Weekly Hit & Run Archive 2007 January 15-31

Here it is, folks: The most anticlimactic political announcement since Bob Dole announced he wouldn't run for president in 2000.

Hillary returns to Antarctica.

Whoops, sorry. Here it is:

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton jumped into the 2008 presidential race yesterday, immediately squaring off against Senator Barack Obama and the rest of the Democratic field in what is effectively the first Democratic primary, the competition for campaign donations.

“I’m in,” Mrs. Clinton said in an e-mail message to supporters early yesterday morning. “And I’m in to win.”

If you think that frontrunners are announcing their presidential bids earlier and earlier, you're right. Gov. George W. Bush didn't announce his exploratory committee until March of 1999; Gov. Bill Clinton entered the presidential race in October 1991. Another change: The lack of substance in announcements. Look at this passage from George Bush's 1999 announcement message.

I’ve described myself as a compassionate conservative, because I am convinced a conservative philosophy is a compassionate philosophy that frees individuals to achieve their highest potential. It is conservative to cut taxes and compassionate to give people more money to spend. It is conservative to insist upon local control of schools and high standards and results; it is compassionate to make sure every child learns to read and no one is left behind. It is conservative to reform the welfare system by insisting on work; it’s compassionate to free people from dependency on government. It is conservative to reform the juvenile justice code to insist on consequences for bad behavior; it is compassionate to recognize that discipline and love go hand in hand.

OK, we know this was the prelude to a presidency which has chiefly served to make Democrats feel less rotten about giving us Jimmy Carter. Still: Substance. Bush wanted to cut taxes, reform welfare, put kids in the slammer. He was a "conservative." Now, here's Hillary.

Let's talk about how to bring the right end to the war in Iraq and to restore respect for America around the world. How to make us energy independent and free of foreign oil. How to end the deficits that threaten Social Security and Medicare.And let's definitely talk about how every American can have quality affordable health care.

Yawn. No real conviction there, probably because when Hillary Clinton says "let's talk about health care," it's like George W. Bush saying "I want to hear everyone's plan for Iraq."

Maybe it should be refreshing that the Clinton II campaign isn't starting out with any substance. At its core, the campaign is about restoring the administration of 1997-2001, just like the Bush campaign (and presidency) was about restoring the most aggressive players of the 1981-1993 administrations. (I leave out the first Clinton term because I think the Albrights and Rubins are more likely to return to the White House than the Shalalas and Reichs). Its big ideas on taxes, health care and entitlements will be the big ideas the Clinton administration wanted to work on before its influence was snuffed out in the Lewinsky scandal.

(Hat tip to Jim Geraghty for transcribing the announcement message.)

Ron Bailey argues that George W. Bush may have inadvertently ushered a surge in stem cell research.

A recent report from the Los Angeles Police Department recommends "stringent regulation" of the city's medical marijuana dispensaries, which it says are attracting recreational users and crime. It suggests 41 rules for the city to adopt, covering matters such as location, security, signage, labeling, recordkeeping, maximum sale quantity (one ounce), maximum garden size (99 plants),  and hours of operation (10 to 6). Some of the rules, such as those demanding bank-style anti-theft precautions, would require substantial, possibly prohibitive investments, while others would limit access by legitimate patients. Probably the most consequential restriction would be the one prohibiting dispensaries "within 1,000 feet of any school, day care facility, church or house of worship, nursery, public park, or any location utilized for the exclusive care of children between the ages of 0 [and] 18 years old." The report does not say how many of the city's 98 dispensaries would be shut down by that rule, but it does note that "all medical marijuana dispensaries showed proximity of less than 1,000 yards to a house of worship, public or private school, or other location where children are likely to congregate, such as a public park." So with a little tweaking of the police department's proposed location restrictions, the city could easily regulate the dispensaries out of existence.

From Chris Sims' invaluable Invincible Super-Blog comes the single greatest comic book story of the 1970s. It's the ninth issue of Luke Cage, Hero for Hire (currently in print thanks to Marvel's "Essential" series). Cage (the namesake of actor Nicholas Cage, who was born "Nicholas Coppola"), gets into a bit of a pickle with Dr. Doom.

In the previous issue, Luke had been hired by a shady character to take down a few guys who stole his boss's "company secrets," and as these things so often do, they naturally turned out to be robots created by Dr. Doom who escaped to America after fleeing his decidedly nonrobocentric regime. So why bother with getting Luke Cage for the job? Well, according to von Doom, the robots have disguised themselves as black men, none of whom live in Latveria, and therefore he--and I quote--"needed a black, and I needed to hire him. Enter: Luke Cage."

Sims' blog contains the summary of the story and some choice experts. Bookmark it when you're done if you're a comic fan with a sense of humor.

(Hat tip: Josh Elder.)

Jack Shafer gives a concise summary of the case for scrapping the Federal Communications Commission.

Here is how Paul Butler, a former federal prosecutor and a special assistant to Donald Rumsfeld at the Pentagon, defends the Bush administration against the charge that it avoids legal challenges to its anti-terrorism policies by switching tactics at the last minute:

You do have to ascribe some good faith. The government uses presidential authority when they think it’s necessary and the law does not provide the specific authority they need. If there is a road that can be taken, operating according to statutes or putting people into the criminal justice system when that makes sense, they will do that.

So the president is happy to follow the law as long as it gives him the authority he wants. He goes outside the law only when he thinks it's necessary. This is called "good faith."

The really sad thing is that Bush does not seem to meet even this pathetically low standard. For years he had the National Security Agency violate the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act by monitoring international communications of people on U.S. soil without warrants, supposedly because getting court approval would have been too cumbersome. This week, with court challenges and congressional hearings pending, his administration announced that the necessary surveillance can be conducted lawfully after all.

Could brain drain be good for poor countries? A new study finds that when "brains" leave their native countries, their fellow citizens may benefit more from their smarts and creativity than if they had chosen to stay.

Imagine, if you will, foreign movie makers who come to California. They are much more likely to make excellent movies there--or even to make movies at all, really--and more of their countrymen will get to watch them when they appear, especially if their countrymen have few qualms about bootlegs.

The authors, economists Peter J. Kuhn and Carol McAusland, write that those who remain behind "benefit because 'their' brains produce 'better' knowledge (such as more effective medicines, more entertaining movies, or more effective software) abroad than if they had remained at home." This is particularly true in situations where a discrepancy between protections for intellectual property at home and abroad makes it easy for residents of the innovators' countries of origin to enjoy the fruits of their labors with low transaction costs.

Previous studies have demonstrated the benefits of cash remittances and return migration, suggesting that money (and people) returning after a stint abroad is the best arrangement. Likewise, the possibility of making big money abroad seems to lead to higher overall educational attainment in certain circumstance. Since not everyone who dreams of emigrating and prepares to do so actually will, those who remain behind may be better educated overall. The mere possibility of skilled worker emigration can "jump start" an economy.

Emigrants who produce "knowledge goods" for large foreign markets also create the largest gains for their home countries: "The emigration of a physician who spends all of her time treating patients (a private good) may be more likely to hurt the remaining residents of her country than the emigration of a physician primarily engaged in research on new treatments and medicines," the paper reports.

There are legitimate concerns that brain drain's short term benefits disguise the high costs of slowed long term growth in developing countries, but the body of work on the surprising upside of brain drain is growing.  

Yesterday the Senate passed a lobbying reform bill without that pesky Section 220, which, in combination with various arcane provisions of existing lobbying law, could have been read to require political activists and bloggers to register and file reports as lobbyists. Read my post from yesterday to see my puzzlement giving way to vague understanding, which no doubt eventually would have become outrage had the threat not already been averted.

I spent a good 90 minutes last night playing with Google's latest bit of genius .

If you're a data geek, rejoice.

My only complaint: The "Help" section isn't loading for me.

In New Hampshire, a couple who believes they have no legal obligation to pay income tax is convicted; the wife Elaine Brown is in custody, while husband Ed Brown, with "25 armed supporters," barricades himself in their Plainfield home:

Brown, in a phone interview with The Associated Press, quoted Revolutionary War figure John Stark.

"Live free or die," he said. "What else can I say?"

Brown said he expected federal agents to swarm his property soon.

"My life is destroyed, what more can I say?" Brown said in a brief interview. "I lost my wife and she lost her business."

Brown warned he would not surrender to authorities.

"The verdict is in. I can guarantee you all hell's going to break loose," Brown said earlier in an interview with WNTK-FM in New London. "It's all bogus charges. None of these charges are lawful."

For now, at least, "marshals say they have no plans to raid the site."

My 2004 Reason feature story on the "we have no legal obligation to pay income tax" movement here.

Charles Murray's three-part exegesis on American education wrapped up yesterday: The three sections are here, here, and here. I'll spoil the thrilling conclusion:

Accept that some children will be left behind other children because of intellectual limitations, and think about what kind of education will give them the greatest chance for a fulfilling life nonetheless. Stop telling children that they need to go to college to be successful, and take advantage of the other, often better ways in which people can develop their talents. Acknowledge the existence and importance of high intellectual ability, and think about how best to nurture the children who possess it.

What Murray is suggesting is 1) to tamp down the hopes for average or below-average children, finding roles for them and not wasting their time with college and the promise that they can succeed in anything they choose and 2) develop a high-level education for above-average children, "to prepare an elite to do its duty." This is framed to avoid the pitfalls that Murray's theories plunged into a decade ago; that is, he doesn't use the word "race."

This is obviously politically untenable, but I wonder how much the market corrects for the relative intelligence of young people right now. Below-average people can go to college, but their records are not passed on to NASA or AEI fellowship programs. They are courted by different industries; the army, for example, spends more time spelunking for recruits from State University than they do from Yale.

Question: If some millionaire, Oprahlike, set up a high-tech grammar school for average and below-average children - with the understanding it would prepare those kids not to become part of the elite, but to become skilled in some vocations - would parents really flock to send the kids there?

Title explanation here.

