Weekly Hit & Run Archive 2006 July 22-31

According to a new ACLU report, pro-active California police haven't just been spying on anti-war protesters. They've been leading them:

Two Oakland police officers working undercover at an anti-war protest in May 2003 got themselves elected to leadership positions in an effort to influence the demonstration, documents released Thursday show.

The extent of the officers' involvement in the... march May 12, 2003, led by Direct Action to Stop War and Others, is unclear. But in a deposition related to a lawsuit filed by protesters, Deputy Police Chief Howard Jordan said activists had elected the undercover officers to "plan the route of the march and decide I guess where it would end up and some of the places that it would go."

Full report here.

I'll be on the Tammy Bruce show at 1:30 ET to discuss the most important issue on which I've ever written: Whether or not she and Ann Coulter are lovebirds.

Jesse Walker eulogises the Doha talks.

Salon has an interesting long piece by Mitch Prothero (you'll have to sit through an ad to see the whole thing) attempting to debunk the notion that Hezbollah's military troops are "hiding among civilians." While it will not be completely convincing to those not inclined to be convinced (or those who see no important distinction between "civilian" Hezbollah and "military" Hezbollah), here are some interesting excerpts:

My own reporting and that of other journalists reveals that in fact Hezbollah fighters--as opposed to the much more numerous Hezbollah political members, and the vastly more numerous Hezbollah sympathizers--avoid civilians....
............
Although Israel targets apartments and offices because they are considered "Hezbollah" installations, the group has a clear policy of keeping its fighters away from civilians as much as possible. This is not for humanitarian reasons -- they did, after all, take over an apartment building against the protests of the landlord, knowing full well it would be bombed -- but for military ones.

"You can be a member of Hezbollah your entire life and never see a military wing fighter with a weapon," a Lebanese military intelligence official, now retired, once told me. "They do not come out with their masks off and never operate around people if they can avoid it. They're completely afraid of collaborators. They know this is what breaks the Palestinians -- no discipline and too much showing off."
............
Hezbollah's political members say they have little or no access to the workings of the fighters. This seems to be largely true: While they obviously hear and know more than the outside world, the firewall is strong.

Israel, however, has chosen to treat the political members of Hezbollah as if they were fighters. And by targeting the civilian wing of the group, which supplies much of the humanitarian aid and social protection for the poorest people in the south, they are targeting civilians.

UPDATE: David Bernstein over at Volokh Conspiracy discusses how the Salon article, while trying to argue that Hezbollah does not have a policy of hiding among civilians, undercuts itself by reporting some specific examples of them doing exactly that.

Last week a federal judge in San Francisco said a lawsuit against AT&T over its cooperation with the NSA's warrantless surveillance program could proceed, rejecting the Bush administration's argument that the case would reveal state secrets. This week a federal judge in Chicago said a lawsuit against AT&T over its cooperation with the NSA's collection of phone records cannot proceed, accepting the Bush administration's argument that the case would reveal state secrets. The crucial difference: While administration officials have acknowledged the existence of the surveillance program, they have not acknowledged the existence of the phone call database. If they're not talking about it, it must be a secret.

That argument is awfully convenient for the government, but it's not quite as worrisome as a more ambitious variation: If they're not talking about it, it must be legal. Then again, the practical result may be the same.

I'm going to pretend there's some libertarian lesson to be drawn from this somehow, because it's too freaking funny not to post: Steven Colbert vs. D.C. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton.

That's the question asked by Massachusetts General Hospital endocrinologist David A. Shaywitz in an op/ed in the Boston Globe. To wit:

The national preoccupation with university researchers who collaborate with drug companies has now blossomed into a full-fledged witch hunt. Before we burn these heathen scientists at the stake, however, we might want to step back and examine our underlying assumptions. . . .

Ultimately, the myopic focus on financial conflicts is likely to discourage relationships between university researchers and drug companies--a bad idea, since these associations offer enormous potential for medical advancement.

Whole thing here.

More troops will probably be in Iraq at the end of the year then there are now, AP reports, as an extra 5,000 are sent in to Baghdad to quell escalating violence there:

The Pentagon signaled plans to maintain or possibly increase the current level of about 130,000 troops in Iraq, by announcing that roughly 21,000 Army soldiers and Marines have been told they are scheduled to go to Iraq during the current 2006-2008 rotation.

Combined with two previous announcements of about 113,000 U.S. service members scheduled for the rotation period, this could bring the number of U.S. troops there to 134,000, if all are deployed.

Military commanders have said deployments depend on conditions in Iraq. But the latest announcement calls into question whether the Pentagon could significantly reduce troop levels in Iraq by year's end as commanders had hoped.

Back in 2003, our own Tim Cavanaugh discussed stop-loss, one of the military's techniques for keeping its numbers robust. The military does insist that it will be meeting its recruitment goals this year--sounds like they'll definitely need it.

Lebanon: the first YouTube war.

In a matter of weeks, YouTube has become a video Dumpster for a global audience to share first-hand reports, military strategies, propaganda videos and personal commentary about a violent conflict as it unfolds....

In a message to Hezbollah, a man asks: "I was wondering if you guys have any nuclear bombs, and if so, what are you planning do with it? How's the war going over there? Do you guys ever go to YouTube.com? Peace." Another video warns to "proceed with caution" before viewing because it shows a bloodied man who appears to be dead. Some groups have posted gritty black-and-white footage of bombs hitting targets in Lebanon....

One of the most popular videos on YouTube this week is one of Beirut posted by a 27-year-old man named Mohammed, who captured bombs lighting up the night a short distance away. He wrote on the Web site: "Listen to the horrifying blasts of israeli bombs exploding in the Lebanese capital, Beirut. This video brings back haunting memories from the 82 israeli invasion of Beirut -- I was then only 4 years old -- But the lasting impact of these blasts has never left me.. For those lucky enough to have not experienced a war during their lifetime, it may appear to you that you understand all about it by watching CNN, BBC, or reading the papers.. This video is an attempt to give you a more realistic sense of how terrifying a war can be on innocent civilians.. and kids, just like me, 24 years ago."

"The voluminous evidence now strongly suggests that unless we act boldly and quickly to deal with the underlying causes of global warming, our world will undergo a string of terrible catastrophes, including more and stronger storms like Hurricane Katrina, in both the Atlantic and the Pacific," said former Vice-President Al Gore and global warming campaigner on NPR recently.

There is considerable evidence for man-made global warming, but the vice-president may have prematurely jumped to a conclusion about hurricanes. A new study in Science co-authored by Chris Landsea of the National Hurricane Center suggests that the trend toward stronger hurricanes that some researchers find in the data may be a result of faulty data. Obviously this scientific debate is far from over.

Thanks to a confluence of events - co-scheduling with America's Future Foundation, plugs on Wonkette, a butterfly flapping its wings halfway across the world - yesterday's Reason Happy Hour broke all attendance records. It was so popular that I hesitate to write snarky captions for these photos only to later discover that I just portrayed the programming director at ABC News or something as a red-eyed tail-chaser. But without further ado. If you're portrayed here and not mentioned in the caption, email dweigel at reason dot com.

One of our models showcases the new Reason T-shirts, constructed from breathable black cotton fibers that scientists have dubbed "Gillespiewear."

More below the fold.

Jeremy Lott, Doublethink Editor David Skinner, and Investor's Business Daily journo Sean Higgins hold court in the sofa room.

Sasha Volokh composes a poem on the spot for Ronald Bailey.

Drinkers crowd onto the 18th Street Lounge's veranda as, apparently, a nuclear weapon detonates.

To The People blogger Baylen Linnekin recovers from last night's blog party by... well, by partying.

Some people discuss some things. (I'm not good with names.)

Matthew Continetti and J. Peter Freire try to bring new Reason Associate Editor Katherine Mangu-Ward into the neocon fold.

Matthew Yglesias, Will Wilkinson and Justin Logan brainstorm ways to turn America over to the terrorists.

And a hundred Hit and Run commenters' hearts break into pieces.

After dousing myself in sweat, I discuss Michael Steele's amazing campaign skills with David Mark.

Chris Lehmann and Reason Web Editor Tim Cavanaugh ask the age-old question: "What the hell is that?"

Nick Gillespie re-enacts great moments from the lives of English kings with John Tabin.

Victoria Kurzweg is temporarily stunned by the charm of AFF's David Kirby.

Ronald Bailey, who has only intellectual conflicts of interest, looks at the financial conflicts of high-minded scientific organizations.

Why? From the Hoosier state:

State homeland security officials have warned Vermillion County to stop using electronic emergency message boards to advertise fish fries, spaghetti dinners and other events.

Homeland Security, which bought the 11 signs for $300,000, said the county could risk losing federal money. The county has stopped using the signs for the community announcements, and commissioners plan discuss the matter next week.

The president of the County Commissioners said Homeland Security is interfering with local governing.

"We run the county," Commissioner Tim Wilson said. "We make decisions to run the county on what's best for us. Did we misuse (the signs)? Or did we just run the county as we saw fit?"

Local officials say residents enjoyed the advertisements.

Goddamn.

"Keep Pornographers away from Major League Baseball!"

That's the lastest rallying cry from Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council (alas, not that Tony Perkins, whose second big role was playing psycho big leaguer Jimmy Piersall in Fear Strikes Out [which, incidentally, should have been accurately titled Fear Draws an Intentional Walk).

Personally--and I say this as someone who has copped to maintaining and Eddie Murray stats-and-sideburns shrine as a kid--I think baseball would have long benefited from closer ties to the porn industry--just imagine the possibilities for mascots such as Chief KnockaHomer and the prehensile-tongue-wielding Phillie Fanatic, not to mention former journeymen such as Dick Pole and Pete LaCock. And let's face it, scandal-clouded Viagra pitchman and Hall of Fame stat machine Rafael Palmeiro's future clearly ain't in baseball these days.

But FRC's Mr. Perkins is spittin' more than Gaylord Perry because...because...well, let him tell you, in an open letter to baseball commish Bud Selig:

I have learned of reports that the Atlanta Braves may soon be sold to Mr. John Malone and Liberty Media. If approved, this purchase would effectively put Major League Baseball into a business partnership with one of America's most prolific purveyors of pornography. Through his ownership of ON COMMAND and his role in the cable company TCI, Mr. Malone has done as much as or more than any other American to mainstream the distribution of degrading porn into the nation's homes and into hundreds of thousands of hotel rooms. Pornography is not a harmless pursuit, but rather an industry that has been shown to play an enormously destructive role in the lives of families, with particular impact on women and children.

Whole thing here.

Really, don't the Braves--not to mention hotel-room-renting porn watchers--have enough problems these days? And isn't there a war on, partly precisely because we are porn-lovin' infidel dogs?

More than two weeks into the Lebanon war several thing are becoming slightly more obvious. The first is that the dynamics of the conflict are changing. Whereas for the first two weeks the Israelis imposed a blockade on all ports and systematically destroyed roads, bridges, Beirut's Shiite southern suburbs, and large areas of the mainly Shiite south and the northern Bekaa Valley, now we seem to have moved to a ground war focused in the border region. After the heavy casualties the Israelis took yesterday in Bint Jubail, I imagine Israel will escalate its air campaigns and essentially try to grind down and overcome the entrenched Hezbollah combatants through massive firepower. That will mean heavy civilian casualties.

Can it do so before a cease-fire? Because of the relative (and I mean very relative) normalization in the rest of the country, and the imminent opening of so-called humanitarian corridors to allow supplies and aid into Lebanon, it seems to me that Israel has bought several more weeks in which to hit Hezbollah, particularly in the south. There is also an embarrassed understanding, both inside Lebanon and out, that if things were to stop now, Hezbollah would emerge much stronger from the fight, and would be in a position to stage an effective coup against the Lebanese state, by virtue of its weapons and its ability (and visible desire today) to seek retribution against its critics.

