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Reason Writers on the Air: Radley Balko Discusses SWAT Teams and Police Militarization on Russia Today
This week, Reason Senior Editor Radley Balko discussed SWAT teams and police militarization on Russia TV's The Alyona Show.
In Which a Leftist Defends Rand Paul
Well no, not exactly, but when it comes to his comments about civil rights legislation this is about as close to a defense as Paul is likely to get from the left. Here's Alexander Cockburn:
It's the easiest thing in the world for a grandstanding liberal to push a libertarian into a corner. Then they'll get praise for their unflinching courage, like Morris Dees' South Poverty Law Center putting another "hate group" in the Index and waiting for the contributions to roll in.
Here's Maddow, brandishing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as though this is the only matter worth considering in the forthcoming race between Rand Paul and the Democrat, an awful neo-liberal prosecutor, Kentucky's current attorney general, Jack "I'm a Tough Son-of-a-Bitch" Conway. Between Conway and Paul, which one in the U.S. Senate would more likely be a wild card – which is the best we can hope for these days – likely to filibuster against a bankers' bailout, against reaffirmation of the Patriot Act, against suppression of the CIA's full torture history? Paul, one would have to bet, and these are the votes that count, where one uncompromising stand by an outsider can make a difference, unlike the gyrations and last-ditch sell-outs of Blowhard Bernie Sanders, no doubt a hero to Maddow and [Amy] Goodman. Liberals love grandstanding about what are, in practice, distractions. You think the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is going to come up for review in the U.S. Senate?
If Rand Paul hadn't been so preoccupied with winding up for what he plainly thought was his knock-out punch, concerning Maddow's posture on the right to bear arms in every restaurant in America from Joe's Diner to Le Cirque, he could have turned the tables easily enough, just by saying that this ritual flourishing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act doesn't have too much to do with what has happened to blacks since that glorious day, from an appalling school system, to blighted housing, constricted employment possibilities, shriveled share of the national income and most recently the great transfer in US history of money and assets from African Americans to rich white people by the mortgage speculators, given free rein by Democrats and Republicans.
It's “Take Our Children to the Park and Leave Them There Day”
Screw "Take Your Daughter
to Work Day." Want your kids to learn about the real world? Why not
let them hang out in it, unsupervised, for a little while
today?
Lenore Skenazy, author of a book and blog called Free-Range Kids, has declared today a kind of kid independence day. Her suggestion:
May 22...is the very first “Take Our Children to the Park…And Leave Them There Day.” The idea behind it is simple: Most of us want our children to play outside and have fun, but this is impossible because there aren’t any OTHER kids outside for our kids to play with....A day to get kids outside to meet each other and re-learn the lost art of playing!
Join in any way you feel comfortable:
Once again, let me reiterate that this is not a day to leave our 2-year-olds in the park. It is meant for kids age 7 or 8 and up. And it needn’t be more than an hour or even a half hour. And you can just take a walk around the block, if that’s all you or your child are ready for. And you can give them cell phones! I just want to get kids out of the house so they can frolick and maybe even plan to do this strange thing where they ask a friend to “come out and play” again.
And a little statistical literacy to go with your freedom:
When, thanks to the odds in a country of about 60 million children, one of them fractures an arm or, God forbid, suffers anything worse, I can see where it could very easily become, “We told you so!” and, “It’s all her fault!” on the part of the media. Media that will not know who to point to when another child tests positive for diabetes, or learns that he has high blood pressure brought on by a sedentary childhood, or dies in a car crash, as 5 or 6 kids do every day.
Festivities start at 10 a.m. in a park near you. And, in case you were wondering, leaving your kids on their own in the park is totally legal—at least for now.
Matching Funds for Your Opponent No Big Deal, 9th Circuit Says
Today a federal appeals court rejected a First Amendment challenge to the "matching funds" provision of Arizona's Clean Elections Act. Under this law, participating candidates receive a taxpayer dollar for every private dollar spent by their unsubsidized opponents (or by groups that support them). In January, on the day before the Supreme Court overturned federal restrictions on political speech by corporations in Citizens United v. FEC, U.S. District Judge Roslyn O. Silver ruled that Arizona's system "burdens…First Amendment rights, is not supported by a compelling state interest, is not narrowly tailored, and is not the least restrictive alternative." The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit disagreed (PDF), saying the law "imposes only a minimal burden on First Amendment rights" and is therefore subject to "intermediate scrutiny," rather than the "strict scrutiny" applied by Silver. The 9th Circuit said Arizona's system "survives intermediate scrutiny because it bears a substantial relation to the State's important interest in reducing quid pro quo political corruption." The issue, which may ultimately be resolved by the Supreme Court, is timely because one of the responses proposed by critics of Citizens United is increased public subsidies for political campaigns.
The Institute for Justice, which represents the state legislator and political activists who brought the suit, has background here.
Prison for Prince of Pot
Yesterday, as expected,
Canadian cannabis activist Marc Emery, who was arrested in 2005 for
selling marijuana seeds to Americans via the Internet, was
transported from a Vancouver jail to a federal detention center
near Seattle. After he appears before a judge, the self-anointed
Prince of Pot will begin serving a five-year prison term, a much
harsher penalty than he would have received in Canada, where many
vendors openly sell marijuana seeds with little or no legal
trouble. CBC News
reports that Emery, who seems to have been targeted by American
drug warriors for political reasons, "is expecting to return to
Canada to serve his sentence."
[Thanks to Kent Cowan for the tip.]
It Would Have Been Better If They Had Smoked Meth Beforehand, but I'll Take It
Today is Mark Souder's
last day as a congressman. The moralistic Indiana Republican,
one of the most vocal drug warriors in the House, this week
announced he was resigning due to "a mutual relationship with a
part-time member of my staff" (the same staff member who worked
with him on a
video urging sexual abstinence). Some highlights from
Souder's career:
- He introduced legislation that denied college aid to students convicted of any drug offense, including marijuana possession. Bank robbers and murderers, meanwhile, were still eligible.
- He likened consumption of politically incorrect intoxicants to rape and child abuse.
- He called medical marijuana "just a phony excuse to be a pothead" and staunchly opposed legislation that would have stopped federal raids on medical marijuana suppliers.
- He opposed the nomination of former Massachusetts Gov. William Weld as ambassador to Mexico, citing Weld's support for medical marijuana.
- He was a major author of the law that aimed to suppress illicit methamphetamine production by imposing nationwide restrictions on purchases of allergy and cold pills containing pseudoephedrine.
Souder also co-sponsored the Internet Gambling Prohibition Act and the Military Honor and Decency Act, which would ban Playboy sales on military bases.
In November 2008, Radley Balko hoped voters would finish Souder off. Balko noted a 2007 appearance on Tucker Carlson's MSNBC show in which Souder defended increased funding for the government's demonstrably ineffective anti-pot propaganda on the grounds that "a marijuana user is very seldom just a casual marijuana user."
D.C. Kids Demand Bigger Condoms With More Bling
D.C. has been giving away free condoms to
encourage safe sex. They chose the slightly cheaper Durex brand for
the freebies. But a new survey finds that D.C. teens are
demanding larger, more durable Trojan Magnums instead, claiming
that the Durex are too small. Because, you know, teenage boys are
very likely to reliably report the size of their Captain Howdy
on an official city survey.
The whole condom controversy is a handy study in the problems with (in this case, literal) one-size-fits-all government-provided goods:
"If people get what they don't want, they are just going to trash them," said T. Squalls, 30, who attends the University of the District of Columbia....
Health officials and consumer advocates say that in terms of preventing pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases, there's no difference between Trojans and the less-expensive Durex condoms that the city is offering....
"We thought making condoms available was a good thing, but we never asked the kids what they wanted," said D.C. Council member David A. Catania (I-At Large), chairman of the health committee.
Solution: Grease the squeaky wheel (sorry) and then—to ration the good and prevent the most egregious fraud—construct some hoops for distributors to jump through:
D.C. officials have decided to stock up on Trojan condoms, including the company's super-size Magnum variety, and they have begun to authorize teachers or counselors, preferably male, to distribute condoms to students if the teachers complete a 30-minute online training course called "WrapMC" -- for Master of Condoms.
To wrap up (sorry again), here's your government-sponsored condom quote of the day:
"The gold package certainly has a little bit of the bling quality," said Michael Kharfen, a spokesman for the city's HIV/AIDS administration.
Who Doesn't Hate Libertarians?
Regarding Matt Welch's perspicacious take on Salon's soft fatwa on libertarians, lest you wonder who they meant when they refer to those who are "tip-toeing around this belief system like its adherents are the noble last remnants of a dying breed, still clinging to their ancient, proud ways," I imagine this piece critiquing the Tea Party movement from the June Atlantic by Michael Kinsley is an example of what Gabriel Winant meant.
While calling most Tea Partyers selfish and silly, grand old man of kinda-contrarian liberalism Kinsley says:
If the Tea Party Patriots ever developed a coherent platform or agenda, they would lose half their supporters.
Principled libertarianism is an interesting and even tempting idea. If we wanted to, we could radically reduce the scope of government—defend the country, give poor people enough money to live decently, and leave it at that. But this isn’t the TPP vision. The TPP vision is that you can keep your Medicare benefits and balance the budget by ending congressional earmarks, and perhaps the National Endowment for the Arts.
Keep on being tempted, Mr. Kinsley. And remember, nothing is so satisfying to give in to as temptation.
Scalia, Breyer, and Kagan: Just Friends
Say what you will about the
conservative jurisprudence of Justice Antonin Scalia, but
this is pretty funny:
Justice Antonin Scalia says Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan has at least two friends on the high court: Scalia and Justice Stephen Breyer.
Scalia offered the comment while before a House Judiciary subcommittee on Thursday.
Scalia and Breyer were there to talk about the Administrative Conference of the United States. Scalia was chairman and Breyer served as a Senate liaison for the regulation-studying body.
House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers said he had a question but that staff had warned him it was out of bounds.
Scalia responded, "Mr. Chairman, we're both friends of Elena Kagan, and I don't think we're willing to go beyond that." People at the hearing laughed.
Speaking of Libertarians and the Civil Rights Act....
Some past Reason writing on the topic, for those (few?) who are interested in actual discussion on the issue.
Ronald Bailey, August 2003:
The [Martin Luther] King ["I Have a Dream"] speech also lent momentum to two of the most consequential pieces of civil rights legislation in American history, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The Civil Rights Act outlawed state-sanctioned and enforced racial discrimination in the form of Jim Crow laws. For example, it allowed blacks to come down out of that theatre balcony in Bristol Virginia. The Voting Rights Act insured that Southern blacks who were being systematically denied the franchise by corrupt voter registration officials would have access to the ballot box.
Sure, these laws are not perfect. For example, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act has been interpreted as authorizing the creation of affirmative action programs. This despite the fact that Senator Hubert Humphrey (D-MN) declared specifically that Title VII "would prohibit preferential treatment for any particular group," and famously promised that if this turned out to be wrong that he would eat the pages on which the statute was printed. I wonder if the Senator would have liked the pages sautéed or with a nice béchamel? And yes, the Voting Rights Act has led to "racial gerrymandering." Still, we are a far better, and fairer country because of those laws.
Richard Epstein, July 2002:
Putting aside the woeful state of public education for inner-city students, much of the difficulty in labor markets could be due to regulations that hurt the people they're designed to help. I speak here of...Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, against discrimination based on race in the terms and conditions of employment. This sort of legislation has ambiguous economic consequences: Blacks who find jobs will receive some protection against dismissal, but at the same time that protection will make employers, fearing litigation, more reluctant to hire black workers in the first place. One would therefore expect that once Title VII swept away the explicit racial classifications common in the United States before 1964, progress through employment discrimination laws would be slower than many hoped, which has been the case since 1975 or so. Rather than an overall improvement in black wage levels, the result of Title VII would be a higher variation in the income of black workers, with the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer, which seems to be part of the trend. [...]
[T]he voluntary efforts of universities, corporations, and foundations put affirmative action on the map. These programs went far beyond the color-blind commands of the civil rights laws. In their 1998 book The Shape of the River, William Bowen and Derek Bok argue that such efforts did by and large achieve their goal of bringing capable black students into the social mainstream. (See "Unexplored Tributaries," February 1999, for my rejoinder.) One need not accept that argument, which has a shaky empirical foundation, to believe that private institutions should be free to do as they please in this area, within the context of their own purposes and budgets. Universities are in the business of organizing cross-subsidies. Their separate and decentralized activities will not be narrowly atomistic. Freed of external political pressures, they are far more likely to produce sensible social outcomes than any ham-handed state mandate on affirmative action. [...]
[D]ecentralized social institutions offer the greatest prospect for improving race relations. The Civil Rights Acts were important in securing the demise of Jim Crow, but those laws have long since outlived their usefulness in the regulation of private behavior in competitive markets. Now we need a return to freedom.
Glenn Garvin, March 2002:
Nothing was more problematic [for Barry Goldwater] than the civil rights issue -- particularly the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which outlawed most forms of racial discrimination. Goldwater was no racist; early in his career as a Phoenix city council member, he aggressively supported local civil rights ordinances. But as his conservatism deepened, he grew first skeptical and then fearful about the use of government for social engineering. "You cannot pass a law that will make me like you--or you like me," Goldwater told one rally. "That is something that can only happen in our hearts." He understood, too, that government-mandated affirmative action was merely the flip side of segregationist racialism: "It reintroduces through the back door the very principle of allocation by race that makes compulsory segregation morally wrong and offensive to freedom." And, that, to Barry Goldwater, was the bottom line. "Our aim, as I understand it, is neither to establish a segregated society nor to establish an integrated society," he said. "It is to preserve a free society."
Goldwater was privately appalled to discover that his opposition to the Civil Rights Act rallied to his side not only libertarians but racists who detested and feared not state power but black people. He was horrified when Alabama's racist Gov. George Wallace offered to switch parties and run as his vice president. Goldwater eventually became so paranoid about the influx of racists to his campaign that he worried that a summer riot in Harlem had been secretly instigated by his supporters in hopes of generating a white backlash vote.
More Reason on the Civil Rights Act here.
Salon: "Libertarianism is juvenile," "stupid," "silly," "bratty"
Over at the publication famous for (among other impressive accomplishments) having a political columnist write about licking doorknobs at Gary Bauer's campaign headquarters, Gabriel Winant uses the Rand Paul/Civil Rights Act controversy as a teaching moment about the irredeemable immaturity of libertarianism. Sample:
It's not just that he screwed up and said something stupid because he's so committed to a purist fancy. No, it's worse than that. Libertarianism itself is what's stupid here, not just Paul. We should stop tip-toeing around this belief system like its adherents are the noble last remnants of a dying breed, still clinging to their ancient, proud ways.
Now, to be clear, before continuing: there are legions of brilliant individual libertarians. [Dave] Weigel himself, for example, is a great writer and reporter, and a true master of Twitter. We've never met, but by all accounts, he's also very much a stand-up fellow. But brilliant, decent people can think silly things. And that's what's going on here. It's time to stop taking libertarianism seriously. [...]
Think about the New Deal. Although libertarian ingrates will never admit it, without the reforms of the 1930s, there might not be private property left for them to complain about the government infringing on. Not many capitalist democracies could survive 25 percent unemployment, and it doesn't just happen by good luck. [...]
The government didn't just help make the "free market" in the first place -- although it did do that. It's also constantly busy trimming around the edges, maintaining the thing, keeping it healthy. The state can think ahead and balance competing interests in a way that no single company can. [...]
The libertarian who insists that the state has no place beyond basic night-watchman duties is like a teenager who, having been given a car, promptly starts demanding the right to stay out all night. Sometimes, someone else really is looking out for your best interests by saying no.
And that's why the best rap on libertarians isn't that they're racist, or selfish. (Though some of them are those things, and their beliefs encourage both bad behaviors, even if accidentally.) It's that they're thoroughly out of touch with reality. It's a worldview that prospers only so long as nobody tries it, and is too unreflective and self-absorbed to realize this. In other words, it's bratty. And that's bad enough.