Were you worried that Hugo Chavez's power wasn't increasing daily? Hey, relax!

The National Assembly has given initial approval to a measure that would let President Hugo Chavez enact laws by decree for 1 1/2 years, a key step in what the leftist leader calls an accelerating march toward socialism.
...
"This process is unstoppable," lawmaker Juan Montenegro Nunez told the National Assembly. "This process is a historic necessity."

I nominate "This process is unstoppable" for the title of track 3 on the next Chemical Brothers album. But seriously, Venezuela has one of the stupidest oppositions on the planet (they boycotted the last legislative elections to make a point about how Chavez didn't respect democracy), and this was predictable months ago. The upsides: 1) He still shouldn't cause any Americans to worry outside of the Fox News production booth. 2) With the price of oil falling, this reads like desperation. Chavez was at his most popular when oil was trading at $80.

More on Chavez here.

David Weigel spends a week watching the Democrats debate whether or not to end the war in Iraq... and deciding not to decide anything.

The latest TV ad from ONDCP almost makes one wonder what the people in the drug czar's office have been smoking. It's actually a pretty funny commercial, shot in mockumentary style. I just don't understand the point. I actually first thought it was a parody of an ONDCP ad.

The message seems to be something along the lines of, "smoking marijuana because everyone else is doing it is as dumb as sticking leeches on yourself because everyone else is doing it."

Except of course that marijuana is a dried plant that gets you high and makes you feel good. Leeches, on the other hand, are carnivorous annelids that use mucus and suction to attach to a host, at which point they secrete an anti-clotting enzyme that enables them to gorge on the host's plasma until full.  They then fall off to digest the hemoglobin-y goodness they've just snorted into their bellies.

So yeah. Totally the same.

Of course, there are some similarities. For example, while many people find leeches icky and undesirable, they're basically harmless . Kinda' like marijuana. What's more, despite their bad reputation, leeches also have some medical benefit. Again, kinda' like marijuana.

I guess the one big difference is that absurd as SLOMming would be were anyone to actually try it, it would still be perfectly legal (unless there were some evidence that it gets you high, at which point I'm sure legislators would rush to ban it). The only real harm associated with marijuana is generally what the government will do to you if they catch you using it.

To the People notes that New Mexico governor and possible presidential candidate Bill Richardson is proposing a publicly searchable state registry of convicted drug offenders. The bill mirrors a federal proposal now pending in Congress.

Our beloved former colleague Matt Welch, now hanging his editorial fedora at the LA Times, digs up some fine examples of John McCain's sensible non-interventionist foreign policy thinking--alas, from decades and conflicts gone by.

A reader at Daily Kos transcribed this exchange from today's Senate Judiciary Hearings:

Sen. Arlen Specter: Now wait a minute, wait a minute. The Constitution says you can't take it away except in the case of invasion or rebellion. Doesn't that mean you have the right of habeas corpus?

AG Gonzales: I meant by that comment that the Constitution doesn't say that every individual in the United States or every citizen has or is assured the right of habeas corpus. It doesn't say that. It simply says that the right of habeas corpus shall not be suspended.

I'd call such parsing "Clintonian," except that to do so would undermine the seriousness of it all. When Clinton fiddled with the meaning of "is," he was hedging about a blowjob. Gonzalez is getting cutesy with 300 years of human rights jurisprudence, and the very foundation of modern criminal law.

The Hotline's senior editor John Mercurio has a little smoke blown his way in a story about (among other things) whether Americans would elect a black president.

[Black Democrat Robert] Ford said a national ticket featuring Obama in 2008 would be a significant drag on Democrats up and down state ballots, hurting the party as it struggles to hold slim majorities in Congress and pick up governor's offices in red states like Indiana and Missouri. He also said it would be unwinnable. "He'd have to get 47 to 49 percent of the white vote in every state, and that's humanly impossible," Ford said, accusing Obama of falling prey to "ego."

Here's the problem with that: Forty-seven or 49 percent of the white vote would be unusually high for a Democratic candidate. That's more than any Democrat has racked up since Lyndon Johnson bellowed his way past Barry Goldwater 43 years ago.

Check out the exit polling for John Kerry, who came within one state of winning the presidency in 2004. Kerry, who's got a pigment defict that puts Obama to shame, lost the white vote to George Bush by 17 points. That was a big step down from Al Gore, who won the popular vote while losing the white vote by 10 points. And that number's only as high as it is because 44 percent of white women voted for Kerry. Only 37 percent of white men did.

None of this should controversial (although since the journalist who spends the most time studying it is Steve Sailer, so it is). We have two political parties. One unites white conservatives, moderates and center-rightists; the other unites white liberals with liberal and conservative minority groups. (The third parties are overwhelmingly white.) Neither party wins by turning out or converting minority voters. Three-quarters of the electorate is white, and Republicans win by getting more than 55 percent of the white vote, while Democrats win by getting more than 45 percent of it. If Obama got 49 percent of that vote, he'd be winning the biggest Democratic landslide in two generations - 56 or 57 percent of the popular vote, and probably more than 380 electoral votes. But the critical question is "Can he get 45 percent of it?" He got 66 percent of it in 2004, but he was running against Alan Keyes. Fun fact: That's 3 points better than Hillary Clinton did in 2006, running against a similarly pathetic (but white) candidate, John Spencer. Obama has a comfortable, emotional appeal to white voters, which makes him very dangerous for Republicans.

The Encyclopedia Britannica will now have its first extended stand-alone coverage of libertarianism, in an entry written by David Boaz of the Cato Institute. And you can check it out here .

Richard Viguerie claims a lobbying reform bill the Senate is considering would force bloggers and political activists to register with the government, under the threat of criminal penalties:

Section 220 of S. 1, the lobbying reform bill currently before the Senate, would require grassroots causes, even bloggers, who communicate to 500 or more members of the public on policy matters, to register and report quarterly to Congress the same as the big K Street lobbyists. Section 220 would amend existing lobbying reporting law by creating the most expansive intrusion on First Amendment rights ever. For the first time in history, critics of Congress will need to register and report with Congress itself.

The bill would require reporting of "paid efforts to stimulate grassroots lobbying," but defines "paid" merely as communications to 500 or more members of the public, with no other qualifiers. On January 9, the Senate passed Amendment 7 to S. 1, to create criminal penalties, including up to one year in jail, if someone "knowingly and willingly fails to file or report."

Viguerie, whose warning has been picked up by several online publications, says Sen. David Vitter (R-La.), who introduced the penalty amendment, and Sen. Robert Bennett (R-Utah) are trying to remove Section 220. If so, I guess they agree with Viguerie's interpretation, but I'm not so sure.

The text of S. 1 is available here. Section 220 defines "paid efforts to stimulate grassroots lobbying" as "any paid attempt in support of lobbying contacts on behalf of a client to influence the general public or segments thereof to contact one or more covered legislative or executive branch officials (or Congress as a whole) to urge such officials (or Congress) to take specific action with respect to a matter described in section 3(8)(A), except that such term does not include any communications by an entity directed to its members, employees, officers, or shareholders." The definition also excludes efforts "directed at less than 500 members of the general public." Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see how that would cover bloggers or grassroots activists who are not being paid by a client to lobby the government. 

Update: According to the ACLU, which opposes Section 220, grassroots political groups could be affected because "'client' under existing law includes the organization that employs an in-house staff person or person who lobbies. If, for example, the ACLU hires an individual to stimulate grassroots lobbying on behalf of the ACLU and pays that individual for her efforts in amounts exceeding $25,000, it appears that individual would be considered a grassroots lobbying firm, and would have to register and report as such. The fact that the ACLU employs that individual appears to be irrelevant to this provision." The quote is from a letter to senators dated January 17, 2007, which does not seem to be online, but the ACLU sent a similar letter last year that is.

Another Update: Mark Fitzgibbons of American Target Advertising, who sent me the ACLU letter, explains how some bloggers could be covered by the law: Title 2, Section 1602 of the U.S. Code says a "client" is "any person or entity that employs or retains another person for financial or other compensation to conduct lobbying activities on behalf of that person or entity." It adds that "a person or entity whose employees act as lobbyists on its own behalf is both a client and an employer of such employees." An "employee" includes "a proprietor of a person or entity." A "lobbyist" is "any individual who is employed or retained by a client for financial or other compensation." Therefore, says Fitzgibbons, "a blogger, acting in a sole proprietorship capacity, may be both the client and lobbyist by engaging in lobbying activity, which would be redefined to include communications to more than 500 members of the public." If your blog generates income, I gather, you're a "sole proprietor," making you both employer and employee, client and lobbyist. If, like most bloggers, you don't make any money from blogging, you're in the clear. Otherwise, assuming this bill passes in its current form, you'd better hire a lawyer.

Is the right to die in America on life support?

RU Sirius sizes up the state of our freedom to expire.

I just got out of a House of Representatives press conference led by Republican Rep. Walter Jones, featuring Democratic and Republican co-sponsors of his binding resolution to demand congressional approval before any military action in Iran. The money bit:

Absent a national emergency created by attack by Iran, or a demonstrably imminent attack by Iran, upon the United States, its territories, possessions or its armed forces, the president shall consult with Congress, and receive specific authorization pursuant to law from Congress, prior to initiating any use of force on Iran.

Confession: I didn't come out of the presser with the sense this was going to be rushed to the floor. For one, Ron Paul is supporting it, and I'm way too used to Paul supporting good ideas that don't work. He sounded almost as heartsick about Jones at the possibility of war. "What we're doing here is constitutionally redundant, but very necessary," he said. "Let's consider the possibility of a Gulf of Tonkin incident." And he pointed to the free-flowing "rumors" always trickling out from the Middle East about Iran's meddling in an attack on Americans or its readiness for war.

