Weekly Hit & Run Archive 2010 June 1-31

Senior Editor of Reason Magazine Katherine Mangu-Ward talks Tea Parties, fringe candidates, and third-party candidates on Russia Today's The Alyona Show on May 25, 2010.

Approximately 5 minutes.

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It’s an unsurprising story, but the Wall Street Journal digs into the financing of the anti-Wal-Mart movement and finds that rival supermarkets—like Supervalu, Safeway, and Ahold NV—have been stoking and underwriting community outrage:

Robert Brownson long believed that his proposed development here, with its 200,000-square-foot Wal-Mart Supercenter, was being held hostage by nearby homeowners.

He had seen them protesting at city hall, and they had filed a lawsuit to stop the project.

What he didn't know was that the locals were getting a lot of help. A grocery chain with nine stores in the area had hired Saint Consulting Group to secretly run the antidevelopment campaign. Saint is a specialist at fighting proposed Wal-Marts, and it uses tactics it describes as "black arts."…

Safeway, a national chain based in Pleasanton, Calif., retained Saint to thwart Wal-Mart Supercenters in more than 30 towns in California, Oregon, Washington and Hawaii in recent years, according to a Saint project list and interviews with former employees. Former Saint employees say much of the work consisted of training Safeway's unionized workers to fight land-use battles, including how to speak at public hearings.

A few years back, I wrote about the history of big box panics.

Politico has a decent article up about how, 

Spurred by state budget crunches and an angry public mood, Republican and some Democratic leaders are focusing with increasing intensity on public workers and the unions that represent them, casting them as overpaid obstacles to good government and demanding cuts in their often-generous benefits.

Lots of Chris Christie/Mitch Daniels quotes, but it remains striking to me how lame the public-sector union responses sound:

"It's outrageous to blame a librarian – to blame a fireman for the financial mess that we find this country it," the president of the American Federation of State County, and Municipal Employees, the largest national public workers union, [Gerald] McEntee, said. "We are the scapegoats in the states." [...]

"The Al Shankers and the Victor Gotbaums...they're not around any more," said Norman Adler, the former political director of the New York City public workers union, referring to public sector union leaders who battled through the crises of the 1960s. "The people who have replaced them are either not as sophisticated or not as talented as the old guard was." [...]

American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, for instance, blamed "the hedge fund folks" who, she said, are "trying to use charters as a way of demonizing public school teachers."

So, don't blame the noble firefighter for the economic crisis, the movement needs greater Great Leaders, and god DAMN those hedge funds. Really?

What's missing every time this debate comes up is any actual defense of the basic and 100 percent undeniable trend line–we are paying much, much more money to deliver government services that (with few exceptions) are not performing any better, and the single biggest line item in that cost increase is employee compensation. The burden of proof is on the people pocketing our taxpayer dollars, and yet they continue to dissemble, whine, and change the subject (and sometimes even shrug), rather than robustly defending the public policy mess they have been instrumental in creating. As long as We Are Out of Money, they (and their apologists) will rightly be on the defensive.

Watch me debate with a California union honcho on the Stossel show below. And refresh your memory with our three classic cover stories: "Class War," "Failed States," and "The Next Catastrophe."

I'm happy to announce that Meredith Bragg of Reason.tv won second runner-up honors for his entry in the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's "I Am Free Enterprise" video contest. Check out his video about the making of a sandwich:

First-runner-up honors went to "Tracy Foster is Free Enterprise," which Dan Hayes helped out with.

The big winner was Carlos Sanchez. Check out his video.

For more background on the contest, go to the chamber's site here.

In a recent interview with National Review Online's Will Cain, Senior Editor Jacob Sullum explains why "drug-related violence" is really prohibition-related violence, why more drug use after legalization would be a good thing, and why controlled substance is a misnomer.

Today Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter signed a law that authorizes government-licensed medical marijuana dispensaries. "Primary caregivers," who are allowed to grow cannabis for patients under the voter-approved constitutional amendment that legalized the medical use of marijuana in 2000, will now be limited to five patients each and generally will be permitted to grow no more than six plants per patient (although exceptions can be made based on medical necessity). Yet the law also allows larger-scale dispensaries to stay open, provided they obtain state and local licenses, grow at least 70 percent of their marijuana, operate at least 1,000 feet from the nearest school, and meet various other requirements. The Marijuana Policy Project says "hundreds" of the state's existing dispensaries will be able to stay in business, although municipalities would be allowed to ban them altogether.

Another bill signed by Ritter today requires that doctors who recommend marijuana have "bona fide" relationships with their patients:

The new law will require doctors to have completed a full assessment of the patient's medical history, to talk with the patient about the medical condition that has caused them to seek marijuana and to be available for follow-up care. The law also prevents doctors from getting paid by dispensaries to write recommendations.

Colorado now joins New Mexico, Rhode Island, Maine, New Jersey, and Washington, D.C., on the list of jurisdictions that explicitly authorize medical marijuana dispensaries. The new rules eliminate the ambiguity that had allowed the DEA to continue raiding cannabis suppliers despite the Obama administration's policy against prosecuting those who comply with state law. If the DEA raids state-licensed dispensaries in Colorado (or elsewhere), it will be clear that the alleged shift in policy means nothing in practice.

Medical marijuana advocates plan to challenge the provision that permits local governments to ban dispensaries, which in theory could lead to statewide prohibition, contrary to the state constitution's medical marijuana provision.

On my Twitter account last week, I noted the story of a Richmond, VA health insurance start-up that specializes in consumer-driven health care plans—or did, anyway, until it shut down. The top execs are now claiming the company was put out of business by regulatory uncertainty created by the passage of ObamaCare. Today, Politico's Sarah Kliff has a nice follow-up:

A Virginia-based insurance company says "considerable uncertainties" created by the Democrats' health care overhaul will force it to close its doors by the end of the year.

The firm, nHealth, appears to be the first to claim that the new law has driven it out of business. "We don't know what the rules are going to be and, as a start-up, our investors need certainty," nHealth CEO and president, Paul Kitchen, told POLITICO. "The law created so much uncertainty that is beyond our control."

...In an interview with POLITICO, Kitchen explained the impact of health reform on his business as two-fold. First, it created an uncertain future. With regulations yet to be written and rules constantly forthcoming, he said "everything felt beyond our control."

Second, Kitchen is apprehensive about a more-heavily regulated insurance market. The new health reform law requires insurance companies to spend a certain amount of premium dollars on medical costs and, in many cases, bans lifetime limits on medical coverage. Kitchen said he was uncertain whether nHealth would be able to comply.

"The rules changed in the middle of the game," says Kitchen. "We're not willing to wander into that environment." The White House aide agreed that the rules will indeed change, but in a way that benefits consumers. Stricter regulations will ultimately guarantee better coverage for subscribers. The medical loss ratio regulation, for example, will ensure that insurers spend a certain percent of subscriber dollars on medical costs rather than administrative expenses.

The fact that there are losers in a market is not by itself proof that a law is problematic (I can imagine any number of deregulatory moves, especially in the energy sector, that might kill some business models). And start-ups with short track records are inherently less stable than existing successful businesses, which means they're the most likely to get pushed out when rules change. But it does suggest the tough road health insurers are going to have ahead of them, and, in particular, the difficulties that companies that aim to innovate with CDHC-flavored plans are likely to face.

I took a longer look at how ObamaCare threatens consumer-driven health care plans here.

Mother Jones reporter Suzy Khimm notes that the deluge of corporate speech prophesied by President Obama and other critics of the Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United v. FEC so far does not even amount to a trickle. The Center for Responsive Politics counts exactly one example of express advocacy by a corporation in the recent elections: "A real-estate company called KDR Development ran a print advertisement against the Democratic incumbent in a Texas state House race." Labor unions, by contrast, have been quick to take advantage of their new freedom:

The American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) and the AFL-CIO have begun to use the new Citizens United rules to promote their preferred candidates in closely fought contests, such as Lt. Gov. Bill Halter's challenge to Sen. Blanche Lincoln in Arkansas' Democratic Senate primary, and the special election in Pennsylvania's 12th congressional district, which Democrat Mark Critz won in mid-May....

The ads urged voters to "say no to Blanche Lincoln," "vote no on Blanche Lincoln," and "vote for Bill Halter," as well as another TV ad that suggested that "it's time for Arkansas to let [Lincoln] go."...

Similarly, the AFL-CIO told voters to "cast a vote for Pennsylvania jobs—Mark Critz for Congress" in a radio spot funded by soft money contributions. "We participated heavily in that election and we’re proud of the results we got," says AFL-CIO spokeswoman Amaya Tune. "We think that ad, and others that we got, were extremely helpful in pushing Critz over."

It makes sense that unions, which do not have to worry about alienating customers or upsetting shareholders, would be be more eager to run political ads than major corporations are. Still, Ricky Feller, AFSCME's deputy political director, worries that the union advantage won't last and therefore suggests that it should be enshrined in law:

"Once corporations figure out how they’re going to do this or not do this, we can't compete with their money," says Feller. But they believe that the same rules shouldn't apply to them. "We think unions are different from corporations," says AFL-CIO's Tune. "They actually represent members who pay their dues, representing working people."

Khimm alludes to the DISCLOSE Act, which she describes as "legislation that would create stricter disclosure requirements for political advertising," without mentioning that it embodies the sort of double standard Feller wants.

Here's what you were reading last week at Hit & Run:

David Souter, Jim Crow, and the Living Constitution, by Damon W. Root (6/4)

Yet Still Even More on The Coming War Between Public and Private Sector Workers...Chap MCMXIII, by Nick Gillespie (6/3)

Royal Society to Re-evaluate Position on Global Warming, by Ronald Bailey (6/1)

The Berwick Battle Begins, by Peter Suderman (6/2)

When Governments Choose To Pay For Medicine, They Also Choose What Medicine To Not Pay For, by Peter Suderman (6/3)

The Wall Street Journal reports on the Obama administration's latest policy innovation:

On Monday, insurers that sell Medicare Advantage plans must submit their 2011 bids to the government. In a letter to four insurance-industry executives, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius warned the companies not to increase premiums and co-payments for seniors.

"Focus on price and quality rather than asking seniors who need health care the most to pay more for it," Ms. Sebelius wrote in a letter sent Friday and reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. The letters went to WellPoint Inc., Cigna Corp., BlueCross BlueShield Association and Health Care Service Corp., according to a person familiar with the situation. Those executives met with Ms. Sebelius last month.

Many insurance companies are planning to increase costs for a range of services for seniors next year, according to consultants who have helped prepare their bids. Dozens of Medicare Advantage providers plan to cut back vision, dental and prescription benefits. Some plans are eliminating free teeth cleanings and gym memberships, and raising fees for hearing aides, eye glasses and emergency-room visits.

Consultants cite two reasons for the cuts. The rate the government will pay private insurers to run the plans is frozen for 2011 at 2010 levels, while medical costs are expected to increase an average of at least 6%. Such price increases and benefit cuts will help them recoup that difference, the consultants say.

Meanwhile, the health overhaul will impose drastic payment cuts to insurers that run the plans, and consultants say insurance companies need to begin adapting now. Starting in 2012, the law calls for a gradual reduction in government payments to insurers, totaling $136 billion before the end of the decade.

The Obama administration and Senate Democrats say that passing those costs on as early as next year is unfair. In her letter, Ms. Sebelius warned insurers that she will deny insurers bids if they include excessive price increases, using new powers under the health law.

Now why would Sebelius need to send a letter like this? Wasn't the Affordable Care Act supposed to, you know, make care more affordable? And didn't President Obama himself indicate that seniors needn't fear Medicare cuts? Or is this an admission that that, despite the administration's steady promises to the contrary, health insurance premiums are likely to go up in the wake of the new health care law?

Or maybe this letter is just a way of following through on those promises. The way the Obama administration will keep prices down and quality up is by...writing threatening letters to the health insurance industry warning them to keep service levels high and prices low.

If this is such a great idea, though, I wonder why we can try it for other industries? I propose we start with the video game console market: Let's make sure Microsoft puts out a next-generation Xbox pronto, and a stack of nifty new games to go with it. Obviously, though, I don't want to pay any more for it than a current console. Maybe the FTC and the FCC can take of this one with a joint-letter. And how about the wedding industry? Costs have gone up steadily over the years, and American families, already burdened by the effects of a sluggish economy, are suffering. If all it takes is a stern letter and a flash of some agency's regulatory weaponry to get more reasonable pricing and service out of the wedding planners and DJs and venue managers of the world, then surely this is a problem we can solve.

It's absurd, obviously, but hardly more so than what the Obama administration is doing here. Price controls on health insurance have already provoked a massive legal battle in Massachusetts, and the state's four biggest insurers are now all reporting operating losses—in large part, they claim, because of rate-hike rejections. Even Bill Clinton's economic advisers warned during the HillaryCare debates that imposing price controls would be difficult to implement and were likely to produce adverse effects. But those lessons appear not to have been passed on to the current administration, which seems determined to turn health insurance into an all-but government-run quasi-public utility.

Since we haven't run the video here yet, here's the ancient White House correspondent-turned-columnist Helen Thomas celebrating Jewish Heritage Month by telling Israelis (via a camera-wielding interlocutor) to go back to Poland and Germany:

Under heavy criticism (including from the White House), Thomas today announced her retirement.

As a fellow ex-UPIer and someone who greatly enjoyed a wine-drenched evening in Thomas' company 16 years ago (during which she told me, tears in her eyes, that Bill Clinton's disrespect for the office was worse than any of the presidents she'd covered), I am tempted to feel bad for an 89-year-old lady getting caught in what might be passed off as a senior moment, but there's no reason to believe that her statement and tone don't reflect her basic views.

They also, I believe, reflect an interesting, under-appreciated, and ultimately impermanent media phenomenon: The longer someone is submerged in what they and their organizations regard as traditional "straight" reporting, the more gruesome the results are when the gloves come off. As Thomas herself reportedly said in a 2002 speech, "I censored myself for 50 years.... Now I wake up and ask myself, 'Who do I hate today?'"

Straight reporters have been taught for six decades to submerge or even smother their political and philosophical views in the workplace. Like all varieties of censorship, this process creates resentment and distortion. Whatever it is that you feel prevented from saying, you will be more likely to scream once given the chance. This is why, for example, some of the most politically opinionated people you'll ever meet are newspaper reporters a couple drinks in out yakking with their colleagues.

Degrading the quality of that discussion still further is the likelihood that the partisanship-averse journos haven't bothered to construct their own self-conscious political philosophy, beyond identifying Bad Guys and wanting to Fix Problems. Show me the world's most intractable problems–the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the inability to produce mass amounts of energy without negatively impacting the environment, the search for a beer that tastes great and is less filling–and I'll show you reporters in bars having conversations worthy of the Alex Jones show. It's not that they're all Helen Thomases–she is truly one of a kind–but that in the absence of subjecting their own beliefs to journalistic rigor, they are more likely than many would expect to quietly nurture beliefs that outsiders would find surprisingly slanted and even extreme. 

For these and other reasons, when straight reporters transition to opinion journalism, one of the first things to go is the "journalism" part of it. Now they can say what they really feel, dammit, and what they really feel is that the Bad Guys are preventing us from Fixing Problems. There's no longer any need to grok the Bad Guy's point of view. Think of what happened to longtime Associated Press/CNN reporter Peter Arnett, for example, or just read the latest political musings from the once-straight war correspondent Chris Hedges. I saw this process repeatedly at the L.A. Times, when newsroom lifers would tranfer to the Opinion Dept. and immediately begin producing pieces that sounded like an activist's fundraising letter, caricutarizing the opposing side's absolutely worst argument.

All of which is why I wish even the straightest-edge news outlets would follow Reason's still-lonely example and show us (at minimum) who their staffers are voting for. Newspapers are more terrified that the public will realize how biased their reporters are than they are at continuing to publish work contaminated by suppressed political leanings and resentments. With the advent of blogs, social media, and other boomlets of cultural expression, and the deserved market decline in what press-thinker Jay Rosen has derisively termed "the view from nowhere," the mask has long since begun to slip and crack. Hopefully, the current generation of reporters entering the market will have figured out how to pursue fair journalism without hiding their beliefs, and to speak in whatever public fora without fatally undermining their work.