As a longtime if lapsed fan of Salon, who I've both written about and for multiple times over the years (including a piece in 2005 encouraging then-wilderness Democrats to embrace their inner libertarian, proving once again that no one loves libertarians more–and more shallowly–than the major party out of power), I must express my deep chagrin that the Frisco kids have now officially rejected brattiness. Good luck with that job hunt, Havrilesky!
As for the main argument here–that libertarians and their policy preferences are "out of touch with reality"–the same could be said, at minimum, of Glenn Greenwald's principled fight against ever-expanding executive power, and Salon's long-running critique of the War on Drugs. (Each of those categories of government abuse, by the way, are often defended precisely on grounds that "someone else really is looking out for your best interests by saying no.") When reality is unconscionable, and you are an opinion-journalism outfit with principles (or just a human with a functional spine), you tilt at the goddamned windmills, without first vetting it through a reality check.
I will let our commenters take a swing at Winant's curious grasp of economic history–you really need to read the whole thing to bask in the sophistication. (Sample sentence: "To summarize very briefly a long and complicated process, we got capitalism in the first place through a long process of flirtation between governments on the one hand, and bankers and merchants on the other, culminating in the Industrial Revolution.")
Instead, I'll close with this: The "worldview" of libertarianism suggested, back in the early 1970s, that if you got the government out of the business of setting all airline ticket prices and composing all in-flight menus, then just maybe Americans who were not rich could soon enjoy air travel. At the time, people with much more imagination and pull than Gabriel Winant has now dismissed the idea as unrealistic, out-of-touch fantasia. They were wrong then, they continue to be wrong now about a thousand similar things, and history does not judge them harsh enough.
New at Reason: David Harsanyi on Net Neutrality
As there is no real problem with the Internet,
it's not surprising that some of our top minds have been working
diligently on a solution. The Federal Communications Commission,
for instance, has been working diligently on something called "net
neutrality." It may sound wonderfully fair, writes David Harsanyi,
but the reality is that net neutrality makes as much sense as
mandating that tricycle riders have the same rights and privileges
as cars and trucks on our roads.
Charles Krauthammer and Bill O'Reilly on the Columbia, Missouri SWAT Raid Video
A couple of years ago, I had a telling IM exchange with an aspiring young conservative pundit. (I like the guy personally, so I'm not going to mention his name.) He had just gone on a cable network and said some things about an issue in the news that were completely wrong. So I sent him some links that showed why he was wrong. He thanked me and replied, "One of the really hard things about being a journalist is going on TV to talk about things you're not really read up on."
Well, no. That's one of the "really hard" things about being a hack. I really loathe this about cable news. They bring in the same personalities to talk what's going on in the news. It doesn't matter if those personalities have the slightest idea what they're talking about. They're on TV not because they have specialized knowledge about a given story, but because they're talented at applying standard partisan talking points to a wide variety of issues. And now, Dick Morris will talk about the Federal Reserve. Joining us to explain what the drug war violence in Mexico means to you, here's Democratic strategist Bob Beckell. Their job is to tell the portion of the audience that already agrees with them what the audience already thinks it knows. Everyone is stupider for it.
What the hell does Charles Krauthammer know about the drug war? He knows he's in favor of it. That seems to be about it. What does he know about the increasingly militaristic way the drug war is being waged? Judging by this video, absolutely nothing.
As I explained in a column a couple weeks ago, this wasn't a "botched raid." It was a routine raid. The police got the correct house. They found the guy they were after. They arrested him. No one was killed. Most of these raids don't turn up huge stashes of drugs or weapons. Most result in misdemeanor charges. If Krauthammer finds the Missouri SWAT raid video "harrowing and horrible," he ought to find the drug war "harrowing and horrible." Because the images in that video are typical of how we're fighting it.
FCC Paves the Way For More Wireless Regulation
As expected, yesterday's FCC report on the state of wireless competition declined to label the industry competitive. It does not go so far as to explicitly label the industry uncompetitive; instead it avoids making an explicit call. Some reports are calling this a "neutral stance." But given the contrast with the industry's 2008 report, which explicitly labeled the industry "effectively competitive," the agency's decision to avoid labeling the industry competitive constitutes a strong suggestion—and probably an implicit judgment—that it's not.
Why the change? In a statement about the report, Commissioner Genachowski said it's an effort to avoid making a "simplistic" yes or no conclusion. But it seems fairly clear that it's intended to pave the way for increased regulation. Page five of the report, for example, explains that its purpose is to provide "data that can form the basis for inquiries into whether policy levers could produce superior outcomes." [bold added] Translation: It's a preemptive excuse for FCC intervention.
New at Reason: Radley Balko on the Subversive Vending Machine
From our June issue, Senior Editor Radley Balko
celebrates the liberatory history of automated commerce.
Green Jobs Destroy Good Jobs
An
op/ed in today's Investors Business Daily is reporting
that yet more studies that show that subsidizing "green" jobs
destroys good jobs:
A Spanish economics professor said attempts by his country to create a green economy would fail. Now a Spanish government report confirms his findings, blunting claims that the professor's report was biased.
The professor, Gabriel Calzada Alvarez of Juan Carlos University in Madrid, produced a 41-page study last year on the European experiment of going full bore on the conservation front. He found that "the Spanish/EU-style 'green jobs' agenda now being promoted in the U.S. in fact destroys jobs."
For every green job created by the Spanish government, Alvarez found that 2.2 jobs were destroyed elsewhere in the economy because resources were directed politically and not rationally, as in a market economy.
"The loss of jobs could be greater if you account for the amount of lost industry that moves out of the country due to higher energy prices," the professor told the press.
Alvarez's findings, of course, were rejected by the environmental left, which tried to smear him as a stooge of the oil industry.
But inconveniently for the eco-conscious, his results have been backed up by Carlo Stagnaro and Luciano Lavecchia, a couple of researchers from the Italian think tank Istituto Bruno Leoni.
They found that in Italy, the losses were worse than they were in Spain: Each green job cost 6.9 jobs in the industrial sector and 4.8 jobs across the entire economy.
"Green investments are an ineffective policy for job creation," they say in their report. Despite the other merits of investments in new energy, "to the extent that the 'green deal' is aimed at creating employment or purported as anti-crisis or stimulus policy, it is a wrong policy choice."
Even more inconvenient for the environmental left is a study by the Spanish government. This leaked document supports the Alvarez report. The green lobby can't claim bias in this analysis because the Zapatero administration that compiled it is a socialist government that sees windmills when more rational people see dragons.
If you're interested in more info, see also my The Green Jobs Delusion and my post on the Spanish solar power bust.
Go here for the whole op/ed.
L.A. Loses Deep-Fryer, 45 Percent of Items Purchased With Taxpayer Funds
In
budget-crunched L.A., a new report finds that
45 percent of items purchased with taxpayer dollars have gone
missing [PDF].
(Los Angeles) – City Controller Wendy Greuel released an audit today showing that
* Of 254 items that we attempted to locate, 115 were not where they should have been. While 56 items were ultimately found in the wrong location, 59 were unable to be located at a cost of $938,000.
various City departments could not locate hundreds of items purchased with taxpayer
funds, and that hundreds of other items had been sitting unopened or unused for up to 7
years....
—Some of the items that were never found included a video recorder purchased by ITA for almost $60,000.
* Departments are supposed to conduct a physical inventory of items every two years to maintain accurate physical inventories of equipment. ITA and Sanitation have not conducted a review in at least 5 years and Recreation and Parks has not conducted a review of all items in at least 7 years.
* ITA and Recreation and Parks have 138 items that were purchased at least 1 year ago, still in warehouses or staging areas. These items are worth $237,000, and some were purchased over 7 years ago.
—Some of the items not placed into service included 9 microwaves, 1 deep fryer and 2 television sets by the Recreation and Parks Department and various computer equipment by ITA.
All this is a state and a city and a country that are totally out of money!
Reason Morning Links: Now Featuring the Hot Political Debates of 1964
• The Senate passes a financial regulation bill.
• Dennis Blair resigns as national intelligence director.
• Germany joins the Euro bailout.
• Rand Paul now says he would have voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
• The House wants to extend a national DNA database by taking samples from people arrested but not convicted of crimes.
• Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer?
New at Reason: Friday Funnies
In the latest edition of Friday Funnies, Chip Bok
wonders what happens if you cross a car salesman with a
politician.
Teh Internets Saved His Tongue!
John Stossel's show tonight on Fox Business was all about free speech. It included segments with great friends of Reason John Stagliano and Judge Andrew Napolitano, arguing that speech and thoughts consumed in private are nobody's goddamn business (Stagliano, the Fellini of Fetish, is facing a 32-year sentence for distributing porn videos to folks willing to pay for the privilege of watching them).
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, author of the excellent memoir Infidel and the new Nomad (haven't read the latter yet) and subject of a fascinating (and contentious) Reason interview was also on, talking about how the thug's veto of free speech can never be allowed.
And Ezra Levant appeared too. As publisher of the Canadian journal The Western Standard, Levant published some of the Jyllands-Posten cartoons that caused the row that eventually led to Everybody Draw Mohammed Day. Levant wrote about his travails in Reason. Fifteen government officials spent 900 days investigaratin' him, at a cost of at least $500,00 (Canadian!) to the taxpayers in the Great White North and 100,000 clams (again Canadian!) to the Western Standard crew. All trying to prove that Levant and his pub had somehow broken the law via discussion of a contentious issue (guilty as charged!).
Here's a snippet from Levant's Reason account:
The Western Standard was prepared to debate our decision to run the cartoons, but voluntarily, in a process involving our subscribers (who enthusiastically agreed with our decision), our advertisers (who were nervous at first but ultimately supported us), and our distributors (most of whom stood with us and saw strong newsstand sales). In the edition following the one in which the cartoons appeared, we ran an extended letters section, with the entire spectrum of views represented, including a worried mother of a Canadian soldier in Afghanistan, a Muslim immigrant to Canada who said she wanted to get away from Shariah law, and nutcases who said I published the cartoons only because I was Jewish. That’s what a public debate in Canada looks like.
One of the points that Levant stresses is that new technologies allow for freedom of expression in ways no one really anticipates. A key part of his story (as the title to his Reason piece indicates) is that being able to document actions and tribunals in a decentralized way is a real game-changer when it comes to repressive state action. Think of it as Fox's Book of Martyrs 2.0. Here's a vid of Levant's inquisition by Canadian officials.
Go here for more vids that lay out the new ways in which government seeks to punish uncomfortable speech. Thankfully they failed this time around.
He's Gonna Get a Case of Wine...
Via Jeremylott.net comes this BBC interview with Sir (Dame?) Mick Jagger, musing on Internets piracy and all that:
I am quite relaxed about it [the tubes and downloading on the downlow]. But, you know, it is a massive change and it does alter the fact that people don't make as much money out of records.
But I have a take on that - people only made money out of records for a very, very small time. When The Rolling Stones started out, we didn't make any money out of records because record companies wouldn't pay you! They didn't pay anyone!
Then, there was a small period from 1970 to 1997, where people did get paid, and they got paid very handsomely and everyone made money. But now that period has gone.
So if you look at the history of recorded music from 1900 to now, there was a 25 year period where artists did very well, but the rest of the time they didn't.
Stossel on the First Amendment Tonight
John Stossel’s Fox Business program will dive into First Amendment issues with Ayaan Hirsi Ali tonight at 8 p.m. Eastern (re-airs at midnight). Stossel is also scheduled to discuss obscenity laws with filmmaker John Stagliano, who is facing up to 32 years in federal prison for distributing adult movies. Reason recently examined Stagliano's case in our "Should Obscenity Be Illegal?" video.
What You've Been Waiting For at Long Last...
We're pleased to announce the winner of our "Everybody Draw Mohammed" contest.
Click here to view the winning image. Do not click through if you are offended by graphical representations of the Prophet Mohammed.
New at Reason: Tim Cavanaugh on the Value of a Diploma
From our June issue, Contributing Editor Tim
Cavanaugh notes that Americans have always loved college and real
estate. So why do these assets need government support?
Iowa Gay Marriage Stats, One Year Out
Some stats from the first midwestern state to
legalize gay marriage, one year out:
Out-of-staters made up 60 percent of same-sex couples married in Iowa since the state began allowing such unions in April 2009, officials reported Tuesday.
The new report from the Iowa Department of Public Health says 2,020 same-sex marriages were recorded in Iowa from April 27, 2009, through March 31. Only 815 of the couples were from Iowa. The newly married included 199 gay couples from Illinois, 158 from Missouri and 111 from Nebraska.
Overall, 19,904 couples were married in Iowa during the time period. Of those, 2,020 were listed as "same gender" couples, 16,869 were listed as "opposite gender" and 1,015 were listed as "not stated."
Among gay couples getting married here, 728 were two men, and 1,292 were two women.
Polk County had the most gay marriages, with 484; Scott County had 238; Johnson County, 235; and Pottawattamie County, 222.
Via Mark Lambert, tipster king.
Rand Paul, Property Rights, and Racism
As Matt Welch noted earlier, Republican senatorial hopeful Rand Paul is taking heat for criticizing those sections of the 1964 Civil Rights Act that prohibit discrimination by private businesses. As Paul’s interview last night with MSNBC host Rachel Maddow indicates, many on the left see Paul’s libertarian position on this issue as a tacit endorsement of racism (or worse). As Maddow put it, “unless it's illegal, there's nothing to stop that—there's nothing under your world view to stop the country from re-segregating like we were before the Civil Rights Act of 1964.”
Of course, Paul was pretty clear that he supports the federal desegregation of public schools and the federal enforcement of voting rights, as well as most of the other provisions in the 1964 Civil Rights Act, so it’s unlikely we’ll see any wholesale re-segregating if his “world view” ever reaches the commanding heights. Maddow can rest easy.
But this controversy does raise the very important topic of the government’s central role in American racism. First and foremost, Jim Crow was a legal regime, one that relied on state and local laws to restrict the political, social, and economic liberty of African Americans. Those laws interfered with the right to vote, to acquire property, to contract, to travel, to associate, to marry, and to keep and bear arms. Under the 14th Amendment, state and local governments are forbidden from violating such rights. Yet as we all know, the courts only selectively enforced the 14th Amendment during the Jim Crow era. Indeed, the Supreme Court has yet to enforce the 14th Amendment when it comes to gun rights. But none of that changes the fact that we’re talking primarily about state action, not about some failure of the free market.
It’s also important to acknowledge that economic rights are not in some inherent conflict with civil rights. In fact, we have significant historical evidence showing that legally enforced property rights (and other forms of economic liberty) actually undermined the Jim Crow regime. Most famously, the NAACP won its first Supreme Court victory in 1917 by arguing that a residential segregation law was a racist interference with property rights under the 14th Amendment.
Finally, keep in mind that Plessy v. Ferguson, the notorious 1896 Supreme Court decision that enshrined “separate but equal” into law and become a symbol of the Jim Crow era, dealt with a Louisiana law that forbid railroad companies from selling first-class tickets to blacks. That’s not a market failure, it’s a racist government assault on economic liberty.
New at Reason: Brian Doherty on Rand Paul's Victory
Rand Paul's victory in the Kentucky Republican
primary for Senator is seen as a sign of political power for the
Tea Party and a new hope for libertarians. He even has the respect
of some prominent progressives. But as Brian Doherty writes, what
does a politican beloved by both Ron Paul and Sarah Palin really
stand for? And is he a hardworking outlier or the shape of things
to come for American politics?