Another reason I'm pessimistic: the men behind the Jones Resolution talk much more diplomatically about Iran than the leaders of either party. Hawaii Democrat Neil Abercrombie thundered against the Bush administration for refusing to dialogue with Iran and Syria, and said the government of Iraq would be perfectly justified in talking with them: "They have issues with their neighbors just as we have issues with Canada over the lumber trade." A great message, but if the Jones Resolution breaks through the lobbyists' spiderweb and moves ahead, they'll probably hone it.

On the way out, after getting buttonholed by a LaRouchie, Abercrombie got asked if he'd heard Tony Snow's dismissals of congressional resolutions on the war.

"I haven't talked to the ASPCA today," Abercrombie said. "I don't know what's going on with the lapdogs."

Isn't this exactly the sort of vibrant political discourse that Tocqueville celebrated about America?

Kathleen Ensz is accused of going inter her backyard, getting some dog poop, and then placing it in an unwanted political mailer and slipping it under Congresswoman Marilyn Musgrave’s door.

The 63-year-old Ensz, a Democrat, was angered by repeatedly receiving political mailings from the Musgrave campaign.

Ensz is a retired French Professor from the University of Northern Colorado. She claims her action was a form of political protest.

But Musgrave’s people don’t see it that way.

Prosecutors in Weld County filed a misdemeanor charge of “use of a noxious substance” against Ensz.

More here.

I'm not going to take sides in this, but here's a word of advice for Ensz: If former Attorney General Ramsey Clark, who's got time to kill now that his latest client--Saddam Hussein--was himself killed--offers to represent you at your trial in May, pull a Charlie Manson and do it yourself. You can't do worse.

The Chicago Tribune reports that three adjoining Illinois towns that recently enacted smoking bans may temporarily repeal them in response to complaints from local bar and restaurant owners who say they are losing business to competitors in more smoke-tolerant jurisdictions:

Bar owners in Oak Forest, Tinley Park and Orland Park complained this week that their business sank as much as 50 percent because the towns banned smoking in public places effective Jan. 2.

"Given the success of the Bears, there should have been a spike in business, especially at sports bars," beer distributor Jerry Michler told Tinley Park board members this week.

So, after just two weeks, the three suburbs may be poised for a smoke break. All three towns have called emergency board meetings for 5 p.m. Friday to reconsider the bans—in plenty of time for the Bears' 2 p.m. Sunday kickoff in the NFC title game against the Saints. The bans would be delayed until March 14, well after the Super Bowl....

"It [allowing smoking during the playoffs] is a big point for our businesses, especially with the Bears involvement, " [Oak Forest Mayor JoAnn] Kelly said.

"Go Bears," the mayor added. 

Even if the towns decided to let bar and restaurant owners set the smoking rules on their own property past March 14, a Cook County smoking ban that takes effect the next day would prohibit such magnanimity.  

[Thanks to Russ Dewey for the link.]

The federal "no fly" list is due for some slimming, said Kip Hawley, head of the Transportation Security Administration, who hopes to cut the list in half by 2008.

Some are still griping:

Even cutting the list in half is "nice but not all that meaningful," said Barry Steinhardt, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union. He noted that various estimates of the list's size, which is classified, have ranged from 50,000 to 350,000 names.

"Cutting a list of 350,000 names is not all that impressive," Steinhardt added.

Presumably the 175,000 people no longer on the list would find it fairly impressive when they tried to board a plan to visit grandma for Christmas. If the list is fixed, though, we will lose the chance for stories of hilarious identity confusion, like this one:

Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska...complained that his wife, Catherine, was being identified as "Cat" Stevens and frequently stopped due to confusion with the former name of the folk singer now known as Yusuf Islam, whose name is on the list. In 2004 he was denied entry into the U.S., but officials declined to explain why.

More on who can fly and who can't here and here.

On Monday, Toby Iselin of Keene, New Hampshire, sent a short, polite email message to his state representative, Delmar Burridge, asking him to support a full legislative debate on a marijuana decriminalization bill that the House Criminal Justice and Public Safety Committee, on which Burridge serves, was scheduled to consider this week. "I know you are opposed to this bill," Iselin said, but "I hope you will consider passing it through committee so that all sides will have their chance to speak on it." Burridge responded with predictable prohibitionist bluster, starting with his account of how marijuana killed his brother (who "was smoking a joint before the crash") and moving on to the "family devastation," "severe burns," and "lots of blood and death"—apparently all marijuana-related—that he witnessed as a juvenile probation officer in Philadelphia during the 1970s. "I will vote no on this Bill," he said, "and have lots of very chilling stories to relate to the other committee members so it goes my way." Fair enough. But then Burridge closed his message with what sounds like a veiled threat: 

I am copying two members of the Keene Police Department in case you want to change your ways and act legal and save your friends.

You are very passionate in your beliefs and would make a great snitch.

Burridge evidently believes the police should take an interest in anyone who expresses support for drug policy reform. Talk about chilling.

Update: As jf and PoN helpfully note, the full text of the two messages can be found here and here (Iselin's blog).

[Thanks to NORML's Allen St. Pierre for the tip.]

As a few commenters noted yesterday, it's not clear whether the National Security Agency is now seeking warrants from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court for each U.S. target whose communications it monitors. Rep. Heather Wilson (R-N.M.), a member of the House Intelligence Committee, told The New York Times that Bush administration officials "have convinced a single judge in a secret session, in a nonadversarial session, to issue a court order to cover the president’s terrorism surveillance program." That contradicts the administration's account:

The Justice Department said Wednesday that it had obtained multiple orders, or warrants, a week ago from the FISA court allowing it to monitor international communications in cases where there was probable cause to believe one of the participants was linked to Al Qaeda or an affiliated terrorist group.

"As a result of these orders," Mr. Gonzales told leaders of Congressional Intelligence and Judiciary Committees in a letter dated Wednesday, "any electronic surveillance that was occurring as part of the Terrorist Surveillance Program will now be conducted subject to the approval of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court."

Justice Department officials said that the FISA court orders, which were not made public, were not a broad approval of the surveillance program as a whole, an idea that was proposed last year in Congressional debate over the program. They strongly suggested that the orders secured from the court were for individual targets, but they refused to provide details of the process used to identify targets—or how court approval had been expedited—because they said it remained classified. The senior Justice Department official said that discussing "the mechanics of the orders" could compromise intelligence activities.

Since it's hard to see how explicitly saying, as opposed to strongly suggesting, that the warrants cover specific individuals would threaten national security, it sounds like the administration is deliberately obscuring the point for political reasons. Shocking, I know. But with congressional hearings focusing on this very issue, how long can the president and his men hope to keep things vague? 

Nobel prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi has accused the Myanmar dictatorship of mudering its own people, forcibly relocating minorities, and holding the nation hostage. In retaliation, the government regularly accuses Suu Kyi of parking violations. But this , I think, is new:

State media on Thursday accused pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi of evading taxes by spending her money from the 1991 Nobel Peace prize and other awards overseas.

Suu Kyi, the country's opposition leader, has been in prison or under house arrest for 11 of the last 17 years.

Explains the always interesting state-controlled New Light of Myanmar:

She avoided paying taxes to the State by asking her family members abroad to spend all her cash awards provided by international organizations and honorariums presented for her works she had created abroad instead of spending the money in the country...

It was very considerate of the government to put only restriction on her, instead of punishing her in accordance with law.

In my hometown of Los Angeles, 11 different marijuana dispensaries--legal under state and local law, as if the feds care--were raided yesterday by the federal Drug Enforcement Administration. Details and links from LAist.

The number of U.S. cancer deaths has decreased significantly for the second year in a row in 2004. The American Cancer Society reported 553,888 cancer deaths in 2004, 3,014 fewer than in 2003. There were 369 fewer deaths in 2003 than in 2002, which was notable as the first recorded drop in cancer deaths in more than 70 years.

Doctors say that the 2003 number is so small that it can’t be hailed as a milestone in cancer treatment. The 2004 drop is tremendously significant though....

The recorded drops in deaths came from three of the four major forms of cancer — breast, prostate and colorectal — and a decline in deaths among men from the fourth, lung cancer.

This comes as a result of several factors: a decline in cigarette smoking among men, wider screening of men and women for colon cancer, prostate and breast cancer, and better treatments, according to Jemal and others....

The rate of cancer deaths - the number of deaths per 100,000 people - has been dropping for more than a decade. But with the population steadily aging, the total number of cancer deaths kept climbing.

More here.

Back in 2001, Reason's Ronald Bailey asked the question, "What Cancer Epidemic?"

...and reaps the bounty :

Last January, an Arizona law took effect requiring police to seize the vehicles of individuals accused -- but not convicted -- of certain violations. Already at least two jurisdictions are generating millions in revenue.

The law mandates that police impound a vehicle for 30 days if the police officer suspects its driver had a suspended license or a blood alcohol content of 0.15 or more. Pima County and Tuscon together tow nearly a thousand cars a month, bringing $5 million in fees and fines annually. Under the new law, each violation nets up to $450 in fees and fines divided up between the jurisdictions and towing companies who often are able to keep cars when the fees are inflated beyond the vehicle's value. These fees come on top of fines for the various offenses that can exceed $2000.

Jim Mooney, owner of Frontier Towing, told the Arizona Daily Star that he was purchasing four $85,000 tow trucks to keep up with the increase in seizures.

This is pretty interesting, too:

Tuscon also seizes automobiles from individuals who transport individuals for medical care without first checking their citizenship status.

Yesterday it was Hillary Clinton; today it's John McCain watching his polls go the way of Ernest Shackleton.*

For seven years, conventional wisdom has said that the state’s pivotal independent voters would line up behind maverick Sen. John McCain, as they did so famously in the 2000 GOP primary. But new polling data, to be released later this week, will suggest that might no longer be the case.

Manchester, N.H.-based American Research Group finds that McCain’s popularity among New Hampshire’s independent voters has collapsed.

“John McCain is tanking,” says ARG president Dick Bennett. “That’s the big thing [we’re finding]. In New Hampshire a year ago he got 49 percent among independent voters. That number’s way down, to 29 percent now.”