Kristin Davis rose to notoriety as the madam who provided New York Attorney General and Gov. Eliot Spitzer with the escorts that led to his demise. Davis ended up going to jail for providing a business populated by and for consenting adults. Spitzer's penalty? Possibly getting a show on CNN.

Now Davis herself is running the Empire State's top slot in Albany, on a platform this is simple and straightforward in libertarian sanity: She wants to legalize (and tax) marijuana and prostitution. For a state as deep in the red as New York, that's no joke. She has also proposed liberalizing gaming laws and called for gambling casinos in the Catskills.

I built a multi-million dollar escort service from scratch before pleading guilty to promoting prostitution.  Prostitution in New York is estimated to be a $5 Billion a year business. Legalization and a reasonable tax rate could bring $ 1Billion in new revenues to New York State each year. Legalizing Marijuana would reap another $2 Billion a year. Then New York could balance the budget and still cut property and income taxes.

Additionally, she wants to legalize gay marriage because the state shouldn't discriminate and highlight the inequities of a criminal justice system that treats the politically powerless far worse than the politically powerful. Read more here.

Davis' official campaign site is here.

Davis has enlisted the aid of legendary political operative Roger Stone for a campaign which has no chance of knocking off presumptive gubernatorial shoe-in Andrew Cuomo. But her run gives voice to a series of issues that deserve to be heard now more than ever. And her run gives form to a vision of smart governance and policy that is not simply provocative but utterly persuasive.

Reason.tv's Nick Gillespie sat down with Davis to talk about her platform, the hypocrisy of elected officials, and her coming web-based reality show, Madam Governor, which will document her campaign.

Shot by Dan Hayes and Meredith Bragg; edited by Bragg. Approximately 5 minutes.

Go to Reason.tv for downloadable versions. Subscribe to Reason.tv's YouTube channel for automatic notification when new material goes live.

Last year the Obama administration updated Washington’s official position on what forms of expression are legal. “Whether a given category of speech enjoys First Amendment protection,” Solicitor General Elena Kagan argued in U.S. v. Stevens, “depends upon a categorical balancing of the value of the speech against its societal costs.” Yet as Editor in Chief Matt Welch explains in our July issue, consequentialism and the First Amendment don't mix.

Today's quote of the day comes from the disgraced former tyrannical prosecutor Eliot Spitzer:

After reading the Gettysburg Address, does the idea of a carbon tax to finally move us away from an oil and old-energy dependence that is fouling not only the Gulf of Mexico but our entire climate, foreign policy, and economy seem so outrageous?

These were the most popular columns at Reason.com last week:

Obama's Glamour Problem: Former reason editor Virginia Postrel on the economics of health care and the intersection of glamour and politics, by Ted Balaker (6/1)

Fight Bigotry Without Government: How the free market undermines racism and segregation, by John Stossel (6/3)

Do Liberals Suffer from Arrested Moral Development? What 10-year-olds and liberals have in common, by Ronald Bailey (6/1)

The Persecution of Gilbert Arenas: How gun prohibitionists and an image-conscious NBA scapegoated a basketball star, by Daniel Wattenberg (6/3)

Legalize Immigration: It's time to focus on letting legal immigrants in, by Steve Chapman (5/31)

Writing at National Review, Harvard economist Jeffrey Miron argues that if the Tea Party movement wants to get serious about limiting government, it must oppose the drug war:

Voter dissatisfaction with Republicans and Democrats is at historic levels, and the tea-party movement is hoping to play kingmaker in the November elections. The country’s current breed of discontent is ideal for the tea parties, because economic concerns are foremost, allowing the movement to sidestep the divisions between its libertarian and conservative wings.

As the elections near, however, voters will want to know where the party stands not just on the economy but on social issues. A perfect illustration is drug policy, where conservatives advocate continued prohibition but libertarians argue for legalization. Which way should the tea party lean when this issue arises?

If the party is true to its principles — fiscal responsibility, constitutionally limited government, and free markets — it must side with the libertarians.

Read the whole thing here. And click below to watch Jeffrey Miron discuss his new book Libertarianism From A to Z with Reason.tv:

This purportedly carbon-neutral building, in Venice, California, is three and a half feet too tall, according to Los Angeles zoning restrictions. Removing the solar panels would knock it down 18 inches, but that might not be enough for the City Council. The architect says, "To fix it would cost more than it cost to erect it in the first place." Read more about it at L.A. Curbed.

Hat tip to Shawn Richardson.

It's Monday morning. Time for another reminder about the coming budgepocalypse!

How big and bad is the U.S. debt, and how big and bad is it likely to become over the next decade? The President's budget expects it to reach 77 percent of GDP by 2020, which is far above the generally-accepted healthy threshold of 60 percent of GDP. This is the best-case scenario, which, given Washington's history of bloated budgeting, means you can safely ignore it. The CBO, on the other hand, projects that publicly held debt will equal 90 percent of GDP by 2020. And according to economists Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff—whose recent history of fiscal crises, This Time Is Different, is among the most thorough and influential takes on how economies weigh themselves down with debt—it's at that 90 percent point when things get really scary. Growth slows, and the economy becomes more likely to suffer shocks. Federal interest payments climb ever higher. And as that happens, the country becomes more and more likely to lose its triple-A credit rating—which is sort of like being put on economic probation (in other words, really bad news).

But what if we hit the 90 percent threshold even faster? The CBO's headline figure only total up publicly-held debt. But if you look at the government's gross debt, the timeline for the budgepocalypse is even shorter. In fact, we may already be there: The CBO expects gross central government debt to hit 94 percent this year. And it's expected to keep growing, too. This morning, Bloomberg is reporting that total debt could could hit 100 percent of GDP by 2012, according to IMF figures. Maybe we all get some sort of award when we finally owe more than we produce in a year? Or maybe we just keep shrugging our shoulders and scratching our heads and setting up bipartisan commissions to make it look like we're doing something.

In other news, according to the Wall Street Journal, some folks in Washington aren't quite sure whether to keep borrowing money in order to fund more stimulus programs or start cutting spending. But for the Obama administration, it's not that tough a decision: "The priority remains stimulating economic growth through continued spending." Fiscal responsibility!

• New report alleges Bush administration experimented on Gitmo detainees.
• Two U.S. citizens arrested in New Jersey, accused of planning jihad against America.
• Bernie Madoff, prison hero.
• Democrats dealing with voter anger by . . . ignoring voters.
• Flurry of big Supreme Court decisions due in coming weeks.

The first comes from Tufts, via the invaluable Inside Higher Ed:

Lawrence Bacow, president of Tufts University, has been inviting students who are mentioned in police reports to his office, so he can talk to them one-on-one about the risks of excessive drinking, The Boston Globe reported. In the article, Bacow argues that cultural shifts are needed to change drinking patterns, and so he asks students not only to change their own behavior but to look out for their friends. He started the effort after an incident this fall when he was walking back to his house, along with the president of Bowdoin College, after Tufts had defeated Bowdoin in football in the homecoming game, and he found a fire truck and an ambulance there, dealing with an intoxicated student. “There’s a student passed out on my lawn,’’ Bacow told the Globe. “At 3:30 in the afternoon!’’

I sympathize with Bacow regarding substance abuse by students, but however heartfelt his approach is, it doesn't really get at those drinking patterns he wants to change.

For that, check out this Reason.tv video produced by Paul Feine and Alex Manning and featuring University of the South/Sewanne president (and former Middlebury president) John McCardell. McCardell's crazy idea? End the prohibitionist mind-set that triumphed on campuses by the late 1980s and actually give kids some basic instruction on how to drink without puking your guts out. As he notes, no one expects a 16 year old to be able to drive a car without practice and instruction.

Former Libertarian Party presidential nominee Bob Barr notes that Faisal Shahzad's Times Square bombing attempt might be a causus belli for the federal government to make pre-paid cell phones illegal. Excerpt:

This innocuous device, available now to virtually anyone wishing to buy a cheap cell phone useable for a limited period, represents perhaps the last opportunity for a person to communicate anonymously.  Yet, these devices are being targeted for extinction by a pair of United States Senators simply because the failed Times Square bomber used one in his preparatory activities; and law enforcement discovered this not because the *purchase* of the cell phone was recorded in an accessible database, but because Shahzad made at least one call to a number already on a government list of suspected terrorists.

Democratic New York Sen. Chuck Schumer now has teamed with his Republican colleague from Texas, John Cornyn, and introduced a bill that would employ the heavy hand of federal law to prohibit anonymous cell phones. [...] [I]t is certain that many of their colleagues will jump at this latest chance to prove they are as tough on terrorists as the next guy, whatever the cost to the rest of the citizenry.

While Sens. Schumer and Cornyn may believe that the only people who purchase prepaid cell phones are terrorists, the fact is, many average, law-abiding citizens use such devices regularly.  Some people do so because they may not have the funds or the creditworthiness to buy a cell phone with a network plan.  Others may do so precisely because of the anonymity such phones offer; something especially important for journalists to be able to protect communications with their sources from being revealed.

Whole thing, including other civil liberties warnings, here; link via Barr's Twitter feed. The former Republican explained to Reason in 2003 and again in 2008 how voting for the PATRIOT Act hastened his turn to libertarianism. Watch his 2008 Reason.tv interview below:

In the Midwest, writes Steve Chapman, we don't have damp, blustery fall days: We have Big Ten weather. We don't have mammoth land-grant universities: We have Big Ten schools. You may insult our climate, our politicians, or our Miss America contestants, but not the Big Ten. But as Chapman notes, right now, people in high positions are talking about expanding the nation's oldest collegiate athletic conference. What they may overlook is that it's not just a sports association. It's an identity in a region that needs one.

Is Barack Obama a secret Muslim? communist? immigrant? extra in the video for "Whoomp (There It Is)"? Gawker weighs the evidence.

Obama's commission to reduce the federal budget deficit . . . says it needs more money.

...oh yeah, and his quixotic Senate bid against incumbent Barbara Boxer.

The Kaus family was deeply intertwined with California politics and culture long before journalist/blogger Mickey Kaus started his longshot bid to unseat Sen. Barbara Boxer in the 2010 Democratic primary.

Mickey’s father, the Viennese-born Otto Kaus, was a well-respected jurist who sat on the California Supreme Court from 1981 to 1985. His brother Stephen is a prominent Bay Area civil-litigation attorney and a commentator for The Huffington Post. Mickey’s maternal grandmother, Dorothy Huttenback, was a musical prodigy who headed up the Los Angeles Music Guild for three decades, and Dorothy’s son Robert served as chancellor of the University of California at Santa Barbara. Both sides of the family were part of the historic wave of German-speaking Jews who fled the Nazis for Southern California in and around the 1930s, injecting a distinctive, semi-alienated yet intensely patriotic intellectual style to the Golden State’s civic conversation.

Mickey Kaus’ position within the national public policy discussion has always been that of a tweak-your-own-side contrarian. He was part of the group of writers at the left-of-center Washington Monthly in the 1980s who hatched what they called “neoliberalism”—a qualified rejection of interest-group politics and Keynesian economics in favor of policies intended to harness rather than oppose market forces. That frame led him to The End of Equality, a seminal 1992 book that stressed opportunities over outcomes and took on the liberal sacred cow of welfare. Kaus certainly hadn’t abandoned the liberal fold—among other things, the book called for a federal jobs program, universal health coverage, and compulsory national service—but he wasn’t an ordinary Democrat either.

By the end of the 1990s Kaus’ name was synonymous with political blogging. He had launched one of the first and most influential journalist blogs, Kausfiles, which for most of its lifespan has been published by Slate. In 2005 he helped kick-start the video debate site Bloggingheads.tv with his friend and frequent sparring partner Robert Wright. There and elsewhere, Kaus has distanced himself from his own Democratic Party on unionism, health care reform, public sector pensions, and especially immigration.

In 2010 Kaus decided to put his money where his mouth is and run against Boxer, the powerful three-term senator, as a way to advance the discussion about modern Democratic priorities. Needless to say, Kaus has no chance of unseating Boxer in the California primary coming on June 8. Yet his insights on new media, unions, and politics more broadly are well worth hearing. And his story about bringing the Velvet Underground to perform at Beverly Hills High in the '60s is not to be missed.

Reason.tv Editor Nick Gillespie spoke with Kaus in May, just after Arizona passed a controversial law about checking the immigration status of anyone who comes into contact with law enforcement.

About 40 minutes. Shot by Dan Hayes and Meredith Bragg; edited by Bragg. Go to Reason.tv for downloadable versions.

Here's the great science writer Matt Ridley, author of, most recently, The Rational Optimist, writing in the Wall Street Journal about the evolutionary origins of trade:

Given that progress is inexorable, cumulative and collective if human beings exchange and specialize, then globalization and the Internet are bound to ensure furious economic progress in the coming century—despite the usual setbacks from recessions, wars, spendthrift governments and natural disasters.

The process of cumulative innovation that has doubled life span, cut child mortality by three-quarters and multiplied per capita income ninefold—world-wide—in little more than a century is driven by ideas having sex. And things like the search engine, the mobile phone and container shipping just made ideas a whole lot more promiscuous still.

More here.

If you sign on for Reason's first-ever cruise next February, you can spend a week hanging out with the very tall Ridley (and the equally tall and brilliant Ron Bailey, for almost 14 feet of science reporting excellence). Can Ridley play shuffle board and limbo as well as he can write? Come aboard and find out already.

And besides Ridley and Bailey, you'll get to hang with Matt Welch, Jacob Sullum, and me (whether you want to or not). And then there's Patri Friedman, the visionary behind the Seasteading Institute! This is one ship whose Lido Deck is gonna be pretty awesome.

The cruise leaves from Fort Lauderdale on January 30, 2011 and goes to exotic ports of call throughout the Caribbean for a week; cabins start around $1,500 per person, so you really can't afford not to come (this logic seems to work well with governmental jurisdictions, so maybe it'll work with you all too). That's an all-inclusive price for the ship, which is a pretty sweet deal.

Go here for more info.

The president this week did one of his classic bits of corner-cutting caricaturization of his political opposition:

But to be fair, a good deal of the other party's opposition to our agenda has also been rooted in their sincere and fundamental belief about the role of government.  It's a belief that government has little or no role to play in helping this nation meet our collective challenges.  It's an agenda that basically offers two answers to every problem we face:  more tax breaks for the wealthy and fewer rules for corporations.

The last administration called this recycled idea "the Ownership Society."  But what it essentially means is that everyone is on their own.  No matter how hard you work, if your paycheck isn't enough to pay for college or health care or childcare, well, you're on your own.  If misfortune causes you to lose your job or your home, you're on your own.  And if you're a Wall Street bank or an insurance company or an oil company, you pretty much get to play by your own rules, regardless of the consequences for everybody else.

Keep in mind, the president is talking specifically here not about libertarian freakazoids who want to privatize their own grandmothers, but about governing Republicans. You know, the gang who, "during the first half of 2001 and all of the 2003-07 period maintained full control of both the White House and Congress," during which time they "increased total spending by more than 20 percent, an average of 5 percent a year," jacking up "both nondefense spending and mandatory programs enormously." How in the hell can you spend so much money on "more tax breaks for the wealthy and fewer rules for corporations"? Which one of those two answers (the only ones the GOP has, remember) best describes No Child Left Behind, Sarbanes-Oxley, or Medicare Part D? If Bush was really all about "fewer rules for corporations," how was it that he managed to be "the biggest regulator since Nixon"? (And do click on those links, they are filled with things like facts and numbers.)

And no, tax breaks and deregulation were not at the heart of the "Ownership Society." That mostly stillborn idea focused on increasing individual control over retirement, health care, and education. Not much to do with oil spills there, kemosabe.

Since the president is doing battle with imaginary libertarian foes, let me zero in on one claim: that–according to limited-government ghastlies–"if you're a Wall Street bank or an insurance company or an oil company, you pretty much get to play by your own rules, regardless of the consequences for everybody else." Here's the deal: On Planet Libertopia, if you're a Wall Street bank that screws the pooch you go BANKRUPT, as an opening bid. It's pretty hard to "play by your own rules" when you're dead.

I'll give Obama the last word:

And the truth is if I had taken office in ordinary times, I would have liked nothing more than to start bringing down the deficits that [Republicans] created.  But we took office amid a crisis, and the effects of the recession put a $3 trillion hole in our budget before I even walked through the door.  Additionally, the steps that we had to take to save the economy from depression temporarily added more to the deficit -- by about $1 trillion.  Of course, if we had spiraled into a depression, our deficits and debt levels would be much worse.  

