not putting gay marriage in scare quotes and running crap like this.

And this post-Modern Language Association annual conference piece by columnist Suzanne Fields, who gulpingly (her concept, not mine) confesses to having earned a literature Ph.D. in a previous life, and then delivers a remarkably inane and under-informed gloss on the MLA and literary studies more generally. What's most interesting is that Fields' ostensibly conservative critique is no different than the one pushed by the ostensibly liberal New York Times. Both share a superficial familiarity with literary studies that borders on the anti-intellectual.

Apparently keying off my TCSDaily coverage and a few other sources, Dr. Fields runs through any number of cliches about the MLA (did you hear the one about "Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl"?!?!) and outright mistakes (Reason is "a publication of the Cato Institute"). But what's really annoying is the lack of familiarity with literary history, especially coming from a Ph.D.

So Fields bitches and moans about the "queering" of, among others, good old-fashioned Amurican authors such as Willa Cather. Here's a news flash: During her college days at Univ. of Nebraska, Cather dressed as a man for a while and even took to calling herself "William"; she also had several long-time intimate relationships with women. That sort of long-suppressed biography makes Cather a particularly strong candidate for reappraisal from a queer studies perspective. As important, Cather's treatment by queer studies critics represents the best hope that she will continue to be read.

Fields, like most conservatives, also sniffs at the politicization of literary studies. There's no question that can be overdone to death, but the insistence of Literature and its study as a politics-free zone leads to summations of John Milton like this one: "Anyone who reads John Milton quickly discovers that a mix of ideas engages and provokes the intellect toward wisdom." What the hell does that mean? God, is there any way to make poor Milton more boring and uninteresting than by invoking such blandishments? If Milton is staging a comeback (as Fields says--and I agree with her), it's precisely because critics over the past decade or so have been stressing his politics. This is a guy who not only wrote one of the earliest defenses of an unlicensed press, he was a regicide who wrote in favor of beheading Charles I; and he later served in Cromwell's government as Secretary of Foreign Tongues. His work becomes infinitely more interesting when read in light of his political activity and thought. Paradise Lost works better--or at least equally well--as a meditation on Cromwell's thirst for power as on Christ's redeeming power.

Then there's Fields' defense of William Faulkner. The campus PC clerics "all but evicted" the worst postal worker in the pre-David Berkowitz era from the college campus, she says:

Sneering at the white man fell particularly hard on William Faulkner, who was all but evicted from campus. When Faulkner accepted his Nobel Prize for literature in 1950, he spoke of the importance of "the old verities and truths of the heart . . . love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice." Such qualities have since been strangers at MLA sessions. When the Faulkner Journal called for scholarly papers, they asked authors to consider "the whiteness of Faulkner himself." One paper was entitled, "Why Are You So Black? Faulkner's White-face Minstrels Primitivism and Perversion."

Yeah, it's really nuts to puzzle over Faulkner's "whiteness"--it's not like he never wrote about the South, the Civil War, the legacy of slavery, and race relations (just for starters, Fields might want to thumb through Light in August sometime). Btw, for those interested in "whiteness studies"--or the social construction of race and ethnicity, a topic of no small interest to the history of these United States--I can heartily recommend two books that Fields would no doubt proactively dismiss: A Hideous Monster of the Mind: American Race Theory in the Early Republic and Working Toward Whiteness: How America's Immigrants Became White.

As important, she might want to recall that Faulkner's books had famously gone out of print by the mid-'40s and it was our oldest enemy the French who revived his reputation and put him on the path to the Nobel Prize. Half a century before he was "evicted" from campus (a statement belied by the absolutely mammoth bibliography of critical work on him), the American reading public had already told him to the corn cob from Sanctuary and stick it where the sun don't shine. So if you're a Faulkner fan, kiss a frog today.

Fields' whole col is here. Again, what's most interesting to me is how her critique mirrors that of many liberals.

Matt Welch wants to know if soi-disant libertarians with a crush on the Bush administration will at least condemn some hypothetical abuses of power before the White House tries to justify them.

Glenn Reynolds on the misreported miners story:

If bloggers had made these kinds of mistakes, Big-Media folks would be pointing them out as evidence that the blogosphere can't be trusted. But where were all those editors, filters, and fact-checkers?

I take his point, but it's worth noting that bloggers did make "these kinds of mistakes." Lots of blogs repeated the false report that 12 miners survived the disaster, just like CNN and The New York Times did -- which is exactly what you should expect, since they're all part of the same media ecosystem. Do a Technorati search for "miners are alive," then scroll past the angrier, more recent posts; you'll find a ton of happy announcements. Granted, most of them are from LiveJournals -- I think this quickly corrected comment sums things up pretty well -- but LJs are blogs too; and it isn't as though there weren't any widely-trafficked sites that made the same mistake.

I'm not saying this to put down the bloggers. I'm saying it because I don't think this story fits the hoary old new media vs. the MSM storyline beloved by blog-bashers and blog-boosters alike. Photo Dude makes the more important point: "The first reports are almost always inaccurate, if not flat out wrong." That's true on the Web as well as in the rest of the press:

So many seem to think blogging is about immediacy. Taken to extreme, we have the typing contest known as "live blogging," where someone taps out each merry thought that passes through their skull while they watch some event. Imagine someone going to a movie and describing each detail over the cell phone to someone else, convert it to text, and you've got "live blogging." How enlightening.

Many bloggers feel like they've got to post about a news event within ten minutes of it happening. They end up publishing half-baked thoughts about partially erroneous first reports, to which they later have to add..."Update: never mind."

I can already get that from the media, thank you very much.

There's an important place for immediate reports, of course. But experienced news consumers know to take them with even more salt than usual. That's just as true for online diarists as it is for TV networks.

So, a press release from Focus on the Family is touting some unintentionally-hilarious sounding contribution to the moral panic over video games, which I'll have to remember to make fun of in due course, but this line caught my eye:

Focus on the Family will soon be offering parents an in-depth look into the seldom-glimpsed underworld of violent video games.

Seldom glimpsed underworld? The video game industry has higher revenues than Hollywood. Last I checked, the games in the Grand Theft Auto series held the top sales records for the Playstation 2. What kind of "underground" is that? By whom is it "seldom glimpsed"? And do you really need Focus on the Family to tell you that a game named after a felony that sports screenshots of mayhem with automatic weapons on the box might be violent?

