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Ron Paul Caucus Goers in Their Own Words
Henderson, Nev. - Ron Paul may have finished second in the caucus here, but according to his supporters, he did very well in the battle for delegates to the state convention. Here Paul delegates Miles Planette and Karen Manning talk about their caucus experience. Karen, 52, was active in 2008 while this is the first rodeo for Planette, 21.
What a Nevada Caucus Looks Like
Henderson, Nev. - Covering a caucus is a bit
different from covering a primary or general election, because you
only get to visit one site. You cannot jump from caucus to caucus
because they all start and end at about the same time. Some
reporters luck out and end up at really interesting caucuses
like mine; others end up having
really bad experiences.
One thing that struck me about the caucus I attended was that despite its chaotic beginings, everybody remained civil. Nobody started screaming and yelling when a new chair was chosen. Below are some quick videos of caucus day at Green Valley High School.
This is a clip of what it looks like outside the caucus place when people first arrive. It is a bit chaotic and confusing, especially if you have no idea what you're doing or where you're going.
In this video the people of precinct 7683 nominate and select a caucus chairman after the designated one failed to show up.
Romney Takes Nevada, Ron Paul and Gingrich Battling for Second Place
From
CBS News, updated around 10.25 pm ET:
With the doors closed at caucus precincts across Nevada, CBS News projects that Mitt Romney has won the Nevada Republican caucuses by a sizable margin, giving him his third victory in the race for the Republican presidential nomination.
With 148 of 1,835 precincts reporting, Romney has 41 percent of the vote. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, with 25 percent, and Rep. Ron Paul, with 22 percent, are battling for second place. Former Sen. Rick Santorum has 13 percent of the vote.
Ron Paul Places Second at Chaotic Henderson Caucus
Henderson, Nev. – When people gathered at Green Valley High School to participate in the 2012 Republican caucus, it looked like organized chaos. Lines of people were snaking from three different directions to a series of small tables where caucus participants could find out where to go. Confused voters cut lines and interrupted caucus workers trying to help people find their own caucus rooms. Peppy cheers from a cheerleading competition across the quad added to the noise.
At the caucus for precinct 7683 there was momentary confusion when the caucus chairman did not appear at the start. Eventually the group elected a chair, Valerie Blake, 47, from among those present. From there the group had instructions on a sheet that they had to follow.
- Check voter eligibility
- Select delegates to the state convention
- Speeches from the candidates supporters
- Open floor discussion
- Vote for president
After the instructions were given there were occasional delays due to paperwork issues but the caucus moved quickly without any major problems. Six delegates were elected to the state convention of which two were Ron Paul supporters.
Karen Manning, 52, one of the delegates elected to go the state convention, spoke for Paul at the caucus.
“It’s all about small government and staying within the confines of the constitution. If it’s not outlined in the Constitution, government should not be doing it,” she said, encouraging caucus goers to vote for Paul.
Mitt Romney won this precinct with 23 votes, followed by Paul with nine. Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich both had five.
Manning was disappointed, but she expected Paul to finish at least second.
“I wanted more. We were really organized in this precinct but there were just more broad based Romney supporters here. Plus, he’s been given more media support and a larger platform nationally,” she said.
The other Paul delegate, Miles Planette, 21, said that people should vote for Paul because he is the only candidate who wants to stop the welfare state at home and abroad. “We talk about curtailing spending at home but we can’t forget so much of our budget is devoted to things overseas,” he said.
One Romney supporter said he liked Paul but did not like his libertarian approach to social issues. “Ron Paul’s policies will give people access to drugs so they can destroy themselves,” said David, the Romney supporter.
Planette countered, “I don’t do drugs myself and would not recommend them but it’s not of my business or the government’s business what my neighbor does in the privacy of his own home.”
“As long as he isn’t hurting anyone, what does it matter?” said Planette.
The discussion then shifted from the War on Drugs to electability and beating President Obama.
Paul's Final Push In Las Vegas
Las
Vegas - After starting his day in the remote town of Pahrump
Ron Paul returned to Sin City to make one last push before today's
caucuses. Paul visited a gun store and an American-Filipino
veterans event at a Leatherneck Club.
The event at American Shooters was borderline chaotic as people jammed the doorways to get a glimps of Paul. As Paul was leaving the event a mother startled Paul by thrusting a baby at him. The candidate obliged her with picture. Paul's security team struggled to make a path for him on his way across the street to the Leatherneck Club.
At the Leatherneck, Paul pledged his support for HR 210, the Filipino Veterans Fairness Act. Paul deviated from his standard stump speech and focused on his support of the bill while emphasizing his efforts as a congressman to find lost medals and commendations for veterans.
Why Ron Paul Might Pull the Mormon Youth Vote
"I think it's definitely possible to be a libertarian and a Mormon," says Dustin Peterson, BYU-Idaho student and board member of Latter-Day Saints for Ron Paul.
Peterson, who spent time volunteering for the Paul campaign in Iowa, spoke with Reason.tv while in Spokane, WA about why Ron Paul might take Mormon votes away from the only Mormon in the race.
While many political analysts believe Mitt Romney has a near-monopoly on the Mormon vote, Ron Paul has spent considerable time courting LDS members living in Western caucus states like Nevada and Idaho (which happen to be the states where he performed best in 2008).
While he expects most Mormons to fall into line behind Romney, Peterson says Mormons have many reasons to support Ron Paul, including theological ones.
"Within our faith, there's a concept called 'agency,' and that's close to liberty," says Peterson. "We're taught to make choices and to decide based on our agency."
While Peterson believes that Mitt Romney will still win most of the Mormon vote, he's hopeful about the future.
"About half the students at BYU-Idaho are Ron Paul supporters, and the other half support Mitt Romney," Peterson says. "There's a battle going on right now on the campuses about the future of the Republican Party."
About 2 minutes. Interview by Zach Weissmueller. Shot by Sharif Matar. Edited by Weissmueller.
Visit Reason.tv for downloadable versions of our videos. And subscribe to our YouTube channel to get automatic updates when new material goes live.
Ron Paul's Pahrump Security Volunteers
Pahrump, Nev. - This is the only county Rep. Ron
Paul (R-Texas) won in the 2008 Nevada Caucus, and Paul's
campaign event at the Skate Zone today made it
pretty clear why
. The entirely volunteer-run event
had all the trappings of a professional campaign: people providing
information on
where to caucus, merchandise hawkers, audio and visual people, and
a massive map for people just to make sure, again, that they
knew where they were going tomorrow.
Even before arriving at the event I had to drive by several massive "Ron Paul for President" signs that dotted the main roads into town. Paul's event in Elko was well run but this was on a whole different level.
"Like all the grassroots Ron Paul things, there's nobody really in charge. Somebody says something needs to get done somebody steps up and does it," said, Pat Kerby, one of the main Paul organizers in Nye County.
Sources in the Paul campaign said the candidate relied on the local organizers to select the venue and do the rest. All the campaign did was put up the money to rent the facility and cover incidentals.
"We learned all about this process in 2008 and we're ready to repeat our victory again by a much bigger margin," said Kerby, a retired project manager with the Clark County School system.
There was even a local security team comprised of several men openly carrying handguns, uniformly dressed in black "Ron Paul 2012 Freedom Tour" shirts. In addition to these volunteers, Paul has his own security.
Sam Jones, one of the local security volunteers, was carrying .45 Long Colt on his side. Jones said that he’s been volunteering with the campaign since he heard Paul was running.
“All the signs you see around the valley, we build and put ‘em up,” he said.
Jones said he will not vote for another candidate if Ron Paul is not the Republican Party nominee, but he said he was open to Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson.
Paul’s Nevada campaign chairman, Carl Bunce expects Paul to win Nevada tomorrow as long as his campaign turns out its identified supporters. Bunce said the campaign did not have a problem with people openly carrying guns at campaign events. “Ron Paul is strong on the Second Amendment. We have the right to bear arms,” he said.
Leak Complaints End Federal Witch Hunt Against Lance Armstrong
Months after Lance Armstrong’s
attorney sought an investigation of federal government leaks to the
establishment media,
U.S. attorneys have ended their investigation of the cycling
champion.
United States Attorney Andre Birotte Jr. capitulated in a press conference today, announcing that his office "is closing an investigation into allegations of federal criminal conduct by members and associates of a professional bicycle racing team owned in part by Lance Armstrong."
Birotte failed to specify his reasons for closing down the investigation into claims of blood doping. Since July, Armstrong attorney Mark Fabiani has been demanding an investigation to find whether prosecutors were actively leaking damaging details to reporters.
Armstrong, who survived advanced testicular cancer at age 25 but went on to win the Tour de France seven times and date Sheryl Crow, was targeted not only by the federal government but by 60 Minutes. Anchorman Scott Pelley devoted nearly an hour of broadcast time and several "Overtimes" to hawking an anti-Armstrong interview with cyclist Tyler Hamilton, an admitted serial doper whose Olympic gold medal has been revoked. (Armstrong during his career passed 24 unannounced tests for performance-enhancement violations.)
"Blood doping" is a process of concentrating red blood cells so that your blood will somehow be more vigorous than that of other cyclists, who presumably must make do with whatever hemotherapeutic benefits can be derived from eating liver and oysters. Although doping once required an uncomfortable process of blood extraction and transfusion, advances since the 1980s have made it easier and more convenient.
I have never met Lance Armstrong and have no particular feelings about him. Although I find his public persona more agreeable than those of the only other cyclists I can name – Floyd Landis and Greg LeMond – Armstrong was sponsored by the U.S. Postal Service, a legally protected monopoly that should not require any advertising. As far as I’m concerned, the only Tour de France winner who matters is Pee Wee Herman.
But I do wonder why the squares went after him with such a vengeance. U.S. attorneys have broad discretion to pick their targets. So does 60 Minutes. What possible upside did they see in tearing down a beloved athlete and cancer activist?
Sheldon Richman on Why the U.S. Is Not a Free Market
According to GOP presidential candidate Mitt
Romney, thanks to Barack Obama, “we are only inches away from
ceasing to be a free market economy.” Actually, writes Sheldon
Richman, the U.S. never had a free market. What we have is a
corporatist system, and the sooner we get rid of it the better.
Why Stephen Colbert's Super PAC Joke Falls Flat
Institute for Justice lawyer Paul Sherman makes
some incisive points regarding Stephen Colbert's supposedly
satirical super PAC,
noting that Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow is not
the indictment of Citizens United that the comedian
and fans such as Slate's Dahlia Lithwick think
it is:
Virtually everything Stephen Colbert is doing was legal before Citizens United.
Although Colbert has often used the phrase “unlimited corporate money” in reference to his Super PAC, last Tuesday's disclosures paint a very different picture. Colbert’s PAC, which raised more than $825,000 through the end of the year, has raised almost no corporate money. Indeed, the only two corporate donations he reported to the Federal Election Commission amount to $714, total. In addition to barely raising any corporate money, Colbert's Super PAC accepted only one contribution from an individual (of $9,600) in excess of the $5,000 limit that applies to regular PACs.
In other words, more than 99% of the money Colbert has raised to mock Citizens United and Super PACs is money that has been legal under the campaign finance laws for decades.
While people with easy access to mass media have never had a problem getting their messages out, the restrictions overturned in Citizen United were a real impediment for people who were neither rich nor famous but still wanted to exercise their First Amendment rights. Yet Colbert and Lithwick apparently think we were better off when a political activists could be imprisoned for pooling their resources to criticize a politician on TV:
There will always be those who use their free speech rights to advocate that others' be restricted. And it is surely their right to do so. But such people aren't—as Colbert and Lithwick seem to believe—cleverly using the tools of the Machine to attack the Machine. They're simply advocating censorship for speech they disagree with, and weakening the basis of their own rights in the process.
For more on misguided criticism of Citizens United, see my story in the December 2010 issue of Reason. I considered the rap against super PACs in a column last month. Last year I questioned Lithwick's take on the constitutional challenge to Arizona's subsidies for political candidates, which she claimed was all about protecting "America's defenseless bajillionaires."
Plainclothes NYPD Officers Chase, Fatally Shoot Unarmed 18-Year-Old Over Drug Deal
An 18-year-old in the Bronx was
shot to death in his own home by the NYPD because he ran from
police and because an itchy-fingered cop says the suspect/victim
reached towards his waistband, meaning he was reaching for a
weapon.
According the Huffington Post:
18-year-old Ramarley Graham was gunned down Thursday inside the bathroom of his Bronx home following a foot pursuit by a team of plainsclothes cops. He was unarmed.
Investigators say police spotted Graham--who's had 8 prior arrests on charges including robbery, marijuana possession and resisting arrest-- on White Plains Road when he started to run.
The always-repulsive NYPD Police Commissioner Ray Kelly first said that Graham struggled with cops, now he's admitting that's not the case.
On Thursday afternoon, Graham was spotted engaged in a drug deal and cops radioed that in, including the fact that Graham appeared to have a weapon. A witness, according to The New York Post, heard police identify themselves, which is good, but the fact that they were apparently in plainclothes makes reasonable doubt in identification something worth raising. It sounds like Graham was trying to flush the drugs down the toilet while he was shot by police who "burst into the apartment" after a foot chase. Officers yelled "show me your hands!" according to Kelly, and then "gun!" and then it was over. Gramam's mother and Grandmother were there, as well as his six-year-old brother (who may have witnessed the shooting).
If Graham was indeed trying to flush drugs, that implies that he knew his pursuers were cops. But it also further clarifies that the penalty for disobeying police orders is occasionally death. There are lots of words for this kind of incident, but somehow "unnecessary" sums it up perfectly
Reason on cops and the drug war and the general awfulness of the NYPD
Does the NYPD Have a Strategy to Infiltrate and Dominate Muslims in New York?
If you look closely at the picture to the right, you'll see what appears to be the flag of Al Qaeda haphazardly Photoshopped over none other than the White House. The picture is a screen-cap from a documentary that has drawn the New York City Police Department considerable scrutiny, following the revelation that at least 1,400 officers were shown the propagandist, anti-Muslim film on a continuous loop during counter-terrorism training in 2010. Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly, who appears in interviews for the film, has tried pretty hard to cover his tail. From Human Rights Watch:
The police department’s spokesman also told the media last year that Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly’s appearance in the film came from old video clips and that Kelly had no direct participation in the film’s production. However, after the New York Times recently obtained information from the filmmaker confirming that Kelly was specifically interviewed for the film, the spokesman conceded that this was the case.
The documentary, called The Third Jihad, claims that Muslims in America are implementing "a strategy to infiltrate and dominate America," and that "this is the war you don’t know about." It was made by the Clarion Fund, "an independently-funded non-profit organization that produces and distributes documentaries on the threats of Radical Islam."
I'm sure the Muslims (yes, all of them) prefer the term "kinetic military action."
Between the NYPD's illicit spying on Shiite Muslims and its repeated screenings of The Third Jihad, it's worth wondering who has the intention of infiltrating and dominating: The NYPD or Muslims in the United States? Though sensationalist, there's much truth to this Huffington Post op-ed on the story, including:
What we have is a rogue police department that is completely out of control with no sense or obligation of transparency or accountability to anyone but themselves. This police department is engaging in a long list of highly inappropriate activity from extensively spying on mosques, entrapping into terrorism plots, stop and frisks, corruption scandals, fudging crime statistics, the Schoolcraft scandal, racial profiling, and brutalizing people engaged in expressions of free speech and dissent such as Jazz Hayden, journalists, and the Occupy movement.
The trailer for The Third Jihad is available for viewing on YouTube and is pretty terrifying on a number of fronts:
Read more on the noble efforts of Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly, the Muslim takeover of American society, and counter-terrorism.
Does Stupidity Cause Conservatism?
A new study in the journal Psychological
Science by two Canadian researchers suggests that the answer
is yes. And worse yet it causes racism and homophobia too. The
abstract from the article, "Bright Minds and Dark
Attitudes: Lower Cognitive Ability Predicts Greater Prejudice
Through Right-Wing Ideology and Low Intergroup Contact."
reports:
Despite their important implications for interpersonal behaviors and relations, cognitive abilities have been largely ignored as explanations of prejudice. We proposed and tested mediation models in which lower cognitive ability predicts greater prejudice, an effect mediated through the endorsement of right-wing ideologies (social conservatism, right-wing authoritarianism) and low levels of contact with out-groups. In an analysis of two large-scale, nationally representative United Kingdom data sets (N = 15,874), we found that lower general intelligence (g) in childhood predicts greater racism in adulthood, and this effect was largely mediated via conservative ideology. A secondary analysis of a U.S. data set confirmed a predictive effect of poor abstract-reasoning skills on antihomosexual prejudice, a relation partially mediated by both authoritarianism and low levels of intergroup contact. All analyses controlled for education and socioeconomic status. Our results suggest that cognitive abilities play a critical, albeit underappreciated, role in prejudice. Consequently, we recommend a heightened focus on cognitive ability in research on prejudice and a better integration of cognitive ability into prejudice models.
IQ actually exists? I thought IQ was a fiction imposed by the patriarchy as yet another way to exclude women and minorities. Who knew?
That being said, it is probably true that less intelligent people are more fearful people which likely inclines them toward sticking with what they know and avoiding social, economic, and technological novelty. Interestingly, the Huffington Post does note:
"Reality is complicated and messy," [University of Virginia psychologist Brian Nosek] told The Huffington Post in an email. "Ideologies get rid of the messiness and impose a simpler solution. So, it may not be surprising that people with less cognitive capacity will be attracted to simplifying ideologies."
But Nosek said less intelligent types might be attracted to liberal "simplifying ideologies" as well as conservative ones.
Simplifying liberal ideologies? You think? Maybe something along the lines of a simplistic ideology based on the belief that "fairness" is the same as "equality"?
In any case, my fellow libertarians need not fret. Research shows that libertarians - out of the major socio-political groups - score highest on "need for cognition" and "openness to new experiences." However, it must be said that many of my fellow libertarians do tend exhibit just a bit of "prejudice" against rigid liberals and conservatives.
For further background, see my 2004 column, Pathologizing Conservatism: Is it an unfortunate evolutionary holdover, or the product of a bad upbringing.
Thanks to Mark Sletten for the tip.
The Supreme Court Has Been Getting Along Nicely. What's that Mean for ObamaCare?
At The Huffington Post, Supreme Court reporter Mike Sacks has a very interesting take on what the Court's recent decisions may reveal about the upcoming vote on the constitutionality of ObamaCare’s individual mandate. After first noting that the justices have achieved “unanimity in major cases that pit religious liberty against civil rights, Republicans against Democrats, and law enforcement efficiency against personal privacy,” which might portend at least some similar agreement on the health care law, Sacks wonders if maybe this is all just the calm before the storm:
There remains the chance that Roberts' work this term has simply served to collect enough good will to spend on an explosive second half headlined by the demise of the individual mandate. Supreme Court history is heavy on early-term unanimity and late-term divisiveness.
I remain unconvinced that there are five Supreme Court votes against the individual mandate, but I have no doubt that we're in for some serious divisiveness.
Roseanne Barr is Planning to "Fix Everything that is Wrong with the World" Herself
The actress, comedian, and mother is calling for a divine matriarchy, as part of her campaign for the "Green Tea Party's" presidential nomination (and the Prime Minister position of Israel, simultaneously, she says).
According to ABC, she has actually legally filed seeking the actually existing Green Party's nomination, but she says "Green Tea Party" in the clip below.
Israel and U.S. Publicly Argue Over Iran Strike, Komen Caves to Planned Parenthood, GOP Teeming in Nevada: P.M. Links
"There’s a growing concern...that the
Israelis...might launch a strike without
approval, warning or even foreknowledge."- Susan G. Komen tries to make nice with Planned Parenthood.
- Nevada is full of GOP candidates.
- Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg will have to pay $1.5 billion in taxes if Facebook goes public.
- FBI and Scotland Yard got hacked by Anonymous today.
- Nasdaq at 11-year high.
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Anthony Randazzo on Obama’s Next Bailout
Under a new revision to the Obama
administration’s Home Affordable Modification Program, second (and
third) homes—whether owned as a rental property investment, as a
vacation home, or just as an extra mortgage from a house-flipping
project gone array—are now eligible for taxpayer subsidies to
reduce the principal on the underlying mortgage. As Reason
Foundation Director of Economic Research Anthony Randazzo explains,
this means that even though those investors made a poor economic
decision, taxpayers will still be forced to help foot the bill.
Mitt Romney, Hollow Man
It’s hard to imagine Mitt Romney’s inner life.
Even if you presume that he has one (which is not entirely
obvious), guessing as to what form it might take seems like the
sort of challenge better suited to, say, science fiction writers
who specialize in telling stories about alien cultures than it does
magazine profile writers or literary novelists.
Getting inside his head is a job that no one has yet been able to accomplish; it’s easier to imagine Romney as some sort of administrative system made flesh, or perhaps living software, with code and programming instructions rather than recognizably human thoughts and personality.
Yes, there is ample evidence that Romney is in many ways an individual worthy of respect, perhaps even admiration, at least for his private sector accomplishments. By all accounts, he is dedicated and hard working, intelligent and rational, deeply devoted to his family and religious community. People I’ve spoken to who have known Romney personally or studied his career all praise his work ethic and his value as a business partner. But there is little to suggest what, if anything, lies underneath that perfectly polished exterior.