Soon after certain segments of the media accused Rand Paul of latent racism for his comments regarding the Civil Rights Act, the Kentucky Republican took another drubbing for the claim, made on ABC’s Good Morning America last week, that President Obama’s criticism of BP struck him as “really un-American.” Now Paul is taking a safer, if less libertarian line, on the BP disaster:

Paul, calling the spill "a great tragedy," told Tony Cruise on WHAS-AM that "I think we do have to have regulations, and we do have regulations in place but apparently wasn't enough.

"And sometimes even the best of regulations don't work because something unforeseen happens and that's what we have to figure out from this."

Via Hotair.

On a junket to the former Soviet Republic of Georgia—sponsored by the government of Mikheil Saakashvili—Michael C. Moynihan visits the Russian line of occupation in South Ossetia and a nearby museum dedicated to the country's most famous son, Josef Stalin. He discovers, to his surprise, that the Soviet dictator was not only an unsurpassed political and military leader, but also a great scientist, humanitarian, and all around swell guy.

The New York Times squints and rubs its eyes in wonder at the pairing of two political adversaries:

After squaring off as political foes for more than a year, the Obama administration and the health insurance industry have suddenly discovered that they need each other.

Suddenly, eh? So the Times thinks this is a recent development? That's interesting, because I swear I've heard something like this before somewhere.

Look, it's easy to paint insurers as villains and act surprised when the industry buddies up with Washington. And, sure, it would be an exaggeration to say they supported the health care overhaul wholeheartedly; AHIP CEO Karen Ignagni was never going to quit her job and go volunteer at Health Care for America Now. And it's likely that there will be continued squabbling over rate hikes and regulations as ObamaCare takes shape. But the insurers saw where the legislative winds were blowing, knew they were going to be targeted, and, as a result, decided early on to suck up to the administration in an effort to get into its good graces, and thereby expand their influence. In doing so, they—like PhRMA (though not quite as explicitly)—made themselves partners in the health care reform process.

The flipside of that is that, for all its stern rhetoric, the White House ended up partnering with the insurers. The federal government has never regulated health insurance to this extent before—those responsibilities were left to the states—and, ultimately, the insurers are responsible for carrying out a lot of what the health care law calls for. And now the two are stuck together. They may not like each other, or at the very least they may not want to be seen to like each other, but either way, they're locked arm in arm—and they're going to be for a while.

Look, a private company blasted a rocket into orbit today!

Read all about it here.

In my 2006 piece on high hopes for the private space industry here, I wrote:

Elon Musk, the founder of PayPal, now runs SpaceX, which is developing the Falcon rocket series, designed to be a cheap, reusable means of getting satellites and eventually heavier space vehicles for human use into orbit. Falcon testing has been mostly unsuccessful to date, with several delayed launches and an unfortunate fire at the first launch, which sent the rocket crashing into the ocean.

An "almost flawless" first flight for the Falcon 9 is a huge success.

UPDATE: Video!

Well, here's an ugly story:

A group of artists has been asked to lighten the faces of children depicted in a giant public mural at a Prescott school. [...]

[The mural] features portraits of four children, with a Hispanic boy as the dominant figure.

R.E. Wall, director of Prescott's Downtown Mural Project, said he and other artists were subjected to slurs from motorists as they worked on the painting at one of the town's most prominent intersections.

"We consistently, for two months, had people shouting racial slander from their cars," Wall said. "We had children painting with us, and here come these yells of (epithet for Blacks) and (epithet for Hispanics)."

Wall said school Principal Jeff Lane pressed him to make the children's faces appear happier and brighter.

"It is being lightened because of the controversy," Wall said, adding that "they want it to look like the children are coming into light."

Lane said that he received only three complaints about the mural and that his request for a touch-up had nothing to do with political pressure. "We asked them to fix the shading on the children's faces," he said. "We were looking at it from an artistic view. Nothing at all to do with race."

City Councilman Steve Blair spearheaded a public campaign on his talk show at Prescott radio station KYCA-AM (1490) to remove the mural.

In a broadcast last month, according to the Daily Courier in Prescott, Blair mistakenly complained that the most prominent child in the painting is African-American, saying: "To depict the biggest picture on the building as a Black person, I would have to ask the question: Why?" [...]

Faces in the mural were drawn from photographs of children enrolled at Miller Valley, a K-5 school with 380 students and the highest ethnic mix of any school in Prescott.

Link via Wonkette.

From the NYT:

Diane Ravitch, a leading educational historian who until recently favored charter schools, is strongly critical of the virtual charter system. Ms. Ravitch said the system eliminated “brick and mortar schools and it bypasses the unions,” mainly for the benefit of for-profit companies.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but: Duh. That's the whole idea.

Virtual charters are just what they sound like: Online charter schools that allow kids and parents from a state or district to choose online schooling, while remaining part of the public school system. They are only possible in states with charter laws that allow, or don't expressly forbid, those charters to go virtual and open up enrollment to the larger population. Kids often, although not always, take classes at home. The schools are frequently run by national companies like K12 Inc. or Connections Academy, which have developed working models for this new kind of education and contract with charters to provide content, equipment, and staff.

In her attempt at criticism, Ravitch has managed to articulate one of the strongest arguments for virtual charter schools.

As the article notes, Ravitch recently switched sides in the debate on education reform. Her despair is understandable: Charters and vouchers have not (yet?) produced the kind of radical systemic change that reformers hoped for, and standards-based reforms like No Child Left Behind haven't dazzled either. But having recently been on the side of reform, Ravitch retains her keen eye for stuff that freaks out unions and the educational establishment. Virtual charters don't tend to use unionized teachers, and if enough kids opt for online schooling, the way education dollars are allocated could change dramatically—undermining the unions' lock on the education industry.

The Times reporter's phrasing "for the benefit of for-profit companies," is odd, however. I suspect it slightly mischaracterizes what Ravitch, a smart and economically literate woman, actually said. Virtual charters are in competition with traditional schools, and they are often (although not always) run by for-profit firms. But that's like saying speedy taxi drivers are trying to beat out lumbering, unpredictable city buses "for the benefit of for-profit companies." It's technically sort of true, but doesn't explain why someone might want to take a cab.

To read more about the fraught relationship between teachers unions and virtual charters, check out my upcoming feature in the next print issue of Reason. (Update: that's the August/September issue.)

Former Supreme Court Justice David Souter gave a big commencement speech last week at Harvard University where he criticized originalism—the school of thought that says the Constitution should be read according to its original public meaning—for having “only a tenuous connection to reality.” According to liberal pundit E.J. Dionne, Souter’s speech proves that liberal champions of the “Living Constitution” now “have fighting words of their own.”

Fighting words, maybe. But accurate words? Not exactly.

Souter argued that originalism has nothing useful to say about the racial segregation imposed by the South’s Jim Crow regime, and claimed that it was only thanks to living constitutionalism that the Supreme Court eventually nullified the vile doctrine of “separate but equal.” Here’s the relevant portion of his commencement speech:

[Brown v. Board of Education] ended the era of separate-but-equal, whose paradigm was the decision in 1896 of the case called Plessy v. Ferguson, where the Supreme Court had held it was no violation of the equal protection guarantee to require black people to ride in a separate railroad car that was physically equal to the car for whites.  One argument offered in Plessy was that the separate black car was a badge of inferiority, to which the court majority responded that if black people viewed it that way, the implication was merely a product of their own minds.  Sixty years later, Brown held that a segregated school required for black children was inherently unequal.

For those whose exclusive norm for constitutional judging is merely fair reading of language applied to facts objectively viewed, Brown must either be flat-out wrong or a very mystifying decision.  Those who look to that model are not likely to think that a federal court back in 1896 should have declared legally mandated racial segregation unconstitutional.  But if Plessy was not wrong, how is it that Brown came out so differently?

Here’s the problem with Souter’s claims: The Plessy decision is wrong under an originalist reading of the Constitution. Originalism includes the original public meaning of the 14th Amendment, which commands: “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States.” Among those privileges or immunities is the right to economic liberty. Remember that the origins of the 14th Amendment lie in the anti-slavery politics of the Radical Republicans who drafted it and spearheaded its ratification. Their philosophy centered on a radically libertarian form of self-ownership, one that included both the right to armed self-defense and the right to liberty of contract. That philosophy was enshrined in the Constitution when the 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868.

In Plessy, the Supreme Court upheld a Louisiana law that forbid railroad companies from selling first-class tickets to black customers. That law was a blatant violation of economic liberty under the 14th Amendment and should have been struck down as such. That the Supreme Court failed to do so isn’t an indictment of originalism, it’s an indictment of the justices who failed to take the Constitution at its word.

In section 4205, which lays out requirements for nutrition labeling at chain restaurants, the new health care law instructs the administration's Health and Human Services Secretary to "consider standardization of recipes and methods of preparation, reasonable variation in serving size and formulation of menu items, space on menus and menu boards, inadvertent human error, training of food service workers, variations in ingredients, and other factors, as the Secretary determines." [bold added] Time to admit defeat, declare Demolition Man prophetic, and convert all restaurants to Taco Bells?

Thanks to John Hoff at the always-helpful Galen Institute for the pointer.

On the evergreen subject of BP, here's a dumb column from Tom Frank and a decent response from Tim Carney. Frank sees conservatives criticizing the Minerals Management Service's cozy partnership with the industry it regulates and writes, "Galt only knows how many times 'coziness' of the MMS variety has been celebrated as part of the struggle for free markets and free people." Carney responds that "BP's oil gusher is in federal waters, on seabed leased from the federal government," so "asking Washington to manage its own backyard fairly and competently isn't akin to embracing Frank's statism." Frank, Carney writes, is confusing "pleas for government competence with a desire for bigger governments."

Carney is clearly correct, but there's a larger point worth making here as well. When cronyism like the corruption at the MMS is exposed, there are people whose immediate response is We need to get better regulators and there are people whose response is We need to get a better system. The first group thinks in terms of creating and enforcing an ideal set of rules that will prevent accidents. The second group thinks in terms of ensuring companies know they'll feel the full impact of the liability for any damage they cause. Group two might prefer competent regulation to incompetent regulation, but it also prefers the limits imposed by attorneys and insurers to the limits imposed by regulators.

These are general approaches, not precise platforms. In the wake of BP's big leak, members of group one called for everything from stricter enforcement of existing rules to a ban on all offshore oil exploration. And while group two would probably agree on abolishing the drillers' $75 million damage cap and ending federal ownership of the seabed, some of its advocates have also called for reforms ranging from mandating liability insurance to rethinking the limited liability corporation itself. But the basic approaches are constant, even if the details vary. One group focuses on regulation, the other on liability; one group wants to concentrate intelligence at the center of the system, and the other wants to push it out to the edges.

I'm in the second group, so when I read those reports about the MMS I see an indictment of the regulatory state. Frank reads the reports and sees evidence that the regulatory state should be stronger. The difference is that I understand Frank's reasoning, whereas Frank seems hardly aware that there's another position here at all.

Elsewhere in Reason: My review of Frank's last book, in which he makes some similarly addled arguments. Also, an article I wrote way back when about Exxon's liability for the Valdez spill.

This week an initiative that would legalize medical use of marijuana qualified for the ballot in Arizona:

The initiative would allow terminally and seriously ill patients suffering from specified diseases or conditions to use marijuana with their doctor's approval. It also allows for state authorities to add diseases or conditions to that list. The initiative creates a registry system for patients and caregivers and establishes penalties for false statements and fraudulent IDs.

Patients would have to procure their medicine at a regulated medical marijuana dispensary unless they live more than 25 miles away from a dispensary. In that case, patients or their caregivers could grow up to 12 plants. No caregiver could grow for more than five patients. Patients could possess up to 2.5 ounces.

Sixty-five percent of Arizona voters endorsed medical marijuana back in 1996 (the same year California became the first state to let patients use the drug), but the state legislature overturned the initiative. In 1998 Arizonans voted to reinstate the measure, but it never took effect because of a drafting error. The initiative purported to let doctors "prescribe" rather than "recommend" marijuana, a legally fatal mistake because prescriptions are regulated by the federal Controlled Substances Act.

In other marijuana initiative news (mostly courtesy of the Drug War Chronicle):

• The latest poll shows support for California's legalization initiative dipping below 50 percent, but opponents are still outnumbered by eight points, with 10 percent undecided.
• A new survey finds that 52 percent of Washington voters agree with the idea of "removing state civil and criminal penalties for possession or use of marijuana," which is what a ballot initiative whose supporters are still gathering signatures would do.
• An initiative that would eliminate municipal penalties for possessing up to an ounce of marijuana has qualified for the ballot in Detroit.
• A recent poll finds that 54 percent of Texans think marijuana should be legal for medical purposes (compared to national support of 60 percent to 75 percent, depending on the phrasing); half of them (27 percent) think it should be legal for recreational use as well (compared to more than 40 percent of Americans generally).

 [Thanks to Suzanne Wills for the Texas tip.]

A few weeks ago, I noted that the Obama administration, reputedly more enlightened than its predecessor on matters of drug policy, is encouraging states to enact gratuitously punitive laws that treat drivers with marijuana metabolites in their urine as if they were drunk. Since traces of marijuana can be detected in urine long after the drug's effects have worn off, this policy is just an excuse for sending pot smokers to jail. I suggested that tests of THC in blood would be a more accurate measure of impairment, comparable to the standard for alcohol. But as at least one commenter noted, there is an argument for treating drivers under the influence of marijuana less severely than drivers under the influence of alcohol: They are less of a threat to public safety. Experiments repeatedly have found that marijuana has a less dramatic impact on driving ability than alcohol does, with the added advantage that pot smokers seem to be more aware of their impairment and therefore tend to compensate for it by slowing down (whereas drinkers tend to speed up). In the latest study, reported recently in the Journal of Psychoactive Drugs, subjects who smoked a joint containing marijuana with about 3 percent THC "decreased their speed [more than the sober control subjects did] and failed to show expected practice effects during a distracted drive," but "no differences were found during the baseline driving segment or collision avoidance scenarios."

In their book Marijuana Is Safer, which I reviewed in the April issue of Reason, Steve Fox, Mason Tvert, and Paul Armentano cite marijuana's relatively minor impact on driving ability as a public safety advantage. To the extent that legalizing pot encourages people to shift from alcohol to marijuana, it could actually produce a net decrease in traffic deaths, contrary to the nightmare scenarios painted by prohibitionists.

Armentano surveys the evidence on marijuana and driving here.

[via the Drug War Chronicle]

Just letting Reason readers know that I'm scheduled to talk about "Energy Production: Policy and Consumption" on To The Point between 2 and 3 pm EDT today. Other guests apparently include No Impact Man Colin Beavan.

Cracked.com, which regularly disgraces its old paper namesake by being on occasion actually funny and smart, has a personal take on why people might want to just say screw trying to diligently obey U.S. immigration laws and processes. Some excerpts from the Australian writer:

It turned out my initial application was returned because, while I had attached a police certificate that proved I didn't have a criminal record, I hadn't attached fingerprints. Apparently, according to the DHS, the Australian police force is not yet advanced enough to have thought of prosecuting crimes using fingerprints. The Americans, therefore, needed a set of prints to make sure I hadn't got away with any crimes that had slipped past my homeland's investigation system...

No matter who makes the mistake, it's up to you to solve it.

In my case, the fuck up was performed by a border guard, who forgot to take a piece of paper from my passport which proved I'd left America after an earlier visit and hadn't overstayed my visa. This kind of thing is quite common. Once I figured out what had happened, I frantically collected the mountain of paperwork that would prove that I had indeed returned to my country (credit card records, work transcript, plane ticket stubs, etc) only to find that the office in Kentucky that I sent the proof to would not confirm that it had received this proof for another three months.

Note that this is not the waiting time for them to process the documents and decide whether they're adequate, but the waiting time for somebody to wander into the mail room, pick up the envelope, and confirm that it is in fact there.

in my home state of 400,000 square miles and 1.5 million people, there was exactly one doctor deemed trustworthy by DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano to check me for disease. This means that the sole America-approved doctor, knowing he has a monopoly and you don't have a choice, will charge several hundred dollars to listen to your chest and ask you a couple of health background questions.