Yesterday GW Pharmaceuticals announced that it has received FDA approval for Phase III clinical trials of its cannabis extract spray, Sativex, which the Canadian government last year approved as a treatment for neuropathic pain in patients with multiple sclerosis. The U.S. study will test Sativex's effectiveness in treating the pain of cancer patients who do not get adequate relief from narcotics--an application that has shown promise in a European study. GW, which is based in the U.K., reports that the FDA let it skip Phase I and Phase II trials, which focus on establishing safety and appropriate dosage, because it had already conducted substantial research on Sativex in Europe.

GW's success with Sativex, which is sprayed into the mouth, once again contradicts American drug warriors' repeated denials of marijuana's therapeutic utility. At the same time, it's another step toward a future in which legal alternatives to smoked, vaporized, or ingested whole cannabis will render the medical marijuana debate moot.

Another such step is Philip Morris' medical inhaler, which is based on technology developed for its unsuccessful smokeless cigarette. The device delivers aerosol medicine to the lungs for quick absorption. If used with THC and/or other useful cannabinoids, it would have all the medical advantages of smoked marijuana (immediate action, patient control over dosage, no capsules to swallow and keep down) without the drawbacks (variable strength, combustion products). Such a product would be more expensive than homegrown or club-dispensed marijuana, but presumably it would be covered by insurance.

These developments, while a boon to patients, will pose a challenge to the drug policy reform movement, which has gotten a lot of mileage out of the federal government's cruel, know-nothing intransigence on the issue of medical marijuana. Once legal, equally effective aternatives to marijuana are readily available, reformers will be forced to switch their focus back to recreational use (which is, after all, the main form of marijuana consumption), seemingly confirming the accusation that all their talk about the drug's medical virtues was just a cover. And having emphasized the sympathetic claims of suffering patients for so long, they will be in a weak position to argue that people shouldn't need a special excuse to smoke pot.

Tony Blankley has written a humdinger of a column, headlined "Let's Organize to End War Disunity," in which he blames the following on our country's shameful "lack of unity" -- military manpower shortages, John Murtha's mouth, national security-related leaks ("Only traitors or the careless would be releasing such information, as opposed to today's perhaps subjectively well-intentioned, if objectively misguided, releasers of such information," he niftily explains).

But what really got my attention was this:

If we had national unity, Congress and the president could be motivated and able to set spending priorities.

Come again? If the Democrats stopped criticizing the president's conduct in the Wars on Terror and Iraq, and the rest of us shlubs gave him a symbolic group hug, then suddenly he and the other members of the party that runs the national government would stop the whole drunken-sailor routine? I'm afraid I don't follow.

The rest of the column is a hoot, too; whether it's Blankley's assurance that he's not making "an argument against dissent," and that "it is time for convinced members of the public (including prominent figures) to organize at a much higher level than exists a broad-based, well-financed operation to try to move the better part of the American public to a unity of purpose in the face of the present danger."

What will those who solemnly accept the no-doubt heavy "burden of persuasion" teach the rest of us?

[T]he necessity for measures such as NSA-type surveillance, the extension (or even expansion) of the Patriot Act, the role of the military in domestic security, the need for a much larger active military force (and likely future conventional wars), the need to secure both the Mexican and Canadian borders, and the spending of scarce taxpayer dollars for substantially increased homeland security operations.

Don't say you haven't been warned!

My December column about misleading news coverage of Hurricane Katrina-related rumors keeps producing an interesting trickle of e-mails from people who had boots on the ground. Here's one:

My name is Dwayne Felty. I just finished reading your article "They shoot helicopters don't they?" I thought this was a really good article. I am a union electrician from Herrin Illinois. About 1 week after hurricane Katrina several partners and myself traveled to Gulfport Mississippi to help in the reconstruction effort. We spent several weeks in Gulfport when we started getting word that they were needing electricians in New Orleans. But as your article talked about, we were kind of scared to go because of all the unbelievable rumors that were coming out of the city.

We heard stories that there was some kind of research laboratory in the city in which some kind virus had gotten loose and was infecting people, and the medical community was trying to keep it quiet. To another story that I really don't know if was a rumor or not. It involved the private security firm [name omitted]. We were told by several residents that [name omitted] was one of the law enforcement groups responsible for doing evacuation of 9th ward residents who had refused to leave their homes after the storm. We were told that they had been given orders to bring out no wounded, if these residents absolutely refused to leave they were given permission to use whatever force they felt necessary, and that they were drowning people that refused to leave their homes.

Despite these stories we decided to travel to New Orleans anyway. We went to work under contract of the city of New Orleans Sewage and Water Board. Our job was to completely rewire pump station #5 which was directly across the street from the London Ave. Canal levee breach in the lower 9th ward. For the next two months I spent 12-15 hours a day, 7 days a week in that ravaged neighborhood. Besides military and rescue personnel, we were one of the first crews allowed in that neighborhood.

Unlike the rumors that we had been hearing which we had no idea if they were true or not, I witnessed horrors in that neighborhood with my own eyes that I know for fact are not rumors, and this is kinda the reason that I decided to write you, to share with you some of my experiences. [...]

[A]fter witnessing some of the things I saw, I feel like I have a responsibility to tell my story to everyone I can.

The one thing that haunts me the most is that when they finally started door to door search and rescue they would spray paint the front of the building, and it would contain the date of the search, who performed the search, how many were found dead, and how many were found living. As you probably know the flood waters came in on August 29-30. I can't even begin to count how many homes that we saw that were not checked for survivors for the first time until the 24-26 of September. I would just like to know why it took almost a month to check these homes for survivors? There were people who starved to death because they could not escape their attics, and the resources were there to help them. THEY LET PEOPLE DIE!

Up until the day that I left to return home, they were finding bodies on a daily basis. One day in particular they found a family of 10 dead in the attic of their home. On another occasion I ran into a camera crew from NBC. They were being escorted by two New Orleans police officers. As I talked to them I told them that they needed to come down to [the] 9th ward because no one was showing the things that we were seeing on TV. They told me that they had been trying to get into that neighborhood but were not allowed past the military checkpoints. As I talked to these people one of the police officers rudely interrupted me and as he chuckled he asked me "So, how many niggers you seen floating down there? Those people got exactly what they deserved! That place should have been leveled years ago!" I couldn't believe what I had just heard, I just turned around and walked away. [...]