Where will this lead? That depends on how well Hezbollah fights back. But the Israeli government has two contracts to fulfill: one toward its own people (and PM Ehud Olmert needs to prove that he can defend Israel, particularly if he goes through with a unilateral withdrawal from the West Bank in the future); and a contract with the Bush administration, which has asked Israel to cut down Hezbollah. Both objectives mean this is a fight Israel cannot afford to lose; and one Hezbollah cannot either.

On the diplomatic front, Condoleezza Rice's visit to Beirut earlier this week showed two things: that the U.S. doesn't have a clear idea how to deploy an international force in the border area; and that Rice is open to ideas. In a lunch session with representatives of political forces opposed to Syria, and critical of Hezbollah, she initially said that her plan called for clearing out a 20 kilometer area in the south where an international force would deploy. When the assembled politicians said this was ridiculous, since Hezbollah would only fire at Israel from behind the peacekeepers, Rice backtracked, saying that hers was only a proposal. She reportedly told assistant secretary David Welch to note that the plan had to be changed, and that the U.S. would aim for a demilitarization of the south. Quite how the U.S. intends to do this remains utterly unclear.

My own view is that this is a long work in progress, so that it is senseless to draw too many conclusions today. This is going to last for several more weeks, and the diplomacy will only really begin making inroads if Hezbollah agrees to compromise. We're far from that yet, but facing 500,000-700,000 displaced people, mounting economic costs estimated at $2 billion, the displeasure of much of Lebanese society, Hezbollah's leader, Hassan Nasrallah, needs his militia to come out of the Israeli land operation looking more or less intact, otherwise his margin to delay on a compromise will become narrower and narrower.

Most alarming, however, is that there are increasing calls in the U.S. for the Bush administration to engage Syria, so that it can help control Hezbollah, on the assumption that if you deal with Syria, you can isolate Iran. One wonders if those peddling the idea have any memory at all: it was under Syria that Hezbollah became a military power, and what the Syrians will demand, or maneuver to achieve, in exchange for "helping" would be onerous. They will want the international investigation of Rafiq Hariri's murder to be dropped, to save their regime that ordered the crime; and they will want oversight power over Lebanese affairs, which, with an armed Hezbollah as Praetorian Guard, would effectively mean they would again rule the country.

My own suspicion is that this is also Israel's Plan B if the international peacekeeping force project doesn't work out. The Israelis have always preferred dealing with predictable Syria in Lebanon than with a weak state that cannot control Hezbollah and is open to myriad outside irritants. Because the Israelis have no confidence in Lebanon's innate stability, they have no qualms about making that stability increasingly impossible.

In her 8 millionth version of this column, Suzanne Fields articulates a message that I, for one, cannot get enough of: You're all sluts, and you like it. To wit:

Fashion reflects the times and modesty and femininity are anachronisms in a world in which "slut" is no longer a slur. The word was popularized by gangsta rappers, linking it with "ho" and other denigrating descriptions of women. The New York Times reports that it has become a term of endearment between women friends, a "fun word" for ladies who lunch. These are the young women who read "The Vagina Monologues" to each other, reveling in the celebration of their body parts.

This piece, while being utterly devoid of substantive content, really does have it all: a reference to "gangsta rappers," awkward use of the word ho, a sorrowful nod to the slutty poor (they "suffer most," let's please not forget), mention of a "media-saturated culture," a reference to that peerless chronicler of the cutting edge, The New York Times Style Section, and my personal favorite, a lengthy quote from the expert on the nuances of sexuality among adolescent girls, septuagenerian Tom Wolfe.

As I took some time off from a long string of rainbow parties to read this column, I could think only of the South Park episode where we learn the show King of the Hill Family Guy is written by manatees rearranging "idea balls," each of which are stamped with words to be used in the script. Is there a tank somewhere with balls labeled "Vagina Monologues," "college hook-ups," and "Girls Gone Wild"? Are these columns composed with magnetic poetry?

The married anti-terrorist officer told police he was working undercover to video al-Qaeda suspects. But back at the station they found his camera had close-ups of bottoms and knickers.

He was nabbed by a plain-clothes team watching out for perverts and paedophiles in Trafalgar Square, Central London, on Tuesday. A police source claimed the man, a Scotland Yard surveillance expert with more than 20 years' experience, had the camera hidden in a sports bag. He added: "The officer used surveillance techniques for his own perverted hobby - taking pictures up women's skirts.

Whole thing here. Rule, Britannia.

A new article by sociologists Emily Erikson and Peter Bearman offers an interesting take on the history of global trade. I haven't read the paper itself yet, but this description on the Scientific American website makes it sound fascinating:

In the 17th and 18th centuries, the East India Company established a monopolistic trade network on the high seas, gaining immense wealth and influence at home in England. Their ships sailed from Europe with silver and bullion, returning months or years later with exotic goods from Asia and Africa. Along the way, enterprising ships' captains engaged in private trading of their own, abusing company resources for personal gain. Now, researchers at Columbia University have shown that it was this illicit trading, rather than officially sanctioned activity, that was directly responsible for the creation of the first global market and the success of the East India Company.

The researchers analyzed data from 4,572 voyages undertaken by the East India Company between 1601 and 1833, totaling over 28,000 port-to-port journeys. In a paper in this month's American Journal of Sociology, they describe how many rogue captains ignored orders to trade in established markets and then return directly to England, choosing instead to explore new locations and trade between local Asian ports for their own personal profit. Although they were breaking the law by appropriating supplies and ship crews for this private trading, in doing so they ultimately benefited the East India Company by building a larger market and gaining a unique knowledge of local market fluctuations...."They were engaging in criminal activity but that was actually necessary to build up what was the first instance of the global market," says Erikson.

[Via Ender's Review]

With no time or money to hire a book packager, Tim Cavanaugh releases his own unedited ramblings on honesty in autobiography.

George Squyres, the chair of the LP's platform committee, provides a detailed and nuanced discussion of what happened with the LP's platform at its Portland national convention earlier this month, and why. An excerpt:

The factions in the party refuse not simply to listen to each other, but to even consider that each is legitimate. The reformers consider the purists as sociopaths who want the LP to be nothing other than a protest organization, and who don't want to win office as that success would leave them without something to protest. The purists consider the reformers as spineless Republicrat wannabes who will do anything to gain power, ready to sell out principle and whore themselves to gain a few votes. In the midst of this is another faction that doesn't accept either of the other factions but continues to, as Ken Lindell put it in his recent article in Liberty, "jockey for position in an utterly powerless political organization."

Add to this that the platform has long been considered the battleground where somehow political success is going to be won or lost. Getting the platform right is the silver bullet that will propel our candidates to success! Once the other faction has been banished from the platform, America will rush forward in a return to freedom. Yes, I know this sounds silly, but too many believe that this is where the rubber really meets the road.....

My own account of the convention and its goings-on here and here.

Last month about 30 Dallas police officers raided what the local CBS affiliate described as "an illegal high stakes poker game," arresting 10 people and citing 72 others for gambling. Radley Balko highlights a detail the TV report omitted: The raid was carried out by a heavily armed SWAT team, accompanied by a camera crew filming the operation for the A&E series Dallas SWAT. "This was no Sopranos-style game where everybody's packing," Balko notes. "It was a well-known, advertised, gray-area gathering of poker fans."

According to the police, that gray area was solid black, despite the open promotion. "Playing the game [Texas Hold 'Em] is legal unless the dealer or house gets a share of the betting," explained CBS 11 News. "That's what police say was going on at the city's largest underground poker game." When I hosted poker games in Virginia, the other players would usually give me a few bucks of their winnings to help pay for beer and snacks. Does that constitute an illegal "share of the betting" in Texas? The question is more than rhetorical, since I live in Dallas now and I was thinking of getting a game together.

It sounds like the Dallas SWAT team is planning more poker raids. Citing a "reliable firsthand source," Pokerati reports that "the police had a computer-generated form, specifically designed for poker room raids. It was a chart of a poker table, with seats 1-10 numbered correctly...and as they went around ID'ing each player, they noted the individual's position at the table and possibly the size of his or her chipstack."

Reminder! There's a Reason Happy Hour tonight, starting around 6:30PM, at The 18th Street Lounge, in Washington, DC. The Lounge is located at 1212 18th Street, NW, near the intersection of Jefferson, 18th, and Connecticut (look for an unmarked door next to a mattress store and walk on up).

Among the reasons to celebrate:

--we're welcoming Katherine Mangu-Ward, late of The New York Times and The Weekly Standard, aboard as an associate editor (she was also a Reason summer intern in 2000). Read some of her previous work for Reason here and here.

--the promotion of Kerry Howley to associate editor. Read her work here.

--the publication of Reason's annual August-September issue, with its controversial special section, "Immigration Now, Immigration Tomorrow, Immigration Forever" that has been praised by the Wall Street Journal and already caused a couple dozen subscription cancellations.

--Reason being named one of "The 50 Best Magazines" by The Chicago Tribune for the third time in four years.

--first-place finishes in the 48th annual Southern California Journalism Awards by Reason's Ron Bailey, Matt Welch, and Nick Gillespie, and a fistful of second-place and honorable mentions, too.

Special Guest Star Alerts: Reason's S.F.-based Web Editor, Tim Cavanaugh, will be on hand to discuss the fine points of Middle Eastern politics and his stunning appreciation of the original Star Trek series in the Aug-Sept ish.

Other guest stars include ABC News' Jake Tapper and the DC Examiner's and FishBowl DC's Patrick Gavin.

Bonus treats: Randomly sized Reason t-shirts to the first 30 or so guests who make themselves known to us. And countless Reason stickers to put on the backs of unsuspecting liberals and conservatives alike.

The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) is considering a ban on the use of altitude tents and altitude rooms, which simulate the low-oxygen atmosphere of high elevations with the aim of encouraging red blood cell production and boosting endurance. WADA's ethics committee deems the widely used training method contrary to "the spirit of sport." As I've said, I don't really understand why performance-enhancing drugs violate "the spirit of sport." But if they do, it is hard to see why performance-enhancing rooms don't. They seem at least as artificial to me; if anything, steroids are more natural.

But saunas, cold soaks, vitamin capsules, and weight training are artificial too. None of these methods is cheating unless it's against the rules. If everyone is allowed to use it, the competition is still fair (leaving aside differences in natural endowments). In fact, banning high-altitude simulations arguably would make contests less fair, giving an advantage to athletes who happen to live at high elevations or who can afford to move there. "Ninety-five percent of the medals that have been won at Olympic Games have been won by people who train at or live at altitude," a running coach tells The New York Times.

I gather that "the spirit of sport" is not synonymous with fairness; it's more of an aesthetic judgment. Still, why would it permit athletes to improve their performance by moving to a mountain but not by retrofitting their bedrooms with a filtering system?

In a nonsensical confluence of living-wage hype and anti-big box angst, Chicago just passed a bill forcing big-boxers to pay a higher minimum wage by 2010. The Chicago Tribune reveals Wal-Mart's less-than-surprising response to the latest in a string of stupid bills out of the city:

In an interview at Wal-Mart's Chicago office last week, Lewis said if the city council approved the bill, Wal-Mart would "put more time and effort in the suburbs," in particular focusing on those close to the city in order to draw shoppers across city lines.

"It would stand to reason that we would ring Chicago with Supercenters," Lewis said.

Or Feyadeen West? Quite a big difference there.

Saddam's informal guerilla force caused havoc along U.S. supply lines in Iraq for a couple weeks, but also managed to get themselves splattered by superior U.S. firepower in spectacular numbers. The Viet Cong, of course, harassed and frustrated U.S. forces in Vietnam for years. Only the overreach of the Tet offense -- in which the North conveniently killed off the South's best fighters and potential future rivals -- ever, really, neutralized the Cong.

If Israel is fighting Feyadeen-like fanatics in south Lebanon, then yes, a few more weeks should do the trick. But if the IDF faces something like the VC, this conflict will drag on until Hezbollah wants to end it.

Thus far one sign that Hezbollah is a few notches more accomplished than the Feyadeen is its ability to avoid casualties. Guerilla armies need to avoid them both because of their small numbers and the experience gap between veteran fighters and wide-eyed supporters of the cause.

