Weekly Hit & Run Archive 2008 December 8-31

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

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

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

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

To embed this video at your own site, go here.

For an audio podcast, go here.

Words Pictures that wound, via Jerry Brito, who writes, "Holy crap! Marie is right! There is a resemblance":

For the record, I am not Rod Blagojevich, I never have been Rod Blagojevich, and if I were as corrupt as him, I wouldn't be talking on the telephone so much. And when I curse, my four-letter words come out as God intended, not with a bunch of asterisks.

Watch reason's Michael C. Moynihan and Mike Flynn talk with Terry Michael (yes, too many Michaels for one show!) about the massive corruption in "Crook County, Illinois, and beyond:

You can't fault Mark I. Pinsky for dreaming. The award-winning religion writer was laid off from the Orlando Sentinel in July, and his essay for The New Republic was probably more of a vehicle for his frustrations than a sincere policy proposal (unlike some of the other people demanding big money from Uncle Sam's supposedly bottomless pockets). Either way, Pinsky's essay is worth reading in full despite its lack of a compelling argument:

Any federal effort to put back to work the hundreds of thousands thrown out of work in the nation's hard-hit industrial, construction, airline, and financial sectors should consider displaced news media workers--including those newly laid off from the publishing industry--as well....

The Federal Writers Project operated from 1935-1939 under the leadership of Henry Alsberg, a journalist and theater director. In addition to providing employment to more than 6,000 out-of-work reporters, photographers, editors, critics, writers, and creative craftsmen and -women, the FWP produced some lasting contributions to American history, culture, and literature. Their efforts ranged from comprehensive guides to 48 states and three territories to interviews with and photos of 2,300 former African-American slaves. These are preserved in the seventeen volumes of Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves....

Today, there are many dislocated "old media" journalists from newspapers, radio, and television on the street--here I declare my personal interest, as one of them--who could provide a skilled pool to staff a new FWP. But since these journalists represent only a fraction of the larger displaced workforce, it is fair to ask what the public benefit would be of money spent....

Gifted FWP alumni who went on to distinguished literary careers in literature include John Steinbeck, John Cheever, Nelson Algren, Saul Bellow, and African Americans Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, and Richard Wright. The recent death of Studs Terkel-- a FWP veteran who went on to use the skills he developed in the program to chronicle the working- and middle-classes on his long-running radio show and in his Pulitzer Prize-winning books--is a reminder of how valuable this kind of experience can be. Ellison used his FWP research in Invisible Man, and Steinbeck and John Gunther relied on the FWP state guides for Travels With Charley: In Search of America and Inside U.S.A., respectively.

This time, the FWP could begin by documenting the ground-level impact of the Great Recession; chronicling the transition to a green economy; or capturing the experiences of the thousands of immigrants who are changing the American complexion. Like the original FWP, the new version would focus in particular on those segments of society largely ignored by commercial and even public media....

How would it work? Administering the new FWP as an individual grant program through community colleges and universities could minimize bureaucracy and overhead. In consultation with the Obama administration--perhaps through the National Endowment for the Humanities--and Congress, guidelines could be established and a small staff assembled in Washington to oversee the projects, in the form of grants, rather than hourly wages. Projects could be pitched locally to colleges, or suggested and posted by them, vetted preliminarily and then approved or rejected by the national staff.

Pinsky's policy prescriptions are ambiguous and take a lot for granted: What if Barack Obama can't "stimulate" several million green jobs? And where's the money going to come from for the additional FWP jobs, many of which wouldn't be green? And who's going to make up the objective panel of project reviewers? (Pinsky's concession that such a massive program might fall prey to bureaucratic abuses is a laughable understatement; his conviction that there's a way to circumvent the bureaucrats is, at best, wishful thinking.)

That leaves the historical elements of the essay (it's hard for me to say anything bad about underwriting greats like Bellow and Ellison) and Pinsky's opinion, which he shares with many journalists, that the government can't "just do nothing" while the media industry goes through a period of creative destruction. As someone who works at an alt. weekly, I won't deny that I'd like a little more job security. On the other hand, I'd rather join the growing ranks of PR writers than pitch my porn reviews to some stuffy, government pencil-pusher. (And let's not forget that a government-backed medium would be even less adept than a privately-owned dead-tree paper at keeping up with "citizen journalists.")

For the past quarter-century, Robert J. Samuelson has written about business, politics, and economics for The Washington Post and Newsweek.

His masterful and eminently readable new book, The Great Inflation and Its Aftermath: The Past and Future of American Affluence, may just be the most important non-fiction volume published this year-or next year, for that matter. Certainly, in a world of economic chaos and seemingly never-ending bailouts and "stimulus packages," The Great Inflation is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding what happens when the government tries to tame the business cycle and fine-tune the economy as if it were a two-stroke engine. (Are you listening, Henry Paulson? George W. Bush? Congress? Barack Obama?)

The Great Inflation tells the story of how smug economists and politicians in the post-war era almost wrecked the U.S. and how President Ronald Reagan and Federal Reserve head Paul Volcker tamed double-digit inflation in the 1980s. Samuelson provides a rich history of wisdom triumphing over hubris-and he provides a singular commentary on just where the U.S. economy might be headed for the next decade or more.

Samuelson sat down with reason.tv's Nick Gillespie in December for a wide-ranging conversation about economics, media, politics, and the desperate need for reality-based commentary. The interview was filmed by Michael C. Moynihan and edited by Dan Hayes. Approximately 50 minutes.

For an audio podcast of this interview, go here.

Looks like I triggered Greg Palast's Google Alert. The Chavez-loving "investigative journalist" took exception to my including him in this piece and sends along this sober, academic rebuttal:

Subject: post this, Little Michael

Your half-baked little web columnist, "Michael C. Moynihan," if that's his real name, wasted your readers' time by pretending he could read my mind and smear me with words I've never said.

Michael states, with the assurance of the ignorant:

 "Those who gasped in horror that America's elections were rigged in 2000 and 2004, that warned against a sinister plan afoot in 2008-think Greg Palast, Robert Kennedy Jr., Gore Vidal-seem not to mind systematic and acknowledged voter intimidation in Venezuela or, in the case of Cuba, the total absence of democratic elections."

Now, I don't mind being put in Bobby Kennedy's company (he is, after all, a co-author of my investigations for Rolling Stone), or Gore's, but to assume that Kennedy and I have blessed the Cuban dictatorship is ... well, what is in Moynihan's soda pop?

After doing a verbal photoshop putting me and Kennedy in Castro's bed, Moynihan then throws out that old chestnut about Chavez' supposedly bending Venezuela's elections. Funny that guy Chavez: he lost the last vote by 1% - I guess he's not good at vote theft.  Maybe he should hire Katherine Harris.  Or maybe he doesn't steal votes.

Agree with me or not, take note, you wannabe Jimmy Olsons:  rule one of journalism is, rather than guess what someone thinks, pick up the phone and ASK.  And get rid of that psuedo-gonzo (sic) get-up, man.  The '90s are over.

Greg Palast

Oh dear. I'm not sure to what gonzo get-up Palast is referring, man, though as an enterprising Jimmy Olson type, I suspect I need to get one of those fedoras to be a real journalist. But to the point: I suggest that Palast reread the sentence that so offended him and see that my "verbal photoshopping" accuses him not of defending Castro, but of not speaking out against voter fraud in countries like Venezuela and Cuba and being, in the words of lefty journalist Marc Cooper, a "conspiracy theorist" when the Democratic Party loses. One more time, here's what I wrote: "Those who gasped in horror that America's elections were rigged in 2000 and 2004, that warned against a sinister plan afoot in 2008—think Greg Palast, Robert Kennedy Jr., Gore Vidal—seem not to mind systematic and acknowledged voter intimidation in Venezuela or, in the case of Cuba, the total absence of democratic elections."

If Palast would like me to be clearer, here it is: He and RFK Jr. have consistently shilled for Chavez and Gore Vidal for Castro. I have no doubt that Palast is deeply outraged by the fifty year Cuban dictatorship but, oddly, I can find no reference to him ever having written about it. Lots of stuff about Bolivia, Chile, and Venezuela, yes. But nothing about Cuba. Indeed, while his book Armed Madhouse is currently ranked #38 on Amazon's list of "human rights" books, it doesn't appear to contain any references to the Brothers Castro—though readers are told that the Department of Homeland Security is "manipulating elections in Latin America."

And yes, everything is peaches in Venezuela. If Palast would take off the ideological blinders for a second, perhaps he could inform his readers of the Tascon List (imagine if Karl Rove possessed such a thing!), credible claims of vote rigging, voter intimidation by Chavista thugs, the banning of opposition candidates from the ballot, the harassment of opposition journalists, and recent statements that tanks would be sent into states that didn't vote for "the revolution."  

As for Chavez's recent electoral defeat, in which he was barred from running again in 2012, Jorge Castañeda, biographer of Che Guevara, explains in Newsweek why it took so long for the initial results to be released: "As reported in El Nacional, and confirmed to me by an intelligence source, the Venezuelan military high command virtually threatened [Chavez] with a coup d'état if he insisted" on overturning the election results. And if Palast hasn't noticed, Chavez, the great democrat, sees this only as a temporary setback and now intends on introducing a constitutional amendment that would allow him to seek reelection indefinitely.

On Monday, the U.S. Conference of Mayors went to Capitol Hill to ask for a bailout. Writing in The Wall Street Journal, the Reason Foundation's Robert Poole explains why any infrastructure stimulus money they receive will lead to thousands of tennis centers to nowhere.

Read all about it here.

Immigration to the United States, 1820-2007.

Immigration to the US, 1820-2007 v2 from Ian S on Vimeo.

I don't know about you, but this video makes me feel warm and fuzzy about immigration. Look! A snazzy animated rainbow flowing into our country. How can that be bad?

...well, not quite yet. But I know some Japanese scientists who can.

The team, led by chief researcher Yukiyasu Kamitani, succeeded in catching the signals and then reconstructing what people see.

In their experiment, the researchers showed people the six letters in the word "neuron" [the name of the journal where the study was published] and then succeeded in reconstructing the letters on a computer screen by measuring their brain activity. 

So far, they've only managed to read simple images using 400 background information scans, so think complex thoughts and you should be safe. 

Imagine how freaked out people would have been if this paper had been released in say, 1992, at the height of Crichtonism (the insane fear that the Japanese would soon own America, body and soul, most perfectly realized in Michael Crichton's anti-Japanifesto Rising Sun.)

Via Kurzweil

The Montana Meth Project, an absurdly hyperbolic ad compaign that warns of ghastly consequences from even the most casual contact with the stimulant (its tag line: "Not Even Once"), has attracted state and federal funding, generated plaudits across the country, and spawned similar efforts in other states. Yet according to a research review in the December issue of the journal Prevention Science, there is no evidence the campaign works and several indications that it's counterproductive. The author, David Erceg-Hurn, a doctoral student in clinical psychology at the University of Western Australia, notes that "meth use had been declining for at least six years before the ad campaign commenced, which suggests that factors other than the graphic ads cause reductions in meth use." Furthermore, exposure to the ads is associated with what are usually considered to be undesirable attitude changes:

Following six months exposure to the MMP's graphic ads, there was a threefold increase in the percentage of teenagers who reported that using meth is not a risky behaviour; teenagers were four times more likely to strongly approve of regular meth use; teenagers were more likely to report that taking heroin and cocaine is not risky; and up to 50% of teenagers reported that the graphic ads exaggerate the risks of using meth.

Erceg-Hurn concludes:

Claims that the campaign is effective are not supported by data. The campaign has been associated with increases in the acceptability of using methamphetamine and decreases in the perceived danger of using drugs. These and other negative findings have been ignored and misrepresented by the MMP. There is no evidence that reductions in methamphetamine use in Montana are caused by the advertising campaign. On the basis of current evidence, continued public funding and rollout of Montana-style methamphetamine programs is inadvisable.

I criticized meth hyperbole in a 2005 column and raised concerns similar to Erceg-Hurn's about the Montana campaign in 2006. The project's backers should take comfort from the fact that similar levels of empirical support did not prevent the National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign from receiving $1.5 billion in taxpayer money since 1998 or keep DARE from becoming (and remaining) the dominant drug "education" model in the nation's schools.

[via the Drug War Chronicle]

Reason.tv's Michael C. Moynihan talks about the long history of corruption in Chicago politics and the current troubles of Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich with Terry Michael, former press spokesman for the Illinois House Democrats and former press secretary for Sen. Paul Simon, and Mike Flynn, Director of Government Affairs at the Reason Foundation.

Over at The Huffington Post, Northeastern University Law Professor Roger I. Abrams, who is probably some kind of Red Sox fan, comes up with the most asinine non-bailout public policy proposal you'll hear all day, riffing from the apparently untenable system the National Collegiate Athletic Association has for determining its champion football team, and a jokey statement from Barack Obama about this important national issue.

Of course, all other NCAA championship finalists in all other sports are determined by playoffs, but the defenders of the status quo fear the loss of collegiate glory for the many teams that can play in the "Corporate-Sponsored Bowl." Those lesser bowls actually cost colleges money after they cover expenses, money that is in short supply these days. I will leave the merits of the two conflicting approaches for a later discussion. But the Obama comment raises a more fundamental question: what might the President-Elect do to make sure someone in the federal government is responsible for national policy on, and coordination of, athletics and sports?

I propose we create a Department of Sport. Admittedly, this is not a unique idea. Most countries have a Ministry of Sports with responsibility for fostering physical education, developing amateur athletics and monitoring the businesses of professional sports.

Hmmm, let's see what well-governed, freedom-loving sports powerhouses come up first in a Google search on "Ministry of Sports"!

1) India
2) Tatarstan (pictured)
3) Guyana
4) Cameroon
5) Belarus [pdf]
6) Pakistan
7) Oman
8) Malaysia
9) Oman, again
10) Rwanda

So what's the rationale?

Obviously, placing the portfolio for athletics and professional sports in a single governmental entity would allow for some rational oversight. Under the current system of non-oversight, athletics have been driven purely by the profit motive.

Obviously! And as a result of this glaring lack, we continue to muddle through with the world's most entertaining and highest-quality competition in baseball, basketball, American-rules football, hockey, track and field, the gorgeous ladies of wrestling, and on and on. Not only has the profit motive improved said competition, the competitors themselves, once they were allowed to earn the fruits of their labors (much to the chagrin of those who prefer sporting indentured servitude in "pure" fields of play such as Cuba) then encouraged the rest of us to let our freak flags fly.

Best part of Professor Abrams' proposal?

I must admit a personal interest in this new Department of Sport since I would be more than willing to serve as its first Secretary.

Nothing much new here, but the document, Dignitas Personae, according to Reuters, has ruled the following reproductive techniques as immoral:

-- in vitro fertilization.

-- research in and use of embryonic stem cells.

-- post-fertilization birth control methods such as morning after pills, the so-called abortion pill RU-486 (mifepristone) and the inter-uterine device (IUD).

-- surrogate motherhood.

-- human cloning, both reproductive and therapeutic.

-- hybrid cloning using animal oocytes (immature female germ cells) to reprogram the nuclei of human somatic cells.

-- freezing embryos or oocytes for use in artificial fertilization.

-- pre-implantation diagnosis of embryos to avoid genetic defects or select for gender or other qualities.

-- reduction of implanted embryos to prevent multiple births.

-- intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) to overcome male fertility problems.

-- germ line cell therapy to modify genes transmitted to offspring.

-- genetic enhancement for purposes other than medical treatment.

-- use of human biological material of illicit origin, such as experimentation on human embryos.

Reuters also reports:

Saying life was sacred from the moment of conception to the moment of natural death, the document also defended the Roman Catholic Church's right to intervene on such matters.

Intervene? The church as the right to try to intervene, and others have the right to prevent its intervention. 

Over at Forbes, Reason Foundation Senior Analyst Shikha Dalmia argues that when it comes to diagnosing the woes of GM, Ford, and Chrysler, Big Labor is what's making all that noise under the hood.

Read all about it here.

Senior Editor Radley Balko reports on what the railroading of substitute teacher Julie Amero by technically-inept police and prosecutors reveals about America's criminal justice system.

Read all about it here.

According to a Bureau of Justice Statistics report (PDF) released yesterday, 2.3 million Americans were behind bars in 2007, 1.5 percent more than in 2006 and a new record. The number includes about 780,000 people in local jails, 1.4 million in state prisons, and 200,000 in federal prison. Roughly one in five state prisoners and more than half of federal prisoners were serving time for drug offenses. Assuming the percentage of drug offenders in jails is similar to the percentage in state prisons, the total is more than half a million. "That is ten times the total in 1980," notes the Drug Policy Alliance, "and more than all of western Europe (with a much larger population) incarcerates for all offenses."