Like I said, I just want to tell my stories -- and I have plenty more -- to as many people that will listen. [...]

Sincerely,
Dwayne Felty

I've done some light copy editing to the letter.

Reporting from an American Enterprise Institute conference on the future of Russia, Cathy Young looks for glimmers of hope in politics and popular attitudes. She doesn't find any, but she did end up spotting a shiny quarter in the foyer at AEI.

For most of the Cold War, the United States' "public diplomacy" efforts mostly emanated from the United States Information Agency, which generally set up shop in embassies and libraries abroad, attempting to counter Soviet propaganda and get out the good Yankee word. Since the agency was killed in 1999 (its duties were folded into the State Deptartment), former USIA hands have become pretty embittered about what they feel was a short-sighted kneecapping of the crucial hearts-and-minds mission.

The Iraq-propaganda story, unsurprisingly, has been the straw that broke this particular camel's back. Here's an excerpt from a Dec. 18 column by retired USIA vet Guy Farmer:

During my 28-year career with the old U.S. Information Agency, one of my specialties was foreign media placement. And not once, never, did I pay for placement because that was the only way to maintain credibility with our local media contacts. What the Pentagon doesn't understand - and may never understand - is that once you start paying for media placement, your credibility is shot to hell and you've moved from the semi-respectable public affairs/public diplomacy business over the line into the murky world of paid publicity and advertising. That's a dividing line that every self-respecting journalist, Americans and foreigners alike, understands.

A personal anecdote: Early in my Foreign Service career, while serving as American embassy press attache in a Latin American democracy, I discovered that another agency of our government was paying for media placement. I immediately went to the ambassador and asked him to put a stop to that sub-rosa media activity on grounds that it was unethical and furthermore, that we could afford only one press attache at a time. He agreed and told the other guys to cease and desist, much to their chagrin. We - myself and my Press Section colleagues - went on to set media placement records in that front-line country, which shall remain nameless for obvious reasons.

Whole thing here. And here's a more recent account from old USIA Nigeria hand Patricia Lee Sharpe. Excerpt:

Working in Nigeria as a USIS Information Officer counteracting Soviet disinformation, I made an astonishing but reassuring discovery: facts are powerful and truth trumps fiction rather easily. A quick consultation with researchers back in Washington would give us what we needed to set the record straight on the latest gross distortion of US history or policy. We'd generate an honest story in a lively style with a Nigerian angle and it would be published.

Public diplomacy during the USIA era had an amazing placement record, but the whole process depended on credibility. Our material was self-serving, of course, but it was reprinted by influential local publications because it was relevant and trustworthy. That respect rested on two pillars: facts--and honest open attribution. Nothing phoney. Nothing hidden. We didn't slip cash to editors or reporters. We didn't conceal our authorship. [...]

Of course, we had nothing to hide in those days either.

Another thing: This extremely effective USIA information operation in Nigeria was an incredibly inexpensive, in-house operation.

Both links via John Brown's Public Diplomacy Review.

A big one this time. The political question isn't just whether he'll survive to see his 78th birthday, but whether his Kadima Party will live to see its first.

In a Los Angeles Times op-ed piece, Doug Bandow explains (but does not justify) his decision to write columns supporting the interests of Jack Abramoff's clients at the lobbyist's behest. Bottom line: He did it for the money. Struggling to pay his bills with various inadequate sources of income--including his Cato gig, his syndicated column, political consulting, and speechwriting--he found it hard to resist Abramoff's relatively generous offer of $1,000 or so per column, especially since he never had to write anything that was contrary to his own views (a claim I have not seen anyone contradict). To his credit, Bandow says his punishment, which included losing his Cato job and his column, was "well-deserved." But one possible lesson to draw from his account is that Cato ought to pay its fellows better if it expects them to remain unencumbered by embarrassing financial arrangements like this one (although Cato's official objection was not so much that Bandow took Abramoff's money but that he failed to disclose the fact).

I like Doug and have no desire to kick him while he's down, so let me instead take up his suggestion that we use this episode as an opportunity to discuss the ethics of punditry for pay. I agree that it's dishonest for a paid advocate who is willing to say whatever his client requires to present the resulting work for hire as his own independent assessment. I also agree that failing to disclose an advance arrangement for article-specific payments from an interested party, even when the views you express are sincere and consistent with your principles, is certainly unwise and possibly unethical, especially if you conceal the information from the people publishing your work. But as Doug suggests, once you get beyond cases like those, there is a lot of gray, with decisions based on the desire to avoid not actual conflicts of interest so much as the "appearance" of such conflicts--which is to say, anything that might look bad.

As you may have guessed by now, I speak from experience. From time to time I am accused of being a flack for Big Tobacco because more than a decade ago I accepted a reprint fee from R.J. Reynolds for an op-ed piece about secondhand smoke I had written for The Wall Street Journal. The company used the article in an ad campaign and, since I had retained the reprint rights, paid me $5,000 for the privilege (a pretty fat reprint fee, I admit, but not very much compared to what RJR was planning to spend on the ads). Although I recognized that the transaction might be used against me, I did not see anything unethical about it, since RJR did not commission the article. What I did not realize (but should have) was how little such distinctions matter to people who are determined to discredit your views by implying that you arrived at them for financial reasons.

That article reprint was the only time I've ever had financial dealings with a tobacco company (a topic that came up on another Hit & Run thread recently), and since then I've tried to avoid anything that could be construed as an indication of "ties" to the industry. I've turned down junkets in Geneva and Cancun, requests for (unpaid) legislative testimony, and invitations to write op-ed pieces. But I can't help the fact that Philip Morris/Altria has donated money to the Reason Foundation, which publishes Reason (in addition to running a think tank). Last time I checked, the contributions (none of them tobacco-related) amounted to less than 1 percent of the foundation's budget. So although I may not be pure enough to satisy the average anti-smoking activist, I am at least able to alleviate the concerns of radio and TV producers who raise the issue (typically at the prompting of an anti-smoking activist).

The thing is, avoiding the taint of tobacco is purely a practical concern for me. I do not see any ethical problem with, say, writing an essay for an industry-supported Web site (another offer I recently declined). I do not worry that if I went to Cancun on a tobacco company's dime I would suddenly find myself abandoning my principles to support the Master Settlement Agreement or (in Philip Morris' case) FDA regulation of tobacco products. I just know that such interactions with the industry are, in terms of public perception, more trouble than they're worth. Although it's a basic logical error to think you can discredit someone's argument by impugning his motives, I'd rather not have to explain this particular rhetorical fallacy every time I open my mouth.