Another more Cong-like attribute of Hezbollah has been its ability to withstand airstrikes. "They really cannot be destroyed from the air. There's really no alternative but to send in ground forces," said Maj. Michael Oren of the Israeli Defense Forces.

Ground forces it is then.

As reporter I have regularly heard frustrated advocates of catastrophic global warming muse among themselves about how they could "get the evangelicals on board." I have also been present at conferences where environmentalists and evangelicals have been "dialoguing" about global warming. Now the activists have gotten their wish--evangelicals have been drawn into the climate change debate.

This past January, a group called the Evangelical Climate Initiative issued a statement, Climate Change: An Evangelical Call to Action, which recognizes "that human-induced climate change is a serious Christian issue requiring action now." The Call to Action is particularly concerned that man-made global warming will harm the world's poor the most. The initial statement was signed by 85 evangelical leaders.

This week another group of evangelicals, called the Interfaith Stewardship Alliance, has issued a statement, A Call to Truth, Prudence, and Protection of the Poor: An Evangelical Response to Global Warming as a challenge to the conclusions of the Evangelical Climate Initiative. For example, the Call to Truth statement argues that "the destructive impact on the poor of enormous mandatory reductions in fossil fuel use far exceeds the impact on them-negative or positive-of the moderate global warming that is most likely to occur."

The authors of the ISA statement include theologian E. Calvin Beisner and the respected University of Alabama Huntsville climate scientist Roy Spencer who is also an evangelical Christian. Other authors listed are long-time catastrophic global warming skeptics such as free-market activist Paul Driessen and statistician Ross McKitrick. ISA's Call to Truth is signed by over 130 scholars, theologians, scientists, economists, and other leaders.

However the global warming debate among evangelicals turns out, it is a sign of progress when theologians appeal to science rather than revelation to justify their positions.

Jay Hancock describes an unintended effect of the Security and Exchange Commission's "fair disclosure" regulation. It was meant to "cut down on leaks of corporate tidbits to Wall Street analysts, big shareholders and other people likely to trade on the information." But it has also left executives frightened to talk to ordinary reporters -- or just given them an excuse to clam up. The SEC, Hancock writes,

should revisit the matter of whether Regulation FD is properly understood. When the rules came out, the agency worried about a "chilling effect" on the flow of information, with a "cost to overall market efficiency and capital formation."

The chill is here. Let's turn up the thermostat and open up the conversation.

Pat Buchanan waves the white flag to end the Culture Wars. Nick Gillespie says: "Forward, march!"

Intelligence officials offered up a rather weird argument in defense of the NSA's warrantless surveillance program in congressional testimony today:

But the administration officials called FISA impractical and ineffective for tracking al Qaeda, saying the law would require separate warrants for each U.S.-bound phone call placed by an overseas suspect.

"It would cause a tremendous burden," said NSA Director Army Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander.

"You'd be so far behind the target if you were in hot pursuit, with the number of applications that you'd have to make and the time to make those, that you'd never catch up."

Now, if FISA actually works like that—if you really need a separate warrant for each call from a foreign suspect to a U.S. person, rather than a single warrant that covers any incoming communication from the person named—that's stupid. I find it a little hard to believe that's really how it works, given that we don't do domestic surveillance that way, but assume it is. Isn't the proper remedy just to tweak FISA to allow somewhat broader warrants? What about this problem requires a whole new program?

Flying in the face of my past advice, the Texas jury in Andrea Yates' second trial for drowning 3 of her 5 kids she drowned (the prosecution was holding the other two in reserve for possible future prosecution) acquits by reason of insanity.

The U.K.'s Daily Mail has been running a must-read, hard-hitting series on well-fed men who bare their ample, pasty British torsos in the summer heat, prompting a "wave of revulsion" in the sea power that was. Now the paper is taking credit for a local movement to have all topless men labeled "anti-social" and forced to cover up. The justification? Slow-moving, bubble-and-squeak-scarfing, male breast-baring Brits "look aggressive and occasionally behave aggressively."

It's a mystery to me how anyone who eats and drinks in the U.K. can avoid being as fat as, say, the scale-tippers in our own fattest state. But the big men of Britain can keep this in mind as they sadly layer up: Britain, like the rest of the developed world, is getting fatter by the minute, and the shrill skinny will be overrun soon enough.

The Daily Mail's "gallery of topless men" is here.

We'll be having a Happy Hour this Thursday, July 27, starting around 6:30PM, at The 18th Street Lounge, in Washington, DC. The Lounge is located at 1212 18th Street, NW, near the intersection of Jefferson, 18th, and Connecticut (look for an unmarked door next to a mattress store and walk on up).

Among the reasons to celebrate:

--we're welcoming Katherine Mangu-Ward, late of The New York Times and The Weekly Standard, aboard as an associate editor (she was also a Reason summer intern in 2000). Read some of her previous work for Reason here and here.

--the promotion of Kerry Howley to associate editor. Read her work here.

--the publication of Reason's annual August-September issue, with its controversial special section, "Immigration Now, Immigration Tomorrow, Immigration Forever" that has been praised by the Wall Street Journal and already caused a couple dozen subscription cancellations.

--Reason being named one of "The 50 Best Magazines" by The Chicago Tribune for the third time in four years.

--first-place finishes in the 48th annual Southern California Journalism Awards by Reason's Ron Bailey, Matt Welch, and me, and a fistful of second-place and honorable mentions, too.

Special Guest Star Alerts: Reason's S.F.-based Web Editor, Tim Cavanaugh, will be on hand to discuss the fine points of Middle Eastern politics and his stunning appreciation of the original Star Trek series in the Aug-Sept ish.

Other guest stars include ABC News' Jake Tapper and the DC Examiner's and FishBowl DC's Patrick Gavin.

Bonus treats: Randomly sized Reason t-shirts to the first 30 or so guests who make themselves known to us. And countless Reason stickers to put on the backs of unsuspecting liberals and conservatives alike.

One of the snappiest drug songs of the '30s, Cab Calloway's "Reefer Man," has made it to YouTube. Prairie Home Companion fans will note that it shares a melody with Garrison Keillor's little jingle for powdermilk biscuits. The tune probably predates both songs, but I still have to wonder about the "whole wheat" in Keillor's fictional product ("to give shy persons the strength to get up and do what needs to be done").

Megan McArdle reveals the not-so dirty truth of why rich countries are happy countries.

BusinessWeek has a great and moving piece discussing the implications the implications of increasingly refined and effective means of screening embryos. The article is penned by "one of the dwindling number of women who receive a prenatal diagnosis of Down syndrome and choose not to terminate our pregnancies."

I would not want scientists to stop delving into the mysteries and wonders of the human genome. I am glad that I knew my son had Down syndrome before he was born. If one of these scientists found a "cure" for my son's Down syndrome, I almost certainly would give it to him. But I will admit that I would pause beforehand. I would think hard about this real-life conversation between a teenager with Down syndrome and her mother. The daughter asked her mother whether she would still have Down syndrome when the two were together in heaven someday. The mother, taken by surprise, responded that she thought probably not. To which her daughter responded, "But how will you know who I am, then?" And I would also think hard about whether the world would really be a better place without my son's soft, gentle, deep, almond-shaped eyes.

Whole thing here. It's easy to say that, at some point, it will be possible to cure many diseases in utero, but it's also true that what counts as "normal" and "abnormal" will change over time, so parents will always have choices to make, even or especially in an age of "designer children." In any case, it was striking to read an article that is not archly ideological but rich in human experience.

Hat tip: John Derbyshire over at The Corner.

Reason's forum on human enhancement touched on many related issues. That's online here.

The Ohio Supreme Court has unanimously rejected the city of Norwood's attempt to take property in an allegedly "deteriorating" neighborhood and hand it over to a private developer. The court called the "deteriorating" label, applied to areas that are admittedly not "blighted" but might (or might not) become so one day, a "standardless standard," and it rejected the "economic development" rationale for the use of eminent domain that the U.S. Supreme Court endorsed in Kelo v. New London. The Institute for Justice, which represented the property owners in the case, calls the decision "a complete and total victory for Carl and Joy Gamble, Joe Horney, the Burtons and every home and business owner in the State of Ohio."

Here is the opinion.

Via MAP comes word that British conservatives are pushing for the legalization of the Afghan opium trade:

"The poppy crops are the elephant in the room of the Afghan problem. We're in complete denial of the power that the crops have on the nation as a whole, and the tactics of eradication are simply not working," [Tory whip Tobias] Ellwood told Guardian Unlimited.

"Last year we spent 600m on eradication and all that resulted was the biggest-ever export of opium from the country."

He said that opium farming should be licensed so that the harvest could be sold legally on the open market, bringing in income for Afghan farmers and helping to plug a global shortage of opiate-based medicines.

Further down in the piece, an expert notes the experience of Turkey, which was a major heroin producer in the '70s until the government there went the licensing route. The result: Turkey is now a major supplier of legal opiates to the U.S. Whole thing here.

Gratuitous semi-guerilla political strategem: Legalizers should follow the lead of the Veterans of Foreign Wars and start selling "buddy poppies" as a means of raising awareness.

The Bush administration is circulating a bill that would tweak the rules for trying accused terrorists before military commissions. The New York Times says the new rules include some additional protections for defendants, but after reading the article twice I'm still not sure what they are. Hearsay would still be admissible as evidence, and so would information obtained through coercive interrogation techniques (though not through torture--but remember that waterboarding is not torture). Defendants could still be excluded from their own trials. Instead of starting with standard court-martial procedures and revising them as required to handle terrorism, as several influential senators would prefer, the administration is startiing with the commissions nixed by the Supreme Court and hoping that a few barely perceptible revisions will suffice.

The procedural details may not matter in any case. "Rather than requiring a speedy trial for enemy combatants," the Times reports, "the draft proposal says they 'may be tried and punished at any time without limitations.' Defendants could be held until hostilities are completed, even if found not guilty by a commission." If "hostilities" are not completed until the world is rid of terrorism, suspects can get a life sentence with or without a trial, no matter what procedures are used and regardless of the verdict.

The fun-loving folks over at To the People are celebrating making it to the one-year mark tonight at Madam's Organ, 2461 18th Street NW, Washington, DC, at 7:30PM. More details here.

Air marshals admit to reporting suspicious activity just because they've essentially been ordered to do so, whether that activity represents a legitimate security threat or not. Excerpts from a Denver TV station's report:

[S]everal air marshals object to a July 2004 memo from top management in the Las Vegas office, a memo that reminded air marshals of the SDR [Surveillance Detection Report] requirement.

The body of the memo said, "Each federal air marshal is now expected to generate at least one SDR per month."

"Does that memo read to you that Federal Air Marshal headquarters has set a quota on these reports?" Kovaleski [the TV reporter] asked.

"Absolutely, no doubt," an air marshal replied.

A second management memo, also dated July 2004, said, "There may come an occasion when you just don't see anything out of the ordinary for a month at a time, but I'm sure that if you are looking for it, you'll see something."

What sort of perfidy does this system uncover?

"Have marshals in the Las Vegas office, I don't want to say fabricated, but 'created' reports?" Kovaleski asked.

"Creative writing -- stretching a long ways the truth, yes," an air marshal replied.

One example, according to air marshals, occurred on one flight leaving Las Vegas, when an unknowing passenger, most likely a tourist, was identified in an SDR for doing nothing more than taking a photo of the Las Vegas skyline as his plane rolled down the runway.

"You're saying that was not an accurate portrayal of a potential terrorist activity?" Kovaleski asked.

"No, it was not," an air marshal said.

[LInk via Rational Review.]

The Wash Times writes up last week's America's Future Foundation debate twixt Jonah Goldberg and me on the dread issue of whether libertarians are really a candy or really a gum really part of the right (or something like that):

"I think the problem with many libertarians nowadays is this idea of culture libertarianism," Mr. Goldberg said during the debate. "This idea that we can all be our own priests, that we can all define our own selves, that not just the state, but tradition and authority of any kind somehow should have no real sway over our lives. Those type of libertarians aren't part of the right at all."