The frontrunner's melting down in other primary states too, and the pollsters know why: "His hawkish stance on the Iraq war, which is tying him ever more closely to an unpopular president." That could help him with Republican base voters, but it's weakening him with the swing voters who decide things in New Hampshire and weakening him with the general electorate.

McCain's basically doubled down on the Iraq War, cognizant that the media will congratulate his courage unless something goes terribly wrong. But what are the odds of that happening in Iraq? Note also that McCain has fudged the number of brigades he said would be "essential" for saving Iraq, laying the groundwork for criticizing how the Bush administration wrecked his foolproof surge plan.

*"South," obviously.

The president's scoffing at war opponents and their lack of an awesome plan to fix Iraq has evidently  rankled anti-war Democrats and Republicans. Dana Milbank spent Wednesday shuffling back and forth on Capitol Hill listening to them propose their own plans. Oh, and here's the funny bit: Because none of these people think they can stop the war or the surge, they're not actually doing the groundwork to pass the bills.

[Connecticut Sen. Chris] Dodd, who last week declared his presidential bid on "Imus in the Morning," was the first to demonstrate McHugh's thesis. "It is time," he said at his morning news conference, to "offer meaningful action." He would require a new war authorization.

So would he enforce this by cutting off funding for the war?

"No, we've stayed away from the funding here," Dodd answered.

Any co-sponsors? "I haven't asked."

How about supporters in the House? "I haven't talked to anyone on the House side about it, either."

There is an effort in the House of Representatives to introduce a bill cutting off funds to continue the war, introduced yesterday by liberal House Democrats and given zero media coverage. But according to Republicans I talked to, that's because any bill to actually defund the war "would go down in flames." So we get posturing and the revelation that the average senator doesn't actually seem more presidential than GWB.

Radley Balko breaks bread with former cops who want to bring the drug war to a halt.

The CDC seems to be simultaneously defending and backing away from its warnings that a few errant molecules of secondhand smoke just might give you heart disease or lung cancer. Last summer, in a statement that accompanied his report on secondhand smoke, then-Surgeon General Richard Carmona claimed "even brief exposure...increases risk for heart disease and lung cancer." Responding to criticism that such statements are scientifically unfounded and biologically absurd, since these diseases take decades to develop even in smokers, Terry Pechacek, associate director for science at the CDC's Office on Smoking and Health, recently told Inside Bay Area "we can't quantify what is 'brief.'" Could it be, say, 40 years? Pechacek won't say. At the same, Pechacek "explained the reason for the Surgeon General's warning that even brief exposure could trigger cancer. 'There is some risk that even a very small amount can damage a cell,' he said, setting off a chain reaction that causes cancer.'"

This position renders irrelevant any attempt to determine what level of exposure to a possibly dangerous chemical is associated with a measurable increase in cancer risk. It implies that any substance that causes cancer in some doses under some circumstances should not be tolerated in any dose under any circumstances. Michael Siegel sums it up well on his tobacco policy blog:  

By this reasoning, the CDC should also be warning the public that:

• A single chest X-ray causes cancer.

• Being in the sun for thirty seconds causes cancer.

• Breathing in diesel fumes for ten seconds causes cancer.

• Eating peanut butter causes cancer.

• Eating a single char-broiled burger causes cancer.

• Drinking a sip of chlorinated water causes cancer.  

In fact, just the process of living every day could be said to cause cancer, since there is always damage being done to our cells that could potentially trigger cancer. The body has defense mechanisms that repair this damage constantly. This is the reason why it takes more than a single exposure to cause cancer. The exposure has to overwhelm the body's ability to repair the damage....Once you are willing to state that a single exposure to a carcinogen that could potentially damage one cell is enough to warrant a public statement that the exposure causes cancer, then all of your statements about carcinogenic exposures become meaningless. 

Facing stepped-up opposition from a Democratic Congress to its Nixonian position that "if the president does it, that means it's not illegal," the Bush administration now says it will deign to follow the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, at least insofar as the law requires permission from the special FISA court for monitoring communications involving people on U.S. soil. Recall that until this very moment the president and his men insisted this approach was simply unworkable, so cumbersome that it posed an intolerable threat to national security. Now? Not so much. White House spokesman Tony Snow says the FISA court has satisfied "administration concerns about speed and agility when it comes to responding to bits of intelligence where we may be able to save American lives."

Evidently the administration chose to operate outside the law for years when all that was necessary was a few tweaks in FISA procedure, so minor they do not even require congressional action. The president's contempt for the rule of law has never been more apparent.

The botched hanging of Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti, Saddam Hussein's half-brother and former head (no pun intended) of the Iraqi tyrant's secret police, was like so gross, not to mention troubling for anyone who still had any confidence in the current government's competence. But it also has its lighter aspects:

"When the trapdoor opened, I realized that I was looking at the rope swinging freely, and I asked myself, 'Where did Barzan go?' " said Jaafar al-Moussawi, who was chief prosecutor at the trial that ended with the death sentences for Mr. Hussein, Mr. Ibrahim and Mr. Bandar. He added: "I thought that somehow he had gotten loose. So I moved forward toward the pit and looked down, and saw the convict Barzan lying on the ground without his head."

Like the complaints that Saddam's execution was insufficiently dignified, the flinching at the separation of Ibrahim's body from his head is both understandable and strange. If a guillotine had been the chosen means of execution, presumably this outcome would have been unobjectionable. And then the Iraqis would not have had to worry about calculating the correct drop for a given height and weight to avoid asphyxiation on the one hand and decapitation on the other. The guillotine was designed to be an especially humane method of execution that would avoid such problems. Given Saudi penal practices, I assume there's no special Muslim objection to dismemberment of criminals, but I could be wrong.

Apropos of Jacob's post below, here's another case of prosecutors gone wild:

A substitute teacher in Norwich, Connecticut with no prior criminal record could get 40 years in prison for exposing a middle school class to pornography. She apparently was using the computer in front of students when a loop of pop-up ads for porn sites began to appear. The loops only intensified as she tried to close out the ads. The woman made the plausible defense that some sort of adware or malware on her computer caused the pop-up ads to appear. She also testified that she notified several teachers and administrators of the problem, and got no assistance.

Over at Boing Boing , several tech-savvy experts weigh in, mostly in the woman's defense. They point to this passage from the local Norwich paper:

Computer expert W. Herbert Horner, testifying in Amero's defense, said he found spyware on the computer and an innocent hair styling Web site "that led to this pornographic loop that was out of control."

"If you try to get out of it, you're trapped," Horner said.

But Smith countered Horner's testimony with that of Norwich Police Detective Mark Lounsbury, a computer crimes investigator. On a projected image of the list of Web sites visited while Amero was working, Lounsbury pointed out several highlighted links.

"You have to physically click on it to get to those sites," Smith said. "I think the evidence is overwhelming that she did intend to access those Web sites."

Strange that local authorities refuse to give the woman the benefit of the doubt (see also the laughable editorial from the same Norwich paper). Seems unlikely that a 40-year-old woman with no prior record would knowingly subject school children to porn -- not to mention the absurdity of the charge itself (is your average middle schooler today really going to be traumatized for life after exposure to pop-up porn?) and the ridiculous possible sentence. I would presume (but I'm not certain) that the conviction would also qualify the woman as a sex offender. Meaning that her life is about to become damn-near unlivable.

Even more troubling, one Boing Boing commenter notes that the prosecution's witness clearly has no idea what the hell he's talking about:

I'm not sure if you noticed this: the Norwich Bulletin article had a VERY troubling quote on it -- the prosecution used an expert witness that said a highlighted link was proof that the accused had clicked on the URLs.

That is simply not true. The expert witness is either lying or a fucking idiot. Visited links are highlighted if a browser had ever loaded a URL-- I've yet to find a browser that highlights visited links on a "source | destination" basis -- every one i've ever encountered highlights links on "destination" alone.

I made a quick demo over here to illustrate my point: Link. 

Other commenters note that the school itself could be in trouble for allowing the licenses on its content filters to expire, a bit of information that also suggests the school probably wasn't particularly vigilant about keeping its computers free of malware and spyware, either.

In fact, the same police expert quoted above apparently admitted on the stand that the computer wasn't even inspected for spyware.

Tech geeks at Slashdot also weigh in, overwhelmingly in the woman's defense.

Europa International is offering free plastic surgery in Prague to winners of a lottery it is running. Naturally some people object. For instance, Douglas McGeorge, president of the British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons, tells the BBC, "I am appalled at this new scheme but unfortunately not surprised. Companies are plumbing new depths to take advantage of a growing interest in plastic surgery."

Are the winners adults? If yes, then what's the problem? Is the product being offered fraudulent? If not, again, no problem. Human beings have been trying to enhance their looks since the first caveman smeared some soot on his face to strive for that tall dark and handsome look in formal bearskins. By the way, most plastic surgery patients report being satisfied with their results.

In world in which Nick/Tuck is in its fourth season and women on The Swan have their bodies dramatically reshaped in front of a TV audience of millions, a little promotional gambling for a plastic surgery gift certificate is pretty tame stuff. Is BAAPS against this lottery because of concerns about the patients or because its members fear the loss of business as more Brits hop flights to Prague to indulge in some inexpensive body-sculpting tourism?

For an extended presentation on the ethics of voluntarily transforming our bodies, see transhumanist Anders Sandberg's interesting, "Morphological Freedom: Why we not just want it, but Need it. "

If you read only one random essay on health care policy esoterica by a cantankerous wonk today, make it Clark C. Havighurst's response in the latest Cato Unbound forum. Havighurst, who is capable of writing sentences like "the true vices of the tax subsidy are three," nonetheless lays out the awe-inspiring dysfunction of the current insurance system in nine short paragraphs. Sparring partners Jonathan Cohn (of The New Republic) and Arnold Kling (of Cato) are worth a read as well.

Very Little, as in Rich Little, your host for this year's White House Correspondents Association dinner.