I showed how the U.S. incarceration rate compares to those of other countries in the June issue of reason.

I've covered the various baseless conspiracy theories about Barack Obama as much as they probably should be covered. Last week and this week, I wrote for Slate about the apogee of the theory that Obama, for whetever reason, is not a "natural born citizen." But it seems like the problems of Rod Blagojevich, and the Obama's campaigns strangely muted and incomplete explanations of what-they-knew-when-they-knew-it, have taken the gas out of the Birthers' engines.

Exhibit A: World Net Daily, which had been the de facto control room for Birtherism, has rushed right along to the Blagojevich scandal. I count seven articles about Blagojevich on the web mag's front page compared to five about the birth conspiracy, and the ratio was much higher on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Exhibit B: Roger Bredow, who organized a tiny vigil outside the Supreme Court to pray that they'd disqualify Obama, immediately jumped onto the Blagojevich story.

These are good things, as no small number of conservatives were fretting about the rise of something like the old Vince Foster and Ron Brown and "Clinton Chronicles" conspiracies of the 1990s—freakish stuff that whipped up talk radio but made the opposition to Democrats look crazy.

One problem: if this conspiracy is losing steam, it's still popular with the Constitution Party and with elements of the Ron Paul r3VOLution. Last week, staffers for Paul told me that they were inundated with calls about the birth conspiracy, egged on by talk radio hosts who helpfully informed listeners that "Dr. Paul cares about the Constitution." This week I see that the Constitution Party (whose candidate for president this year was endorsed by Paul) is "challenging Barack Obama to release his birth certificate." Take it, national chairman Jim Clymer!

If a non-citizen can be given a free pass to the presidency than what’s to say someone with no allegiance and who harbors ill will toward the country won’t someday assume office?

What, indeed?

Maybe Ron Paul doesn't have to worry about this stuff. After all, what's the danger in people who associate themselves with his name and causes engaging in ethnically-charged wingnuttery?

The problem with political hip-hop isn't that it's too conspiratorial and too obsessed with Gary Webb-type stories of the CIA and crack cocaine, like this imbecilic (but pretty catchy) Mos Def-Immortal Technique song, but that it is typically slow in responding to interesting issues in the news. The nutty stuff is fine by me, as long as its reasonably topical. But generally speaking, there is little for the hip-hop loving news junkie, few songs that quickly respond to stories one might read in The Politico, save the countless paeans to President-elect Obama. But considering it's Friday and I couldn't resist this terrific track by Firedoglake's Spencer Ackerman (and his mysterious co-M.C., Vitamin), I present "Dey Know (Blago)," the first hip-hop song to deal with scandal enveloping Gov. Rod Blagojevich. 

Che director Steven Soderbergh tells Politico why his new four-hour, two-part epic about Ernesto Guevara is relevant in 2008:

"We're certainly seeing the result of what happens when you make profit the point of everything, where money that's being earned doesn't represent any particular product or labor on anybody's part. That can't sustain, because it's magical thinking. It can't go on indefinitely, because eventually it crashes. Che's dream of a classless society, a society that isn't built on the profit motive, is still relevant. The arguments still going on are about his methodology."

More here.

Aye caramba. Yes, the real lesson to be drawn from a man who oversaw summary executions and ran Cuba's economy 20,000 leagues under the sea is that profits and capitalism are evil.

I didn't hate Kelly LeBrock because she was beautiful and I don't hate Steven Soderbergh because he's rich. There's no doubt that American foreign policy toward Cuba and all of Latin America has been disastrous, in large part due to the idiotic drug war that Soderbergh actually managed to valorize in many ways in his awful Traffic (far from critiquing drug prohibition, the movie actually signs off on any number of cliches about substance abuse and the role of the state in policing it; it's an After School Special with sex scenes).

No one can accuse Soderbergh of being a coherent or consistent thinker. In the same interview he (thankfully) argues that the U.S. should lift the embargo against Cuba. Why? To "flood that place with tourists. The people of the U.S. are the best advertisement for its ideals." And tourists, of course, and the people who serve them, never have any profit motive involved, right? Let's check back in when the Castro Brothers are eventually declared dead and the first Starbucks opens in Havanna, and see whether Soderbergh applauds or pouts.

As for the dream of a classless society, I'm not sure what the profit motive has to do with that per se (classes, as Marx would tell you, predate bourgeois society) or precisely how desirable such a thing is (I write as an arriviste whose parents grew up grindingly poor, needless to say). The U.S. has classes, for sure. What is different about this place is that class is not fixed on status or connections. It is not perfect, to be sure, but it's a much more fluid and forgiving place than the hierarchical societies that produced Fidel and Che and it's also a lot less stultifying than the open-air prisons they helped create.

And you've got to ask: Who precisely is still debating Che's methodology, other than, I don't know, Lynndie England and various al Qaeda cells?

More about Soderbergh, who is quickly draining the pleasure out of The Limey and Sex, Lies, and Videotape, here.

Hat tip: Michael C. Moynihan

See Associate Editor Katherine Mangu-Ward on Fox's Red Eye w/ Greg Gutfeld:

Plus, get bonus Mangu-Ward video from PJTV, plus reason contributors Todd Seavey and Will Wilkinson.

From our January issue, Associate Editor Katherine Mangu-Ward discusses online democracy, nerd values, Ayn Rand, and much more with Craigslist founder Craig Newmark.

Read all about it here (and watch video of the interview too!). 

Since Congress declined to approve the auto industry's Bridge Loan to Nowhere, President Bush says the Treasury Department will have to help G.M. and Chrysler on its own, using some of the $700 billion Congress appropriated for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). Along with the usual economic and philosophical objections to an auto industry bailout, this move should provoke concern about the rule of law. The Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 (PDF), which created TARP, authorizes Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson "to purchase, and to make and fund commitments to purchase, troubled assets from any financial institution." Paulson already was stretching the law when he decided to instead purchase stakes in banks (presumably on the theory that shares of their stock constituted "troubled assets"). But a carmaker is not a "financial institution," and loaning it money is not purchasing a "troubled asset." In other words, Bush is acting not only without legal authority but contrary to the stipulations of a law that Congress passed at his behest. That much is familiar. But usually he does this sort of thing under the banner of national security. Is the failure of the Big Three automakers to produce cars that people want to buy part of an Al Qaeda plot?

Addendum: Episiarch suggests the Bush administration could argue that the automakers' finance divisions makes them "financial institutions." But GMAC and Chrysler Financial are no longer wholly owned subsidiaries of the carmakers: A consortium of investors, including Cerberus Capital and Citigroup, owns a controlling interest in GMAC, while Chrysler Financial became a standalone company in 2007. Ford Credit is still wholly owned by Ford, but a manufacturer with a finance division is plainly not what Congress had in mind when it passed the law authorizing TARP. Ford, in any event, is not seeking a government loan right now.

Prince George's County, Maryland officials are still refusing to hand over documents related to the botched raid on Berwyn Heights Mayor Cheye Calvo.

In letters obtained by The Gazette, county lawyers rejected the mayor's request to obtain police reports, officer accounts and other significant documents from the raid.

"We will object to any request that deals with matters that are or have been subject to investigation," wrote Mary C. Crawford, deputy county attorney, in an Oct. 21 letter to Calvo.

Police spokesman Maj. Andy Ellis said Monday that the county is still reviewing its role in the execution of the search warrant.

"The preliminary investigation has been completed," Ellis said. "Right now it's in the review phase."

Ellis said the department would likely notify Calvo of the conclusions of its internal investigation but said he wasn't sure if police would turn over incident reports and other documents the mayor has sought.

"It's not something we normally do," Ellis said. "I presume he could request them, and we would consider any request. But as a matter of course, it's not something we usually do."

[...]

Calvo, who said he's become increasingly concerned with the tactics officers employ in drug warrants, had also requested copies and reports from other searches the county has done in addition to his own.

Though the county agreed to give copies of the training orders and policy manuals allowed under the Maryland Public Information Act, they denied more specific information about the July 29 raid and any other raids. County attorneys also said they would charge Calvo more than $1,000 to copy the allowed records, which include police training manuals and department policy statements on how to execute search warrants.

"It will be time consuming," Crawford wrote. "Please let me know if you want to spend the money to identify the material."

The Maryland Public Information Act allows anyone to request copies of existing records, though exceptions are made for personnel records, privileged communication with lawyers and material that is part of an ongoing investigation.

Crawford also said budget problems would hamper the county's ability to turn over the allowed information in a timely manner.

This is an elected official making these requests, in a case where he was terrorized and nearly killed by agents of the government, in a botched raid where he was clearly innocent, and that made national news.  And they're still giving him the runaround.  Four-and-a-half months later, they're still playing games. Imagine what happens when normal people try to get documents related to run-ins with the police.

By now, you should know what that means.

Bettie Page, '50s pinup star and witch-hunt target, has died at age 85. Greg Beato described her place in pop history in a reason story last year, explaining that "Before Page, porn was about sex, not publicity":

[A]t the exact moment when soft-core erotica was evolving from under-the-counter specialty item to news-rack staple, Page was willing to show more than any woman prettier than her, and prettier than any woman who was willing to show more.

While Page is often credited for normalizing kink, for showing how even sun-kissed girl-next-door types could have a secret taste for lesbian spanking action, what’s most notable about her oeuvre is how little sexual heat she radiates. Naked, fresh-scrubbed, practically incandescing with exuberance, she looks like she's posing for a vitamin ad. Rarely can one detect any libidinal ache, or even a mild hunger for something carnal. Clearly, the camera excited her -- but not in that way. Its promise of fame was what got her off, and ultimately the potential for celebrity overwhelmed anything more specifically sexual her photos were supposed to communicate.

Nowhere was this more apparent than in her fetish work. Plenty of Page's contemporaries could drain the sexual tension from scenarios where only sunny beaches were involved, but only she could turn ball gags, stilettos, and all the other totems of sex as a dangerous, primal, overwhelming force into mere props for picture taking. Wielding a whip, sheathed in black nylon -- none of it obscured her star-struck giddiness at the sight of a camera. Forever ready, it seemed, to break into a cheerleader's chant for deviance -- "Gimme an S! Gimme an M!" -- she reduced kink to kitschy fashion.

Later, Page would join the Billy Graham Crusade, spend a decade in a state mental institution, and give this assessment of her career to a Playboy interviewer: "When I turned my life over to the lord Jesus I was ashamed of having posed in the nude. But now, most of the money I've got is because I posed in the nude. So I'm not ashamed of it now. But I still don't understand it."

In The Wall Street Journal, Reason Foundation Senior Analyst Shikha Dalmia explains why it's time for India to drop its draconian gun control laws.

Read all about it here.

Here's the headline from MSNBC's review of Steven Soderbergh's four-hour, two-part biopic about everybody's favorite revolutionary murderer. The film, which is being released for a week-long run in New York and Los Angeles so it can be considered for various awards, comprises two parts, The Argentine and Guerrilla:

Soderbergh's ‘Che' is quietly revolutionary: Two-part epic about the rise and fall of Guevara avoids the obvious

..."Guerrilla" is somewhat harder to watch, since we know that, unlike "The Argentine," things aren't going to end well for Guevara. His jungle travails are similar to his Cuban experiences, but we see how the U.S.-backed Bolivian government did a better job than Batista at keeping the peasant population from supporting the guerrillas.

Whole review here.

Yeah, I'm betting it avoids the obvious about Che. I in no way am interested in assessing art, music, film, video, cartoons, whatever simply through the lens of politics and ideology. I find certain works (Journey to the End of Night, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Manhattan Transfer, Sister Carrie, the movie version of Papillon [written by the execrable Dalton Trumbo], everything by Dashiell Hammett, most of Balzac, the list is nearly endless) captivating and impressive despite their politics or those of their authors. I don't even care about "aesthetics," if by that term you mean a preconceived notion of beauty, symmetry, blah blah blah. A creative work can move its audience for an infinite number of reasons and that effect, however inane or offensive the thought behind it, should always be acknowledged. 

But I wince at the coming reaction to Che partly because I'm sure it's a well-wrought urn and hence will be praised as a "serious" movie because of its politics rather than director Soderbergh's craft. He's a good director (who doesn't like The Limey even as we say enough already with the goddamn Ocean's franchise [any of which is more watchable than the dreadful Rat Pack original]?). Every retard in Hollywood is now going to start thinking about doing "serious" political movies now and most of them will be as profound and insightful as, say, Bulworth or Dave.

In any case, as we brace for the coming Hooray for Che wave, keep in mind three reason pieces that went live yesterday:

Dumb Man Talking: Sean Penn stumps for Cuban communism, by Michael C. Moynihan, which highlights the plight of Cuban punk band Porno Para Ricardo and the vapidity of Sean Penn and the Castro-loving useful idiots at The Nation. (Say what you will about America's censorious streak, but Chuck Berry was prosecuted for criminal acts, not inventing the Duck Walk.)

But If You Go Carrying Pictures of Chairman Mao, by Matt Welch, which recalls a clandestine meeting in Cuba in the 1990s (!) where students secretly listened to the Beatles. None of the students, writes Welch, "could understand what kind of evil, micro-managing jerkoff would criminalize "She Loves You" ... well, except for the American woman who was nice enough to bring me there."

And watch Killer Chic: Hollywood's sick love affair with Che Guevara, which hopefully brings some balance to the gauzy, kiss-kiss portraits of the Butcher of La Cabana, the infamous Cuban prison:

There's nothing like an incoming Democratic administration to stiffen the spines of Republican senators, is there? It's like partisan Viagra or something, I tells ya. The latest on the auto bailout:

A bailout-weary Congress killed a $14 billion package to aid struggling U.S. automakers Thursday night after a partisan dispute over union wage cuts derailed a last-ditch effort to revive the emergency aid before year's end.

Republicans, breaking sharply with President George W. Bush as his term draws to a close, refused to back federal aid for Detroit's beleaguered Big Three without a guarantee that the United Auto Workers would agree by the end of next year to wage cuts to bring their pay into line with U.S. plants of Japanese carmakers. The UAW refused to do so before its current contract with the automakers expires in 2011.

The breakdown left the fate of the auto industry—and the 3 million jobs it touches—in limbo at a time of growing economic turmoil. General Motors Corp. and Chrysler LLC have said they could be weeks from collapse. Ford Motor Co. says it does not need federal help now, but its survival is far from certain.

More here.

Btw, isn't it time they update the number of jobs the auto industry "touches" to every job in America, since at some level everyone is auto-dependent? And by the same calculation, is any industry more vital to American security than the dry-cleaning industry?

I'm glad to to see the auto bailout go down for this round (though I wish the same had happened to the financial services bailout in the version that passed). However, I find it troubling that Republicans are also interested in dictating terms to any business (the story says they would have passed it if they figured the deal would break the unions more than the passage of time already has). That just isn't Congress' job and it's been part of the problem in the U.S. for at least 80 or so years. The federal government has intervened in labor markets for decades in major ways, rigging the negotiations for labor or management (two terms that increasingly fail to reflect current workplace conditions anyway) depending on the moment.

Something to consider: The United Autoworkers did negotiate a very different deal with Ford, GM, and Chrysler last year, a deal that basically brings labor costs for new employees into line with industry averages (averages, I rush to point out, that are being in other parts of America to American workers; one problem with this whole discussion is that it's premised on the notion that there are "domestic" and "foreign" car companies). The Big 2.5's problem is that it needs to jettison the more expensive workers, and quickly, to have a future.

To be honest, I'm as worried at the idea of Congress dictating labor terms for industry as I am about them simply throwing gobs of money at failing companies. None of it is good and the discussion needs to proceed along very different principles, I think. Which is to say that, if government is going to be handing out bailouts (never a good idea), they should be done at the individual level rather than at the corporate or industry level.

Look for the next round of negotiations on an auto bailout to center on how to offload pension and health care costs on to U.S. taxpayers. Oldsmobile and Plymouth may be a thing of the past, but guess who is going to be for the retirements and oxygen machines of the folks who built those behemoths? To paraphrase Mick Jagger, it is you and me.

In the latest edition of Friday Funnies, Chip Bok follows Santa as he starts organizing his Christmas list.

reason's Nick Gillespie writes in from post-illusion America, where we know that the worst things we can imagine about our politicians are true, now and forever, amen.

Editor's note: This column is about politics and hence is filled with profanity and heaping helpings of excretory imagery. The faint of heart should evacuate this page immediately, like patrons at a Golden Corral buffet once the cheese sauce runs out.

Read all about it here.