First Man-Made Genome Boots Up
Today, the journal Science is announcing
that researchers at the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) have
created the first genome from scratch, uploaded it into a bacterium
and it works. The Science press release explains:
Scientists have developed the first cell controlled by a synthetic genome. They now hope to use this method to better understand the basic machinery driving all life and to engineer bacteria specially outfitted for fuel production, for example, or environmental cleanup. The research team has already chemically synthesized a bacterial genome, and they have transplanted the genome of one bacterium to another. Now, Daniel Gibson and colleagues have put both methods together, to create what they call a “synthetic cell,” although only its genome is synthetic. In this case, the synthetic genome was a copy of an existing genome, though with added DNA sequences that “watermark” the genome to distinguish it from a natural one. In the future, the scientists would like to design more novel genomes that would make bacteria capable of performing specific tasks that could help solve energy, environmental or other problems. The team first synthesized the genome of Mycoplasma mycoides, then transplanted it into Mycoplasma capricolum. The new genome “booted up” the recipient cells. Although fourteen genes were deleted or disrupted in the transplant bacteria, they still looked like normal M. mycoides bacteria and produced only M. mycoides proteins, the authors report. “If the methods described here can be generalized, design, synthesis , assembly and transplantation of synthetic chromosomes will no longer be a barrier to the progress of synthetic biology,” they write.
For more information on the research go to the JCVI site here.
Illinois: Where Recording On-Duty Cops Is Treated Like Sexual Assault
Last week, an Illinois judge rejected Chicago artist Christopher Drew's motion to dismiss the Class I felony charge against him. Drew is charged with violating the state's eavesdropping statute when he recorded his encounter with a police officer last December on the streets of Chicago. A Class I felony in Illinois is punishable by 4 to 15 years in prison. It's in the same class of crimes as sexual assault. Drew will be back in court in June to request a jury trial.
I'm currently working on a feature for Reason about man in a more rural part of the state charged with six violations of the same statute, all of them for making audio recordings of on-duty public officials. For several of the counts in that case, the police were actually on the man's property. He started recording his conversations with police because he felt he was being unjustly harassed for violating a town ordinance he thought was unconstitutional.
I'm of the opinion that it should always be legal to record on-duty police officers, both as a matter of policy and under the free speech, free press, and right to petition the government provisions in the First Amendment. We saw the power and potential of audio and video recording technology to expose government abuse in the Iranian protests last summer. But we also see it here in the U.S. with the thousands of police misconduct videos uploaded to YouTube in recent years.
Typically, police who want to arrest someone for recording them while on duty use a strained interpretation of state wiretapping laws or whatever state or local law addresses obstructing or interfering with law enforcement. These incidents are troubling enough, and I think state legislatures should consider passing laws explicitly making it legal to record on-duty law enforcement officials. Those laws should include remedies for people wrongly arrested, or who have had their cameras or cell phones illegally confiscated, damaged, or destroyed.
But in Illinois the situation is quite a bit worse. In Illinois it actually is illegal to make audio recordings of on-duty cops--or any other public official. Illinois is one of a handful of states that require all parties to consent before someone can record a conversation. But the other all-party-consent states also include a provision in their statutes stating that for there to be a violation of the law the nonconsenting party must have a reasonable expectation of privacy. On-duty police officers in public spaces have no such expectation.
Here's where it gets even worse: Originally, the Illinois eavesdropping law did also include a similar expectation of privacy provision. But the legislature stripped that provision out in 1994, and they did so in response to an incident in which a citizen recorded his interaction with two on-duty police officers. In other words, the Illinois legislature specifically intended to make it a Class I felony, punishable by up to 15 years in prison, to make an audio recording of an on-duty police officer without his permission.
Given the spate of recent stories about cops in Chicago caught on video misbehaving (some of whom were subsequently held accountable only because of the video), the legislature's already-awful-when-it-passed 1994 amendment hasn't aged well.
I suspect most state officials know this law is unconstitutional. While several people have been charged under the statute for recording public officials, I've so far been unable to find anyone who was actually convicted, much less had a conviction upheld. (If you know of someone who has, please email me!) Prosecutors tend to either drop the charges or offer a plea bargain before the case gets to trial. It isn't difficult to see why someone would take a misdemeanor plea and a clean record instead of challenging a bad law and risking up to 15 years in prison and a felony record if they lose.
Before Drew the closest anyone came to challenging the law came in 2004, when documentary filmmaker Patrick Thompson was arrested for recording police interactions with patrons outside of bars and restaurants in Champaign-Urbana. He was looking to document allegations that police were treating white patrons differently than black patrons. (See the ACLU's brief on Thompson's behalf here). But Thompson took a plea bargain before his case went to trial.
So the law remains on the books. Which Illinois police officers remain authorized by state law to detain, arrest, and jail people who record them while on-duty, and they can continue to confiscate the recordings.
(Cross-posted at Instapundit.)
UPDATE/CORRECTION: Eugene Volokh emails to say that Massachusetts also doesn't appear to recognize an expectation of privacy exception to its all-party-consent law, and has upheld a conviction for recording on-duty police officers.
New at Reason: John Stossel on Asset Forfeiture Laws
In America, we're supposed to be innocent until
proven guilty. Life, liberty, and property can't be taken from you
unless you're convicted of a crime. But as John Stossel writes,
thanks to asset forfeiture laws the police can seize the property
of innocent people.
Rand Paul Defends Opposition to Civil Rights Act's Prohibitions on Private Discrimination
About one second or so after Rand Paul won the GOP primary in Kentucky's Senate race, the liberal commentariat began painting him as a lunatic and possibly racist creep, using as prime evidence his recent statements in opposition to the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act. Over at the Washington Post, Reason Contributing Editor David Weigel defends Paul, and posts video and excerpts from a remarkable and frank exchange the Tea Party-backed candidate had last night with Rachel Maddow. Well worth a gander.
Read our feature on Paul's campaign here.
Reason Writers Around Town: Shikha Dalmia on France's Anti-Burqa Jihad
In her latest Forbes column, Senior Analyst Shikha Dalmia defends the burqa from fellow athesists such as Christopher Hitchens who are cheering French efforts to ban it. Dalmia notes that their arguments betray more affinity than they realize with the religious tendencies that secularism is supposed to transcend:
This becomes obvious when one compares their attitude toward the burqa to that of India's secularists, few of whom would ever dream of banning it.
Why does France feel the need to do this?
It's not like burqas are a huge problem in the country. Although estimates vary, Muslims constitute less than 10% of the French population and no more than 2,000 of them sport burqas. This means most French folks can comfortably go through life without ever encountering a burqa-clad woman. By contrast, India has nearly 140 million Muslims--or 13.4% of its population--and millions of them sport burqas, making it hard to go a few days without running into one...
Read the whole thing here.
A Climate Change Team B?
The
National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences
yesterday released a
three-part report on the science of climate change and
suggested policy responses with the aim of mitigating and adapting
to its effects. The NRC report dealing with climate science
concludes:
Climate change is occurring, is caused largely by human activities, and poses significant risks for—and in many cases is already affecting—a broad range of human and natural systems.
The report then cites a lot of evidence for this conclusion while noting that there are some outstanding research questions that need to be further refined:
Scientific understanding of climate change and its interactions with other environmental changes is underpinned by empirical and theoretical understanding of the Earth system, which includes the atmosphere, land surface, cryosphere, and oceans, as well as interactions among these components. Numerous decisions about climate change, including setting emissions targets and developing and implementing adaptation plans, rest on understanding how the Earth system will respond to GHG emissions and other climate forcings. While this understanding has improved markedly over the past several decades, a number of key uncertainties remain. These include the strength of certain forcings and feedbacks, the possibility of abrupt changes, and the details of how climate change will play out at local and regional scales over decadal and multidecadal timescales. While research on these topics cannot be expected to eliminate all of the uncertainties associated with Earth system processes (and uncertainties in future human actions will always remain), efforts to improve projections of climate and other Earth system changes can be expected to yield more robust and more relevant information for decision making, as well as a better characterization of remaining uncertainties.
Naturally, these reports all urgently call for further research funding. (I suspect that there has never been an NAS report that did not urgently call for further research funding.) One idea from the report that merits some consideration is the establishment of an integrated climate observing system. This would provide data that would not only show the pace of warming, but is vital for helping to validate the climate models upon whose outputs policymakers may wager vast sums in an attempt to avoid deleterious climate change.
A truly bad idea from the report is:
Recommendation 5: A single federal interagency program or other entity should be given the authority and resources to coordinate and implement an integrated research effort that supports improving both understanding of and responses to climate change. If several key modifications are made, the U.S. Global Change Research Program could serve this role.
A top-down monopolistic climate science research effort would enforce (even unconsciously) groupthink. An intriguing idea to counter groupthink was offered at a Capitol Hill briefing by the Marshall Institute last week. Team B. Princeton University physicist William Happer, who also heads up the Institute, discussed his successful experience with the Team B process when he consulted on missile defense for the Department of Defense. In that case, the Team B experts killed off many flawed ideas that were being promoted by other sections of DOD.
With regard to climate change science, the idea is that a select group of climate researchers would be convened with the explicit goal of trying to poke holes in the analyses and conclusions of consensus climate science. Obviously, how to set up a climate change Team B requires careful thought, but it's likely that launching such a process would help avoid some of the intellectual pitfalls that are inherent in any monopoly, including scientific research monopolies.
Reason Morning Links: Financial Reform Hits Senate Roadblock, Pakistan Blocks the Internet, Immigration and Crime
- Gulf oil spill hits Louisiana wetlands.
- Financial reform bill stalls in the Senate.
- Mortgage delinquencies, foreclosures at record highs.
- The Washington Post looks at Wikileaks.
- Pakistan government blocks most of the Internet for Draw Mohammed Day.
- More evidence debunking the alleged link between immigration and crime.
New at Reason: Steve Chapman on Striking a Balance Between Conservative and Liberal Legal Theories
Making sense of the Constitution is not a matter
of simple equations, as Justice Clarence Thomas would suggest, nor
of following one's own desires, as Justice Anthony Kennedy seems to
believe, writes Steve Chapman. Judges have to be guided by the
past, with a full understanding of the present.
Because Britons Were Such Responsible Drinkers Before the Law
In 2003, the Labour-controlled
parliament in the United Kingdom passed the Licensing Act, allowing
pubs to potentially stay open 24 hours, provided they could
convince a local licensing board that an open-all-night
establishment wouldn't cause social unrest. For those who spent
time in England prior to the legislation (or just after the
outbreak of World War I), you will recall the 11pm last orders
which resulted in short sessions of furious drinking and the
traditional "lock in." The Telegraph reports
that, under the new ConDem government, those days might be
returning:
Theresa May, the Home Secretary, said she is determined to examine problems created by the ''binge-drinking culture'', including street violence and other crimes.
Speaking at the Police Federation conference, she said she opposed the 2003 Licensing Act when it was introduced by the previous administration.
Questioned by a police officer in the audience about the problems caused by heavy drinking, Mrs May confirmed that a review is under way.
She said: ''We are going to look at the licensing laws. I was in opposition when the new laws were introduced and I argued against them.
''I argued that those were the sorts of problems that would come about but I was told we would have a cafe culture. We think they have produced problems on the streets.
Denial of the Day
The British Royal Navy "does not maintain any form of central repository of information purely devoted to sea monsters."
Because the Key to Wireless Competition is More Bureaucracy
If the FCC is to pursue "jurisdiction over everything," what's next on its list? How about the wireless industry?
Tomorrow, the FCC will release yet another report on the state of the U.S. wireless industry. Its last report, in 2008, reported that the industry is competitive—a conclusion I agree with. It's not yet known how tomorrow's report, which will rely on data collected in 2008, will read. But if the report were to decline to label the industry competitive, as multiple industry-connected sources I've spoken to believe is likely, it would almost certainly signal that the agency is intent on clearing the way to impose a wireless version of the Net neutrality regulations that have been giving it so much trouble recently.
It's pos
sible to make a reasonable argument that
the country's wireline broadband industry is insufficiently competitive
(though that doesn't make regulation necessary). But contrary to
the constant protestations of folks like Columbia
University's Tim Wu, the wireless phone market, while certainly
imperfect, is far from short on competition.
By at least one measure, the U.S. market is the least concentrated in the OECD. Other reports make strong cases that innovation is thriving. And according to CTIA, an industry group representing wireless companies, the U.S. wireless market services more than 600 devices and is one of only two countries with more than five wireless providers.
Some of those are industry-provided figures, so feel free to take them with a grain of salt. But I think when it comes to the basic question—do wireless-industry customers lack choice of devices, networks, or applications?—the answer is pretty clear: No. And part of the reason, particularly when it comes to devices, is that competition has already worked.
When wireless Net neutrality first became an issue in 2007, Wu wrote a paper that focused on the then-new iPhone. He suggested that Apple's exclusive contract with AT&T was a reason to impose a rule that would require all carriers to open up their networks to any device. And, he argued, doing so would spur innovation amongst device makers who could be assured that their devices wouldn't be limited to a single network.
But what he missed was that allowing
carriers to cut exclusive deals with phone makers would
create incentives for carrier/device-maker partnerships to
create new phones. And that's arguably a big part of the reason why
consumers now have a fleet of high-end smartphone alternatives to
the iPhone. After the success of Apple and AT&T, both carriers
and device-makers wanted a must-have smartphone of their own.
Are there legitimate gripes about wireless service providers? Absolutely. There are weeks when I'm pretty sure my AT&T-connected iPhone drops more calls than it doesn't. But, thanks in large part to increased mobile web access and speed, I'm far happier with my wireless service now than I was a few years ago—which may help explain why overall wireless customer satisfaction ratings are on their way up. I think if anything, what the last few years have demonstrated is that although the wireless market is imperfect, it can and will improve—and without FCC meddling .
Last summer, I noted early indications that the FCC might be pursuing wireless Net neutrality.
New at Reason: Radley Balko on Pre-Crime Policing
From our June issue, Senior Editor Radley Balko
reports on a troubling case from Oregon where a SWAT team was
called in to arrest a man and seize his legally purchased guns, all
for a crime that no one committed.
Senate Financial Reform Voting, Annotated for Your Protection
The Senate is voting on whether to limit debate and amendments to the financial reform bill right now. Go watch the roll call with the Sunlight Foundation folks, who are annotating the vote with info about campaign contributions and personal asset statements, and offering handy explainer chats for those not in the habit of watching CSPAN for fun.
Read more about the bill here and here.
UPDATE: 57 votes for cloture. Motion fails. The debate continues.
UPDATE 2: Nope. They're voting again!
UPDATE 3: Nope again. More yammering and then a quorum call.
Top FCC Staffer Says Commissioner Copps "would love to have jurisdiction over everything."
What's the proper role of the FCC? According to Jennifer Schneider, FCC Commissioner Michael Copps' Legal Adviser, her boss would "love to have jurisdiction over everything." She let the cat out of the bag at the NCTA's 2010 Cable Show last week:
Here's a transcript of her answer, lightly edited for
clarity:
"Well, I think Commissioner Copps would love to have jurisdiction over everything (laughter)....but he knows that's not really what the FCC is here for. Right now we're focusing on this Title I/Title II issue. When it comes to the Internet, and what rides over the Internet, we understand that it's still young. The industry is still trying to find business models that work. And we certainly don't want to interfere with that. Ultimately, though, the concern is with the consumer, so if/when things move along and there are issues, which I can't imagine happening anytime soon, someone will have to step in and I guess we'll have to wait and see if [it's] the FCC or some other agency or who knows..." [bold added]
Schneider's defense would no doubt be that it's just an off-handed remark, intended as something of a joke. And sure, she also backpedals fairly quickly by saying that Copps "knows that's not really what the FCC is here for." But it's also inadvertently revealing—a Kinsley gaffe, you might say, in which a political figure accidentally tells the truth. Copps, who has pushed to involve the FCC in everything from journalism to satellite TV service, and who has been the Commission's chief proponent of strong Net neutrality regulation, wants an FCC with few or no limits on its power. Even Schneider's placating remarks about not wanting to interfere with the still-young Net's development are followed by a prediction that once business models mature, "someone will have to step in." In other words, if Copps get his way, the FCC will leave the Internet alone for a little while, but with the implicit understanding that greater FCC control is on the way.