Still, if the worry is that opinion journalists and think tank wonks shave the truth to fit predetermined conclusions, the focus on money seems misplaced. While it's reasonable to expect disclosure of an ongoing financial arrangement or of payments like those Doug Bandow accepted, ideology and partisan loyalties are far more likely to color a pundit's presentation of the evidence than financial considerations. If a writer is intellectually dishonest, it ultimately does not matter whether his motive is politics or money. A financial disclosure in the author ID may remind people to be skeptical of what they read on op-ed pages, but that's good advice in any case.

Critics have long insisted that libertarianism is an adolescent philosophy—Stuart Anderson has found some children's books that prove them right.

Teresa Nielsen Hayden is a touch miffed at Ralph Nader. To wit:

If Ralph Nader is run over by a beer truck and killed, if a very large meteorite falls on the offices of Public Citizen and vaporizes the lot of them, I won't feel sorry. Not the least little bit.

It turns out Teresa had been treating her narcolepsy with Cylert (the brand name of pemoline), a stimulant initially developed for ADHD, but also frequently prescribed off-label to narcoleptics and MS patients suffering from fatigue. Because it increases the risk of liver failure, it's typically something doctors resort to only after other medications fail. Now, under pressure from Public Citizen, the FDA has withdrawn it entirely.

The FDA's reason is that it has determined "the overall risk of liver toxicity from Cylert and generic pemoline products outweighs the benefits of this drug." Except, of course, that Teresa Nielsen Hayden obviously thought the benefits outweighed the risk. And, of course, there isn't really such thing as the "benefit" or "risk" of a drug in itself, but only the benefit and risk to a particular patient—not just because of physiological variation between people, but because of how we differently value the same sets of positive and negative effects. A sane FDA would give us the information and let us decide for ourselves which way the balance came out.

Today's Washington Post explains why Maryland is a bad place to die:

There's no good time to lose a loved one, but in this case, the timing could hardly have been worse. That day, the mortician who held the license to run Brown's funeral home had quit unexpectedly, and in Maryland -- unlike in any other state -- there are only two ways to own a funeral home: Be a mortician, or possess one of 59 special ownership licenses.

Brown called the state's funeral regulators, begging for an exception. "Look, we have a body in the basement," he recalled telling them. "No," they replied. "You're closed."

The prevailing argument for the licensing requirement? Charming mom-and-pop funeral outfits might have to compete with big box burial services:

Maryland's leading mortuary owners say the law guards against an invasion of mega-corporations. But the law also has given those owners a virtual lock on the local trade, which some believe is why the state's funeral costs are among the nation's highest.

Whole thing here.

Are you aware of the epithet "Conservatarian"? Those of you who don't follow lefty blogs might not be. Basically, it's an insult aimed at self-described small-government conservatives and libertarians who don't seem troubled by the expansions of White House police power, and who reliably back the current president.

Recently, this critique seems to be proliferating; see here, for example, or this year-end wrap-up by Duncan "Atrios" Black:

2005 was the year that the president of the United States declared proudly that he had broken the law repeatedly and with full intention, that he had the power to do so whenever he wanted to, and that he would continue to do so whenever he determined it to be desirable. This declaration was met with basic approval from much of the beltway chattering classes, prominent libertarian bloggers, and just about every small government conservative.

Then there's this are-you-really-a-libertarian quiz.

What's interesting to me is the sorta-implied assumption that at least some libertarian ideals are worth having in the first place. Whether this meme will still exist on the left if the Democrats ever regain power on any national level (or indeed whether it actually exists at all), is another question entirely.

An interesting debate [PDF] on NSA/FISA and presidential authority. (Link via Secrecy News.)

The Vermont House of Representatives has rejected the misnamed "Farmer Protection Act" that would have imposed strict liability for "contamination" on biotech seed companies. The idea is that organic farmers would be able to sue seed companies for "contaminating" their crops if pollen blew over onto their fields from a neighbor who was growing biotech crops. Under strict liability organic farmers would be required to show only that their crops had been contaminated by biotech seed pollen and that he suffered economic losses as a result. A farmer who prevailed on both points could collect economic damages. This bill was clearly a backdoor attempt by anti-biotech activists to essentially ban biotech crops in Vermont.

Why should the concerns of organic farmers trump the rights of other farmers to grow safe and productive crops? Short answer: they shouldn't. My longer answer is in my column "Organic Law." The central argument is below:

So does [organic farmer] Robert Quinn have a right to fields uncontaminated by pollen from genetically enhanced crops? Drew Kershen, a law professor at the University of Oklahoma, has been thinking about issues like this one for years, and he concludes that Quinn has no such right.

First, Kershen points out that organic standards are process standards, not product standards. Organic crops receive certification because of the way they are produced: no chemical fertilizers, no synthetic pesticides, and so forth. Saying a product is organic does not mean it is totally free of chemical fertilizers and synthetic pesticides. Organic farmers already experience accidental pesticide drift and the admixture of conventional seeds. They can still obtain organic certification, provided they conscientiously follow all the rules specified by the National Organic Program. The same standard could easily apply to organic farmers whose crops have experienced minor interbreeding with transgenic crops.

Second, Kershen notes that U.S. law generally does not allow those with special sensitivity to an activity to declare that they have been harmed by it. It is their responsibility to protect themselves from the activities they dislike. "You do not have a claim based on your assertion of increased sensitivity," Kershen explains. "If you don't like to hear rock music, you can't prohibit your neighbors from playing it at reasonable levels. You have to protect yourself. Stay away from concerts. Soundproof your home." Similarly, organic farmers could perhaps grow borders that would insulate their crops from their neighbors' pollen flow.

Robert Quinn's most persuasive argument is that he will lose money because his customers will reject his product if they think it is "contaminated" with genes from genetically enhanced crops. Kershen says that argument won't wash either. He offers an example in which a tattoo parlor legally opens between a florist and a Christian bookstore, advertising a special on satanic tattoos. Customers offended by the tattoo shop begin avoiding the florist and bookstore. Under American common law, the florist and the bookstore do not have a cause of action, because "economic expectation is not recoverable." (Of course, Coase would say the bookshop and florist might want to buy the tattoo owner out.) Similarly, an organic farmer who expected to sell his crop at a premium would nevertheless be able to sell it at market rates as a conventional crop; he loses only the premium he expected to gain.