But you can never be too careful when it comes to disease, right? Well, the thing is, at the time I embarked on my medical check, I had already spent three months in America on a "tourist" visit, meaning that I didn't need to apply for a visa or do anything other than show up in LAX with a passport.

During those three months, I'd had ample opportunity to breathe the air, cough on people with my foreign, disease-infested lungs, and share used needles with schoolchildren while bleeding openly into the water supply.

Author C. Coville goes on to bitch about having to have his embassy interview back in his home country rather than America, and the limbo-like inability to do such normal-life activities as opening a bank account in the U.S. while the process crawls along.

Check out Jesse James DeConto's February 2006 Reason magazine feature on the criminal aspects of our immigration law enforcement, focusing on the difficulties placed in the path of resident immigrant workers. Also, Terry Colon's award-winning classic cartoon chart from Reason magazine's October 2008 issue, showing in graphic form even more details of the immigration law bullshit that Cracked's article complains about.

The human genome sequencing company Illumina has just announced that it is cutting its price to sequence a person's entire genetic makeup from $48,000 to $14,500. Apparently, the service is ordered through a physician, so that may avoid some of the interference from the FDA and Congress that direct-to-consumer genotype scanning companies are now experiencing.

At that rate of decline - and if the feds can resist meddling - genomes should be going for less than $1,000 in about three years.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, employment grew by 431,000 jobs in May. This morning President Obama said "these numbers...mean...we're moving in the right direction," because "the economic policies that we've put in place are working." Since 95 percent of the net gain in jobs is due to temporary Census Bureau positions, the point is debatable. But it does jibe with the logic of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which counts every 520 hours of goverment-compensated work in a quarter as a job created saved funded. Think how much healthier the economy would be if we had a census every year. For that matter, why not every month?

Gary Alan Fine has studied the sociology of rumor for decades. In his new book, The Global Grapevine: Why Rumors of Terrorism, Immigration, and Trade Matter, Fine and co-author Bill Ellis dig into the rumors that both surround and shape the anxieties and stresses of America’s move into an interconnected global world. Senior Editor Brian Doherty interviewed Fine about a representative set of such rumors, including rumors of wicked immigrants who simultaneously enjoy secret tax breaks and form hyperviolent gangs; rumors of terror threats masterminded by Arabs, Israelis, and the U.S. government itself; rumors of tourists adopting pet rats and contracting AIDS from malign foreigners; and rumors of international trade that brings disease and death to hapless Americans.

The Washngton Post ran yesterday an excellent editorial on the U.S. government's idiotic policy of massively subsidizing cotton growing. The World Trade Organization has ruled that the $3 billion in annual subsidies is a trade barrier and has awarded Brazil the right to retaliate by charging countervailing duties on U.S. exports of nearly $150 million per year. Not wishing to endure the wrath of U.S. software makers, wheat growers, and the like whose products would suffer the Brazilian tariffs, the Obama administration simply sends a check directly to the Brazilian government. As the Post editorial explains:

The federal government has spent more than $50 billion propping up cotton growers since 1991, with subsidies averaging more than $3 billion per year over the past decade. Most of this aid supports large, politically connected agribusinesses in the Sun Belt -- although the Arkansas Department of Corrections' operation, manned by convicts, has also received some of the cash. Thanks partly to the subsidies, U.S. producers can outcompete lower-cost producers on the world market; American farms account for about 40 percent of global exports. In 2002, Brazil complained to the World Trade Organization about this, arguing that the U.S. programs violated international free-trade agreements that the United States itself had championed. It took a while, but the WTO has agreed, authorizing Brazil to retaliate by levying tariffs against other American products. Brazil's threat to use that authority against U.S. goods, from wheat to software, forced the Obama administration to buy a truce last month...

The Post is entirely correct when its editors write:

Not only is it a wasteful sop to special interests, but it's also an obstacle to free and fair trade that needlessly complicates U.S. relations with the rest of the world. Reform -- or, better, repeal -- is long overdue.

Yes. The editors conclude with this most likely vain hope:

If this sorry episode doesn't shame Washington into ending this fiasco, nothing will.

Whole Post editorial here.

Ah, the conundrums that modern times bring us and our hapless elected officials. The Associated Press is reporting:

Rehoboth Beach in Delaware isn't a topless beach — but a few transgender men caused a stir by treating it like one. Police say passers-by complained after the men removed their tops and revealed their surgically enhanced breasts over Memorial Day weekend. A lifeguard asked them to put their tops back on. The men initially refused, but covered up before police arrived.

Even if they hadn't, though, Police Chief Keith Banks notes the men were doing nothing illegal. Since they have male genitalia, they can't be charged with indecent exposure for showing their breasts. Banks says there's no need for a specific law to address the issue.

Rehoboth Beach commissioner Kathy McGuiness isn't so sure. She says the matter will be discussed at a town hall meeting next week.

One way to solve this issue would be for Rehobeth Beach commissioners to vote for the freedom to bare all, regardless of natural or enhanced upper torso status. However, I fear that the stumped politicos -- just to be "fair" to everyone -- are more likely to adopt the Victorian option and require that all bathers wear t-shirts at the beach.

The Bush-Obama, Paulson-Geithner, Republican-Democrat policy of having the federal government dominate the mortgage finance business until the Singularity reunites Christ with Valentine Michael Smith has lost the editorial board of USA Today:

As bailouts go, nothing quite matches the torrent of taxpayer money still pouring into Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the housing giants that now guarantee nearly half of the nation's $11.7 trillion in mortgages.

To cover loans that go sour, the federal government has already doled out almost $145 billion, and the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office estimates the final tab will be about $381 billion. [...] [M]ost of this money won't get paid back. And even now, there's little talk in Washington about how to fix the problem. [...]

[They can't go on] forever as wards of the state, soaking up taxpayer cash. They also should not be allowed to go back to their unusual former status as publicly traded companies that are also "government-sponsored enterprises." That's why they got in trouble in the first place, paying outsized compensation and backing risky mortgages because politicians of both parties prodded them to do so.

Fannie and Freddie need to be rethought entirely, if not eliminated outright. And the time to start planning for that is now. [...]

Their "American dream" mission of profitably making risk disappear, so that banks would lend and people could buy their own homes, was always a fantasy. They merely took risks from banks and piled it on the taxpayers. Now everyone is paying the price.

Whole thing here. As Tim Cavanaugh put it last month, 

We can't go on like this. Leaving taxpayers on the hook for this continuing disaster isn't just unfair. It's economically ruinous. And nobody in the Treasury Department, the Fed, or the administration has anything resembling an exit strategy.

More Reason on Fannie/Freddie here, including the Reason Foundation's Anthony Randazzo succinct point in March: "It's time to kick Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac out of the housing market."

Oh yeah, and his quixotic Senate bid against incumbent Barbara Boxer.

The Kaus family was deeply intertwined with California politics and culture long before journalist/blogger Mickey Kaus started his longshot bid to unseat Sen. Barbara Boxer in the 2010 Democratic primary.

Mickey’s father, the Viennese-born Otto Kaus, was a well-respected jurist who sat on the California Supreme Court from 1981 to 1985. His brother Stephen is a prominent Bay Area civil-litigation attorney and a commentator for The Huffington Post. Mickey’s maternal grandmother, Dorothy Huttenback, was a musical prodigy who headed up the Los Angeles Music Guild for three decades, and Dorothy’s son Robert served as chancellor of the University of California at Santa Barbara. Both sides of the family were part of the historic wave of German-speaking Jews who fled the Nazis for Southern California in and around the 1930s, injecting a distinctive, semi-alienated yet intensely patriotic intellectual style to the Golden State’s civic conversation.

Mickey Kaus’ position within the national public policy discussion has always been that of a tweak-your-own-side contrarian. He was part of the group of writers at the left-of-center Washington Monthly in the 1980s who hatched what they called “neoliberalism”—a qualified rejection of interest-group politics and Keynesian economics in favor of policies intended to harness rather than oppose market forces. That frame led him to The End of Equality, a seminal 1992 book that stressed opportunities over outcomes and took on the liberal sacred cow of welfare. Kaus certainly hadn’t abandoned the liberal fold—among other things, the book called for a federal jobs program, universal health coverage, and compulsory national service—but he wasn’t an ordinary Democrat either.

By the end of the 1990s Kaus’ name was synonymous with political blogging. He had launched one of the first and most influential journalist blogs, Kausfiles, which for most of its lifespan has been published by Slate. In 2005 he helped kick-start the video debate site Bloggingheads.tv with his friend and frequent sparring partner Robert Wright. There and elsewhere, Kaus has distanced himself from his own Democratic Party on unionism, health care reform, public sector pensions, and especially immigration.

In 2010 Kaus decided to put his money where his mouth is and run against Boxer, the powerful three-term senator, as a way to advance the discussion about modern Democratic priorities. Needless to say, Kaus has no chance of unseating Boxer in the California primary coming on June 8. Yet his insights on new media, unions, and politics more broadly are well worth hearing. And his story about bringing the Velvet Underground to perform at Beverly Hills High in the '60s is not to be missed.

Reason.tv Editor Nick Gillespie spoke with Kaus in May, just after Arizona passed a controversial law about checking the immigration status of anyone who comes into contact with law enforcement.

About 40 minutes. Shot by Dan Hayes and Meredith Bragg; edited by Bragg. Go to Reason.tv for downloadable versions.

Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm:

Whereas, an umpire's missed call resulted in Armando Galarraga being charged a hit that clearly should have been an out [...]

Now, Therefore, be it Resolved that I, Jennifer M. Granholm, governor of the state of Michigan, do hereby declare Armando Galarraga to have pitched a perfect game, and I join Tigers fans all across the globe in saluting his unassailable accomplishment — the first perfect game in Tigers history.

Rep. John Dingell (D-Dearborn):

Baseball's executives have corrected a mistake on the field in a regular season game before – the pine tar game. This is the right thing to do and if getting this resolution passed makes it easier, I’m glad to help. [...]

Umpire Joyce made a colossal blunder, but if we can reverse it, he will have played a huge role in righting the wrong.

Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.):

Last night's performance deserves its place in the record books. It is clear that Commissioner Selig should make an exception in this case and invoke the "best interests of the game clause" to reflect Armando Galarraga's perfect game for the Detroit Tigers.

Michigan Attorney General Mike Cox:

I'm suing Jim Joyce for the call last night.

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs:

I hope that baseball awards a perfect game to that pitcher. [...]

We're going to work on an executive order. [...]

I'm speaking with the full weight of the federal government.

Note: Cox and Gibbs were joking. We think.

Excellent story in Elle exploring the issues raised when men's and women's views about pregnancy clash in relationships.

The Parent Trap: Paternal Rights and Abortion

What happens when the girlfriend of a recently divorced father of two gets pregnant—and she wants the baby, he doesn’t? Should men, too, have the right to choose?

The story follows a late-30s/early-40s couple and is a great exploration of all sides of the issue. Bonus character: Mel Feit, a 1980s' men's right crusader who wore skirts on Phil Donahue.

Feit’s list of grievances range from sexist social standards—why should men still be expected to foot the bill on dates? Why is crying or showing weakness verboten for them?—to what he considers discrimination enforced by the state: men’s lack of reproductive rights combined with unfair child support laws. “Reproductive choice isn’t a fundamental right if it’s only limited to people who have internal reproductive systems,” Feit says. “If it only applies to women, it’s a limited right and that weakens it.” In his view, Planned Parenthood’s motto—“Every child a wanted child”—should apply to both people who make the baby.

Also in the mix is Dalton Conley, a professor at NYU who wrote an op-ed in the NY Times arguing that men had rights in fetuses: 

Conley, who calls himself a “progressive Libertarian,” pledged his allegiance to Roe v. Wade in the first few paragraphs of the piece, he concluded with this barnstormer of a recommendation, one that would gut Roe: “If a father is willing to legally commit to raising a child with no help from the mother, he should be able to obtain an injunction against the abortion of the fetus he helped create.”

But it's the two people at the center of the story, both recently split from spouses themselves, who discuss the real-world difficulties and implications of the issue, that carry the story. It's a rare piece on the general topic that doesn't immediately devolve into an ideological sumo-wrestling match.

Read it here.

In The Claremont Review of Books, Charles Murray, who remains very impressed and influenced by Ayn Rand, reviews Anne Heller's and Jennifer Burns' recent bios of the author of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. A snippet:

There's no getting around it: taken as a whole, there is a dismaying discrepancy between the Ayn Rand of real life and Ayn Rand as she presented herself to the world. The discrepancy is important because Rand herself made such a big deal about living a life that was the embodiment of her philosophy. "My personal life is a postscript to my novels," she wrote in the afterword to Atlas Shrugged. "It consists of the sentence: ‘And I mean it.' I have always lived by the philosophy I present in my books—and it has worked for me, as it works for my characters." As both books document, that statement was self-delusion on a grand scale.

After Atlas Shrugged was published in 1957, Rand and her chief disciple Nathaniel Branden converted the themes of her novels into a philosophy that they labeled "Objectivism." Objectivism takes as its metaphysical foundation the existence of reality that is unchanged by anything that an observer might think about it—"A is A," as Aristotle put it, and as Rand often repeated in her own work. Objectivism's epistemology is based on the capacity of the human mind to perceive reality through reason, and the adamant assertion that reason is the only way to perceive reality. In Rand's view, notions of intuition or spiritual insight were hokum.

One of the extensions of these premises to daily life is that "[o]ne must never attempt to fake reality in any manner," in words from The Virtue of Selfishness (1964) that appear in variations throughout Rand's work. To fake reality despoils that which makes human beings human. Wishful thinking, unrealistic hopes, duplicity, refusal to take responsibility for the consequences of one's actions—all these amount to faking reality and, to Rand, were despicable. But Rand herself faked reality throughout her life, beginning in small ways and ending with the construction of a delusional alternative reality that took over her life.

More here.

Several Reason staffers reviewed the Burns and Heller volumes. Check it out here.

And check out Reason.tv's "Radicals for Capitalism," a 10-part series analyzing the enduring influence of her work and ideas. First episode below and rest here.

In the latest edition of Friday Funnies, Henry Payne looks at the problems Joe Sestak has been causing Barack Obama.

• North Korean official: "a war may break out any moment."

• As efforts to contain the BP oil leak continue, the feds halt all new offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.

• The U.S. prepares to spend $100 million on a Special Operations HQ in Afghanistan, with construction to start around the time the drawdown of troops is scheduled to begin.

• Apparently, if you go on a Jew-hunting excursion for Richard Nixon, people just might hold it against you.

• The leadership PAC as self-perpetuating slush fund.

Newsmax is bidding to buy Newsweek.

Last year, Radley Balko pointed out that El Paso, Texas, which sits on the Mexican border, directly across from the hideously violent city of Juarez, is one of the safest big cities in America. But surely that is an anomaly, considering that the Obama administration is entertaining the idea of sending troops to the border with Mexico. As the Los Angeles Times noted last month, "Officials say more than 6,200 people died last year in Mexico as a result of the drug war, and more than 1,000 were killed in the first eight weeks of 2009."

Now, it's an easy story to parse. Thousands are killed every year on the Mexican side of the border, as a result of the stupid, wasteful, failed "war on drugs." The Associated Press ran the numbers and found that Balko's positive picture of the situation in El Paso, vindicated by crime data, is also true of other border cities:

It's one of the safest parts of America, and it's getting safer.

It's the U.S.-Mexico border, and even as politicians say more federal troops are needed to fight rising violence, government data obtained by The Associated Press show it actually isn't so dangerous after all.

The top four big cities in America with the lowest rates of violent crime are all in border states: San Diego, Phoenix, El Paso and Austin, according to a new FBI report. And an in-house Customs and Border Protection report shows that Border Patrol agents face far less danger than street cops in most U.S. cities.

The Customs and Border Protection study, obtained with a Freedom of Information Act request, shows 3 percent of Border Patrol agents and officers were assaulted last year, mostly when assailants threw rocks at them. That compares with 11 percent of police officers and sheriff's deputies assaulted during the same period, usually with guns or knives.

In addition, violent attacks against agents declined in 2009 along most of the border for the first time in seven years. So far this year assaults are slightly up, but data is incomplete.