But that isn’t stopping publications with the words “New York” in their titles from attempting to crack Romney’s code. In New York Magazine and The New York Review of Books, Frank Rich and Michael Tomasky respectively attempt to solve the mystery of the man who will probably be the Republican party’s next presidential nominee. What is Mitt Romney’s dark secret? It turns out he’s a Mormon...with a father.
In a piece titled “Who in God’s name is Mitt Romney?,” Rich argues that the key to the man must be his murky background as a Mormon lay minister:
He seems to have no cultural passions beyond his and his wife’s first-date movie,The Sound of Music. He is not a sportsman or conspicuous sports fan. His only real, nonnumerical passions seem to be his photogenic, intact family, which he wields like a weapon whenever an opponent with multiple marriages like John McCain or Gingrich looms into view—and, of course, his faith.That faith is key to the Romney mystery. Had the 2002 Winter Olympics not been held in Salt Lake City, and not been a major civic project of Mormon leaders there, it’s unlikely Romney would have gotten involved. (Whether his involvement actually prompted a turnaround of that initially troubled enterprise, as he claims, is a subject of debate.) But Romney is even less forthcoming about his religion than he is about his tax returns.
When the Evangelical view of Mormonism as a non-Christian cult threatened his 2008 run, Romney delivered what his campaign hyped as a JFK-inspired speech on “Faith in America.” This otherwise forgotten oration was memorable only for the number of times it named Romney’s own faith: once.In the current campaign, Romney makes frequent reference to faith, God, and his fierce loyalty to “the same church.” But whether in debates, or in the acres of official material on his campaign website, or in a flyer pitched at religious voters in South Carolina, he never names what that faith or church is. In Romneyland, Mormonism is the religion that dare not speak its name. Which leaves him unable to talk about the very subject he seems to care about most, a lifelong source of spiritual, familial, and intellectual sustenance. We’re used to politicians who camouflage their real views about issues, or who practice fraud in their backroom financial and political deal-making, but this is something else. Romney’s very public persona feels like a hoax because it has been so elaborately contrived to keep his core identity under wraps.
And in the New York Review of Books, Michael Tomasky takes the Darth Vader route and pins Romney’s emptiness on his determination to learn from his father’s mistakes:
For men like Romney, everything comes back in one way or another to father. Mitt was the “miracle baby,” the fourth child born nearly six years after the last of the other three, and named in part after J. Willard Marriott—like George, a nationally prominent and respected Mormon. He “grew up idolizing” his father, write Kranish and Helman. He walked the factory floor with him at the American Motors Corporation, which the elder Romney made profitable; he listened closely to his father’s religious and civic lectures; he wanted to become his father.
His pursuit of the presidency surely has much to do with the fact that his father didn’t make it there, torpedoed by his famous comment about having been “brainwashed” about American progress in the war by generals on a visit to Vietnam.George Romney didn’t back down from that remark, made to a Detroit television interviewer in 1967. He never backed down, not even to Nixon, with whom, asHUD secretary, he had numerous skirmishes. The son—unable even to view the “brainwashed” clip, Kranish and Helman write, until thirty-nine years later—seems to have decided that backing down is often a pretty good idea.
Commentators have spent countless hours speculating whether Romney is “really” moderate or conservative. The answer is that he is neither, and both. The lessons he learned from watching his father fail to make it to the White House are: don’t stick to your guns; be flexible; suit the needs of the moment. And so, in order to complete his father’s unfulfilled destiny, he has decided to become his father’s opposite.
I find Tomasky’s explanation more convincing in part because it reaches essentially the same conclusion about Romney that I did in my March cover feature: Romney’s path to success has always benefited from flexibility over ideology, narrow problem-solving acumen over larger principle. And while pinning Romney’s pandering on his father’s daddy issues might smack of psychological gimmickry, it’s also probably true to some extent: His father may have been a moderate, but he was a deeply committed moderate, and he lost his shot at the presidency in part because of that commitment. No doubt this served for young Mitt as a powerful early illustration of the dangers of stubborn commitment. In response, Mitt Romney has spent his life committed only to avoiding any kind of ideological commitment.
In the end, however, both Rich and Tomasky recognize that there’s no solving the Romney riddle. Whoever he is, or isn’t, we’ll probably never know, and even the most intriguing Theories of Romney tell us little about what’s actually important, namely: how he might govern. In fact, as I argue in my story, at this point, the best way to view Romney’s long-running campaign for president is not as a window into who Romney is, but as a reflection of the divided and uncertain party he’s trying to please. It may be impossible to truly understand Mitt Romney, but his campaign tells us an awful lot about the conflicted inner life of the GOP.
Pick up a copy of Reason’s March issue on a newsstand near you, or catch a special early online preview of the story. And if you’re not a subscriber, well, why not?
*Post updated to make a few edits and clarifications.
It's Not What You Owe, It's Who You Owe
Both are important, of course, but this Yahoo! Finance account of who holds U.S. debt is still interesting:
About 40 percent is held by public entities, including parts of the government. Here's who owns the most. Foreign countries listed include private and public investors, according to monthly U.S. Treasury data.
1. Federal Reserve and Intragovernmental Holdings
U.S. debt holdings: $6.328 trillion
That’s right, the biggest single holder of U.S. government debt is inside the United States and includes the Federal Reserve system and other intragovernmental holdings. Of this number, The Fed's system of banks owns approximately $1.65 trillion in U.S. Treasury securities (as of January 2012), while other U.S. intragovernmental holdings - which include large funds such as the Medicare Trust Fund and the Social Security Trust Fund - hold the rest.
In the monthly Treasury bulletin, both are combined into one category and the total accounts for a stunning $6.328 trillion in holdings as of September 2011 (the most recent number available). The amount is an all-time high as the Federal Reserve continues to expand its balance sheet, partially to purchase U.S. government debt securities....
Presidential candidate Ron Paul has introduced a bill to cancel that debt owed to Fed. Back to the top 10 debt-holders....
2. China
U.S. debt holdings: $1.132 trillion
The largest foreign holder of U.S. Treasury securities, China currently has $1.132 trillion in American debt, although it is down from all time highs of $1.173 trillion in July 2011. ...
3. Other Investors/Savings Bonds
U.S. debt holdings $1.107 trillion
With the most recent numbers from June 2011, this extremely diverse group includes individuals, government-sponsored enterprises, brokers and dealers, bank personal trusts, estates, savings bonds, corporate and noncorporate businesses for a total of $1.107 trillion....
4. Japan
U.S. debt holdings: $1.038 trillion....
5. Pension Funds
U.S. debt holdings: $842.2 billion
Pension funds control large amounts of money, reserved for personal retirements, and thus are obligated to make relatively safe investments. This group, which includes private and local government pension funds, holds $842.2 billion in U.S. debt. The private pension fund category also includes U.S. Treasury securities held by the Federal Employees Retirement System Thrift Savings Plan G Fund.
6. Mutual Funds
U.S. debt holdings: $653.5 billion
According to the Federal Reserve, mutual funds hold the sixth-largest amount of U.S. debt compared to any other group, although mutual fund holdings have diminished by more than $105 billion since December 2008....
7. State and Local Governments
U.S. debt holdings: $484.4 billion
U.S. state and local governments have nearly a half-trillion dollars invested in American debt, according to the Federal Reserve. The level of investment has remained stable since 2006, moving within the range of $484 billion and $576 billion....
8. The United Kingdom
U.S. debt holdings: $429.4 billion
The U.K. currently holds $429.4 billion in U.S. debt, but the country's investment has fluctuated dramatically during the past two years. Now at its all-time high (and rapidly increasing), British holdings were as low as $55 billion in June 2008.
9. Depository Institutions
U.S. debt holdings: $284.5 billion
As of June 2011 (the most recent numbers available), the Federal Reserve Board of Governors lists depository institutions as holding about $284.5 billion in U.S. debt.
This group includes commercial banks, savings banks and credit unions. In 2011, its holdings more than tripled from the 2008 low of $105 billion....
10. Insurance Companies
U.S. debt holdings: $250.1 billion
According to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, insurance companies hold $250.1 billion in Treasury securities. This group includes property-casualty and life insurance firms.
Woman Required to Show I.D. to Buy a Six-Pack...of Teaspoons
Apparently British people sometimes buy six-packs
of teaspoons at the grocery store. Who knew? Perhaps their spoons
get worn out from stirring all that tea?
Anyway, a gal who happens to be a reporter for a grocery store trade publication called (unsurprisingly) The Grocer was innocently buying some teaspoons at Sainsbury's when beep, an I.D. check alert went off at the self-checkout scanner.
When she asked why the purchase had to be verified, she was told the spoons “could be used as drug paraphernalia”.
Sainsbury's later changed its story, saying that the alert calling for age verification had been an error. Whew. Sanity restored, right? Wrong.
“The self-scan system recognised the spoon’s SKU as one for a knife,” said a spokeswoman. This had now been rectified.
Of course you have to be 18 to buy cheap cutlery with a dull blade. That makes perfect sense.
Read more Reason on the United Kingdom's crusade against knives.
Via BoingBoing
Oklahoma Legislator: Let's Tax "Violent" Video Games
An Oklahoma state representative wants to tax gamers. Introduced by the ironically named William Fourkiller, the bill would impose a 1 percent tax on "violent video games." Half of the revenue raised would go to an anti-obesity fund (the "Childhood Outdoor Education Revolving Fund"), and the other half would go to a bullying prevention fund. Taxing video games to stop childhood obesity and bullying—it's a nanny state trifecta!
In addition to the obvious libertarian outrages (it's a tax hike that could violate the First Amendment!) there are other flaws with the bill (SB 2696). First, it's far too broad:
As used in this section, “violent video game” means a video or computer game that has received a rating from the Entertainment Software Rating Board of Teen, Mature or Adult Only.
In other words, Teen-rated games like The Sims, Dance Central, or Guitar Hero would be included in the tax, even though they're non-violent. Brilliant.
Second, Fourkiller claims, “Violent video games contribute to some of our societal problems like obesity and bullying."
That's not actually true. A Michigan State University study tracked almost 500 kids' media habits and weight. Their results:
The team found that while video games were used more than the internet and cellphones, none of these activities predicted a child's weight or BMI. Instead they found that race, age and socioeconomic status were the strongest predictors.
In addition, Fourkiller assumes video games are for kids. But in fact, according to the Entertainment Software Association, the average age of a gamer is 37. So taxing adult gamers to fight childhood obesity is not exactly the most rational course of action.
Meanwhile for minors, the ESA points out, "Parents are present when games are purchased or rented 91 percent of the time." If parents truly objected to video games, then they shouldn't buy them for their kids. Children are the responsibility of their parents, not the state.
Reason on video games. Me on Oklahoma and the nanny state.
FDR, The New Deal, and The Expansion of Federal Power
During his first presidential press conference, Barack Obama defended federal economic intervention, stating "there are several who have suggested that FDR was wrong to intervene back in the New Deal. They are fighting battles that I thought were resolved a pretty long time ago." "We were just amazed to hear him say that," says historian Anita Folsom. While this "idea is taught in colleges all over the country, we have to come to the realization that these big government ideas do not lead to prosperity."
In his 2008 book, New Deal or Raw Deal: How FDR's Economic Legacy Has Damaged America, historian Burton Folsom took on the idea that the New Deal "worked." Now he's collaborated on a new book with his wife Anita, FDR Goes to War: How Expanded Executive Power, Spiraling National Debt, and Restricted Civil Liberties Shaped Wartime America, which tackles the idea that Roosevelt was a great wartime leader. During the war, the book argues, the Roosevelt Administration stomped on civil liberties, fixed prices throughout the economy, ballooned the national debt, and brought the top income tax rate up to 94%.
The Folsoms see Roosevelt's big government approach as instrumental in shaping the modern world. From ObamaCare to the Community Reinvestment Act, they draw a direct line from FDR's actions to the worst public policies of today, along with the general view that "government programs are the solution to economic and political problems."
Bert and Anita Folsom sat down with Reason.tv's Nick Gillespie to discuss their new book and the enduring myths of FDR's presidency.
About 9:30 minutes. Shot by Meredith Bragg, Jim Epstein, and Joshua Swain and edited by Bragg.
Visit Reason.tv for downloadable
versions of our videos. And subscribe to our YouTube channel to get
automatic updates when new material goes live.
"Cheap natural gas jumbles energy markets, stirs fears it could inhibit renewables"
The above is an
actual headline from the Washington Post today. First,
I told you so - see my column, Natural
Gas Flip Flop. From the Post here's some of the fear
provoked by cheap abundant natural gas:
Rachel Cleetus, a senior climate economist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said that “the problem is [natural gas] can take over the entire pie and crowd out renewables. Part of the reason this is happening is there’s a boom and there’s a sense that natural gas resources will be around forever.”
...the economic issue is disruptive, too. The rush to produce shale gas “is forcing all of us to seriously address what it means for us,” said Ralph Izzo, chief executive of Public Service Enterprise Group (PSEG), a New Jersey-based utility that relies on nuclear energy for half of its power supply. Izzo said it would mean “the delay of the nuclear renaissance for years to come.”
Can an energy source be all that bad if it scares the two most heavily subsidized sectors of the electric power generation industry?
Iranian Court Upholds Death Sentence for Software Designer
Last week, I blogged about
protests in Geneva against
the Iranian government's expanding program of Internet and
satellite censorship. Taking place outside of Iran (and
consisting of what appears to be a fairly small crowd from the
pictures in this
post), the protest was a mostly symbolic act—but we're likely
to see more and stronger reactions to what Supreme Leader Ayatollah
Khamenei calls his country's
soft war against Western cultural influence in the months to
come.
This week the Iranian supreme court upheld the death sentence handed down to an Iranian-born Canadian resident named Saeid Malekpour, who was arrested while he was inside Iran visiting his ailing father. Malekpour is charged with "insulting the sanctity of Islam" and "corruption on earth," two regularly invoked grounds for execution in Iran, because of photo-uploading software he designed that was then "used by a porn website without his knowledge," reports The Guardian.
This is equivalent to Mark Zuckerberg being put on trial because someone uploaded a nudie pic to his or her Facebook profile.
According to the Amnesty International report, there were at least 600 executions in Iran last year, compared with 43 in the United States. Last year Iranian-Dutch citizen Zahra Bahrami was executed before Dutch officials could move for her release from Iranian custody, and recently, American citizen and former U.S. Marine Amir Mirza Hekmati was sentenced to death in Iran on highly questionable espionage charges.
Confessions from both Hekmati and Malekpour were broadcast on national television, but the letter Malekpour wrote after more than a year in solitary confinement in the notorious Evin Prison sheds serious doubt on his and any other political prisoner's confession:
Some of the confessions they forced me to make were so ridiculous and far-fetched that they are not even possible. For example, they asked me to falsely confess to purchasing software from the UK and then posting it on my website for sale. I was forced to add that when somebody visited my website, the software would be, without his/her knowledge, installed on their computer and would take control of their webcam, even when their webcam is turned off. Although I told them that what they were suggesting was impossible from a technological point of view, they responded that I should not concern myself with such things.
He also elaborated on the conditions under which his confession was extracted:
While I remained blindfolded and handcuffed, several individuals armed with their fists, cables, and batons struck and punched me. At times, they would flog my head and neck. Such mistreatment was aimed at forcing me to write what the interrogators were dictating...Sometimes, they used extremely painful electrical shock that would paralyze me temporarily. Once in October 2008, the interrogators stripped me while I was blindfolded and threatened to rape me with a bottle of water.
Read Malekpour's full letter here (Persian and English).
The recent increase in Internet censorship, arrests, and intimidation are widely viewed as an effort by the government to preemptively suppress protests during the country's upcoming parliamentary elections in March. Considering the massive protests following the highly disputed 2009 presidential election, the results of which were apparently counted at miraculous speed and announced only two hours after ballots were cast, it's not hard to understand why the ruling powers might be a little nervous.
Ron Paul Visits Elko Gymnasium
Elko, Nev. – Ron Paul delivered his typical stump speech during his only northern Nevada appearance last night before a crowd of over 300 inside the Elko Indian Colony Gymnasium. While touching on subjects like the Federal Reserve, eliminating the income tax, slashing the federal budget, restoring civil liberties, and scaling back America’s intervention in foreign affairs, Paul often sounded, and appeared, like a professor giving a Libertarianism 101 lecture. The crowd did not treat it as a lecture, though, and frequently cheered and applauded. At one point late in the speech the crowd even broke into a “President Paul!” chant.
“Believe me, if you defer to the government and think that they should tell you how to run your life and how you should spend your money, then, I’ll tell you what, we’re not going to get over this. It should be in a free society, it should be the people’s decision on how they run their life and how they spend their money,” said Paul.
“Yeaaah!”
The crowd was very favorable to Paul but a series of interviews conducted before the speech indicated that there were several undecided voters in the gymnasium.
“I am not sure about Ron Paul and some of his stances. Particularly the border, how he would deal with illegal aliens,” said William Graunke, 66, a retired civil engineer who is leaning towards Romney, but appreciates the fact that Paul served in the military.
Paul did not touch on any local issues during his speech here, instead focusing on larger national issues. This played well with Tyler Cummings, a local gold miner. “The Federal Resreve is able to print money without any accountability to anyone, [that] is kind of disturbing to me,” said Cummings, 24. "I’d like to see the Federal Reserve audited."
After Paul finished speaking he signed some autographs and spoke to the handful of reporters there. The press gaggle was local except for me and former Reason writer Dave Weigel. A boisterous group of Idaho voters that traveled here to see Paul shouted to him frequently while he answered questions.
I asked Paul two questions, both local. One was about his thoughts on the controversial Travel Management Plan for the Humboldt/Toiyabe National Forest. This was a subject that came up frequently during my interviews with Paul supporters here. Paul could not answer specifically about the plan for the forrest but he said he thinks the state should make the decision, not the US Forest Service. "I don't want the federal government dictating to the state of Nevada. Period," he said.
The other local question I asked him was if he would strip funding for the Cowboy Poetry Gathering, an annual event currently going on in Elko that became a national story after Harry Reid referenced it on the floor of the Senate early last year. The event recieves a very small amount of federal funding but its supporters contend it never would have got off the ground almost 30 years ago without federal start up cash.
When I described it to Paul he said it was not something that he would be in support of but that it was minor. "Some of these programs that might be small in amounts and seem to be wonderful they don't motivate me to run for congress or president. I'm motiviated to stop hundreds of billions of overseas spending," he said.
"These are minor programs but philosophically, no, I would not support it," he said.
Cato Paper Shows How Guns Thwart Crimes and Save Lives
In a new Cato Institute
paper,
Clayton Cramer and David Burnett review the controversy over how
often Americans use guns in self-defense each year. Estimates range
from about 100,000 to more than 2 million, and the surveys used to
generate the numbers are subject to weaknesses that plausibly lead
to undercounting or exaggeration. Cramer and Burnett's
contribution, an analysis of defensive gun uses reported in the
press during an eight-year period, does not resolve this issue. As
they emphasize, the vast majority of defensive gun uses seem to be
encounters where brandishing a weapon suffices to interrupt or
prevent a crime. When no shots are fired and no one is injured or
killed, the incident may not even be reported to the police,
let alone be deemed newsworthy. Still, Cramer and Burnett's
analysis, based on a randomly drawn sample of nearly 5,000
incidents, sheds light on the details of cases that are considered
interesting enough to report in a newspaper.
The most common situation, accounting for 1,227 of 4,669 incidents, was a "home invasion," where intruders try to force their way into a home they know to be occupied. Burglaries were also common, accounting for 488 incidents. In 285 cases, the defender had a concealed carry permit, and most of those incidents occurred in public. There were very few cases where a permit holder became involved in an avoidable dispute that turned deadly because he had a gun—a scenario that figures prominently in arguments against nondiscretionary permit laws. Also contrary to the warnings of gun controllers, victims in this sample were rarely disarmed by their attackers; the reverse happened more than 20 times as often. Criminals took away defenders' guns in 11 out of 4,669 incidents, and the defender ended up dead despite being armed in 36 incidents, less than 1 percent of the time. Cramer and Burnett describe many specific cases (mapped by Cato here) in which a gun prevented robbery, rape, serious injury, or death, illustrating their general point that policy makers need to take these benefits into account instead of focusing exclusively on criminal uses.
Cramer and Burnett note that journalists often seem irrationally hostile to the very idea of armed self-defense, as reflected in a 2009 Miami New Times story:
It was pouring rain just after 1 p.m. Monday, July 20, when a man burst into a Honduran grocery store on NW 36th Street in Miami. A shirt was wrapped around his face as he gripped a black semiautomatic handgun. Twenty-year-old Charles Bell shoved the pistol into the face of a manager behind the counter. Then he demanded the contents of the cash register and cartons of cigarettes in a plastic bag. Next he began herding customers to the back of the small market.
After the store's manger shot and killed the robber, police deemed it a justifiable homicide. The headline on the article: "South Florida Store Clerks Go Vigilante."
A. Barton Hinkle on the Abuse of "Literally"
All patriotic Americans ought to stand up and say
enough is enough. We need a law to put a stop to this
literally-abuse. If we don’t get one—and soon—then the Almighty is
sure to send another Flood as punishment for our
transgressions. In fact, it may already be too late, writes A.
Barton Hinkle. As these words are written, it is raining cats and
dogs outside. Literally!