Kershen makes the further point that those who have created a niche market should be the ones responsible for protecting it. "After all, they are the ones trying to differentiate their products in order to obtain higher profits," he notes. "Therefore, the rest of us who don't care shouldn't be saddled with the costs of defending their self-imposed standards and labeling." That would be akin to forcing conventional meat packers to carry "non-kosher" labels on all their meats for the benefit of kosher meat producers.

One method of dealing with the problem faced by Quinn and other organic farmers is to set reasonable tolerances. Many activists and organic farmers advocate "zero tolerance" standards that in effect would outlaw genetically enhanced crops. Since every scientific body that has ever looked into the safety of biotech crops has found them safe, this would be an absurd requirement.

Crops have exchanged pollen for millennia, and they will continue to do so. Seed breeders have decades of experience in setting tolerances for seed purity. As Mark Condon, vice president for international marketing at the American Seed Trade Association, recently explained, "seed purity certification standards were commonly set at 98 percent to 99 percent varietal purity levels or a standard of 1 percent to 2 percent adventitious genetic impurity." It should be possible to maintain similar standards for organic crops. Since organic farmers set their own standards, they could easily adopt these tolerances and save themselves and conventional farmers a lot of trouble.

The California Supreme Court has agreed to consider the question of whether the state's employment law protects medical marijuana users from losing their jobs for consuming cannabis. State law says employers may not fire people for legal off-the-clock activities (which presumably would include tobacco smoking). Medical use of cannabis is permitted by state law but prohibited by federal law, under the dubious but U.S.-Supreme-Court-endorsed rationale that it somehow constitutes interstate commerce. The Riverside Press-Enterprise (registration required) reports that

Workers who have been fired or disciplined for using medicinal marijuana have filed numerous complaints with the state, claiming their employers violated California labor law, which prohibits people from being punished for performing a legal act while off duty, said Dean Fryer, spokesman for the California Department of Industrial Relations.

But the state is not processing their complaints.

"We are not accepting any claims for discrimination regarding the use of medical marijuana because federal law makes it illegal and therefore it is not lawful off-duty conduct," Fryer said, adding that the California labor code does not distinguish between state and federal law.

As with job-related drug testing generally, I have mixed feelings about this issue. To fire someone simply because he uses marijuana, whether for medicine or recreation, seems irrational to me. The woman cited in the Press-Enterprise story--who uses cannabis to treat her glaucoma and was fired because she tested positive for marijuana, despite an unblemished work record--certainly was treated shabbily. But as a general rule, I think businesses should be free to hire and fire based on whatever criteria make sense to them (within the constraints set by contracts), even if that means some of them adopt stupid, unfair policies. (They have to bear the consequences of those policies, which might include public criticism, boycotts, and a disadvantage in attracting and keeping qualified workers.) Then again, there's no question that employers would treat marijuana use differently if marijuana were (completely) legal. Generally speaking, I think, they would worry about it only when it interfered with work. To the extent that there are legitimate concerns about impairment, they are no different in principle from the concerns raised by alcohol or (a closer analogy in this case) prescription drugs.

If patients are under the influence of marijuana during the work day, it might affect their ability to perform certain tasks, just as narcotic painkillers or anti-anxiety drugs might. (With marijuana as with Vicodin, patients who take the drug for symptom relief often report that they hardly feel the psychoactive effects.) But it sounds like the main issue for California employers is marijuana's legal status. A spokesman for the California Association of Employers told the Press-Enterprise the group advises its members "they do not have to balance a duty to accommodate an applicant or employee whose drug use impairs their performance and poses a potential liability should an accident occur." But he added (in the paper's paraphrase) that "employers could consider accommodating an employee or job applicant if there are no safety issues that are involved in their work. Those accommodations could also include steering the user toward a prescription drug such as Marinol, although medical-marijuana advocates argue the synthetic pharmaceutical is not nearly as effective." In other words, FDA-approved synthetic THC is OK, but THC in the federally forbidden plant is not.

The tyranny of federal law is especially clear in the case of Riverside County, which issues medical marijuana ID cards yet refuses to hire people who carry them.

Over at Out of Control, the Reason Foundation's policy blog, Geoff Segal has replied to my article on Sandy Springs, the newly independent Georgia suburb that is delivering nearly all its services via private contractors. He makes a good point when he notes that the new government isn't taking on any new functions, and therefore isn't an ideal specimen of the pitfalls of the contract model of privatization. (Indeed, the hypothetical example I offered of a private monopoly -- trash collection -- is a basically free market in Fulton County, and the new town doesn't plan to change that.) He also acknowledges that the city is still involved in areas even a moderate libertarian would consider objectionable, but suggests that "at least under the contractual arrangement they're doing it for much less."

I'm less sympathetic to his argument that "Sandy Springs is simply enforcing the codes and laws on the books." For one thing, where the local "adult" industry is concerned, they're adding new regs as well as reviving old ones. More importantly: If the old rules were essentially a dead letter, why revive them now? Where genuine nuisances are concerned -- fire hazards, pest magnets -- I can appreciate the neighbors' frustrations. (Believe me, I can appreciate them. I live in the Rat Capital of the United States.) But where it's just a matter of not wanting to see an old car or a shaggy lawn, we've moved beyond the realm of harmful spillover effects and into the area of minding other people's business.

To reiterate my article's conclusion, it's probably best to regard Sandy Springs not as an example of full-fledged privatization but as an experiment in decentralization. I can defend it, and the other incorporations that might follow, on federalist grounds. But that doesn't mean I'm going to defend everything the new governments do.

Further reading:

* Geoff's original article on Sandy Springs is here.

* I stuck up for another wave of incorporations here.

* I wrote about the benefits and perils of another brand of devolution here.

* Robert Nelson deals with many relevant issues in his excellent new book, Private Neighborhoods and the Transformation of Local Government. Buy a copy today!

Over the course of a week, a DWI roadblock in Connecticut stopped more more than a thousand cars, issued 29 tickets, towed 15 cars, and made two arrests for drug possession. Ten police officers manned the roadblock.

They made one DUI arrest. For this, the campaign was deemed "a success."

More at Radley Balko's blog.

Jacob Sullum could use a prozac after a look at the ballooning projected costs of the Medicare prescription drug bill.