New at Reason: Jesse Walker on Facebook
As politicians and bureaucrats get
ready to regulate Facebook, Managing Editor Jesse Walker points out
that the company has much more to fear from the creative
destruction of the marketplace.
Defending the Project of Free Inquiry
One of my first and most disappointing attempts at writing in the Editorial Voice of the Los Angeles Times–an act roughly as improbable as Christopher Hitchens taking over L'Osservatore Romano–was a February 2006 editorial about the Danish Mohammed-cartoon controversy, under the headline "The Freedom to Blaspheme." While I was relieved that the finished product contained none of my colleagues' desire to criticize the Jyllands-Posten newspaper for being "irresponsible," and I was happy to make some libertianish points about how "a private newspaper's editorial judgment is not the government's business" and that judging news content "by the standard of how much offense it gives" is "a surefire path toward self-censorship," there was a hostage note embedded in the penultimate sentence:
For our part, The Times has not reprinted these insensitive images, even as a means of shedding light on the controversy in Europe.
Behind those 23 words was a long and passionate argument about free expression and journalistic responsibility, one that I obviously lost.
Even though it meant depriving their customers of a chance to see and judge for themselves what all the fuss was about, America's newsrooms almost unanimously refused to reprint even a single one of the 12 allegedly offensive cartoons (which you can view at the far-out radical site Wikipedia, for starters). As Tim Cavanaugh aptly put it later, most readers would have looked at the images, "which are at about the artistic level of Asterix," and be "dumbfounded that anybody could commit murder over them." That, Cavanaugh said, "is the story." And it's one U.S. newspapers refused to tell.
Though I never expected the L.A. Times newsroom to show either backbone or a basic respect for readers, I held out higher hopes for the autonomous Editorial Page, where I worked. My three-pronged argument in the ensuing discussion was essentially utilitarian: 1) If the newsroom shirks its duty, all the more reason why we should pick up the slack. 2) The Prophet Mohammed actually lived. He isn't some Noah's Ark-type fable that requires suspension of disbelief; they were writing biographies of the guy before the first millenium. It is unconscionable that–under murderous duress!–those in the free speechin' business would suddenly cede the authority to depict a really existing historical figure to a loud minority's religious preferences. If the Church of Scientology tomorrow declared all depictions of L. Ron Hubbard verboten, and backed up the prohibition with just enough car-burning and death-threats to keep people on their toes, would the L.A. Times and 99 percent of American newspapers comply with the command? As Tim Cavanaugh pointed out in 2006, and as you can see at the Mohammed Image Archive, there is a rich tradition of Muslim depictions of the Prophet. What's more–and this point can never be stressed enough–three of the images that enraged Muslims to the point of killing 10 people were never published in any Danish newspaper. Their exact provenance is unknown, but they were circulated and popularized by the outrage-ginning Imams themselves. The most offended were arguably the biggest offenders.
And 3) by reprinting one of the cartoons, we would be demonstrating solidarity not with the sentiments contained within it, but with the foundational notion that people ought to be able to publish stuff like that (and worse), period, let alone without fear of having their heads lopped off.
Terrorism and self-censorship are both
self-fulfilling prophecies. If you allow yourself to be terrorized,
then everything looks scary, the ground is softened for restricting
freedom, and the bad guys win. When nearly every respectable news
outlet decides at the same time that a certain piece of content is
just too offensive, too irresponsible, too dangerous to publish,
then the next time around you can go ahead and take out the
"nearly." The always-booming
anti-defamation industry is nothing if not hyper-attuned to
tactical retreats by the target media. When squeaky wheels get
grease, they squeak louder next time, ennobled by the
self-censorious ways of what Reason
contributor Jonathan Rauch famously described as the "kindly
inquisitors."
If,
on the other hand, those of us committed to speech-expansion and
the broader project of liberalism do not reward bullies,
do not give in to the fear that crude cartooning is a dog whistle
for suicide bombers, and instead spread the risk far beyond a
handful of moderately spineful European newspapers and a couple of
children's-show animators, the prophecy loses traction in an
instant, and maybe starts heading in the other direction. If people
who threaten violence on cartoonists are treated not with fear but
with outright mockery, and produce as a direct result of their
actions not a cowed and silent respect for their fervor but an
epidemic of giggling and a global WTF, maybe they'll be
less incentivized to repeat the threat next time around. Meanwhile,
the rest of us, with our now-broader parameters of acceptable
discourse, will be able to get on with the tasks of modernity and
prosperity, a process that the great science writer Matt Ridley has
described as relying above all else on "ideas having sex." (Look
for an excerpt from
Ridley's new book on that topic in the July issue of
Reason.) Ideas can't have sex if they're wearing
chastity–or suicide–belts. As Rauch wrote in the intro of a book
you should
buy and read today,
A very dangerous principle is now being established as a social right: Thou shalt not hurt others with words. This principle is a menace–and not just to civil liberties. At bottom it threatens liberal inquiry–that is, science itself.
As a person first, American second, journalist third, and libertarian fourth, I feel quadruply duty-bound to expand the legal and societal scope of free inquiry, especially within the places I call home: North America and Europe. As Spiked-Online writer (and Reason contributor) Brendan O'Neill (who is against "Draw Mohammed Day") correctly points out, "it is not barbarians at the gates but institutions inside the gates that have denigrated Enlightenment values." It was Canadian do-gooders who hauled magazine editor Ezra Levant on human rights violation charges for reprinting eight of the original Danish cartoons, a process Levant wrote about for Reason last year. It is French would-be truth-tellers who have made denial of the Armenian genocide a crime. The West has largely gone wobbly on speech, and confronting that is a core part of our magazine's mission.
At the L.A. Times these arguments lost out to one main consideration: We don't know what sets these people off, so who are we to play with fire by gratuitously inflaming them with crudely provocative art? Or in the case of Comedy Central these days, with something so offense-less as discussion about the controversy?
This
well-intended paternalism is where the argument gets a bit personal
for me. What kind of undifferentiated mass of simmering,
modernity-hating humans have we allowed ourselves to believe the
world's billion-plus Muslims have become? I've known three Muslims
well in my lifetime. The first was a semi-notorious,
trenchcoat-wearing ethnic Albanian Macedonian video pirate, with a
frequently illegal smile and a heart of gold. He was fond of
upbraiding Americans like me for failing to appreciate the genius
that is Giant Sand. The
second was that dude's best friend, yet 100% different–a practicing
Muslim and chain-smoking teetotaler, who also looked like Nick Cave
even more than he insisted on listening to the ultra-violent
"O'Malley's
Bar" over and over again. Had about a thousand college degrees,
spoke even more languages, and talked almost exclusively in the
dialect of
Pulp Fiction. The third was an assholish Bosnian
refugee who stayed with me for a while, making fantastical claims
about his family's influence back home while hatching unreasonable
plots about becoming the next Bill Gates. He ended up emigrating to
the States, and becoming a successful software guy. Each was
totally different than the other, richly profane, thoroughly versed
in pop culture. That is to say, they were individuals, each with
their own agency (even during the hardship of war), and downright
enthusiastic about the rough give-and-take between cultures,
religions, nationalities, and music fanbases. I would no more
consider protecting their delicate sensibilities from images of the
Prophet than they would refrain from calling me and other Americans
dull-witted beasts.
We are having an Everyone Draw Mohammed Contest tomorrow not to gratuitously insult my old pals or any other practitioners of a richly diverse religion, we are doing it as a simple declaration that depiction and caricaturization is within the bounds of acceptable discourse, that nobody owns the images of historical figures, and that free-speech backsliding in the West ultimately threatens all of us much more than isolated acts of semi-suicidal bravado from the pathologically aggrieved. I refuse to believe we are sharing the planet with 1 billion sleeper agents, ready to be activated by a cartoonist's pen.
Tune in tomorrow to see what we come up with.
Note: Due to past experience and the limitations of managerial time, comments on this post are closed. Send concerns/reaction to matt-dot-welch-at-reason-dot-com.
Distorting Elena Kagan's Second Amendment Record
Doug Kendall, president of the liberal Constitutional Accountability Center, has a long post explaining why conservative legal activist Ken Klukowski is wrong about Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan and the Second Amendment. At issue is a recent Townhall column where Klukowski asserted that Kagan’s “shocking” decision as solicitor general not to file a brief in the gun rights case McDonald v. Chicago reveals Kagan’s deep hostility to the Second Amendment. Yet as Kendall explains:
I joined McDonald’s lead counsel, Alan Gura, in a meeting with General Kagan and her staff to ask the Solicitor General to file a brief in support of McDonald and incorporation, against the City of Chicago....
I think the federal government does have a very important interest in making sure that constitutional rights, including the Second Amendment, apply against the states in the same manner that they apply against the federal government. I urged the United States to take that position. But I was not surprised—given the tradition of [the solicitor general] not weighing in on incorporation cases, the fact that the United States was not a party, and the fact that this case originated from Chicago—that the United States chose to stay on the sidelines. General Kagan gave us an entirely fair opportunity to state our case, and the decision by her office to refrain from filing a friend-of-the-court brief in this case tells us nothing meaningful about Kagan’s views on the Second Amendment.
Kagan decided not to file a brief in a case where the federal government had no direct interest and where there was no federal law at stake. It's really quite a stretch to equate this with hostility to the Second Amendment.
Besides, as Kendall notes, Klukowski has his own record of constitutional infidelity to answer for:
Finally, it bears noting that Klukowski himself filed a brief in McDonald assailing Mr. McDonald’s primary and strongest textual argument for incorporation: the argument that the Court should incorporate the Second Amendment into the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Mr. Klukowski supports his argument against incorporating in the manner intended by the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment out of policy concerns. In this breathless piece in the Washington Times, Klukowski argued that restoring the original meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment could lead to the “unhinging of the American culture.” Thus, if anyone undermined the constitutional basis for incorporation in McDonald, it’s not Elena Kagan, it is Ken Klukowski himself.
For more on the debate over the Chicago gun case and the 14th Amendment, see here and here.
(Via Josh Blackman)
Attn DC-Area Freedom Fighters: Join Matt Ridley and Ronald Bailey at CEI Thursday, May 20!
Please
join the Competitive Enterprise
Institute and Reason for a cocktail reception to honor
the publication of
The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves, by
acclaimed science writer Matt Ridley. The event will take place on
Thursday, May 20 from 6 – 8 PM at the Competitive Enterprise
Institute’s Washington, DC office.
Reason Science Correspondent Ronald Bailey will introduce Matt Ridley, who will make brief remarks about his new book and field audience questions. Ron and Matt will both stick around to continue the discussion over drinks throughout the evening.
What: Cocktail reception for Matt Ridley’s new book The Rational Optimist
When: Thursday, May 20 from 6 – 8PM
Where: The Competitive Enterprise Institute at 1899 L Street, NW, 12th Floor
Go here to learn more about Matt Ridley and The Rational Optimist.
Space is limited and RSVPs are required. Please send an email to events@reason.com or call Reason’s DC office at 202-986-0916 to reserve your space.
New at Reason: David Harsanyi on the Liberal Case for Enlightened Despotism
"One-party autocracy certainly has its
drawbacks," says liberal New York Times columnist Thomas
Friedman. "But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of
people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages." Yet
as David Harsanyi writes, some form or another of Friedman's
rationale has been used in nearly every embryonic dictatorship.
Now, if only Venezuela and Sudan funded more solar farms, Friedman
could embrace their progressive forms of governance as well.
Truthdig: "Who's Afraid of Rand Paul?"
Lefty-journalist warhorse Robert Scheer cheers last night's Randslide:
Count me as one lefty liberal who is not the least bit unhappy with the victory by Rand Paul in Kentucky's Republican primary for the U.S. Senate. Not because it might make it easier for some Democratic Party hack to win in the general, but rather because he seems to be a principled libertarian in the mold of his father, Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, and we need more of that impulse in the Congress. What's wrong with cutting back big government that mostly exists to serve the interests of big corporations? Surely it would be better if that challenge came from populist progressives of the left, in the Bernie Sanders mold, but this is Kentucky we're talking about.
Rand Paul, like his dad, is worthy of praise for standing in opposition to the Wall Street bailout, which will come to be marked as the greatest swindle in U.S. history and which was, as he noted on his website, an unconstitutional redistribution of income in favor of the undeserving rich [...]
Heresy, I know, but it is only thanks to Ron Paul, the father and hopefully the mentor of the potential Kentucky senator, that we got a congressional mandate to audit the Fed’s role in the banking bailout. How bad could it be to have another irascible Paul in the Congress?
Whole thing here.
UPDATE: Andrew Sullivan has a rich sampling of reaction here (thanks to reader Ray Eckhart for the tip).
NYPD Whistleblower Says He Was Forcibly Admitted to Psych Ward
On Monday, I wrote about NYPD whistle-blower Adrian Schoolcraft, who recorded hundreds of conversations and roll call meetings at his precinct in Brooklyn. The recordings supported prior allegations that NYPD is encouraging its officers to harass New Yorkers with "stop and frisk" encounters and bogus arrests while encouraging the same officers to downgrade actual crimes, or not report them at all.
Schoolcraft's recordings were first brought to light earlier this month in an ongoing series of reports by the Village Voice, but the NYPD officer had been sounding alarms internally at the department for months.
Yesterday, former Newsday police columnist Len Levitt reported a distrubing addition to the story:
Schoolcraft has already paid a price for speaking out. As in the old Soviet Union, police forcibly took him to Jamaica Hospital last October, where, he says, he was kept against his will inside the psychiatric ward for six days.
He landed there last Halloween night after the NYPD came to his home in Queens and ordered him back to work after he says he fell ill and left his tour of duty an hour early.
When he refused to return, officers called Emergency Medical Service, which determined he had high blood pressure, then transported him to Jamaica Hospital, where he ended up in the psych ward - hardly the usual place for treating blood pressure problems.
His father Larry says the hospital has refused to release the records of his son's stay, including the name of the admitting doctor.
Levitt says the hospital is now going over Schoolcraft's records again, and will release them to him by the end of the week.
Is It a "Contribution" When the Government Forces Someone To Make It?
The Massachusetts Senate moves forward with its plan to require financially sound hospitals to pay into a fund used to reduce health insurance premiums. Is it a tax? No. Of course not. They're calling it a "contribution." From the AP:
Wealthier hospitals would be required to make a one-time $100 million contribution to ease insurance premiums for smaller businesses under a bill approved Tuesday by the state Senate.
...Senate Republicans sought to strip the $100 million hospital assessment from the bill.Senate Minority Leader Richard Tisei, R-Wakefield, said the assessment amounts to a tax increase on hospitals. He said some bigger hospitals might be able to afford it, but smaller community hospitals might not.
Fellow Republican, Sen. Robert Hedlund of Weymouth, said calling the assessment a "contribution" was disingenuous.
"Is this the proper term to use when the Legislature takes money from one private entity to give it to another private entity?" he asked. "We're going down a troubling path."
Sen. Mark Montigny, D-New Bedford, backed the assessment, saying that just because hospitals are considered charities doesn't mean some don't also have deep pockets.
"All charities are not created equally," Montigny said. "There are some struggling charities in this climate ... and there are many in the exact opposite place."
The Republican amendment failed.
Reason Morning Links: Bad Night for the D.C. Establishment, Crackdown in Thailand, Promise in the U.K.
- As noted below, primary night brings bad news for incumbents and establishment candidates.
- Eliot Spitzer rumored to be getting a show on CNN.
- UN Security Council votes for new round of sanctions on Iran.
- Thai government initiates bloody crackdown on protesters.
- Liberal Democrat leader and Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg lays out his policy plan for British government, and it's surprisingly good news for civil libertarians.