Mr. Gillespie drew applause from the crowd by countering, "If not following in lock step some kind of ... tradition makes me not a member of the right, I'd rather be wrong."

In a postdebate interview, Mr. Gillespie said, "One of the marks of libertarianism is that we recognize that people can choose among past traditions for whichever one works best. Different people value things differently, and the sign of a good society is one that allows as many people as possible to pursue the good life."

More here.

Audio/pics of the damn thing here. More here. Even more here.

Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y. and Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., are still maintaining their "hold" on the confirmation of Dr. Andrew von Eschenbach to head up the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Why? Because they want the agency to issue a final decision one way or the other on whether or not the emergency contraceptive Plan B should be sold over-the-counter. The decision has been pending since an FDA scientific advisory panel overwhelmingly voted in favor of selling Plan B over- the-counter back in December 2003.

The senators are right--it's way past time for the FDA to make a decision. Of course, the correct decision should be that the drug should be available right next to the condom display in drugstores. As I have previously asserted, if the FDA decides against allowing Plan B to be sold over-the-counter, Eschenbach's confirmation should go down in flames.

Paul Cantor, a frequent contributor to our pages, is delivering a series of lectures at the Mises Institute on "Commerce and Culture." They're being webcast here.

Elsewhere in Reason: Cantor on W.C. Fields. On Greil Marcus. On The Osbournes. On the globalization of American TV.

Jacob Sullum's great new col is about the disturbing arrest of BetOnSports CEO David Carruthers, who was arrested on U.S. soil despite operating a business that is totally legal in his home country.

Here's more Internet-gambling-related news, and it too is disturbing. From Walter Williams' syndicated col, a shout-out against pending congressional legislation:

The Internet Gambling Prohibition Act gives Congress the authority to go to an Internet Service Provider (ISP) and order that they not provide linkages to online gambling establishments. If you think Congress will be satisfied with restrictions only on gambling establishments, you're going to be disappointed. After all, the Internet provides people with access to other establishments that can be said to "cause innumerable problems in our society." There are various hate groups with Internet sites that spew vile propaganda. There are pornographic sites. There are sites that present political ideas or religious fanaticism that are offensive to many people and can "cause innumerable problems in our society."

If the Internet Gambling Prohibition Act is approved, it will become a precedent for congressional control over other aspects of the Internet and an important loss in our liberty.

Whole thing here.

Reason checked out online gambling back in 1999 (and hey, I personally took home $170, far better than I ever managed in good ol' Atlantic City).

More recently, in May 2006, Reason pondered "How Legalized Gambling Went from the Strip to Main Street."

From Forbes, re: the trial of Saddam Hussein:

He asked the court to execute him by firing squad--"not by hanging as a common criminal"--if it convicts him of all charges and sentences him to death.

"I ask you being an Iraqi person that if you reach a verdict of death, execution, remember that I am a military man and should be killed by firing squad," he said.

More here. As an opponent of capital punishment, I've gotta say that characters such as Saddam test that position in me.

I posted this at Wonkette and I figured it was worth repeating here. In a debate last night, New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer fielded two questions on marijuana. One: Would he legalize medical marijuana? Two: Had he ever smoked marijuana? The answers: No and yes. The terror of Wall Street has picked up and run with the old Clintonite maxim: Do as I say, not as I did.

Jacob Sullum wonders why the CEO of BetOnSports was arrested for doing nothing wrong, unless you count having a connecting flight in Texas.

An Indonesian Web site editor is arrested on charges of inciting religious hatred for publishing those Danish cartoons we'd all like to forget.

[Link hat tip to the indispensable Comics Reporter.]

Thanks to U.S. truculence over that cornerstone principle of American governance, farm subsidies, the Doha Round of international trade talks has collapsed, the Los Angeles Times reports--amid "bitter recriminations," yet. The U.S. tosses blame back at the European Union for not being open enough to foreign farm products.

The last round of international trade talks, the Uruguay round, similarly fell apart, but after three years a reconciliation and eventual agreement was reached back in 1993.

Read the whole article for further recriminations, beefs over beef, and how disappointed American business interests, ag and not, are over the breakdown.

Business Week a few months back questioned the overall value of an agreement at Doha, and noted that any failure can really be laid at the feet of the developing nations, since

at the insistence of developing countries, Doha largely ignored trade in services, even though many economists believe that the consumer benefits from liberalization of services--from advertising to banking--are far greater than the remaining opportunities in goods trade. That may have been a miscalculation by the poor nations. With little to gain on the services front, the U.S. and Europe have less motivation to budge on the farm and factory issues that developing nations care most about.

While trolling (and I do mean trolling) through the Web site for the upcoming National Conservative Student Conference, I stumbled across this fascinating speaker's fee page at Young America's Foundation, which lists the $$$ requested by speakers big (Bill Bennett, Ann Coulter, Zell Miller[?], who demand $20,000-plus and, doubtless, a bowl of mono-color M&Ms) and small (YAF President Ron Robinson, YAF spokesman Jason Mattera, YAF Director of Campus Programs Patrick X. Coyle, who will show up for $0-$1,000 and bring their own food to boot).

Most curious to me: Former Attorney General John Ashcroft is listed as demanding $20,000--putting him the top category--while equally former (and clearly fatter) Attorney General Ed Meese only snags $3,000-$5,000, the same amount of green pulled down by former Rep. Bob Barr, B-52s' backup singer Phyllis Schlafly, and National Review "girly-boys" (to use La Coulter's own phrase) Jonah Goldberg and Rich Lowry.

Why is Meese selling at such a discount? Didn't he go out of his way to help rev up Reagan's War on Drugs and persecute (prosecute doesn't really get at it) good, upstanding citizens in the name of porn prohibition, among other sins? Or, perhaps more accurately, why is Ashcroft selling at such a premium, assuming anyone actually pays him that much? I mean, really, who other than Jean Carnahan would ever cough up that much to have him in the room?

Post theories of market failure below.

Dance with the undead, spend a weekend behind bars:

In the middle of downtown Minneapolis Saturday night, police found seven people clustered on a street corner, some pale-faced and covered in fake blood and wearing tattered clothes. A few carried backpacks with protruding wires.

It was, participants said later, a "zombie dance party," in which a group of young friends dress in sometimes outlandish attire and congregate in public places to dance to music from portable stereos carried on their backs.

But when the dancers wouldn't tell police concerned about the mysterious wires, give their names or provide identification, they ended up arrested, held in jail until Monday afternoon on suspicion of having "simulated weapons of mass destruction."

Clearly, when the zombie terrorists finally strike, downtown Minneapolis will be the first target. And as the police helpfully explain, the living really can't expect to wear excessive mascara without disturbing the peace:

Police say the group was uncooperative and intimidated passersby with their "ghoulish" makeup at a time when officers were on high alert in reaction to a bulletin about men in other states who wear clown makeup while attacking and robbing people.

Stop hogging the headlines, Palestine and Kashmir. Foreign Policy tours the world's forgotten territorial disputes, from the Arctic to the South China Sea.

Almost 20 years ago, I remember visiting the Sears Tower in Chicago and having to sit through a promotional film about how goddamned great the then-Second City (and now third, after NYC and LA) was and how much better the Sears Tower was than the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, and the World Trade Center combined.

In a curious bit of '80s waning homophobia--the sort on display, say, in virtually every episode of Barney Miller and Three's Company--the John Facenda[*]-like narrator proclaimed, a propos of absolutely nothing, "Chicago ain't no sissy town!" He was, if memory serves, quoting some alderman or whatever the fuck they've got there.

Well, it turns out that Chicago is a sissy town, though in a way that has naught to do with sexuality:

If you're a cell phone-using, goose liver-eating, cigarette-smoking, fast food-loving person, Chicago might not be your kind of town.

In this city that once winked at Prohibition, members of the City Council are trying to crack down on things they deem unhealthy, immoral or just plain annoying.

A proposal that would restrict fast-food chains from cooking with artery-clogging trans fat oils got a public airing last week, and in the past year alone aldermen have banned smoking in nearly all public places and the use of cell phones while driving.

In April, Chicago became the first U.S. city to outlaw the sale of foie gras, a goose liver delicacy that is decried by animal-rights activists because it is created by force-feeding birds to fatten up their livers.

Whole thing here.

"Stormy, husky, brawling,/City of the Big Shoulders"--not so much anymore.

[*]: corrected

Update: Reader Chris Scoggins writes in with news that Windy City pols now want to micro-chip Fido.

More Update: Reader Dave Wegener points to a Sun-Times' story about Chicago pols pushing for hiked wages and benefits to be paid by big-box retailers.

As you may recall, erstwhile Reason assistant editor Dave Weigel is guest-blogging this week over at Wonkette, which offers up "politics for people with dirty clothes minds."

Now Dave and I have a relationship not unlike the one between Charles Bronson and Jan Michael Vincent in The Mechanic or Lee Marvin and Keith Carradine in The Emperor of the North Pole, so you know that right up to the moment he kills me in an unforgettable way (spoiler alert--too late!) or I toss him from a freight train with the admonition, "Kid, you got no class" (sorry about that again), you know I'm telling you the straight dope when I say Dave is the greatest product to come outta Delaware since George Thoroughgood and Valerie Bertinelli combined.

Today's Weigelania include a great bit on political bobbleheads (literal bobbleheads) and cancer lawsuits; Judge Sam Alito's Facebook problem; Tony Snow's Elvisoid sunglasses and backtracking on the stem-cells-is-murder line; and fucked-up info on assorted political races that will make your libertarian ears bleed with joyous anger.

Check Dave's posts out often at Wonkette. I know I won't be sorry you did.

While the radio was playing in the other room and I was barely paying attention, I swear I just heard coming from Rush Limbaugh's mouth the words "Phony baloney plastic banana good time rock n rollers."

I'm not looking for an explanation. And may Dave Barry, Rush (both talk show host and band) and all my readers forgive me, but I think I'm using that as a name for my next band.

Brian Doherty asks the hard questions about the conflict in Lebanon: Is it justified? Who are the victims? Who's to blame?

We'll be having a Happy Hour this Thursday, July 27, starting around 6:30PM, at The 18th Street Lounge, in Washington, DC. The Lounge is located at 1212 18th Street, NW, near the intersection of Jefferson, 18th, and Connecticut (look for an unmarked door next to a mattress store and walk on up).

Among the reasons to celebrate:

--we're welcoming Katherine Mangu-Ward, late of The New York Times and The Weekly Standard, aboard as an associate editor (she was also a Reason summer intern in 2000). Read some of her previous work for Reason here and here.

--the promotion of Kerry Howley to associate editor. Read her work here.

--the publication of Reason's annual August-September issue, with its controversial special section, "Immigration Now, Immigration Tomorrow, Immigration Forever" that has been praised by the Wall Street Journal and already caused a couple dozen subscription cancellations.

--Reason being named one of "The 50 Best Magazines" by The Chicago Tribune for the third time in four years.

--first-place finishes in the 48th annual Southern California Journalism Awards by Reason's Ron Bailey, Matt Welch, and me, and a fistful of second-place and honorable mentions, too.

Special Guest Star Alerts: Reason's S.F.-based Web Editor, Tim Cavanaugh, will be on hand to discuss the fine points of Middle Eastern politics and his stunning appreciation of the original Star Trek series in the Aug-Sept ish.

Other guest stars include ABC News' Jake Tapper and the DC Examiner's and FishBowl DC's Patrick Gavin.

Bonus treats: Randomly sized Reason t-shirts to the first 30 or so guests who make themselves known to us. And countless Reason stickers to put on the backs of unsuspecting liberals and conservatives alike.

In the past couple of days here we've seen First Couple of libertarianism Milton and Rose Friedman divided on the libertarian approach to war, Robert Higgs quite certain that no one worthy of the name could be anything but staunchly anti-intervention, and Ilya Somin parsing out some of the charactertistics that might divide libertarian-leaning warriors from anti-warriors.