Fresh off his 1976 television show, The Rich Little Show aired by the National Broadcasting Company until later in 1976, Little has recently hit the Indian casino circuit.

In 2003 Little released what was billed as "a patriot treat for every generation" in the form of a DVD called The Presidents. The 122 minute disc features Little doing nine presidents and various other Washington staples, like Walter Cronkite and David Brinkley. Throughout Little promises "a deep respect for the Oval Office while dramatically reflecting our country, our culture and ourselves."

Think this approach was attractive to the Beltway crowd who last year got hit right between the eyes by Stephen Colbert? E&P reports:

"My approach is to try to make it a comfortable venue that is enjoyable, funny and interesting," said Steve Scully, president of the White House Correspondents Association, who chose Little. "But you don't want to offend anyone." He cited the slogan for the Washington Gridiron Dinner, which says, "singe, don't burn."

Another scribey, Ron Hutcheson of McClatchy Newspapers, advises that, "We don't need to have a blogfest and a partisan slugfest after the dinner. We don't need that."

Ah, yes -- actual news and national interest. No need of that. No need of the most serious and direct criticism of Beltway newsgathering in, oh, forever. And newspapers wonder why more and more people are deciding they do not need newspapers.

Have fun folks. Bringing Little in after Colbert is like having Pat Boone follow the MC5. Too little, too late -- and too telling.

Dave Weigel reports on a Rasmussen poll showing that Hillary Clinton is rapidly approaching an Edmund Muskie-like burnout.

A new Zogby poll of Iowa voters turns up these numbers: Edwards leading the pack with 27 percent of likely Hawkeye State caucus-goers wanting him to be the Dem candidate. Obama, Vilsack, and Clinton are the only other Dems with double-digit support (between 16 percent and 17 percent).

On the GOP side, things are tighter: Giuliani and McCain are pulling 19 percent and 17 percent respectively, while Newt the Chins Gingrich is snagging 13 percent of likely Republican caucusoids.

After that, the GOP list goes well into single digits and, quite frankly, starts to sound like some sort of bizarro Wiggles knock-off, with cuddly characters named Tancredo, Huckabee, Pataki, and Brownback netting around 1 percent each (Rice gets 9 percent; Romney gets 5 percent).

More details here. 

Rasmussen Reports has been polling the Democratic field, and today they measure the strength of Hillary Clinton's presidential bid: She's down to 22 percent support in the primary and fading fast.

That's one poll with a sizable (5 percent) margin of error, but it's an incredibly weak showing for Clinton.

Illinois Senator Barack Obama (D) formally announced his plans to run for President and instantly finds himself near the top of the heap. A Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey of 401 Likely Democratic Primary Voters finds that 22% favor New York Senator Hillary Clinton (D) while 21% prefer Obama. Obama has consistently been in second place in several Rasmussen Reports polls, but this is the first time he has been in a virtual tie with the former First Lady.

John Edwards polls at 15 percent; he's up 6 since the last poll, Obama's up 4. Hillary is down 12 points from the last poll in early December.

How sad is this for Clinton? In 1999 we (blessedly) didn't start the presidential race this early, but Texas Gov. George Bush was coming in around 40 percent support in Republican primary polls. A poll taken by Opinion Research Corporation (CNN's pollster, now that Gallup's split off from the network) in Jan 6-11, 1999, had Bush at 40 percent, Elizabeth Dole at 22 percent, Jack Kemp at 8, and a bunch of single-digiters including Dan Quayle and some guy named John McCain. Most Republicans had heard of Bush (or thought he was his dad) and kind of liked him. Every Democrat knows who Hillary Clinton is, and almost 4/5 of them are looking for another candidate. It's a blow to the vaunted "support the war, don't support Grand Theft Auto" playbook.

The punchline: This poll was taken before Obama announced he was in the race.

Classically Liberal tells the Kafkaesque tale of Matthew Bandy, an Arizona teenager who faced a possible sentence of 90 years in prison because of nine images on his computer that the government identified as child pornography. Police, who (naturally) seized the computer during a ridiculously excessive military-style raid, apparently obtained a warrant based on Bandy's alleged visit to a website that included child porn. But that site was not the source of the images on his computer, and Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas could not prove the pictures had been deliberately downloaded (as opposed to planted by malicious software), let alone that Bandy had downloaded them. After putting the kid through hell for two years, Thomas tried to save face by charging him with a trumped-up felony that consisted of showing another boy a copy of Playboy. Bandy pleaded guilty to avoid spending the rest of his life in prison. To add insult to injury, Thomas tried to force Bandy, who had admitted to nothing but looking at legal pornography, to register as a sex offender.

The case, which was recently covered by ABC's 20/20, illustrates several dangerous trends, including laws that treat the possession of pictures more harshly than rape; militarization of the police, who routinely use SWAT teams to serve search warrants on nonviolent offenders (as documented in a recent Cato report by our own Radley Balko); arrests (and convictions) based on nothing more than data on a hard drive that may or may not have been placed there by the computer's owner; sex offender registries that throw harmless people together with child molesters; and excessive prosecutorial power based on vague laws and harsh mandatory sentences. Thomas, who comes across as dishonest and not terribly bright, is unrepentant, saying he hopes Bandy learned a "hard lesson" about the dangers of looking at dirty pictures. He implies that anyone who inadvertently comes across Internet porn featuring models 17 or younger deserves whatever he gets, presumably including a life sentence.

Remember the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and their "Midnight's almost here oh wait it's not wait no it is" Doomsday Clock? It's being moved forward again, but not because the threat of nuclear armageddon has increased. It's being moved because of climate change.

Experts assessing the dangers posed to civilisation have added climate change to the prospect of nuclear annihilation as the greatest threats to humankind. As a result, the group has moved the minute hand on its famous "Doomsday Clock" two minutes closer to midnight.
...
"When we think about what technologies besides nuclear weapons could produce such devastation to the planet, we quickly came to carbon-emitting technologies," said Kennette Benedict, executive director of the Chicago-based BAS.

You can spend five minutes kissing your loved ones before doom strikes; alternatively, dig into Reason's global warming archives.

Let's not forget the other war (or the other front in the same war, or the important front being unjustly ignored, or whatever you want to call it) in Afghanistan. New Defense Secretary Gates was there this week, and

said he was “strongly inclined” to recommend a troop increase to President Bush if commanders believe it is needed.

......The prospect of a troop increase in Afghanistan, at the same time Bush is ordering 21,500 more troops into Iraq, raises new questions about the military’s ability to sustain its war-fighting on two major fronts. There now are about 24,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, which Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry, the senior American commander here, said is the highest since the war began in October 2001.

Eikenberry already told Gates he wants extended tours of duty for 1,200 soldiers in Afghanistan. And what sort of situation are these soldiers facing, more than five years after the invasion?

Suicide attacks in 2006 totaled 139, up from 27 in 2005, and the number of attacks with roadside bombs more than doubled, from 783 in 2005 to 1,677 last year. The number of what the military calls “direct attacks,” meaning attacks by insurgents using small arms, grenades and other weapons, surged from 1,558 in 2005 to 4,542 last year.

Supporters of SWAT tactics often argue that the number of times a SWAT raid ends in gunfire is extremely low -- I guess inferring that SWAT raids aren't all that dangerous. In the past I have responded with something along the lines of, "That misses the point. We could start using SWAT teams to apprehend copyright violators or parking ticket scofflaws, too, and the percentage of raids ending in gunfire would be even lower. That doesn't mean it's a good use of SWAT teams."

Looks like I can't use that bit of hyperbole-for-effect anymore.

Last night, a federal SWAT team assisted the RIAA in a raid on the studio of Atlanta musician DJ Drama.

This local news report says the locally famous mixtape DJ is under investigation for piracy. But Drama's supporters say the DJ is a mix artist, not a bootlegger. They say news footage of the raid shows RIAA officials boxing up only recordable CDs filled with mixes, not bootlegs of retail CDs (the local news reporter seems to conflate the two as well).

Assuming for a moment that RIAA and federal officials do indeed know the difference between a mash-up DJ and a bootleg operation, and that they did find evidence of actual piracy in the bust, there's still the problem of why RIAA officials were participating in a police action, and why a SWAT team was used to raid a professional studio under investigation for a nonviolent, white-collar crime.

The always-engaging NPR show On the Media recently interviewed Guy Taylor about his piece in the February issue of Reason, "After the Damascus Spring: Syrians search for freedom online."

That story is not yet posted but the On the Media transcript and audio is online here.

A snippet:

BROOKE GLADSTONE: So, to sum up, the Internet is not going to usher in an age of freedom of speech and access to information in Syria.

GUY TAYLOR: At the same time, people are excited about the possibility that there's more information available about what's happening in Syria and the region, and they've also got an online forum through blogs and chat rooms to talk about it publicly without even giving their identity.

I think there's a great deal of hope and optimism involved in bringing this technology to the masses.

Back in November, On the Media interviewed Associate Editor Kerry Howley about the Child Online Protection Act. That's online here.

And in 2005, I appeared on the show and criticized Newsweek's hysterical coverage of the methamphetamine "epidemic," which led to a bit of a row between me and Newsweek's then-editor, Mark Whitaker. Check that out here.

Jeff Taylor dissects President Bush's 60 Minutes performance.

Tasty, wrinkly tomatoes win a battle against bureaucracy in Florida:

The Florida Tomato Committee, which controls most of the $500 million industry in the state, [previously] refused to allow Procacci Brothers to ship UglyRipe tomatoes out of the state. The committee was established by a federal agreement in 1937, and is one of many such groups that regulate agricultural products in several states.

The rules govern the looks of tomatoes. "Flavor is not a factor because, in the committee’s view, it is too subjective," reports the Times.

Hilariously, opponents claimed these little wizened-looking tomatoes would have an unfair advantage:

Florida governor Jeb Bush, opposed the change on the grounds that it would give an unfair advantage to the grower of UglyRipes. “Every grower has some percentage of its crops that is flat, elongated, ridged, etc., yet they are still required to adhere to the minimum grade requirements,” the governor’s letter said....