1) Rich Raddon, "the highly praised and well-liked director of the ever-enlarging L.A. Film Festival," privately donates $1,500 to the campaign in favor of Proposition 8, the California initiative limiting state-sanctioned marriage to heterosexual couples.

2) Because of disclosure laws, Raddon's name shows up on the Prop. 8 donor database. Hollywood blogger David Poland notices, reports the news, and word soon spreads.

3) Raddon resigns from the festival's parent organization (Film Independent, or "FIND"), but the resignation is turned down. Further outcry ensues.

4) About 10 days later, Raddon resigns again. This time it's accepted.

5) On the Santa Monica-based KCRW, arguably the most influential public radio station in the country, Claude Brodesser-Akner, host of the Industry-tracking program "The Business," opens his Dec. 8 show (about Che Guevara, fittingly enough!) with a self-descibed "rant" about the whole episode:

Raddon's censure feels an awful lot we're headed back to a time in Hollywood none of us should want to revisit. It was called the Black List. Let's not shame ourselves with a Pink List to go with it.

6) Chastened no-on-8 types decide to chill out, and think twice before demanding people lose their jobs over their political activities. Ha ha, just kidding. Legendary KCRW General Manager Ruth Seymour–past recipient of a Los Angeles Times First Amendment Award!–takes the unusual step of bitch-slapping Brodesser-Akner publicly:

Last week listeners to this program heard an announcement by host Claude Brodesser-Akner purporting to be a (quote) "rant on behalf of the entire editorial staff of The Business."

Well, a "rant" is certainly what it was, in all the pejorative meanings of that term.

The management of KCRW takes editorial positions on very rare occasions. Management alone has that prerogative. In this instance, management was neither consulted nor informed. [...]

The Business compared his resignation to the Hollywood Blacklist days when members of the film industry lost their jobs because of alleged Communist sympathies. The actors, directors, writers and producers who were targeted in the Blacklist never resigned their positions. The Business never offered those who disagreed with the producers the opportunity to answer. KCRW regrets airing this out-of-the-blue opinion and has made it clear to those involved that it is unacceptable. On behalf of the station and its commitment to fairness and accuracy, please accept our apologies and regrets.

Back in 2004, I wrote about how Ruth Seymour A) fired an essayist for inadvertently using the word "fuck" on air, and then B) blamed it on the Bush administration.

Some really smart folks over at The Edge have made a really stupid proposal for an "Economics Manhattan Project." As they describe it:'

The economic crisis has to be stabilized immediately. This has to be carried out pragmatically, without undue ideology, and without reliance on the failed ideas and assumptions which led to the crisis. Complexity science can help here. For example, it is wrong to speak of "restoring the markets to equilibrium", because the markets have never been in equilibrium. We are already way ahead if we speak of "restoring the markets to a stable, self-organized critical state."

In the near-term, Eric Weinstein has spoken about an "economic Manhattan project". This means getting a group of good scientists together, some who know a lot about economics and finance, and others, who have proved themselves in other areas of science but bring fresh minds and perspectives to the challenge, to focus on developing a scientific conceptualization of economic theory and modeling that is reliable enough to be called a science.

They then proceed to make some smart, but mostly pretty stupid criticisms of economic theory. For example, they suggest much could be learned from an input/output model of the physical and energy flows of the economy. As though such a model could tell you much about the value of what is flowing through it. The Soviets tried exactly this approach with results that should be all too obvious after the fall of the Berlin Wall. It's almost as though they have never read any current economic theory.

And may Mammon help them, these naifs suggest that the development of computer climate change models might point the way for economic models: 

In the longterm, there needs to be an independent, non-partisan methodology for economic and financial modeling which involves globally agreed upon standards, as in the world of climate modeling. As in that world, one can imagine an international commission of economic scientists who develop, test and benchmark economic models against each other, and against past data, so that there is a reliable understanding of what the best models are and how reliable they are for studying different kinds of problems and predicting the impacts of proposed new economic and financial regulation. This will allow new proposals for innovative financial instruments or changes in trading rules or accounting rules to be tested in an open environment using best practices to understand their results.  

It is as though they think that no one has ever thought of creating an econometric model before. 

In any case, commentators at The Edge have, for the most part, sensibly rejected the proposal. A few choice comments are below.

Stanford University new growth economist Paul Romer: 

Imagine that fires were devastating the world's forests and you came across this manifesto:

The forest crisis has to be stabilized immediately. This has to be carried out pragmatically, without undue ideology, and without reliance on the failed ideas and assumptions that led to the crisis. Complexity science can help here. For example, it is wrong to speak of "restoring the forests to equilibrium," because forests have never been in equilibrium. We are way ahead if we speak of "restoring forests to a stable, self-organizing critical state."

Would this convince you that only complexity science can prevent forest fires?

With one tweak, this is the first paragraph from the pull-quote for this piece. All I've done is change "market" to "forest." The forest version sounds pretty implausible to me, but after a financial crisis, people seem to be drawn to the version with "markets." For example, after Citibank made some bets that turned out badly in the Latin American debt crisis of the 1980s, its CEO John Reed helped mid-wife the Economics Program at the Santa Fe Institute. He wanted the new theoretical insights about financial crises that the new complexity scientists promised. Ever since, the complexity scientists have been telling us that markets are self-organizing systems. For the life of me, I can't see how this puts us way ahead. Didn't seem to help Citibank either, which I've noticed is back in the headlines.

Then as now, a key recommendation is to recruit some "good" scientists (their modifier, not mine; see the second paragraph from the pull quote) from other fields. I guess that these outsiders are supposed to purge economics and finance of the aforementioned ideology and failed assumptions. But before we put up money for an "economic Manhattan Project," wouldn't it make sense to ask if there is any evidence to support the basic claim here--that more theory, developed by people who don't have domain experience, is the key to scientific progress in macroeconomics and finance?

Or Skeptic Magazine editor, Michael Shermer:

...imagine the futility of government bureaucrats trying to find the right price for each of the approximately 170,000 different books published each year, factoring in hardback versus paperback prices, special discounts for multiple purchases of bundled books, plus shipping specials for minimum sales and factoring in, of course, the discriminatory pricing now used in the same way the airlines price their tickets, and then imagine multiplying that process by the hundreds of thousands of different markets, industries, and businesses and it becomes crashingly clear why no top-down system could ever match the real-time sensitivity to prices provided by the bottom-up complex adaptive pricing system currently in place.

Expand the problem by many orders of magnitude and we get a sense of the breathtaking inanity of trying to control an entire economy, no matter how smart the experts in our hypothetical economic Manhattan Project may be. The economy is a product of human action, not of human design. Trying to redesign something that was never designed in the first place is futile. I vote no on an economic Manhattan Project.

My favorite comment comes from Black Swan author Nassim Nicholas Taleb:

I spent close to 21 years in finance facing "scientists" in some field who show up in finance and economics, realize that economists and practitioners are not as smart as they are (they are not as "rigorous" and did not score as high in math), then think they can figure it all out.

Nice, commendable impulse, but I blame the banking crisis (and other blowups) on such "scientism".

We've seen them from all fields of study-particularly that finance pays (used to pay) a multiple of what someone can earn in the more respectable sciences. We've seen people from astrophysics, statistical mechanics, mathematical biology, pure mathematics, applied mathematics, semi-applied mathematics, probability theory, engineering, solid state physics, turbulence ... literally ever single field. 

Meanwhile the most robust understanding is present among practitioners who do not have the instinct to reduce ambiguity and uncertainty that scientists have.  I urge you all scientists to go take your "science" where it may work-and leave us in the real world without more problems. Please, please, enough of this "science". We have enough problems without you.

Amen.

Read the whole Economics Manhattan Project proposal and commentary here. 

Hat tip to Matt Wolinsky. 

As Cuban punk bands, bloggers, and dissident journalists get rolled up by the state security services, writes Michael Moynihan, Sean Penn stumps for Raul Castro, a man who "moves with the agility of a young man," with a "warm, open, energetic and sharp of wit."

Read all about it here.

The Office of National Drug Control Policy brags that the latest Monitoring the Future Study, the results of which were released today, "shows that in 2008, illicit drug use among youth continued to decline." That's a questionable interpretation of the numbers, which actually show that past-month use of illegal drugs rose among eighth-graders and 12th-graders while falling among 10th-graders. But mainly drug czar John Walters wants to take credit for "a 25 percent reduction in overall youth drug use over the past seven years." As I explained last week, that sounds plausible only if you overlook the fact that drug use among teenagers began to decline years before George W. Bush took office.

And if Walters wants to take credit for every drop in drug use that occurs on his watch, he'll have to take the blame for the enormous increases in past-month LSD use among high school seniors and  past-month methamphetamine use among sophomores, both of which nearly doubled between 2007 and 2008 (hitting a whopping 1.1 percent and 0.7 percent, respectively). It's a shame he has to go out on such a note of failure.

Here's an interesting fact noticed by Bruce Mirken of the Marijuana Policy Project: If a high school sophomore reported smoking in the previous month, the dried plant material in his cigarette was more likely to have been marijuana (13.8 percent) than tobacco (12.3 percent). The latter is still more popular than the former among eighth-graders and high school seniors, but just barely. Mirken draws a lesson about prohibition's effectiveness at keeping kids away from drugs:

According to the new survey, current (i.e. past 30 days) marijuana use has nearly doubled among  8th graders since 1991, from 3.2 percent to 5.8 percent, with big increases among 10th and 12th graders,  too. During that same period, cigarette use dropped like a rock, with current cigarette smoking dropping from 14.3 percent to 6.8 percent among 8th graders, and dramatic drops in the older grades as well....

What the data show is that prohibition for adults is neither necessary nor effective at reducing use among kids. Last year over 775,000 Americans were arrested for possession of marijuana while zero were arrested for possession of cigarettes.

The 2008 Monitoring the Future data are available here (PDF).

That's according to climatologist John Christy, who is a professor of atmospheric science and director of the Earth System Science Centre (ESSC) at The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH). His group has been measuring the earth's temperature using satellite data since 1979. The UAH researchers report:

Half of the globe has warmed at least one half of one degree Fahrenheit (0.3 C) in the past 30 years, while half of that - a full quarter of the globe - warmed at least one full degree Fahrenheit (0.6 C)...

Globally, Earth's atmosphere warmed an average of about 0.4 C (or about 0.72 degrees Fahrenheit) in 30 years, according to data collected by sensors aboard NOAA and NASA satellites. More than 80 percent of the globe warmed by some amount.

A map of Earth's climate changes since December 1, 1978, (when satellite sensors started tracking the climate) doesn't show a uniform global warming. It looks more like a thermometer: Hot at the top, cold at the bottom and varying degrees of warm in the middle.

This is a pattern of warming not forecast by any of the major global climate models.

The area of fastest warming is clustered around the Northern Atlantic and Arctic oceans, stretching from Arctic Canada across Greenland to Scandinavia. The greatest warming has been on opposite ends of Greenland, where temperatures have jumped as much as 2.5 C (about 4.6 degrees F) in 30 years.

During the same time, however, much of the Antarctic has cooled, with parts of the continent cooling as much as Greenland has warmed. But areas of cooling were isolated: Only four percent of the globe cooled by at least half of one degree Fahrenheit.

'If you look at the 30-year graph of month-to-month temperature anomalies, the most obvious feature is the series of warmer than normal months that followed the major El Nino Pacific Ocean warming event of 1997-1998,' said Christy. 'Right now we are coming out of one La Nina Pacific Ocean cooling event and we might be heading into another. It should be interesting over the next several years to see whether the post La Nina climate 're-sets' to the cooler seasonal norms we saw before 1997 or the warmer levels seen since then.'

Virtually all of the warming found in the satellite temperature record has taken place since the onset of the 1997-1998 El Nino. Earth's average temperature showed no detectable warming from December 1978 until the 1997 El Nino.

Since 1979, average temperatures have been increasing at 0.13 degrees Celsius per decade. To see the actual satellite data go here. 

In other news, the United Nations' Poznan climate change conference should be sputtering out tomorrow. 

Greg Lukianoff and the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education have the story of a Michigan State student government leader found guilty of "spam" for sending out an email seeking support for opposition to a university plan to shorten the academic year.

Lukianoff writes:

After FIRE broke the story, national media outlets had a few questions for MSU: namely, how exactly is MSU's anti-spam policy consistent with the university's legal obligation to protect the First Amendment rights of its students and faculty? University spokesman Kent Cassella responded that MSU's anti-spam policy, which limits unsolicited e-mail of all kinds to about 20-30 e-mails over two days -- unless, of course, MSU grants prior approval-- is "not a free speech issue." Cassella argued that a viewpoint-neutral policy is inherently constitutional.

This is absurd. It's not just that requiring prior approval is a prior restraint. It's not just that you can bet your bottom dollar that prior approval is based on content. The crowning absurdity here is that MSU thinks that there is nothing wrong with placing a completely arbitrary limit on the number of people you can e-mail about a serious issue of public concern at a public university. So much for the right to petition government for redress of grievances. Apparently, MSU's IT department has overruled the Bill of Rights.

The good folks at Wonkette have assembled their laffalicious 2008 War Against Xmas Gift Guide, featuring writeups about various items, including a naked clown calendar (relax, it's for charity!), Republican and Democrat steak-branding irons, and this particularly gruesome item commemorating "the night when Barack Obama clinched the Democratic nomination":

It's available for $20 (includes shipping and handling!), but act fast because, well, unicorns don't really exist.

And as long as we're spreading Christmas sneer, was it really only a year ago that Christopher Hitchens headlined Reason's Very Special, Very Secular Xmas Party by saying "Bah Humbug on Christmas"?:

By reportedly selecting physics nobelist and head of the federal government's Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, Steven Chu as the next Secretary of Energy, President-elect Obama makes it clear that he is serious about addressing the energy/climate change conundrum. As the head of the Lawrence Berkeley Lab, Chu launched the Helios Project to research how to produce liquid biofuels and solar powered electricty.

"Sustainable, carbon-neutral energy is the most important scientific challenge we face today,” said Chu in a 2007 Science profile. This view is clearly is in line with Obama's promise to spend $15 billion a year on alternative energy research and to create 5 million new "green collar jobs."

Earlier this week, Obama met with former Vice-President Al Gore to talk about energy and climate change. During the press conference after the meeting, Obama said, "We have the opportunity now to create jobs all across this country in all 50 states to repower America." 

Of course, "repower America" is the campaign launched by Gore this past summer that aims to make the country's entire energy production carbon-neutral in just 10 years. Is the president-elect signaling something more sweeping by using that phrase?

Being a sunny-side-up kinda guy, the sight of college students, protesters, and/or retarded celebrities consuming Che Guevara-branded merchandise (as memorably rendered in today's terrific reason.tv video on Che-chic), makes me laugh more than seethe, not least because of what Cuban jazz great Paquito D'Rivera observes at the end of the clip: There's something hilariously perverse about a violent anti-capitalist becoming a Western marketing icon. With rare exception, I don't expect much in the way of historical knowledge from Che-shirters, not least because few have been to the island-prison themselves.

Ah, but some have, and still retain their jock-sniffing totalitarian apologia, and this is what makes my brown eyes blue. A decade ago I went to a secretive gathering at a house in Havana, where rebellious youth sat around indulging in the disapproved and even dangerous behavior of ... listening to the Beatles. It was an underground society of sorts, where the kids danced, sang, and gaped at the wonders of the G-sixth chord. None of them could understand what kind of evil, micro-managing jerkoff would criminalize "She Loves You" ... well, except for the American woman who was nice enough to bring me there, a graying hippie named Karen Wald. Yeah, Castro might have gone a bit too far, she said, but it was an "understandable" defense in the face of "Western cultural imperialism."    

If you have never lived or visited a totalitarian country, the concept of political prisoners, show trials, or even government murder are somehow ... abstract. Enemy combatant outrages aside, we generally don't have stuff like that here. But there is something immediately recognizable in the insanity of banning pop, rock, or (another favorite commie target) jazz. It was the 1976 arrest of Czech art-rock band The Plastic People of the Universe, after all, that spurred Vaclav Havel to create the most influential anti-totalitarian dissident group of the past half-century: Charter 77. "Everyone understood," he wrote about the experience later, "that an attack on the Czech musical underground was an attack on a most elementary and important thing, something that in fact bound everyone together: it was an attack on the very notion of living within the truth, on the real aims of life."

Such attacks on "the real aims of life" advertise the fundamental insecurity of regimes (if two-part harmony gives you the vapors, you've got some bigger fish to fry), but they also ooze with a familiar paternalistic contempt for the choices individuals would make if they could. Wald's defense, alas, continues to hold some sway in ostensibly grown-up countries such as Canada and France, where Fear of an American-Pop Planet still informs cultural policy and provides endless fodder for academic seminars. And there's an equally dunderheaded version here in the U.S. and A., where Mexifornia-phobes fret about the "Balkanization" of the very American culture that the rest of the world fears.