Plan to Take British Health Records Into Virtual Reality Encounters Bureaucratic Reality, Shuts Down
It's hard to imagine a better environment in which to test a government-run health information technology system than Britain's National Health Service. The system is fully socialized, with a single government payer, universal enrollment, and doctors employed directly by the state. There are roughly 60 million beneficiaries, which is big enough to see if the system can scale, but perhaps not so big that it's sure to be overwhelming. It's popular enough that in 2010, the country's conservative party successfully ran on a health platform where the top item was a promise to increase spending on the system every year. In other words, it's about the best possible testing ground for instituting a complex, integrated system of computerized health records through government oversight.
And yet it still hasn't worked. As Greg Scandlen notes, it seems that the country's health system is canceling a multi-year, $20 billion Health IT project after a report concluding that it was impossible to deliver on the plan's ambitious goals. The Independent reports:
A plan to create the world's largest single civilian computer system linking all parts of the National Health Service is to be abandoned by the Government after running up billions of pounds in bills. Ministers are expected to announce next month that they are scrapping a central part of the much-delayed and hugely controversial 10-year National Programme for IT.
Instead, local health trusts and hospitals will be allowed to develop or buy individual computer systems to suit their needs – with a much smaller central server capable of "interrogating" them to provide centralised information on patient care. News of the Government's plans comes as a damning report from a cross-party committee of MPs concludes that the £11.4bn programme had proved "beyond the capacity of the Department of Health to deliver".
The NHS's failure isn't the only government-managed health IT debacle. The 2009 stimulus package included $30 billion to help fund a major health IT rollout here in the U.S. In addition, doctors are spending an average of about $40,000 each to build out electronic health records systems in their offices. But as Marketwatch reported last summer, "even after all that expense, few physicians will be able to send patient records to other doctors who could benefit from having rapid access to medical histories."
As with so much bureaucracy, the biggest problems with publicly managed health IT systems tend to be practical in nature—poor administration and unexpected challenges with implementation. According to The Independent, "The project has been beset by changing specifications, technical challenges and clashes with suppliers, which has left it years behind schedule and way over cost." Technology contractors walked out on the project or failed to deliver. Leadership inside Britain's health service was unable to cope with the competing demands of elected officials and on-the-ground project management. It was a typical bureaucratic mess.
This is not to suggest that electronic health records are themselves a bad idea. But these government-funded efforts to encourage their use don't have a great track record.
The State Squeal of Vermont
The
Vermont State Police recently discovered that the decals on the
sides of its patrol cars had been subtly altered by the addition of
a pig-shaped splotch on the cow in the state seal. Pig,
the Associated Press
reports, is "a derogatory term for police." The 16-inch
decals were first produced two years ago by inmates at the state
prison in Windsor, and about 60 are in circulation. "While some may
find humor in the decal modifications," state police Maj. Bill
Sheets said yesterday, "the joke unfortunately comes at the expense
of the taxpayers." A.P. says replacing the decals will cost $780,
which "will be be covered by a surplus in the revolving fund
that supports the offender work program." That's just one-tenth of
a cent per Vermonter. Where can you get a better entertainment
value?
[Thanks to Mike Spinney for the tip.]
Nick Gillespie on Why the Super Bowl (and Other Sports) Shouldn't Become Political Footballs
As a teenage, mostly non-practicing heterosexual
libertarian regularly accused of being gay and communist simply for
playing soccer in the 1970s, Nick Gillespie gets annoyed when some
dumb game is larded up with ideological meaning. Over the years,
characters as distinct as Ethel Rosenberg and Peggy Noonan have
done just that and, with the Super Bowl just days away, the
conservative National Review is even making the case that
mixed-martial arts is "the true conservative sport"—even more than
NASCAR.
Seeing your favorite sport through political filters is no way to while away your weekends, Gillespie writes, and it is a real buzz kill when it comes to enjoying athletics.
Reason Writers at the Movies: Peter Suderman Reviews Chronicle in The Washington Times
Associate Editor Peter Suderman reviews
Chronicle, a viral-video inspired riff on the superhero
origin story, in today's Washington Times:
What happens when you give a trio of teen boys superpowers?
Maybe they’ll goof off. Or maybe they’ll decide to wreck a major city in a fit of adolescent angst.
In “Chronicle,” they do both.
A cleverly twisted take on the superhero origin story, “Chronicle” is also a cautionary tale about the dangers of superpowers: There may be a superhero in all of us - but there might also be a supervillain.
Shot in a faux-documentary, found-footage digital video style that at first resembles the fake monster-invasion movie “Cloverfield,” “Chronicle” is the story of three teenage boys who gain superpowers, including the mysterious ability to ensure that the camera is always on and pointed in just the right direction whenever something important is happening.
Convenient, right? Well, yes, but unlike “Cloverfield” and other similarlyYouTube-inspired genre riffs, “Chronicle” pulls it off by making the camera an integral part of the story.
Global Temperature Trend Update: January 2012
Every month University of Alabama in Huntsville climatologists John Christy and Roy Spencer report the latest global temperature trends from satellite data. Below are the newest data updated through January, 2012.
The 3rd order polynomial fit to the data (courtesy of Excel) is for entertainment purposes only, and should not be construed as having any predictive value whatsoever.
Global climate trend since Nov. 16, 1978: +0.14 C per decade
January temperatures (preliminary)
Global composite temp.: -0.09 C (about 0.16 degrees Fahrenheit) below 30-year average for January.
Northern Hemisphere: -0.06 C (about 0.11 degrees Fahrenheit) below 30-year average for January.
Southern Hemisphere: -0.13 C (about 0.23 degrees Fahrenheit) below 30-year average for January.
Tropics: -0.13 C (about 0.23 degrees Fahrenheit) below 30-year average for January.
Go here to see the monthly satellite temperature database.
A.M. Links: Obama to Unveil $5 Billion Jobs Plan, Israel Preps for War With Iran, Unemployment Falls to 8.3 Percent
Obama has a jobs plan proposal
for veterans.
It will cost $5 billion. - Unemployment falls to 8.3 percent.
- Israel is getting ready to bomb Iran.
- Westerners really don't want that to happen.
- Planned Parenthood doesn't need Susan G. Komen anyway.
- Lawmakers offer to slap themselves on the wrist.
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New at Reason.tv: "China and Transportation: What We Can Learn In The United States"
Nick Gillespie in Time on "The Conservative Crisis"
I was asked to participate in a
Time forum on the current state of conservative thinking and
politics. Here's part of my answer:
The current crisis in the conservative movement is embodied in a GOP presidential primary season in which the two frontrunners used to support the health care mandate that is supposedly the ultimate sign of President Obama’s Third World socialist tendencies. Conservatives never really believed in shrinking the size and scope of government, at least not when they were running the show. That’s why we’re $15 trillion in debt as a country and poised to reelect a President whose stimulus was an utter failure by his own predictions, whose extrajudicial killings of American citizens are justified by Bush Administration dicta and whose health care plan has managed to increase premiums even before being put into practice, and whose bailout of GM has created the Terri Schiavo of car companies, a living corpse that will never again rise from its deathbed.
My whole entry, which also includes a quick list of what the next prez should do, is here.
And in case anyone is wondering whether GM has really turned the corner and is back (as President Obama said in his State of the Union address), check out the latest Treasury estimate on the losses on the GM and Chrysler bailouts.
The home page for the forum, which includes input from Grover Norquist, Ramesh Ponnuru, and Rich Lowry, Erick Erickson, and my upcoming debate partner Ann Coulter, and many others, is here.
Henry Payne on the Florida Primary
Henry Payne imagines the Florida primary as a
trip to the beach.
Elko Barbers for Ron Paul
Elko, Nev. – A few years back the Lion’s Mane Barbershop relocated from the Red Lion Hotel & Casino to the small complex that serves the residents of the Double Dice RV Park. Its residents, a combination of mine workers, drifters, and people just passing through, provide a steady stream of customers for owner Tyler Vavak, a Ron Paul supporter. It is to these customers that he preaches the libertarian gospel while providing the only straight razor service in town. “I voted for Bush in 2004. I was always Republican leaning but I get a lot of customers that are veterans and they told me about this guy named Ron Paul,” he said
Vavak first heard about Paul in 2006 from a veteran who was venting about the Federal Reserve and the gold standard. It is not just about the Federal Reserve for Vavak though. One of the issues here is the US Forrest Service’s creation of a Travel Management Plan for the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest, a popular place of recreation for local residents. The plan would create restrictions that Vavak thinks go too far. He believes Paul would stop its implementation.
Inside Vavak’s shop, just below some Oakland Raiders memorabilia and pictures of haircuts, is a table full of Paul stickers and pamphlets. (Oh, and there is this sweet Ron Paul clock.) Vavak says his shop is a place not only for people to get a great haircut and shave but a place of discussion, too. “I have customers with all kinds of opinions. Some are private about them and others love to mix it up,” he said.
Later today Vavak is headed to Elko Regional Airport to pick up Paul and take him to his afternoon campaign appearance. Ron Paul Elko MeetUp organizer Marla Criss suggested him for the task. While he is out with his favorite congressman from Texas, Vavak's barber apprentice, Dave Shinn, will be holding down the shop.
Shinn, 29, is a big fan of Paul too and he credits Vavak for his “political awakening. “I didn’t really care about politics until I started working for Tyler last year. He really opened my eyes to the Constitution and stuff,” he said.
“Now he’s got me making phone calls and talking to customers,” he said.
When asked about having to go through Nevada’s official barber licensing process, Shinn said it’s a pain but added, “I wouldn’t want just anybody cutting my hair. I think you should have to be licensed to do a lot of things.”
Death of the Auteur: Is Highbrow Movie Criticism Democracy’s Lifeblood?
In the American
Prospect,
Tom Carson yokes together two recent developments – the
National Film Registry's choice of Forrest Gump in its
annual list of 25 "culturally, historically or aesthetically
significant films" and the
Village Voice’s firing of highly regarded critic J. Hoberman
after 24 years at the paper – to conclude that the “Yahoos are
winning” the Kulturkampf. Carson writes:
Watching the Voice lobotomize itself over the past decade or so—a process pretty much complete now that he's been canned—has been something I can't help feeling a personal stake in, even though business is business, and I should know better.
Whether or not he'd care for the title, Hoberman, along with The Nation's Stuart Klawans, is the most honorably anti-yahoo movie critic in the country. The art of film is his beat, and that's all there is to it; when it comes to deciding what's consequential and what isn't, compromises with the non-cinephile public's proclivities aren't in the cards...
With Hoberman's departure, the paper has gone from being a shell of its former self to a shell of its former shell—a process most people blame exclusively on finky New Times Media, the Voice's owner since 2005 and the single outfit most responsible for gutting the alternative press in general.
I can sympathize with what Carson, to his credit, admits is a fogey’s lament. During my own salad days in the Big Apple, the Voice’s main attraction was Carson himself, and the weekly generally had more pages but less interesting content than the rival New York Press (speaking of shells of their former husks). And I will say Hoberman (who recently spoke with a fair amount of optimism about the current state of cineastery) has become one of the LA Weekly’s few remaining points of interest, excluding the American Apparel ads.
But is movie criticism really the frontal lobe of the culture? I am, ahem, an actual Hollywood professional in addition to being an occasional movie writer. (Dig my woolgathering about Night Nurse, The Thing, Mildred Pierce, The Road Warrior and other pictures in Chris Fujiwara’s Little Black Book of Movies, yours for a reasonable $0.93 at Amazon.) I’m tempted to say that film analysis by somebody who’s never made a movie is like a sex column written by a virgin. That isn’t fair of course.
But I question the idea that the highbrow movie critic is being undone by the ruthlessness of the competitive market or the triumph of conventional wisdom. I think the critic’s job has been obviated by surfeit. It’s just not that hard to find a variety of opinions on any movie. I don’t need to leave the site you’re reading right now to find strong arguments that some year’s Oscar-winner is in fact the worst movie ever made, that Men Behind the Sun is a lost masterpiece, or that you are no better than a blind cave fish if you haven’t seen every movie made in Korea (South Korea! South Korea!) in the last decade.
Carson is right that there’s a generational element and a political element at work here. I think both of those resolve themselves into the auteur theory, that durable French import which holds that the director is the author of the film. Hoberman was not precisely a prominent auteurist only because by the mid-seventies the theory was universally accepted. (Talk about conventional wisdom!)
Writers are supposed to hate the auteur theory, but my reason for thinking it is of little value has nothing to do with any confidence in scripts. The problem is that for once the Academy has it right in giving the Best Picture Oscar to the producer. In all but a vanishingly small number of movies, the producer(s) is/are responsible for the largest share of the outcome.
That doesn’t mean the producer
could be called the author in any conventional sense. Sometimes the
biggest contribution is made by the editor or the writer or (more
rarely than you’d expect) the financier. In some cases the
star has the biggest impact, and that’s true even with the
mightiest directors: I’m pretty sure if you took a group of
reasonably dedicated movie fans and asked them to categorize a pile
of DVD boxes by type of movie, more people would stack The
Searchers with John Wayne movies like Hondo and
Chisum than with John Ford movies like What Price
Glory? and My Darling Clementine. (For my money
The Quiet Man is the Ford/Wayne movie that truly could not
have been made by anybody else.) The Mission: Impossible
pictures have all been helmed by very distinctive directors: Brian
De Palma, John Woo, J.J. Abrams and Brad Bird. The scripts are by
some of the most successful writers in Hollywood. Yet Tom Cruise is
the closest thing to an author those movies have.
It’s a mystery why a bunch of socialist critics came up with a Great Man theory to describe the most collaborative art form outside of North Korean mass-gymnastic exhibitions. What we really need is a death-of-the-auteur theory. Making a movie is such a crap shoot, involving so many parties with conflicting motives, that we should consider it a fluke when something gets made that holds together as well as My Cousin Vinny. An actual masterpiece (whatever your choice of masterpiece may be) has to be considered a heroically improbable event, and one that depends on both the movie itself and the audience’s response to it.
In that respect I’m not sure the hardcore cinephile is all that rare a bird. I enjoy Hoberman’s phrasings and laughed at one of his zingers of yore about how Steven Spielberg’s vision encompasses the world like an infinitely expanding piece of Saran Wrap. (You can always count on these guys for cheap shots at Spielberg.) But a real contrarian would be able to argue that Forrest Gump is in fact a masterpiece, not for the way it flatters conservative boomers with repotted history but for the surreal vision with which it embraces its own artificiality, as Forrest Gump is sent to every Vietnam movie ever made, dashes through a perfectly representative college football film, attends an obvious Hollywood mockup of a sixties protest, and so on, while the audience is let in on the joke through all the wry stock-footage chicanery.
A good critic might even plug Gump into the series of movies Tom Hanks made in the 1990s that in one way or another revisited the “generation gap” between the Greatest Generation and the Dearest Generation, and resolved most of the old issues in favor of the squares. Tellingly, Hanks did this in some movies as an actor, in others as a director and/or producer, but he deserves at least some author credit for all of them. As motion picture stars from Boris Karloff to David After Dentist can tell you, there are many ways to get your personal stamp on a movie.
Jesse Walker named Hoberman’s An Army of Phantoms as one of his best of 2011, and I dug his comments on zombie films back in the Bush Administration. More recently I raised my monocle in praise of Carson’s book Daisy Buchanan’s Daughter. And for movie criticism so hard and gemlike you might cut yourself on it, check out Reason’s Kurt Loder.
Pedants Are Revolting: Grammar Nitpick Sparks Barnyard Henpeck
Call it the circular firing
squad or the pot calling the kettle black or the hoisting of the
jackanapes on his own petard (actually, please call it that last
one). Years ago, esteemed Hit & Run commenter
R C Dean considered the law under which anybody who points out
a "typo, misspelling or grammatical error" will in turn commit
"some kind of typographical, spelling, or grammatical offense."
Now Scott Stein sifts through a CNN comment thread that puts the snicket in persnickety to find a tragic example of Dean's Law in action. (Will we ever learn?)
One or two commenters blow the whistle on the author's violation of the underpublicized "I've got" injunction. But no sooner have the grammar constables taken off after the illiterate wordstress than they are besunken in a slough of misplaced subjunctives and possessive pitfalls:
“I’ve got nearly 20 years of experience in the classroom…”
I’ve got – if it wasn’t so sad, it would be funny.
And:
You’re opinion died at “got”. Sorry.
Very funny. All the usual characters show up for the Hobbesian copyedit of all against all. Even the romantic who sings that we must cast aside these Latinate chains that bind our rough Teutonic tongue and give full Nordic will to the Queen's English. That person goes by the name Uthor and calls people Nazis. (Isn't there a Web 1.0 rule about that too?)
If anybody knows the logic behind the prohibition on "I’ve got," please pipe up in the comments. Extra credit to anybody who can explain why "the fact that" is grounds for public ridicule.
Kurt Loder on W.E., Chronicle, and The Woman in Black
One positive thing to be said about Madonna’s new
movie, W.E., writes Kurt Loder, is that it is leagues
better than her first directing effort, the 2008 Filth and
Wisdom. But then many things are, periodontal surgery among
them. The new shaky-cam “real footage” movie Chronicle, on
the other hand, features good (if little-known) actors, a solid
genre plot, and surprisingly slick effects. The Woman in
Black, meanwhile, reaches back into the horror-movie past,
long before mad slashers and crazed gore frenzies infested the
genre, to present us with an unapologetically old-fashioned
haunted-house exercise. Kurt Loder reviews all three.
Lawsuit Alleges NYPD Harassed Transgender Woman, Kept Her Chained for 28 Hours over Minor Subway Violation
Over
at Jezebel, Anna North blogs the story of transgendered woman
Temmie Breslauer who was arrested on January 12 by the NYPD
for the misdemeanor charge of using her father's discount subway
fare card. Soon after, Breslauer alleges that "The arresting
officers — the suit names one, Officer Shah — laughed at her" and
asked about the status of her genitals. Then, says Breslauer's
complaint (which
Gothamist has in full):
"[S]he was fingerprinted, seated on a bench, then painfully chained to a fence wherein, for no apparent reason, her arm was lifted over her head and attached to the fence to make it appear that she was raising her hand in the classroom. She sat there in that position for 28 hours.
Adds North:
She also says officers not only refused to call her "she," they instead referred to her as "He-She", "Faggot," and "Lady GaGa," and asked her "So you like to suck dick? Or what?" Meanwhile, people arrested for the same minor crime (misdemeanor "theft of services") she was were calmly processed and allowed to leave. Finally, she was able to go before a judge, who gave her two days of community service. She says the whole ordeal aggravated her existing PTSD and left her sleepless and suicidal.
Breslauer's suit names the City of New York, Officer Shah, and several other officers as defendants. It accuses them of assault, battery, false imprisonment, and violation of Breslauer's civil rights, and asks for compensatory and punitive damages.
A transgendered man who was arrested at that massive Occupy Wall Street Brooklyn Bridge protest last fall alleges similar harassment and painful handcuffing by the NYPD. And it's not just transgendered individuals; after Pittsburgh G-20 in 2009, several women who were arrested said they were leered at and harassed by police, with calls from one officer to separate the women and "get the hot ones out" and several accusations of excessive pat-downs. Another woman at G-20 said she heard an officer threaten to put a male arrestee in with "Bruno" who would make the man "his girlfriend." (Prison rape is not just for horribly unfunny comedies and police officers who were apparently auditioning for said comedies, it's also for 90,000-plus actual prisoners a year.)
This isn't just about women or transgendered people; it's not a demand for politically correct accommodations (though cops should recognize prisoners who might be in more danger and decline to toss them in with the general population). This is about excessive punishment for minor crimes and it's about (sadly relatively) small petty, nasty abuses of people who are in a vulnerable position. Anybody in handcuffs in police custody is in a vulnerable position. They might be innocent, or guilty. They might be afraid (I know I would be). They might know that regardless of cops' freedom to indulge their dislike of transgendered people, or their misogynistic tendencies, or their racism, or maybe just general misanthropy, people die in police custody for all sorts of reasons. Or, famously in the case of Abner Louima (NYPD sighting!), they might just get beaten and then raped.
This isn't some Law and Order: SVU-type interrogation of a suspected child killer or serial rapist. There was no gain for the officers perpetuating this treatment except a bored, twisted power trip; a desire to make their prisoner uncomfortable and afraid. There's no way to spin that except deny that it happened at all. But as North pointed out, other transgendered individuals say it has happened to them as well.
Mike Riggs blogged a horror story a few months ago on what happened to a transgendered woman while she was being held in an immigrant detainment center awaiting deportation back to Mexico.
Reason on prisons, police, and criminal justice
Ron Paul to spend Nevada caucus night in Minnesota
Elko, Nev. - Ron Paul willl not be in Las Vegas for a
caucus night victory party on Saturday. Hell, he won't even be in
the state of Nevada. According to his public schedule,
Paul will be stumping in Minnesota on the day of the Nevada
caucuses. His campaign has confirmed there are no formal caucus
night events being sponsored by the Paul campaign. Jesse Benton,
Paul's national campaign chairman, said in an email that the
campaign has to keep moving forward. 
"We like to celebrate, but we also have a lot of work to do, so we will campaign in Minnesota while our first class operation turns out a great victory in Nevada," wrote Benton in an email to Reason.
Seeing as the primary season is in full swing, this is not that shocking. Paul's plan is to focus on as many caucus states as possible, and spending precious time in a far-flung location like Nevada on election night is probably not the best use of his limited resources. Like we saw in Florida, the candidates will get live media coverage anywhere they go on the night of an election or primary.