The tomato committee, which guarantees the consistency of Florida tomatoes, said that the new ruling could create a precedent that might allow inferior tomatoes to get to market.

Apparently, only the Florida Tomato Committee is able to detect "inferior tomatoes." I wonder what all those people are doing in the grocery store when they pick one up, squeeze, sniff, and put it back in the bin and walk away?

UglyRipes, marketed as Santa Sweets, will start shipping tomorrow. 

Jacob Sullum tracked the Ugly wars for the magazine in 2005.

Theoretically, the Senate's going to vote today on stopping politicians from getting cushy lobbying jobs for their family members. Theoretically.

At least half a dozen congressional spouses have jobs as registered lobbyists and several more are connected with lobbying firms, but reining in the practice to prevent potential conflicts or the appearance of them has not been a priority among congressional leaders. Even modest proposals such as banning wives and husbands from lobbying their spouses or using their spouses' floor privileges for lobbying have gone nowhere.

Democrats made ethics reform a major issue in last fall's congressional elections, but the ethics package the House approved earlier this month didn't address the issue and neither did the one proposed by Senate Democrats. Last week, however, Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) proposed banning spouses of senators from lobbying any part of the chamber. The lone exception is for spouses who were lobbying at least one year before their husband or wife was elected.

The Senate is scheduled to vote on the legislation as soon as today. Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) called Vitter and said he would support the proposal with one caveat: It should exempt spouses who are already lobbyists.

Things are moving slowly, as you'd expect after that. Anyone know a good blog or site keeping tabs on this?

Craig Malisow has an odd story in the Houston Press; Pakistani-American Mariyah Moten participated in a Miss Bikini World shoot in China, and let herself be photographed with a Pakistani flag. She graced the cover of a cheesecake calender. And while Malisow tries to sex the story up, the point seems to be... no one cared.

As Miss Canada Pakistan founder Sonia Ahmed says, "They have opened up the women' s rights, and women are now free to do what they want and dress how they want, and represent Pakistan in whichever way they feel they want to represent Pakistan. It's becoming more secular."

After the firestorm over Moten, Ahmed says, she's entered contestants in four pageants without a peep from Pakistani officials. She says it's part of a cultural shift that, at times, can be confusing.

"The majority right now is a modern and liberal government," she says. "The people are now confused...thinking, 'OK, we were once upon a time very Islamic, now we've got to be modern. So if we're going to tell everyone that we're Islamic, are we going to be the bad people?'"

This is, of course, the most promising news you could apply to the future of Iraq in quite a while.

UPDATE: Nick Gillespie noted Moten last year, when it appeared as though the model and her deep thoughts might actually prove controversial.

The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril, by Paul Malmont (Simon and Schuster, 2006). A fully delightful novel, simultaneously skilled and thrilling pulp adventure mixed with serious literary skill, meta-commentary on the nature and attraction of pulp fiction, and a full-on fan wallow in the pleasures of a bang-up narrative in which the corpse of H.P. Lovecraft tries to deliver a world-saving message to Robert Heinlein and L. Ron Hubbard in a New York bar (while, separate from the action across the room, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster plan their next move), where Stan Lee and Jack Kirby help Walter Gibson (the real "Maxwell Grant") keep on the trail of a sinister Chinese man with a mysterious and horrible plan all across Manhattan to a secret counterfeiting plant, where a chemist named Edward Elmer Smith helps save Manhattan from a poison gas attack.

This novel features some of the best fight scenes I've read in years, vivid sailing action, mysterious statues in abandoned theaters in the dark heart of Chinatown, and loads of believable and lovable characters (the love and exasperation and crisis and renewal in the relationship between Lester and Norma Dent is especially winning), most of them real people, fighting for love and vengeance and self-respect and a reason to live.

First-time novelist Paul Malmont is a second generation fanatic for the lost pop art of American pulp fiction, of the Shadow and Doc Savage and the shudder pulps and the science fiction rags, and says in his introduction that his goal is to "introduce you to some old friends of mine, and make their days come alive again. I will let their voices speak and let their hearts fill with life one more time." He succeeds, gloriously. This novel provides special depths of pleasure for those who have, like Malmont, romanticized and fantasized about pulp characters and creators; but it also stands apart from these fannish pleasures as a gripping novel exploring and explaining a fascinating and colorful Lost World.

In his syndicated column, Jacob Sullum runs through the arguments against student loans and the unintended effects they may have on education costs.

A story in today's Washington Times does a bit more of the math: If the Dems manage to pass a law cutting interest rates on need-based loans from 6.8 percent to 3.4 percent, "It ultimately would save the average student borrower about $4,400 over the life of a loan." Recall that college grads on average make $1 million more over their lifetimes than high school grads.

The cost of the program, which would be phased in slowly until 2011? The Dems say "$5.85 billion over five years. The National Taxpayers Union said the original version from last year would have cost $37 billion." It's not clear what NTU estimates the current version will cost.

Last year, Kerry Howley looked at the panic over Generation Debt and concluded that college kids with $20,000 to pay off in loans were likely to do pretty well after all.

"When many of these veterans went to war, the government threw cigarettes at them, and now they are 80 years old, and the government is telling them that they can't smoke in their private club," said Seagraves, who is also a member of the advisory committee. "The government made smokers out of them. ... Those guys fought for that freedom."

The sense of outrage comes through loud and clear but I really don't understand what that last sentence means.

The speaker is William Seagraves, Ohio state commander of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, dissing the Buckeye State's smoking ban, which may or may not cover private clubs such as VFW halls. Ohio voters handily passed the butt ban, which technically went into effect on December 7 but cannot be enforced until the state health department comes up with actual rules to govern the policy.

Full account of the brewing brouhaha here.

...says Reuel Marc Gerecht in the New Republic. Matthew Yglesias wonders if he means it:

[T]the consequences of the view that the US government should draw no distinction between its responsibilities to Americans and to non-Americans has far reaching and radical consequences for policy areas far removed from the Iraq withdrawal debate. Immigration, say, or international intellectual property policy. Why not mothball a carrier group and spend the money on mosquito nets? Why not dedicate 3 percent of GDP to direct subsidies to the world's 25 poorest nations? I mean, who knows. Gerecht obviously hasn't given any thought to this position whatsoever. He's a hawk. Since he's a hawk, he against leaving Iraq. Since hes against leaving Iraq, he needs some arguments. He came to a point in the debate when arguing that the US government should value Iraqi and American lives equally was convenient, so he started espousing this position. Does he espouse it consistently? Has he considered its implications? No, no, of course not. He's just bullshitting around.

Indeed, some pro-warriors are sounding a a bit desperate these days. They ought to relax, though. As this Radar mag story shows, being wrong on Iraq seems better for your career as a pundit than having been right all along.

Police in Escondido recently set up a DUI roadblock from 6pm to 12am. The tally:

1,600 cars stopped,

931 drivers screened,

82 drivers pulled aside for extra scrutiny,

32 vehicles impounded,

52 tickets issued to drivers other than those whose vehicles were impounded,

and, drum-roll please....

...one DUI arrest.

Given that the Supreme Court has only ruled on the legitimacy of roadblock checkpoints for DUI policing (it has declared them illegal for the purposes of drug policing, for example), you have to wonder at what point what these roadblocks are achieving in practice begins to make them constitutionally dubious, despite the fact that their stated purpose may be.

Jacob Sullum wonders what the Democrats hope to achieve with their student loan cut "solutions."

Those of you hip-deep in the world of Burning Man might already be aware that one of the event's early driving forces, John Law, last week filed a lawsuit against the two fellow owners of the Burning Man trademark, Larry Harvey and Michael Mikel.

Law insists his ultimate goal in the suit (which specifically argues that he has been defrauded of his own 1/3 share of the trademark's value over the years since he left the active management of the event in 1996) is to get the trademark out of his hands and those of the other already-feuding pair who helped turn the event from a beach burn to a huge desert festival--Mikel and Harvey were already heading to arbitration in a previous legal battle over compensation from Burning Man as an active institution to Paper Man, the LLC consisting of Law, Harvey, and Mikel that owns the trademark--and into the public domain.

This post from Laughing Squid.com has the best set of links to all the relevant legal documents and subsequent online brouhaha over whether or not the spirit of Burning Man can survive the public domain. John Law's own blog explaining himself here .

Newsweek's Jessica Bennett interviewed me last week for my thoughts on the lawsuit and the state of the Man--and here's their edited transcript of the conversation.

The background and issues are long and complicated, and for the whole decades-long saga and detailed reportage on the personalities involved, consult my 2004 book This is Burning Man, now out in paperback from BenBella Books.

You know, I kinda almost feel sorry for the government after officials in Prince William County (Virginia) had to tangle with Robert Eberth over a car inspection sticker. For six years.

Eberth fought the $35 citation he received -- he thought the county had no authority to ticket a car parked on private property -- and the Virginia Court of Appeals eventually agreed with him.

Yeah, but put a box of Sudafed on the dash.....

The men of Powerline serve up a perfect example of Republican opinion on Barack Obama.

Unless one counts his good looks, good speaking, and bi-racial status, it's difficult to discern Obama's qualifications for the presidency. Obama has never run anything of substance... A serious country would not take his candidacy seriously.

The last open election for the White House pitted Al Gore against George W. Bush. Gore had been in national politics for 24 years; eight years each as congressman, senator, and vice president. Bush had been the governor of Texas for six years, and before that a businessman with - let's be nice about it - a mixed record of achievements. Still, the Bush campaign tried to present their candidate as a man who'd lived in the real world and the corporate world versus this orange-colored hack who'd grown up in Washington, D.C. and never really left. Fifteen percent of voters cast their ballot based on experience. Gore won them by sixty-five points. But Bush had beaten Gore soundly on the questions of trustworthiness, likeability, and being a strong leader, which more voters cared about, so he won (despite getting fewer votes overall etc etc).