- GOP congressional hopeful and regular Reason villain Mary Beth Buchanan loses handily in the Pennsylvania primary.
The Great Disestablishmentarianism of 2010 Proceeds Apace!
The good news (so far) from the electoral process: The establishment candidates, broadly speaking, are getting their asses whipped like Jimmy Carter did Ted Kennedy's back in the day.
This is all but certain: It's an anti-Washington, anti-establishment year. And candidates with ties to either better beware.
Any doubt about just how toxic the political environment is for congressional incumbents and candidates hand-picked by national Republican and Democratic leaders disappeared late Tuesday, when voters fired Democratic Sen. Arlen Specter in Pennsylvania, forced Democratic Sen. Blanche Lincoln into a run-off in Arkansas and chose tea party darling Rand Paul to be the GOP nominee in Kentucky's Senate race.
"People just aren't very happy," Ira Robbins, 61, said in Allentown, Pa.
With anyone linked to power, it seems.
Taken together, the outcomes of primaries in Pennsylvania, Arkansas and Kentucky — following voter rejections of GOP Sen. Bob Bennett of Utah and Democratic Rep. Alan Mollohan in West Virginia — provided further evidence that voters are in the mood to choose outsiders over insiders.
Don't forget good ol' sitting Gov. Charlie Crist (R-Fla.) having to go indy to stay in The Sunshine State's Senate race (which he might just win). While it's true that a Jack Murtha bag man won his dead boss' slot, it's looking very good for a real shakeup in the fall. Arguably the best news is that this, unlike 1994, isn't simply about one party benefiting at the expense of the other. Republicans are taking it on the chin along with the Democrats, suggesting that the real dynamic is about unseating entrenched, clubby incumbents who have long drank deep the same Kool-Aid of overspending and overreaching.
Here's hoping.
New at Reason: Jacob Sullum on Preventive Detention of 'Sexually Dangerous' Prisoners
On Monday the Supreme Court
upheld a law that allows the indefinite civil commitment of federal
prisoners who have completed their sentences but are deemed
"sexually dangerous." In doing so, Senior Editor Jacob Sullum
argues, the Court not only blessed yet another use of psychiatry to
escape the safeguards of our criminal justice system by disguising
punishment as treatment. It also encouraged Congress to pile one
dubious assertion of power on top of another until the tottering
tower is tall enough to surmount the fence erected by the
Constitution.
What's the Spanish Word for Straitjacket?
It's being reported that Woody Allen has told a Spanish newspaper that he'd like Barack Obama to "be a dictator for a few years because he could do a lot of good things quickly." Things like this, presumably:
Grayson Concedes in Kentucky GOP Senate Primary; Rand Paul the Winner
Politico has a summation of the bloodbath for the GOP establishment:
Insurgent Senate candidate Rand Paul claimed the Republican nomination for the seat of retiring Kentucky Sen. Jim Bunning Tuesday evening, easily besting establishment favorite Trey Grayson, the sitting secretary of State who won the endorsement of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.
With approximately 39 percent of precincts reporting, Paul was drawing 59 percent of the vote to Grayson's 36 percent – a yawning lead over a candidate once viewed as a sure bet for his party's nomination.
Rand Paul, the poster boy for both Tea Party and libertarianish sentiments amongst this year's GOP challengers, will be facing Kentucky state Attorney General Jack Conway on the Democratic side in November. Look for a longer piece on the meaning of Paul's victory here on Reason Online in the next 48 hours. In the meantime, read our May Reason magazine feature on the rise of Rand Paul.
Reality TV in the Middle East
Henry Jenkins has published a fascinating interview (part one, part two) with Marwan Kraidy, author of Reality Television and Arab Politics, about the ways "reality television has been a key vehicle through which the Arab world has been negotiating a range of social, cultural, political, economic, and technological changes." An excerpt:
Reality television crystallized a festering Arab malaise exacerbated by the Iraq War, Abu Ghrayb, the Danish Cartoons, the plight of the Palestinians, and an existential crisis whose scope is truly all-encompassing -- ideological, social, political, economic, religious, etc. Clearly, reality television did not trigger all the above on its own, but the intense controversy it created, because it was public, transnational, and involved many sectors of society, gave many Arabs a language and a platform to voice their anger, fears and aspirations. Reality television's claim to represent the real fomented the polemic by compelling many social groups to advance multiple Arab realities. Some said: "This (young men and women living together for four months and competing for viewers' text-messaged votes) is not our reality. It is a reality imposed by the West." This prompted other Arabs to say: "In fact, some aspects of our reality are much more similar to the social interactions we see on reality shows than the reality that you--conservatives speaking in the name of religion--are in fact trying to impose on all of us."
Related reading in Reason: Charles Paul Freund's classic articles on Arab music videos and the power of pop vulgarity.
IMF Joins CBO, CMS In Expressing Skepticism About ObamaCare's Medicare Cuts
When Medicare's chief actuary,
Richard Foster, released a report on the likely
effects of the Affordable Care Act, the big takeaway for most
of the press was that total health care spending in the U.S. was
projected to rise over the next decade. That was a big deal, but
just as big a deal—possibly even bigger—was that Foster, who
crunches numbers for the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services,
expressed skepticism that the Medicare cuts that pay for about half
of the law's ten-year cost could be "unrealistic and
unsustainable."
Now Foster's skepticism is echoed by a report on the coming budgepocalypse put out by the IMF. On page 43, the report warns that "the substantial decrease in Medicare payment rates [called for by the Affordable Care Act] to health care providers may prove difficult to implement."
In its numerous scores of the reform bill drafts, the Congressional Budget Office, of course, also provided cautious and carefully hedged warnings about the Medicare cuts, noting that, historically, Medicare cuts have not always been implemented as called for. But President Obama and OMB director Peter Orszag largely ignored those cautions and treated the CBO's deficit projections as facts instead.
Given that one of the president's key messages was that, once passed, the bill would reduce the national deficit, that's hardly a surprise: If the Medicare savings don't materialize, we'll see higher deficits instead. And the truth—"it might reduce the deficit, but we're not totally confident"—wouldn't have been much of a sales pitch.
I took a longer look at the PPACA's budgeting here.
Ketchup to Become Less Salty, Imperfect
Your ketchup is about to
get less salty, thanks to threats of government regulation:
Just after the FDA announced its plans to limit salt in processed foods, Heinz has given word that it's tweaking the recipe for its iconic ketchup -- and the new bottles will hit stores this summer. The company, which has not changed this ketchup recipe in 40 years, believes the new formula -- which contains 15 percent less sodium -- will be as popular as the old version, according to the AP. And that's very popular indeed -- the brand corners about 60 percent of the ketchup market.
Which is a shame because, as Malcolm Gladwell convincingly argued in The New Yorker six years ago, Heinz ketchup is the perfect food:
There are five known fundamental tastes in the human palate: salty, sweet, sour, bitter, and umami. Umami is the proteiny, full-bodied taste of chicken soup, or cured meat, or fish stock, or aged cheese, or mother's milk, or soy sauce, or mushrooms, or seaweed, or cooked tomato. "Umami adds body," Gary Beauchamp, who heads the Monell Chemical Senses Center, in Philadelphia, says. "If you add it to a soup, it makes the soup seem like it's thicker—it gives it sensory heft. It turns a soup from salt water into a food." When Heinz moved to ripe tomatoes and increased the percentage of tomato solids, he made ketchup, first and foremost, a potent source of umami. Then he dramatically increased the concentration of vinegar, so that his ketchup had twice the acidity of most other ketchups; now ketchup was sour, another of the fundamental tastes. The post-benzoate ketchups also doubled the concentration of sugar—so now ketchup was also sweet—and all along ketchup had been salty and bitter. These are not trivial issues....What Heinz had done was come up with a condiment that pushed all five of these primal buttons. The taste of Heinz's ketchup began at the tip of the tongue, where our receptors for sweet and salty first appear, moved along the sides, where sour notes seem the strongest, then hit the back of the tongue, for umami and bitter, in one long crescendo. How many things in the supermarket run the sensory spectrum like this?
Worse, the sodium theft will be stealth. No advertising campaign is planned. Which means most people will simply find their french fry experience puzzlingly imperfect this summer. At least, they will until they shrug and shake more salt on their plates.
Via Jacob Grier.
New at Reason: Bradley Smith and Jeff Patch on How the DISCLOSE Act Will Restrict Free Speech
Last week, the House Administration Committee
held hearings on the DISCLOSE Act, which would extend the Federal
Election Commission’s control over broadcast communications to all
“covered communications,” including the blogosphere. As former FEC
chairman Bradley A. Smith and Jeff Patch of the Center for
Competitive Politics write, this bill would give the government
unprecedented power to regulate political speech online.
Or Else They'll Have to Write a Strongly Worded Letter
As I blogged last week, the South Korean government has quietly suggested that explosive residue found in the wreckage of its sunken naval vessel clearly indicated North Korean involvement. Now, according to the Washington Post, the government in Seoul will formally charge Kim Jong-Il's dictatorship with the attack, which took the lives of 46 sailors.
South Korea reached its conclusion that North Korea was responsible for the attack after investigators from Australia, Britain, Sweden and the United States pieced together portions of the ship at the port of Pyongtaek, 40 miles southwest of Seoul. The Cheonan sank on March 26, following an explosion that rocked the vessel as it sailed in the Yellow Sea off South Korea's west coast.
The officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because South Korea has yet to disclose the findings of the investigation, said that subsequent analysis determined that the torpedo was identical to a North Korean torpedo that had previously been obtained by South Korea.
With the end of the failed "Sunshine Policy," it is unclear what, if any, response is forthcoming. As the Post notes, North Korean "artillery could—within minutes—devastate greater Seoul, which has a population of 20.5 million."
In other North Korean Are Crazy news, Zimbabwean scumbag Robert Mugabe plans to ship a "Noah's Ark" of animals to the malnourished prisoners of the Hermit Kingdom:
The British conservation group Born Free has joined the outcry against a plan by Zimbabwe to ship a “Noah’s Ark” of wildlife, including two young elephants, to North Korea.
News reports last week said the animals, reportedly two of every species in Zimbabwe’s 14,600 square kilometer Hwange National Park, are to be a gift from Zimbawean President Robert Mugabe to his North Korean counterpart, Kim Jong Il.
The title reference, from this brilliant scene in Team America:
New at Reason: Greg Beato on Annotating Everything
Are you ready to get a warning from the Center
for Science in the Public Interest about the evils of high fructose
corn syrup every time you buy a Coke? Would you like to share your
thoughts on the anti-feminist subtext of Computer Engineer Barbie
with anyone who picks up the doll? For years, writes Greg Beato,
we’ve mostly confined political discourse to static, insular venues
like the university, the coffee shop, and the Web. But now, thanks
to a new app called Stickybits, we can have our say in truly vital
venues, like the toy aisle at Wal-Mart.
Selective Denialism
The New Scientist (one of my favorite popluar science magazines despite its propensity toward knee-jerk leftism) is running a feature section on "denialism" in the current issue. Well, OK. But I tend to agree with Michael Fitzpatrick's opinion piece in the feature section where he argues that trying to suppress the speech of one's opponents by denouncing them as "deniers" of scientific truth is dangerously illiberal:
Such attempts to combat pseudoscience by branding it a secular form of blasphemy are illiberal and intolerant. They are also ineffective, tending not only to reinforce cynicism about science but also to promote a distrust of scientific and medical authority that provides a rallying point for pseudoscience.
He then quotes University of Exeter philosopher Edward Skidelsky who says,
..."the extension of the 'denier' tag to group after group is a development that should alarm all liberal-minded people." What we need is more debate, not less.
The New Scientist then supplies a list of denialisms, under the title "True Disbelievers." The list includes, climate denial, evolution denial, Holocaust denial, AIDS denial, 9/11 denial, vaccine denial, and tobacco denial. For my part, I agree that science and history are against any would-be "deniers" of the listed phenomena. However, I am bemused that some other "denialisms" were not on the list. Perhaps the editors ran out of space. So, using the New Scientist list format, I add a few of the current denialisms that annoy me:
Biotech crop denialism
In a nutshell: Biotech crops are dangerous for human health and environment
Origin: Leading NGOs, including Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, and the Union of Concerned Scientists
Call themselves: Environmentalists, or greens
Influence: Five stars*****
Drug war denialism
In a nutshell: We are winning the war on drugs
Origins: Early 20th century progressive prohibitionists
Call themselves: Drug Enforcement Agency, Congress
Influence: Waning, but still four stars ****
Market denialism
In a nutshell: Economies can be better directed from the top down by benevolent politicians and bureaucrats
Origins: Primitive beliefs given the guise of science in the 19th century by Karl Marx and other practitioners
Call themselves: Progressives and socialists
Influence: Unfortunately growing, now three stars ***
I cordially invite Reason readers to identify any other denialisms that they think that the New Scientist overlooked.
New at Reason: Ronald Bailey Parses the Kerry-Lieberman Carbon Rationing Scheme
Last week,
Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Sen. Joe Liebermen (I-Conn.)
introduced their American Power Act which aims to radically
transform the way Americans produce and use energy as a way to
address the problem of man-made global warming. Reason
Science Correspondent Ronald Bailey finds that the proposed
legislation will raise energy prices, reduce incomes, cut jobs, and
do precious little about climate change.
Why We're Having an Everybody Draw Mohammed Contest on Thursday May 20
Author's
Note: This article includes three images that clearly
denigrate Islam and the Prophet Mohammed. So there is absolutely no
question about the provenance of these images, I would like to
direct all readers to
Wikipedia's authoritative writeup on the matter.
These images were included in a dossier that aggrieved imams living
in Denmark took with them to the Middle East specifically to stoke
outrage at a dozen cartoons published in September 2005 in the
Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. The images include an amateurish
doodle identifying Mohammed as a pedophile, a dog humping a
prostrate praying Muslim (with the caption, "This is why Muslim
pray five times a day"), and a photocopy of a French comedian in a
pig-squealing contest (with the phony caption, "Here is the real
image of Mohammed"). It is nothing less than amazing that holy men
decrying the desecration of their religion would create such foul
images, but there you have it. It is as if the pope created "Piss
Christ" and then passed it off as the work of critics of
Catholicism. The images below may indeed give offense, not just to
Muslims but to people of all faiths and even atheists. If they do,
remember who created and distributed them.
The deadline for submitting work to Reason's Everybody Draw Mohammed contest has passed; winners will be shown on Thursday, May 20.
All that remains is anticipation, both of the artwork that will be displayed and the possible threats of violence that will likely follow. Or should that be "the likely threats of possible violence"?
Before the calendar page turns to Thursday, it's worth meditating on the whys and wherefores of the contest, which was inspired by a jihadist death threat against the creators of South Park and was originally suggested by Seattle artist Molly Norris. Soon after asking everyone to draw the Prophet in solidarity with the arguably millions of people repressed by threats of theologically justified violence, Norris herself went into ideological hiding, suggesting instead that everyone draw another target of South Park satire: former Vice President Al Gore.
While Gore, who likes to credit himself with understanding the architectonics of cyberspace (if not creating them) and who way back when convened Congressional hearings to discuss the dread menace of satanic heavy metal lyrics (vaya con diablo, Ronnie James Dio!), is certainly worthy of the sort of ongoing abuse that only a fully distributed Internets can deliver, the obvious reason that Norris changed her target is real and potential violence.
Who can blame her? People have been killed for representing Mohammed in ways that displeased Islamic terrorists. People have been punched and kicked and forced into hiding. No wonder, then, that Norris, like Galileo in front of a Catholic tribunal, apologized to "everyone of the Muslim faith who has or will be offended" by her drawing (visible at the right). This conditionally unconditional language is the language of the forced penitent, of the prisoner in a totalitarian world, of the sad sack on the Catherine Wheel who will say anything, will confess anything to get off the rack. We all understand exactly why such language is being used: The threat of violence.