Both Paul and Rick Santorum spent the night of the Florida primary in Nevada and their responses to the results were shown live on all the networks.
Information on where the other candidates will be on Saturday night was not immediately available.
China and Transportation: What We Can Learn in the United States
China's economy has been the envy of the world for a decade, but what about its transportation system? With the largest population in the world and growing, maybe we should be looking at its mobility. The economic superpower has built a 21st century road system to keep up with its new appetite for cars.
Transportation economist and Vice President of Policy Research at Reason Foundation, Adrian Moore, says that China is using toll roads and science to keep up with the largest car market in the world. He sat down with Reason.tv to talk about what he calls, "the most important bilateral relationship in the 21st century."
Moore has been working with China on free market transportation solutions for booming cities that are attracting hundreds of thousands of people every month. China's demand for cars is being driven by its new middle class, which is roughly the size of the entire United States population.
Doing transportation right is something China can't afford to do wrong. Moore explains what it is doing right and what this "capitalist country" can learn from the "avowedly communist country".
Filmed and edited by Sharif Christopher Matar.
Approximately 10 minutes.
Go to reason.tv for downloadable versions of this and all our videos, and subscribe to Reason.tv's YouTube channel to receive automatic notification when new content is posted.
Facebook Founder Bemoans Dodd-Frank, Newt Contests Florida Primary, Billionaire Birther Endorses Mitt Romney: P.M. Links
Donald
Trump endorses
Mitt Romney. - Re the above: Ron Paul doesn't give a damn.
- Gingrich challenges Florida's winner-take-all primary.
- Mark Zuckerberg says Facebook going public will be expensive because of over-regulation.
- Darrell Issa and Eric Holder dueled today.
- The kerfuffle over Susan G. Komen pulling funds from Planned Parenthood continues.
- Two missionaries found murdered in Northern Mexico.
Do you want hot links and other Reason goodies delivered to your inbox twice a day? Sign up here for Reason's morning and afternoon news updates.
Veterans for Weed Threatened by That Other VFW
The pro-pot Veterans for Weed has been forced to change its name after the Veterans of Foreign Wars threatened legal action. The latter actually has a copyright on the acronym "VFW," so the "stoner soldiers" group is now known as the Veterans for Weed United. The founder of VFWU, Walter Solomko, is a former Marine and Vietnam combat veteran. But he prefers to go by the name "Hemp Solo."
However, the VFWU has not backed down from mimicking the famous POW/MIA image, which is in the public domain. (And yes, that's actually their logo). A spokesman for the VFW was pleased by this name change, but was still upset by the VFWU's logo choice:
They should be ashamed...What they have done is a total insult to their memory and sacrifice, and to their families who still grieve.
Hemp Solo responds:
Sometimes that’s the job of art, to piss people off...What is good about this is it’s stirring up conversation.
Solo hopes to raises awareness
for veterans and marijuana. A 2005 Veterans Affairs study
estimates that 11.5 percent of veterans are cannabis consumers. In
addition to other ailments,
medical marijuana has enormous
potential to treat post-traumatic stress disorder. PTSD
currently afflicts 6-11 percent of soldiers serving in Afghanistan
and 12-20 percent of those returning from Iraq. This has also led
one Vermont lawmaker
to introduce a bill that would amend that state's medical marijuana
laws to include PTSD.
Of course, no marijuana site would be complete without terrible puns, like "Semper High" and "Prisoner of Weed (POW)." It also features "pot art," like this brilliant Dada-esque cow picture.
Drew Carey and Reason.tv on medical marijuana.
Damon Root on Libertarians, Guns, and Federalism
In a new essay titled “The Libertarian Gun
Fallacy,” New York University law professor Richard Epstein argues
that most libertarians, including Reason Senior Editor
Damon Root, are wrong to believe that the Second Amendment right to
keep and bear arms applies against state and local governments. As
Epstein sees it, the Second Amendment isn’t about individual rights
at all. Instead, its purpose is to maintain federalism. In his
reply to Epstein, Root argues that the text and history of the 14th
Amendment show that the right to keep and bear arms does in fact
apply to the states.
"If they're saying $100 billion, that means it'll be $200 billion." More Californians Feeling Low About High-Speed Rail
Celebrated Los Angeles
Times columnist Steve
Lopez loses his bullet-train enthusiasm in a new column:
"Should
California bite the bullet on high-speed rail?"
It's not clear whether "biting the bullet" here means going ahead with the project or abandoning it. This may be the column that refutes an old journalismism about how if the headline ends in a question mark, the answer is no.
Lopez knows his readers well enough to start out by grokking the awesomeness of the wow factor that is being imagineered in the high-speed rail concept. Then the big but:
In 2008, California voters supported — bravely, naively or perhaps both — construction of a gargantuan, 520-mile bullet train route and authorized $9 billion in state bonds to get things going. The total projected cost to lay rail for electric cars, whizzing from San Diego to San Francisco at almost 200 mph, was originally estimated at $33 billion.
Since then, the high-speed dream has become a slow-motion nightmare, and we might be better off running a zip line from Mt. Shasta to Mt. Baldy.
The projected completion date has gone from 2020 to 2033. The anticipated cost has ballooned to as high as $117 billion, and no one seems to have a clue where the bulk of the money would come from. The state auditor and the state Legislative Analyst's Office have raised serious concerns, and the rail authority's own peer review group said the project represents "an immense financial risk" to the state. And two weeks ago, the railroad authority's top executive resigned.
The columnist journeys to Union Station (railroads and buses) and what Lopez, in a gratuitous swipe at the late Bob Hope, calls simply "the Burbank airport." He lets regular Californians pipe up about the high-speed rail project until he gets quotes for, against and in the middle.
I generally take Lopez’ real-life quotes from just plain folks with a fistful of salt (Morton’s or superstore equivalent salt like an average Joe, not fancypants sea salt like some fancypants), but he does identify people by full name and location. I appreciate Lopez’ deft juxtaposition of some pinwheel-eyed economics from a "semi-pro soccer player, actor, model and musician" with this:
Not Joe Bogenschutz, though. As the Burbank resident was about to board a plane Tuesday morning in Burbank, he said: "If they're saying $100 billion, that means it'll be $200 billion."
Lopez has the good fortune to answer to the newsroom rather the opinion section, where bullet-train belief still reigns as supremely as it does in Gov. Jerry Brown’s rumpus room. The important thing is that one more prominent Golden State blowhard is sealing the case against the vacant and bankrupt high-speed rail project.
Reason Writers on TV: Peter Suderman Talks Mitt Romney's Flip Flops on Freedom Watch with Judge Napolitano
On Wednesday, February 1, Reason Associate Editor Peter Suderman appeared on Freedom Watch to discuss GOP primary frontrunner Mitt Romney's book, No Apology, and the candidate's record of flip-flops on healthcare. Approximately five minutes.
Atlas Shrugged Part Two To Start Filming In April
Businessman and Rand acolyte John Aglialoro, who financed the production and distribution of the first "Atlas Shrugged" film for $20 million, and producer Harmon Kaslow announced that they have raised the necessary financing for the sequel. They declined to reveal the final budget, but in an earlier interview, Kaslow said they were aiming for a production budget in the $10 million-to-$15 million range.
I gathered from reporting my feature for Reason's May 2011 issue on the making of Atlas Shrugged Part One that they did not lock down the original cast contractually for sequels, so recasting may be necessary. Original director Paul Johansson (who, from my judgment from my experience on set, did a great job with the time, budget, and materials he had to work with) will definitely not be returning for this second part.
“There have been no good reasons not to televise the Supreme Court.”
In an unsigned editorial, The New York Times notes that in England, “the highest court in the land...has the good sense to see that televising hearings can boost the court’s reputation and confidence in the legal system.” Unlike over here:
The Supreme Court of the United States, however, still refuses to see these benefits. It does not allow broadcasts of oral arguments out of a misguided worry that cameras would encourage grandstanding by lawyers and might cause the justices to censor their questions.
But the court currently releases transcripts of oral arguments soon after they are finished and audio recordings of arguments the week they occur — all without causing grandstanding or self-censorship. Adding video would further enhance public understanding of the court.
Reason.tv made the case for cameras in the Supreme Court back in 2010, though as you’ll see in the video below, my colleagues also touched on certain subjects that The New York Times’ more sensitive readers might prefer to avoid:
New Jersey Legislators Get a Chance to Fix the First Amendment Problems With Their Anti-Bullying Law
Last week New Jersey's Council on Local
Mandates
ruled that the state's Anti-Bullying Bill of Rights, enacted
last summer in response to the 2010
suicide of Rutgers University freshman Tyler Clementi,
illegally requires new expenditures by local governments without
providing funding for them. The council, which was created by a
voter-approved constitutional amendment in 1995 to address the
problem of unfunded mandates, focused on provisions requiring
schools to establish bullying prevention programs, hire
anti-bullying specialists and coordinators, create school safety
teams, and provide counseling and other services "once an incident
of harassment, intimidation or bullying is identified." But now
that the law will have to be revised, says the Foundation for
Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), the legislature should fix
its First Amendment defects as well. "This 'anti-bullying' law, as
it is currently written, makes opening one's mouth on a college
campus in the state of New Jersey a serious risk," says FIRE
President Greg Lukianoff . "FIRE knows all too well that even
well-intentioned rules that provide vague proscriptions on speech
that challenges or offends are a true disaster for free speech,
candor, and robust intellectual inquiry."
The law, which requires colleges to ban "harassment, intimidation and bullying," defines harassment to include "a single incident" that "substantially disrupts or interferes with the orderly operation of the institution or the rights of other students" and "has the effect of insulting or demeaning any student or group of students" or "will have the effect of physically or emotionally harming a student." That definition of student-on-student harassment, FIRE notes, is substantially broader than the one the Supreme Court has said is consistent with the First Amendment in the context of Title IX lawsuits: conduct "so severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive, and that so undermines and detracts from the victims' educational experience, that the victim-students are effectively denied equal access to an institution's resources and opportunities." New Jersey's law also seems inconsistent with two rulings by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit (where New Jersey is located). In 2008 the 3rd Circuit struck down Temple University's regulations aimed at "generalized sexist remarks and behavior," saying the policy "provides no shelter for core protected speech." In 2010 the appeals court rejected the University of the Virgin Islands' ban on conduct that causes "emotional distress," noting that "every time a student speaks, she risks causing another student emotional distress." FIRE argues that "New Jersey has in effect sanctioned the 'heckler's veto,'" since anyone who claims to be insulted, demeaned, or emotionally harmed by another student's speech can make a fuss about it, thereby generating the disruption that triggers punishment.
Last year in Reason, Michael Tracey and Harvey Silverglate noted the hazards posed by legislation introduced in response to Tyler Clementi's death.
[Thanks to Victor McDonald for the tip.]
Commerce Department Moves to Destroy Green Jobs
Just weeks
after
promoting its "green jobs" record, the Obama administration may
soon destroy green jobs. Led by SolarWorld, a German-based solar
manufacturer, the Coalition for American Solar Manufacturing (CASM)
has
petitioned the Department of Commerce and the International
Trade Commission to do something about
"illegal trade practices" by China. More specifically, CASM
claims the Chinese government has been unfairly subsidizing and
"dumping" (selling them below cost) solar products in the American
market. Ergo, CASM is seeking countervailing tariffs, preferably up
to 250
percent. On March 2, the Department of Commerce is scheduled to
rule on these tariffs.
Unsurprisingly, protectionism would raise the cost of solar in the U.S., causing job losses. According to a new report by the Brattle Group, tariffs could eliminate upwards of 50,000 jobs. Depending on the size of the tariff (the Brattle Group examined the effects of 50 and 100 percent tariffs), costs for solar consumers would increase anywhere from $621 million to $2.6 billion over the next three years. In addition, if China retaliates by imposing its own tariffs on American solar products, another 11,000 net jobs could be lost.
So to recap: Green jobs destroy other jobs. And now the Obama administration may destroy green jobs. It's a government-backed circle of death! (Of course, in Ron Paul's America, there wouldn't be any talk of tariffs or a solar trade war. Hell, there wouldn't even be a Commerce Department.)
Fortunately for free markets, many solar firms have formed the Coalition for Affordable Solar Energy (CASE) to attack this solar Smoot-Hawley. Proving that not everyone in renewable energy is a watermelon, CASE declares:
The Coalition for Affordable Solar Energy is a fast-growing coalition of American solar companies that believe free trade and industry competition are critical to making solar electricity affordable for everyone. CASE is united in its commitment to support the continued growth and development of the solar industry in America...
In a solar trade war, everyone loses. Protectionism is bad for the America solar industry, the economy, and the environment.
After all, low-cost solar panels are crucial to attaining grid parity, i.e., when solar is cost-competitive with traditional energy sources. But by imposing tariffs, CASM would raise prices and hinder progress towards grid parity. In other words, CASM would render solar less competitive in the United States.
Speaking of which, why not let the Chinese subsidize solar panels and then we can import them at dirt cheap prices? Consumers would benefit from lower prices, environmentalists would get a cheaper alternative to fossil fuels, and American taxpayers wouldn't be forced to risk another Solyndra. And if SolarWorld and other manufacturers can't compete by providing a better, cheaper, longer-lasting, and/or more reliable product, then they deserve to go bankrupt.
Here's me on solar subsidies and China envy. Matt Welch on the useless Department of Commerce. Frederic Bastiat on solar tariffs.
Chrysler CEO Whines That Uncle Sam Has Not Treated Him Generously Enough
Isn’t this precious? Guess who is claiming to be a victim of all the aid Uncle Sam has been showering on Detroit automakers? Toyota or Honda? Nope. O.K. then, American taxpayers? Haven’t been heard from lately.
Believe it or not it is Sergio Marchionne, the CEO of Chrysler, the only automaker to be bailed out twice by the government in half a century. Detroit Free Press auto columnist Tom Walsh reports that Marchionne took a jab Wednesday at GM and Ford. Writes Walsh:
He suggested the competition is uneven because these companies are getting help from Uncle Sam -- GM still 26% owned by the U.S. Treasury and Ford having been awarded $5.9 billion in federal retooling loans, while Chrysler's request for Department of Energy retooling loans is stuck in limbo.
"One got DOE funding, and the other received equity capital," Marchionne said of GM and Ford, "so I'm the only guy sitting over here who's paid back everything with interest. I don't want any favors, I just don't want to be mistreated."
The shamelessness and mendacity of this comment is astounding, even by the rather lofty standards of corporate CEOs. Even the Treasury admitted that American taxpayers incurred a $1.3 billion loss on their “loan” to Chrysler although the true figure is closer to $6.4 billion as Washington Examiner’s Conn Carroll reported in May. Yet Marchionne claims he didn’t receive any favors and doesn’t want to be mistreated?
So what is this poor mistreated, CEO doing with the all this money he didn’t get from Uncle Sam. He is “spreading the wealth” to....his own workers. He announced today that all of Chrysler’s hourly workers would get an average of $1,500 in bonuses this year. “This is a reward that you have earned,” Marchionne told them in an email. “The more difficult the task, the more satisfying it is to overcome all obstacles…. Your efforts rewrote the history that so many naysayers had forecast.”
No, jerk, U.S. taxpayers’ empty wallets did.
My piece on how much the GM bailout is going to cost taxpayers here.
The Paul/Romney Alliance?
The Washington Post writes a story pushing the idea of a Paul and Romney alliance; there is some truth to this, though the story exaggerates it.
The remaining candidates in the winnowed Republican presidential field are attacking one another with abandon, each day bringing fresh headlines of accusations and outrage.
But Mitt Romney and Ron Paul haven’t laid a hand on each other.
They never do.
It is factually incorrect that "they never do"--an early Ron Paul moneybomb was specifically framed around combatting Romney, Paul's campaign paid for and aired anti-Romney radio ads in Iowa leading up to the caucusues there. But it is true that Paul had spent less money and effort at specifically attacking the front-runner, so far, compared to how he's gone after Santorum and Gingrich
While covering the Paul campaign for my forthcoming book, Ron Paul's Revolution, I picked up off-record hints that there was communication between the two camps and a likely realization that for both of them, clearing the field of the other competitors was more important than taking each other on directly, and that they both might need things from each other in a downfield race likely to be all about Romney v. Paul, along the lines of this from the Post story:
Romney’s aides are “quietly in touch with Ron Paul,” according to a Republican adviser who is in contact with the Romney campaign and spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss its internal thinking. The two campaigns have coordinated on minor things, the adviser said — even small details, such as staggering the timing of each candidate’s appearance on television the night of the New Hampshire primary for maximum effect.
Romney obviously gets to try to hold on to a portion of Paul's fan base in the general, if he wins the nomination, by not deliberately alienating Paul and his people. What might Paul get from not alienating Romney?
“Ron Paul wants a presence at the convention,” the adviser said — and Romney, if he is the nominee, would grant it.
What Paul and his supporters would demand, and what Romney would offer, are subjects of some speculation. One Paul adviser, speaking on the condition of anonymity to talk freely, said prime-time speaking slots for Paul and his son Rand, the junior senator from Kentucky, are obvious goals. On the policy front, Ron Paul’s priorities are reforming the Federal Reserve and reducing federal spending. So promises to audit the Fed and to tackle deficit reduction seriously could appease the congressman and his supporters, the adviser said.
The story is also good on explaining some of the specifics of Paul's fans strategy behind the scenes of wracking up big primary vote numbers:
To ensure that they are heard — not just now but after Election Day, too — Paul and his followers are working to gain a permanent foothold in the Republican Party nationwide. One state at a time, Paul’s supporters are seating themselves at county committee meetings, and standing for election as state officers and convention delegates, to make sure their candidate’s libertarian vision is taken into account....
In Reno, regional coordinator Wayne Terhune used a slide show on a recent weeknight to teach volunteers how to participate in a Republican precinct meeting to help Paul win delegates in the state’s caucuses on Saturday. He has tutored packed rooms at Denny’s as well as smaller crowds in the campaign’s Reno headquarters, located in a low-slung office building alongside the airport.
In a tiny conference room with a water cooler and two dogs on the floor, Terhune told the volunteers not to allow paper ballots out of their sight once votes take place — and to dress neatly and inconspicuously, so fellow Republicans won’t be disinclined to elect them as caucus delegates....
“You’ll nominate yourself,” Terhune told the room. “They’ll probably have you give your speech. Have a meeting a day ahead so all the Ron Paul people know who the other Ron Paul people are, so you can vote for them. Then you give a generic speech, and the non-Ron Paul people say, ‘Oh, he’s solid, I can vote for him.’ ”
Terhune also urged the volunteers to pull out their iPhones and record the proceedings on caucus night if party officials “don’t play by the rules.”
I discussed the friendly rivals joshing about whether it was going to be Romney-Paul or Paul-Romney last month in my after-New Hampshire wrap-up article.
Polls Don't Tell Full Story of Nevada Caucuses
Elko, Nev. - The latest polling data from the Las Vegas Review Journal is as follows:
- Mitt Romney 45%
- Newt Gingrich 25%
- Rick Santorum 11%
- Ron Paul 9%
- Undecided 9%
This is a huge jump for Romney. The last poll in late December had him in first but with a much smaller lead over Gingrich.
- Mitt Romney 33%
- Newt Gingrich 29%
- Ron Paul 13%
- Rick Santorum 3%
Paul's support is surpringsly low for somebody who has been campaiging here for months, and had a campaign apparatus on the ground since 2008. While Romney has rock-solid support here and is expected perhaps to even break the 50% mark for the first time in the nominating process, Paul's Nevada campaign boss, Carl Bunce, dismissed the results in an interview with the LVRJ, saying Paul could still win:
"If turnout is higher than 65,000 to 70,000, then more Romney people and more supporters of other candidates are coming up, then we might have some trouble," said Carl Bunce, the Nevada chairman of the Paul campaign. "But we have the numbers to win. We just have to turn them out."
Bunce dismissed the poll results, saying most Paul supporters refuse to participate or lie in surveys because of a bad experience in Nevada four years ago. He said Sen. John McCain's campaign did robocalls to identify Paul supporters and then sidelined them at the state party convention. McCain won the GOP nomination, but the state GOP convention was shut down before delegates could be counted and after Paul supporters tried to take over the meeting from the floor.
"A lot of the political activists don't answer those polls, or answer falsely," Bunce said. "I'm always skeptical of polls."
Not only are Paul and Romney the only ones campaigning outside of Reno and Las Vegas, they are the only ones who have built statewide networks here. Gingrich has been playing catch-up everywhere since his win in South Carolina, as his campaign was built more on free media than it was on a traditional organization. Santorum's shoestring operation bailed on Florida when it was clear they were wasting their time and quickly bought air time in Nevada for tough ads like this.
These polls are tricky, because caucuses are a completely different animal than a straight primary. Voters have many opportunities to change their minds during a caucus, because they go on for a few hours. They require a deeper understanding of process and devotion to candidate that goes beyeond spending 10 minutes at a polling station. Paul has this in his base of support here. He could perform much better on Saturday than polls are indicating.
John Stossel on Policing the World
With
an election approaching and at least some Americans upset about
irresponsible spending, the president has finally expressed a
political interest in cutting something. He says the Pentagon will
spend “only” $525 billion next year. That’s slightly less than the
current $531 billion. A cut is good, but this will barely dent
the deficit. We could save much more, argues John Stossel, if
America assumed a military policy designed for defense rather than
policing the world.