The point is that voters don't make their presidential decisions (arguably any political decisions, but especially presidential ones) based on a checklist of the factors that make a good president. The issues change every four years. And there are two possibilities for 2008. One: We learn that 21,500 extra troops were what was standing between total defeat and total victory in Iraq, and George W. Bush becomes the most beloved president since Jed Bartlet. Two: Iraq gets worse, the Bush presidency continues to crumble, and voters want to scramble away from the legacy of the last eight years faster than the audience at an Uwe Boll movie. If we find ourselves living in that second scenario, a cipher like Obama (especially if he colors in his bio by talking about cutting spending and getting out of Iraq) is exactly who Americans will want to elect. They won't necessarily be "unserious" for wanting to, either.

Republican grumbling about Obama is probably all about projection, anyway. Republicans have been gunning to elect the first black president for a while, hence the 1996 Colin Powell boomlet, the 2005 Condi Rice boomlet, and the 2006 efforts to elect a black Republican farm team to office in Pennsylvania (Swann), Maryland (Steele) and Ohio (Blackwell).

Iraq is in the throes of the largest refugee crisis in the Middle East since the Palestinian exodus from Israel in 1948, a mass flight out of and within the country that is ravaging basic services and commerce, swamping neighboring nations with nearly 2 million refugees and building intense pressure for emigration to Europe and the United States, according to the United Nations and refugee experts.

That's the opening of a SF Chronicle story by Reason Contributing Editor Carolyn Lochhead. Most of the refugees are heading to Jordan (where Iraqis are now 10 percent of the population) and Syria. Both of those countries are apparently getting a bit crowded these days. The story goes on to quote Kathleen Newland of the Migration Policy Institute about historic American attitudes toward refugees from wars in which the U.S. played key roles:

Despite anti-war sentiment, Newland said, "we have not seen as much of an outpouring of sympathy for the innocent victims of this war from Americans, as we did in the aftermath of that terrible photograph of the little girl on fire with napalm (in Vietnam.) Nothing seems to have quite seized the imagination of the American public about Iraqi civilian victims of war in quite that way. Maybe we're just in the early stages. "

 Read the whole dreary tale of displaced people here.

Robert Novak has the write-up I've been waiting for on last week's drama in the Senate, when Majority Leader Harry Reid tried to kill the House Democrats' version of earmark reform - as introduced by Republican Jim DeMint.

Reid moved to table (that is, kill) DeMint's amendment, which would substitute in the Senate ethics package the language covering all earmarks as contained in Speaker Nancy Pelosi's House bill. Reid was surprised to fail, 46 to 51, with nine Democrats abandoning their majority leader. The Senate routine is that when a tabling motion fails, the bill is passed by a voice vote. But an obviously distressed Reid took the floor to hold open the vote indefinitely on DeMint's bill, contending that the Democratic-controlled House had acted in haste.

The ploy was shut down by some Democrats whom, I'm pleased to note, I've taken flak for occasionally promoting on H&R.

The two leading Senate Democratic reformers, Russell Feingold of Wisconsin and Barack Obama of Illinois, who two days earlier lavished praise on Reid's ethical leadership, voted against him on the tabling motion. However, of the nine freshman Democrats who also had honored Reid, only two -- Jim Webb of Virginia and Jon Tester of Montana -- voted for transparency. The other seven toed Reid's party line. (Seven Republicans voted with Reid, but they included Minority Whip Trent Lott.)

One of the terrific ironies of election 2006: In demoting Republicans to the minority, they have apparently empowered the party's best senators. Coburn had some successes in the 109th Congress, but he wasn't rising in the ranks. Nor did he really want to. He's told me he considered himself a "minority in the majority" and that his role wouldn't be much different in a Democratic majority. But now that Republicans are no longer running the agenda and worrying about covering for the Bush administration, Coburn's got a louder voice in the caucus. And, apparently, allies in the Democratic party. Same for DeMint. (It's a shame this isn't how things work in the House.)

Reason's Nick Gillespie, Radley Balko, Kerry Howley, and David Weigel invite you to come out at 6.30PM next Tuesday, January 16, to the Upstairs Bar at Dragonfly and celebrate the publication of our February 2007 issue featuring stories such as:

Divided We Stand: What to expect from the long-awaited, much-anticipated return of gridlock.

Peace on the Border: Why anti-immigration conservatives fell flat in 2006.

Pot Clubs in Peril: Are San Francisco zoning boards a bigger threat to medical marijuana than the DEA?

Quotations from Chairman Milton: More than three decades of wisdom from the late champion of liberty, culled from the pages of Reason.

We the Living Dead: The convoluted politics of zombie cinema.

Joining us will be special guest stars Jacob Sullum, Reason senior editor; Alex Pareene of Wonkette; Bill Wyman, assistant managing editor of the arts desk at National Public Radio; and Megan McArdle, global agenda correspondent for The Economist and proprietress of Asymmetrical Information. Details:

Reason Happy Hour
Tuesday, January 16, 6.30PM to whenever
The Upstairs bar at Dragonfly, 1215 Connecticut Avenue, NW, near the intersection of Connecticut, N, and 18th Streets

If you would like to get automatic emails about Reason Happy Hours, please send a note to events@reason.com.

Ben Schwartz in the New York Times discusses the glorious golden age of comic strip reprint projects we are currently living through--a phenomenon I've celebrated both at the American Spectator and here on Hit and Run.

A philosophy professor at UC-Riverside crunches some numbers and find that ethicists have stickier fingers than their colleagues:

Ethics books are more likely to be stolen than non-ethics books in philosophy (looking at a large sample of recent ethics and non-ethics books from leading academic libraries). Missing books as a percentage of those off shelf were 8.7% for ethics, 6.9% for non-ethics, for an odds ratio of 1.25 to 1.

Do these numbers reflect book thieves in search of a cure for their compulsion? Or could the explanation be a rash of ironical practical jokesters trolling university libraries? Read more here.

Via Marginal Revolution

....I'd hammer out RFID-tagged passports, all over this land. Wired magazine notes in its January issue that, rather than running it through the wash or microwaving it, the best approach if you don't want computer trackability in any form on your passport (while remembering that tampering with your passport is "punishable by 25 years in prison") is to go about "hitting the chip with a blunt hard object...A nonworking RFID doesn't invalidate the passport, so you can still use it."

Over at Slate, Will Saletan considers the business logic of embryo selling:

What if you hired two highly fertile and desirable donors, combined their eggs and sperm in one IVF round, made a big batch of embryos, and sold the embryos a pair a time? Why buy retail when you can buy wholesale?

[Jennalee Ryan] charges $2,500 per embryo. Two women split the first batch; a third has signed a contract for two embryos from the second batch. Ryan figures each batch costs about $22,000 to make. The yield from the first round was 26 embryos. With 300 buyers on her waiting list, Ryan is well positioned to sell out each lot. At $2,500 per unit, a batch of 26 viable embryos would gross $65,000 and net $43,000.

Why the flat fees? It's a lot easier to get away with using the word donation if prices don't fluctuate with demand. Officially, the company is just compensating donors; selling tissue is arguably illegal. And yet as Ryan herself notes, she is stockpiling desirable traits: white skin, blue eyes, blond hair. The flat fees, as Saletan points out, won't last. Payment for eggs can range from $3,500 to $35,000 or more, and sperm prices vary as well.

Other than the possible avoidance of legal trouble, there is no reason to sell the finished product at a fixed price. I get the feeling Ryan is just testing the water here, and she'll soon be basing the price of the embryos on the SAT scores, race, and physical desirability of the donors.

That said, I'm not at all convinced of a huge market for ready-made embryos. Women buy ova not to make superbabies, but because of infertility issues and heritable disease. They want babies that look like them, and more to the point, like their partners. The entire process of anonymous ova donation is geared toward erasing the identity of the donor, of reclaiming the baby as a product of the partnership between the intended mother and actual father. Collecting genetic material from two strangers, rather than one, will make that process more difficult and the product less desirable.

Ron Bailey was onto JennaLee Ryan's embryo-Mart back in August, and I put my eggs on the auction block in October.

Cathy Young asks why the tone of the global warming debate is hot enough to melt glaciers in under 60 seconds.

John Tierney, estwhile New York Times columnist (and occasional Reason contributor), has been promoted to science columnist. He launches his debut column in today's Science Times where he subjects himself to an MRI to look deep within his brain to find out why he is a spendthrift. It turns out that spending money makes him feel good. His new blog, TierneyLab links to a Carnegie-Mellon University survey that helps you determine if you're a tightwad or a spendthrift.

I've just taken the survey, but given my credit card debt, I think I already know which way it's going to come out. Damn my pleasure besotted nucleus accumbens!

The Democratic party's superstar has beaten Hillary to the punch; he's entering the race for president. Rather cleverly, he announces in a video (perfect for 24/7 cable news!) that he'll open an exploratory committee and spend four weeks being hounded by reporters and screaming teenage girls before he makes another announcement on February 10.

Pre-emptive answer to charges of "shilling for Democrats": Obama is probably going to be the only Democratic presidential candidate who's co-sponsored a bill with Sen. Tom Coburn. Compare that to Hillary Clinton's anti-video game alliance with the Connecticut for Lieberman Party and you've got a pretty clear case of white hat versus black hat.

A couple weeks back I assessed whether Obama's campaign was a creation of "white guilt"; in 2004, in the American Spectator, I welcomed the break Obama represented for black politics.

The founders of the online payment service Neteller have apparently been arrested at airports in New York and Los Angeles.

It's not yet clear why they were arrested. But it's worth noting that Neteller, which is based in the Isle of Man, is the only offshore online payment service that decided to continue to allow its U.S. customers to do business with online gambling sites after the new bill banning such transactions passed at the end of the last Congress.

And of course, U.S. officials have made a habit of late of arresting high-profile offshore gambling executives when they pass through the U.S. to switch planes.