Luckily, most people aren't like Wald (or Jacob Weisberg!). When they go to Cuba, they see a country of very nice people who are poor, proud, starved for information, and oppressed. As Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) told us in another memorable reason.tv production, every American should visit Castro's incarnation of Che's paradise. Nothing will disabuse you of juvenile anti-capitalism quicker than seeing the results of 50 years trying it the other way.

The Wall Street Journal's Dan Henninger asks: Is Santa Claus too big to fail? Learn all about the dangers of Christmas List Swaps here:

More on the bailout(s) from reason here.

During the presidential campaign, Barack Obama's critics said he was a typical product of a seamy political culture. The arrest of Gov. Rod Blagojevich, a fellow Democrat, validates the claims about Illinois. But as Steve Chapman writes, it also gives Obama a chance to prove he has managed to tiptoe through the sewer without getting dirty.

Read all about it here.

In Lawrenceville, Georgia, just outside of Atlanta:

Gwinnett County police drug investigators on Wednesday served a “no-knock” search warrant and forced entry into a Lawrenceville house, but soon discovered they were at the wrong address.

In a news release, a Gwinnett police official said it was “a case of human error and not deliberate malfeasance on the part of the investigator.”

[...]

The front door was patched with a piece of wood Wednesday night, but splinters still littered the front hallway of the home of John Louis, 38, and his girlfriend Heather James, 37.

Louis said he was upstairs working from a home office when police used a battering ram to break through the door. James and their 3-month-old daughter were asleep in separate bedrooms.

“They came in here and put guns to us. The house was full of police,” Louis said. “I’ve never had a gun in my face before. I’ve never even held a gun.”

He said that he and James, who was in a nightgown, were ordered at gunpoint to lie on the floor. When he tried to ask what they wanted, Louis said, he was told to “shut up.”

After the officers roamed through the house for a few minutes, they spotted the baby and realized their mistake, Louis said. He said they apologized and told him they confused his home with that of a neighbor two doors down, a suspected methamphetamine distributor.

Louis said he still has questions for police about how such a mistake happened.

“If you had the house under surveillance for three months, why did you come here?” Louis said. “You broke in here and put all our lives in danger, and all you can say is you’re sorry?”

Seems like we've reached a troubling new comfortableness with wrong-door raids when the police department's defense is, "well, at least it wasn't deliberate."  I'd hope that raiding the wrong house would never be deliberate.

Video of a local news report here.

Gisele Bundchen wears him on the runway, Johnny Depp wears him around his neck, and Benicio Del Toro becomes him in the new, highly acclaimed, two-part epic film from Steven Soderbergh, Che. Ernesto "Che" Guevara, the revolutionary who helped found communist Cuba, is the celebrity that celebrities adore. And be it Madonna, Rage Against the Machine, or Jay-Z, musicians really dig Che.

It's something that baffles Cuban jazz legend Paquito D'Rivera. "Che hated artists, so how is it possible that artists still today support the image of Che Guevara?" Turns out the rebellious icon that emblazons countless T-shirts actually enforced aesthetic and political conformity. D'Rivera explains that Che and other Cuban authorities sought to ban rock and roll and jazz.

"Che was an inspiration for me," D'Rivera tells reason.tv. "I thought I have to get out of this island as soon as I can, because I am in the wrong place at the wrong time!" D'Rivera did escape Cuba, and so far he's won nine Grammy awards playing the kind of music Che tried to silence. But D'Rivera says Che's crimes didn't end with censorship. "He ordered the execution of many people with no trial." Che served as Castro's chief executioner, presiding over the infamous La Cabana prison. D'Rivera says Che's policy of killing innocents earned him the nickname-the Butcher of La Cabana.

"We're rightly horrified by fascist murderers like Adolph Hitler," says reason.tv's Nick Gillespie. "Why aren't we also horrified by communist killers?" Certainly, Che's body count isn't anywhere near Hitler's. But what about someone Che idolized, someone whom he might have liked to wear on his chest?

"Che, Castro, all the communist regimes idolized only one thing that Mao personifies—violence." Kai Chen grew up in China under the reign of Mao Zedong. Although he won gold medals for China's national basketball team, Chen's was far from the celebrity life of an NBA star. Says Chen, "You have no right to talk, and you have no right to think."

The punishment for questioning Mao's authority was often death. The Black Book of Communism estimates that Mao is responsible for the deaths of 65 million people—a figure that dwarfs even Hitler's body count. "Mao is a murderer," says Chen. "The biggest mass murderer in human history."

And yet, like Che, Mao's image is becoming an increasingly popular way to move merchandise. You can buy Mao t-shirts, mugs, caps-you name it. Near Chen's Los Angeles home there's even a restaurant called Mao's Kitchen. "Can you imagine a restaurant called Hitler's Kitchen?" asks Gillespie.

Neither D'Rivera nor Chen understands why communist killers are considered Chic, but each finds his own way to have the last laugh on these anti-capitalist icons.

"Killer Chic" is written and produced by Ted Balaker. Director of Photography is Alex Manning.

Go here for embed code, related materials, and iPod and HD versions.

In keeping one's eye on the ferment in lower courts on gun issues post-Heller, Eugene Volokh at the Volokh Conspiracy finds an interesting footnote in a U.S District Court for Utah memorandum opinion and order.

The order allows the (partial) moving forward of a lawsuit charging some police officers of 4th Amendment excessive force violations due to their ruffian behavior against a man in Salt Lake City who didn't, because he was physically unable to, raise both hands above his head when ordered to by the cops. The details of the story in Volokh's post make for aggravating reading, to be sure.

While the case was not a Second Amendment one, the fact that a gang of cops were accosting Miles Lund in the first place was because of a call in about a "man with a gun" in the park. As it turned out, Lund was not that "man with a gun." But the footnote avers interestingly, among much discussion of specifically Utah constitutional provisions and policies:

By itself, mere possession of a firearm in public is not unlawful and may well represent the exercise of a fundamental constitutional right guaranteed by the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution..... See District of Columbia v. Heller, 128 S. Ct. 2783, 2799 (2008) (“There seems to us no doubt, on the basis of both text and history, that the Second Amendment conferred an individual right to keep and bear arms.”)..... Salt Lake City’s asserted governmental interest in its police officers’ response to a report of a “man with a gun” in a public park cannot be weighed in isolation....there may well be more individual constitutional rights at stake than the Fourth Amendment freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures.

For the history of the case that started this new wave of Second Amendment judicial musings, see my new book Gun Control on Trial.

I want to write a blog post about H. Walker Royall, the Dallas developer who sues people when they criticize his abuse of eminent domain, but I'm afraid he'll sue me. After all, he sued Wright Gore III over a website that detailed the city of Freeport's attempt to condemn land occupied by the Western Seafood Company, a business owned by Gore's family, so Royall could use it for a luxury marina project. And he sued Carla Main, a journalist who wrote a book about the legal struggle over the Gores' land, along with her publisher, Encounter Books. He sued University of Chicago law professor Richard Epstein, one of the country's leading authorities on eminent domain, for writing a blurb that appeared on the cover of Main's book. He even sued a newspaper that published a review of the book.

So after thinking carefully about my potential legal exposure, I have decided not to say that Royall is an arrogant, thin-skinned cheater who thinks nothing of abusing the legal process and violating other people's rights to advance his business interests and protect his vanity. Although that opinion is completely protected by the First Amendment as criticism of a public figure and speech about an issue of public importance, Royall still could sue me. And as the Institute for Justice, which is representing Main, Epstein, and Encounter Books, points out, even if defamation lawsuits against critics of eminent domain abuse fail in court, "the large expenditure of time and money associated with defending them all too often accomplishes the goal of silencing those who stand up for their rights." With that in mind, I have decided to refrain from calling Royall a corrupt coward, a litigious leech, or a supersensitive censor. I encourage you to refrain from doing so as well.

But first you might want to read a bit more about Royall and his lawsuits. I.J. has some background here. I discussed another I.J.-highlighted effort to silence property rights activists here.

For the past quarter-century, Robert J. Samuelson has written about business, politics, and economics for The Washington Post and Newsweek.

His masterful and eminently readable new book, The Great Inflation and Its Aftermath: The Past and Future of American Affluence, may just be the most important non-fiction volume published this year-or next year, for that matter. Certainly, in a world of economic chaos and seemingly never-ending bailouts and "stimulus packages," The Great Inflation is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding what happens when the government tries to tame the business cycle and fine-tune the economy as if it were a two-stroke engine. (Are you listening, Henry Paulson? George W. Bush? Congress? Barack Obama?)

The Great Inflation tells the story of how smug economists and politicians in the post-war era almost wrecked the U.S. and how President Ronald Reagan and Federal Reserve head Paul Volcker tamed double-digit inflation in the 1980s. Samuelson provides a rich history of wisdom triumphing over hubris-and he provides a singular commentary on just where the U.S. economy might be headed for the next decade or more.

Samuelson sat down with reason.tv's Nick Gillespie in December for a wide-ranging conversation about economics, media, politics, and the desperate need for reality-based commentary. The interview was filmed by Michael C. Moynihan and edited by Dan Hayes. Approximately 50 minutes.

Go here for embed code, related materials, and HD and iPod versions.

Go here for an audio podcast version.

Via IOZ, I see that Thomas Frank is troubled by the fact that women are allowed to form contractual agreements involving their own reproductivity:

When money is exchanged for pregnancy, some believe, surrogacy comes close to organ-selling, or even baby-selling. It threatens to commodify not only babies, but women as well, putting their biological functions up for sale like so many Jimmy Choos. If surrogacy ever becomes a widely practiced market transaction, it will probably make pregnancy into just another dirty task for the working class, with wages driven down and wealthy couples hiring the work out because it's such a hassle to be pregnant.

Frank is talking about Alex Kuczynski's much-criticized New York Times Magazine story on her experience with infertility. He finds it interesting that Kuczynski only quotes "the surrogate mother" three times. I find it interesting that Frank can't bother to call the surrogate mother by her name (it's Cathy Hilling) and chooses to disregard those quotes Kuczynski does include. He seems to find the lived experience of surrogate mothers irrelevant to his thesis. Here is Hilling, paraphrased:

The experience of having a baby for the New Jersey couple, Cathy said, provided her with a deep thrill, and the feeling that she was needed in a profound, unique way. There might always be other willing foster parents, she said, but there would not always be willing, able surrogate mothers.

Perhaps this is simply what one is supposed to say to prospective parents, but I think it's fair to assume that Hilling doesn't see herself as performing a "dirty task" and would find that framing offensive. On the other hand, Hilling seems aware that she is performing a service worthy of payment, precisely because it is a "hassle to be pregnant." This transaction is so controversial in part because women are not supposed to acknowledge that pregnancy can be a burden; rather, it's "what we're made for," "deeply fulfilling." "You're glowing!" men say, patting you on the back for a job well done, an evolutionary purpose fulfilled. Surrogacy exposes pregnancy for what it is: work. 

To her considerable credit, Kuczynski didn't spend 6,000 words trying to signal all the officially sanctioned feminine emotional responses. She writes:

As the months passed, something curious happened: The bigger Cathy was, the more I realized that I was glad — practically euphoric — I was not pregnant. I was in a daze of anticipation, but I was also secretly, curiously, perpetually relieved, unburdened from the sheer physicality of pregnancy. If I could have carried a child to term, I would have. But I carried my 10-pound dog in a BabyBjörn-like harness on hikes, and after an hour my back ached.

Obviously, this kind of thing is not allowed. The acceptable reaction would be an expression of profound loss at the inability to experience the Most Important Day of a Woman's Life; angst at the fact that she was forced into the position of spectator, jealousy of the lucky woman growing heavy with her child. Such dishonesty would not have done justice to Hilling and the work she performed, but it probably would have appeased many of Kuczynski's critics.

[Crossposted at KerryHowley.com]

Of the many critiques that followed the Supreme Court's landmark gun rights decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, perhaps the most interesting came from conservative federal Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III. In a Virginia Law Review article entitled "Of Guns, Abortions, and the Unraveling Rule of Law," Wilkinson denounced Justice Antonin Scalia's majority opinion for engaging in judicial activism and compared the reasoning in Heller to that in the abortion rights case Roe v. Wade (not exactly a compliment from one conservative judge to another).

Now George Mason Univesity's Nelson Lund and the Independence Institute's David Kopel have written what looks to be a decisive critique of Wilkinson's article, which they recently made available via the Social Science Research Network. Here's part of their abstract, which doesn't exactly pull any punches:

Part I shows that Judge Wilkinson's analogy between Roe and Heller is untenable. The right of the people to keep and bear arms is in the Constitution, and the right to abortion is not. Contrary to Judge Wilkinson, the genuine conservative critique of Roe is based on the Constitution, not on judicial "values." Judge Wilkinson, moreover, does not show that Heller's interpretation of the Second Amendment is refuted, or even called into serious question, by Justice Stevens' dissenting opinion.

Part II shows that Judge Wilkinson himself does not adhere to the "neutral principle" that he claims to derive from "judicial values." Under the principle of judicial restraint that he articulates, many now-reviled statutes, including the Jim Crow laws of the twentieth century, should have been upheld by the courts. Judge Wilkinson does not accept the consequences of his own supposedly neutral principle, preferring instead to endorse or condemn Supreme Court decisions solely on the basis of his policy preferences. That is not judicial restraint. It is judicial lawlessness.

Read the whole thing here. I wrote about Heller, Judge Wilkinson, and the failures of conservative judicial restraint here.

This Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court will host a reenactment of the landmark Progressive Era case Muller v. Oregon, which "proved" that women required special protection by the state. But the decision, writes Damon Root, was grounded in the worst of the Progressive movement's sexism and collectivism.

Read all about it here.

At least there's one industry group feeling cheery these days. Apparently nothing brings more glee to the annual meeting of the Career College Association, a group of for-profit colleges, than shrinking endowments and rising tuition at traditional schools. And history suggests that they have good reason for optimism:

For-profit colleges have seen enrollment grow by an average of about 17 percent during the past nine economic downturns—when Gross Domestic Product declined and unemployment rose—compared with an average of 8 percent growth during positive economic conditions, according to an analysis provided by Stifel Nicolaus, a brokerage and investment banking firm....

As would be expected, publicly traded for-profit colleges saw revenues increase as well, generating $10 billion in the fall of 2008, an increase of 13 percent over last year, Stifel Nicolaus found.

Incidentally, according to the article quoted above, the former chairman and CEO of ITT Educational Services is named Rene Champagne, and the CEO of Devry is Daniel Hamburger. Make of that what you will.

For more on the joys of for-profit education, check out my article from the July print edition, "Education for Profit: Why Is Everyone Flaming the University of Phoenix?"

It wasn't that long ago (was it?) that President-elect Barack Obama and every pol in either party was flapping his gums about "a new ethic of responsibility."

Part of the reason this crisis occurred is that everyone was living beyond their means-from Wall Street to Washington to even some on Main Street. CEOs got greedy. Politicians spent money they didn't have. Lenders tricked people into buying homes they couldn't afford and some folks knew they couldn't afford them and bought them anyway.

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

Yeah, yeah, it was easy credit ripoffs at every level that gave us the bubble, the bust, the bailout, whatever. When I hear the word art responsibility, I reach for my wallet (too late!).

So we all know the solution to this problem, right? Giving people more easy money! Especially to buy houses! New houses! Bigger houses! From a Reuters account of a recent Congressional grilling:

Rep. Maxine Waters, a California Democrat who had supported the $700 billion program, pressed [Treasury official Neel] Kashkari for actions that would throw troubled homeowners a lifeline.

"Please don't come here and ask for another penny because if you do, I'm going to work 24 hours a day with the same people I worked with to support you to make sure that they do not support giving you another dime," she said.

Kashkari defended the Treasury's strategy of first trying to stabilize the financial sector by injecting capital into banks, saying confidence had to return to the system before lending would pick up.

He said the department was looking "very seriously" at a plan that would issue 30-year fixed rate mortgages at 4.5 percent, about a full percentage point below their current level.

"Reducing interest rates to get borrowers off the sidelines so they can afford to buy a home for the first time or afford a bigger home is the only thing that's going to help home prices, so we think it has some merit," Kashkari said.

More here.

Everybody who has a 30-year, fixed-rate mortgage at 4.5 percent, raise your hand! All one of you!