"The border is safer now than it's ever been," said U.S. Customs and Border Protection spokesman Lloyd Easterling.

I'm seriously considering immigrating to a 24-hour Wal-Mart. As far as I can tell, as soon as Wal-Mart starts offering sleeping pods, a fairly decent lower middle-class, middle-American life-cycle should be possible entirely within the confines of one of the megastores. I will get a job there, purchase my cheap organic produce in-house, pick up a gun if I want one, and buy everything else on the cheap. When I have kids, I will get Wal-Mart to put RFID chips in them, so that they will be easier to keep track of. When I am old, I will get my "women's medications" for osteoporosis at a massive discount. To sweeten the deal, Wal-Mart has announced it is getting into the college education biz:

The purveyor of inexpensive jeans and lawnmowers is dipping its toe into the online-education waters, working with a Web-based university to offer its employees in the United States affordable college degrees.

The partnership with American Public University, a for-profit school with about 70,000 online students, will allow some Wal-Mart and Sam’s Club employees to earn credits in areas like retail management and logistics for performing their regular jobs.

The university will offer eligible employees 15 percent price reductions on tuition, and Wal-Mart will invest $50 million over three years in other tuition assistance for the employees who participate....

“If 10 to 15 percent of employees take advantage of this, that’s like graduating three Ohio State Universities,” said Sara Martinez Tucker, a former under secretary of education who is now on Wal-Mart’s external advisory council. “It’s a lot of Americans getting a college degree at a time when it’s becoming less affordable.”

More on the joys and sorrows of getting a college degree online here.

That’s Canadian prog-rock trio—and Ayn Rand enthusiasts—Rush, whose attorney has sent a cease-and-desist letter to Republican senatorial hopeful Rand Paul over his use of the band’s songs during campaign stops. The Louisville Courier-Journal has the details:

[Robert] Farmer, general counsel for the Anthem Entertainment Group Inc. in Toronto, which is Rush's record label, has sent a letter to Paul campaign officials informing them that they have violated copyright laws -- and urging them to stop."This is not a political issue -- this is a copyright issue," Farmer said in an interview. "We would do this no matter who it is."...

Jesse Benton, Paul's campaign manager, said in an e-mail: "The background music Dr. Paul has played at events is a non-issue. The issues that matter in this campaign are cutting out-of-control deficits, repealing Obama Care and opposing cap and trade."

He did not say if the campaign would stop using the band's music.

Obligatory Rush video below:

On December 19, 2009, NBA star Gilbert Arenas and fellow Washington Wizards player Javaris Crittenton got into a heated argument over a card game, exchanging violent threats. After Crittenton challenged him to a fistfight, Arenas told his younger teammate he was too old to fight him, but he’d burn his SUV or shoot him in the face instead. Crittenton answered that he’d shoot Arenas in his surgically repaired left knee.

Two days later, before practice at Washington, D.C.’s Verizon Center, Arenas placed four unloaded handguns on the chair in front of Crittenton’s cubicle in the team’s locker room with a note that read, “PICK 1.” As Daniel Wattenberg explains, that's what Arenas did. What Arenas didn't do was hurt anyone, fire a gun, own illegal firearms, or bring a loaded gun into either D.C. or the Wizards' locker room. Yet as Wattenberg explains, Arenas is still being scapegoated by gun prohibitionists and an image-conscious NBA.

The arrest of Maryland motorcyclist Anthony Graber is generating some considerable backlash against the state's law enforcement officials. Graber was arrested and is being charged with felonies for posting video to YouTube of a cop who pulled his gun on Graber during a traffic stop. I've written about Graber here and here, and I discussed the case on WBAL's Ron Smith show yesterday.

Cato's David Rittgers has posted his own analysis of how officials are misinterpreting the state's wiretapping law here. Rittgers also discussed the issue on D.C. NPR affiliate WAMU's Kojo Nnamdi show.

And in a somewhat odd pairing, anarchist writer Wendy McElroy's write-up of the issue was picked up by Gizmodo. That triggered a link and discussion thread at Slashdot.

It's good to see this issue picking up steam. As I said on Smith's show yesterday, there seems to be a big disconnect here between the general public's attitude on recording cops (the feedback I've received has been almost unanimous in support of ensuring that the practice is legal) and the attitudes of law enforcement officials (on-duty cops have a right to privacy) and politicians (generally a position of deference to law enforcement).

The issue is important not just in order to keep law enforcement transparent and accountable, but in that it raises fundamental questions about the nature of individual rights in a free society. The way Maryland officials are interpreting the state's wiretapping law, government agents—in this case on-duty cops—have privacy rights in public spaces that ordinary citizens don't. But state employees acting as state employees don't have rights. Citizens have rights. Governments and their employees have powers, and only to the extent that those powers have been delegated to them by the people they're governing.

Earlier this morn we learned of state Sen. Bruce Patterson who wants to license journalists in Michigan, thus pushing the Wolverine State boldly into, what the 17th century?

Now via Reuters' Jim Pethokoukis comes word of a

“staff discussion draft” from the Federal Trade Commission recommends ways the government can save journalism.  First, it lists a number of ways Washington can subsidize the media (to the tune of $35 billion a year):

– Establish a “journalism” division of AmeriCorps.

– Increase funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

– Establish a National Fund for Local News.

– Provide a tax credit to news organizations for every journalist they employ.

– Establish Citizenship News Vouchers (lets you direct money from tax return).

This sort of crap would be paid for with a slew of taxes on just about everything related to spectrum, broadband, and consumer electronics (which BuzzMachinist Jeff Jarvis has dubbed the "iPad tax").

Read more here.

Here's hoping this incredibly retarded idea goes over about as well as the new Jon Meacham-improved Newsweek.

While being widely seen as an example of exactly why bigger, better government is needed to ameliorate or somehow prevent mega-natural resource and pollution crises, anarcho-theorist and Seasteading guru Patri Friedman takes a swing at explaining how and why a truly free market, including some changes in current corporate liability law, has a better chance of managing such disasters. The key:

BP is worth about $250B, and current estimate are the spill will cost them $1B.   So damages after the fact can actually work.  I think the $1B number is very low, but even if it is off by two orders of magnitude, they could afford to pay $100B in damages.

Unfortunately, there are laws which limit the liability of oil companies for disasters, and thus prevent them from having the proper incentive. (Krugman blames libertarians for these laws, which is ridiculous, libertarianism != crony capitalism, and there is nothing libertarian about limiting damage liability). So BP can't legally be charged the full cost of the cleanup - which is a government failure, not a market failure.  Government implemented a policy which benefits special interests - big surprise.

Now, this idea of damages after the fact doesn't hold for all disasters - it just happens that the oil industry has the largest companies in the world, so they can pay damages even for very large disasters.   In other industries, where potential damages exceed company assets, I think the answer is to require liability insurance with amounts large enough to cover worst-case damages. Then you get a free-market price put on the risks (by the insurance market), which gives companies the right incentive to avoid risky behavior even if the damages are to large for them to pay.

If you have a 1% chance of causing $1B in damages with your $100M company, insurance will charge you $10M/year (plus a little profit for them).  Thus the company must bear the expected value of the disaster - which is exactly the optimal thing, it's the true cost of the activity.  Thus they will only take this risk if the benefit is greater than the cost.  Whereas if they don't have to have insurance, they face only a $1M/year cost (1% of the $100M max they will have to pay since that's all they have), which is not the true cost of their activities.  Note that one way to bring about this situation is to remove the limited liability of corporations for damages, which I favor on moral and practical grounds.  (Limited liability for business debts, or any other contractual interactions with persons, can simply be done through a consensual contract.  But why should liability be limited when you hurt people you didn't get consent from?).  If shareholders, officers, and staff were personally liable for damages in excess of the corporation's assets, you can bet your ass that every venture would have insurance!

You could argue with Friedman about this, if you care to, on Reason's first cruise ship excursion, early next year.

On June 8, Californians will get to vote on Proposition 14, which would eliminate the current party primary system in favor of one open primary in which anyone could vote for anyone regardless of party registration, the candidates could list or not list a party affiliation as they wished, and whoever the top 2 votegetters are, of whatever party, would go on to the general election. Polled support for the measure has been slipping lately, but is still above 50 percent (but with a large margin of undecided).

It is being sold as a way to crush Party inner circle poobahs from having too much power in choosing who gets to be the candidate. But third party activists from the Libertarian Party to Ralph Nader see it as just a way to ensure there is no possible third party choice for voters in general elections.

I survey the shape of the debate, with quotes and links galore, at my California news and politics blog "City of Angles." Go here for an anti-14 campaign led by LP candidate for California secretary of state, Christina Tobin. The official ballot arguments for and against Prop. 14. A similar measure in California's northern neighbor Oregon failed big in 2008 after early leads in pre-election polls.

Senate candidate Rand Paul has been repeatedly criticized for telling TV talker Rachel Maddow that the part of the Civil Rights Act that bans discrimination by private business is an improper interference with property owners' rights. According to the chattering classes, this was an unforgivable endorsement of racism. But as John Stossel writes, individuals should be surrounded by a sphere of privacy where government does not intrude. And part of the Civil Rights Act violates that freedom of association.

One of Barack Obama's most appealing qualities is his calm demeanor, which makes him seem thoughtful, reasonable, and disinclined to shoot from the hip. This quality is especially welcome in the wake of incidents such as the attempted sabotage of Northwest Flight 253 or the fizzled Times Square bombing, both because it encourages the public to keep the risk of terrorism in perspective and because it reassures those of us who worry about an overreaction from an administration that fails to do so. But the conventional wisdom in the Washington press corps seems to be that Obama needs to blow his cool to show he cares—really cares—about the BP oil gusher in the Gulf of Mexico. That advice apparently influenced a statement Obama made on Saturday, when he said the seemingly unstoppable leak is "as enraging as it is heartbreaking." But did he really mean it? At a press briefing on Tuesday, A.P. White House Correspondent Ben Feller was determined to find out:

Feller: The President said when the top kill procedure failed over the weekend that the leak was as enraging as it is heartbreaking.  Have you seen the President enraged about this?

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs: Throughout this process, absolutely.

Feller: Do you think that that has come through to the American people?

Gibbs: I think the American people are frustrated.  I think the people of the Gulf are frustrated.  I think the President is frustrated. I think the White House is frustrated. I don't see how anybody could look at what’s happening in the Gulf and not be frustrated and heartbroken—absolutely.

The briefing then shifted to other topics. Fortunately, Chip Reid of CBS News picked up the ball from Feller, focusing with laser-like precision on the question all Americans are asking: Exactly how pissed off is the president?

Reid: You said earlier that the President is enraged. Is he enraged at BP specifically?

Gibbs: I think he's enraged at the time that it's taken, yes. I think he's been enraged over the course of this, as I've discussed, about the fact that when you're told something is fail-safe and it clearly isn't, that that's the cause for quite a bit of frustration. I think one of the reasons that—which is one of the reasons you heard him discuss the setting up of the oil commission in order to create a regulatory framework that ensures something like this doesn't happen again.

Reid: Frustration and rage are very different emotions, though. I haven't—have we really seen rage from the President on this?  I think most people would say no.

Gibbs: I’ve seen rage from him, Chip. I have.

Reid: Can you describe it? Does he yell and scream? What does he do? (Laughter.) 

Gibbs: He said—he has been in a whole bunch of different meetings—clenched jaw—even in the midst of these briefings, saying everything has to be done. I think this was an anecdote shared last week, to plug the damn hole.

Holy crap. Obama clenched his jaw? This must be serious.

To some extent, the bizarre fixation on how angry Obama is and how he expresses it (Does he raise his voice? Does he curse? And if so, does he use the really filthy words that you still can't say on broadcast television before 10 p.m., although they're acceptable on HBO and A&E?) reflects the "cult of the presidency" that Gene Healy decries. New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, whose infantile expectations of the president Healy has skewered, is one of the pundits who thinks Obama should be more emotional to show that he's engaged. But I'm not sure that demand makes sense even for those who view the president as the literal father of our country. If Obama went on a profanity-laced, LBJ-style tirade, would Feller, Reid, and Dowd be satisfied? Or would they be frightened by the sight of Daddy freaking out?

Following the lead of Arizona, the Buckeye State's senatorial solons have passed a bill banning the creation of "human-animal hybrids." A press release from the Ohio Christian Alliance hails the proposed ban:

Ohio Christian Alliance President Chris Long made the following statement, "For the past seven years, OCA has been working tirelessly with members of the Ohio Legislature to ban embryonic stem cell research, human cloning, and in recent years, animal-human hybrid. Science has advanced to the point where DNA from animals and humans can be intermixed in scientific laboratory experimentation. This is simply outrageous! Animal-human hybrid research is currently being conducted in England, which many in the international medical community now consider to be a rogue medical state. It is unknown how many U.S. laboratories are currently conducting similar research.

Among other activities, the Ohio bill would ban:

(a) A human embryo into which a nonhuman cell or a component of a nonhuman cell is introduced so that it is uncertain whether the human embryo is a member of the species homo sapiens;

(b) A hybrid human-animal embryo produced by fertilizing a human egg with a nonhuman sperm;

(c) A hybrid human-animal embryo produced by fertilizing a nonhuman egg with a human sperm;

(d) An embryo produced by introducing a nonhuman nucleus into a human egg;

(e) An embryo produced by introducing a human nucleus into a nonhuman egg;

(f) An embryo containing at least haploid sets of chromosomes from both a human and a nonhuman life form;

(g) A nonhuman life form engineered with the intention of generating functional human gametes within the body of a nonhuman life form;

(h) A nonhuman life form engineered such that it contains a human brain or a brain derived wholly from human neural tissues.

The Ohio bill would punish such "rogue" research by throwing perpetrators into jail for one year or imposing a fine of $250,000 or both.

As far as I know, only (e) and (h) have been attempted. For example, in 2008 "rogue" British researchers introduced a human nucleus into a hollowed out cow egg and managed to get it to grow to the 32 cell stage. The goal of the research is to create stem cells that might one day be used to figure out the genetic roots of illnesses and/or eventually to cure diseases by developing transplantable cells and tissues.

With regard to inducing human brain cells to grow in animals, researchers at Stanford University did this back in 2005 by injecting human embryonic stem cells into the brains of mouse fetuses. The goal is to research the development of human brain diseases and create better models for testing drugs to cure such diseases.

The Ohio bill is very similar to a couple of bills introduced some years back by U.S. Sen. Sam Brownback. In two columns, "Brownback's Chimerical Attempt to Curb Science" and "Senators Brownback and Landrieu Want to Outlaw Centaurs and Minotaurs," I discuss some of the valuable research that would be derailed by such bans.

According to the Wall Street Journal, a number of European countries are planning to cut back on prescription drug spending in order to help patch their budgets. Predictably, that means that some of the latest, most expensive drugs won't be available to some folks:

Greece has enacted some of the steepest cuts, slashing what it will pay by about 25% and drawing the ire of some drug makers. Over the weekend, Denmark's Novo Nordisk A/S said it was refusing to lower the price on its most expensive forms of insulin, effectively making them unavailable to Greek patients.

Novo Nordisk said it would supply its older, cheaper forms of insulin at the reduced rate. "A 25 percent price cut does not allow us to run a sustainable business in Greece, and this is what we have told the government," Novo Nordisk said in a statement Wednesday. "We will ensure that there are still insulin products available, albeit not the newest versions."

Danish drug maker Leo Pharma A/S also said it would stop supplying some drugs to Greece. The company makes treatments for psoriasis, eczema and other ailments.

This comes just days after a report that Canada plans to make big cuts in its prescription drug spending, also in response to looming budget troubles and the rising cost of care. The point here isn't that these governments should be spending more on medicine. It's that when governments provide, pay for, and guarantee medical care, it's always exceedingly difficult to keep costs from rising out of control because neither patients nor doctors have any incentive to make prudent decisions about care.

It doesn't require that patients or providers be totally reckless, either; marginal calls about the value of additional testing and treatment are going to be different when those tests and treatments are publicly subsidized. But that results in ever-increasing demand, which results in budget troubles. Inevitably, those budget troubles lead to government bodies making choices about what care to not pay for. And because public health care systems tend to have built-in advantages that allow them to dominate their markets, those otherwise reasonable-sounding budgeting decisions become decisions about what treatments are and aren't available to citizens—which frequently means that citizens get stuck with lower-quality treatments.