Now Reason contributing editor Brink Lindsey (an old boss and an old friend) presents vividly the foreign policy divide within himself: While he supported the invasion of Iraq--a position of great controversy within the Cato Institute, where he works--he now admits he might have been wrong. It is well worth reading in full, but here is a quick guide through his thinking:

[M]y support for the invasion was based on the assumption of active biological and nuclear weapons programs. That assumption, of course, proved incorrect. I also failed to anticipate the Sunni insurgency that has been at the root of Iraq's post-Saddam problems. And, perhaps most egregiously, I placed my trust in the Bush administration to assess the Iraqi threat accurately and do all within its power to make the occupation of Iraq a success. That trust, however foolishly offered, was badly betrayed.

He still can't say for sure, though, that even knowing what he knows now that he would have opposed the forced overthrow of Saddam. But moving forward, what should happen?

For a long while I kept hoping that political progress in Iraq would lead to progress in subduing the insurgency. It hasn't, and now the country seems to be spiraling into sectarian civil war. I don't see any prospect for things to get better in the foreseeable future, and thus I see no U.S. interest in maintaining our presence there. So I'm in favor of getting out.

He's also reconsidered the practical benefits of some interventions on deck, thinking that an Iran invasion right now wouldn't be worth it, either. He stresses this doesn't represent any huge ideological sea change from "interventionist" to "noninterventionist"; he maintains he tries to suss out the proper thing to do in foreign policy conundrums based on specific circumstances, not ruling abstract theories. He concludes:

What has changed, for me, since the spring of 2003 is the weight I assign to the relevant risks. In particular, I currently consider the threat of Islamist terrorism to be far less grave than I feared it to be in the wake of 9/11....my best reading of the available evidence tells me that both the scale and the sophistication of anti-U.S. terrorist activity are currently rather limited. Consequently, I am less persuaded than before of the need for bold and risky moves against terror-sponsoring states. At the present time, I therefore prefer a more cautious approach in dealing with rogue regimes.

Brink was the libertarian pro-war voice in a Reason debate on the wisdom of U.S. war in Iraq; here is where he stood back in 2002.

The last time I read something by America's most mustachioed movie maven [*], Michael Medved, he was admitting to a hotel-soap-stealing compulsion, yammering that we should call Islamo-Fascists Islamo-Nazis, and trying to replace the term "traditional marriage" with "natural marriage" in an attempt to "drive the gay activists crazy." In what shaped up as an inadvertent attack on adoption, the arch social conservative wrote that his new term "will force the other side to try to assert the obviously absurd proposition that it's just as natural for a same-sex couple to raise somebody else's baby as it is for a heterosexual couple to raise their own."

Welcome to Medved 2.0, in which our hero shows himself to be one of the greatest, endlessly renewable entertainment resources we've got in this sweet land of liberty. Here he is heaping praise upon Reason Contributing Editor Deirdre McCloskey's new book, The Bourgeois Virtues:

I eagerly await the opportunity to digest this book in its entirety--feeling gratified that it seems to echo some of the arguments in a key chapter in my own most recent book, RIGHT TURNS...[in which] I specifically and passionately praise..."the Bourgeois Virtues," which have been subjected to considerable calumny and every sort of intellectual assault, while deserving as many defenders as possible. Deirdre N. McCloskey has, apparently, made a major contribution in that effort.

Whole thing, including Medved's strange identification of science writer extraordinaire (and major Ron Bailey fan) Matt Ridley as a "British banker and philosopher," here.

I'm curious as to Medved's reaction when he finally chows down on McCloskey's book and learns that she is the former Donald McCloskey, a change she documented in her stunning memoir, Crossing (excerpted here in Reason). If Medved is put off by bourgeois gays and lesbians who dast "raise somebody else's baby" as their own, what will he do when he learns that his great champeen of virtue is an unrepentant gender-bender, a drug-war apostate, a Modern Language Association member, and perhaps most shocking of all to a social conservative, the author of the following line regarding that great inspiration to Maggie Thatcher, F.A. Hayek: "You read it here: Hayek has more in common with Jacques Derrida than with Bentham and Comte and Russell"?

I don't know, but I sure hope Medved writes about it.

[*]: Commenter tew below argues that Gene Shalit is our most mustachioed movie maven and upon reflection, I'm tempted to agree.

Ex-Congressman Martin Frost of Dallas wishes the media wouldn't pay so much attention to the gubernatorial campaign of Kinky Friedman, the cult country singer turned mystery novelist. "Much of the national press is treating Kinky as the second coming of Jesse Ventura, the former professional wrestler who was elected governor of Minnesota as an Independent a few years ago," he writes at FoxNews.com. "Nothing could be farther from the truth. All polls in Texas have consistently shown Kinky running fourth in a four-person race."

That is true only if "all polls" does not include SurveyUSA, which currently has Kinky running second. (Granted, the margin of error is big enough to push him back down to fourth.) At any rate, Frost argues that Friedman's support boils down to a batch of Austin liberals and a contingent of "rural voters who are down on everyone currently in government." In other words, the candidate has reassembled the grand coalition of urban ironists and back-country militiamen who made the '90s so interesting. That's reason enough for me to back the man -- though as it happens, I have three other reasons as well:

1. I support any offbeat celebrity running on a third-party ticket, regardless of platform.

2. Friedman once rhymed "Baruch atah Adonai" with "What the hell you doin' back there, boy?" That's worth at least five votes right there.

3. My brother once bought me Kinky's book Blast from the Past and stood in line so the author could sign it for me. He wrote:

Dear Jesse--
Any brother of Andrew is a brother of mine!

I never finished the book -- I prefer Friedman's songs to his novels -- but that's the funniest inscription I've ever seen.

Frost may well be right about Brother Kinky's chances, but he's wrong to attribute reporters' fascination with Friedman to a habit of treating Texas like "some erratic third-world nation." They just like to write about an entertaining guy who keeps spouting funny one-liners; if John Waters was running for governor of Maryland, they wouldn't treat the Free State any differently. Either way, Frost's defense of Texas' honor isn't doing his state any favors:

The remarkable thing about the national media's blind spot about Texas politics is that so many nationally prominent politicians have come from Texas during the last 50 years. During that time, three U.S. presidents have been Texans: Lyndon Johnson, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush; two U.S. vice presidents have been Texans: Johnson and Bush Sr.; Texans have served as speaker of the U.S. House: Sam Rayburn and Jim Wright; three Texans have served as majority leader of U.S. House: Wright, Dick Armey and Tom DeLay; one Texan has served as chairman of the Democratic National Committee: Bob Strauss.

Many nationally prominent television journalists have also come from Texas: CBS's Walter Cronkite (University of Texas), Dan Rather (Houston) and Bob Schieffer (Ft. Worth); ABC's Sam Donaldson (El Paso) and PBS's Jim Lehrer (San Antonio and Dallas).

LBJ? Tom DeLay? Are you trying to make your state look bad? I'd take Kinky Friedman over all those schmoes put together. He's an heir to the other great Lone Star political tradition: the one that elected Pappy O'Daniel.

Finally, I'm not sure what to make of this passage:

Kinky is exactly the kind of candidate for whom my 26-year-old daughter--who is single [and] socially liberal and has read all his books--would vote. There is only one problem. She lives in Santa Fe, N.M., and is not registered to vote in Texas. There are a lot of out-of-staters who would vote for Kinky if they only could.

Oh, I understand the point that Frost is making. I just don't know why he threw in the bit about his daughter being single. You think you're reading a political column, and suddenly you're in the middle of a personals ad. SWF. Liberal. Kinky Friedman fan. No smokers. She's only 26, Dad. You don't need to rush things.

In the Washington Times, sometime Reason contributor Bruce Bartlett argues that access to alternative media is spurring the oh-so-close elections we seem to have been experiencing the past several years. Apres talk radio came the Internet et voila:

There was finally a full blown conservative alternative to the decades-long liberal media domination. This, I believe, is behind the tightening of political races. Now both sides can get their message out with equal effectiveness, returning politics to the 19th century norm, before liberals took de facto control of all major media, creating an era of liberal political domination that was a historical aberration.

More here. Bartlett is responding to a Michael Barone col in which Barone posited sharp divisions on basic issues as the cause.

Outside of presidential races, I'm not convinced we are in some grand age of razor-thin contests. Isn't the conventional wisdom that gerrymandering has made U.S. representatives and senators even more bullet-proof than ever? But to the extent that presidential races have been close--and to my mind the most striking thing about the past four elections is that only one has produced a majority vote-getter, Bush in 2004, and not by much--maybe it's consensus on most issues that's providing the dead heats. Dem and Rep presidential candidates have been offering up an echo of each other, not a distinct choice, which might explain the weak vote totals as much as anything else.

Sen. Hillary Clinton and a few of her Democratic colleagues from the Legion of Doom World's Greatest Deliberative Body and Goode Tyme Eatin' House have unveiled an "American Dream Initiative" which promises a college grad with gold-plated health care in every two-car garage.

Reuters via China Daily calls the play:

Rewriting her husband's famous 1992 campaign slogan, "It's the economy, stupid," she declared: "It's the American dream, stupid."...

"This plan will make the basics of life in the middle class -- health care, education and retirement -- affordable for those who take responsibility," Clinton said.

"These ideas will make sure every American will get a fair wage, access to college and home ownership and a path out of poverty and into the middle class," she said.

Also in the offing: "American Dream Grants" to states based on the number of state college grads they produce, "American Dream Accounts" for retirement, American "baby bonds" that would cough up $500 per infant, and, I'm guessing, "American Dream Ice Cream," which tastes great but is not fattening, and "American Dream Food Stamps" so it's easier to shop at the sort of upscale grocery stores that the vanishing middle class prefers but can't afford. On top of it all: "New rules to rein in federal spending." More here.

Give Hillary, Sens. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.), and Gov. Tom Vilsack (D-Iowa) this much credit: This plan has better theatrics than Rep. Nancy Pelosi's (D-Calif.) bold promise to deliver broadband access at a slower rate than the market is currently doing. But I suspect the rest will ring pretty hollow for most people: Housing prices are steep in key metro areas (largely the fault of existing gov't policy, btw) but the percentage of owners is at or near historic highs. The same holds true for college attendance.

And somehow, however annoying and frustrating the American health care system is, it seems unlikely that Hillary Clinton, of all people, will motivate voters to pull the Dem lever. Indeed, even her line--"It's the American Dream, stupid!"--sounds off. Where Bill Clinton's campaign slogan was clearly designed to keep his team focused, her line seems more directed at recalcitrant voters. Then again, against the current crop of Republicans, this sort of thing might look like genius thinking, especially if the GOP's Napoleon in Elba AEI is campaigning mostly on a weight-loss plan.

Russian (Soviet?) scientist Dmitri K. Belyaev began a series of experiments in 1959 in which he crossbred generations of wild animals selecting only for increased tolerance for human beings. He considered this characteristic to be the hallmark of tameness or domestication. Most famously, Belyaev eventually bred foxes that in only a few generations became as tame as dogs. The New York Times has a fascinating article today looking at how Belyaev and his successors have also bred tame rats, minks, and so forth. Tamed animals look more like younger versions of their forbears.

Researchers have noted that domesticated animals generally have smaller brains than their wild ancestors did. In fact, modern humans also have smaller brains than our ancestors did. This has led some researchers to suggest that human beings are self-domesticated. As the Times noted: "Richard Wrangham, a primatologist at Harvard, has proposed that people are a domesticated form of ape, the domestication having been self-administered as human societies penalized or ostracized individuals who were too aggressive."

Researchers reported last year that one variant of the microcephalin gene affecting human brains was strongly selected for and swept through human populations about 37,000 years ago. Another study found that a variant of the ASPM gene, which is also involved with the development of human brains, arose merely about 5,800 years ago and has since swept to high frequency under strong positive selection. Could these genes be involved in our ongoing self-domestication? Is self-domestication (and the increased tolerance of others that goes with it) responsible for our ability to build large-scale civilizations?