Do you get that? This bailout is truly sickening for reasons that are virtually beyond calculation. But here's a starting point: Why should any of us who rent or own pay our rent or mortgage in a world where by defaulting or being late you can get the best damn deal in town? Or maybe even a "bigger home." Flip this house, Congress, President Bush, President-elect Obama.

America's mayors have $73 billion in "shovel ready" infrastructure projects just waiting to be funded by a new federal government stimulus package. In today's Wall Street Journal, Reason Foundation founder and director of transportation policy Robert Poole takes a look and finds that the mayors spell infrastructure as "P.O.R.K." What vital projects do they seek to fund?

On Monday, the U.S. Conference of Mayors went to Capitol Hill to ask for a handout, or as they put it: "We are reporting that in 427 cities of all sizes in all regions of the country, a total of 11,391 infrastructure projects are 'ready to go.' These projects represent an infrastructure investment of $73,163,299,303 that would be capable of producing an estimated 847,641 jobs in 2009 and 2010."

A wish list that is 11,391 projects strong! What vital infrastructure projects would cash-strapped taxpayers get for their $73 billion? Here's a sampling:

- Hercules, Calif., wants $2.5 million in hard-earned taxpayer money for a "Waterfront Duck Pond Park," and another $200,000 for a dog park.

- Euless, Texas, wants $15 million for the Midway Park Family Life Center, which, you'll be glad to note, includes both a senior center and aquatic facility.

- Natchez, Miss., "needs" a new $9.5 million sports complex "which would allow our city to host major regional and national sports tournaments."

- Henderson, Nev., is asking for $20 million to help "develop a 60 acre multi-use sports field complex."

- Brigham City, Utah, wants $15 million for a sports park.

- Arlington, Texas, needs $4 million to expand its tennis center.

- Miami, Fla., needs $15 million for a "Moore Park Community Center, Tennis Center and Day Care" facility. The city is also desperate for $3.6 million to build a covered basketball court and a new tennis court at Robert King High Park. Then there's the $94 million Orange Bowl parking garage you are being asked to pay for.

- La Porte, Texas, wants $7.6 million for a "Life Style Center." And Oakland, Calif., needs $1 million for Fruitvale Latino Cultural and Performing Arts Center.

And you thought infrastructure investment meant roads, bridges and schools. It is clear that any infrastructure stimulus money given to the country's mayors will lead to thousands of tennis centers to nowhere.

Forget about crumbling bridges, leaky water and sewer systems, and massive traffic congestion. Mayors prefer to cut ribbons in front of shiny new projects rather than fix up potholed highways, rotting bridges, grungy airports, and the like. Our infrastructure needs are great as Poole notes:

We have a backlog of deferred maintenance on both highways and bridges. According to Reason Foundation's Annual Highway Report, 24% of U.S. bridges were reported structurally deficient or functionally obsolete in 2006. At the current rate of repair it will take 62 years for those bridges to be brought up to date...

...we could eliminate severe congestion in all of the nation's urban areas for $21 billion a year -- less than we are spending on transportation today, and $52 billion less than the mayors just asked for. And by investing in the right projects we'd save 7.7 billion hours each year.

Reducing traffic congestion, which costs Americans well over $63 billion a year in wasted time and fuel, should be a primary criterion for any transportation project that is funded. Our economy depends on it.

Whole Poole op/ed here. reason online editor Nick Gillespie decries the mayors' pork barreling here. And true policy geeks can dig into the Reason Foundation's transportation research here. 

From our January issue, Contributing Editor Veronique de Rugy explains why Barack Obama's assertions to the contrary, George W. Bush was the biggest regulator since Richard Nixon.

Read all about it here.

According to ABC News political correspondent Brian Ross, "Senate Candidate #5," the unnamed public official who, according to wiretaps of Gov. Rod Blagojevich, would fork over a cool million dollars to be named successor to President-elect Obama in the Senate, is Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr.

According to the FBI affidavit in the case, Blagojevich "stated he might be able to cut a deal with Senate Candidate 5 that provided ROD BLAGOJEVICH" with something "tangible up front."

Jackson Jr. said this morning he was contacted yesterday by federal prosecutors in Chicago who he said "asked me to come in and share with them my insights and thoughts about the selection process."

Jackson Jr. said "I don't know" when asked if he was Candidate #5, but said he was told "I am not a target of this investigation." 

[...]

"Senate Candidate #5" played a key role in the Governor's efforts to obtain something of value in exchange for the Senate appointment, according to the FBI affidavit.

According to the affidavit, Blagojevich threatened to appoint Senate Candidate #5 if President-elect Barack Obama refused to help get his wife on "paid corporate boards right now."

"If they feel like they can do this and not f***ing give me anything…then I'll f***ing go [to Senate Candidate 5]."

All the sordid details are here.

The other day, Matt Welch noted that President-elect Obama admitted to Tom Brokaw that he still sneaks a cigarette now and then. Addiction expert (and reason contributor) Stanton Peele notes that Obama exemplifies an increasingly common type of smoker that anti-tobacco activists and public health officials like to pretend does not exist:

Barack Obama quit his early drug use when he got serious about life. Now, Barack is tackling the biggest taboo of all—cutting out his cigarette addiction but not quitting smoking altogether!

Last Sunday Tom Brokaw grilled Obama on Meet the Press about his furtive smoking. Obama answered that he had quit, but that he falls off the wagon sometimes. Brokaw pounced: "Then you still smoke!" Obama replied, "I have done a terrific job under the circumstances of making myself much healthier."

The data show that cutting back smoking or smoking occasionally is possible, and it does improve your health....

Contemporary college students who smoke do so less intensively—about half as many (7%) smoke a half pack or more of cigarettes daily today as did so in 1980 (13%). Most smoke less. Of course, smoking any number of cigarettes regularly is harmful; but smoking fewer cigarettes is less harmful—and potentially life saving over time. That more young people seem to be able to smoke casually instead of addictively is good.

Or at least that's what Barack Obama's example and statements would indicate.

Over at The Huffington Post, the Drug Policy Alliance's Tony Newman, who has himself repeatedly quit smoking, offers a similar observation:

Some see failure in Obama's current smoking status. I see success. While Obama could be a regular smoker, going through a pack a day, it sounds like he is an occasional smoker and has one here, one there. That is not a setback, that is progress! Obama shows that it is not all or nothing, but that moderate use may be attainable for some smokers.

According to the National Health Interview Survey, the share of American adults who were current smokers (i.e., people who have smoked more than 100 cigarettes in their lives and now smoke "every day or some days") fell from 37 percent in 1974 to 21 percent in 2006. At the same time, the share of current smokers who consumed fewer than 15 cigarettes a day increased from 32 percent to 53 percent, while average daily cigarette consumption among current smokers fell from 20 to 14.

Wherever Obama's consumption falls on the continuum from chipper to pack-a-day smoker, one thing is certain: Even if he did resume his former habit, he might suffer embarrassment, but he would not be arrested. "While it seems crazy to lock up someone who relapses over cigarettes," writes Newman, "it makes no more sense to lock up a cocaine addict who relapses."

New Hampshire is suspending jury trials for a month, thereby saving $73,000 that would otherwise be spent on juror "stipends" (at $20 a day, these really should be called "insults"). The state is facing a $250 million budget deficit, so this move gets it 0.03 percent of the way there. You might think a reputedly libertarian-leaning state, before cutting back on one of the government's few legitimate functions, would look into slashing or eliminating some of these:

Acupuncture Licensing, Board of

Agriculture, Markets, and Food Department

Americorps, New Hampshire

Arts Council, Cultural Resources Department

Auctioneer's Board, Secretary of State

Barbering, Cosmetology, and Esthetics Board

Bicycle/Pedestrian Information Center

Boxing and Wrestling Commission

Christa McAuliffe Planetarium

Commission on the Status of Men

Commission on the Status of Women

Community College System of NH

Community Development Finance Authority

Cultural Resources Department

And that's just the first three letters.

Officials struck an agreement in principle on the measure Tuesday and hoped to finalize it and schedule swift House and Senate votes as early as Wednesday. Money could be disbursed within days to cash-starved General Motors Corp. and Chrysler LLC, while Ford Motor Co.—which has said it has enough liquidity to stay afloat—would be eligible for federal aid.

All three would have to negotiate with labor unions, creditors and others and submit blueprints by March 31 to an industry czar named by President George W. Bush showing how they would restructure to ensure their survival. If not, the emergency loans would be revoked, the companies cut off from further federal help, and the government overseer could order his own overhaul, including forcing them into bankruptcy.

There are still "obstacles," by which I mean a few legislators, mostly senators who have the ability to hold stuff up, whether out of principle or partisanship, who might just put the brakes on the bailout. And then there's the no-show threat in the World's Greatest Deliberative Body. Says the AP: "Getting 60 votes for an agreement, with many senators expected to be absent for the emergency, postelection debate, could be tricky."

And then there's Michigan Democrat Sen. Carl Levin who, in a football season in which his Detroit Lions are winless, resorts to football analogies that would make make Knut Rockne trade in his Model A: "This gets us to the 20-yard line, but getting over the goal line will take a major effort, particularly in the Senate."

Quick question: Are you on your own 20, senator? Or your opponent's danger zone red zone[*]? And by opponents, I mean the American taxpayers and pretty much the whole free enterprise system. Hayek, Mises, Schumpeter—suit up and hold that line!

More here.

[*]: Yes, I meant red zone. Apologies to Kenny Loggins. And apologies for Kenny Loggins.

With support from major foundations and political heavy hitters like Barack Obama, universal preschool is the next big thing in education reform. Indeed, it's second only to universal health care on the liberal wish list. The goal is to offer publicly funded preschool-complete with credentialed teachers and and a standardized curriculum-to all four-year olds during the school year.

Advocates argue that public investments in early education will pay dividends over the long term. Critics point out that the evidence from states that have universal preschool programs shows that whatever benefits kids receive from those programs fade out by the fourth grade.

Since preschool attendance rates in states that have universal preschool are no higher than the national average, universal preschool wouldn't even increase preschool attendance. It would, however, cost a lot of money, put lots of privately owned preschools out of business, and dramatically decrease early education options for parents.

So what do you think? Is expanding our failing K-12 system the best way to fix it?

This 10-minute documentary is hosted by reason's Nick Gillespie. It is produced by Paul Feine and Roger M. Richards.

Go here for related links, HD and iPod-friendly versions, and embed code so you could post this video at your own site.

In January 2007, Rep. David Price introduced a bill that would have applied American criminal law to all government contractors who commit felonies while working in areas where U.S. forces are operating. But as Senior Editor Jacob Sullum writes, in the case of the Blackwater International guards who killed 17 civilians in Baghdad's Nisour Square last year, holding contract personnel accountable may be incompatible with the rule of law. That's because the law they are accused of violating does not apply to them.

Read all about it here. 

I'm out of the country at the moment, so I haven't been able to follow the Republic Windows and Doors story closely enough to formulate a firm opinion about it. But as laid-off workers occupy a factory and demand the severance pay they're reportedly owed, it's revealing to watch the glosses that observers with different ideological agendas put on the event.

The Huffington Post's Peter Dreier, for example, presents the occupation as an early sign of reinvigorated government activism:

The symbolism of the workers' take-over also adds credence to Obama's call for a major government-funded infrastructure program that will stimulate several million jobs - almost all of them in the private sector - and help jump-start the ailing economy.

"The workers want Bank of America to keep the plant open and the workers employed," said UE President Carl Rosen. "There is always a demand for windows and doors. But with Barack Obama's stimulus proposal, there will be even greater demand for the products made by Republic's workers. It doesn't make sense to close this plant when the need is so obvious."...

During the past two weeks, as Obama appointed moderates and former Clintonites to high-level positions in his economic brain-trust, some progressives worried that the president-elect was already moving to the center, even as the economy nosedived. But Obama's call for the largest public investment plan since the interstate highway program begun in the 1950s, his support for a major federal loan to the Big 3 auto companies if they retool to become more energy-efficient, and now his embrace of the Republic workers' occupation of their factory has given many progressives assurance that Obama hasn't forgotten his liberal instincts.

Meanwhile, the autonomist writer Ben Dangl has a more anarchistic take:

Argentina's crisis was similar to the current recession in the US in the sense that in December of 2001, almost overnight, Argentina went from having one of the strongest economies in South America to the one of the weakest. As the occupation of the factory in Chicago indicates, there are some tactics and approaches to combating economic crises that were used in Argentina that could be applicable during the US crisis.

During Argentina's economic crash, when politicians and banks failed, many Argentines banded together to create a new society out of the wreckage of the old. Poverty, homelessness and unemployment were countered with barter systems, alternative currency and neighborhood assemblies which provided solidarity, food and support in communities across the country.

Perhaps the most well known of these initiatives were the occupation of factories and businesses which were later run collectively by workers. There are roughly two hundred worker-run factories and businesses in Argentina, most of which started in the midst of the 2001 crisis. 15,000 people work in these cooperatives and the businesses range from car part producers to rubber balloon factories. Though the worker occupation of Republic Windows and Doors is different in many respects to examples of worker occupations in Argentina, it is worth reflecting on the strikingly similar situations workers in both countries found themselves in, and how they are fighting back.

For those of you who aren't familiar with them, those Argentine cooperatives were usually born when their previous owners, facing failure and debt, skipped town; the employees then decided to keep the abandoned enterprises alive.

I'm in Argentina myself right now, and I'm afraid the remnants of the 2001-02 rebellion aren't easy to find. The barter-based alternative currency is long gone, and most of the neighborhood assemblies dissolved after Trotskyists and the like decided they'd be a good place to bloviate. Many of the worker-owned businesses are still thriving, though. I stopped in one of the most famous coops, the Hotel Bauen, a few days ago. My wife and I took our seats in its coffeeshop and, in a post-ideological gesture, I bought a bottle of Coca-Cola.

Now that we have a party change in the White House, this will be the first time we have an extensive, searchable online archive of punditry and speechifying covering all of the last administration.

It'll be fun to see who does an about face on issues like judicial confirmations, use of the filibuster, executive power, and other issues now that an imperial GOP presidency is likely to be replaced by an imperial Democratic one.

We saw a bit of this in the 1990s, with Republicans and Democrats doing a switch about the Senate’s proper role in the confirmation process, and among Republicans who were critical of President Clinton’s unauthorized wars in the Balkans but then argued for plenary war powers under President Bush.

I’m guessing we’ll see plenty of hackery over the next four, possibly eight years, from both sides, and I’m thinking that it’ll be fun to document it.

To kick things off, the first installment of HackWatch comes courtesy of Cato's Gene Healy.  Your inaugural hack-tastic politico: Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.).

Here's Kyl in 2005 (pdf) on the subject of using the Senate filibuster to hold up Supreme Court nominations:

Republicans seek to right a wrong that has undermined 214 years of tradition – wise, carefully thought-out tradition. The fact that the Senate rules theoretically allowed the filibuster of judicial nominations but were never used to that end is an important indicator of what is right, and why the precedent of allowing up-or-down votes is so well established. It is that precedent that has been attacked and which we seek to restore….

My friends argue that Republicans may want to filibuster a future Democratic President’s nominees. To that I say, I don’t think so, and even if true, I’m willing to give up that tool. It was never a power we thought we had in the past, and it is not one likely to be used in the future. I know some insist that we will someday want to block Democrat judges by filibuster. But I know my colleagues. I have heard them speak passionately, publicly and privately, about the injustice done to filibustered nominees. I think it highly unlikely that they will shift their views simply because the political worm has turned.

Here's Jon Kyl's warning to President-Elect Obama last month:

Jon Kyl, the second-ranking Republican in the U.S. Senate, warned president-elect Barack Obama that he would filibuster U.S. Supreme Court appointments if those nominees were too liberal.

Kyl, Arizona’s junior senator, expects Obama to appoint judges in the mold of U.S Supreme Court Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, David Souter and Stephen Breyer. Those justices take a liberal view on cases related to social, law and order and business issues, Kyl said.

“He believes in justices that have empathy,” said Kyl, speaking at a Federalist Society meeting in Phoenix. The attorneys group promotes conservative legal principles.

Kyl said if Obama goes with empathetic judges who do not base their decisions on the rule of law and legal precedents but instead the factors in each case, he would try to block those picks via filibuster.

Kyl has set the bar pretty high, here.  So high, in fact, that I'm having a hard time envisioning how anyone could top him.  There's really no wiggle room in those two statements.  For that, I'm giving him a 10 out of 10 on the somewhat-arbitrary "Hackery Index."

If you see an example of a pundit, politician, major blogger, or other Beltway creature who’s done a 180 on this or another issue, please send it to us, with links, and “HackWatch” in the subject line.