In his new book The Watchers: The Rise of the America's Surveillance State , Washington, D.C., reporter Shane Harris chronicles 25 years of the intelligence community's efforts to "connect the dots" on terrorist threats in the United States.

Harris explains why we should have caught the Christmas Day bomber, how one promising electronic surveillance system was wiped out due to privacy concerns, and what it's like to be a spy in the age of Google.

In his day job, Harris covers electronic surveillance, intelligence, and counterterrorism for National Journal.

Reason Senior Editor Katherine Mangu-Ward interviewed Harris in February 2010. Shot by Dan Hayes and Meredith Bragg; edited by Bragg.

Approx. 10 minutes. Go to Reason.tv for downloadable versions and subscribe to Reason.tv's YouTube channel for automatic notifications when new material goes live.

The Daily Intel offers a taxonomy of commenting communities, with pithy portraits of the commenters at sites ranging from Jezebel to The New York Post. Unfortunately, the list leaves out Hit & Run, but you can rectify that with your own efforts in -- where else? -- the comments.

The Reason Foundation is a 501(c)(3) non-profit (donate today!) with two primary functions: 1) publishing all Reason-branded editorial content, such as this sentence, and 2) conducting a bunch of nonpartisan public-policy analysis to help lawmakers and their bosses (youse) make better decisions. Being headquartered in California, some of the best research behind Door Number 2 has to do with the clusterfudge that is the Golden State's public policy.

On that topic, the Foundation today has released a shiny new study called "How to Fix California's Pension Crisis" (summary here, whole PDF report here), by Adam Summers. Some lowlights about the state they're in:

* California's public pension and retiree health and dental care expenditures have quintupled since fiscal year 1998-99, from about $1 billion to $5 billion this year. Retirement spending is expected to triple again - to $15 billion - within the next decade. [...]

* Since 2008, California has added over 13,000 employees to the state payroll during this recession. [...]

* In the 1960s, just one out of every 20 California state workers received "public safety" pensions. Now, one out of three state workers receives the lavish public safety benefits originally intended for the firefighters and police officers who put themselves in harm's way. [...]

* California taxpayers pay 85 percent of the health care premiums for most active state workers, 100 percent of the health care costs for most state retirees and 90 percent of health care costs for their families.

* CalPERS reported a loss of $56.2 billion for the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2009. CalSTRS posted a loss of $43.4 billion in 2009. California taxpayers are on the hook for funding shortfalls not made up by pension fund performance or employee contributions, so taxpayers will be paying more to make up for these pension investment losses. [...]

* California is the only state in the nation that uses just one year – an employee's final year salary – to determine their long-term pension benefits. Most states use three- or five-year periods to determine pension benefits, making their systems less susceptible to pension spiking.

Among the many sensible suggested reforms:

* Close the defined-benefit pension plans for state employees and enroll all new employees in defined-contribution plans for pensions and other post-employment benefits, such as retiree health care and dental benefits. [...]

* Adopt an amendment to the state constitution prohibiting retroactive benefit increases.

Start chewing on the report here. Past Reason coverage on California's pension mess here.

Proving once again that the only way to make it in government is to be as boring as possible, the Obama administration has ruled out the use of a nuclear weapon to plug BP's leaking oil well. Talk about avoiding political fallout! Anyone living along the Gulf Coast who was hoping to reenact that scene in True Lies where Ahnuld smooches Jamie Lee Curtis while a mushroom cloud of love blooms oh-so-cinematically in the background is going to be pretty disappointed. But maybe not that disappointed: Who needs nukes when you've got the advice of the King of the World himself, James Cameron? That's right!

Film director James Cameron said he hopes he can bring together some of the top experts in deep-sea work to help craft a solution to the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

The director of “Avatar” and “Titanic” said he was moved to action after days of watching the oil well spew uncontrollably and successive attempts to cap it failed.

“I was watching with growing horror thinking, ‘Those morons don’t know what they’re doing,’” said Cameron, speaking at the All Things Digital conference Wednesday evening.

His work on the film “Titanic,” he said, gave him exposure to some of the world’s top experts who work in deep-sea environments. That started him thinking that those trying to stop the oil flow didn’t have the right skill set.

“Wait a minute,” he said, “I know a lot of people who work in deep submergence … They know the engineering that’s required to work at that depth.”

He contacted the Environmental Protection Agency about his plan. “I thought let’s get all the people I know together for a brainstorming session,” he said.

No word yet on whether Cameron will be bringing in an army of submersible mechs, or what roles Bill Paxton and Sigourney Weaver will play. But I'm guessing that Michael Bay, who once made a movie that was actually about a deep-water drilling crew sent to stop a catastrophe with a nuke, is jealous.

This is Bruce Patterson, a state senator in Michigan, who wants to regulate and license journalists in the Wolverine State, a place that has been Mississippi du Nord for going on three decades now, with massive job losses, population shifts, and an economy that performs somewhere south of Greece. Oh yeah, and a massive budget deficit that shows no signs of turning around anytime this century.

Patterson, reports FishBowl NY, wants to pass a law that

would require license applicants to possess, among other things: 1) "Good moral character"; 2) a degree in journalism; and 3) three writing samples. In our experience, those first two "qualifications" are in no way preconditions to quality reporting. The third may be necessary, but is by no means sufficient.

In any case, Patterson has said that the existence of a license would not preclude unlicensed writers from reporting the news; sounds like he's more interested in putting a state seal of approval on certain organizations/individuals instead. His bill is a response to certain instances of reporting in which the writer has demonstrated a lack of understanding of the issues at hand.

Maybe it's just the honorary Ohioan in me but, Jeebus H. Christ, the things those Michiganders up there think of!

On the up side, when pols of all stripes start yapping about licensing the press - or subsidizing it with public money - maybe that's just a sign that pixel-stained wretches (of absolutely horrible moral character, with no degrees, and likely no "clips") are starting to draw blood. Or at least attention the free-spending, idiotic ways of most statehouses and legislatures. Mebbe.

Is it a good idea for governments to get involved with the media financially and/or in terms of licensing? Obviously no. Watch a vid that makes the point.

From Aaron Proctor's Twitter feed comes news of a blood-rage-inducing-and-perfectly-legal-ripoffsky of taxpayers in Ben Franklin's hometown:

Camille Cates Barnett will get nearly $50,000 annually from the city pension fund for the rest of her life after June 30, when she leaves her post as Philadelphia's managing director after two years, five months, and 24 days.

On the same day that a City Council committee moved to close the loophole that allows short-time employees such as Barnett to buy credit in the city's pension fund based on public service elsewhere, the Board of Pensions and Retirement revealed that Barnett had done just that.

Barnett has paid $122,303 to become vested in the pension plan, according to the Mayor's Office and the Pension Board, a privilege unionized employees are entitled to only after serving five years.

She had already made some payments toward the buy-in this year, and paid the balance of $106,564 on April 15.

Whole story here.

As noted above, this loophole - which only applied to non-union-represented workers, by the way - has been closed. But you gotta wonder how many other similar scams are built into Philly's and other cities' pensions and benefits plans. My wild guesstimate: a lot.

Reason on the war between public and private sector workforces.

• Obama administration accused of offering another candidate a job in exchange for not running for the U.S. Senate.
• Rod Blagojevich corruption trial begins.
• George W. Bush joins Facebook, defends waterboarding.
• D.C. teachers union signs pay-for-performance contract.
• Another ship with humanitarian aid heads to Gaza.

In the last 44 years, the Miranda warning has become as American as the Iowa State Fair. Most of us could recite it in our sleep, particularly the part that goes: You have the right to remain silent. Police and prosecutors, who once saw it as coddling criminals, have learned to live with this modest obligation. But as Steve Chapman writes, not everyone is so adaptable. Some people bridle at the notion of going along with something that protects the guilty as well as the innocent. Five of them sit on the Supreme Court of the United States.

Filling in over at Matt Yglesias's Center for American Progress blog, Jamelle Bouie upbraids British historian Andrew Roberts for writing that "Far from being the much-heralded 'crisis of Capitalism' that the left has so long and salivatingly augured, this recession has in fact seen Capitalism’s ultimate triumph." Bouie says that a clever chappie like Roberts "can’t possibly be surprised by Europe’s rightward turn during the recession," pointing to a recent study, previously trumpeted by New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, that "found that 'for every percentage point decline in GDP growth over two quarters, support for the far right rises by 0.136 percentage points,' which is a statistically significant effect, though not an electorally significant one (emphasis added)."

I am going to assume the study cited is methodologically sound (the conclusions seem unsurprising, though, from a quick look at the paper, the authors don't seem to identify which parties it considers "far right"), but Bouie's analysis is wrong on almost every count. By conflating the rise in "far right" parties with free market parties—Roberts is talking about a supposed rejection of "prime-the-pump Keynesianism"—Bouie concludes that Europe's recent turn to the right is unsurprising. Roberts' case is a mite overstated (I made a similar argument here), but Bouie, who says the correlation between financial disaster and an insurgent right is "obvious," doesn't seem to understand that the far-right parties of Europe are almost all anti-immigration and pro-welfare state.

There are also, he argues, obvious historical precedents to consider:

That said, you need only look to Europe in the 1930s to see how economic distress distorts the political landscape. Right-wing parties successfully capitalized on widespread insecurity to gain power or influence in Spain, Italy, Germany, Austria and France.

This is bizarre. The Italian fascists came to power in 1922, some years before the depression (and the 1930s!), by advocating a corporatist economy. In Spain, the fascists didn't ultimately seize control until 1939. As historian Stanley Payne points out in The Collapse of the Spanish Republic, by 1934 the Spanish economy was recovering and "although economic circumstances played a role, political rivalry remained the dominant motivation" for the political upheaval of that year, which precipitated the coup in 1936. Indeed, a fascist putsch seemed unlikely, Payne argues, because Spain was not burdened by "any significant demobilized army, any great mass of urban unemployment, any strong Spanish nationalism or militarist programs, or potential popular leaders."

And to what is Bouise referring in France, which saw the 1936 election of Leon Blum's socialist Popular Front, which had Édouard Daladier as a Prime Minister in 1933, and a moderate-right government in the early 1930s? In Austria, a far-right party—the National Socialists—gained power by annexation, using the ethnic pitch of Heim ins Reich and not an appeal to economic concerns.

But back to modern Europe: I invite Bourie to look at the party platforms of extreme right parties like the NPD in Germany, the Danish People's Party in Denmark, and Sverigedemokraterna in Sweden, all of whom display a deep hostility to capitalism. On the website of the NPD, an unreconstructed neo-Nazi party that periodically polls well in the former East Germany, one can buy "anti-capitalist" t-shirts and sweatshirts (and Admiral Doenitz gear!) and can print out generically anti-American handbills. Most of the extreme parties—left and right—agree on economic issues, though differ on who should receive state assistance—i.e., immigrants.

One more thing: Yesterday, I criticized blog posts by Matt Yglesias and Ezra Klein for credulously reporting from a newly constructed Chinese village, where everything was free and the state provided gratis birthday cakes (and Beijing's version of eminent domain, which has forced people from their homes to make way for new developments). Yglesias emailed me, pointing out the he had previously blogged on the horrid policy of forced relocations. A fair point, and one I should have included in the post. And to be honest, it was Klein's giddyness and baffling credulity about the "sweet deal" offered by the Chinese government that really irked me.

Yesterday the California Assembly approved a bill that would make it a crime to openly carry a gun in public. Under current law, Californians may carry guns openly as long as they're unloaded—a fact that some gun owners have used to make a symbolic statement about their Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms. The alarm generated by these displays gave rise to the bill, which now goes to the state Senate. The Los Angeles Times sums up the arguments pro and con:

Supporters of the bill...argued that the practice [of openly carrying guns] intimidates the unarmed and wastes police resources because officers frequently have to respond to worried callers saying there's a person with a gun outside Starbucks, or a similarly crowded public space....Opponents argued that there have been no serious incidents associated with openly carrying firearms in California, and called the bill a solution in search of a problem.

What's interesting is that carrying a concealed weapon, which by the logic of this bill's backers would be preferable, is much harder to do legally in California. In addition to undergoing training and passing a criminal background check, you need permission from the local sheriff or police chief, who decides whether you have "good cause" to carry a gun. Such a discretionary permit policy is now the exception in the U.S.; nearly 40 states either do not require a license or grant one to any resident who has a clean record and completes the training. But policies like California's used to be common, based on the premise that hiding a gun, as opposed to carrying it openly, reflected a sinister motive. As Justice Antonin Scalia noted in D.C. v. Heller, the 2008 Supreme Court decision upholding the Second Amendment right to armed self-defense, "the majority of the 19th-century courts to consider the question held that prohibitions on carrying concealed weapons were lawful under the Second Amendment or state analogues." But those laws allowed the carrying of visible weapons, which were deemed less threatening precisely because they were out in the open—exactly the opposite of the premise endorsed by the California Assembly yesterday.

The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence cites a poll it commissioned that indicates most Americans share this uneasiness about the open display of firearms (unless they're carried by police). The group does not provide the exact wording of the questions it used (which may have been biased against conspicuous gun toting), but the results are plausible. Question for discussion: What does this reversal of traditional assumptions about the proper way to carry a gun signify?

Previous coverage of gun-toting Starbucks customers here and here.

According to a letter in the June 1 issue of the Annals of Internal Medicine, cocaine mixed with the veterinary anti-parasitic drug levamisole hydrochloride can cause "bilateral necrosis of earlobes and cheeks"—or, as the Yahoo! News headline puts it, "Contaminated Cocaine Can Cause Flesh to Rot." Doctors already have reported that levamisole in cocaine can cause agranulocytosis, a reduction in white blood cell production that leaves the body vulnerable to various infections. But this week's letter, which describes two cases, is the first report of skin lesions like these tied to consumption of levamisole-tainted cocaine. Both side effects have been seen in clinical studies of levamisole, which is used in humans to treat cancer and autoimmune disorders.

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 70 percent of cocaine seized at the border in 2009 contained levamisole, up from around 10 percent a few years before. The drug's popularity as a cutting agent may have increased because it enhances cocaine's perceived effects while reducing its cost. But even though most cocaine consumed in the U.S. (perhaps as much as 80 percent) now contains levamisole, and about 6 million Americans use cocaine every year, there have been few reports of serious side effects from the contaminant, which suggests that they do not occur very often. Presumably people whose immune systems are already weak are especially vulnerable. As I noted last September, when the federal government started warning the public about levamisole in cocaine, whatever hazard it represents is entirely attributable to prohibition, which makes drugs more dangerous by encouraging practices that would never survive in a legal, open, competitive market. Just as drinkers no longer need to worry about methanol in their liquor, medical users of legally produced cocaine need not worry about levamisole.

The Cute Beatle (who is vying to the death with Ringo Starr for the vaunted designation of "the Only Remaining Beatle") sounds off on the Internets and the downloading and the young Italian girls:

“Years ago, when this first started, this idea of people being able to download stuff for free, I was doing an interview in Italy and it was a young girl and I said, ‘What do you think about it?’ and she said: ‘Oh, I think it’s great. You know, you get it all for nothing.’ I said, ‘Okay, this week, you go back to your office and your boss says, ‘Sorry, I’m not paying you this week,' how’d you like that? She said, ‘Oh, no, I wouldn’t like that.’

“I said, ‘Well, that’s the equivalent’ because I’ve kind of, you know, I’ve kind of had the best of it, really. But the young kids coming up now, let’s say, there’s a guy who's got a hit and he’s got a young family--that’s his job. Now, if he doesn’t get paid for that, I think that’s unfair. So, I think, you know, it’s good to get a nice, fair system where whoever does something that’s really successful, should get paid for it.”

More, including video, here.

Actually, the equivalent would be something like: "You go back to your office and and your boss says, You've sold a million records but I'm not paying you because you owe for studio time and distribution and marketing costs and keeping the lights on while you were out."

As The Walrus's contemporary, Roger McGuinn, could tell him, those record companies aren't exactly quick to dispense royalties to performers.

Are contemporary young, successful songwriters stuck darning their own socks like a latter-day Father McKenzie? Somehow I doubt it. But wot do I know? I actually saw Give My Regards to Broad Street in the theater.