Paleo-cons, realists, and libertarians take their swings at the neo-cons in the letters page of Commentary, in response to this extended diss by Gary Rosen. The whole thing is surprisingly interesting; I'll quote from Rosen's response to the libertarians:

Messrs. Logan and Preble parrot a few of the more credible assertions made by critics of the war in Iraq, but they should not pretend to come to these matters with an open mind. The Cato Institute is dogmatically laissez-faire in foreign policy just as it is on every other policy question. Fearful of statism at home, libertarians have reflexively resisted virtually every assertion of American power and influence since the cold war: no to the National Endowment for Democracy, no to NATO expansion, no to the first Persian Gulf war, no to engagement in the Middle East, no to American intervention in Haiti and the Balkans. [...]

Despite the upheavals and changed circumstances in America's international situation in recent years, this continues to be Cato's basic outlook. It leaves little guesswork in predicting the foreign-policy views of the institute's staffers, which is why, in my article, I called them ideologues.

Link via Andrew Sullivan.

We've been debating these questions ourselves, including a should-we-invade-Iraq? tussle from November 2002, a summer 2003 roundtable on whether liberalism can be spread at gunpoint, and much more.

The Donald & Paula Smith Family Foundation

Present a debate

The Politics of Science:
Are politicians giving us the right prescriptions?

Featuring
Chris Mooney
Seed Magazine
Author: The Republican War on Science

Ronald Bailey
Reason Magazine
Author: Liberation Biology

Wesley J. Smith
Discovery Institute
Author: Consumer's Guide to A Brave New World

Moderator
Harvey Shapiro
Contributing Editor, Institutional Investor

From embryonic stem cell research to the fate of Terry Schiavo, science has given us a whole new set of political issues. Politicians are now compelled to have a position on everything from performance enhancing drugs in sports to global warming. In taking these positions, are politicians listening to the scientific community or are they responding to the interest groups essential to their election? Do politicians strike the right balance between the desire for progress and ethical implications of that progress? What role should elected officials and government play in encouraging desirable scientific research? Does science education accurately reflect the scientific consensus? Is science too important to be left to the scientists?

January 10, 2006
6:30 P.M. Prompt
(Free and open to the public - Reception to follow)

The Graduate Center
The City University of New York
365 Fifth Avenue, New York
(Corner of 34th Street & 5th Avenue)

RSVP by going here.

Well, the tobacco nannies have had their way in Spain, and it seems all but inevitable that D.C. is now poised to protect the inalienable God-given right of each (non-smoking) citizen to walk into any bar he pleases and dictate terms to the owner. But if you're at least inclined to rage against the dying of the cigarette's light, you can go vote in NBC's poll against the new resolution. Note that at least Spain's ban has some wiggle-room for smoking sections physically isolated from the rest of the bar or restaurant. The D.C. banners haven't been interested in any one of a number of intuitively appealing compromises that would've ensured plenty of non-smoking choices for patrons and workers alike—because at the end of the day nobody really believes this has anything to do with protecting workers, and for the hardcore activists, it isn't even about the petty but widespread desire to go to the exact place you want without dealing with smoke, but rather about socially stigmatizing all those poor, sick, nicotine-stained wretches.

Jesse Walker finds that in one Georgia town, "privatization" may just mean changing the logos on the garbage trucks.

Russell Roberts of Cafe Hayek has a great short analysis of the loopy economics of the board game Monopoly, which he delivered as an NPR commentary yesterday. And better still, he references Settlers of Catan, a game much-beloved of libertarians that a roommate (now an econ prof out in California) introduced me to back in college. One of the things I always liked about the game was that the existence of a trading mechanism encouraged players to play all sorts of coalition strategies, with tit-for-tat style mechanisms for punishing defectors, that create a much richer sort of play than the relatively simple rules might suggest.

The Edge--a website inhabited by some of my favorite pointy headed intellectuals, such as Stewart Brand, Susan Blackmore, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Freeman Dyson, Joel Garreau, Brian Greene, Ray Kurzweil, Steven Pinker, Matt Ridely, and J. Craig Venter--has announced its annual question:

The Edge Annual Question--2006

WHAT IS YOUR DANGEROUS IDEA?

The history of science is replete with discoveries that were considered socially, morally, or emotionally dangerous in their time; the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions are the most obvious. What is your dangerous idea? An idea you think about (not necessarily one you originated) that is dangerous not because it is assumed to be false, but because it might be true?

In 2004, Foreign Policy magazine asked another bunch of policy intellectuals what they thought the world's most dangerous idea was. Robert Wright nominated a "War on Evil"; Eric Hobsbawn suggested the "Spreading of Democracy"; Paul Davies worred about "Undermining Free Will": and Francis Fukuyama warned against "Transhumanism."

BTW, I responded to Fukuyama's overblown fears about transhumanism in a column here.

I personally believe that no ideas are dangerous if they are true--false ones, though, can be a problem. I will periodically update Hit & Run on some of the "dangerous ideas" proposed over at the Edge and maybe even suggest a few risky ones myself.

Thanks to David Ridgely for the heads up on the Edge question.

From the Marijuana Policy Project:

The Rhode Island House of Representatives voted to override Gov. Donald Carcieri's veto of the Marijuana Policy Project's medical marijuana bill today, making Rhode Island the 11th state to make medical marijuana legal and the first to enact a medical marijuana law since the Supreme Court's June decision in Gonzales v. Raich. Rhode Island's medical marijuana law is the third to be enacted by a state legislature, and the first passed by overriding a governor's veto. (The other eight states' medical marijuana laws were enacted via ballot initiatives.)

More here.

Some previous reasons to love the Ocean State? They've gotta begin with Roger Williams.

Lobbyist Jack Abramoff has copped a plea today to charges of conspiracy, fraud, and tax evasion; he'll cop more pleas tomorrow. He'll get 9.5 to 11 years--and he'll start cooperating in earnest with a federal probe into all sorts of stuff that will likely embarass many, many people in DC and beyond.

From Reuters via the Boston Globe:

Abramoff's plea was sure to send shockwaves through Congress, where many Republicans and Democrats have benefited from campaign contributions from him or his clients. Lawmakers seeking to distance themselves from him have returned more than $200,000 in recent weeks.