Though the new law doesn't officially take effect until DOJ and the Treasury write the regulations that will enforce it, many at DOJ consider the mere facilitation online gambling -- as Neteller does -- to be illegal, even before last year's bill.

The latest goings-on in that other war:

• A member of the Kuwaiti royal family has been sentenced to death for drug trafficking.

• The Atlanta Journal Constitution delves into the culture of the city's narcotics policing, and finds a system rife with perverse incentives. The paper finds that the raid that led to the shooting death of Kathryn Johnston promised a kilo of cocaine -- a one in 1,000 bust. The paper found that pressure to make arrests and the lure of the professional esteem that comes with a big bust encourage police to take shortcuts and manipulate the facts to secure a search warrant. None of this is new or unique to Atlanta, of course.

• GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney has hired Mel Sembler as a top money man for his campaign. Sembler, you may remember, is a fierce drug warrior, and in the 1980s and 90s ran Straight, Inc., the string of "tough love" teen rehab centers frequently accused of child abuse.

• Outstanding piece attacking the drug war in the NY Times over the weekend from guest columnist Orlando Patterson.

• A new report comes to the striking conclusion that -- surprise! -- Canada's war on drugs is an "utter failure."

Yesterday's NY Times has an interesting article about the coming battles between Hollywood studios and Google-owned YouTube, which are in negotiations for a licensing deal that will avoid the copyright hassles that shut down Napsters, Grokster, and other file-sharing sites. Estimates of the amount of "Hollywood-derived content" on YouTube--actual clips and original mash-ups--run between 20 percent and 70 percent of all content on the site. Some snippets:

YouTube distributes unauthorized clips of the movies that the studios spend an average of $96 million to make. But it can also help them build tremendous buzz, and that is driving Hollywood to try to work with it instead of against it....

"I think studios will sue if they don’t get a licensing deal they like,” said Jessica Litman, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School. “My guess is if I were a movie studio, getting a cut of the money is more profitable than shutting it down. But it’s complicated, very complicated, and it’s only going to get worse.”...

“I think that the marketing side of our company and the copyright-protection side have contradictory impulses,” [Universal chief Marc] Shmuger said. “But there is a huge appetite for content, and we are well-advised to recognize that appetite and find constructive ways to feed it.”

Mr. Shmuger said the studios need to embrace sites like YouTube because they are the future of movie marketing. “If you want to be involved in the cultural debate, you have to allow consumers to be more actively involved,” he said. “That’s a different world order which we are not used to.”...

It's encouraging when a studio head, of all people, recognizes that the old top-down modes of cultural production are like, so 20th century. Yet the Times' article notes that Universal Music sued MySpace for copyright infringement recently and that when Google bought YouTube, it put aside some $200 million to cover copyright-related lawsuits. And the story is thick with Big Content gurus admitting that yes, they like the Napoleon Dynamite-Eminem mashup but that it's still piracy don't you know.

And the Director's Guild, last seen attacking CleanFlicks for pixallating Kate Winslet's Titanic breasts, is taking a hard line against anyone messing with product.

Times article here.

Reason review of Jessica Litman's excellent Digital Copyright here.

Reason on Big Content vs. Silicon Valley, a.k.a Hollywood vs. the Internet here. 

Reason on mash-ups here.

Remember this statement by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in June 2005? It was made at the American University in Cairo, and for many people represented a fundamental American reassessment of past U.S. policy in the Middle East.

We should all look to a future when every government respects the will of its citizens -- because the ideal of democracy is universal. For 60 years, my country, the United States, pursued stability at the expense of democracy in this region here in the Middle East-- and we achieved neither. Now, we are taking a different course. We are supporting the democratic aspirations of all people.

Well, Rice is back in Cairo, and we might want to reassess that supposed reassessment.

At least 34,452 Iraqi civilians were killed in violence in the country in 2006, the United Nations said in a report. A further 36,685 people were injured.

That's from a Bloomberg News story which continued:

"The root causes of the sectarian violence lie in revenge killings,'' the UN said today in an e-mailed statement detailing the report's findings.

Sectarian attacks are causing the migration of Iraq's professional class, the UN said, while the "basic rights and freedoms'' of women and other minorities are "profoundly affected by violence and action by insurgents, militias and criminal gangs.''

Whole thing here.

Back in 2002, former Reasoner Matt Welch checked out an earlier U.N. study on the effects of economic sanctions against Iraq and found claims about the number of dead children to extremely unreliable. Read "The Politics of Dead Children" here.

Go here for a report on the continuing controversies over the number of death in the Gulf War.

Martin Luther King Day has come and gone; it's safe now to link to Michael Brendan Dougherty's essay on the late Sam Francis, from the America's Future Foundation magazine Doublethink. It's striking how quickly Francis' work has receded from the public conciousness, but MBD provides the quick take:

According to Francis, every elite -- and the groups and individuals composing or attached to it -- protects itself from exploitation by use of the power it exerts against others. Conservatism as it had been understood since 1789 had been tasked with the defense of tradition and authority against revolutionaries and the eroding forces of modernity. Francis found this wanting. The managerial revolution had already occurred, and the elite that came to power with it were implacably hostile to everything Francis sought to conserve. In Francis’s analysis, Russell Kirk and the conservative movement had blundered. Instead of playing defense, those who wanted to conserve Western tradition and culture needed to become an insurgent political force.

That insurgency would be rooted in an appeal to disgruntled "Middle American Radicals," and would be inextricably tied to racism. That's where the MLK link came in; Francis was probably the intellectual leader of the movement to stop an MLK day holiday in the early 1980s.

Francis’s real concern was that a national holiday would legitimize King’s understanding of the Declaration of Independence as a promissory note: “not merely declarative of national independence but also imperative of social reconstruction in accordance with an egalitarian commandment.” A King holiday would provide the Left with a stick with which to beat Americans for not delivering on the full promise of King’s legacy and to cow them into accepting ever more radical measures in his name. The Left would not stop at expunging Confederate symbols and the playing of “Dixie,” but would set their sights on Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln, whose statements on racial egalitarianism, Francis quipped, “make Jimmy the Greek sound like an ACLU lawyer.”

This is a charitable framing (excising the now odd-sounding USSR conspiracism that Francis leaned on) of what Francis was trying to do; it sounds almost prescient, right? Except that the King holiday didn't launch everything Francis said it would. Of course we all hear about college professors or elementary schools going after the legacies of Thomas Jefferson et al, but it never became epidemic. The "egalitarian commandment" tide started rolling ashore in 1978, and it crashed in the 1990s. We've been taking MLK Day off, and our presidents have basically been consecrating it, and the push for racial preferences has been struggling since prop 209.

All of this is a long-winded way of saying Francis is worth studying as an example of how the American right can founder when its preservation of "tradition" extends to the preservation of inequality, and that Dougherty's essay is pretty interesting.

Jesse Walker pays tribute to Robert Anton Wilson.

Earlier this month, a Santa Cruz, California family inadvertently ate some poisonous mushrooms they'd collected in a nearby woods. The "death cap" mushroom they ate is often fatal, and there's no antidote approved for use in the U.S.

The doctor on call at Dominican Hospital did a search on Google Scholar, and found that in some parts of Europe, intravenous administration of an extract from the milk thistle plant had been used to effectively treat poisoning from this particular variety of mushroom.

Enter the FDA. The treatment isn't approved in the United States. So the doctors next embarked on a harrowing battle with various bureaucracies to get the drug to the U.S. from the manufacturer in Germany in time to treat the family.

The good news is that they succeeded, and managed to save five of the six patients.

Story here .

A new study from the Cato Institute's Alan Reynolds argues that income inequality is exaggerated:

Tax changes induced thousands of businesses to switch from filing under the corporate tax system to filing under the individual tax system. Corporate executives switched from accepting stock options taxed as capital gains to nonqualified stock options taxed as salaries. The huge growth in tax-favored savings plans, such as 401(k)s, has resulted in billions of dollars of investment income disappearing from tax returns. Meanwhile, studies of inequality that are based on tax return data usually exclude transfer payments, which results in exaggerating the shares of income received by those at the top by ignoring growing amounts of income at the bottom.

[...]

In sum, studies based on tax return data provide highly misleading comparisons of changes to the U.S. income distribution because of dramatic changes in tax rules and tax reporting in recent decades. Aside from stock option windfalls during the late-1990s stock-market boom, there is little evidence of a significant or sustained increase in the inequality of U.S. incomes, wages, consumption, or wealth over the past 20 years.

Of course, there's also the question of whether income inequality is really something we ought to worry about , anyway.

Reason's Nick Gillespie, Radley Balko, Kerry Howley, and David Weigel invite you to come out at 6.30PM next Tuesday, January 16, to the Upstairs Bar at Dragonfly and celebrate the publication of our February 2007 issue featuring stories such as:

Divided We Stand: What to expect from the long-awaited, much-anticipated return of gridlock.

Peace on the Border: Why anti-immigration conservatives fell flat in 2006.

Pot Clubs in Peril: Are San Francisco zoning boards a bigger threat to medical marijuana than the DEA?

Quotations from Chairman Milton: More than three decades of wisdom from the late champion of liberty, culled from the pages of Reason.

We the Living Dead: The convoluted politics of zombie cinema.

Joining us will be special guest stars Jacob Sullum, Reason senior editor; Alex Pareene of Wonkette; Bill Wyman, assistant managing editor of the arts desk at National Public Radio; and Megan McArdle, global agenda correspondent for The Economist and proprietress of Asymmetrical Information. Details:

Reason Happy Hour
Tuesday, January 16, 6.30PM to whenever
The Upstairs bar at Dragonfly, 1215 Connecticut Avenue, NW, near the intersection of Connecticut, N, and 18th Streets

If you would like to get automatic emails about Reason Happy Hours, please send a note to events@reason.com.

Cathy Young tries to unravel the tangle of aggrieved feelings, conspiracy theories, and enemy lists that makes up The O'Reilly Factor.