Reason on this sort of thing.

One goddamn great Macca tune (who really could never write a goddmaned lyric to save his life):

In a guest post at the Legal History Blog, Harvard law professor Mark Tushnet draws some interesting parallels between President Franklin Roosevelt’s Supreme Court strategy during the New Deal and President Barack Obama’s recent selection of Elena Kagan:

The basic story is simple. Roosevelt was looking for justices who would uphold the New Deal's major initiatives or, more generally, who held expansive views of the scope of the national government's powers under Article I. He was relatively indifferent to his nominees' views on issues of civil rights and civil liberties, as his nominations of Reed and, later, James Byrnes show....

I mentioned Elena Kagan in this post because my sense -- based on no inside information, of course -- is that her selection reflects a strategic calculation by President Obama similar to FDR's. What the President wants is a Supreme Court that will stand aside when or if Congress enacts the programs the President favors, and is relatively indifferent to his nominees' views on other questions. Put pretty crudely, SG Kagan hasn't been vetted for her views on what we might call "Warren Court" (or "Brennan-Marshall") issues (other than the scope of national power) -- which may be why some on the liberal-left side of the spectrum are nervous about what she would do as a Justice dealing with those issues.

Read the whole thing here. And go here for Nick Gillespie’s 2005 interview with Tushnet, where the Harvard professor argued that the Supreme Court matters much less than you think.

There was never a lot to love about last summer's Cash for Clunkers program. We pointed out the ways it could be scammed, how it made used cars more expensive, destroyed useful goods, and even its backers admitted the claims about environmental benefits were most a bunch of hot air—and last we checked it was threatening to spawn lookalikes.

But finally, someone has found a silver lining. The excellent Coyote Blog sums it up:

I have found a reason to love the Cash for Clunkers program:  it is a fabulous demonstration project for just how utterly pointless government stimulus programs can be.  Stimulus programs tend to be hard to evaluate in our complex economy — sort of like trying to calculate the effect of a butterfly flapping its wings on world climate.  But since cash for clunkers only lasted a few weeks and hit only one industry, we can learn a lot about the effectiveness of government stimulus.

You'll notice that the dotted line—which simply averages the month o' clunkers and the month after—lands pretty much where the trend line would have been without that $3 billion in federal spending.

Via Reason contributor Will Wilkinson.

Our entire June issue is now available online. Don't miss Peter Suderman on rising GOP star Paul Ryan, Eli Lake on how Barack Obama is operating with the same war powers used by George W. Bush, and Nick Gillespie on how to save Cleveland, plus our complete Letters, Citings, and Briefly Noted sections, the Artifact, and much more.

Click here to read our full June issue.

The New York Times is reporting that a number of state governments won't be sending taxpayers their tax refunds on time:

Procrastination is no longer just for the taxpayers who wait until the last moment to file their tax returns. Thanks to the economic downturn, at least a half-dozen cash-poor states are now delaying their tax refund checks.

Hawaii initially planned to delay all tax refunds until July, when its fiscal year begins, but decided two weeks ago that its finances were healthy enough to begin sending checks to people whose tax returns were processed back in January. New York briefly postponed sending out half a billion dollars worth of refunds until its new fiscal year began in April. Rhode Island extended its tax filing deadline until May 11 to help taxpayers who were still reeling from severe floods; now the state is delaying refunds to make sure it has enough money left to pay debts coming due in June.

On the other hand, they are sorry. And to prove it, they're all going to pitch in. Teamwork!

“We’re sorry for the inconvenience. We understand that people are relying on the money for credit card bills, etc., etc., but we’ll get them out as fast as we can,” said Paul L. Dion, the chief of Rhode Island’s Office of Revenue Analysis, explaining that 34,423 refund checks were being held up as the state ensures that it has enough cash on hand to pay its debts on time. “For the record, mine is on hold as well.”

Some states lack the staff to process returns on time. Budget cuts left Iowa’s Department of Revenue without the money to hire the 50 temporary workers it usually adds around tax time. So some refund checks were slowed while nearly everyone in the department—from auditors and revenue agents to top agency officials—was directed to pitch in by opening up envelopes and processing tax returns. 

No doubt it helps that many states require additional interest be paid on returns delivered later than 60, 90, or 120 days. As policies encouraging prompt repayment go, that's better than nothing. But why shouldn't the penalties be immediate? They are for the rest of us. The IRS begins assessing penalties on late tax filings for individuals the day after the deadline. I frequently hear people refer to their tax rebates as a sort of cash-back bonus, but the reality is that most tax returns effectively serve as interest-free loans from taxpayers; interest doesn't kick in until the government is two months late with the rebate. It's bad enough that the tax system is set up to give the government all those cheap loans in the first place. Shouldn't the penalties for late repayment be strict enough that state governments aren't tempted to extend those loans further?

More in we-are-out-of-money stories here and here.

Post updated for clarity.

Two recent New York Times articles try mightily to elicit sympathy for borrowers whose bad financial decisions turned out badly.

"Your Money" columnist Ron Lieber asks us to feel the pain of Cortney Munna, a 26-year-old NYU graduate who owes $100,000 for "an interdisciplinary degree in religious and women's studies" that is not quite as lucrative as she expected. Munna "makes $22 an hour working for a photographer" in San Francisco (one of the most expensive cities in the country) and dreads the thought of "slaving away to pay for an education I got for four years and would happily give back," which she says "feels wrong to me." To his credit, Lieber assigns some responsibility for this state of affairs to Munna and her mother, who says:

All I could see was college, and a good college and how proud I was of her. All we needed to do was get this education and get the good job. This is the thing that eats away at me, the naïveté on my part.

But Lieber also wants to blame Citibank (featured in a photo accompanying the column) for "handing over $40,000 to an undergraduate who had already amassed debt well into the five figures." That may turn out to have been a bad business decision, but is it a bank's job to tell a loan applicant what her priorities should be? Citibank made it possible for Munna to realize her dream of attending the college of her choice instead of various less expensive options, and Lieber is saying, in effect, that it should have told her to aim lower. Likewise, he faults NYU's financial aid office for not giving Munna better advice, which would have meant suggesting that she attend a different, cheaper school. Not only is it unrealistic to expect a college to send away a student who is ready to pay full tuition, but at the time Munna and her mother probably would have resented the suggestion.

While Munna is paying the price for her financial folly, the borrowers featured in a story on the front page of Monday's Times have decided that gradually paying off one's debts is for suckers. Alex Pemberton and Susan Reboyras are taking advantage of the long delay between foreclosure and eviction in Florida to live "rent free" in St. Petersburg while spending the money that would have gone toward their mortgage on steak dinners, casino trips, and excursions in their "gas-guzzling airboat." According to the Times, this couple represents a trend:

A growing number of the people whose homes are in foreclosure are refusing to slink away in shame. They are fashioning a sort of homemade mortgage modification, one that brings their payments all the way down to zero. They use the money they save to get back on their feet or just get by.

"Instead of the house dragging us down, it's become a life raft," says Pemberton. "It’s really been a blessing." He and his wife rationalize defaulting on the debt by citing the mortgage company's stupidity in lending them money (emphasis added):

"We could pay the mortgage company way more than the house is worth and starve to death," said Mr. Pemberton, 43. "Or we could pay ourselves so our business could sustain us and people who work for us over a long period of time. It may sound very horrible, but it comes down to a self-preservation thing."

They used the $1,837 a month that they were not paying their lender to publicize A Plus Restorations [a business that restores pest-plagued attics], first with print ads, then local television. Word apparently got around, because the business is recovering.

The couple owe $280,000 on the house, where they live with Ms. Reboyras's two daughters, their two dogs and a very round pet raccoon named Roxanne. The house is worth less than half that amount—which they say would be their starting point in future negotiations with their lender.

"If they took the house from us, that's all they would end up getting for it anyway," said Ms. Reboyras, 46.

One reason the house is worth so much less than the debt is because of the real estate crash. But the couple also refinanced at the height of the market, taking out cash to buy a truck they used as a contest prize for their hired animal trappers.

It was a stupid move by their lender, according to Mr. Pemberton. "They went outside their own guidelines on debt to income," he said. "And when they did, they put themselves in jeopardy."

That's one way of looking at it.

More on borrowers who blame lenders for enabling them to buy an overpriced college degree here and here. Tim Cavanaugh on mortgage deadbeats here.

The Washington Examiner looks at the economic renaissance that baseball's Nationals were supposed to bring to their neighborhood and finds plenty of errors, wild pitches, and old-fashioned pants-splitting sadness:

Half a decade after the city's leaders plunked down hundreds of millions of tax dollars to bring baseball back to the nation's capital, many Washingtonians are still waiting for their dividends.

"What did it bring here besides the stadium?" said Victor Williams, who lives in the neighborhood near Nationals Park.

The $611 million stadium -- nearly all of it paid out of public coffers -- was packaged as the best way to build up the long-moribund neighborhoods around the Navy Yard and the Anacostia River.

"This ballpark really is about ... the rebirth of the Anacostia waterfront," then-mayor Anthony Williams said at the 2006 groundbreaking.

But the collapse of the economy and the team's futility have conspired to keep people and businesses from the area. Half Street SW is still advertising about 75,000 square feet of space and is, as one resident described it, "a giant bowl of mud."

It didn't help that one of the neighborhood's top developers was Monument Realty, whose main financier, Lehman Brothers, shut down in the recession.

Attendance at Nationals games was projected to average nearly 30,000, meaning suburbanites would help pay for the stadium with every ticket, hot dog and beer. But the Nats reached that milestone only in 2005, the club's first year in the District -- in Robert F. Kennedy stadium. This year, in the Nats' third year in their new park, fewer than 21,000 are coming to each game.

Hey but not to worry: The stadium, claims a local councilman, is a moneymaker. How? As the Examiner's David Freddoso reports, the city increased taxes on non-baseball-related businesses by a total so far of $202 million (a tax, by the way, that will likely never go away, even after its putative purpose of paying for the stadium's construction, is done). So the councilman claims the stadium has brought in $200 million. Which of course ignores all sorts of direct and indirect costs of building the thing in the first place, ranging from $600 million plus to build the thing and $32 million last year alone just on debt service (versus a total of less than $17 million in stadium rents and direct revenue). And, as Freddoso puts it, "the D.C. government has now skimmed $200 million from its economy that could have instead supported job creation and provided goods and services that people actually wanted."

Back in May 2008, Reason.tv urged cities to get out of the publicly financed stadium business altogether. Virtually every non-biased economic analysis of the effects of such edifice-complex projects comes to the same conclusion: These behemoths add nothing to the local economy and typically suck money out of it due to the sorts of big bond-passing and tax hikes that DC passed to produce a shrine to a team that's going to make the old Senators look sharp.

Say it ain't so! Poker players use drugs in an effort to sharpen their Texas Hold 'Em and Seven-Card Stud skills. So says a new study from Nova Southeastern University in Florida that reports that 80 percent of poker players use performance enhancing drugs. The press release reads:

Poker players are using drugs such as marijuana, cocaine, amphetamines, Valium, and other prescription medications, as well as substances including caffeine, energy drinks and guarana to get an edge over their opponents....

Respondents included professional poker players, semi-pro, amateur, and recreational players. Regardless of one’s status, an overwhelming majority of poker involves some amount of money, Clauson said. The players surveyed played poker --- largely no-limit Texas hold’ em ---- both in person and on the Internet. Most were males in their mid-20s.

About 73 percent of the respondents said they used drugs and other substances to focus and concentrate better. The rest used these products to calm their nerves, stay awake, and improve memory.

The results suggest that the use of substances to improve poker performance is widespread, especially at higher stakes,...

What kind of gambling role models are these guys and gals?! Can it be long before an outraged Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) [MLB steroid YouTube alert] drags these gamester scoundrels before his Congressional committee and demands that the Poker Players Association require pre-game drug testing?

Via Newswise.

As the House and Senate prepare to reconcile their versions of the new financial regulation package, Tim Carney starts to sort out which businesses will benefit from the new rules and which ones will come out behind. The players, he notes, include "investment banks, commercial banks, hedge funds, private equity firms, car dealers, community banks, credit unions, and many others. A general rule when following these complicated rumbles is to ask 'who has the strongest political connections?' and then assume that side will win."

Gene Healy, on "the bipartisan conniption over President Obama's 'responsibility' for the Gulf oil spill."

This crisis (like every crisis before it) has provided more raw Kool-aid for our national Cult of the Presidency.

The coming battle over President Obama's nomination of Donald Berwick to the top spot at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services is, like the health care reform debate before it, a struggle between centralizers and decentralizers. Indeed, Berwick is an almost prototypical centralizer. In particular, he has repeatedly expressed fondness for Britain's NICE, which does cost-benefit analysis for the country's government-run health care system (ie: rationing). Philip Klein has done a thorough job of digging through Berwick's record:

On a number of occasions, Berwick has praised Britain's National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE), a body of experts that advises the government-run health care system on how to allocate medical spending based on cost-benefit analysis. Among other decisions, they have ruled against the use of cancer-treating drugs and put a dollar value on the final six months of human life.

"NICE is extremely effective and a conscientious, valuable, and—importantly—knowledge-building system," Berwick said in an interview last June in Biotechnology Healthcare. "The fact that it's a bogeyman in this country is a political fact, not a technical one."

...In 2003, Berwick signed on to an open letter in Health Affairs, called "Paying for Performance: Medicare Should Lead." (Among his co-signers was Nancy-Ann DeParle, the current White House health care czar.) "Our recommendation-to the executive branch; to Congress; to employers and health plans; and to hospitals, physicians, nurses, and other health professionals—is that payment for performance should become a top national priority and that Medicare payments should lead in this effort, with an immediate priority for hospital care," the letter read. It went on to say that the CMS administrator's successors must continue to show "aggressiveness and commitment" to the cause, noting that, "A major initiative by Medicare to pay for performance can be expected to stimulate similar efforts by private payers…"

The idea of paying doctors and hospitals for delivering better quality health care and of offering guidance on best practices seems benign enough. As the letter put it, "Quality is not an issue for partisanship." The problem arises when government bureaucrats or expert panels are in the position of judging quality, performance, and best practices which get applied across a broad and diverse population.

As cardiologist Sandeep Jauhar argued in a September 2008 New York Times op-ed, pay for performance initiatives can cause unintended consequences such as doctors overprescribing certain medications that are deemed effective and carry bonuses. He also recounted how an initiative in the early 1990s to give report cards to doctors performing coronary bypass surgery prompted doctors to cherry pick patients to avoid the most severely ill cases that could jeopardize their grades. The problem with any uniform medical guidance is that what's good for the "average" patient may not be right for any given patient.

Given President Obama's leanings on health care policy—as demonstrated in the recent health care legislation—it's not all that surprising that he would choose a strong centralizer for this role. But the choice continues a worrying trend toward health care policy that places far too much emphasis on centralized control and far too little on individual decision making.

When the domestic beer industry consolidated into a duopoly of Anheuser-Busch InBev vs. MillerCoors in 2008, I was happy. Not because I like duopolies (or their mono cousins), but because I don't. As a general rule, the faster that industries try to consolidate away the competition, the faster they become uncompetitive, and leak away market share. Companies with a captive consumer base tend to treat them like, well, captives. As the Wall Street Journal's William L. Bulkeley put it in a smart 2006 piece about the suddenly troubled photo-processing duopoly of Eastman Kodak and Fuji Photo Film,

Photography and publishing companies shouldn't be surprised when digital technology upends their industries. After all, their business success relied on forcing customers to buy things they didn't want.

Lo and behold, American customers are busy this year not wanting all those Coors Lights and Bud Longnecks:

The $100 billion U.S. brewing industry is staggering into its crucial selling season from its weakest position in years. Sales for 11 of the biggest brands fell in the four weeks ended May 16, according to SymphonyIRI, and only four of the top 30 -- Keystone Light, Modelo Especial, Yuengling and Pabst Blue Ribbon -- posted gains. Meanwhile, despite massive measured-media support, category titans Bud Light, Coors Light and Miller Lite all declined. [...]

Anheuser-Busch's Bud Light, the largest U.S. brand, is down 5.3% year to date, and the drop is in comparison to 2009, the first negative year in the brand's 28-year history. It's no less grim at No. 2 U.S. brewer MillerCoors, where the company's leading lights, Coors Light and Miller Lite, are down 0.5% and 7.5%, respectively.