MySpace, it turns out, is more than a place for 45-year-old men posing as varsity football players. It's also a place for Marine recruiters sporting action-packed streaming video. According to its MySpace page, the U.S. Marine Corps is way popular, with no fewer than 12,987 friends. AP reports that an Army recruitment page is in the works.

Via Sploid.

If a libertarian had written this New York Times op-ed as a piece of Swiftian satire, I can only assume it would have been regarded as ham-handed and over-the-top. But barring some recent and little-publicized reversal of ideological polarity, I've got to suppose quondam presidential aspirant Mike Dukakis and UCLA prof Daniel Mitchell are in earnest. Their core idea:

If we are really serious about turning back the tide of illegal immigration, we should start by raising the minimum wage from $5.15 per hour to something closer to $8.

Following this modest proposal, we're treated to an unnecessarily long rehash of the argument that it's a canard to talk about "jobs Americans won't do" when, after all, Americans will do most anything at some wage. This is, of course, an obtuse response, though I lay the blame for its familiarity with the immigration advocates who provoked it by crafting their talking points for an audience brighter than the average toaster. The obvious rejoinder is that very, very many of those jobs simply wouldn't exist at the wage levels necessary to fill them purely domestically, unless we assume that the demand for landscaping is totally inelastic.

But don't worry, Dukakis and Mitchell have anticipated that objection. In fact, it's the crux of their case! You see:

If we raise the minimum wage, it's possible some low-end jobs may be lost; but more Americans would also be willing to work in such jobs, thereby denying them to people who aren't supposed to be here in the first place.

Again, but for that byline, I'd read the satirist's ironic understatement here: It's not possible that a minimum wage hike would destroy jobs, it is—notwithstanding the hoary progressive tradition of insistence to the contrary—the crucial presumption underlying their plan. Because Dukakis and Mitchell reject, for eminently sound reasons, schemes to seal the borders with fences or create intrusive national ID systems and verification requirements for employers. So in effect we're being promised that raising the minimum wage will entail "turning back the tide of illegal immigration" as a purely economic consquence.

But gosh, since "[m]illions of illegal immigrants work for minimum and even sub-minimum wages," wouldn't pumping up the minimum hourly wage by a few dollars entice still more workers over the borders? Well, no, not if you assume that whatever incentive is provided by the higher wage gets washed out by such dramatic job shrinkage that the expected value of hoofing north drops despite the significant income boost for those lucky enough to find a job. (And add the assumption that you don't just drive that many more into the illicit economy paying those "sub-minimum" wages.)

I'm guessing any conservative economist who predicted employment contraction of that magnitude following a $3 hike in the minimum wage would get roundly blasted as an alarmist wingnut and shill for business. I'm morbidly curious to see whether Michael Dukakis can get away with it, as long as the mojados are supposed to bear the brunt of the losses. [Cross-posted @ Notes from the Lounge]

Cathy Young makes a (doomed?) effort to save conservatives from, well, other conservatives.

President Bush looks ahead, a new trade pact is dead, and Microsoft's iPod competitor isn't worth the bread... in the new Reason Express.

In the past two weeks, as latter-day celebrity Beirut fans like Anthony Bourdain and Liza Minelli have hightailed it out of the Middle East or canceled appearances (in Minelli's case as a kind of international goodwill gesture), one group of long-time Lebanon hands has hung on doggedly: Deep Purple boldly and repeatedly refused to cancel its appearance at the Baalbeck Festival. "The band has never canceled a show and has no intention of doing so," Deep Purple said in a statement a week ago. "If the festival promoter decides to cancel the show as a result of the current conflicts, Deep Purple will vow to reschedule in the near future."

Sadly, a band willing to brave smoke on the water was stopped by smoke over Baalbeck, which has since become another target. I'd look for them to keep that rescheduling promise, however. Deep Purple to my knowledge has been playing Lebanon since at least the early 1990s, a time when that trip was still considered somewhat intrepid. Back then, Deep Purple and the legendary Samantha Fox were the only acts broad-minded or career-challenged enough to make Beirut a stop on the tour, but make it they did. In the Hariri era the pickings got easier and the celebrity namechecks moved up the C- and into the B+ and A- lists: Shirley Bassey, Alvin Lee and Ten Years After, Roger Waters, Mariah Carey (post-crackup!), Fiddy... All gone now. The summer celebrities have flown the nest, but bank on this: Deep Purple shall return, river-deep and mountain-high.

The secretary of state has paid a surprise visit to Lebanon, meeting with the prime minister and the speaker of the parliament:

[Assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs C. David] Welch said Rice's delegation came away from the meetings quite struck by the extent of the humanitarian crisis in Lebanon and the depth of emotion about it.

According to a Lebanese political source quoted by Reuters news agency, Rice told Berri, the speaker of the Lebanese parliament and a strong ally of Syria, that the situation on the Israeli-Lebanese border "cannot return to what it was before July 12." She referred to the date on which fighters of the radical Shiite Hezbollah organization, which is supported by Syria and Iran, crossed into Israel, killed three Israeli soldiers and abducted two others, triggering the current crisis.

The Lebanese source, describing the meeting's tone as "very negative," said Rice told Berri there would be no cease-fire before Hezbollah freed the soldiers unconditionally and pulled its forces back at least 12 miles from the border, Reuters reported.

Welch said the meeting with Berri was quite emotional, but he said it was "unfair" to characterize it as negative.

Nothing will come of it, but it seems like a smart move, one I didn't see coming.

For those who, contra Robert Higgs, recognize that some libertarians are for the war and some are agin', the Volokh Conspiracy's Ilya Somin offers a bunch of reasons for the division, connected to the Milton Friedman/Rose Friedman divide re: Iraq. And one of those reasons is related to immigration:

[A]necdotal evidence suggests that immigrant libertarians are more likely to be pro-Iraq War than native-born ones. So too with Jewish libertarians (who, even if native-born, may have a strong consciousness of their people's oppression by governments outside the US) as opposed to gentile ones, though Milton Friedman is one of many exceptions to the pattern. If you are highly focused on the evils of oppressive regimes and political movements outside the US, you might be more willing to countenance the use of American military power to destroy or contain them than if you have regarded the US government itself as the main threat to your freedom.

In a post back at my own site this morning, I argued (in reply to Andrew Sullivan and John Tierney) that there are good reasons for libertarians to oppose a ban on federal funding of embryonic stem-cell research even if we'd generally prefer private funding of science. Among other things, I argued:

One of the problems here is that if you look at the National Institutes of Health FAQ of stem cell funding, you find this (emphasis mine):

No federal funds may be used, either directly or indirectly, to support research on human embryonic stem cell lines that do not meet the criteria established by President Bush on August 9, 2001.

Now, NIH guidelines go on to allow a sort of mini-exception: Federal funding for "facilities and administrative costs" won't necessarily bar an institution from doing any embryonic stem-cell research, provided the grant recipients are willing to jump through various accounting hoops. But nothing charged as a direct cost can be used to "subsidize" non-allowed research. As I read it, that means any kind of machinery or equipment acquired as part of a directly-funded project can't later (or simultaneously, for that matter) be used for embryonic research outside those few approved lines. That leaves a lot of labs with the choice between eschewing federal funds altogether, finding separate funding to buy a lot of redundant equipment, or focusing on research programs the feds like. Now, maybe embryonic research is sufficiently promising that there are plenty of places willing to do one of the first two. But larger labs with lots of resources, especially in the academic world, are likely to find themselves pushed toward option three.

So the problem isn't just that the ban results in less direct funding for embryonic research that can be made up easily enough elsewhere, it's that it warps the decisions of institutions by making the marginal cost of pursuing embryonic research much higher than some alternative (if less promising) project, even if both are directly funded from a private source, because the other project isn't going to require that you purchase a bunch of new equipment to avoid repurposing stuff from other projects. The distorting effect goes well beyond having to find alternative funding for specific research. So given that we're going to have some federal funding for scientific research, I think we should at least insist it not distort the ordinary developement of research any more than necessary.

Well, I just got an e-mail from a scientist who, owing to his own ties to the government, prefers to remain nameless. He says:

Your analysis of the effect of restictions of federal funds on labs that might do stem cell research is spot-on. Academic labs get built up over time through a variety of funding sources: startup money awarded to new faculty (which may come from private, state, or federal resources), contract work, and grants. It's understood (even if not explicitly acknowledged by the NIH) that durable goods (everything from equipment down to pipettors and glassware) are going to be around beyond the funding period of the grant on which they were purchased, that some grant money will be used as "seed money" to collect preliminary data for subsequent grant submissions, and that multiple projects are usually going on in a lab and that no one "dedicates" equipment for one project only (unless necessitated due to technical requirements such as dedicated equipment for RNA work).

As such, the idea that federal money cannot directly or indirectly go to support a particular line of inquiry is not only onerous--it's completely unrealistic. This is the biggest problem I see with the current policy.

I suspect that this complication is getting little airplay for several reasons:

1) The policy makers are completely out of touch with how labs operate.
2) The NIH doesn't want to open this can of worms, for fear that congress might come back and demand greater accountability for where NIH money goes, and the NIH recognizes what a burden that would place on both it and researchers.
3) As a researcher working on an NIH grant, I certainly wouldn't want that to happen, either.

On Saturday The New York Times ran a surprisingly sympathetic front-page story about Maryland psychiatrist Peter Gleason, who was arrested in March for talking too much about Xyrem, the prescription version of the depressant gamma hydroxybutyrate (GHB), which used to be sold over the counter as a nutritional supplement but was banned for most uses in 2000 after being demonized as a "date rape drug." Although the FDA has approved Xyrem only for treating narcolepsy, Gleason says he has found it is also useful as a pain reliever and antidepressant. Under federal law, doctors may prescribe drugs for purposes other than those specifically approved by the FDA, and they are free to discuss the evidence supporting such off-label uses with their colleagues. Drug companies, by contrast, are forbidden to promote off-label uses for their products. Gleason's crime, according to federal prosecutors, was conspiring with the Xyrem's manufacturer to evade that prohibition by giving lectures about the drug for which the company paid him. But doctors routinely give such lectures, which have not heretofore been deemed a felony. Although the Times implies that Gleason's enthusiasm for GHB leads him to underplay its hazards (which were shamelessly hyped by the drug warriors who pushed its prohibition), it correctly notes that prosecutions like this one raise serious First Amendment problems and are apt to have a chilling effect on scientific debate.

AP reports that bills we can't see look rather like those we can: lovingly stuffed with pork. The report jumps off an investigation of the incarcerated Rep. Duke Cunningham, who habitually slipped self-help items into classified intelligence bills. But in his case, at least, there is an explanation:

One committee member, Rep. Darrell Issa, R-California, said Cunningham also had an exaggerated personality. "If he were talking about a tuna fish sandwich, it could drive him to anger or tears," Issa said. "Some of his actions were discounted as, 'It's just Duke.' "

In other words: We accepted pork to avoid recurrent temper tantrums. Another committee member weighs in:

"Our committee -- our 20-odd people and a comparable number of staff -- cannot offer sufficient oversight over many billions of dollars of activity," said Rep. Rush Holt, D-N.J.

"We don't try," he said

Ronald Bailey shoots up the hype and myths that have built up around child vaccinations.

The Wall Street Journal pays a visit to the famed free-market economists Milton and Rose Friedman. An excerpt:

Mr. Friedman here shifted focus. "What's really killed the Republican Party isn't spending, it's Iraq. As it happens, I was opposed to going into Iraq from the beginning. I think it was a mistake, for the simple reason that I do not believe the United States of America ought to be involved in aggression." Mrs. Friedman--listening to her husband with an ear cocked--was now muttering darkly.