DFW Reason Readers: Come Hear Me Talk About Liquor Laws
Tonight I will be talking about "Loony Liquor
Laws" at a Liberty
on the Rocks event in Euless, which is about midway
between Dallas and Fort Worth. Among other examples of
alcohol-control insanity, I will discuss Pennsylvania's "wine
kiosks" (one of which can be seen on the right) and Texas
restrictions on beer marketing that were recently overturned on
First Amendment grounds. The event is open to the public and
admission is free. Here are the details:
Liberty on the Rocks
8 to 11 p.m., Thursday, February 2
210 South Industrial Boulevard
Euless, TX 76040
817-858-0507
Gregory Benford’s Reading List for Space Science Fiction
As NASA’s manned space efforts shrank, starships
became more the stuff of science fiction. In his reading list of
science fiction classics, Contributing Editor Gregory Benford
shares a selection of different paths to expansion into space.
Disrupting the Moral Forcefield in Social Psychology: Affirmative Action for Conservative Researchers?
University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan
Haidt is still provoking his confreres in social psychology.
The Chronicle of Higher Education, in advance of the
publication of his brilliant (I have had the pleasure of reading
the galleys) new book, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People
Are Divided by Politics and Religion, muses at his
provocative notion of affirmative action for conservative scholars
in academic psychology. The Chronicle cites the furor that
Haidt's
famous talk at last year's annual convention of the Society for
Personality and Social Psychology created:
...Haidt argued that the field discourages conservatives from entering—and leaves those who do feeling like closeted homosexuals. He called for affirmative action to make the field 10 percent conservative by 2020.
In support of his ideas, Haidt pointed to "taboos and danger zones," subjects that turn on the moral "force field" and prevent researchers from exploring "the full range of alternative hypotheses." He offered as one example the controversy that engulfed Lawrence H. Summers, a former president of Harvard, after he speculated that innate differences might partially explain why men are overrepresented in mathematics and science departments at leading universities.
"We psychologists should have been outraged by the outrage," Haidt said. "We should have defended his right to think freely."
Haidt also pointed to the extreme underrepresentation of conservatives in social psychology. When he surveyed the 1,000 colleagues who attended his talk, 80 to 90 percent identified themselves as liberals. Only three [emphasis added] people said they were conservatives.
Of course, when accused of possible discrimination, open-minded social psychologists immediately ask themselves if it might be true. Well, actually not so much. As The Chronicle reports:
One criticism is that Haidt lacked the evidence to back some of his conclusions. Another is that his argument might arm those who are "eager to dismiss our findings," as John T. Jost, a psychologist at New York University, expresses it. "We've seen this with climate-change issues," he tellsThe Chronicle. "If you can just accuse the scientist of ideological bias, then you can ignore the research findings."
Jost adds that the personal beliefs of social scientists are "scientifically irrelevant" because of safeguards against bias that are built into the research system. "Any research program that is driven more by ideological ax-grinding than valid insight is doomed to obscurity," he wrote in response to Haidt's talk, "because it will not stand up to empirical replication and its flaws will be obvious to scientific peers—all of whom have been exposed to conservative perspectives even if they do not hold them."
Personal beliefs are scientifically irrelevant? Hmmm. Not even a chance that personal ideological commitments could influence the questions that a researcher in social psychology might be motivated to ask? Perhaps not.
In any case, Haidt has put together a web page that addresses the fallout from his talk and cites a lot of relevant research on academic intellectual diversity. With regard to Haidt's call for affirmative action for conservatives as way to boost intellectual diversity, he makes the following points:
I am not concerned about the underrepresentation of conservatives in social psychology, just as I am not concerned about the underrepresentation of women or minorities in any occupation. As I said in my talk, "there are many reasons why conservatives would be underrepresented in social psychology, and most of them have nothing to do with discrimination or hostile climate." I am concerned about two things: First: Discrimination. If conservatives, women, or minority group members are being discriminated against, it is wrong and it should stop. And that includes the creation of hostile climates, which discourage students from entering fields in the first place. Second, I'm concerned about the absence of valuable perspectives from occupations that need multiple perspectives. When a group with a unique perspective drops below some threshhold, members of the majority group begin to assume that everyone around them shares their pespective. They begin to espouse their moral values more openly (i.e., "locker room talk"), and the small number of minority-group members shrinks even further or retreats to the closet. This is what (I claim) has happened in social psychology (and in many academic fields). Most groups and institutions don't need moral diversity. Diversity disrupts group cohesion and effectiveness. But in science, our goal is not cohesion, it is finding the truth, and if moral diversity will help us to disrupt the forcefield and shut down groupthink, then it will help us to do better science. This is why I called for affirmative action for conservatives in social psychology. (I mentioned the figure of 10% in my talk not as a quota but as a target. If the day ever comes when 10% of social psychologists are conservative, or perhaps just non-liberal, then we can probably relax our efforts to diversify the field.)
Go here to read The Chronicle's whole article. Read Haidt's "The Moral Foundations of Occupy Wall Street" at reason.com here.
Reason Writers Around Town: Shikha Dalmia on the Future of Right to Work After Indiana
After a 10-year hiatus, Indiana became the 23rd state in the country to embrace a right-to-work law that will ban union bosses from coercing workers in closed-shop companies to pay dues. Reason Foundation Senior Analyst Shikha Dalmia examines in her column at The Daily what this means for the future of the law. Big Labor is livid and will do everything to stop it from spreading to other states. As in the past, it'll try to scare the GOP establishment with dire political consequences. But, she notes:
Indiana’s law will go down in history as the watershed moment that decisively stemmed the awesome power that Big Labor has exerted on American politics for about a century...
First, unions are in a depleted state after fending off attacks in Indiana, Wisconsin and Ohio. They may no longer be able to fight effectively on new fronts...
Second, anemic growth and state budgets saddled with public employee legacy costs have shifted opinion in a pro-right-to-work direction. In Michigan, the union epicenter, the issue has been drawing over 50 percent support for a while.
But, above all, Indiana will both intensify the competitive pressure on its neighbors and offer lessons that they can’t ignore...
Read the whole thing here.
A.M. Links: FBI Uses Chainsaw in No-Knock Raid, No-Fly List Doubles in One Year, Romney Takes Huge Lead in Nevada
FBI uses chainsaw in no-knock raid on
the wrong front door,
terrifying mother and three-year-old. - Donald Trump threatens to endorse a GOP candidate.
- The U.S. no-fly list doubled last year.
- Romney is polling huge in Nevada.
- The DOJ is "invoking executive privilege to cover how the Department of Justice reacted when Congress began asking about" Fast and Furious.
- Nobody is buying the GM Volt.
Do you want hot links and other Reason goodies delivered to your inbox twice a day? Sign up here for Reason's morning and afternoon news updates.
New at Reason.tv: "LA Forces Condoms onto Porn Actors! (Nanny of the Month, Jan 2012)"
First They Came For Sugar Smacks, And I Didn't Care Because I Had Already Moved on to Mueslix...
A number of readers have
alerted Reason to the latest silliness coming out of the Bay Area,
this time in the form of a research paper arguing that sugar is
toxic, an additive, and hence should be regulated.
“We are now seeing the toxic downside,” co-author and sugar researcher Lustig, a professor of clinical pediatrics at the UCSF Center for Obesity Assessment, Study, and Treatment, told WebMD. “There has to be some sort of societal intervention. We cannot do it on our own because sugar is addictive. Personal intervention is necessary, but not sufficient.”…
Hot Air's Allahpundit has an interesting gloss on the larger issues:
One of the co-authors has an op-ed at CNN making her case. She doesn’t want prohibition — imagine trying to enforce an outright ban on sugar — but rather “gentle ‘supply side’ controls, such as taxing products, setting age limits and promoting healthier versions of the product.” You would think that in an information age, as TVs and cell phones become ubiquitous even among the lower classes, nanny impulses would be channeled more frequently into public education campaigns than into regulation. Doesn’t feel that way, though, does it?...
The more access to information you have, the dumber you supposedly are, and therefore the more your choices have to be made for you by your superiors. Isn’t the future glorious?
Steve Chapman on Obamacare's Condom Rule
A few weeks ago, Rick Santorum got some criticism
for saying the Supreme Court erred in saying states may not outlaw
contraception. The idea that Americans could legally be forbidden
to buy condoms or birth control pills struck most people as a gross
violation of personal liberty. They are right, of course. But
many of those who think it's wrong
to forbid Americans to buy contraceptives think
it's just fine to require them to buy
contraceptives. In this group, writes Steve Chapman, are President
Barack Obama and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen
Sebelius, who are hell-bent on enforcing that mandate on nearly
everyone.
From Outsider to Insider: Ron Paul Supporter Moves Up Elko GOP Ladder
Elko, Nev. - Marla Criss did not really care about
politics before 2008. Then she learned about Ron Paul. 
Today, she's the chairman of the Elko County Republican Party.
Criss, who's been chairman since 2010, was elected as a Ron Paul delegate to the controversial 2008 GOP state convention in Reno. She walked away from the experience determined to make changes after what she saw happen there.
"We were appalled by what happened at the convention four years ago, so we got involved at many levels and worked to make the party much more responsive to the regular people," she said.
Criss, along with other Paul supporters, worked their way into the local party infrastructure by attending its meetings and running for positions. Criss spent two years on the party's executive board before running unopposed for party chairman.
"We kinda took it over," she said.
After taking power, the Paul supporters rewrote the party bylaws. "We worked to really open it up to more than just one group that always did it. We got a lot more young people and different people involved," she said.
Criss emphasized that they did not do this just for Paul supporters but for the county as a whole. During our interview she wanted to make it clear that when she supports Paul, she's doing it as Marla Criss private citizen, not Chairman Marla Criss. "The county party and its officers cannot endorse candidates in an official capacity," she said.
Paul is making a campaign stop here tomorrow. Criss hopes he'll draw a bigger crowd than when he stopped here in 2007. The organization Elko's Paul supporters built in 2008 is still largely intact, and volunteers have been making phone calls and interacting with voters. "We’ve had a few sign waves downtown, that was good. We’ve been in parades. Given away about a thousand Ron Paul balloons at a parade," Criss said. Though they are not performing traditional canvasing.
When asked about how many Paul supporters have gone through caucus training, Criss said she didn't know, but speculated that many already went through the training in 2008.
Paul is popular here because "there is a real independent libertarian streak in this area, everyone wants to be left alone," she said.
As the party chairman, Criss declined to speculate on the outcome of Saturday's caucus, saying only that she hopes there are enough ballots and paper for everyone that attends.
Plaid Revolution: Citizens Celebrate Death of Redevelopment
"Free at last!" exclaimed a Los
Angeles gadfly as victims of eminent domain flocked into L.A. City
Hall to celebrate the abolition of California’s redevelopment
agencies.
Today is VR day, the date on which the Golden State’s more than 400 redevelopment agencies must dissolve themselves. In Los Angeles, the Community Redevelopment Agency (CRA/LA) will lay off 192 employees, leaving behind nothing but destruction, wasteland, and bad debt.
Many cities are in even worse shape than L.A. Today the East Bay town of Hercules went belly up on a $2.4 million redevelopment bond.
But the demonstration in downtown L.A. – at a city hall now surrounded by chain link fence and dead grass after the police crackdown against Occupy L.A. – rocked a place redevelopers all over Southern California once looked to for inspiration. Throughout the 1960s, Downtown L.A. was razed. Over the subsequent decades, the vacant land created by uprooting 20,000 residences and many more businesses was rebuilt with large buildings, which now suffer from double-digit vacancy rates. In the county, only the city of Glendale, which was similarly favored by an expensive redevelopment of its center, suffers more vacancies than Downtown L.A.
Prior to today’s City Council
session, local activists, cranks and victims of the CRA held a
press conference in the rotunda. In attendance was Gordon Pattison,
whose residence – a palatial Victorian on the
now-defunct Bunker Hill Ave. that Pattison’s family owned as a
combination family home and rental property – was among the last
houses destroyed to make way for what is now the interior of a
Wells Fargo skyscraper.
The press conference and subsequent speeches to the City Council were organized by familiar local gadfly John Walsh, a plaid-jacketed City Hall regular who invoked Martin Luther King in a speech in Council Chambers recounting the CRA’s bigoted and abusive history; praising a “coalition that spanned from Marxist-Leninists to libertarians”; and duly praising Gov. Jerry Brown – who, out of expediency as much as principle, pushed the state law wiping redevelopment agencies out.
Walsh and his supporters brought along a prop headstone reading “RIP CRA.” Security guards in the council chambers tried to suppress the headstone, though the government’s prohibition on political displays in chambers holds council members to a different standard than it holds the public. Councilman Paul Koretz prominently features a bobblehead of President Obama on his desk.
Somewhere to your right you see Valarie Stewart, whose father Nick Stewart used the money he made playing janitor Lightnin’ on the Amos ‘n’ Andy TV show to build and operate the Ebony Showcase Theatre in Mid-City. The CRA seized this historic site and now operates it as a performing arts center named after infamously corrupt former City Councilman Nate Holden.
This was standard behavior for
the CRA. The agency (the most secretive and impenetrable government
body I have experienced in Los Angeles) wrapped itself in rhetoric
about raising living standards for the poor, but in practice the
CRA deprived tens of thousands of working and lower-income
residents of their homes and livelihoods while granting
vast subsidies to billionaires.
Stewart’s family long ago abandoned its efforts to get their theater back. She attended today in hope of making a statement to the City Council, but the non-agenda-items comment period (the only portion of a Council event in which citizens are given an open forum to demand redress of grievances) expired before she had a chance to speak.
The comment period lasted less than half as long as the time the Council allotted for a ceremony in honor of Rob Dyrdek, during which most of the council members spoke individually to praise Dyrdek’s hard work in the expansion of skateboard parks; Dyrdek was then given time to praise each of the council members in turn.
And with that redevelopment comes to an end in California – at least until eminent domain abusers find another guise under which to make theft of private property sound like high-minded vision. The CRA’s phone line still plays a normal-office-hours message but warns that “our menu has changed.”
This gang of thugs deserved a more ignominious end. But the important thing is that it is an end, and it was worth heading even to L.A.’s grim, sparsely populated downtown to celebrate it.
Ron Paul Roundup: Defends Immigrants, Not at CPAC, Gets Nearly a Million in SuperPAC Support from Peter Thiel, and Can't be Pinned Down
Ron Paul was campaigning in Nevada today, as the only Republican who actually showed up to a Hispanics in Politics event. The LA Times reports:
The audience -- dozens of politically active Latinos who gathered in an eastside community center -- applauded Paul the civil libertarian when he slammed drug laws that unfairly target minorities. They even cheered his defense of the gold standard.
Immigration, however, was another story.
The 12-term Texas congressman spent the better part of a 25-minute address thinking aloud about the thorny subject. He talked about how Americans are more accepting of outsiders when the economy is good, but when trouble looms there is a search for scapegoats.
"I believe Hispanics have been used as scapegoats, to say, they're the problem instead of being a symptom maybe of a problem with the welfare state," Paul told the group....
"Now there's a lot of antagonism and resentment turned just automatically on immigrants," he continued....
Paul said he's not one of those politicians who believes that "barbed-wire fences and guns on our border will solve any of our problems." That's not, he said, the American way. And he doesn't think that a national identification card is the way to go.
The LA Times also profiles Paul's Nevada support base.
*The University of Minnesota's "Smart Politics" page notices Paul is the only GOP candidate who doesn't wear lapel pins to demonstrate his political beliefs.
*The Independent Voter Network tries to argue that a Paul who wins the GOP nomination is so electable:
As is consistently attested by poll results and even the Republican Party’s most recent primary votes in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina, the facts are these: Ron Paul performs better among independentsthan any other Republican candidate for the presidential nomination. He also performs better among young voters under 30 than any other Republican. Ron Paul also outperforms any of the remaining Republican candidates among Democrats, liberals, moderates, and low-income voters.
Independents, people under 30, liberals, moderates, and low income voters are all key constituencies that helped Obama win his primary and the general election in 2008. It only stands to reason that the candidate with the broadest appeal to Obama’s key voters and the greatest chance of swaying their votes is the most electable candidate. Even former Florida Governor Jeb Bush realizes that the Republicans can only win the general election with a candidate who appeals to independents, which is why he recently admonished the GOP’s candidates, saying “You have to maintain your principles but have a broader appeal.”
*The Examiner on how Ron Paul, the winner of the last two CPAC straw polls, won't be at CPAC this year.
*Ron Paul SuperPAC Endorse Liberty announces support from futurist and libertarian superfinancier Peter Thiel, to the tune of $900,000.
*CNN challenges Dick Armey: why aren't the Tea Party forces behind Ron Paul by acclamation? Well, they aren't a monolith, he says. As to why they aren't becoming one behind the only guy with a consistent record as an insurrectionist outsider serious about taxing and spending and small government, well, I guess the answer to that is (not that Armey gives this answer) that they aren't that serious.
Reason's Ron Paul archives. My forthcoming book, Ron Paul's Revolution.
Unions Threaten to Derail the Super Bowl After Indiana Becomes the 23rd Right-to-Work State
Indiana became the 23rd right-to-work state this afternoon after its Senate voted 28-22 to approve a bill to that effect and Governor Mitch Daniels signed it post haste. This means that Big Labor will no longer be able to extract mandatory dues from workers and channel them (dues, not workers) to elect compliant Democrats.
Union activists are livid and chanted “shame, shame” outside as the Senate voted. They are threatening to stop the Super Bowl in Indianapolis on Sunday in protest.
They claim that the law is pure union-busting vindictiveness on the part of the GOP. Senate Minority Leader Vi Simpson, a Democrat, called the notion that many employers would be attracted to Indiana because of the law a myth. "Right-to work is a race to the bottom, it's a downward spiral to lower wages and fewer benefits," Simpson said.
He may be right or he may be wrong (actually, he’s wrong, studies have shown) but one thing is for certain: Unions won’t win friends and influence Americans by ruining the Super Bowl. Thanksgiving, may be. Christmas, perhaps. Super Bowl, hands off.
Having failed in their goal line stand, wouldn't it be plain un-American to send fans to the field to stop the game?
(Watch this space tomorrow for an analysis by yours truly on where the right-to-work movement is headed next.)
The Interns are Revolting! Or, a Former Unpaid Intern for Harper's Bazaar Wants A Class Action Lawsuit
It's happening again. In spring
2010, Obama's Labor Department was flexing
its muscles extra hard over supposedly exploitative employees
who didn't pay their interns. Now, once again the unpaid
interns of the world (and their various supporters and legal
support) are rising up, revolting and trying to make a case that
they are being used by employers who overwork them, don't provide a
"real educational experience," and of course don't pay them a
salary. Basically, the Board of Labor needs to fix this problem in
some way or another. Even though
there are already rules in place which cover unpaid
internships:
The following six criteria must be applied when making this determination:
1. The internship, even though it includes actual operation of the facilities of the employer, is similar to training which would be given in an educational environment; 2. The internship experience is for the benefit of the intern; 3. The intern does not displace regular employees, but works under close supervision of existing staff; 4. The employer that provides the training derives no immediate advantage from the activities of the intern; and on occasion its operations may actually be impeded; 5. The intern is not necessarily entitled to a job at the conclusion of the internship; and 6. The employer and the intern understand that the intern is not entitled to wages for the time spent in the internship.
One former intern in particular, notes The New York Times blog, would like to turn her work experience into a class action lawsuit:
In her lawsuit, filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan, the intern, Xuedan Wang, and her law firm are asking to make the case a class action on behalf of what they say are hundreds of unpaid interns at Heart Magazines, which also publishes Cosmopolitan, Seventeen and Good Housekeeping....
The lawsuit against Hearst states, “Employers’ failure to compensate interns for their work, and the prevalence of the practice nationwide, curtails opportunities for employment, fosters class divisions between those who can afford to work for no wage and those who cannot, and indirectly contributes to rising unemployment.”
According to the lawsuit, Ms. Wang, who graduated from Ohio State University in 2010, was an intern at Harper’s Bazaar from August 2011 to December 2011 and said she generally worked 40 hours a week but sometimes as many as 55 hours. Her lawyers said that Ms. Wang, with a degree in strategic communications, coordinated pickups and deliveries of fashion samples between Harper’s Bazaar and fashion vendors and showrooms and assigned other unpaid interns to help carry out the pickups and deliveries....
“Unpaid interns are becoming the modern-day equivalent of entry-level employees, except that employers are not paying them for the many hours they work,” said Adam Klein, one of the lawyers for Ms. Wang. “The practice of classifying employees as ‘interns’ to avoid paying wages runs afoul of federal and state wage and hour laws.”
Basically, Wang says she was treated like an employee but without the benefits or the salary. Hearst counters that their interns are told about employment conditions in advance and they offer academic credit. While musing this lawsuit, please note this May 2010 New York Times article which has a whole bunch of anecdotes from interns who did or didn't feel like their unpaid tenures at various places were worth it. That sounds about right.
Yes, it's true that sometimes people can't afford to work for free. Or they get screamed at, overworked, all the cliches must ring true for some poor sap somewhere. Journalism internships are particularly notorious for being unpaid (Reason is, of course, an exception!).
And yes, I once wanted to intern for The Oxford American. And even if they hadn't declined (I'm assuming that was due to my tragic case of Yankee-itus), I wouldn't have been able to work all summer in Arkansas without getting paid for it. I applied just for the hell of it. Requiring them to pay me or any other intern would —obviously — have simply funneled money the magazine could have spent elsewhere. Maybe then they would have had to hire only one intern, or cut a staff position, or ya know, just not hire any interns at all.