The article is from Advertising Age (link via Conor Friedersdorf's Twitter feed), and thus obsessed with the top-down blues of ad-spending legacy beermakers. But there's a much cheerier story on the frothier (and more delicious) end of beer's Long Tail:

More than ever before, the craft brewing industry has a lot to celebrate. Even though overall U.S. beer sales were down 2.2 percent in 2009, craft beer sales grew 7.2 percent by volume and 10.3 percent by dollars in the same year. And in 2008, craft beer grew 5.9 percent by volume and 10.1 percent by dollars.

Stuff like this is why knee-jerk anti-trusters almost always leave me cold. In an almost-literal sense, they anti-trust American consumers to turn down bland crap from entitled behemoths, and instead create marvelous, idiosyncratic workarounds to industry mediocrity and idiotic government restrictions.

The craft brew revolution is a wonderful American–and libertarian–story. As Greg Beato explained in a terrific March 2009 column, post-Prohibition laws made home-brewing a crime for four decades, crushing a storied American tradition practiced by, among others, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. But then came deregulation:

In 1978, however, a supplier of beer-making equipment in Rochester, New York, asked his congressman, Barber Conable (R–N.Y.), to sponsor a bill that would extend the home winemakers' exemption to DIY beer makers. [...]

Conable [...] insist[ed] that independent Americans shouldn't have to "rely on the beer barons" for their daily libations. According to an Associated Press article written at the time, the bill "sailed through the House on a voice vote with no audible objection."

Under the guidance of Sen. Alan Cranston (D–Calif.), it fared much the same in the Senate. Then [Jimmy] Carter signed it into law, and just like that, after 43 years of government inertia, indifference, and undue concern about the ways home brewers might abuse the privilege of mixing hops and malt extract in their unsupervised kitchens, home brewing was suddenly legal again.

This federal freedom, followed by deregulations at the state level, breathed life into an already growing microbrew subculture in the Pacific Northwest, and now you can finally find a rich variety of beers all over America.

I don't doubt that the watery beer duopoly will continue to lumber along, and warp various restrictive regulations in an attempt to preserve market share, but the future does not belong to them. You want to inflict damage on the Evil Beer Corporates? Instead of blocking their consolidation, dismantle the dumb laws that lock in their size advantage, then stand back and enjoy their slow, inevitable decline.

For more, watch Reason.tv's "Beer: An American Revolution," below:

Over the Memorial Day weekend, the Libertarian Party met in St. Louis to elect new officers and conduct other official business. Unlike in some past years, I did not directly cover the convention, but the St. Louis Beacon did. Here are excerpts from its take, in which 2008 VP candidate and presumptive front-runner for the 2012 presidential nod, Vegas's own Wayne Root, failed in a bid to become party chair:

more than 500 delegates from around the country selected a new party chairman in a battle that exemplified the tug between two party factions: one camp favors reaching out to the socially conservative Tea Party movement, and the other side preaches standing firm on longstanding libertarian principles.

As Missouri delegate Julie Stone of St. Louis put it: "The big bone of contention is whether the party should remain as pure or become more inclusive."

Personifying the big-tent approach was Wayne Allyn Root -- an effusive, unapologetic self-promoter...

Accompanied by an ever-present film crew (it's shooting a reality show that Root said would air "only if I'm elected"), he admitted upsetting some by preaching a more-inclusive message that he said will move the Libertarian Party into the nation's political mainstream.

"If I move this country toward Libertarians, I'm the most radical person here,'' Root said in an interview...

Although leading in the early rounds of balloting, Root -- the Libertarian Party's 2008 vice presidential nominee and now a cable TV regular -- ended up as the runnerup to Mark Hinkle, a veteran Libertarian from California.

The two were among five contenders who battled for support from the 540 delegates all Sunday afternoon. Outgoing chairman William B. Redpath remained neutral.

Hinkle won out, says [chair of the Missouri LA Glenn] Nielsen, because "he was the least polarizing candidate on the ballot."

In a telephone interview afterward, Hinkle quipped that he won because "I was everybody's second choice." During the three rounds of ballots, the lowest vote-getter was forced out. Most of those losing candidates' supporters then defected to Hinkle.

Hinkle, 59 and a small businessman, said he campaigned as a uniter. But he emphasized that, as chairman, he won't shy away from the Libertarian Party's longstanding platform.

Root -- who had campaigned to be the party's "chief enthusiast, cheerleader, rainmaker, man-about-town" -- declared in his concession speech, "Ladies and gentlemen, you can’t get rid of me."....several delegates told Root that they hoped he'd be their presidential nominee in 2012.

Whether Root is in fact "more inclusive" than other libertarians depends on what sort of folk one wants to be inclusive to, and Root definitely aims at a more traditional Right. In one encouraging sign, the LP's traditional fundraising banquet at the convention drew nearly $55,000, far better than usual for non-presidential race conventions.

The Independent Political Report sums up the last day's officer elections for at-large seats on the Libertarian National Committee, and for its Judicial Committee, as well as detailing the results in the treasurer and secretary races, the vice chair race, and the most prominent chair race, with ballot-by-ballot breakdowns. The comment threads on all those posts are interesting for LP internal warfare fans.

• Israel to release, deport Gaza flotilla activists.
• Arizona governor to meet with Obama to discuss immigration bill.
• Supreme Court rules that suspects must speak up to assert their right to remain silent.
• DOJ launches criminal investigation of BP over Gulf oil spill.
• Japanese Prime Minister Hatoyama resigns over broken campaign promise.

Or maybe not.

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has already missed as many as four deadlines under the law—not on any major regulations—but still a worrying trend, critics say.

Congressional staff and industry representatives have also been asking HHS for a timeline specifying when it will issue the numerous regulations required by the law. They were shocked to find the agency has not produced such a document, one aide said.

The issue is important because vast industry sectors are trying to plan their own implementations of the health-care law and most of the details remain in bureaucrats’ hands, leaving a vacuum of uncertainty about the final burdens the law will impose.

The missed deadlines include creating task forces on breast cancer and Alaskan health care, publishing a list of new authorities granted under the law, and setting a schedule for a Government Accountability Office study and financial audit.

More on Obamacare's early troubles here and here.

From the Israeli journalist Gershom Gorenberg, a tightly argued critique of both the IDF's attack on the Gaza flotilla and the earlier follies that led to the clash.

The Gulf of Mexico continues to gush oil just as a whaling controversy threatens to land Australia and Japan in international court for killing protected species. Meanwhile, another less-publicized but arguably more cataclysmic oceanic disaster continues to worsen.

Overfishing threatens to destroy most of the world's fisheries within a matter of decades. But while it's proven difficult to save the gulf or save the whales, we know how to save the fish: Stop treating the ocean like a public bathroom, says Christopher Costello, a professor of natural resource economics at UC Santa Barbara.

Director Louis Psihoyos and his team of filmmakers embarked on an elaborate sting operation to expose Japan's illegal dolphin hunters. The result is a documentary called The Cove, which took home the Oscar for best documentary. And days after the Academy Awards Psihoyos was back stirring things up.

Using the same cameras that were used to expose illegal dolphin hunters, Psihoyos and his team busted The Hump, a Santa Monica, California restaurant that had secretly been serving sushi made from the endangered sei whale.

"Everything in the ocean from the great whales to dolphins to plankton is being jeopardized," Psihoyos tells Reason.tv. "We're raping and harvesting the ocean unsustainably."

Overfishing "could mean the end of certain species," agrees UC-Santa Barbara's Costello. He points out that about a third of the world's fisheries have already collapsed, and many more are heading toward the same fate. Costello says the world's fisheries are in such bad shape because of the same reason public restrooms are typically foul places: "Nobody owns them. Nobody has the incentive to keep them up."

One proven solution is a system called "catch share," in which fishermen have the right to a certain share of the total catch of a type of fish. This form of ownership gives fishermen an incentive to make sure fish populations grow, and according to Costello's worldwide research, it's the only thing that seems to work.

Environmentalists are often suspicious of the profit motive, but from Alaska to New Zealand, market forces have been harnessed not for plunder but for preservation. Fishermen like the system because they make money, and environmentalists like it because it supports sustainable practices. Expanding the catch share system may well be the best way to save a dying ocean.

"How to Save a Dying Ocean" is written and produced by Ted Balaker, who also hosts. The associate producer is Paul Detrick, the cameramen are Hawk Jensen and Alex Manning; Zach Weissmueller also helped to produce the segment. Animation by Hawk Jensen.

Approximately six minutes.

Go to Reason.tv for downloadable iPod, HD, and audio versions of this and all our videos, and subscribe to Reason.tv's YouTube channel to receive automatic notification when new material goes live.

In a 1996 law review article, Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan warned that campaign finance laws "easily can serve as incumbent-protection devices, insulating current officeholders from challenge and criticism." Senior Editor Jacob Sullum says the DISCLOSE Act, which Congress is expected to vote on this week or next, is a good example.

I just returned from a junket to Georgia (the country, not the state), a trip which, when you peel away the layers, was ultimately underwritten by the government in Tbilisi. Obviously, the PR companies that handle such trips—and they are, in this case, firms affiliated with both Republicans and Democrats—are paid to make their clients look good in America, though they go to great lengths to include opposition figures and voices critical of the government they represent, and the journalists brought along typically represent a wide range of views. Obviously, they do this knowing that Western writers are generally skeptical people, not likely to trust the word of some droopy-faced apparatchik droning on about the bountiful leek harvest or the Dear Leader's penchant for shooting multiple holes-in-one per round of gold. (Yes, yes. I used the qualifier generally.)

But True/Slant blogger Ethan Epstein notices that the ghosts of Lincoln Steffens and Beatrice Webb were spotted this week in China, inhabiting the bodies of expert-in-everything bloggers Matt Yglesias and Ezra Klein. (Yglesias, who once took a junket to Sweden and is constantly telling us free-market types the "truth" about Scandinavia, as revealed to him by his Social Democratic minders, recently blogged about some guy named "Frank Reinfelt," who is said to be Sweden's prime minister.) Epstein notes that the two precocious lefty bloggers were brought to a Potemkin village for China's "displaced." Here is what they saw:

Klein and Yglesias’ group was taken to tour a spanking-new village built on the outskirts of the northern city of Dalian. As Yglesias describes it, “back in 2006 the former “village” of rudimentary structures was razed and the government constructed a large and extremely nice park (it’s in a very scenic area), reforested the hillsides, and constructed a series of apartment complexes. The former villagers now live in modest but up-to-date structures.” But don’t worry about the forcibly displaced, Yglesias admonishes us, because, “[w]e spoke to one retired couple who was given four apartments—they live in one and rent out the other three to families who’ve either moved out to Cha’an from the central city or else moved to the area from less prosperous regions of China. The town’s current party boss said he was given five apartments.” Klein’s coverage on the website of the Washington Post was equally credulous. He informed his audience, “A conversation with some residents revealed that they didn’t just get one free apartment in the new building. They got four free apartments, three of which they were now renting out. And medical coverage. And money for furnishings. And a food stipend. And — I’m not kidding, by the way — birthday cakes on their birthdays. Sweet deal."

Jesus. I doubt even John Reed would believe that every Stakhanovite comrade in Minsk got four free tractors and a bag of blinis on his birthday. And if Yglesias knew as much about Sweden as he claimed, he might have recognized this type of propaganda when Jan Myrdal filed his Report from a Chinese Village, celebrating Mao's disastrous Great Leap Forward.

In 2006, I wrote about BP's massive (and massively successful) greenwashing campaign. The company changes their logo to a green and yellow sunburst/flower/explosion of happiness, and BP started "thinking outside the barrel," "mobilizing Malaysians to take action on climate change," and generally pretending it wasn't still a gigantic oil company—with an already-spotty safety record. That PR push meant that when it came time for a little protesting, activists tended to choose Exxon over BP as a target every time.

But as oil continues to gush into the Gulf, all those mobilized Malaysians aren't helping BP one bit, and no one's likely to forget they're an oil company anytime soon, no matter how cute their ads were.

From the February 2006 issue:

For an example of a company apparently trying to single-handedly save the planet through expensive public relations alone, one needn't look farther than the corporate darling of serious environmentalists and greenish consumers alike: BP

BP is first among many companies that have opted to do their environmental penance in the glare of the spotlight. British Petroleum (recently rechristened BP, following KFC's model in removing unsavory words from its brand name) has been much ballyhooed for its commitment to the environment. Most of the ballyhooing is being done by BP itself.

A gas and oil company with $225 billion in revenue, BP is part of an industry that will keep environmental advocacy groups in business for as long at it exists. Yet these days BP is styling itself "Beyond Petroleum" and declaring that it's "thinking outside the barrel." BP's Environmental Team has crafted an elaborate advertising campaign and rebranding effort, recently expanded to the Web. Its goal: to convince the world that a company that sucks dead dinosaurs out of the earth, turns them into gasoline, and delivers that gas to SUVs can also be environmentally friendly enough to use a green and yellow sunburst (or is it a flower?) as its logo....

One might be forgiven for wondering how BP is managing to take in hundreds of billions in oil and gas revenue, apparently in its spare time.

The conclusion?

For the moment, the marriage of convenience between BP and environmental activists remains intact and fairly functional. But both sides recognize that they have struck a delicate balance.

Looks like Al and Tipper aren't the only green couple with a marriage on the rocks.

Read the whole thing here.

On May 19, the National Academy of Sciences issued three reports on climate change and concluded:

"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 academy also urged that the U.S. take "strong actions" to cut the emissions of the greenhouse gases, chiefly carbon dioxide produced from burning fossil fuels, in order to limit future climate change. Across the pond in the United Kingdom another scientific dynamic appears to be taking place. As the Times (London) recently reported:

Britain’s premier scientific institution is being forced to review its statements on climate change after a rebellion by members who question mankind’s contribution to rising temperatures.

The Royal Society has appointed a panel to rewrite the 350-year-old institution’s official position on global warming. It will publish a new “guide to the science of climate change” this summer. The society has been accused by 43 of its Fellows of refusing to accept dissenting views on climate change and exaggerating the degree of certainty that man-made emissions are the main cause.

The society appears to have conceded that it needs to correct previous statements. It said: “Any public perception that science is somehow fully settled is wholly incorrect — there is always room for new observations, theories, measurements.” This contradicts a comment by the society’s previous president, Lord May, who was once quoted as saying: “The debate on climate change is over.”

The admission that the society needs to conduct the review is a blow to attempts by the UN to reach a global deal on cutting emissions. The Royal Society is viewed as one of the leading authorities on the topic and it nominated the panel that investigated and endorsed the climate science of the University of East Anglia. ...

ir Alan Rudge, a society Fellow and former member of the Government’s Scientific Advisory Committee, is one of the leaders of the rebellion who gathered signatures on a petition sent to Lord Rees, the society president.

He told The Times that the society had adopted an “unnecessarily alarmist position” on climate change.

Sir Alan, 72, an electrical engineer, is a member of the advisory council of the climate sceptic think-tank, the Global Warming Policy Foundation.

He said: “I think the Royal Society should be more neutral and welcome credible contributions from both sceptics and alarmists alike. There is a lot of science to be done before we can be certain about climate change and before we impose upon ourselves the huge economic burden of cutting emissions.”

He refused to name the other signatories but admitted that few of them had worked directly in climate science and many were retired.

“One of the reasons people like myself are willing to put our heads above the parapet is that our careers are not at risk from being labelled a denier or flat-Earther because we say the science is not settled. The bullying of people into silence has unfortunately been effective.”

Whole Times article here.

“There’s no reason I should have to shut up because some guy doesn’t want his dirty laundry out,” Mr. Kurtz said. “It’s the power of the Internet, man.”

Kalamazoo, Michigan college student Jason Kurtz fights against speech-chilling lawsuits with a Facebook group, plus a new federal law in the works to protect people who want to complain about bad service. Read all about it.

The finalists for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's "I Am Free Enterprise" video contest have been selected and I'm happy to announce that two of the videos in contention have Reason.tv connections.

First is Meredith Bragg's story of a sandwich:

Second is "Tracy Foster is Free Enterprise," a finalist that Dan Hayes helped with:

You can vote for particular videos once a day every day until June 2.

Congrats again to Meredith and Dan.