During the course of human evolution, people frequently engaged in cooperative activities such as big game hunting, even though it was often all too easy for individuals to free ride on such projects. What's to prevent free riders while encouraging real cooperation? Science Correspondent Ronald Bailey points to surprising new research on "altruistic punishment" that may hold the answer.

Read all about it here.

"We don't want government to run companies," President-elect Obama said on NBC's Meet the Press on Sunday. "Generally, government historically hasn't done that very well." Still, the new car czar will have to dictate certain things to the people actually running the companies:

They're going to have to restructure. And all their stakeholders are going to have restructure. Labor, management, shareholders, creditors—everybody is going to recognize that they...do not have a sustainable business model right now, and if they expect taxpayers to help in that adjustment process, then they can't keep on putting off the kinds of changes that they, frankly, should have made 20 or 30 years ago.

Perhaps the right approach is the one taken by America's drug czar, who tries to eliminate an industry and thereby ensures its continued existence.

When we last considered claims about the impact of Scotland's smoking ban, an alleged 17 percent drop in hospital admissions for heart attacks (a claim reported in the New England Journal of Medicine and widely repeated by the press) turned out to be more like 8 percent in the year after the ban took effect. A drop of this size is consistent with the pre-existing downward trend in heart attacks. Now data for the second year after the ban was imposed show an increase in heart attack admissions roughly equal to the previous year's decline. Christopher Snowden observes:

If the 2006-07 decline had really been the result of the smoke-free legislation, it would be expected for rates to remain low in subsequent years. The fact that Scottish hospitals have seen an unusually sharp rise—despite the smoking ban being rigorously enforced—suggests that whatever lay behind the 2006-07 dip, it was not the smoking ban.

Hospital data from England and Wales has failed to show a significant reduction in incidence of acute coronary syndrome since going smoke-free in 2007. This new evidence from Scotland casts serious doubts on the theory that smoking bans have a measureable impact on incidence of acute coronary syndrome.

As I noted in connection with smoking bans in Massachusetts, such laws, to the extent that they encourage smokers to quit and deter others from picking up the habit, can be expected to reduce heart disease over the long term, even if secondhand smoke has no effect on the cardiovascular health of bystanders. But the sharp, immediate reductions reported in some jurisdictions with smoking bans (beginning with Helena, Montana, in 2003) are not biologically plausible and are almost certainly due to random variation or pre-existing trends.

Michael Siegel challenges anti-smoking groups that seized on the NEJM report as evidence of the benefits from smoking bans to acknowledge the more recent data. He cites misleading statements about the Scottish ban from 19 groups and offers a $200 prize to the one that corrects the record first. "I am not going to lose sleep worrying about my $200," he says, "because I am sure that no anti-smoking groups will respond appropriately."

Good for Colbert King.  The Washington Post columnist won't let the 2004 case of Jonathan Magbie go away.  Magbie was a 27-year-old quadriplegic sentenced by Washington, D.C. Superior Court Jduge Juditch E. Retchin to 10 days in jail for marijuana possession.  It was Magbie's first offense.  Retchin was well aware of Magbie's condition, that he needed a ventilator to breathe, and that D.C.'s jails weren't equipped to handle him.  Even prosecutors in the case asked her not to send him to jail.  She did anyway.  Once he was admitted, the jail's assistant medical director called Retchin, and begged her to allow Magbie to be sent to a hospital instead.  She refused.  Magbie soon fell into respiratory distress, and was sent to an emergency room.  An incompetent doctor then sent him right back to the jail, where he died hours later.

King describes Magbie's last moments:

Magbie's last night at the D.C. jail could be likened to a night in Guantanamo: He was confined in a room with no means to communicate. Conditions worsened when he was returned [from] the hospital. Carbon dioxide was building up in his bloodstream because, without a ventilator, he wasn't breathing deeply enough.

Magbie, fatigued from fighting to stay alive, drew smaller and smaller breaths and his heart finally gave out.

Judge Retchin is still serving on the D.C. Superior Court.  This case should be her legacy.

MORE:  Last week, Magbie's mother settled her lawsuit with the city for a "substantial" amount of money.

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

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

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

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

To embed this video at your own site, go here.

For an audio podcast, go here.

A crack SWAT team of sherrif's deputies, health inspectors, and Ohio Department of Agriculture officials busted into the Manna Storehouse food co-op in LaGrange, Ohio, in a raid last week. The co-op is also the home of the Stowers family, so Katie Stowers, her children, and her in-laws were held at gunpoint while the agents took tens of thousands of dollars worth of meat, plus computers and cell phone. Chad Stowers, Katie's husband, wasn't home because he is a U.S. Navy Seabee currently in Iraq.

Their crime? The warrant listed the reason for the raid as "beef."

Manna may, perhaps, have needed a license to run a retail food establishment. Mostly a coop, they did sell some leftover products in a small store on the property. The exact nature of the business is in dispute, which is why the Stowers' wrote letters to various agencies asking for advice on how to proceed. Obviously, the best way to reply to that request was with a SWAT team.

The folks over at Peace Chicken (yes, that's a real site, compete with chicken death doomsday clock) are seriously peeved. They offer, from the Lorain county sherrif's page, a list of the legit justifications for a SWAT raid:

• Hostage Situations: the holding of any person(s) against their will by an armed or potentially armed suspect.
• Barricade Situation: the stand-off created by an armed or potentially armed suspect in any location, whether fortified or not, who is refusing to comply with law enforcement demands for surrender.
• Sniper Situations: the firing upon citizens and/or law enforcement officers by an armed suspect, whether stationary or mobile.
• High-Risk Apprehension: the arrest or apprehension of armed or potentially armed suspects where the likelihood of armed resistance is high.
• High-Risk Warrant Service: the service of search or arrest warrants where the warrant service matrix or policy recommends or requires the use of SWAT.
• Personal Protection: the security of special persons, such as VIP’s, witnesses, or suspects, based on threat or potential threat to the well being of those persons.
• Special Assignments: any assignment, approved by the SWAT Operations Commander, based on a high level of threat and/or need.

Not on the list:

• Licensing Confusion: when a farm might be a retail establishment, or it might not, based on high level of threat from pitchforks and/or women and children.

Economist Steve Horwitz wonders how bailout supporters can remain sanguine in the face of things like the Blagojovich indictment:

I simply do not understand how those who are in favor of giving government all of these new powers because they sincerely believe that doing so will work out the way their blackboard designs intended can keep a straight face. What kind of cognitive dissonance must it take to believe that the people YOU are handing power over to are "not like" Ted Stevens or Rod Blagojevich? How deeply must one be in denial or engage in rationalization to believe that they are "different?" How blind must one be to think that trillions of dollars in bailout money won't go to the highest bidder (as the lobbyists line up on K Street...) in a process different only in its wink-and-a-nod courtesies than Blagojevich's auctioning off of a Senate seat?

For me, the key insight of public choice is the same insight that underlies Austrian economics: it is the institutional framework that is the key to understanding the choices people make and the unintended outcomes they produce. As I said to a class last week: "Governments can't act like businesses because businesses only act like businesses because they operate in the institutional environment of private property, monetary exchange, and competition." In the same way, getting politicians to stop selling off their power isn't a matter of ethics or psychology, rather it's about changing the rules of the game such that they do not have as much power to sell. Unfortunately, the current bailout mania is changing those rules in utterly the wrong direction.

Dave Weigel blogged (blagged?) the federal indictment of Gov. Rod Blagojevich (D-Ill.) for, among other things, thinking about selling the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Barack Obama. Given that the moth-to-a-TV-camera prosecutor in the case is Patrick Fitzgerald (he of Plamegate infamy), it's worth waiting to see what sticks to Gov. Blago's Spandex hair before convicting the guy of anything more than being a run-of-the-mill jackass pol (more on that in a second).

What cracks me up in this so far is the way the MSM (M*M?) has to transcribe the foul-mouthed Land of Lincolnoid because, you know, we've got protect adults from foul language as if they were 12-year-olds stumbling through the streets of San Andreas or Liberty City.

From an ABC News account:

"I've got this thing and it's f***ing golden, and, uh, uh, I'm just not giving it up for f***in' nothing..." [said Blagojevich].

Told by two other advisers he has to "suck it up" for two years, the FBI says it heard Blagojevich complain he has to give this "motherf***er [the president-elect] his senator. F*** him. For nothing? F*** him."

The governor is heard saying he will pick another candidate "before I just give f***ing [Senate Candidate l] a f***ing Senate seat and I don't get anything."

More here.

Ironically given the charges of corruption, among the relatively legal but totally f***headed things Blago was known for nationally was his campaign against the video game Grand Theft Auto and other fictional depictions of official corruption. As he told CBS News, "There are hidden dangers in these games." And in the Illinois statehouse, too.

Watch and read Blago bitching about video games here.

This is the conclusion of a group of prominent neuroscientists and bioethicists writing in Nature earlier this week. The authors correctly note:

Human ingenuity has given us means of enhancing our brains through inventions such as written language, printing and the Internet. Most authors of this Commentary are teachers and strive to enhance the minds of their students, both by adding substantive information and by showing them new and better ways to process that information. And we are all aware of the abilities to enhance our brains with adequate exercise, nutrition and sleep. The drugs just reviewed, along with newer technologies such as brain stimulation and prosthetic brain chips, should be viewed in the same general category as education, good health habits, and information technology — ways that our uniquely innovative species tries to improve itself...

Three arguments against the use of cognitive enhancement by the healthy quickly bubble to the surface in most discussions: that it is cheating, that it is unnatural and that it amounts to drug abuse.

In the context of sports, pharmacological performance enhancement is indeed cheating. But, of course, it is cheating because it is against the rules. Any good set of rules would need to distinguish today's allowed cognitive enhancements, from private tutors to double espressos, from the newer methods, if they are to be banned.

As for an appeal to the 'natural', the lives of almost all living humans are deeply unnatural; our homes, our clothes and our food — to say nothing of the medical care we enjoy — bear little relation to our species' 'natural' state. Given the many cognitive-enhancing tools we accept already, from writing to laptop computers, why draw the line here and say, thus far but no further?

As for enhancers' status as drugs, drug abuse is a major social ill, and both medicinal and recreational drugs are regulated because of possible harms to the individual and society. But drugs are regulated on a scale that subjectively judges the potential for harm from the very dangerous (heroin) to the relatively harmless (caffeine). Given such regulation, the mere fact that cognitive enhancers are drugs is no reason to outlaw them.

I point out (immodestly) that I dealt with many of these same concerns back in 2003 in my article, "The Battle for Your Brain" in which I concluded:

Like any technology, neurological enhancements can be abused, especially if they're doled out -- or imposed -- by an unchecked authority. But Fukuyama and other critics have not made a strong case for why individuals, in consultation with their doctors, should not be allowed to take advantage of new neuroscientific breakthroughs to enhance the functioning of their brains.

Similarly, the authors of the Nature article now conclude:

Like all new technologies, cognitive enhancement can be used well or poorly. We should welcome new methods of improving our brain function. In a world in which human workspans and lifespans are increasing, cognitive enhancement tools — including the pharmacological — will be increasingly useful for improved quality of life and extended work productivity, as well as to stave off normal and pathological age-related cognitive declines. Safe and effective cognitive enhancers will benefit both the individual and society.

Welcome to these new allies in the struggle for cognitive liberty.

Whole Nature article here.

Oregon's car dealerships are asking the state's legislature to help them cut costs—by forcing them to close on Sundays.

Oregon's struggling auto dealers plan to ask the Legislature to impose "blue laws" prohibiting car sales on Sunday.

The day off would help them cut costs during an economic downturn that has already put 19 Oregon dealerships out of business this year. Nationally, sales of domestic cars declined more than 35 percent in 2008.

Greg Remensperger, executive vice president of the Oregon Automobile Dealers Association, told The Oregonian newspaper his members strongly favor the measure.

[...]

If lawmakers don't approve the restriction on Sunday sales, Oregon dealers could opt for a voluntary pact among themselves. Dealers, however, figure a state law is needed to ensure that nobody takes advantage of the others' closure.

I've been told by contacts in the liquor industry that the biggest opposition to repealing Sunday sales laws related to alcohol tends to come not from moral crusaders, but from long-established liquor stores, who don't want the hassle of staying open all week.

From Obama-Messiah's mesmerizing Change.gov website, the part about the Obama-Biden (Biden!) plan for rural Americans:

Encourage Young People to Become Farmers: Establish a new program to identify and train the next generation of farmers. Provide tax incentives to make it easier for new farmers to afford their first farm.

More, including a pledge to pass a "packer ban" and "encourage local and organic agriculture," here.

As the grandson of peasant farmers from Ireland and Italy, and as a guy who worked in a pantyliner factory and as a UPS truck-unpacker for awhile, all I can tell you is, Thank god I'm not growing up in Obama's America!

And for the uninitiated, there are already plenty of programs designed to identify and train the next generation of farmers. For instance, in the small, semi-rural town in Ohio where I live, there's the 4-H and FFA clubs (look 'em up), not to mention parents. And ag schools galore across this sweet land of liberty.

In any case, as Reason's Ron Bailey, who grew up on a farm, has written, there's a good reason that fewer of us than ever are living the Green Acres dream, and it's not simply because we get allergic smelling hay:

Family farms are not declining because of some conspiracy by industrial ag giants. Actually, what happened is that farmers became so productive that we needed fewer of them. In 1950, 15 percent of Americans lived on farms. Today only 1 percent of us live on farms. The meantime, the output of staples like wheat and corn nearly tripled, while vegetables nearly quadrupled. And the amount of land devoted to crops fell slightly. This dramatically increased agricultural productivity liberated many like me from farm labor so that we could do other work.

Bailey notes, "My sister stayed on [the farm upon which we were raised] and eventually inherited it. She's happy where she is and I'm damned happy where I am." Which is anywhere but a farm.

More here.

And watch Green Acres classic opening here:

University of Pittsburgh creative writer Sam MacDonald used to work for reason. And he used to weigh over 300 pounds. In his entertaining new memoir, The Urban Hermit, MacDonald has penned a tale that punches directly at the soft underbelly of an overspent and overweight America about to go on its own extended austerity program.

In a piece originally written for The New York Post, Nick Gillespie takes the measure of this slacker update to Ben Franklin's Autobiography.

Read all about it here (and click through to see the "after photo").

I confess, I sometimes feel twinges of utterly unironic and unnuanced love of country when our Supreme Court actually considers even for a second this sort of wackiness:

The Supreme Court turned down an emergency appeal Monday from a New Jersey man who claimed that President-elect Barack Obama was not a "natural born citizen" and therefore was ineligible to become president.

The setback is the latest for a small group of persistent litigants who want the courts to block Obama from taking office. So far, none of these plaintiffs has convinced any judge that Obama's assertion that he was born in Hawaii on Aug. 4, 1961, is incorrect.

......Leo Donofrio, a retired lawyer from East Brunswick, N.J., contended that Obama was ineligible to be president because his father was from Kenya. In October he sued New Jersey's secretary of state, arguing that both Obama and Sen. John McCain should be removed from the state ballot because neither was a natural born citizen.

............

Donofrio said Obama should "be required to prove … he was born in Hawaii. … Even if it were proved he was born in Hawaii, Sen. Obama's father was born in Kenya, and therefore, having been born with split and competing loyalties, candidate Obama is not a 'natural born citizen.' "

In Monday's order, the court said it had denied Donofrio's request for a stay.

......Still pending at the high court is an appeal petition claiming Obama was born in Kenya. Hawaii's Health Department and its registrar of vital statistics have determined he was born in Hawaii.

Dave Weigel with some earlier Obama conspiracy watching.

Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, a Democrat, is sitting shiva at Chicago FBI headquarters with his chief of staff, charged with committing all sorts of wonderful crimes since, literally, the minute he took office. He even tried to make some scratch off the replacement for Barack Obama's Senate seat. From the criminal complaint, all emphasis mine:

Throughout the intercepted conversations, Blagojevich also allegedly spent significant time weighing the option of appointing himself to the open Senate seat and expressed a variety of reasons for doing so, including: frustration at being “stuck” as governor; a belief that he will be able to obtain greater resources if he is indicted as a sitting Senator as opposed to a sitting governor; a desire to remake his image in consideration of a possible run for President in 2016; avoiding impeachment by the Illinois legislature; making corporate contacts that would be of value to him after leaving public office; facilitating his wife’s employment as a lobbyist; and generating speaking fees should he decide to leave public office.