Commenters, feel free to joke about imminent class-action lawsuits for hat tips not given.
Read Tim Cavanaugh and John Stossel on the hullabaloo over unpaid internships back in May'10.
Sheldon Richman on Central Planning at the Federal Reserve
The Federal Reserve has recently moved into a new
activity under cover of addressing the financial crisis and
recession: central planner of the allocation of credit. But as
Sheldon Richman observes, just as central planning of the economy
can’t serve the general interest because the planner necessarily
lacks the required information, so it is with the central planning
of the allocation of credit. Ben Bernanke simply cannot know better
than the collective intelligence of the market which firms should
get capital and which shouldn’t.
Bogus Pot Busts Continue Apace in New York City
Despite Police Commissioner Ray Kelly's
avowed
commitment to stopping bogus pot busts, the New York Police
Department made more marijuana possession arrests last year than in
2010. According to new numbers from the New York Division of
Criminal Justice, the 2011 total—50,700—was the second highest
ever. "With the 2011 numbers," A.P. reports,
"the New York Police Department has made more than 227,000
bottom-rung marijuana possession arrests in the last five
years—slightly more than the entire span from 1978 to
2001."
Kelly, who was commissioner from 1992 to 1994 and came back to the job in 2002, did not officially take notice of his department's crackdown on pot smokers, which began in the late 1990s, until last September. That's when he issued a directive instructing officers to stop flouting the law, which treats possession of up to 25 grams (about nine-tenths of an ounce) as a citable offense, instead of manufacturing misdemeanors by tricking people into publicly "displaying" their marijuana. But as I noted in early December, the number of minor pot busts during the three months after Kelly's directive was down by only 13 percent from the same period in 2010, implausibly suggesting that 87 percent of the previous decade's public display arrests were legitimate—in other words, that they involved people openly smoking pot or brazenly waving their bags of weed. Research by Queens College sociologist Harry Levine, who brought the NYPD's little-noticed pot bust binge to public attention, suggests that, to the contrary, most of these arrests were accomplished in ways that Kelly himself says make them illegal. But today Kelly suggested he's satisfied that police are now following the law:
"The numbers are what they are, based on situations officers encountered in the street," Kelly said in a question-and-answer session with reporters after an unrelated briefing. "If you have it in plain sight, then it is a misdemeanor. If you're directed by an officer to take it out of your pocket, that's not the intent of the law. That's what the directive was meant to address. Very difficult to quantify whether or not that was happening."
Or whether it's still happening. Defense attorneys say their clients continue to regularly report that they were arrested for publicly displaying pot after cops took the marijuana out or told them to take it out during a "stop and frisk." They generally do not challenge the arrests, A.P. says, preferring to "take a dismissal deal or plead guilty to a violation, rather than demand a hearing that generally comes after months of court dates and prolongs a case that can compromise job prospects." A.P. describes one such case:
Stephen Glover said he was standing outside a Bronx job-training center in November, sharing a box of mints with friends, when police came up to him, asked him whether he had anything in his pockets that could hurt them and searched them without asking his permission. They found the remains of two marijuana cigarettes in his pockets, he said.
"They just take it upon themselves" to search, the 30-year-old Glover said by phone Wednesday.
A bill sponsored by Assemblyman Hakeem Jeffries (D-Brooklyn) and state Sen. Mark Grisanti (R-Buffalo) would prevent such arrests by reclassifying public display as a violation rather than a misdemeanor. Kelly had a chance to show the legislation is not needed, but it's clear the NYPD cannot be trusted with the discretion to recriminalize an offense that the state legislature supposedly decriminalized in 1977.
Romney "Clarifies" Statement About Poors, Obama Administration Announces Afghanistan Wind-Down, Egyptians Love Soccer to Death: P.M. Links
Mitt Romney
clarifies his statement that he is “not concerned about the
very poor.”- Panetta: U.S. to end "combat role" in Afghanistan in 2013.
- Susan G. Komen still under fire for cutting ties with Planned Parenthood.
- Indiana is now a right-to-work state.
- Seventy-three dead in Egytpian soccer riot.
- RIP, Don Cornelius.
ObamaCare's Unhealthy Expansion of Federal Power
Writing at Forbes, Institute for Justice President Chip Mellor lays out the constitutional case against the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate:
Congress claimed the power to enact PPACA under the Commerce Clause of the Constitution, which says in its entirety that Congress shall have the power “to regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes.” The clause was placed in the Constitution to avoid balkanizing the new nation by giving Congress the power to prevent states from erecting trade barriers....
[This power] was always tied to some activity—some decision made by the individual or entity being regulated that subjected it to Congress’ power. That changed with the enactment of PPACA. For the first time Congress attempted to further its goals by compelling activity or, put another way, by regulating inactivity. Until this the government had always said, “You are engaging in commerce, so we can regulate you.” PPACA turns that on its head. Now the government is saying, “We are going to force you to engage in commerce so we can regulate you.” The result was the individual mandate—Congress’ first literally inescapable law.
A New Pot Legalization Proposal in California Gets Good Poll Numbers
The folks behind a proposed California ballot initiative called "Regulate Marijuana Like Wine" have issued the results of a poll they commissioned with some good news for those who want to see marijuana lose its criminality in the state:
A recent poll reveals that California voters, by a 62% to 35% margin, with 3% unsure, support a ballot initiative to regulate marijuana like wine.
The statewide poll, by Fairbank, Maslin, Maullin, Metz & Associates, Inc. surveyed 800 likely voters and found that 80% of the respondents agreed to the statement, "State and federal drug laws are outdated and have failed, therefore, we need to take a new approach that makes sense for today."...
Likely voters also agree (by a margin of 71% to 24%) that state and local law enforcement agencies spend too much time, money and resources enforcing marijuana laws.
In that same poll, the largest "reason for support" answer (41 percent) was to bring in revenue for the community and state. The largest "reason for opposition" answer was, that they were just against drug use (29 percent). 48 percent of those polled said they had themselves tried pot.
The "Regulate Marijuana Like Wine" folk explain why they think their proposal is better than another pot initiative fighting for ballot access in California, the Repeal Cannabis Prohibition Act.
My account of the rise and fall of the last attempt to legalize marijuana via initiative in California, which failed 54-46, 2010's Proposition 19, from Reason's February 2011 issue. That one looked like it was heading for victory in the polls in the months leading up to the actual election; things can and do shift, but the general trend in public support for loosening pot laws is pretty consistently upward.
What's Going On with Google's New Privacy Policy?
Last week, Google announced
what Pablo Chavez, director of public policy for the company,
called "the most
extensive user notification effort" in the company's history,
reports Politico. These notifications advised users to
upcoming changes in Google's privacy policy—specifically, the
consolidation of separate policies across services into one
umbrella statement.
Responses varied among tech bloggers and reporters. Some were upset: Mat Honan at Gizmodo was apparently so scandalized that he commissioned a visual realization of the true evil at the hearts of Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page. The tech blog VentureBeat declared Google a goner.
Critics charged that "by combining its services, Google makes anonymity more difficult" (VentureBeat), and that "every day, Google pushes harder to keep users inside its ecosystem, discouraging them from venturing elsewhere whenever possible" (Lifehacker). Members of Congress spoke out as well, as Infosecurity reports:
Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas), co-chairmen of the Congressional Bi-partisan Privacy Caucus, sent a letter on Friday to the FTC asking the agency to probe whether the lack of an opt-out provision in Google’s new privacy policy, which allows the company to track activities of users across most of its services, violates the company’s consent agreement reached last year over the Buzz social network.
These are all serious charges, but they also fail to acknowledge that users can avoid data collection by signing out of Google while using search, YouTube, and other products; by creating multiple log-ins; by ticking the "off the record" option for Gchat; by disabling search history; and by tinkering with other options in their preferences.
This also isn't the first time legislators have seen a problem with Internet user privacy and taken it upon themselves to flesh out the perfect set of regulations to keep user data private. In Reason's June 2004 issue, Declan McCullagh summarized a similar effort:
Congress has convened dozens of hearings on Internet privacy issues, and in April 2002 Sen. Ernest Hollings (D-S.C.) introduced his Online Personal Privacy Act. The now-defunct bill would have regulated how Internet service providers, commercial Web sites, and noncommercial sites supported by advertising or product sales collect information about customers. The legislation covered "personally identifiable information," including names, e-mail addresses, and numeric I.P. addresses.
The catch, McCullagh explained, is that Congress’ April 2002 Online Personal Privacy Act and Europe’s opt-in mandates from the same time period are one-size-fits-all solutions to a problem that is lent complexity by the many different types of businesses that provide services—some of which they need to advertise—across a multitude of markets. Google argues that by consolidating user data, the company is more likely to provide search results and advertisements that are relevant to the user's needs.
It's unclear yet where all this leads. Congress and the FTC may step in again, as they did with Google's Buzz fiasco from last year. Privacy observers may simply drop the whole thing after they see the upside to the new policy. Considering that implementation of the changes is still a full month away, we'll have to wait and see what happens.
More from Reason on privacy.
Florida Faces Burmese Python Epidemic, Still Makes Snake Hunters Jump Through Regulatory Hoops
A specter is haunting Florida—the specter of giant Burmese pythons. According to a new study published by the U.S. Geological Survey, Burmese pythons are devouring furry mammals in the Everglades. Raccoon and possum sightings are down 99 percent, bobcats are down 88 percent, and foxes and rabbits haven't been seen at all in years. As you can probably tell from the name, Burmese pythons aren't native to Florida. So there are few local predators to stop their appetite for destruction. These pythons have been known to eat birds, deer, even gators.
Since 2005 the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has spent $6 million trying to contain the pythons. Among other expenses, this money includes, "design[ing] pythons traps," salaries for bureaucrats, using "snake sniffing" dogs, and the "potential use of unmanned aerial vehicles with thermal infrared cameras to detect large constrictor snakes in the field." Can murder drone strikes be too far behind?
Heeding Rahm Emanuel, the Obama administration is making sure it doesn't waste this crisis. Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar used the Lacey Act to label these snakes as "injurious." First passed in 1900, the Lacey Act bans the trade and transportation of certain plants and animals. It's the same act that led to a raid on Gibson Guitars for allegedly using illegal wood and sentenced four Americans to prison for packing lobster tails in plastic bags, not cardboard boxes. Effective March 23, importing, transporting, or selling Burmese pythons and 3 other constrictor snakes across state lines will become a crime. And with stringent consequences: Breaking the Lacey Act can lead to upwards of $20,000 in fines and/or five years imprisonment.
One reptile business owner was furious with the new ruling:
They have a problem in southern Florida with Burmese pythons and they're treating it as a national threat, which is silly...These animals have no chance of surviving in New Hampshire. If you let them go right now in the winter, they would only last an hour.
If someone travels to Massachusetts with their pet snake, that would be a federal crime...It is affecting thousands of people and we're losing our rights.
Granted, I'm not sure how many people travel with their pet Burmese pythons. But as long as their pet pythons don't harm anyone else, their rights should not be infringed. In addition, banning pythons would create a black market. Pythons are very lucrative, worth $10,000-$50,000 per snake. Not to mention a loss of $10-20 million in legal snake sales.
Furthermore, while the ban might seem understandable, it does very little to stop the Burmese pythons already in Florida. Biologists believe that there are anywhere from 30,000-100,000 pythons on the prowl in the Gunshine State. Plus, female pythons can lay 54 eggs on average, with some even laying up to 100.
However, there are other options to stop the snakes in the glades. Writing at National Review Online, Jonah Goldberg lays out his plan for a "great snake genocide":
We nearly wiped out the buffalo in this country because a bunch of guys made money off of buffalo hides. Thousands of years before that, mankind eradicated the woolly mammoth with spears. Spears! Give me five thousand Ted Nugent fans and all the weapons they can carry and the waters of the everglades will run red with Burmese snake blood.
You see, I don’t think we need a vast new government bureaucracy to kill snakes. Heck I think if we created a vast new bureaucracy to kill snakes we would very quickly end up subsidizing people to raise snakes to kill them. But, are you telling me that during a time when unemployment is outrageously high, the government can’t put a bounty on snakes and get results? I don’t know what the right number is but for the sake of argument if we had a hunting season in which you could bring in unlimited number of Burmese pythons for $50 per pound, my hunch is Burmese pythons would be erecting memorials to the great snake genocide of 2012.
Hunts have been done before, but they barely massacred any pythons. Since 2002, only 1,825 pythons have been removed from the Everglades. And there are at least 30,000 pythons in Florida. Isn't indiscriminate killing something the state's supposed to be good at?
Like so many other shortages, the lack of python hunters was caused by the state of Florida. For the 2010 hunt, there were less than 400 licensed hunters. "Python permits" are currently limited to Florida residents; as for capturing pythons, "firearms and traps may not be used." For everyone who isn't Bear Grylls, that's kind of hard.
Elsewhere in Reason: Ronald Bailey discusses invasive species.
In other python news, it looks like Monty Python is re-uniting to make a new sci-fi film. Robin Williams will play a talking dog. And there was much rejoicing.
Nevada for Dummies
With Florida in the rear view, our attention
turns to this Saturday's Nevada caucuses. At first glance, Nevada
looks like a libertarian paradise: no income tax, legalized
prostitution, legalized gambling, everything is 24/7, the
regulatory environment is friendly to business. Dig deeper, and you
find a state with just two (sorry, Elko) urban centers, a scattered
rural population,
high unemployment, and
a housing market that has imploded. Just as Florida's were last
week, all of Nevada's problems will be in full view of the entire
country for the next few days.
Even though this is the first nominating contest in the West, Nevada's influence has been downplayed due to the intense focus on Florida. Some pundits are even suggesting, unwisely I think, that the nomination was wrapped up last night. If that were the case, the networks wouldn't be hyping their Saturday night coverage with such vigor. Long story short: Nevada still has a significant role to play in the GOP primary.
One of the best political writers in the state of Nevada, Jon Ralston of the Las Vegas Sun, has an amusing primer on the Silver State for the candidates. Here he explains what Nevadans think about the controversial Yucca Mountain project:
• The third rail of Nevada politics: The media are more obsessed with Yucca Mountain than most regular folks. But because the media are omnipotent, you better come up with something better than what most of you used in the debates. I wouldn’t use the phrase “sound science,” either — we’ve heard that one before. I would focus on a simple pander and hope no one follows up: “I can promise you as president that I will never put the health, safety and welfare of Nevadans at risk.” It has worked for many Nevada candidates, so it’s worth a shot.
Whole thing here.
If You Recover From Asperger's, You Never Really Had It
In
a New York Times op-ed
piece, Benjamin Nugent, author of
American Nerd: The Story of My People, recounts how "for a
brief, heady period in the history of autism spectrum diagnosis, in
the late '90s, I had Asperger syndrome." His symptoms:
I exhibited a "qualified impairment in social interaction," specifically "failure to develop peer relationships appropriate to developmental level" (I had few friends) and a "lack of spontaneous seeking to share enjoyment, interests, or achievements with other people" (I spent a lot of time by myself in my room reading novels and listening to music, and when I did hang out with other kids I often tried to speak like an E. M. Forster narrator, annoying them). I exhibited an "encompassing preoccupation with one or more stereotyped and restricted patterns of interest that is abnormal either in intensity or focus" (I memorized poems and spent a lot of time playing the guitar and writing terrible poems and novels).
The general idea with a psychological diagnosis is that it applies when the tendencies involved inhibit a person’s ability to experience a happy, normal life. And in my case, the tendencies seemed to do just that. My high school G.P.A. would have been higher if I had been less intensely focused on books and music. If I had been well-rounded enough to attain basic competence at a few sports, I wouldn’t have provoked rage and contempt in other kids during gym and recess.
These characteristics not only convinced Nugent's mother, "a psychology professor and Asperger specialist," that he suffered from a mental disorder but landed him a role in the 2000 instructional video Understanding Asperger's. A few years later, something embarrassing happened:
After college I moved to New York City and became a writer and met some people who shared my obsessions, and I ditched the Forsterian narrator thing, and then I wasn’t that awkward or isolated anymore. According to the diagnostic manual, Asperger syndrome is "a continuous and lifelong disorder," but my symptoms had vanished.
Since the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), which was the basis for Nugent's diagnosis, rules out the possibility of recovery, it seems he was misdiagnosed. Then again, as Nugent notes, telling a friendless adolescent nerd he suffers from a lifelong social impairment that will make it impossible to function normally in the world could have a tendency to impede recovery, making the label to some extent a self-fulfilling prophecy. The diagnosis is also self-validating: People with Asperger's never recover because anyone who does recover did not really have Asperger's to begin with (just as people who insist alcoholism is an incurable disease say problem drinkers who learn to drink responsibly were never really alcoholics). Nugent emphasizes that at age 17 he "fit the bill," so if he was misdiagnosed it was apparent only when his life turned out better than the experts thought it would.
Based on his own experience, Nugent welcomes the proposed redefinition of Asperger's in the upcoming revision of the DSM, which calls for putting it in the same category as autism and tightening the criteria. Assuming that happens, many people who currently have Asperger's will, like Nugent, no longer have it. But it would not be correct to say they never really had it, assuming they met the behavioral criteria set forth in the current DSM. As with drawing a line between normal grief and "major depression," there is no biological test that can verify the diagnosis. It is all a matter of how psychiatrists choose to label (or not label) certain patterns of behavior, which nevertheless can have a serious impact how people perceive themselves and live their lives.
For more in this vein, see my 2011 Reason essay "Diagnosing in the Dark."
U.S. Sends Bulls to Russia, Bad Economics Jokes Ensue
This Washington Post
story about the planned importation of U.S. bulls to
Russia...
Twenty-nine black-and-white aspiring sires have set hoof in Russia, part of the first export of live Virginia Holstein bulls to that country, Gov. Robert F. McDonnell (R) announced last week. Thirty more will head there in April.
Russian farmers want American bulls to improve dairy-herd genetics in a land hampered first by collective farming, then by the collapse of the Soviet Union....
...makes it impossible to resist repeating this old economics joke:
Socialism: You have two cows. The government takes one and gives it to your neighbor.
Communism: You have two cows. You give them to the Government, and the Government then gives you some milk.
Fascism: You have two cows. You give them to the Government, and the Government then sells you some milk.
Capitalism: You have two cows. You sell one and buy a bull.
Nazism: You have two cows. The Government shoots you and takes the cows.
Bureaucracy: You have two cows. You give them to the Government, they shoot one and milk the other then pour the milk down the drain.
Seriously though, details from the Post story about why all this cow shuffling is necessary aren't nearly as funny as the joke above. And the joke above really isn't that funny.
Instead of raising dairy cattle for milk and beef cattle for meat, Soviet collective farms had “dual-use” cattle, which would be milked for a while, then killed for meat, Osipenko said. Those one-size-fits-all cattle may have embodied an egalitarian ideal, but both milk and meat were mediocre, said Osipenko, a native of Ukraine who recalled his mother boiling beef for hours in a fruitless attempt to tenderize it.
After the Soviet Union collapsed, many dairy herds were all but wiped out as hungry Russians consumed them for food.
“There was a terrible crisis, apparently, and they pretty much ate their seed stock,” said Patrick Comyn, a large-animal veterinarian with the private Virginia Herd Health Management Services who worked on the deal.
For an even less funny economics joke, go here. Worse still, go here.
Sativex: Fast for Patients, Slow for Potheads
A Scientific American
article about Sativex, a cannabis
extract spray that the FDA may approve for treatment of cancer pain
after clinical trials are completed in 2014 or so,
assures us (citing "experts") that the product has "little
potential for abuse":
Because the drug is delivered through ingestion, rather than smoking, it would take much longer to have an effect — at least an hour, compared with the minutes it takes to get high after smoking marijuana, said Margaret Haney, a professor of clinical neurobiology at Columbia University. This means drug users seeking a high would be less likely to abuse it. "Smoking is a really effective way to get a chemical into the brain," Haney said. The mouth spray "is a far safer administration," she said.
Actually, Sativex, which contains delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) and cannabidiol (CBD), is sprayed under the tongue or on the inside of the cheek and is meant to be absorbed through the mucous membranes of the mouth. Hence it has a faster onset of action than Marinol, a capsule containing synthetic THC that was approved by the FDA in 1985. "Following administration of Sativex (four sprays)," says Drugs.com, "both THC and CBD are absorbed fairly rapidly and appear in the plasma within 15 minutes after single oromucosal administration." By comparison, the effects of Marinol, which is absorbed by the gastrointestinal system, are felt after 30 minutes to an hour—similar to the lag for swallowed cannabis. Faster action is one of Sativex's advantages over Marinol, both because patients feel relief sooner and because they can more easily titrate their doses, taking an additional spray after 15 minutes or so if the initial dose proves inadequate. They can also avoid taking too much, which is hard when you swallow a standardized dose whose full effects may not be felt for hours. (A related issue with Marinol: It is processed by the liver, producing a THC variant that may compound any unpleasant psychoactive effects.) Sativex's manufacturer, GW Pharmaceuticals, brags that "the spray is quickly absorbed through the oral mucosa, is easy to use for patients and enables them to optimally adjust their dosage."