Attacking iconoclasts (meant here in its literal meaning) has been a constant throughout human history. It's one of the great dividing lines, like laughter and face-to-face copulation, that separates man from beast. Indeed, I'm betting it was a fundamental element of even pre-human history. Can we doubt seriously that some gang of Neanderthals didn't crush the skulls of others who decorated cave walls in "offensive" ways? In the 20th and 21st centuries alone, all sorts of human expression have led to brutality and murder. The ground of Europe and Asia and all the continents with the (possible) exception of Antarctica is fertilized with the blood and bones of martyrs who have done nothing more than make tangible their thoughts in words, music, and pictures. Yet even in a country like ours that threatens consenting adults for making dirty movies with effective life sentences, or in European countries where speech codes imprison malefactors for "hate speech," there is a massive gulf between "mere" censorship and death threats, between the answering of "bad" speech not with more speech but with the blade, the bullet, or the bomb.
This amateurish image was
created by Islamic imams and depicts Mohammed as a pedophile. They
have defiled their own tradition. There comes a
point in any society's existence where it must ultimately, to
paraphrase Martin Luther (who himself was more than happy to
see opponents put to death), dig in its heels and say here we
stand, we will do no other. We don't need to be perfectly
consistent philosophically or historically or theologically to
assert what is special and unique not just about the United States,
with its bizarre and wonderful articulation of the First Amendment,
but the greater classical liberal project comprising not just
the "West" (whatever that is) but human beings in whatever town,
country, or planet they inhabit. And at the heart of the liberal
project is ultimately a recognition that individuals, for no other
reason than that they exist, have rights to continue to exist.
Embedded in all that is the right to expression. No one has a
right to an audience or even to a sympathetic hearing,
much less an engaged audience. But no one should be beaten or
killed or imprisoned simply for speaking their mind or praying to
one god as opposed to the other or none at all or getting on with
the small business of living their life in peaceful fashion. If we
cannot or will not defend that principle with a full throat, then
we deserve to choke on whatever jihadists of all stripes can
force down our throats.
This is not about U.S. foreign policy, or trade policy, or aid to Israel or Egypt, or the creation of a Palestinian homeland. This is about the right to have the conversations that might inform all that and more. We live in a time of paradox: Never before have so many been so empowered to speak their own minds, to produce and consume whatever form of expression when they want, where they want. The impact on those seeking to regulate and control thought is as predictable as it is depressing and, ultimately, ineffective: Whether they are governments or corporations or religious or ideological groups, they want to stamp out the ability of people to say and think for themselves.
Our Draw Mohammed contest is not a frivolous exercise of hip, ironic, hoolarious sacrilege toward a minority religion in the United States (though even that deserves all the protection that the most serioso political commentary commands). It's a defense of what is at the core of a society that is painfully incompetent at delivering on its promise of freedom, tolerance, and equal rights. It's a rebuttal to the notion that we should go limp in the clinches precisely because bullies and bastards can punch or blow us up. It's a rebuttal to the mentality evinced in the recent interview between liberal intellectual Paul Berman and Joel Whitney in the May 2010 issue of Guernica, where the sound you hear in the background is the sound of the interviewer pissing his pants:
Guernica: In the short term, don’t we want to avoid triggering something like that [the murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh by an Islamist terrorist] with incendiary language? Isn’t it mere prudence?
Paul Berman: [Scriptwriter and Islam critic Ayaan Hirsi Ali] didn’t trigger it. They triggered it. What she did and what she continues to do is to go to those people and people who might sympathize with them, and rebuke them. The whole meaning of her career is to say, “There’s a serious problem. I’m gonna deal with it by speaking to it directly. And I’m not gonna mince my words, I’m gonna make an argument.” I think this is great. Some of the arguments that she makes are not my arguments, some of them I would disagree with; my impression is that if I were Dutch I’d be in the Labor Party. I wouldn’t have moved to the other party. And so it’s not that I’m following everything that Ayaan Hirsi Ali says. But I follow the main thing. I follow that totally. The main thing is [that] she is saying to people, “I, Hirsi Ali, am thinking for myself and I want you to think for yourself.” And the way to think for yourself is not to revere authority, the way is not necessarily to guard your tongue. The way is to speak your mind.
Guernica: So to put scriptures on a naked woman’s body in her film was not incendiary or reckless, in your reading, it was merely direct.
Paul Berman: That film is not even one millimeter a violent film. And the purpose of the film is to make the viewer recognize that violence against women is being committed by fanatics in the name of Islam. This should be opposed. And she’s done a brilliant job of opposing that. As a politician, she brought to the Dutch Parliament the issue of honor killings. She proposed to Parliament that the police make records of honor killings, which is the first thing the police department had to do to recognize and solve the problem. She brought about a significant reform. And I’m guessing that quite a few women are alive today as a result of this reform.
Guernica: So she’s not only not responsible for Van Gogh’s death, but she’s saved uncounted lives.
Imams stirred outrage with
the caption, "This is why Muslims pray." This image did not appear
in Jyllands-Posten or anywhere else, except in the imams'
portfolio. Like Berman, I don't agree with
everything Hirsi Ali says (read
this remarkable interview she gave Reason, in which our
interlocutor teases out more than a little contradiction
within her own views). For starters, I reject
emphatically what might be called a fundamentalist atheism,
which always and everywhere fingers religion and religiosity as the
motive force in all that is bad with human beings and human
history. To me, that sort of comprehensive reaction is no
different than Islamists or Christians or whomever sees the
Jews or the Masons or whatever as the villain in every passion
play. But Berman is right, not just about the film
Submission, which is as incendiary as an After School
Special about recycling programs, but the larger idea that we
should apologize for triggering violence in serial killers. Why not
blame J.D. Salinger for the shooting of John Lennon by a deranged
reader of The Catcher in The Rye?
Our Draw Mohammed contest is, hopefully, an exercise in truth-telling. It's not about revelation, of course, of divinely inspired Truth with a capital "T." It's an existential thing, a participatory thing, a living thing. And it's not something that I expect those inclined to violence in the face of free expression to understand.
Imams said this was a
Danish depiction of Mohammed. It is of a French comedian at a
pig-squealing contest." Nor do I expect them to
realize they are part of the problem they hope to bludgeon into
submission. Consider this tremendous irony. For all the discussion
about whether it is forbidden to figure Mohammed in visual form (an
art form that has
a long and glorious Islamic history), three of the most
gratuitously insulting images of the Prophet ever disseminated
were not created by devil-horned Jews or American women
wearing pantsuits or even Danish or U.S. cartoonists. No, they are
the work of imams residing in Denmark who went on an outrage
tour of the Middle East after Jyllands-Posten published
its dozen cartoons in the fall of 2005.
Some sources suggest that it is precisely these three fake
images, on display in this very blog post as a public
service and testament to free speech, that
ignited the furor that lit the fuse that ultimately begat
Draw Mohammed Day. (See the author's note above and hold your
cursor over the images for alt-text information about their
provenance.)
Which is worth keeping in mind come May 20 and every day after. Because the cause of free expression, just like the misguided, pathetic, and ultimately-doomed-to-fail attempts to shut it down, is a long, hard slog that begins again every day the sun rises.
Update: Due to the high, server-crushing volume of comments and the gratuitously insulting imagery of many of them—it seems that if there's one group of folks more obsessed with gay sex than Islamic terrorists, it's critics of the same—we've decided to shut down comments to this post. For those who wrongly equate this with censorship, please note that the Web, like the world itself, is wide and there are plenty of places you can go to post your comments about just about anything. If this be censorship, then kicking drunken party guests out of your living room at 6AM is ethnic cleansing. And the murder of Theo van Gogh simply another bad film review.
Reader comments can be sent to me directly at gillespie-at-reason-dot-com.
The Berkeley Swab
Not your father's UC orientation, that's for
sure:
UC Berkeley is adding something a little different this year in its welcome package -- cotton swabs for a DNA sample. [...]
The students will be asked to voluntarily submit a DNA sample. The cotton swabs will come with two bar code labels. One label will be put on the DNA sample and the other is kept for the students own records.
The confidential process is being overseen by Jasper Rine, a campus professor of Genetics and Development Biology, who says the test results will help students make decisions about their diet and lifestyle. [...]
Rine hopes that this will excite students to be more hands-on with their college experience.
Link via Daniel Hernandez's Twitter feed.
Bay State Senate to Successful Hospitals: Pay Up!
In hopes of bringing down the state's skyrocketing health care costs—which are currently growing about 8 percent faster than the state's GDP—the Massachusetts Senate is reportedly considering a bill that, among other things, would "require hospitals in better financial shape to put money back into the health care system to lower premiums." At first glance, this might sound like an easy way to bring down prices: Cut into provider profits to bring down insurance premiums. And the AP article doesn't provide much in the way of detail about how the provision would work, so it could be basically harmless. But it looks to me like the Senate is pushing for a system in which hospitals that set prices and contain costs successfully enough to find solid financial footing subsidize those that don't. Does this strike anyone else as an odd way to attempt to curb costs?
New at Reason: Cathy Young on Ridley Scott's Robin Hood
The new Ridley Scott film Robin Hood is
drawing some critics' political ire. In New York's leftist weekly,
The Village Voice, Karina Longworth laments that "instead
of robbing from the rich to give to the poor, this Robin Hood
preaches about 'liberty' and the rights of the individual" and
battles against "government greed"; the film, she scoffs, is "a
rousing love letter to the tea party movement." But as Contributing
Editor Cathy Young explains, the Robin Hood of myth and folklore
probably has much more in common with the "libertarian rebel"
played by Russell Crowe than with the medieval socialist of the
"rob from the rich, give to the poor" cliché.
"The case is about a constitutional principle—the right to sell products grown in other states."
The Institute for Justice filed a major lawsuit today against the city of Lake Elmo, Minnesota, which currently forbids local farmers from selling produce grown on their own land if that land happens to fall outside of the city limits. As family farmer and lead plaintiff Keith Bergmann explains in Minnesota’s Pioneer Press:
For over 60 years, my family has lived and farmed in Lake Elmo. We run a small farm and greenhouse called Country Sun Farm. On our farm we sell flowers and plants grown on-site, pumpkins grown on the farm and elsewhere, and Christmas trees grown in other states. Maybe some of you have seen our farm along Highway 36 on your way to view the fall colors in Stillwater. We're the place on the south side of the road with a giant pumpkin, petting zoo, and haunted house filled with kids and families enjoying a wonderful fall day.
Unfortunately, our farm is in jeopardy. In December, Lake Elmo arbitrarily decided that most of the pumpkins we sell in the fall, and the Christmas trees we sell in December, are illegal. The city says these products must be grown within the city limits of our small town to promote the town's rural character. It did this even though we have grown pumpkins outside of Lake Elmo, purchased Christmas trees from growers outside of Lake Elmo, and sold both products at our establishment for over 25 years. This rule just hurts farms like ours. It does not make sense.
To stop this outrage we are joining with fellow family farmers from Nebraska, North Carolina, and Wisconsin who have sold us pumpkins and Christmas trees over the years. Represented by the Institute for Justice Minnesota Chapter, we will file a federal lawsuit today because what the city is doing violates our constitutional right to participate in interstate commercial markets. We should be able to sell produce in Minnesota that we grow in Wisconsin. We should also be able to trade with farmers in other states.
For more on the case, check out the video below:
Because it's Really About Principles
I dislike Arizona's new immigration law as much as the next guy, but the sight of financially (and morally) bankrupt left-coast city councils passing noisy "boycotts" of the Copper State leaves me a bit cold. Especially this one:
Seattle has joined several other U.S. cities in protesting Arizona's sweeping new immigration law. [...]
The council's resolution was written to protect the only substantial contract Seattle has with an Arizona company - a $106,000-a-month deal with American Traffic Solutions. The Scottsdale-based company operates Seattle's 29 red-light cameras.
Link via drlari's Twitter feed.
Commies, Joe Biden, and the Disputed Historical Interest in the Cold War
In City Journal, Claire Berlinski writes
a sad-if-true
account of contemporary historical disinterest in the archives
of the last totalitarian superpower:
Pavel Stroilov, a Russian exile in London, has on his computer 50,000 unpublished, untranslated, top-secret Kremlin documents, mostly dating from the close of the Cold War. He stole them in 2003 and fled Russia. Within living memory, they would have been worth millions to the CIA; they surely tell a story about Communism and its collapse that the world needs to know. Yet he can't get anyone to house them in a reputable library, publish them, or fund their translation. In fact, he can't get anyone to take much interest in them at all.
Then there's Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky, who once spent 12 years in the USSR's prisons, labor camps, and psikhushkas—political psychiatric hospitals—after being convicted of copying anti-Soviet literature. He, too, possesses a massive collection of stolen and smuggled papers from the archives of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, which, as he writes, "contain the beginnings and the ends of all the tragedies of our bloodstained century." These documents are available online at bukovsky-archives.net, but most are not translated. They are unorganized; there are no summaries; there is no search or index function. "I offer them free of charge to the most influential newspapers and journals in the world, but nobody wants to print them," Bukovsky writes. "Editors shrug indifferently: So what? Who cares?"
What's in there? Berlinski doesn't speak Russian,
and is somewhat skeptical about the defectors' claims. Though she
does detail a translated selection of gossipy Soviet dealings with
glad-handing western politicians, including a brief Soviet-archives
account of a 1979 meeting with Sen. Joe Biden:
Unofficially, Biden and [Sen. Richard] Lugar said that, in the end of the day, they were not so much concerned with having a problem of this or that citizen solved as with showing to the American public that they do care for "human rights."...In other words, the collocutors directly admitted that what is happening is a kind of a show, that they absolutely do not care for the fate of most so-called dissidents.
Berlinski comments:
Remarkably, the world has shown little interest in the unread Soviet archives. That paragraph about Biden is a good example. Stroilov and Bukovsky coauthored a piece about it for the online magazine FrontPage on October 10, 2008; it passed without remark. Americans considered the episode so uninteresting that even Biden's political opponents didn't try to turn it into political capital. Imagine, if you can, what it must feel like to have spent the prime of your life in a Soviet psychiatric hospital, to know that Joe Biden is now vice president of the United States, and to know that no one gives a damn.
Remarkable indeed. But then Ron Radosh, who knows a thing or two about the subject, strongly criticizes Berlinski's conclusion, particularly as it pertains to western scholarly interest in the subject:
Is Berlinski correct? I don't think that the evidence supports her claims. To answer the question, I consulted with major experts familiar not only with Bukovsky's and Striliov's claims, but with what is in the Soviet archives, and what is and what is not available. It was not hard to do. Why did Berlinski not take this easy step?
After publishing the results of those conversations, which you really should go read if you're interested in the subject, Radosh concludes:
I think it is clear that Claire Berlinski has not only overstated her case; she has also unfairly impugned the reputation of Jonathan Brent, underestimated what is actually available for anyone to see, and uncritically accepted some of the claims made to her by both Bukovsky and Striliov. She did not check with experts who regularly use this archival material to find out whether or not their claims are accurate.
The failure to publish their documents is not an example of the world failing to acknowledge "the monstrous history of Communism," but of a decision by conscientious editors that these particular documents need more work before anyone can publish them. And in the meantime, those who do want to consult them, have every opportunity to do so. Sometimes there is an easy answer to what on first glance looks like a serious academic and political scandal. If large numbers on the Left ignore the lessons of Communism — that is a situation which many of us have long tried to address — it is not the result of failure to publish either Bukovsky's or Stroilov's material in the United States.
Whole City Journal piece here; Radosh response here; first link via Michael Totten.
Reason's Michael C. Moynihan smoked cigarettes with Bukovsky earlier this month, and wrote about the odd historiography of the Cold War in the November 2009 issue, which also included a column from me on "the unknown war."
Reason Morning Links: Primary Day, Scandal in Connecticut, "Temporary Taxes"
- Primaries in three states expected to reflect anti-incumbent voter mood.