In the earliest intercepted conversation about the Senate seat described in the affidavit, Blagojevich told Deputy Governor A on November 3 that if he is not going to get anything of value for the open seat, then he will take it for himself: “if . . . they’re not going to offer anything of any value, then I might just take it.”  Later that day, speaking to Advisor A, Blagojevich said:  “I’m going to keep this Senate option for me a real possibility, you know, and therefore I can drive a hard bargain.” He added later that the seat “is a [expletive] valuable thing, you just don’t give it away for nothing.”

Over the next couple of days – Election Day and the day after – Blagojevich was captured discussing with Deputy Governor A whether he could obtain a cabinet position, such as Secretary of Health and Human Services or the Department of Energy or various ambassadorships.  In a conversation with Harris on November 4, Blagojevich analogized his situation to that of a sports agent shopping a potential free agent to the highest bidder.  The day after the election, Harris allegedly suggested to Blagojevich that the President-elect could make him the head of a private foundation.

Between Blagojevich, Ted Stevens, and Wiliam Jefferson, this has been a pretty bad year for criminals in public office.

Looks like they may have violated some wetlands regulations, too.

As we noted here a few days ago, the great automaker bailout was a question of when, not if. That ultimate day when the fiscal odometer turns 100,000 (in gazillions of taxpayer money, and maybe even kajillions by the time the Bush admin darkens the door at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue for the last time), is inching closer, like a 1974 Chevy Vega being pushed back into the used car lot you just bought it from:

A federal "car czar" would oversee a government-run restructuring of U.S. auto companies in return for a $15 billion bailout of the beleaguered industry under an emerging deal between the White House and Congress.

Negotiators worked through the night Monday narrowing differences on a bill to rush short-term loans to the struggling carmakers through a plan that requires that the industry reinvent itself to survive—and pay back the government if it doesn't. The package could come to a vote as early as Wednesday.

The measure would put a government overseer named by President George W. Bush in charge of setting guidelines for an industrywide overhaul, with the power to revoke the loans if the automakers fail to do what's necessary to become viable. The White House was seeking tougher consequences, including allowing the overseer—being called a car czar—to force the companies into bankruptcy if they weren't doing enough to cut labor costs, restructure their debt and downsize to stay afloat.

The one ray of hope in this story? "Despite optimism on both sides that Congress and the White House could reach a swift agreement on the measure, it was still a tough sell on Capitol Hill."

Read: As with the grotesque financial sector bailout (doesn't that seem like years ago?), virtually all of those against this are just waiting for the right "sweetener" to make the subsidy go down.

More here.

My vote for car czar? Gary Numan (see below).

Second choice: Former South Dakota Rep. Bill Janklow, who displayed just the right mix of phony remorse and righteous anger when convicted of vehicular manslaughter for a 2003 driving death. It seems to me that that's exactly what you want in a "czar"—a nearly complete jackass who tries to bully his way with the people who run him and the people he lords over.

Special note to Congress and politicians in general: Czar is a terrible word to use for any office. The czars (and czarinas!) were terrible rulers who presided over one of the biggest ongoing failures in human history (a.k.a. Czarist Russia). About the best thing you can say about them is that one of them might have had sex with a horse. Check out the history books, for god's sake already.

Enough already, start your engines today with synth-pop New Wave androgyny of Gary Numan:

Explicitly moral, obscenely didactic, and showcasing a perversely distorted view of the American legal system, fake TV judges have become a constant presence in our lives. But as Contributing Editor Greg Beato writes, while Judge Judy and other shows may promote self-reliance and personal responsibility, they also portray a fantasy world that would radically expand the scope of governmental interference in our lives.

Read all about it here.

See Associate Editor Katherine Mangu-Ward on Fox News' Red Eye w/ Greg Gutfeld, at 3:00 am eastern time. Topics include: snooty Ivy Leaguers, Obama's make-work plan, Kid Rock's fur coat, and why women are better than men at assembling Ikea furniture.

For those who don't suffer from debilitating insomnia, watch it online tomorrow here.

From a Chicago Sun-Times story titled "Obama: Don't stock up on guns":

As gun sales shoot up around the country, President-elect Barack Obama said Sunday that gun-owning Americans do not need to rush out and stock up before he is sworn in next month.

"I believe in common-sense gun safety laws, and I believe in the second amendment," Obama said at a news conference. "Lawful gun owners have nothing to fear. I said that throughout the campaign. I haven't indicated anything different during the transition. I think people can take me at my word."...

Nationally, background checks for gun purchases jumped nearly 49 percent during the week Obama was elected, compared with the same time period last year, according to the FBI's National Instant Background Check System.

Whole story here.

Reason's Jacob Sullum summed up his take on Obama's Second Amendment bona fides thus:

Obama's reading of the Second Amendment is so narrow that he sees no constitutional problem with the Washington, D.C., gun ban that was overturned by the Supreme Court or a similar law in Chicago. Maybe he supports the right to own a disassembled rifle and the right to defend ourselves with pointy sticks, but in practice his position is pretty much the same as that of gun controllers who continue to insist that the Second Amendment protects no rights the government need respect.

More here.

And Reason's Brian Doherty has written a book on the D.C. v. Heller case, which everyone should read.

Hat tip to Sun-Times story: Dan Gifford.

Listen to it here. Read ongoing news and analysis about the debt-addled company's troubles here.  

This weekend's New York Times Magazine features a short interview with historian Annette Gordon Reed, who just won the National Book Award for The Hemingses of Monticello, her illuminating look at Thomas Jefferson's relationship with his slave Sally Hemings and her family. It's the sort of brief Q&A that spends as much time on the author's family life as it does on the book, though a few interesting moments did manage to occur. First, Gordon-Reed totally rejected interviewer Deborah Solomon's talk of "our increasingly mixed-race society." "We've always been a mixed-race society," she responds, after arguing that interracial sex was actually more common in the 18th century than it is today. There's also this exchange on President-elect Barack Obama, which sounds to me like Solomon has annoyed Gordon-Reed just a bit:

[Obama] is relatively fair-skinned, not unlike Sally Hemings. Do you think that comes with any sort of social message?

He's not that light-skinned. If he were walking down the street and I saw him, I wouldn't assume his mother was white. I don't think it's the light skin that matters so much as that he has a white parent. For some white people, that might be comforting.

What about Michelle Obama, who has been more saddled with racial stereotypes, perhaps because her skin is darker?

Black people get stereotyped no matter what shade their skin is.

Whole thing here. My review of The Hemingses of Monticello is here.

Earlier this year, reason.tv sat down with Alan Pell Crawford, author of Twilight at Monticello: The Final Years of Thomas Jefferson, which details the late life of America's third president.

In a 20-minute interview, Crawford, a one-time press secretary to Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) and widely published journalist, discusses Jefferson's massive contributions to American political discourse; his role in creating the University of Virginia; his relationship to Sally Hemings, slavery, and manumission; and much, much more.

Click below to watch. 

When the history of this awful moment of bailout hysteria is written, there'll be a chapter or 20 on the complete bogosity of what might call "the infrastructure flim-flam"—the idea that government can boostrap the economy out its funk by hiring two guys to dig a hole and a couple more to fill it in.

Don't you see? It's the perfect plan!, as Batman's Riddler might exclaim. In fact, one only wonders why they don't hire three guys to fill the holes, thereby cutting unemployment to negative-something.

Then again, taxing Peter to pay Paul to build a parking deck with solar panels for Mary just might not be the sort of economic activity that, you know, accomplishes anything other than creating even more inefficient and generally non-productive public-sector spending with a major administrative dead-weight loss on the top.

Who cares, though, right, because the important thing, in the words of New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg and countless others, is that we don't just stand there, do something! And when it comes to wasting taxpayer money on what used to be called make-work projects, the nation's mayors are true visionaries. From a CBS4 account:

Stressing that investing in Main Street will help Wall Street, the nation's mayors have gathered in Washington D.C. to push for emergency federal aid to fund infrastructure projects.

Led by U.S Conference of Mayors President Miami Mayor Manny Diaz, the mayors, including New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg; Chicago Mayor Richard Daley and Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaigosa, will release their second report on a number of local 'ready-to-go' infrastructure projects, those which can be started and completed in two years, if the emergency funding were made available.

According to the report, the 'ready to go' projects include Community Development Block Grants, transit, highway infrastructure, green jobs, school modernization, public safety and public housing.

Whole account here.

And if you want to crash your browser with over 4MB (and 803 PDF pages) of hot steaming pork projects laid out in loving, excrutiating, and blood-pressure-popping detail by the United States Conference of Mayors, then look upon this document and abandon all hope.

Among the highlights:

• a proposed "O'Malley Road Reconstruction" in Anchorage, Alaska, that will cost $30 million but provide 300 (count 'em!) jobs;
• a Gadsen, Alabama "Hoke Street Sidewalk Construction to serve new Department of Human Resources facility" that's a real steal at $150,000 but will take almost surviving members of the Allman Brothers Band off the public dole (at last!);
• Police Facility Solar Panels for Lake Havasu City, Arizona, for only $400,000 and 75 jobs;
• Stormwater Settlement Ponds for Beloit, Wisconsin for $1,428 million and five whole jobs, which will feed a family of four in the Badger State, especially if they only eat government cheese;

And, literally, so much more it's virtually impossible to document.

But the mayors have. Don't you know that the Columbia Avenue storm sewer in St. John, Indiana needs "additional capacity" (and it will only cost $275,000 and provide 15 Hoosiers good, decent jobs)? Or that Manhattan, Kansas can finally (finally!) coordinate the traffic lights on Fort Riley Boulevard for a measly $71,250 (sure it will add only one job to the economy, but one is almost twice as much as zero when you think about!)? And that for barely over $4 million, Atlanta, Georgia can install "reflective or green roofing" on unspecified buildings, thus becoming the Reflective or Green Roofing Capital of the United States, or at least the Southeastern United States? Maybe the lights will really go out in Georgia, but Hotlanta will be keeping cooler than ever.

Am I the only American saddened by such bushwah? I hope not, even as I acknowledge that perhaps I am the only American outside of Silver City, New Mexico wondering why Silver City, New Mexico didn't ask for more than $60,000 for the "creation of Economic Developer position to service entire county."

I mean, seriously, why didn't the idiots there read their Bastiat, the great 19th century economist, and petition the government for I don't know, like a bazillion dollars for a "Window Breaker to break windows for the entire county"?

Don't you see how it works? All those broken windows will mean work for the glazier, who will then buy bread (which means work for the baker!), who will then buy solar panels (which means works for the solar panel guys!), who will then drive more on Fort Riley Blvd. (which will mean more acccidents on the street, thus increasing demand for traffic light coordinators, who will buy cars...).

Skim the mayors' begging petition, then read your Bastiat. Then go to sleep and pray that you wake up and it's December 2000 and the Supreme Court rules differently in that year's presidential contest.

And laugh for 23 seconds as the ultimate statement on phoney-baloney jobs is made in Mel Brooks' Blazing Saddles:

No denying that a bullet to the head will cure what ails you, but now there's another way to combine shooting sports and the pangs of old age:

Called the Palm Pistol, the weapon is designed for people who have trouble firing a normal handgun due to arthritis and other debilitating conditions.

"It's something that they need to assist them in daily living," says Matthew Carmel, president of Constitution Arms in Maplewood, New Jersey, which hopes to manufacture the Palm Pistol - now just a patent and specifications.

Better still, Constitution Arms is hoping to qualify the squeezable gun for Medicare reimbursement by claiming that the gun is a medical device, like a wheelchair.

One can only hope that all Americans be entitled to one of this babies (should we call them Early Bird Specials, in a nod to the Saturday Night Specials of yore?) when universal healthcare finally comes upon us.

By almost all accounts, Patrick French's recently released (and authorized) biography of V.S. Naipaul, The World Is What It Is, is an admiring look at the Nobel laureate's impressive oeuvre and an unflinching account of his notorious snobbery and sadism towards the overlapping women in his life. It's in the stack of books to be read over the Christmas, though if you cannot invest the time, Ian Buruma has a good recapitulation of the book's main themes here. But French is also an expert on the Indian subcontinent and today takes to the pages of the New York Times to argue that there is no easy political or ideological explaination for last week's spasm of violence in Bombay. As he notes, before any statement was made by the group responsible for the atrocities, countless pundits "were making chilling deductions on their behalf: their actions were because of American foreign policy, or Afghanistan, or the harassment of Indian Muslims. When officials said that the killers came from the Pakistani terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba, it was taken as proof that India's misdeeds in the Kashmir Valley were the cause." Not that simple, says French:

These misdeeds are real, as are India's other social and political failings (I recently met a Kashmiri man whose father and sister had died at the hands of the Indian security forces). But there is no sane reason to think Lashkar-e-Taiba would shut down if the situation in Kashmir improved. Its literature is much concerned with establishing a caliphate in Central Asia, and murdering those who insult the Prophet. Its leader, Hafiz Saeed, who lives on a large estate outside Lahore bought with Saudi Money, goes about his business with minimal interference from the Pakistani government.

Lashkar-e-Taiba is part of the International Islamic Front for Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders (the Qaeda franchise). Mr. Saeed's hatreds are catholic - his bugbears include Hindus, Shiites and women who wear bikinis. He regards democracy as "a Jewish and Christian import from Europe," and considers suicide attacks to be in accordance with Islam. He has a wider strategy: "At this time our contest is Kashmir. Let's see when the time comes. Our struggle with the Jews is always there." As he told his followers in Karachi at a rally in 2000: "There can't be any peace while India remains intact. Cut them, cut them - cut them so much that they kneel before you and ask for mercy." In short, he has an explicit political desire to create a state of war between the religious communities in India and beyond, and bring on the endgame.

Like other exponents of Islamist extremism, he has a view of the world that does not tolerate doubt or ambiguity: his opponents are guilty, and must be killed. I have met other radicals like Mr. Saeed, men who live in a dimension of absolute certainty and have contempt for the moral relativism of those who seek to excuse them.

Read the whole thing here.

The latest issue of the Journal of Experimental Botany includes a report on the oldest known marijuana stash, nearly two pounds found in the grave of a Gushi shaman who was buried 2,700 years ago in the Gobi Desert near Turpan. Analysis of the "superbly preserved" plant material—which had been placed in a wooden bowl and a leather basket, presumably for the shaman's use in the afterlife—found that it contained substantial levels of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), marijuana's main active ingredient. "The cannabis was presumably employed by this culture as a medicinal or psychoactive agent, or an aid to divination," write the authors, led by the American neurologist and cannabis researcher Ethan Russo. "To our knowledge, these investigations provide the oldest documentation of cannabis as a pharmacologically active agent."

In their 1993 book Marihuana: The Forbidden Medicine, Lester Grinspoon and James Bakalar say:

A native of central Asia, cannabis may have been cultivated as long as ten thousand years ago. It was certainly cultivated in China by 4000 B.C. and in Turkestan by 3000 B.C. It has long been used as a medicine in India, China, the Middle East, Southest Asia, South Africa, and South America. The first evidence for medicinal use of cannabis is an herbal published during the reign of the Chinese emperor Chen Nung five thousand years ago. Cannabis was recommended for malaria, constipation, rheumatic pains, "absentmindedness," and female disorders.

Meanwhile, the Marijuana Policy Project reports that Germany is about to become the fifth country to allow the use of cannabis as a medicine. Last month in the U.S., Michigan became the 13th state to do so.

News coverage of the Russo discovery here and here.

[Thanks to Holly Fisher for the tip.]

It takes more than digging ditches and laying asphalt to ensure that infrastructure investments spur job creation and increase productivity, write Adrian Moore and Sam Staley. America's highway and road system must meet the needs of a globally competitive, dynamic, services-based economy.

Read all about it here. 

Times are bad, so let's party on. Last month, Business Week reported:

In New York City, twentysomethings are throwing Depression parties, where the clothes are ’30s vintage and the playlists favor Big Band numbers and Dust Bowl ballads. Evite, the online party-invitation service, says such bashes are on the rise nationwide.

Now some friends of my wife have just invited us to a party featuring an FDR imitation and songs like "The Sunny Side of the Street." In addition:

Depression-style refreshments will be served - stone soup, radiator cocktails, and spam (vegetarian and non-vegetarian).  

A true sign of hard times - vegetarian spam. 

Bill Kristol, in today's New York Times:

[C]onservatives should think twice before charging into battle against Obama under the banner of "small-government conservatism." It's a banner many Republicans and conservatives have rediscovered since the election and have been waving around energetically. Jeb Bush, now considering a Senate run in 2010, even went so far as to tell Politico last month, "There should not be such a thing as a big-government Republican."

Really? Jeb Bush was a successful and popular conservative governor of Florida, with tax cuts, policy reforms and privatizations of government services to show for his time in office. Still, in his two terms state spending increased over 50 percent — a rate faster than inflation plus population growth. It turns out, in the real world of Republican governance, that there aren't a whole lot of small-government Republicans.