Milton: "Huh? What?" Rose: "This was not aggression!" Milton (exasperatedly): "It was aggression. Of course it was!" Rose: "You count it as aggression if it's against the people, not against the monster who's ruling them. We don't agree. This is the first thing to come along in our lives, of the deep things, that we don't agree on. We have disagreed on little things, obviously--such as, I don't want to go out to dinner, he wants to go out--but big issues, this is the first one!" Milton: "But, having said that, once we went in to Iraq, it seems to me very important that we make a success of it." Rose: "And we will!"

Last week one of the "rogue gun dealers" targeted by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg in a recent federal lawsuit sued back, arguing that the mayor's investigators violated state and federal law when they simulated a straw purchase at Adventure Outdoors in Smyrna, Georgia. The sting operation, which was supposed to be aimed at dealers whose guns frequently ended up in the hands of New York City criminals, involved an undercover investigator who handled the preliminary part of a handgun purchase and then called in another investigator to fill out the federal firearm purchase form. Adventure Outdoors owner Jay Wallace, represented by former Georgia congressman Bob Barr, says Bloomberg's investigators broke the law by falsifying the form and then slandered him by calling him a criminal. As I understand it, making a straw purchase is illegal for the buyer and the ultimate owner, but allowing one to happen is illegal for the seller only if he knows the ostensible buyer is not the real buyer. So I guess it's possible for Bloomberg's investigators to be on the wrong side of the law even if Wallace is on the right side. But if the fake/real buyer distinction was just pretend, and neither customer was a felon, did anybody break the law?

Talk about your Sundays bloody Sundays. The Web site Bring It On! points to this story from the Australian News:

Nobel peace laureate Betty Williams displayed a flash of her feisty Irish spirit yesterday, lashing out at US President George W.Bush during a speech to hundreds of schoolchildren....

"Right now, I would love to kill George Bush." Her young audience at the Brisbane City Hall clapped and cheered....

Ms Williams was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize 30 years ago, when she circulated a petition to end violence in Northern Ireland.

More here.

Has it really just been a year since To the People launched, asking "What the fuck?...Does the world really need another libertarian blog?"

To my mind, To the People is one of the best damn blogs mentioned in this sentence anywhere on the World Wide Web--and that's not just because the vice-lovin', civil-liberties-supportin', largely though not completely anonmyous crew over there gave Reason a shout-out in its statement of purpose (though to be honest, that sort of ass-kissing doesn't hurt).

In any case, To the People is celebrating its one-year anniversary this Wednesday at 7pm at Madam's Organ in Adams Morgan. Check out the details here.

And many happy returns to the To the People crew.

Robert Higgs, long-time scholar of the links between warmaking and government growth (consult his classic Crisis and Leviathan early and often) has no qualms about reading anyone who supports U.S. military intervention abroad out of the libertarian movement. An excerpt:

My claim is that those who give a free hand to the government in its foreign and defense policy-making will ultimately discover that they have handed their rulers the key that opens all doors, including the doors that obstruct the government's invasion of our most cherished rights to life, liberty, and property. The war-making key is, so to speak, the master key for any government, because when critical tradeoffs must be made, war will override all other concerns....Anyone who has looked into the actions of the U.S. Supreme Court, for example, knows that during wartime the justices have placed themselves on the casualty list by effectively rolling over and playing dead. Without at least a semblance of the rule of law and an independent judiciary, all hopes for the maintenance of a free society are in vain.
.............
An obvious response by hawkish libertarians appeals to an axiom of classical liberalism: we need the state to protect us from genuine foreign threats; moreover, provision of such protection is the state's most basic responsibility.....

[But] what makes anybody think that the state will protect us, as distinct from the state's leaders and its apparatus of rule? For more than a century, nearly all of the U.S. government's military activities have been devoted to protecting someone or something other than you and me (or, earlier, our forebears). Spain did not threaten Americans in 1898, and the Filipinos did not threaten them between 1899 and 1902. Germany did not seriously threaten any genuine American right in 1917--the right to travel unmolested in a war zone on munitions-laden British or French ships does not qualify, despite Woodrow Wilson's tortured logic--and the Kaiser's government made conciliatory efforts repeatedly to maintain peaceful relations with the United States from 1914 until 1917.
........
In more recent decades, North Korea, North Vietnam, Panama, Serbia, and Iraq, among others, did not threaten American rights before the U.S. government launched wars against them. If, in making war, the government intends only to protect Americans from foreigners who threaten their lives, liberties, and property here on our own territory, then we must conclude that the government has displayed astonishingly bad judgment in choosing its targets.

Be thankful you don't live in Nephi, UT, where there's no thin blue line standing between you and the walking mentally challenged. A local family gets a top-story TV news beatdown for posting a sign reading "Caution Retard's in area" in their yard:

The sign is directed at a 13-year-old mentally challenged neighbor, whom the signmaking family charges assaulted their daughter with a rock. It's pretty stupid to assume the sign is going to do anything about it (although the wife in the video clip claims it's already working as effectively as the Bear Patrol). But what's interesting is that no local authorities, including that ultimate local authority, KSL News, has bothered to investigate the assault charge, while the stupid sign has the county's district attorney "researching" his legal options...

Neighbor: "The young boy, we got pictures and everything and they would not press charges because he is handicapped."

The neighbor claims Colton threw a rock at his young daughter. Other neighbors told us they have frequently found Colton wandering onto their property.

Still, the Disability Law Center says using offensive words is the wrong way to handle a difficult situation.

Fraser Nelson, Executive Director, Disability Law Center: "People with disabilities are probably the last group for whom we continue to use language that is hurtful and offensive. Instead of being someone who is mentally retarded, you are a person with a developmental disability and that means really what we are valuing is the person."

What can I say? I'm not without sympathy for the ignoramuses who put up the sign. Not for putting up the sign, but for feeling menaced by this child. (Presuming that the charge about the rock is true.) Every small kid knows there's nothing scarier than a big retard—that's one of the reasons the mentally challenged get so much abuse from other kids. The abuse is not right, nor is the sign, but the solution in this case was for the family of the 13-year-old to have kept him under control in the first place (a slam-dunk conclusion given that his mother says he's got the mental faculties of a three-year-old). This isn't a matter of the essential rights of the handicapped, but of respecting the rights of your neighbors.

We'll be having a Happy Hour this Thursday, July 27, starting around 6:30PM, at The 18th Street Lounge, in Washington, DC. The Lounge is located at 1212 18th Street, NW, near the intersection of Jefferson, 18th, and Connecticut (look for an unmarked door next to a mattress store and walk on up).

Among the reasons to celebrate:

--we're welcoming Katherine Mangu-Ward, late of The New York Times and The Weekly Standard, aboard as an associate editor (she was also a Reason summer intern in 2000). Read some of her previous work for Reason here and here.

--the promotion of Kerry Howley to associate editor. Read her work here.

--the publication of Reason's annual August-September issue, with its controversial special section, "Immigration Now, Immigration Tomorrow, Immigration Forever" that has been praised by the Wall Street Journal and already caused a couple dozen subscription cancellations.

--Reason being named one of "The 50 Best Magazines" by The Chicago Tribune for the third time in four years.

--first-place finishes in the 48th annual Southern California Journalism Awards by Reason's Ron Bailey, Matt Welch, and me, and a fistful of second-place and honorable mentions, too.

Special Guest Star Alerts: Reason's S.F.-based Web Editor, Tim Cavanaugh, will be on hand to discuss the fine points of Middle Eastern politics and his stunning appreciation of the original Star Trek series in the Aug-Sept ish.

Other guest stars this time around include ABC News' Jake Tapper and the DC Examiner's and FishBowl DC's Patrick Gavin.

Bonus treat: Randomly sized Reason t-shirts to the first 30 or so guests who make themselves known to us.

Barely two hours into it, and Dave Weigel is already blogging up a storm over at Wonkette, what with posts about Liddy Dole's craptacular performance as chairwoman of the Republican Senate Campaign Committee, Newt Gingrich's insaniac 100-page memo about his presidential jog (by the former Speaker's own account, he won't be able to really run for the White House til he goes on a Star Jones-esque diet), Joe Lieberman's Clinton problem, and much more.

Delaware Dave even throws in a dreamy pic of himself that takes me back to my salad days as an editor at Teen Machine and other teenybopper rags. So check him out often over at Wonkette. Like an Elvis impersonator at a motel lounge, he's there all week--and sweating up a storm.

The debate over whether or not to use taxpayer funding for embryonic stem cell research is going on in the European Union. According to the Financial Times Germany objected to such research in a letter to the European Commission:

"The EU science programme should not be used to give financial incentives to kill embryos. The current proposal from the European Commission and the European parliament does not rule this out."

Martin Rees, president of Britain's Royal Society, said: "Last week the US decided to stay in the slow lane on stem cell research, hindering the global race to develop therapies that could benefit millions of people. It now appears that some countries wish to force the EU into the slow lane alongside the US."

The EU vote for funding embryonic stem cell research is apparently "wafer thin."

Whole thing here.

Come for the weightlessness, stay for the opportunity to take a spacewalk:

It may be the pinnacle of travel perks, but the only firm arranging private trips to the International Space Station (ISS) is now offering a bonus spacewalk for clients willing to pay for more than a standard $20 million trip.

The Vienna, Virginia-based firm Space Adventures announced Friday that future paying visitors the space station can take a 90-minute spacewalk, or extravehicular activity (EVA) and extend their orbital trip by up to eight days for an added cost of about $15 million.

A Japanese businessman is set to become the fourth space tourist (that's not counting Jonathan Harris, who really was more of a stowaway). More here.

In March 2005, Reason talked with Ansari X Prize winner Burt Rutan, the Elvis of aerospace, who told us that space tourism is "mainly just for fun." His great NASA-bashing Q&A is here.

In the Washington Times, former flack for the Democratic National Committee and self-proclaimed "libertarian Democrat" Terry Michael asks Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) to show some consistency on the drug war.

Our story thus far: in May, Grammy Award-winning producer Dallas Austin was picked up in the United Arab Emirates with a bit more than a gram of cocaine and faced up to a decade in jail in that relative oasis of liberalism in the Middle East. Hatch, who uses the same law firm as Austin when it comes to his music career, intervened to get the producer sprung, saying he's against mandatory minimums here and abroad.

Writing in the Wash Times, Michael argues

Mr. Hatch, I am hopeful your efforts to save an American being abused in Dubai will cause you to re examine the drug-war abuse millions of Americans face here everyday....

I understand how difficult it will be to return to drug policy sanity. I had jury duty this summer and was sent out on a panel for a case of marijuana possession with intent to distribute. I wasn't chosen for the jury, but it made me realize how much the Drug War Industrial Complex has to lose if we change our laws. Probably a third of the jobs in that courthouse would disappear. Thousands of lawyers, prosecutors, DEA agents, and prison guards would have to find productive employment. Local law enforcement offices would lose much of their federal funding for high-tech toys.

But America would be a less violent and healthier nation. Billions fewer tax dollars would be disbursed as welfare to the legal industries formed around the drug war. And official corruption, stimulated by the lucrative black market we have created with our policies, would diminish, not just in Colombia, Mexico and Afghanistan, but right here in America.

Whole thing here.

Michael's "notes from a libertarian Democrat" blog here.

National Review founder William F. Buckely laid into President Bush--who honored Buckley last fall for his contributions to conservative politics--in an interview with CBS Evening News on Saturday. From a news account:

Buckley views the three-and-a-half-year Iraq War as a failure.

"If you had a European prime minister who experienced what we've experienced it would be expected that he would retire or resign," Buckley says.

Asked if the Bush administration has been distracted by Iraq, Buckley says "I think it has been engulfed by Iraq, by which I mean no other subject interests anybody other than Iraq... The continued tumult in Iraq has overwhelmed what perspectives one might otherwise have entertained with respect to, well, other parts of the Middle East with respect to Iran in particular."

Despite evidence that Iran is supplying weapons and expertise to Hezbollah in the conflict with Israel, Buckley rejects neo-conservatives who favor a more interventionist foreign policy, including a pre-emptive air strike against Iran and its nuclear facilities.