- Supreme Court prohibits life without parole for juveniles convicted of crimes other than murder.
- Connecticut AG Richard Blumenthal caught lying about service in Vietnam.
- States turning to "temporary taxes" to fill budget gaps.
- Civil rights groups file legal challenge to Arizona immigration law.
Reason.tv: Our 3 Entries in The EPA's "Rulemaking Matters!" Video Contest
So the deadline the for the EPA's "Rulemaking Matters!" video contest was yesterday, May 17, and we beavered away like heavily drunken legislators deciding the future of unborn generations late into the afternoon to provide three (count 'em) entries to said contest.
The point of the contest, which will award $2,500 (U.S., alas) to lucky winners at an unnamed cost to taxpayers, was to "to explain federal rulemaking and motivate others to participate in the rulemaking process." Or, in other words, to help the EPA propagandize just how great it and other aspects of the government are.
As the EPA helpfully (and unironically) put it,
Almost every aspect of our lives is touched by federal regulations...Even before you leave the house in the morning, government regulations help set the price of the coffee you drink, the voltage of electricity in your alarm clock, and the types of programming allowed on the morning news.
That's more touching than at a Rep. Eric Massa (D-N.Y.) staff meeting! And, let's face it, most of it is uninvited, unwanted, and unnecessary (again, just like a Massa meeting!). Could, for instance, coffee be priced without the "help" of the government? Would producers of electricity and makers of alarm clocks have created common standards absent federal bureaucrats? Perhaps most important, should we be trusted to check out "disallowed" news in the morning? (Thank you, Internets!)
But in the interest of public spiritedness, Reason.tv is proud to share its three entries into the "Rulemaking Matters!" video contest, which will hopefully motivate you to participate in the creation of rules governing everything from private space flight to the size of holes in Swiss cheese. Because as millions of Lotto winners could tell you, you gotta be in it to win it.
"Let Your Robotic Voice Be Heard!" Produced by Dan Hayes, approximately 1.30 minutes.
"Subtitled For Your Protection," produced by Meredith Bragg. Approximately 1.30 minutes.
"Federal Regulations and You: Partners in Democracy!" Produced by Ted Balaker, with Paul Detrick, Zach Weismuller, and Hawk Jensen. Approximately 1.15 minutes.
Go to Reason.tv for downloadable versions of all our videos. Subscribe to Reason.tv's YouTube channel for automatic notification when new material goes online.
New at Reason: Michael Young on America’s Role in the Arab Civil War
From our June issue, Contributing Editor Michael
Young reviews journalist Lee Smith’s new book The Strong Horse:
Power, Politics, and the Clash of Arab Civilizations, which
argues that the United States is caught up in an Arab civil
war.
Update on Libertarian Videographer Arrested for Filming FIJA Action: Facing Possible Eight Years
I blogged about George Donnelly's arrest and release last week outside a Allentown, PA, courthouse for videotaping FIJA activists handing out information, but he was released merely into house arrest, and faces a possible eight years in jail for allegedly assaulting one of the federal agents who accosted him. This report from the "Photography Is Not A Crime" blog has some details, though Donnelly himself is not talking to the press about it right now:
He is specifically being accused of striking one of the officers.
Anybody who has seen the two previous videos where Donnelly was confronted by federal officers in front of a courthouse will find these charges hard to believe.
After all, Donnelly has a tendency to remain courteous even when getting threatened with violence.
Nevertheless, the federal government is charging him with assaulting, resisting, or impeding certain United States Government officers or employees, which carries a maximum sentence of eight years in prison.
The evidence, of course, lies in the videotape they confiscated from him. We’ll be lucky if that ever makes the light of day.
The blog post also has a list of the annoying requirements of Donnelly's pre-conviction "house arrest," including
- Defendant shall submit to electronic monitoring
- Defendant must obtain a land line
- Defendant may drive to food store three times per week, and must submit receipts to pretrial services, with prior approval of pretrial services
- Travel restricted to the Eastern District of Pennsylvania
- Defendant shall surrender and/or refrain from obtaining or applying for a passport
- Defendant shall surrender and/or refrain from obtaining any firearms
- Defendant shall have no contact with co-defendants in this case, or individuals engaged in any criminal activity
- Defendant may not publicize names, images or locations of officers or release information to anyone else
Donnelly's own blog.
Reason.tv: EPA Rulemaking Matters Vid #3: Let Your Robotic Voice Be Heard, Let Your Robotic Voice Be Heard!
The Environmental Protection Agency is sponsoring "Rulemaking Matters!," a contest that invites filmmakers to submit short videos that explain how federal regulations touch our lives.
Presenting one of three Reason.tv' submissions: "Let Your Robotic Voice Be Heard!"
Written and produced by Dan Hayes. Approximately 1.30 minutes.
Go to Reason.tv for downloadable iPod, HD, and audio versions.
Subscribe to Reason.tv's YouTube channel to receive automatic notification when new material goes live.
Reason.tv: EPA "Rulemaking Matters!" Video Contest Submission, Subtitled For Your Protection!
The Environmental Protection Agency's "Rulemaking Matters!" contest invites filmmakers to submit short videos that explain how federal regulations touch our lives. The best video wins $2,500!
Presenting a reason.tv submission: "Rulemaking Matters!: Subtitled For Your Protection"
Written and produced by Meredith Bragg.
Approximately 90 seconds long.
Health Insurance Regulators Struggle To Define What Makes a Rate Hike "Unreasonable"
Thanks to the Affordable Care Act's provision
requiring governmental review of health insurance premium hikes,
state health insurance regulators are currently in the process of
trying to pin down just what it is that makes an insurance
premium hike "unreasonable." Turns out no one really knows for
sure—and, in fact, no increase at all might qualify: According to a
staffer with the Minnesota Department of Commerce, "even a
zero increase might be unreasonable, if an insurer was at
the same time cutting benefits offered in the policy." [Bold
added.]
Technically, the federal government doesn't yet have the authority to reject rates, but a proposal from Sen. Dianne Fienstein to regulate health insurance like a public utility makes it clear that's where this effort is leading. How'd that work out in Massachusetts, where Governor Deval Patrick recently rejected about 90 percent of this year's proposed rate hikes? Not so well:
The state's four biggest health insurers today posted first-quarter losses totaling more than $150 million, with three of the carriers blaming the bulk of their deficit on the Patrick administration's decision to cap rate increases for individuals and small businesses.
Without a close scouring of the insurance company books, it's impossible to say for certain whether the losses are actually due to the rate caps, as the insurers claim. But this provides at least a strong suggestion that the Bay State's rate review and rejection program isn't going so well: It's tough to implement health reform that works through the private system if the reforms put the private system out of business.
New at Reason: Radley Balko on Troubling New Evidence Against the NYPD
In recent months, the New York City
Police Department had been accused of requiring officers to meet
arrest and citation quotas for petty offenses, resulting in a
dramatic increase in "stop and frisk" encounters. At the same time,
the department has also been accused of pressuring beat cops to
under-report or even refrain from reporting actual crimes in order
to manipulate the city's crime rate. Now, the Village
Voice has obtained more than 100 audio recordings from a NYPD
officer offering more confirmation of both policies.
Reason Senior Editor Radley Balko looks at the possible
ramifications of those recordings.
How to Make Brownies, Pentagon-Style
The Pentagon's brownie recipe is 26 pages
long. Just grab a copy of document
MIL-C-44072C and gather
your ingredients: water that conforms to the "National Primary
Drinking Water Regulations (Copies are available from the Office of
Drinking Water, Environmental Protection Agency, WH550D, 401 M
Street, S.W., Washington, DC 20460)," and some eggs in compliance
with "Regulations Governing the Inspection of Eggs and Egg Products
(7 CFR Part 59)," and you're ready to go!
3.3.2 Brownie preparation. (NOTE: The contractor is not required to follow the exact procedure shown below provided that the brownies conform to all finished product requirements in 3.4.)
a. Whip eggs in large bowl on high speed until light and fluffy.
b. Combine sugars, cocoa, salt, and leavening; add to beaten eggs, and whip on high speed until thick.
c. Add shortening slowly while mixing on low speed.
d. Scrape bowl and whip on high speed until thick.
e. Mix flour, nuts, and flavors together and fold into batter; mix until uniform.
f. Pour batter into pan at a rate that will yield uncoated brownies which, when cut such as to meet the dimension requirements specified in 3.4f, will weigh approximately 35 grams each. (Experimentally, a panning rate of 14 to 16 grams per square inch was used.)
g. Bake at 350F until done (30 to 45 minutes).
3.3.3 Brownie cutting. The brownies shall be cut to the appropriate size when cool (see 3.4f).
Wondering about adding walnuts? Simply consult section 3.2.5.3 from the "30 April 1990 SUPERSEDING MIL-C-44072B 9 December 1987 W/CHANGE 12 February 2003 MILITARY SPECIFICATION COOKIES, OATMEAL; AND BROWNIES; COCOLATE [sic] COVERED."
3.2.5.3 Nuts, walnuts, shelled. Shelled walnut pieces shall be of the small piece size classification, shall be of a light color, and shall be U.S. No. 1 of the U.S. Standards for Shelled English Walnuts. A minimum of 90 percent, by weight, of the pieces shall pass through a 4/16-inch diameter round hole screen and not more than 1 percent, by weight, shall pass through a 2/16-inch diameter round hole screen. the shelled walnuts shall be coated with an approved food grade antioxidant and shall be of the latest season's crop.
These rules are for brownies destined for MREs, so it makes sense that Department of Defense wants to make sure they're getting uniform brownies with staying power. And many of the pages of regulations have to do with durability of packaging. But any sympathy I might have had for the whole brownie specs enterprise dissolved when I got to section 4.5.1.1, "Ingredient and component examination," which included this gem:
If necessary, each ingredient shall be examined organoleptically.
Sound like some kind of fancy scientific process, right? As in: "Put those walnuts in the Organoleptatron3000 to test for radioactivity." But in fact, testing "organoleptically" means that tasting, smelling, or looking at something. It's not clear whether you're allowed to decide if a batch of walnuts are OK by nibbling on a few before or after passing you pass them though a "2/16-inch diameter round hole screen" and coat them with "approved food grade antioxidant." All that and yet they can't spell chocolate or reduce fractions?
To answer the obvious question: No, there are no standards for the production of "special brownies."
Download the entire PDF to get the full specs, or do what I do: Go for the rather less complicated Baker's One Bowl Brownie recipe.
Via CEI's Ryan Young.
Reason.tv: Federal Regulations & You: Partners in Democracy!
The Environmental Protection Agency's "Rulemaking Matters!" contest invites filmmakers to submit short videos that explain how federal regulations touch our lives. The best video wins $2,500!
Presenting a Reason.tv submission: "Federal Regulations and You: Partners in Democracy!"
Written and produced by Ted Balaker. "Billy" played by Paul Detrick. Camera: Zach Weissmueller; Animation: Hawk Jensen.
Approximately 75 seconds long.
Go to Reason.tv for downloadable iPod, HD, and audio versions.
Subscribe to Reason.tv's YouTube channel to receive automatic notification when new material goes live.
New at Reason: David Harsanyi on the Kerry-Lieberman Energy Bill
These days, writes David Harsanyi, there are few
higher callings in Washington than pretending to save the
environment. Reporting for duty are John Kerry and Joe Lieberman,
armed with a new cap-and-trade "energy" bill they've christened the
Newspeak-esque "American Power Act."
The Deadline is Nigh for Everyone to Draw Mohammed!
After being physically attacked during a lecture in Uppsala and having two "offended" critics attempt to burn his house to the ground, the artist Lars Vilks, the man behind the rondelhund drawing of Mohammed, has wisely gone into hiding. And you, dear reader, defender of free speech, opponent of millenarian religious cultists, have the opportunity to do the same. The deadline for Reason's Everyone Draw Mohammed Day, bequeathed to us by a Seattle artist who decided that we should stick up for free speech by drawing Al Gore, is tomorrow at noon. So stop being such a perfectionist and just send the damn thing to mmoynihan - AT - reason.com
And for inspiration, here is the full, uncut video of Vilks being attacked for showing a film, produced by a very brave Iranian woman, of Mohammed as a gay man. At about five minutes into the clip, a shrieking man, speaking in accented Swedish, shows that while he might have learned the language of his new country, he still doesn't quite get the culture: He asks, incredulously, why the police "didn't stop the film."
Home Midwifery Now Illegal in Big Apple
They can't make it there, apparently, thanks to guildlike professional licensing laws. Details from the UK Guardian:
Women can not legally give birth at home in the presence of a trained and experienced midwife.
This city of more than 8 million people, with its reputation for being at the cutting-edge of modern urban living, now lacks a single midwife legally permitted to help women have a baby in their own homes. "It's pretty shocking that in a city where you can get anything any hour of the day a person cannot give birth at home with a trained practitioner," said Elan McAllister, president of the New York-based Choices in Childbirth.
The collapse of New York's legal home birth midwifery services has come as a result of the closure two weeks ago of one of the most progressive hospitals in the city, St Vincent's in Manhattan. When the bankrupt hospital shut its doors on 30 April the midwives suddenly found themselves without any backing or support.
There are 13 midwives who practise home births in New York, and under a system introduced in 1992 they are all obliged under state law to be approved by a hospital or obstetrician, on top of their professional training.
St Vincent's was prepared to underwrite their services, but most other doctors and institutions are not, and they now find themselves without the paperwork they need to work lawfully.
Wondering if you can legally hire someone to help you give birth if you want? Check this useful state-by-state chart of the arcane arts' legal status.
Reason Writers Around Town: Cathy Young on Russia’s Progression from Kleptocracy to Tandemocracy
Writing at The Weekly Standard, Contributing Editor Cathy Young surveys the state of politics in today’s Russia. As she writes:
A year ago, the possibility of change and discontent seemed to be in the air; the economic crisis had signaled an abrupt crash of the relative prosperity associated with Vladimir Putin’s rise to power and made a dent in public confidence in the government. There were also hopeful reports of a growing rift between Prime Minister Putin and his handpicked successor as president, Dmitry Medvedev; many analysts claimed that, with his term entering its second year, Medvedev was at last emerging from Putin’s shadow and coming into his own as a real leader with a more liberal agenda.
Despite a spike in unemployment (now 9 percent) and underemployment, the financial crisis did not hit Russia nearly as hard as some had expected. Neither did a wave of mass discontent. Rather, the prevalent attitude seems to be a cynical, passive malaise: The government does not exactly inspire active loyalty or confidence, but no visible search for alternatives exists—both because the Kremlin regime has done its best to squash, cripple, and marginalize such alternatives over the past decade, and because there is little energy behind a push for change.
Pre-Crime Detention Based on Enumerated (Yet Curiously Unspecified) Powers
Today the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a federal law that allows indefinite civil commitment of federal prisoners who have completed their sentences but are deemed "sexually dangerous." The Court, which in 1997 rejected a challenge to a similar Kansas law based on the Double Jeopardy, Due Process, and Ex Post Facto Clauses, did not deal with the usual constitutional objections in this case. Instead it addressed the question of whether the federal government, as opposed to the states, is authorized to detain people based on sex crimes they might commit in the future. The seven-justice majority concluded that it is, finding that civil commitment of "sexually dangerous" prisoners is a "necessary and proper" means of "carrying into execution" the federal government's enumerated powers. Yet the majority opinion by Justice Stephen Breyer never identifies the powers that provide the authority for this law. The omission is telling, especially since all nine justices agree that the Necessary and Proper Clause does not give Congress any independent powers.