While it's still true that smoking (or vaporizing) cannabis delivers THC and other active ingredients faster than spraying an extract in your mouth, people have been known to "abuse" pot cookies and brownies, which make impatient cannabis consumers wait substantially longer for a buzz than Sativex does. A more plausible reason why Sativex probably won't attract many recreational users: Why go to the trouble of obtaining an expensive prescription drug when you can get more bang for your buck from the original plant? But that question also applies to patients, especially since vaporization, like an oral spray, avoids the hazards of smoking. Another possible advantage of marijuana is that its components may have a synergistic effect that can't be replicated by one or two ingredients. Not surprisingly, GW Pharmaceuticals, as channeled by Scientific American, sees that feature as a bug:
While marijuana is a hodgepodge of about 64 different substances, Sativex is composed mainly of two ingredients: THC and another cannabinoid called CBD. The latter component is thought to ameliorate some of the side effects of THC, including the high that marijuana users feel.
Notice that the "high," an elevation of mood that seriously ill people might actually welcome, is treated as an unwanted side effect. And how does GW Pharmaceuticals know that THC and CBD entirely account for marijuana's beneficial effects? Unimed, Marinol's manufacturer, thought THC was all that patients needed.
In terms of marketing the drug to bureaucrats, however, GW Pharmaceuticals seems to know what it's doing. So far it has won approval of Sativex in the U.K., Spain, Germany, Denmark, New Zealand, and Canada for treatment of neuropathic pain and spasticity caused by multiple sclerosis. Although the distinctions drawn by the company may be be puzzling, they show how a disreputable drug can be transformed into a respectable one: emphasize isolated chemicals instead of raw plant matter, claim the product acts quickly enough to be better than the competition but not so quickly that it would appeal to recreational users, and never admit that patients might enjoy taking it.
Previous coverage of Sativex here.
[Thanks to Richard Cowan for the tip.]
Repeal is the Only Way to Prevent a Zombie CLASS Act
After Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius admitted that she could not certify the Community Living Assistance Service and Support (CLASS) Act—ObamaCare’s fiscally disastrous long-term care program—as financially self sustaining, the administration reluctantly shuttered the program, pink-slipping the actuary and reassigning other staffers. But the program was only suspended, not shut down. Republican legislators wanted to take it off the books entirely, but met with Democratic resistance. The Obama administration ended up in the awkward position of simultaneously admitting that the program would not work, opposing its implementation, and also arguing against its repeal.
The administration and its supporters said
that repeal shouldn’t matter since the program had been closed
down. After all, can a buried program really be a threat? Turns out
the answer is yes: If the program isn’t fully repealed, there’s
still a chance it could rise from the grave, according to a new
report by the Congressional Research Service. At Forbes,
Avik Roy
explains why complete repeal is the only way to prevent a
zombie CLASS act:
According to the text of the Affordable Care Act, Secretary Sebelius is required to “designate a benefit plan as the CLASS Independence Benefit Plan” by October 1, 2012. Back in November, the House Energy and Commerce Committee asked CRS to evaluate the question: based on this language, could advocacy groups file suit against HHS for failing to implement the program? Would a court be likely to side with these plaintiffs? According to CRS, it’s a real possibility.
“If the Secretary does not designate a plan by October 1, 2012,” write the CRS staffers, “this failure to act would appear to be the type of agency action that could be challenged under the judicial review provision for agency action unlawfully withheld.” A court could grant deference to Sebelius’ finding that the program was unsustainable, but it could also force implementation of CLASS by “declaring the Secretary in violation of 5 U.S.C. § 706(1) or issuing a write of mandamus to compel agency action, thus requiring the Secretary to renew her efforts to create a plan that is consistent with the statutory requirements.”
Given the administration’s opposition to full repeal, it’s reasonable to suspect that this is exactly the possibility it’s hoping to preserve. After all, the position of some liberal supporters of CLASS seems to be that the program is basically a good thing and the only real problem is that it lacks a mandate. Former White House budget director Peter Orszag suggested as much last year, and on Tuesday Democratic Sen. Tom Harkin declared that not only do we need “something like” the program, “the problem with CLASS is that it’s voluntary.”
Reason.tv: LA Forces Condoms onto Porn Actors! (Nanny of the Month, Jan 2012)
This month's killjoys are bent on making the Big Apple dry (or not?), and banning electronic (a.k.a. "fake") cigarettes from public places (wait, isn't the anti-smoking movement supposed to help addicts kick the habit?).
But the new year's top slot goes to the City of Angels mayor who's cracking down on those naughty devils in the adult film industry by mandating that actors wear condoms (what could possibly go wrong!).
Presenting Reason.tv's Nanny of the Month for January 2012: Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa!
Approximately 1.22 minutes.
"Nanny of the Month" is written and produced by Ted Balaker. Opening animation by Meredith Bragg.
Go here to watch previous "Nanny of the Month" episodes.
Visit Reason.tv for downloadable versions of this and all our videos, and subscribe to Reason.tv's YouTube channel to receive automatic notification when new content is posted.
David Harsanyi on the GOP’s ObamaCare Problem
Once the presidential nomination process is
settled—and Lord knows that day can't come fast enough—Republicans
will get back to doing what they do best, getting on Barack Obama's
case. Incredibly, though, they'll have to do it without one of
their most potent arguments. The Republican candidate, after all,
can't effectively attack what he supports. And as David Harsanyi
notes, the two leading contenders for the GOP nomination, Mitt
Romney and Newt Gingrich, have each defended the idea of
government's mandating that all consumers buy health insurance in
the interest of the common good.
Julianne Moore *IS* Sarah Palin
Ed Harris as John McCain! Julianne Moore as Sarah Palin! Woody Harrelson as that one guy (Steve Schmidt)! From the director of Meet the Fockers, Austin Powers in Goldmember, and Dinner for Schmucks: HBO's adaptation of Mark Halperin and John Heilemann's book on the 2008 presidential campaign, Game Change. This is what I imagine it would look like if someone took a bunch of Politico stories and smashed them together into a three act structure.
Double Your Spending, Double Your Fun
The Hill's Sam Baker
points out yet another delightful fun fact from yesterday's
Congressional Budget Office report on the Budgepocalypse: spending
on Medicare, Medicaid, and other government health care programs is
expected to double in the next decade, rapidly outpacing GDP. By
2022, the CBO predicts it will eat up about seven percent of the
country's total economic output and cost the nation about $1.8
trillion annually. And that's only if Congress fails to prevent
Medicare payments to physicians from falling by nearly 30
percent—which almost no one thinks is going to happen. Fixing the
doc fix will add another $316 billion or so to the tab.
Lots more on the 2012 Budgepocalypse here.
If Housing Was Overpriced, Is It a Bad Thing Fewer Americans Own Houses?
Our story thus far: Thanks to a combination
of tulip-bulb-style mania among investors (either stupid or greedy,
depending on your predilections), government policies
(mortgage-interest deductions for two homes, subsidized loans,
giant agencies instructed to buy up all private mortgages, etc.),
and Fed policy (keep interest rates as low as possible for as long
as possible), record numbers of Americans bought houses (read: took
on debt), typically at inflated prices (partly due to other
government policies
that restricted supply).
You know the next part: The housing bubble popped, leaving lots of people underwater (owing more than their houses are worth at the moment) and triggering a financial crisis (panic probably a better term) that somehow was solved by bailing out big financial houses in such a way that there are fewer of them but they are bigger and more powerful than ever.
Despite (read: because of) legislation that is supposed to make sure this never happens again (read: sometime again, probably sooner than even cynics believe).
Here's USA Today on the latest home ownership data:
The U.S. Census Bureau reported Tuesday that the nation's homeownership rate fell to 66% in the fourth quarter, continuing a seven-year drop from a fourth-quarter peak of 69.2% in 2004.
At the same time, U.S. home prices fell 1.3% in November from October and were 3.7% below 2010 levels, the Standard & Poor's/Case-Shiller home price index indicates....
As of November, average U.S. home prices were back to mid-2003 levels, S&P says.
"Americans are less keen on homeownership knowing now that prices can fall," says Paul Dales, economist with Capital Economics....
Many economists expect home prices to continue to fall this year and maybe into next year before stabilizing and then showing little or no appreciation for some time....
On a year-over-year basis, only two cities showed rising values. Detroit was up 3.8%, and Washington, D.C., 0.5%, the Case-Shiller data show.
This sort of report is typically uttered with the sort of whispering tone one reserves for the bedside of a dying relative. But with the exception of the slight year-over-year increase in house values in DC, shouldn't this all be cause for celebration? It means that housing prices are heading back to where they were before the bubble inflated like one of Newt Gingrich's chins right before the former Speaker is about to rhapsodize about rent-to-own living pods on the Earth's moon?
Here's the Census Bureau's figure on home ownership since 1995:
Lest we forget, housing has never been the rock-solid investment we've been told it always was. Reason Foundation analyst Anthony Randazzo distilled this insight simply by adjusting the housing price index for inflation. What he found:
Randazzo figures that housing prices still have a ways to fall to get back to their pre-bubble long term average and I suspect he's right. Still, it's always a good time to buy. Or to rent. It depends on your personal situation - geographic, professional, financial. But living indoors almost always is better than living outdoors for any length of time.
But the question of renting versus owning? That's really not such a big deal as people think.
A.M. Links: Romney's Florida Win Driven By Economic Issues, Ron Paul Raises $13 Million, Spy Agencies Warn that Iran May Be Prepared to Launch Terrorist Attacks in the U.S.
Mitt Romney's big win in Florida's GOP primary
was
driven by economic concerns more than social
issues. In exit polls, voters also say that TV ads and debates
were a
big influence. But they're not that enthusiastic: Voter turnout
was
lower than in 2008. Romney, meanwhile, will
get Secret Service protection. - Filings released yesterday reveal that Romney's Super PAC was worth $23.6 million at the end of 2011, more than the candidate's own campaign war chest.
- Ron Paul, meanwhile, raised $13.3 million for his campaign between October 1 and December 1 of last year, with 56 percent of the donations coming from sub-$200 donors.
- President Obama still wants to implement caps on pay for government contractors.
- Spending time in space may alter human genes.
- American spy agencies believe Iran is prepared to use terrorist attacks within the country.
- Julian Assange, the man behind Wikileaks, is still fighting Sweden's extradition request. His case reached the top court in England yesterday.
- Sean Penn has been named an ambassador to Haiti.
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New at Reason.tv: Heather Donoahue on Growing marijuana and the beauty of "grey" markets
Reason Writers on TV: Peter Suderman Talks Eurozone Debt Crisis on Freedom Watch With Judge Napolitano
On Monday, January 31, Reason Associate Editor Peter Suderman appeared on Freedom Watch with Judge Napolitano to discuss Greece's financial meltdown and its subsequent resistance to any austerity measures other EU members want to impose upon it. He also discussed the collapse of financial firm MF Global and whether or not more regulatory enforcement is necessary. Approximately six minutes.
Jacob Sullum on Obama's Idea of Tax Reform
In his State of the Union address last week,
President Obama decried the "loopholes and shelters" that rich
people use to avoid paying their "fair share" of taxes. But in the
same speech, writes Senior Editor Jacob Sullum, Obama promoted a
laundry list of policies that would compound the complexity of our
byzantine tax code.
The Long Race Ahead
Tampa, Fla. – If you do the math you know pretty quickly we are in for a long race.
The delegate count is as follows:
- Mitt Romney 87
- Newt Gingrich 26
- Rick Santorum 14
- Ron Paul 4
- Jon Huntsman 2
- Rick Perry 2
Add all those up and you get a total of 135 delegates out of a possible 1,144 awarded after four contests. That’s around 5 percent. Florida, with its winner-take-all system, is an outlier when it comes to most primary contests before April, because the vast majority of the races before then award their delegates in some proportional manner. Some of the races that are coming up are more complicated as their elections and caucuses are only the first step in selecting delegates for the convention in August. The races do not revert to winner-take-all until much later in the race, the biggest prize among those later states is California with 172 delegates at stake.
The states that award their delegates in proportional manner are good for every candidate not named Mitt Romney. The states with a complex delegate selection process, particularly the ones where the delegates can be what is known as unbound, are good for Ron Paul. The legions of Paul supporters across the country have been organizing in these states since 2008, often independent of the national Paul campaign. Plus, Paul’s supporters have been down this road before and they are no longer rookies when it comes to the delegate selection process.
Even though the road ahead is complicated for all the candidates, this doesn't mean Romney’s win in Florida should be tossed out. His win here was a very impressive display of organizational prowess. His victory here should instill confidence in the national Republicans that support him about their chances here in Florida and nationally. Florida is a vast and complicated state requiring an immense undertaking that few campaigns can successfully handle. Only Romney, and to a lesser extent Paul, are equipped to handle what is now a national race because they have had national organizations in place since 2007. Tomorrow, for example, the candidates will be spread across three time zones and three states. Candidates can no longer focus with laser-like precision on some county in Iowa or a precinct in New Hampshire.
This race is far from over.
CORRECTION: This post originally stated 12% of the delegates have been awarded. The figure is actually closer to 5%. - GQ
Romney Sells "Believe" Not "Hope" in Speech
Tampa, Fla. - In his victory speech tonight Mitt Romney acknowledged the fact this race is looking more and more like it will be a long one.
"A competitive primary does not divide us; it prepares us. And when we gather here in Tampa seven months from now for our convention, ours will be a united party with a winning ticket for America!" he proclaimed to a joyful crowd at the Tampa Convention Center.
With 95% reporting, Romney won the Florida Republican primary with 46% of the vote. Gingrich finished second with 32% while Rick Santorum and Ron Paul finished a distant third and fourth with 13% and 7%, respectively.
Romney spent little time worrying about the potentially divided primary and quickly pivoted from pleasantries to general election campaign mode. Romney went after President Obama question his leadership abilities, particularly his handling of the economy. "Leadership is about taking responsibility, not making excuses. In another era of American crisis, Thomas Paine is reported to have said, “Lead, follow, or get out of the way.” Mr. President, you were elected to lead, you chose to follow, and now it’s time for you to get out of the way!", he said, throwing a bit of red meat to the crowd.
Romney got in another great zinger mocking the president's 2008 slogan before wrapping up.
"Together, we will build an America where “hope” is a new job with a paycheck, not a faded word on an old bumper sticker," he said.
Meanwhile, the Romney campaign was busy hawking these "Believe" t-shirts in the lobby.
Gingrich Promises to "Impose the Future," Return to Florida
Orlando, Fla. - Shortly after declaring, "Forty-six states to go," Former Orange County Mayor and Gingrich supporter Rich Crotty announced to a thin-but-vocal crowd of Newt supporters, "It's not over."
And the wake came alive.
Minutes later, Gingrich took the stage and thanked Floridians. Though they didn't give him any delegates for the Republican convention, they made "clear this will be a two-person race between the conservative Newt Gingrich, and the Massachusetts Moderate." (Mitt Romney, I presume.)
"I just want to reassure the media we will contest every place and we are going to win and we will be in Tampa as the nominee in August."
The money line, in this humble reporter's opinion, was Gingrich's promise to "impose the future on the establishment, and on both parties."
That's a campaign slogan if I've ever heard one.
Updates From Florida's Romneypalooza
Tampa, Fla - There is a weird mix of people outside of Mitt Romney’s victory party here in Tampa. There are Tampa Bay Lightning fans all decked out in silver and black garb, a mostly well dressed crowd of Romney supporters milling about, there are PETA protesters decked out in pig costumes passing out flyers about farm subsidies and there are the usual handful of Occupiers.
Before you even get inside there is an senior with a cane inspecting bags as people come. Once you get by him the professionalism of the Romney operation really stands out. At the door there are volunteers slapping “Romney” stickers on all attendees as they enter. In the center of the check-in area there is a huge merchandise table selling all kinds of Romney wares.
I talked to this couple, the Pennoyers, after they were finished picking through the wares the campaign was selling. They were very happy with Romney’s inevitable victory here.
Outside there were Billionaire For Bush types with suits and hats hanging around and then there was this Occupier who called Romney a fascist because he said America needs a “CEO in chief.” He told me that they have people inside and plans for after the event. It was not clear if actual Occupiers made it by Romney’s lines of security before the event.
Are GOP Immigration Hardliners Out-Of-Sync With Their Constituents?
The Rachel Maddow Show is reporting a fascinating shift on the issue of illegal immigration among GOP voters in Florida. In 2008, 29% said illegals should get a path to citizenship. Now, 36 percent say they should—a 7 percent increase. Likewise, 40% then said that illegals should be deported. Now 31 percent want that—a 9 percent drop.
Could this mean that in their zeal to out-tough each other on immigration, Republican presidential candidates have actually moved rank-and-file opinion in the opposite direction? It is hard to know without figures from other states, but one thing is certain, there has been a sea change in the rhetoric of the Republican leadership.
There was a time not that long ago when the GOP was a much kinder, gentler party on this issue. In 1996, Sen. Spencer Abraham, a Republican Lebanese American from Michigan, was heading the Senate’s Subcommittee on Immigration and fought hard for freer immigration policies on every front—high-tech and low-tech; family and work etc. etc. He thought E-verify-type proposals to snag illegals were wrong because they would require employers to get the “federal government's permission before hiring anyone - citizen or not.”
And he penned sentences like:
Anti-immigrant panic is unjustified. Illegal immigration is a manageable problem calling for prudent law-enforcement measures. Legal immigration is a controlled and limited process…Punish the lawbreakers, but don't extinguish Lady Liberty's lamp for honest immigrants who are willing to work hard and wait to become Americans.
Now Republican candidates want to deploy drones, boots and electrified fences capable of killing crossers on the Southern border to stem a tide of illegals that has already stopped thanks to a tanking economy.
Newt Gingrich Is Late to His Own Florida Concession Party
Orlando, Fla - Minutes after
FOX News projected that Mitt Romney would win Florida, Newt
Gingrich’s final Florida event went from being a victory party to,
well, not quite a wake. Wakes for famous people are generally well
attended, and the crowd at Newt’s party is sparse and mostly media.
Wakes are also generally somber, yet as I type, a DJ is spinning
“Play That Funky Music White Boy.” There are two cash bars, but the
bartenders are twiddling their thumbs.
Gingrich talked a big game in Florida well into the 11th hour, despite the release of several polls over the last week showing him to be trailing Romney by an increasingly wide margin. He criss-crossed the state by plane and bus, packing so many events into each day that he frequently showed up late. True to form, he’s already one minute late for whatever speech he plans to give tonight: a campaign staffer told reporters earlier that Gingrich would address the assembled at 8:15; it’s now 8:17 p.m..
After the DJ kills Wild Cherry, he unleashes “Love Shack,” “Great Balls of Fire,” and Wang Chung’s "Everybody Have Fun Tonight." Soundtrack to the contrary, it appears that whatever fun happens tonight will likely be had by Gingrich reporters who get to head home tomorrow and kiss their spouses/babies/cats.
On a large screen TV, FOX is carrying the footage of Mitt Romney’s victory speech, while at Newt’s own party, there’s still no sign of Newt. (According to Politico’s Ginger Gibson, on scene here, a number of the people in attendance tonight are in town for a hardware convention and decided to check out the DJ.)
At 8:34 p.m., the bleachers in front of which Newt will speak begin to fill up to the sound of the Black Eyed Peas’ “I Gotta Feeling (Tonight’s Gonna Be a Good Night).” The crowd unleashes an occasional cheer, though the effect is more bachelorette-party-at-Chili’s than presidential-candidate-rallying-the-troops, mostly because there is no presidential candidate, and no troops.
I'll update when/if Gingrich arrives.
Budgepocalypse 2012: Revenge of the Budgepocalypse
Feeling a little too upbeat? A
little happy, or satisfied with the state of the world? The
Congressional Budget Office has a cure for you. This year’s
Budget and Economic Outlook—the budget office’s annual preview
of projected federal spending, revenues, and deficits over the next
decade (or,
as I like to call it, the Budgepocalypse)—begins with the
following line: “The federal budget deficit—although starting to
shrink—remains very large by historical standards.” How large?
According to the latest number, “the federal budget will show a
deficit of nearly $1.1 trillion in fiscal year 2012.” That’s
roughly seven percent of America’s total gross domestic product—a
couple points below last year’s megadeficit, but, the CBO notes,
“still higher than any deficit between 1947 and 2008.”
In 2012, the agency projects that the federal government will spend about 23.2 percent of our total economic output. But it will only bring in revenues equal to about 16.3 percent of the economy. That mismatch is what creates our deficit. Keeping that mismatch, or something like it, going year after year is what creates our long-term debt. Now, liberals might say that the problem is that we don’t tax enough. But remember: Even when top tax rates were much higher, we’ve never managed to tax that much. The federal government has never once collected revenues in excess of 20.9 percent of GDP (and that was a one-time deal). Overall, it has averaged about 18 percent since World War II, regardless of tax structure or top tax rates. Which means that we’re not just spending more than we’re taking in now; we’re spending more than we’ve ever managed to take in. And the projections show that we’re planning to spend even more.
Now, it’s true that current law, and thus CBO’s “current law” baseline, calls for us to tax even more, and to cut some hundreds of billions in spending on physician payments out of Medicare: But that’s because current law assumes that we’ll cut payments to physicians by nearly 30 percent in a few months, despite years of both parties supporting overrides to such cuts. And it assumes that tax hikes, including allowing the Alternative Minimum Tax, which was originally designed to hit just 55 very wealthy earners, will eventually hit half the country (meaning much of the middle class)—something neither party is going to support.