"If we find there is a warhead there that is poised, the range of it is tested, then we have no alternative. But pending that, we have to ask ourselves, 'What would the Iranian population do?'"...

"I think Mr. Bush faces a singular problem best defined, I think, as the absence of effective conservative ideology -- with the result that he ended up being very extravagant in domestic spending, extremely tolerant of excesses by Congress," Buckley says. "And in respect of foreign policy, incapable of bringing together such forces as apparently were necessary to conclude the Iraq challenge."

Asked what President Bush's foreign policy legacy will be to his successor, Buckley says "There will be no legacy for Mr. Bush. I don't believe his successor would re-enunciate the words he used in his second inaugural address because they were too ambitious. So therefore I think his legacy is indecipherable."

Whole thing, including streaming video, here.

Hat tip: JABBS.

David Weigel looks out at the window, and sees an army of Davids dancing and playing; and he despises them in his heart.

My wife and kids are (according to our most recent phone conversation) on a plane from Cyprus to the United States now. They made landfall on the disputed Greco-Turk island early in the morning Sunday and boarded a plane very late that night.

I have to wait for the first-hand account, but in my experience, trying to make arrangements with various hotlines in Cyprus, Lebanon and the United States all week, I can say one thing: The United States government has done a bang-up job with this evacuation. There were the predictable half-days of busy signals, incomplete and/or incorrect information, and circular patterns of deferral from one hotline to the next and back to the first, but every person I've spoken with has been courteous, helpful, and as informative as it was possible to be under the circumstances. Mrs. Cavanaugh, not to mention the kids, may have a different story, but I have no complaints with the Departments of State and Defense over this matter.

Every time I reveal details of my personal life I feel like the hero of the great Stephen King story "Survivor Type," so I'm finished with sharing now. That having been said, I appreciate all the well-wishes, thank you sincerely for your concern, and hope you can spare some good thoughts for the many people who remain stuck in this terrible situation.

I was riveted by my first-ever start-to-finish viewing of Soylent Green today, and intrigued to find the name of Professor Frank R. Bowerman listed as the film's technical advisor.

The most recent glimpse of Prof. Bowerman I can find is a May, 1995 listing as an adjunct professor at University of Southern California's department of environmental engineering.

But the professor has a more true and enduring legacy in Irvine, CA's Frank R. Bowerman Landfill, a nest of violations and cease and desist orders over methane, erosion, and drainage control troubles.

I hope the professor lived into the era when people stopped laughing at the wildly inaccurate future guestimate in Soylent Green and began to appreciate the great artistry in which the entire cast and crew wrap the movie's now-universally known premise. Prof. Frank Bowerman, I suspect, was crucial to the achievement of one of America's great apocalyptic visions, so bow your head next time you throw out a bag of condoms and diapers.

And of course, if there are any landfill employees, USC students or alumni, environmental engineering buffs, or other Bowermaniacs out there, please share your memories in the comments book before you leave the service.

From a ticker:

14.20: Ulema Fadlallah: We call again upon the government to avoid being a neutral party in the battle and remind the politicians that this is not the time to discuss their political differences with the Resistance

The Reasonoid takeover of Wonkette continues apace; from Monday to Friday, I'll be guest-blogging at the site alongside Wonkette intern extraordinaire Nick Mueller. Send any and all beltway gossip to tips at wonkette.com or wonkettedave at hotmail.com. (Maybe hold off if you're going after Katherine Harris - I'm almost starting to feel sorry for her.)

We'll be having a Happy Hour this Thursday, July 27, starting around 6:30PM, at the 18th Street Lounge, in Washington, DC. The Lounge is located at 1212 18th Street, NW, near the intersection of Jefferson, 18th, and Connecticut (look for an unmarked door next to a mattress store and walk on up; directions here).

Among the reasons to celebrate:

—the publication of Reason's annual August-September issue, with its controversial special section, "Immigration Now, Immigration Tomorrow, Immigration Forever."

—Reason being named one "The 50 Best Magazines" by The Chicago Tribune for the third time in four years.

—first-place finishes in the 48th annual Southern California Journalism Awards by Reason's Ron Bailey, Matt Welch, and me, and a fistful of second-place and honorable mentions, too.

Special guest alert: Reason's S.F.-based Web Editor, Tim Cavanaugh, will be on hand to discuss the fine points of Middle Eastern politics and his stunning appreciation of the original Star Trek series in the Aug-Sept ish.

Bonus treat: Randomly sized Reason t-shirts to the first 25 guests who make themselves known to us.

See you on Thursday.

Various players in Lebanon opine. No guarantee on factual or grammatical accuracy of translations:

Samir Geagea:

During my trials [in the mid 1990s], I got used to looking at appearances before analyzing the content. Let us agree, first of all, on who can take strategic and tactical decisions? If we are to have hope that we can win this confrontation, the government has to be the one to make decisions. At present, the government doesn't make decisions and the situation is "lax" and no one knows anything because they don't know what will happen at any given moment.

Let us, in the beginning, agree that the government has to decide on behalf of Lebanon and it has to make decisions. No party can negotiate while another maintains a presence on the ground. This is why, in appearance we have not yet fulfilled the conditions of negotiating with the United Nations or other parties.

Hassan Nasrallah:

The course of the battle--I will say how--for example, today, the talk began in Israel, and this is a logical analysis, to the effect that the Israeli military operation has reached its peak. What is more than this? I will answer you. What can the Israelis do more than what they did? What is left is the ground incursion, which is costly at any rate. There is an argument, not among the politicians on the political level, even on the military and security levels there is a real argument on the level of the military and security commands. What is left is the ground incursion. Except the incursion, everything the Israelis could do have done. So, they have reached the peak. Now, they have one of two choices: When they reach the peak they either proceed horizontally, or in other words, continue with the same standard or the dose [preceding word in English] of the peak, or they will begin to decline. So, the military operation will begin to decline and to calm down gradually to pave the way for a political settlement.

Saad Hariri:

We ask the whole world that this Israeli aggression and siege be stopped... A clear Arab position must be issued on this aggression... Israel must understand that Lebanon is not a terrorist state but a country that is struggling [for its rights]. I call on the Lebanese people to remain united and maintain national unity... I am making this tour to halt the Israeli aggression on Lebanon. This aggression is inhuman and is hitting Lebanon with unprecedented brutality.

Samir Franjieh:

Hezbollah took two Israeli prisoners, and the result now is that 3.5 million Lebanese are being held hostage... It's the political path chosen by the Hezbollah and its allies that led to this situation.

Amin Gemayel:

The ship is sinking and all of us, the Lebanese, should stick together and work together to stop the Israeli aggression.

Michel Aoun:

I don't think that Israel has the capability to destroy Hezbollah militarily because Hezbollah is not a group of armed men... Hezbollah is a major part of the Lebanese social fabric.

Nabih Berri:

Israel cannot defeat Lebanon as long as the country clings to its national unity... Israel cannot overcome the resistance, nor can it stand up to the Southern shield unless it succeeds in defeating souls.

Walid Jumblatt:

[A ceasefire must be] within the framework of a resolution that protects Lebanon and does not come at the expense of the state... Southern Lebanon needs international protection and not a [Hezbollah-Israeli] ceasefire at the country's expense... No one can play around with the security of the south and the security of Lebanon... [Iranian president Ahmadinejad] does not care for the Lebanese people... [Bashar Assad and Emile Lahoud hold a] 'vengeful hatred towards the state of independence in Lebanon... [The Syrian regime] is assassinating Rafik Hariri for a second time. We say to this regime that our patience is long, and one day the truth will be revealed...

The war is no longer Lebanon's... It is an Iranian war... Iran is telling the United States: You want to fight me in the Persian Gulf and destroy my nuclear program? I will hit you at home, in Israel... [Hezbollah's] sophisticated arsenal is not there for no reason.

In a Time blog, anonymous sources say to Mike Allen that the Secretary of State's mission will be a gathering of allies:

These officials said Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will leave Sunday night for a week of diplomacy in the region and will go with the modest goal of forming an "umbrella of Arab allies" in opposition to the militant group Hizballah that incited the conflagration by kidnapping two Israeli soldiers.

"She's not going to come home with a ceasefire, but stronger ties to the Arab world," an administration official said. "It's going to allow us to say that America isn't going to put up with this and we have Arab friends that are against you terrorists. What we want is our Arab allies standing against Hizballah and against Iran, since there is no one who doesn't think Iran is behind this. We're going to say to Hizballah and the terrorist groups, 'This will not stand.' That is the way to bring real change to the Middle East. If you just have a ceasefire, then soon or later, they go back to fighting."

Make of that what you will. I appreciate Time's not only continuing to employ Terry Colon but covering my diplomatic skylarking from earlier this week. I also appreciate Time's optimism; to see some benefit coming out of this is truly to believe in Ronald Reagan's pony. Still, I revert to my earlier statement: The only diplomatic play that has any hope is ye olde anti-shiist internationale. And that one's a very small hope. (Beyond which, ye olde anti-shiist internationale may be the same diplomatic play that knocked down the World Trade Center with 3,000 people inside.)

The town of Fih-el-Koura in North Lebanon was attacked today. According to several local residents, backed up by a phone call to a government office, a broadcast tower suffered a rocket attack of some kind. No word on what kind of ordnance was used or what type of vehicle did the bombing, though given Fih's altitude (427 meters above sea level), I'd expect it was an airborne rather than sea-based attack. No casualties reported. There are two antennae in Fih: You can see the one in the center of town in the second thumbnail on this page, and the other in the last thumbnail. Given the lack of casualties I'd expect it's the second; there are some watchmen, a road, and a few new homes in the area of that one, but it's not directly in a population center. All cellular and broadcast communications are out in the area, which may be a result of that attack or several others that occured today, including one that knocked out an LBC tower. [Update: LBC is reporting that the tower fell on some houses, but does not mention any casualties, and also says one of its employees was killed in the attack on a tower in the Keserwan mountains.]

Context: Fih is pretty much as far north as you can go in Lebanon, about two-and-a-half hours' drive from Beirut. It has not suffered any violence since the late 1970s, when it was the site of a battle between the Syrian Social Nationalist Party and a Maronite militia backed up by the Syrian army. It has never before been attacked from the air.

By passing this bit of data along I am neither bellyaching that people I know have become part of foreign policy nor passing along propaganda on direct orders from my handler Hassan Nasrallah. This information hasn't been reported anywhere else, and I am one of the few people who believe that more information is always better than less.

Update: This is all third-person testimony from a stateside family member, i.e., hearsay and inadmissable in court. A technician known to local folks was badly injured, no details on the injury. First name Khaled, last name unknown. Age about 45. Originally from Mena/Tripoli but known and liked by people in Fih. Studied at University of St. Joseph, a French school, then got a job running the antenna. Description of the attack: A warplane firing a laser-guided projectile. People in the area are said to have seen the attacking plane, which came in at a very low level off the ocean, broke the sound barrier over Fih proper, turned 360 degrees, came in again at a very low level off the ocean, and wiped out the tower with one shot. All this was told to me in a tone that was part sadness, part awe, and part I don't know but if I could get my hands on the Israeli sonofabitch that's flying that plane I'd give him a medal. Refer to the pictures above and you'll have a pretty good idea of the terrain: This tower is within 100 or 200 yards of the edge of the Fih valley, which faces the ocean. So it's essentially at the top of a cliff.

Here's another political report card to pore over, this one from a group called Americans for Better [read: Lesser] Immigration.

It's an interactive map that grades senators and representatives from A+ (Colorado's Tom Tancredo is, unsurprisingly, first in this class) to F.

How tough is the curve? Restrictionist deluxe Rep. James Sensebrenner (R-Wisc.), who spearheaded efforts to, among other things, sentence people to five years in jail if they "encourage" immigrants to enter the country illegally, only pulls a C+.

So check out the report card here and then consider just who you might support. Or not.

Update: Meant to throw this in when I posted: The report card is an effort from the Coalition for the Future of the American Worker, an "umbrella group" of various organizations opposed both to immigration and outsourcing.