Abramoff faces a maximum sentence of 30 years, but under the terms of the plea deal it will be reduced to between 9 1/2 and 11 years. The sentence could be reduced even further if Abramoff cooperates fully, a Justice Department official said.

As part of the plea deal, Abramoff agreed to pay at least $25 million in restitution.

Whole thing here.

Claims of executive power unbounded, a low-fare airline is quickly grounded, and when Ukraine can't pass gas Europe's problems are compounded—in the new Reason Express.

New York Times columnist John Tierney has an interesting op/ed today on the looming crisis of too many edumacated uppity wimmin chasing after a dwindling supply of eligible (edumacated and white collar) males. The "crisis" stems from the fact that nearly 3 women graduate from college for every 2 men who do. Tierney points out that under 35 year old men say in polls that they have no big problem marrying women who make more money than they do. However, women who have gone to the trouble of getting a college degree do not want to marry a guy whose pint-sized paycheck would occasion malicious gossip among her friends.

Tierney seems to be onto something. A year or so ago, a professor in a graduate political science program at a leading state university told me that his department was beginning to think about an affirmative action plan for males. Why? Because his department could fill all its classes with qualified women, but women wouldn't apply to the program unless there are some eligible bachelors alongside them in the classrooms.

Tierney writes:

The women surveyed were less willing to marry down--marry someone with much lower earnings or less education--than the men were to marry up. And, in line with Jane Austen, the women were also more determined to marry up than the men were.

You may think that women's attitudes are changing as they get more college degrees and financial independence. A woman who's an executive can afford to marry a struggling musician. But that doesn't necessarily mean she wants to. Studies by David Buss of the University of Texas and others have shown that women with higher incomes, far from relaxing their standards, put more emphasis on their mate's financial resources.

I would link to the op/ed except that the New York Times wants you to pay for seeing it.

Santa Catalina, the island of romance, has a population of 3,600 or so, 3,500 of whom live in the tiny city of Avalon. As of 1997, Avalon had two grocery stores -- a big Vons supermarket, and a little mom-and-pop joint called Fred and Sally's. The next year, Fred and Sally closed shop. The year after that, Vons opened a mini-outlet called Vons Express in the same location. So what did the state of California do?

Sue Vons for anti-trust.

Under terms of the proposed federal consent decree filed Wednesday, the Santa Catalina Island Co., which owns the building that Vons Express leases as well as 70 percent of all property in the one-square-mile city, would have to find a new grocer for the location. A judge must still approve the settlement. [...]

As part of the settlement, Vons must pay $60,000 to the City of Avalon "to be used for the benefit of consumers who purchased grocery store products in Avalon," the consent decree states. Vons must also pay $25,000 to the state to pay for the investigation.

The Santa Catalina Island Co., by the way, basically owns the whole damned island. (Link via Martini Republic.)

The things you find in newly declassified documents:

Winston Churchill wanted the RAF to wipe out German villages in retaliation for the massacre of Czech civilians in the village of Lidice, wartime cabinet documents have revealed....

Churchill abandoned the plan only in the face of opposition from cabinet colleagues, who feared that the lives of aircrews would be placed needlessly at risk. Clement Attlee, the dominions secretary and future Labour prime minister, said he believed it unwise "to enter into competition in frightfulness with the Germans". On June 15 Churchill conceded, saying: "My instinct is strongly the other way ... I submit unwillingly to the view of cabinet against."

Churchill was reportedly much more savage in his blog, where he suggested that his cabinet was "on the other side" and asked, "Don't they know there's a war on?"

Cathy Young looks back on 2005, and it ain't a pretty sight.

The Wash Post's Dan Balz writes today about Americans' ambivalent feelings toward illegal immigrants--an ambivalence reflected in (and reinforced by) shifting policies. According to a new Post-ABC News poll, a solid majority (56 percent) feels that illegals are hurting the country, yet three in five respondents think illegals already here should be given a shot at legit status. Bush apparently is getting his worst marks--no small feat, that--on immigration and control of the U.S.-Mexico border. Whole thing here.

As I note in my editor's note for the February Reason ("If You Enjoyed Your Christmas Tree, Thank an Immigrant"), immigration is going to be a huge issue this year. In December, the House of Representatives passed odious legislation on the topic and the Senate will be taking up the issue in either January or February. The worst quote coming out of that? Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.) saying that "What would be the best Christmas present to the American people is pictures of concrete being poured."

The February issue is on newsstands now and features a cover story on immigration that should give pause to the most ardent anti-immigrationists. You can read a preview version of the story and my editor's note on the topic here.

The author of the cover story, Jesse James DeConto, and I published an op-ed on the topic here. Among other things, it makes the simple point that any immigration policy that doesn't make room for men and women willing to work long hours at relatively low pay is "not simply wrong but immoral." (Interesting take on immigration and wages and assimilation here.)

Over the years, I've found that few issues raise more ire than immigration. I'm not exactly sure why that is and I recognize that the details of immigration policy are difficult and bedeviling. But the rage routinely expressed at immigrants bedevils surprises me.

You probably missed this dispatch from the front lines of the Propaganda War, but the State Deptartment's Public Diplomacy czarina, Karen Hughes, has pulled the plug on hearts-and-minds glossy Hi Magazine.

What the hell's Hi Magazine? It's a two-year-old English-language lifestyle monthly, financed by American taxpayers, cranked out by some publisher-of-mediocrity called The Magazine Group ("our name says it all"); and aimed at the ever-elusive youth demographic in North Africa and the Middle East. As The Toronto Star wickedly put it,

There is sadness in the Arab world today among NASCAR fans, aficionados of U.S. men's fashions and those seeking more information on Washington's healthy eating pyramid or American dating standards.

If you don't trust the shifty Canadians, check out Hi's surviving website, which State Dept. Spokesman Sean McCormack insisted is "a cost-effective endeavor." Some sample headlines from the front page include: "Cooking Up a Career: Can You Stand the Heat?"; "All in the Family: Long part of the culture in the Arab world, multigenerational living is now being embraced by more young Americans" (we're getting there, praise Allah!); and my favorite, "Ask America," in which inquisitive young Syrians and Yemenese can get their questions "answered by an expert and published on the website."

One question that suggests itself is, "How much of our tax money does this stupid crap cost?" Answer: $4.5 million a year, for a monthly with a circulation of 55,000. Compare that to say, Reason magazine, which publishes about 45,000 copies on a budget of around $2.5 million. And you don't even have to cough up your $19.95 a year involuntarily!