Kristol goes on to say that Ronald Reagan was the only Republican president since 1932 who "was even close to being a small-government conservative," and even then "he campaigned in 1980 more as a tax-cutter and national-defense-builder-upper, and less as a small-government enthusiast[.]" Conclusion:

So talk of small government may be music to conservative ears, but it's not to the public as a whole. This isn't to say the public is fond of big-government liberalism. It's just that what's politically vulnerable about big-government liberalism is more the liberalism than the big government.

It will be very interesting to see how the editor of Dick Cheney's in-flight magazine will be treated by a Republican Party that has largely followed his advice since Sept. 12, 2001 (down to embracing his new post-John McCain crush Sarah Palin), and come out at the end of it in worse shape than at any times since the creation of the World Wide Web.

During the campaign, President-elect Barack Obama promised, "We'll invest $15 billion a year over the next decade in renewable energy, creating five million new green jobs that pay well, can't be outsourced and help end our dependence on foreign oil."

Green jobs like building windmills, solar power plants, electric cars, and weatherizing houses. But won't those new green jobs come at the expense of a bunch of non-green jobs, say, jobs in legacy auto companies, coal mining, oil drilling & refining, and so forth? As American Enterprise Institute resident scholar (and former Reason Foundation environmental director) Ken Green explains, Obama is indulging in an economic fallacy:

Unfortunately, the idea of government "job creation" is a classic example of the broken window fallacy, which was explained by French economist Frédéric Bastiat way back in 1850. It is discouraging to think that nearly 160 years later, politicians still do not understand Bastiat's basic economic insight.

He explained the fallacy as follows: Imagine some shopkeepers get their windows broken by a rock-throwing child. At first, people sympathize with the shopkeepers, until someone claims that the broken windows really are not that bad. After all, they "create work" for the glassmaker, who might then be able to buy more food, benefiting the grocer, or buy more clothes, benefiting the tailor. If enough windows are broken, the glassmaker might even hire an assistant, creating a job.

Did the child therefore do a public service by breaking the windows? No. We must also consider what the shopkeepers would have done with the money they used to fix their windows had those windows not been broken. Most likely, the shopkeepers would have plowed that money back into their store: perhaps they would have bought more stock from their suppliers, or maybe they would have hired new employees. Before the windows were broken, the shopkeepers had intact windows and the money to purchase more goods or hire new workers. After the windows were broken, they had to use that money to repair the windows and thus were unable to expand their businesses.

Now consider Obama's "green jobs" plan, which includes regulations, subsidies, and renewable-power mandates. The "broken windows" in this case would be lost jobs and lost capital in the coal, oil, gas, nuclear, and automobile industries. Currently, these industries directly employ more than 1 million people. Conventional power plants would be closed, and massive amounts of energy infrastructure would be dismantled. After breaking these windows, the Obama plan would then create new jobs in the renewable energy sector. The costs of replacing those windows would ultimately be passed on to taxpayers and energy consumers.

In short, the Obama plan reflects fallacious thinking of the first order. There may be sound reasons to switch from existing energy sources to renewables, including the need to slash greenhouse gas emissions, the need to reduce our dependence on Middle Eastern oil, and the need to meet growing energy demand. If Americans wish to pay for a wholesale transformation of the energy industry, that is their choice. But let us not lie about the costs, and let us not espouse an economic fallacy that is nearly 160 years old. Obama's "green jobs" plan would indeed create jobs, but it would do so by killing other jobs. Is that really the type of energy policy Americans want?

Whole op/ed here. A longer analysis can be found here.  

In yesterday's Washington Post, Neil "Millennials Rising" Howe strikes a blow against generational tirades...by attacking late baby boomers/Generation Jones/Early Gen Xers as the real "Dumbest Generation."

Howe's starting point is a broadside against Mark Bauerlein, a (very) occasional Reason contributor, a Reason.tv interview subject, and the author of The Dumbest Generation: How the digital age stupefies the young and jeopardizes our future.

Howe's basic line:

Generational putdowns, Bauerlein's included, are typically long on attitude and short on facts. But the underlying question is worth pursuing: If the data are objectively assessed, which age-slice of today's working-age adults really does deserve to be called the dumbest generation?

The answer may surprise you. No, it's not today's college-age kids, nor even today's family-starting 30-somethings. And no, it's not the 60-year-olds who once grooved at Woodstock. Instead, it's Americans in their 40s, especially their late 40s—those born from the late 1950s to the mid-1960s. They straddle the boundary line between last-wave boomers and first-wave Generation Xers. The political consultant Jonathan Pontell labels them "Generation Jones."

The whole thing is here.

The most interesting things about Howe's article?

First, he is wrong to argue that Bauerlein's book is short on "facts." It is chock full of data from comparable data sets about various sorts of intellectual activities (such as literary reading) and it has a lot of good things to say about the current younger generation. I don't agree overall with Bauerlein's general thesis—that those who don't know anything about history, economics, literature, etc., are likely to create an inferior society—but his book is not a rant in the same way that, say, Susan Jacoby's The Age of American Unreason, is (to my mind, Jacoby misinterprets a shift away from LBJ-style progressivism as a sign of widespread dumbing down).

Second, Howe spends most of his time trying to explain why, despite his bold statement, Barack Obama (born 1961) is not a data point in his argument but Sarah Palin (1964) is. Well, fuck him and his thesis then. For all his supposed oratorical acumen, can anybody cite any evidence that Obama, despite his Ivy League degrees and his windy rhetoric, has ever read a book or pored over a particular period of American history? His first memoir is a great read, but his political speeches are remarkable for their lack of historical and literary allusion. And then Howe suggests that, against all reality and mind-altering chemicals currently known to mankind that the "1946 birth cohort (including such notables as Gilda Radner and Oliver Stone)" is somehow preferable to "the 1963 cohort (Mike Myers, Quentin Tarantino)." Full disclosure: I too was born in 1963. But I don't think I'm special pleading to say I'd rather be trapped in an elevator with the latter couple.

I don't believe in "generations" (if by the term we mean some tightly knit homogenous group) and have certainly spilled a good number of pixels mocking the idea that the kids today are somehow beneath previous cohorts (and that the older generations were somehow even greater or more depraved still). But what Howe does is something that I know I (and dare I say it) people about my age are overly familiar with: He simply recapitulates the long-standing animus against late-boomers by earlier boomers.

Which is more tired than Gilda Radner's corpse. And besides, we all know that the only generation worse than the Greatest Generation was the first half of the one they gave birth to.

Below, check out Dumbest Generation author Mark Bauerlein make his case to Reason.tv:

And watch him answer questions from the home version of Are You Smarter than a Fifth Grader? below:

The LA Times profiles Paul Volcker, Obama's new chair of the freshly created "Economic Recovery Advisory Board" under the front-page link headline, "If Volcker Has His Way, There Will Be Pain." (The actual story has a far duller hed.)

Volcker's old tough-love success at curbing inflation when he ran the Fed in the early '80s is profiled diligently and entertainingly in a feature in the January issue of reason(not yet online, but already in the hands of subscribers). The feature is by Robert J. Samuelson, excerpted from his book The Great Inflation and Its Aftermath.

But that's not the kind of toughness this article talks about, instead linking Volcker's bloodless cruelty to his desire to more heavily regulate exotic new financial instruments--and, better, to his recognition that we-as-a-nation need to stop spending so wildly beyond our means. This is a lesson that his boss Obama will have a politically tough time heeding. It's not clear from this piece whether Volcker thinks that monetary policy, his special area of expertise, bears any responsibility for the bursting bubbles of the past decade, given that the overall price inflation rate hasn't been scarily huge.

The most depressing insight in the LA Times piece into the way our national economic policy is thought about by our elites comes from Princeton's Alan Blinder: "It is less about [Volcker's] ideas but more about his stature, wisdom and integrity...There is not another person on the planet who can match that combination."

Now, we know that Washington highly values its own sense of stature and perceived integrity. But people on all sides, whether a strict "if the CPI ain't flying high, inflation isn't an issue" type or the shiniest of goldbugs, should be able to admit that it does matter what ideas are brought to bear in government attempts to manipulate and manage the economy--that some ideas when implemented are more apt to achieve our goals than others, no matter the stature and integrity of those who suggest the ideas.

As long-time H&R readers know, some commenters have been suspicious of high corn fructose corn syrup (HFCS). Some studies have linked HFCS in carbonated beverages to diabetes.

Now a scientific review of HCFS in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition argues that the sweetner has been wrongly maligned. Americans are getting fatter because they eat more food, not because of HFCS. As the press release from the Corn Refiners Association* explains:

-- High fructose corn syrup contains the same sugars compositionally as
other fructose/glucose-based sweeteners like sucrose (or table sugar), honey
or fruit juice concentrates.


-- Fructose-glucose sweeteners are metabolized through the same pathways
regardless of their dietary source.


-- There are no known substantial metabolic or nutritional differences
between high fructose corn syrup and sucrose. Both have a composition of
approximately equal parts fructose and glucose.


-- High fructose corn syrup and sucrose offer equivalent sweetness and
both contain 4 calories per gram.


-- From 1970-2005, caloric intake in the United States increased by 24%.
This was not due to a disproportionate increase in added sugars (including
high fructose corn syrup), but rather an overall increase in calories from all
food sources including fats and all other nutrient groups.


-- Per capita consumption of high fructose corn syrup has declined in the
United States in recent years, but obesity rates continue to rise.


-- High fructose corn syrup accounts for about one-half of sweetener use
in the United States but only 8% worldwide, yet obesity rates are climbing in
countries that use little or no high fructose corn syrup. Sugar remains the
predominant global sweetener.

Whole press release here.

*I will not impugn studies (and press releases) solely on the basis of who has paid for them. ;-)

From our January issue, Associate Editor Katherine Mangu-Ward explains why bad governance—not deregulation—caused the current financial meltdown.

Read all about it here.

Under the headline "Federal Judge E-Mailed Jokes to 'Gag List,'" the Los Angeles Times reports that Alex Kozinski, chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, for years sent friends and associates jokes that "ranged from silly to politically oriented to raunchy." The more sexually explicit messages bore the warning "T&P," for "tasteless and puerile." The recipients, who were added at their own request or the suggestion of list members, were all consenting adults, able to stop the messages at any time. They included journalists such as National Journal columnist Stuart Taylor and Time columnist Michael Kinsley. Taylor offers a positive spin:

He's not hung up on the need to be dignified. He enjoys life the way he did before he was a judge, and that may not comport with some peoples' image of what judges should be like....The image of the judiciary should not be such a fragile thing.

Kinsley sounds more prudish:

There were a lot of vulgar jokes, very dirty jokes. I was astonished that a judge was doing this.

Yet evidently neither Taylor nor Kinsley thought the judge's jokes were newsworthy. The L.A. Times, by contrast, sees the gag list as part of a troubling pattern that includes the raunchy visual humor on Kozinski's home computer:

Kozinski's taste in humor already has proved problematic for him. Last summer, the judge requested a judicial misconduct investigation into his own actions after The Times published an article about sexually explicit material that he kept on a publicly accessible website. Kozinski maintained that he believed the website was private.

According to Kozinski, the files on the computer, the server for his home network, were never meant to be public but were accessed by a lawyer with a grudge, who shopped the more risqué images around to various news organizations, including the Times. After those pictures received media coverage, Kozinski stopped emailing jokes. But what does it all mean? The Times leaves it to the reader to decide:

The gag list provides additional material for a debate that has continued since then: Do Kozinski's actions indicate a lack of judgment or are they merely the harmless expression of a free-spirited man who happens to be a highly regarded judge?

I'm inclined toward the latter view, and not just because I like Kozinski's libertarian leanings. As Taylor suggests, Kozinski's fondness for dirty jokes, like his video game reviews in The Wall Street Journal, makes him seem playful and fun (if not always funny), a refreshing change from the stuffed shirts most judges aspire to be. Although I'm not sure the email joke list was worth a newspaper story, it's good to be reminded that quirky, imperfect human beings inhabit those robes.

Next in the L.A. Times series: "Federal Judge Farted in Courthouse Elevator, Blamed Others."

More on Kozinski's sense of humor here, here, and here.

[Via Patterico's Pontifications, where you can find examples of the jokes Kozinski circulated.]

It's been a decade since California became the first state to ban smoking in bars and restaurants. After that, the deluge. How far will smoking bans go? How much farther can they go? Click above to see a Reason.tv documentary about Belmont, California, which has passed a law banning smoking in private residences (yes, it's for the children!). Just Can't Quit was written and produced by Ted Balaker. Go here for additional material, embed links, and more.

And click below to see 2002's Talking Butts: A Smoking Documentary, which was made with the help of reason's Paul Feine, Jesse Walker, Jacob Sullum, and Charles Paul Freund. The 25-minute film explores why people smoke and why attempts to regulate and punish smokers have unintended consequences. And it features a cameo by filmmaker John Waters that is absolutely unforgettable.

Barack Obama was on Meet the Press Sunday, and moderator Tom Brokaw put the president-elect's feet to the fire:

MR. BROKAW: Finally, Mr. President-elect, the White House is a no-smoking zone, and when you were asked about this recently by Barbara Walters, I read it very carefully, you ducked.

Have you stopped smoking?

PRES.-ELECT OBAMA: You know, I have, but what I said was that, you know, there are times where I've fallen off the wagon. Well...

MR. BROKAW: Well, wait a minute.

PRES.-ELECT OBAMA: ...what can I tell...

MR. BROKAW: Then that means you haven't stopped.

PRES.-ELECT OBAMA: Well, the--fair enough. What I would say is, is that I have done a terrific job under the circumstances of making myself much healthier, and I think that you will not see any violations of these rules in the White House.

He thinks so, does he? Actually, I'm surprised there isn't some smokers' atrium somewhere on Pennsylvania Ave., given the fact that Central Europeans sometime stop by.

Whole thing here. Jacob Sullum attempted to divine the nexus between Obama's substance-consuming habits and his public policy back in May.

As a graduate of the State University at Buffalo and a college sports fan, I've followed the Bulls football fortunes this season with special interest. Founded in 1846 as a private college, Buffalo has one of the older—and pathetic—gridiron traditions in the U.S. This season they managed to take the title in the Mid-American Conference by beating an undefeated Ball State squad (tough luck, Letterman and Jim "Garfield" Davis) and winning a bid to the lowly International Bowl in Toronto (suffice it to say, any bowl game played in The Great White North is decidedly second- or third-rate).

But Buffalo's strong season shone a light on a story from half a century ago that highlights the innumerable ways that overwhelming, insitutionalized, and all-too-accepted racism came to an end in America. In 1958, Buffalo was invited to the Tangerine Bowl, held in Orlando, Florida.

Fifty years ago the Bulls had one of their finest seasons: 8-1 and an appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show to receive the Lambert Cup, the trophy given to the best small program in the East. A few days later Buffalo was invited to play in the Tangerine Bowl in Orlando. Once they learned of the conditions, the team and university chancellor Clifford Furnas declined the invitation.

"The issue was discrimination," the Courier Express, a Buffalo newspaper, wrote at the time. "Two of Buffalo's players are Negroes. Willie Evans, a left halfback, led the Bulls in rushing yardage.... Mike Wilson is a reserve end." The stadium leaseholder back then, the Orlando High School Athletic Association, stipulated "there be no intermingling of the races in athletic contests in the stadium."

"They are two of our finest young men.... The possibility of discrimination against any member of the team prevents our appearance at the game," said Furnas, a 1920 track Olympian and scientist who served in the Eisenhower administration.

More here.

Another story about the incident fills in locker-room details:

The players were left to decide whether to play without...the only two African-Americans on the team.

It was quickly evident which way the players were leaning. The vote was taken before ballots could even be distributed.

"It was, 'Shall we leave the Italians home? Oh my God, really?' There was a lot of anger," former offensive tackle Jack Dempsey said. "We just threw the ballots on the floor and left. It was, 'Let's get out of here and go get a beer."'

More here.

Racism (and certainly segregation) died a death of a thousand cuts. It certainly took too long and the worst form of collectivism lingers on in various ways. But it's worth recalling various stopping points where individuals and institutions chose not to go along with such an invidious and insidious force in American history.

Reason's Matt Welch wrote a fantastic essay about how free agency helped erode racial animus in sports. Read all about how the experiences of basketball great Oscar Robertson, baseball bonus baby Dick Allen, and former Olivetti Girl Joe Namath speak to all that.

Steve Chapman explains why the mad proliferation of bowl games and the absence of real blocking and tackling represent everything that's wrong with today's college football.

Read all about it here.