Instead of citing specific powers, Breyer says the civil commitment law is justified by whatever enumerated powers underlie the federal criminal statutes that sexually dangerous prisoners are convicted of violating. Three of the five prisoners in this case, for example, were convicted of possessing child pornography, which Congress banned based on its authority to "regulate commerce...among the several states." Other cases might involve people whose crimes were treated as federal offenses because of a case-specific connection to interstate commerce, such as a bias-motivated assault committed with a baseball bat manufactured in another state. (I kid you not.) As Breyer notes, "the Constitution...nowhere speaks explicitly about the creation of federal crimes beyond those related to 'counterfeiting,' 'treason,' or 'Piracies and Felonies committed on the high Seas' or 'against the Law of Nations.'" But that has not stopped Congress from criminalizing a wide range of offenses (including many already addressed by state laws), based on thin or nonexistent constitutional pretexts.
Rather than questioning the constitutional basis for the criminal statues on which the civil commitment law relies, dissenting Justice Clarence Thomas (joined by Antonin Scalia) argues that the law "is aimed at protecting society from acts of sexual violence, not toward 'carrying into Execution' any enumerated power or powers of the Federal Government." Even if we assume the validity of the criminal statutes, civil commitment of "sexually dangerous" prisoners is not necessary to carry them out. The criminal statute has been fully executed at the point where someone convicted of violating it completes the sentence it prescribes, which is precisely when civil commitment takes effect. "The statute," Thomas notes, "therefore authorizes federal custody over a person at a time when the Government would lack jurisdiction to detain him for violating a criminal law that executes an enumerated power."
As further evidence that the authority to commit a "sexually dangerous" prisoner after he finishes his term does not flow from the authority to criminalize his offense, Thomas notes that the offense need not be a sex crime. One-fifth of the cases have involved prisoners who were not convicted of a federal offense involving sexual violence. Someone serving time for mail fraud or tax evasion could be be treated as a "sexually dangerous" prisoner if the government presents "clear and convincing evidence" of a tendency to commit sex crimes, which need not include a criminal conviction. Furthermore, Thomas writes, "the definition of a 'sexually dangerous person'...does not require the court to find that the person is likely to violate a law executing an enumerated power in the future." In other words, the law is only tenuously related to federal criminal statutes, which themselves may be only tenuously related to an enumerated power.
"No enumerated power...expressly delegates to Congress the power to enact a civil-commitment regime for sexually dangerous persons," Thomas writes, "nor does any other provision in the Constitution vest Congress or the other branches of the Federal Government with such a power....The Constitution does not vest in Congress the authority to protect society from every bad act that might befall it." He warns that the majority's opinion, which requires no more than a "rational" connection between a federal law and the enumerated power to which it is allegedly related (and which in this case is not even cited), "comes perilously close to transforming the Necessary and Proper Clause into a basis for the federal police power that 'we always have rejected.'"
The decision is here. Previous coverage of the case here and here.
Judicial Restraint or Constitutional Abdication?
Writing at National Review, conservative law professor Robert F. Nagel argues that conservatives have no business asking the federal courts to overturn ObamaCare:
[S]ome on the right are sufficiently sanguine about the Roberts Court that they are eager to abandon conservatives’ traditional distrust of judicial power. Using the same kind of imaginative legal arguments that leftist lawyers and judges have relied on in modern times, some thoughtful lawyers on the right propose subjecting state and local governments to increased supervision by federal judges by reading into the Constitution rights that cannot be found there. While liberal lawyers strategize about establishing a constitutional right to gay marriage, conservative lawyers plot to create a right to “medical self-defense.” The idea that constitutional argumentation can be used to achieve ambitious moral and political objectives is so attractive that Americans of all political stripes turn to the Court even when the likelihood of vindication is slim.
Nagel goes on to make the standard conservative case for judicial restraint, which includes the importance of letting democratic majorities have their way, restricting the power of unelected judges, and pursuing political change through the ballot box, not through the courthouse. In other words, Nagel thinks the courts should defer to the elected branches in the vast majority of cases, including that of ObamaCare. President Barack Obama certainly agrees. And it looks like Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan does too.
But the courts weren't meant to be a rubber stamp. They were designed as an essential safeguard against the tyranny of the majority, which means that unconstitutional laws should be struck down, no matter how many elected officials disagree. Judicial restraint tosses this constitutional safeguard out the window.
For more on the problems with judicial restraint, see here and here. And keep an eye out for our July issue, where I’ll have an article examining the longstanding division between conservative and libertarian legal activists over this very topic.
Last Week's Top 5 Hit & Run Posts
Here's what you were reading last week at Hit & Run:
Will Janet Napolitano Be Fired For Times Square Incompetence? by Tim Cavanaugh (5/9)
Time Is Not On ObamaCare's Side, by Peter Suderman (5/13)
Columbia, Missouri Police Chief: "I Hate the Internet," by Radley Balko (5/12)
Obama: College Experimentation Is Great, Keep That Mind Open, and Now if You'll Excuse Me, I'm Going to Continue Presiding Over Our Militarized War on Personal Drug Consumption, by Matt Welch (5/9)
Obama Works the Refs, by Matt Welch (5/10)
New at Reason: Peter Suderman on ObamaCare's Lie of Fiscal Responsibility
To hear the bill’s supporters explain it,
ObamaCare constitutes a triumph of fiscal responsibility, lowering
the deficit, extending the solvency of Medicare, and reining in the
growth of health care costs. But as Associate Editor Peter Suderman
explains in our June issue, the truth is that the Democrats relied
on cherry-picked numbers and rhetorical deception to pass their
health care bill.
Last Week's Top 5 Hits at Reason.com
These were the most popular Reason.com columns last week:
A Drug Raid Goes Viral: A violent drug raid posted to YouTube catches fire online. But the only thing unusual about the raid is that it was caught on video, by Radley Balko (5/11)
Our Unsustainable Debt: America is on the verge of financial disaster, by Veronique de Rugy (5/11)
Paul Ryan: Radical or Sellout? The GOP's rising fiscal policy star is too cautious for radical economic reform yet too radical for his own party, by Peter Suderman (5/10)
Meeting Stupidity with Stupidity: For every action, there is an equal and opposite overreaction, by Steve Chapman (5/10)
The Bounds of Silence: Obama's Supreme Court pick looks wobbly on freedom of speech, by Jacob Sullum (5/12)
Reason Writers Around the Web: Radley Balko Guest-Blogging for Instapundit This Week
This week, Reason Senior Editor Radley Balko will be part of a crew of guest-bloggers filling in for Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds.
Follow Balko's posts here.
ObamaCare Puts Strain On Emergency Rooms, Bans Expansion By Doctor-Owned Hospitals
When Masschusetts passed its
health care overhaul in 2006, one of the key arguments supporters
made was that it would bring down provider wait times. Instead, the
opposite happened: Wait times grew all over the state, and Boston
quickly came to lead the nation in medical waiting
periods. Now, rather predictably, under the Affordable Care Act,
we're poised to see similar increases nation-wide. From The Hill:
Richard Foster, Chief Actuary at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, told The Hill that the current dearth of primary care physicians could lead to greater stress on hospital emergency rooms.
“The supply of doctors can’t be increased very quickly–there’s a time lag,” he said, adding, “Is the last resort to newly covered people the emergency room? I would say that is a possibility, but I wouldn’t say anybody has a very good handle on exactly how much of an infrastructure problem there will be or exactly how it might work out.”
The Academy of Architecture for Health predicts hospitals will need at least $2 trillion over the next 20 years to meet the coming demand.
“As more people have access, you have to deal with the increased capacity,” said Andrew Goldberg, senior director of federal relations at the American Institute of Architects. “At the moment there is not a lot of building going on because of the economy and a lot of health care facilities can’t get the financing. We’ve been working on the Hill to try to address that issue.”
You might argue, however, that the law's authors already addressed the issue—albeit not in the way Goldberg is hoping—when they imposed an immediate expansion ban on physician-owned hospitals.
Stop The Music! But Not With a Heckler's Veto at a College Fer Chrissakes!
I hate musicals in real life that way Marlow hated lies in Heart of Darkness; there's a taint of death in both (except death doesn't have dancing too!). So when I see a story about a musical being shut down, part of me wants to break out into...song?!?!
But here's a video put out by the good folks at The Foundation For Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), which is fighting for free speech on campuses all around the country. The case involves a consciously offensive play staged at Washington State University in 2005 that managed to rile up Mormons, Catholics, feminist groups, the local police, and the university itself, which already makes it better than, say, Once Upon a Mattress, Bells Are Ringing, or Grease.
The video, which features FIRE's honcho, Greg Lukianoff, is part of a promotion for the just-out collection New Threats to Freedom, edited and introduced by Adam Bellow and featuring essays by Reasoners Katherine Mangu-Ward and Michael Moynihan. Check it out here (and watch this space for news of a Monday DC bash in honor of the book).
And now, on with the show:
Crises and Leviathans
Ross Douthat gets this right:
For a week after Greece's fiscal meltdown began, all the talk was about the weakness of the European Union, the folly of its too-rapid expansion, and the failure of the Continent's governing class to anticipate the crisis.
But then the E.U. acted, bailing out Greece to the tune of nearly a trillion dollars, and dictating economic terms to Athens that resemble "the kind of thing a surrendering field marshal signs in a railway car in the forest at the end of a bloody war," in the words of the Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum. If the bailout succeeds, the E.U.'s authority over its member states will be dramatically enhanced -- and a crisis created by hasty, elite-driven integration will have led, inexorably, to further integration and a more powerful elite.
This trajectory should be familiar to Americans. The panic of 2008 happened, in part, because the public interest had become too intertwined with private interests for the latter to be allowed to fail. But everything we did to halt the panic, and all the legislation we've passed, has only strengthened the symbiosis.
From the Troubled Asset Relief Program to the stimulus bill, from the auto bailout to health care reform, we've created a vast new array of public-private partnerships -- empowering insiders at the expense of outsiders, large institutions at the expense of small ones, and Washington at the expense of state and local governments. Eighteen months after the financial crisis, the interests of our financiers, C.E.O.s, bureaucrats and politicians are yoked together as never before.
What we have, Douthat suggests, is "a system that only knows how to move in one direction. If consolidation creates a crisis, the answer is further consolidation. If economic centralization has unintended consequences, then you need political centralization to clean up the mess. If a government conspicuously fails to prevent a terrorist attack or a real estate bubble, then obviously it needs to be given more powers to prevent the next one, or the one after that."
Eminent Domaining the Canadian Border
The sleepy Morses Line border crossing between
Vermont and Quebec has fewer than 15,000 vehicle crossings per
year. So, naturally, the Department of Homeland Security wants to
improve it through property seizure:
It intends to acquire 4.9 acres of border land on a dairy farm owned for three generations by the Rainville family. Last month, the Rainvilles learned that if they refuse to sell the land for $39,500, the government intends to seize it by eminent domain.
The Rainvilles call this an unjustified land-grab by federal bullies.
"They are trying to steamroll us," said Brian Rainville, 36, a high school government and civics teacher whose grandfather bought the farm in 1946 and whose parents and two brothers run it now. "We have a buyer holding a gun to our head saying you have to sell or else." [...]
Homeland Security officials counter that modernizing border facilities should be a national priority. US Customs and Border Protection received $420 million in federal stimulus funds to renovate ports of entry along the Canadian and Mexican borders.
Whole Boston Globe article here. Read another from the alt weekly Seven Days (source of the Matthew Thorsen photo above). Hat tip to reader Michael Navarette.
Detroit Girl, 7, Killed in SWAT Raid
Seven-year-old Aiyana Jones was killed during a SWAT raid in Detroit over the weekend (more here and here). Police raided a duplex looking for a suspect in a murder investigation. According to Jones' family, the suspect was arrested in the apartment opposite where the little girl was shot. Police thus far are only saying that they had a warrant for the entire building, and that the suspect was arrested in that building.
The family says when police tossed a flashbang grenade through the window of the apartment where Jones was sleeping, the device ignited the blanket on her bed and set Jones on fire. The police initially claimed Jones was shot after her grandmother had an altercation with one of the officers. They now say the contact with the grandmother was incidental and the gun discharged accidentally. According to the family, neighbors warned the officers that there were children in the home, and pointed officers to toys in the front yard.
If police in this case had intelligence that their suspect posed an immediate threat to others, there might be some justification for using a SWAT team to apprehend him. Clearly a homicide suspect presents more of a threat than someone suspected of drug crimes. But it doesn't appear that the suspect was holding anyone hostage or on some sort of killing spree. And unless we learn that's the case, it's hard to understand why you'd send a SWAT team and deploy incendiary flash grenades into both units of a duplex, especially if it's clear there are children and bystanders inside.
If nothing else, Aiyana Jones' death illustrates just how volatile and violent these raids can be, as well as their low margin for error. It shows why they should be used only when such force is necessary to defuse an already violent situation—that is, unless police intervene, there is an immediate threat of further loss of life. That's really the only scenario under which you can justify using tactics that have proven over the years to themselves carry a not insignificant risk of taking innocent lives.
More as we learn more details.
MORE: Sigh.
Film crews with A&E's "The First 48" reality show, which follows police departments nationwide during the crucial 48 hours after a homicide is committed, were taping the [SWAT] team for a documentary.
Paul Krugman's Koans
Krugman on libertarianism: It won't work, because what's to stop politicians from passing un-libertarian laws?
Reason.tv: Tony Williams - A Pro-School Choice, Pro-Business Democrat Who Just Might Be The Next Governor of Pennsylvania
"You either pay the $16,500 now for our children's public education or you pay the $35,000 or $40,000 later for public assistance, sitting on grandma's couch or in prison," says Anthony H. Williams.
Williams is a long-time Philadelphia-area state senator who is running for the Democratic Party gubernatorial nomination in the Keystone State. Williams is also an ardent supporter of school choice and pro-business in a way that few Democrats (or even Republicans, for that matter) seem to be these days.
A vocal supporter of public funding for the arts, Williams is no doctrinaire libertarian, but he remains an all-too-rare figure in contemporary politics: an individual not completely defined by his party affiliation.
Approximately 10 minutes long. Interview by Nick Gillespie; camera and editing by Dan Hayes.
Go here for downloadable versions and go to Reason.tv's YouTube channel for embed code.
Reason Morning Links: Survivors' Edition
• Rhode Island's fired teachers won't stay fired.
• Michael Bellesiles comes back, and so does Kaavya Viswanathan.
• The Euro continues its slide.
• The Greek government might sue American banks for speaking frankly about the country's ability to repay its debts.
• A Chinese historian claims that Beijing and Moscow came close to nuclear war in 1969.
How to Save Cleveland, Non-Reason Version: Force Parking Lot Operators to Provide Bike Racks, Spend Money on Public Showers
Earlier this year, we debuted Reason Saves Cleveland With Drew Carey: How to fix the Mistake on The Lake And Other Once-Great American Cities. Our suggestions were heavy on deregulating the educational and business environments and outsourcing and privatizing city services. Given that Cleveland has lost more than half its population since 1950, it's time, we figure, to try something radically different than the same-old same-old of more taxes, regulation, and Edifice Complex projects that cost a lot and deliver less than zero.
So here's Cleveland's latest punch toward a comeback:
A new city regulation will require many parking lots and garages to install secure bike racks.
The rule, which takes effect June 16, covers facilities that charge for parking. Parking lots and garages will have to provide one bicycle space with an anchored bike rack or locker for every 20 automobile spaces, with a maximum requirement of 24 spots.
The city doesn't require that the bike spaces be free. But the Cleveland Parking Association doesn't know of any facility planning to charge.
Cleveland is also turning an unused office into a bike parking station that will feature showers, lockers and repair services. The $420,000 project should be finished in late August.
Lots of luck with that, fellas. And when it fails to do anything other than cost more than originally expected, please watch this video. And go here for episode guide and individual segments.
New at Reason: Steve Chapman on Barring Suspected Terrorists from Buying Guns
Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.) is one of many
people wondering why a suspected terrorist can be barred from
flying but not from purchasing a gun. It "defies common sense,"
Lautenberg says, that "the rights of terrorists are placed above
the safety of everyday Americans." But as Steve Chapman writes,
Lautenberg's idea isn't just unwise, it's unconstitutional.
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