As for the policy consideration, I'll turn it over to Daniel Pipes:

[E]ven had Hi been better conceived and executed, it - and to a lesser degree, such US government efforts as Radio Sawa and Al-Hurra Television - is misconceived. Like generals fighting the last war, diplomats recall the successes of Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe in providing precious information to Soviet bloc peoples and thereby helping to bring about the demise of the Soviet Union and its satellites. Doing what they know worked once, they largely adopted the same informational model for Hi, Sawa, and Al-Hurra.

But Muslims generally and Islamists specifically do not lack for reliable information; much less do they (as did Soviet-bloc populations) prefer Western sources of information to their own.

World War IV -- still not World War III!

Before the gong clanged on 2005, President Bush signed John McCain's torture bill into law, with a clarifying signing note that strongly hinted the government reserves the right to torture anyway, if it deems the activity to be covered under its interpretation of White House prerogatives:

The executive branch shall construe Title X in Division A of the Act, relating to detainees, in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the President to supervise the unitary executive branch and as Commander in Chief and consistent with the constitutional limitations on the judicial power, which will assist in achieving the shared objective of the Congress and the President, evidenced in Title X, of protecting the American people from further terrorist attacks.

Presidential signing notes, which Bush (and apparently Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito) are fond of, do not as of yet carry much if any force of law; they're more a window into where the president's head is at.

Reaction from Marty Lederman, whose dogged criticisms of torture I have generally agreed with:

Translation: I reserve the constitutional right to waterboard when it will "assist" in protecting the American people from terrorist attacks. [UPDATE: Or, as Matthew Franck eagerly puts it over at the National Review, "the signing statement . . . conveys the good news that the president is not taking the McCain amendment lying down."]

You didn't think Cheney and Addington were going to go down quietly, did you? (And this even though they took their opponents to the cleaners by negotiating the Graham Amendments, which, by precluding substantial avenues of judicial review, are far more beneficial to their detention and interrogation policies than the McCain Amendment is detrimental.)

But does the White House have the constitutional authority to, as Gary Farber warns us is happening, "collect[] every available bit of information about you, public and that which comes up via investigation of others, accurate or inaccurate, putting it all in a massive file about you updated on a constant real-time basis, and then integrating that into a massive data-matrix that shows all perceived links between you and other people and enterprises, and then analyzes that, and then washes, rinses, and repeats, non-stop"?

Mickey Kaus bravely bulldozes the goalposts on such talk, in a post headlined "Is the Fourth Amendment the problem?" (Sarcastic answer: It sure was for the New Democrats, which is largely why the thing got so battered in the 1990s.) Kaus quotes this Case for Surveillance in The Boston Globe, then comments (emphases his):

of course if there's a credible threat of home-grown terrorism it may also become necessary to scan domestic electronic communications, in which case a lot of the Fourth Amendment loopholes currently being cited in the defense of Bush's FISA snooping (e.g., "border search") will not be available.

What do the women's shoe libertarians say? We're at war! I'd love to have a sensible debate, but damn that media! They're gonna wipe out New York, and you're bugging me about library records?!

Some rebuttals here, more reaction-stuff here, and an exhaustive analysis of the whole NSA/Echelon/Total Government stuff here. Time's description of the new NSA/CIA book by New York Times staffer James Risen -- whose reporting has sparked a Justice Dept. investigation into the leaks that supported it -- is also worth a read.

Just fresh off of my own stab at making predictions, I note that Louis Menand has a fascinating review in The New Yorker of University of California-Berkeley psychologist Philip Tetlock's new book, Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?. Tetlock signed up 284 experts and asked them to make predictions about various events over a 20 year period. According to Menand, Tetlock found,

"that people who make prediction their business--people who appear as experts on television, get quoted in newspaper articles, advise governments and businesses, and participate in punditry roundtable--are no better than the rest of us...Tetlock claims that the better known and more frequently quoted they are, the less reliable their guesses about the future are likely to be. The accuracy of an expert's predictions actually has an inverse relationship to his or her self-confidence, renown, and, beyond a certain point, depth of knowledge. People who follow current events by reading the papers and newsmagazines regularly can guess what is likely to happen about as accurately as the specialists whom the papers quote. Our system of expertise is completely inside out: it rewards bad judgments over good ones."

Whole thing here.

Behold, the prophecies of Ronald Bailey. (2006 edition)

Boing Boing reports that the most recent Coldplay CD comes with a couple little restrictions:

This CD cannot be burnt onto a CD or hard disc, nor can it be converted to an MP3.

This CD...might not play in...some DVD players...car stereos...portable CD players, Game Players....Although you can use your PC's Windows program to listen to certain tracks, this does not mean that the CD can be played in all PCs....This CD does not support Macintosh PC software.

After all that, the insert helpfully informs you that they won't refund or exchange the album. And this "special technology" is to help you "enjoy high quality music."

Now, depending where you get it, the store might well be willing to accept the disc back and offer a refund. But in light of the way increasing numbers of people consume music these days, I wonder whether this isn't a fraudulent (at the least deceptive) practice. I buy most of my music online for download these days, though once or twice a year I'll end up buying a physical CD. I pretty much never listen to music on the CD though—I keep my music on my hard drive and iPod and the physical CD filed away in a book in a closet somewhere. I'm not even sure anyone in my house owns a functional CD player not installed in a computer of some sort. Practically speaking, given the way I (and most people I know) consume music now, a CD I can't rip to a hard drive is no use to me. You might as well sell me a DVD region-coded for play only in Southeast Asia, with no notice until its home and unwrapped that I can't use it in the fashion or with the equipment I customarily do—and (reasonably, I think) took it for granted at the time of purchase that I'd be able to.

Now, looking at the rear cover, I do see some very tiny print hinting at a fraction of the limitations suggested on the insert. Though contra what's printed there, the rear cover seems to suggest that the disc will work with Macs, and never really says in so many words that you can't use the thing with your iPod at all. Any lawyers out there think a class-action suit against Virgin for manufacturing what many would consider a defective product without adequate notice would stand a chance? And if so, want to go halvsies on what's left of the settlement after the vast majority of buyers neglect to collect their $1.50 share of it?

Happy 2006, Reasonoids! Consider this an open thread for resolutions, predictions, reflections, top 10 lists, or whatever else feels appropriate to ring in the new year.