As is now common,
liberal wonks are pointing to the baseline scenario as evidence
that we don’t really have a deficit problem. After all, Congress
just has to follow current policy in order to keep revenues nearly
in line with expenditures. But even forgetting about the country’s
historical inability to raise tax levels substantially above 20
percent of GDP, there’s simply no plausible near-future political
environment in which this happens. It’s a cute fantasy designed to
comfort those who don’t want to cut federal spending.
And ultimately, it’s the increases in spending that kill us: “If that rising level of spending is coupled with revenues that are held close to the average share of GDP that they have represented for the past 40 years...”, the CBO says, “the resulting deficits will increase federal debt to unsupportable levels.”
As usual, the CBO says there are three basic ways out of the current deficit mess: "To prevent that outcome, policymakers will have to substantially restrain the growth of spending for those programs, raise revenues above their historical share of GDP, or pursue some combination of those two approaches.” Liberals might take comfort in the thought that we can fix the budget through tax hikes. But as I’ve written before, they shouldn’t. Tax hikes may not bring in enough revenue. And regardless, any tax hikes big enough would represent a unprecedented increase and fundamental change in the American tax burden—and wouldn’t be politically plausible. At some point, then, the federal government will have to substantially cut spending; the sooner the better.
Romney Rolls to 48% Win; Paul 7%
With half of
Florida's votes counted, President Barack Obama has won the
Sunshine State's Democratic Primary.
Also, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney is handily winning the Republican primary with 48 percent of the votes.
Romney opens a gaping hole in the carcass of former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who pulls down only 31 percent.
Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum is right now bringing in 13 percent.
Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) comes in with 7 percent.
People whose delegate-count and ballot-access fu is better than mine: Speak up in the comments about how this does or does not spell the end of Gingrich, why Rick Santorum should or should not have tended to his sick kid, what this means about Ron Paul's failure or success in meeting his Florida expectations, and so on.
L.A. Times Gets Its Cheops Busted, Sides with Yul Brynner in 10 Commandments
Just yesterday we
listened in as California Gov. Jerry Brown made some truly
bizarre arguments for maintaining the state’s high-speed rail
initiative despite warnings from every expert analyst, objections
from two-thirds of the state’s population, opposition from
governments and residents in the bullet train’s path, and the
state’s dire fiscal condition. In the past, Brown has
likened the railroad project to the Interstate Highway System
as well as the Suez and Panama Canals.
But for sheer rail-maddened desperation, even Jerry Brown must take a bow to my former pals on the Los Angeles Times editorial board. In a piece I missed earlier this month entitled "Keeping faith with California's bullet train," the ed board praised the High-Speed Rail project because it is similar to Boston’s notorious Big Dig and the building of the pyramids by slaves:
The project's current political ills remind us of the firestorm that erupted over L.A.'s subway, when sinkholes appeared on Hollywood Boulevard, construction mismanagement led to cost overruns, and voters became so disillusioned with subways that they approved a measure in 1998 forbidding the expenditure of county sales tax money to pay for them ever again. A decade later, they realized how shortsighted they had been; failure to complete a subway to the sea contributed to worsening gridlock on the Westside, and the subway had such clear benefits for riders that its construction troubles were largely forgotten. The result: County voters approved a new measure in 2008 to raise the sales tax to pay for, among other things, more subway construction.
The same phenomenon is already happening in Boston, home of the nation's most expensive transportation project. The Big Dig highway tunneling scheme was a political catastrophe a few years ago, what with mistakes that prompted severe delays and caused the price tag to skyrocket. Although the Big Dig is nobody's idea of the right way to build infrastructure, Bostonians are now reveling in a downtown park built on what used to be an expressway, and a tangled traffic mess has been unsnarled. In a few more years, the headaches will probably have been forgotten.
Worthwhile things seldom come without cost or sacrifice. That was as true in ancient times as it is now; pharaoh Sneferu, builder of Egypt's first pyramids, had to try three times before he got it right, with the first two either collapsing under their own weight or leaning precipitously. But who remembers that now? Not many people have heard of Sneferu, but his pyramids and those of his successors are wonders of the world.
The tradition of the unsigned editorial is one of the many ways the establishment media have found to fulfill their mission of concealing truth from readers. So I can’t say for sure that board member Dan Turner penned this one, though I do know he wrote the classic "Believe in the bullet train" and I’m pretty sure he was the brains behind the more recent "Yes, the price tag has tripled and its completion date is 13 years later. But it's still a gamble worth taking." I always found Dan to be a reasonably inoffensive person to spend the working day around, so I have to ask: Dan, what the fuck? What the fuckity fucking fuck?
Maybe this piece was a type of performance art, with the editorial board deftly poking fun at its own aristocratic indifference to the common folk by choosing the comparison most likely to sound like it came from a spoiled heiress in a play by Oscar Wilde. That’s the only way I can figure the pyramid thing.
As for Boston’s Big Dig, I haven’t been to Beantown in a while, so maybe that "reveling" description (drawn from a 2011 story in the Globe) is accurate. I know Boston’s people and media tend to be boosterish about their burg in a way I always distrust. (One charm of Southern California is that its mightiest thinkers – from Nathanael West to Joan Didion to The Eagles to Roland Emmerich – exclusively depict Lotusland as a corrupt, mindless hellhole deserving of apocalyptic destruction.)
But that stuff about the local subway system is putrid. First, subway building was one of eight "other things" included in 2008’s Measure R, which passed after shenanigans involving creative editing of the opponents’ arguments and the MTA’s illegal use of taxpayer funds for a political campaign. Among the other items were "synchronize traffic signals, repair potholes, improve freeway traffic flow" and something called "community traffic relief." The only thing Measure R proved was that people in L.A. are not happy about traffic.
Second, any discussion of the u-bahn’s "clear benefits for riders" needs to take into account that the number of people riding the entire county rail network has been flat over the last five years and counterintuitively seems to go down during times of economic hardship. Add to this that the Transportation Authority’s own method for counting riders was changed in 2007 and it’s possible the Red Line (the Downtown-to-North Hollywood line singled out for praise by the Times) has seen no growth in usage since 2001.
This still puts the subway ahead of the bullet train, which, according to the most recent laceration by the state auditor [pdf], has made no effort to get a realistic projection of how many people will ride the thing.
I don’t expect the auditor’s analysis or any other objective report on this doomed project to penetrate the skulls of editorial writers. The California High-Speed Rail Authority, after losing the confidence of nearly every transportation reporter in the state, has for the last few years been focusing its PR efforts on newspaper editorial boards.
This pharaonical fandango in the L.A. Times is the most recent fruit of that campaign, but it may be one of the last. The CHSRA recently fired Ogilvy after that ad agency took the authority for $3 million, and the authority’s in-house PR staff has also jumped off the train like hobos fleeing from a railroad cop. The surest sign that this ill-conceived project is coasting toward euthanasia is that its proponents can’t even do wrong right.
Newt Gingrich Goes "Grassroots," Director of National Intelligence Warns Congress About Iran, CBO Says U.S. Will Have Trillion Dollar Deficit for the Fourth Year in a Row: P.M. Links
The upside of Newt Gingrich's
imminent loss in Florida? Now he can become an
edgy, grass-roots candidate.- Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told Congress that Iran is upping its spying and its support for terrorism. Clapper also said the country has the capacity to build a nuclear weapon if and when it feels like it.
- Four more years! For the fourth year in a row, the U.S. will have a trillion-plus dollar budget deficit declares the Congressional Budget Office.
- The CBO also says that federal taxes will go up 30 percent by 2014.
- Many Western and Arab nations are pushing for it, but Russia is worried that a U.N. Security Council resolution condemning Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad and calling for his removal could push the country further towards civil war.
- Priorities: New York Police Department Commissioner Ray Kelly has banned his officers from wearing unofficial NYPD swag.
- California is on track to run out of money by early March. Needed amount of cash: $3.3 billion.
- Stop it: Newt Gingrich is being sued for unauthorized use of the song "Eye of the Tiger" while President Obama's rendition of Al Green's "Let's Stay Together" provoked fawning tweets from the producer of American Idol.
Gingrich Staffers Attack Ron Paul Supporter in Florida
Yahoo News
reports that Newt Gingrich staffers stomped on the
flip-flop-wearing feet of a sign-toting Ron Paul supporter in
Windermere, a small town outside of Orlando:
Noticing the awkward optics, Gingrich aides and security personnel swarmed Dillard, trying to intimidate him into moving. One of Gingrich's security agents stepped in front of him. When Dillard didn't budge, the agent lifted his heeled shoe over Dillard's bare foot and dug the back of it into his skin, twisting it side-to-side like he was stomping out a cigarette. Shocked, Dillard kept his ground and took a picture of the agent with his phone, which was quickly knocked out of his hand. Dillard slipped off his flip-flop to pick up the phone with his foot, and a Gingrich supporter kicked the sandal away.
"Don't kick me!" Dillard said to the man who knocked away his sandal. More members of Gingrich's security retinue approached, shoving their shoulders and chests in front of him.
"Just block him!" a Gingrich campaign aide said. "Everyone step on his toes!"
In response, Jesse Benton of the Ron Paul campaign issued the following statement:
They say the culture of an organization is a reflection of its top executive and today’s deplorable behavior against Ron Paul supporter Eddie Dillard in Florida reflects very poorly on Congressman Gingrich.
I call on Congressman Gingrich to publicly apologize to Mr. Dillard.
In addition, we ask that those Gingrich campaign staff directly involved in the episode be immediately terminated.
There is simply no excuse for the type of violent, boorish and abusive behavior demonstrated by Mr. Gingrich's campaign. We hope Mr. Gingrich understands this and takesthe actions we recommend.
A Trip Is Ruined, but Marilyn Monroe Is Safe
BBC News reports that
two British tourists were stopped at Los Angeles International
Airport last week and barred from visiting the U.S. because one of
them joked on Twitter that he planned to "destroy America" (meaning
have a good time) and dig up Marilyn Monroe's remains (a Family
Guy reference). Customs and Border Patrol agents
questioned Leigh Van Bryan, a 26-year-old bar manager from
Coventry, and his 24-year-old friend, Emily Bunting, for five
hours, then kept them in cells for 12 more hours before sending
them back to the U.K. "Mr. Bryan confirmed that he had posted on
his Tweeter website account that he was coming to the United States
to dig up the grave of Marilyn Monroe," the CBP officers
reported. "Also on his tweeter account Mr. Bryan posted he
was coming to destroy America." Here are the messages that
ruined Bryan and Bunting's trip:
January 3: "3 weeks today, we're totally in LA p****** people off on Hollywood Blvd and diggin' Marilyn Monroe up!"
January 16: "@MelissaxWalton free this week for a quick gossip/prep before I go and destroy America?"
Bryan told The Sun CBP officers took the threat to the long-dead movie star seriously, looking for shovels in his luggage. "The Homeland Security agents were treating me like some kind of terrorist," he said. "I kept saying they had got the wrong meaning from my tweet, but they just told me, 'You've really fucked up with that tweet, boy.'...It's almost funny now, but at the time it was really scary." In response to the incident, a British travel industry trade group warns tourists that "airport security staff do not have a sense of humour when it comes to potential risk."
[Thanks to Richard Cowan for the tip.]
Ronald Bailey on Scientific Censorship and Avian Flu
Recently, two research teams announced that they
had created strains of the avian flu virus that were transmissible
between mammals. In the wild, this virus has killed about 60
percent of the 600 people who caught it. Today, based on fears of
bioterrorism, the U.S. National Scientific Advisory Board on
Biosecurity recommended that the
journals Nature and Science
restrict scientific communication of these research results.
Reason Science Correspondent Ronald Bailey argues that the
best defense against bioterrorism is not secrecy, but more open and
transparent science.
Ron Paul Has Friends in Celebration
Celebration,
Fla.—Celebration used to be one of the happiest and wealthiest
towns in Florida. Last year it had its first murder, which put a
damper on the happy talk. But it’s still something of an economic
anomaly along US-192, a concentration of high incomes perched
between the poverty and decay of West Kissimmee, where homeless
families pay by the week or the night to live in ratty hotels, and
Disney World, where dreams come true.
A sea of polo shirts and pleated Dockers shorts formed into a line outside Newt Gingrich’s campaign bus in Celebration earlier today to have their pictures taken with the former House speaker and likely loser in the Sunshine State’s GOP primary.
Standing at the edge of the crowd of Gingrich admirers are Clark and Shane. They are anomalies themselves; young, shaggy-headed, and holding Ron Paul signs.
Are they the only two Paul supporters in town? “I know of at least a few others,” says Clark. Shane nods. “It’s growing.”
Clark, 24, has lived in Celebration for 12 years. He and Shane both went to Celebration High School, one of the best high schools—public or private—in the region. Clark then went to the local community college and the University of Central Florida. Along with Shane, he now works in a pizza shop in the center of Celebration called Upper Crust.
“The anti-war angle is his best thing,” Clark says. “The war on drugs is a big problem. It’s a war on Americans, basically.”
They care about the Federal Reserve, but it’s not their chief concern. “I found out about that stuff two or three years ago,” Clark says. “It definitely concerns me.”
The two thought about making a
ruckus at Newt’s event, but decided instead to walk over to the
polling place and cast their votes for Paul. “I think he should’ve
come to Florida,” Clark says. “He’s probably thinking there are a
lot of old people who want their Social Security, and he’s not for
that, so the odds are against him down here. But they’re better
than he thinks.”
Working at Upper Crust is “laid back,” Clark says. (His boss also came to Gingrich’s event, and is torn between Gingrich and Rick Santorum.) I ask them if they have big plans for the future.
“No,” Clark says.
“Ron Paul 2012!” Shane says, laughing and shaking the sign.
Clark sighs.
“We probably look like stereotypes,” he says. “A couple of dudes working in a pizza shop who like Ron Paul. But I do think about the future, and it does scare me. I don’t like everything Ron Paul stands for, I don’t like letting corporations do whatever they want, but Ron Paul also tells it like it is. All the other guys are war-mongering for Iran. It’s like they didn’t learn anything from Iraq. It’s time to bring the troops home, and Ron Paul knows it.”
Obama Admits U.S. Drone Program Exists, But It's Definitely Just for Special Terrorist Occasions
President Obama didn't just use
the Google+
"hangout" to
not answer questions about marijuana. (Okay, that might
have been Youtube and Google's fault, but never underestimate
the powers of not talking about the drug war which happen when
media and politicians' powers combine.) He also used the
opportunity to admit that the United States' program of targeted
drone strikes and assassinations, used throughout the Middle East,
most heavily in Pakistan, does in fact exist. With the incredibly
low standards that the Obama administration and politics in general
demands, that's pretty bold. After all, the program still doesn't
officially exist and most U.S. officials who have spoken about it
with any detail of knowledge have been anonymous. Officials from
the Obama administration noted that this confirmation was not
a mistake from the president (not sure how it could have been
when he talked about the program for four minutes).
The downside to Obama's declaration is that he also assured the Internet-viewing public that the strikes had "not caused a huge number of civilian casualties" and that it is "important for everybody to understand that this thing is kept on a very tight leash." These strikes are "for the most part very precise — precision strikes against Al-Qaeda and their affiliates" most often in Pakistan's Federally Administrated Tribal Areas.
Also, the way targets are chosen is apparently "not just a bunch of guys in a room somewhere making decisions." No, according to a December Washington Post article it's actually a bunch of guys in two rooms making decisions; there's a CIA list and a military list, with some overlap between them, but enough bureaucracy and secrecy to make sure that nobody has a completely clear view of how strikes happen and who is being targeted and why.
But yes, according to Obama the program exists but it has led to practically no civilian casualties, also everyone killed (which is in the the neighborhood of 2000 people since Obama took office) was a terrorist; also there's a lot of accountability and careful oversight. I guess it's supposed to be nice that the transparency-loathing president thinks his citizens are man enough to know that yes, that drone program the media talks about sometimes does exist.
Here's the clip if you feel like suffering through the whole four minutes. Props to the citizen who asked the hilariously cautious follow-up question about whether using drone strikes might cause other countries to "perceive" that we're "intervening in their affairs." How might America fix that crazy perception? Well, the president says that drones are an alternative to intervening more heavily in other countries, they in fact help us "respect the sovereignty" of those places because a strike is better than an all-out war. Which is more or less true and we already knew that, but it's a pretty damned arrogant and unsatisfying answer all the same. And yes Obama addressed the recent controversy over drone flights in Iraq —he said they're surveillance, not strikes — but maybe someone should remind him that the Iraqis already had their all-out war. So it would be more than fair if any American aircraft, even those flying peacefully over that U.S. embassy of 16,000 personnel, gives an Iraqi pause.
I would have preferred to hear him try to evade the pot question yet again.
Reason on drones and the war on terror
Florida Seniors Line Up Behind Romney
Clearwater, Fla.—It was impossible to find voters who supported anyone other than Mitt Romney at the polling place located inside Cove Cay, a snowbird community which just recently opened its exclusive golf course to the general public to help offset financial difficulties. Given those challenges one might expect to hear economic concerns from local voters, but everyone I talked to was focused soley on electability.
"Huntsman looked like the adult in the room, I liked him, but he dropped out so I went with Romney. I think he is the most electable," said Steve Cohn, 69.
Cohn said that he has received over nine phone calls about the election in the last 24-48 hours. "Even Chuck Norris called me," he said.
When asked if he had gone to see any of the candidates in person his response hammered home how different Florida is from the traditional early primary states. "No, I don't think that's neccessary," Cohn declared.
Meanwhile at Cove Cay's shaded, poolside polling station, voters trickled in. The polling officers told me that turnout was below normal so far but emphasized that meetings and activities in the community clubhouse were scheduled for later in the day.
Many here, like retired Marine Harry Goble, 87, called themselves Ron Paul fans but said they could not vote for the Texas congressman because of his age.
"If he was a little younger I would have voted for Paul. He served during Korea. I like that," Goble said.
Like Cohn, Goble said he ended up voting for Romney because he thought the former Massachusetts governor is the most electable and "beating Obama" is the most important thing.
Nobody here had anything nice to say about Newt Gingrich.
Ken Comer, 69, a native of Indiana and a Romney voter, said he briefly considered Gingrich but that his debate performances turned him off. "I think Newt needs an anger management class," he said.
Comer's wife Suzzane, also a Romney voter, said Gingrich "was not trustworthy" and too negative.
"We need to vote Obama out and screaming and yelling will not do that," she said.
Gene Healy on the TSA’s War on Innocent Travelers
The threat of terrorism has radically diminished,
observes Gene Healy. So why is President Barack Obama now trying to
expanding the Transportation Security Administration’s reach beyond
airports and onto highways, sporting events, and train stations?
Haven’t innocent people already suffered enough pointless
indignities?
Reason.tv: Heather Donahue on Growing Marijuana, Life After 'Blair Witch,' and the Beauty of 'Grey' Markets
"To me, the 'canna-business,' it's a great example of community-level capitalism working well," says Heather Donahue, Hollywood actress-turned-marijuana farmer and author of the new book Grow Girl.
Donahue sat down with Reason.tv's Tim Cavanaugh to discuss why she left acting only a few years after her iconic role as "Heather" in The Blair Witch Project and how she ended up cultivating marijuana in a small Northern California community known as "Nugget Town."
Although Donahue favors legalization of marijuana and acknowledges the terrible toll that prohibition has taken, she also thinks that California's medical marijuana market has flourished in the legal "grey area" that currently exists.
"By creating this grey area, you're actually creating a system that works," says Donahue. "This is a system on a human scale, and that's part of why it works so well."
Approximately 9:43 minutes. Interview by Tim Cavanaugh. Shot and edited by Zach Weissmueller.
Visit Reason.tv for HD, iPod and audio versions of this video and subscribe to Reason.tv's Youtube channel to receive automatic notification when new material goes live.
Newsweek Goes Tits Up. With Newt Gingrich's Tits. Or, Why Print Is Dying, But Not Fast Enough.
If anyone still wonders why
20-century newsmagazines are facing an uncertain future, gaze up
this cover of the latest issue of Newsweek, which has
played Alain
Mamoun to Time's Emil Zatopek from the earliest days of its
existence.
Unless there's a $100 taped inside, who the hell is going to open this magazine?
As a former print mag editor who published quite possibly the worst cover in history (that would be this one, IMO) and at least one very good one (here!), I know how freaking impossible it is to hit even a slap single every time you come up to the plate. But this craptacular image proceeds directly from the lackluster imagination of the story and coverage angle of the story it illustrates as well.
And that's the real reason Newsweek has been an also-ran going back to the days when it was covering Wendell Wilkie. It has rarely if ever added anything to the conventional wisdom perpetrated by Time and other bastions of generally boring obviousness.
Good luck, Newsweek, you're going to need it in a future that is less and less beholden to lumbering sources of yesterday's news.
Park Ranger Shoots Man With Stun Gun for Walking Dogs Without a Leash
In the back, no less, according to witnesses.
In fairness, the lapdog-walking perp was not carrying a legal ID, and allegedly did not give the park ranger his real name. For which he was "arrested on suspicion of failing to obey a lawful order, having dogs off-leash and knowingly providing false information," in addition to being electro-shocked from behind. Also, walking dogs without a leash in that location was perfectly legal until last month.
Watch Reason.tv's latest video about Tasers:
A. Barton Hinkle on the Glories of Capitalism
The glories of free-market capitalism are
capacious, writes A. Barton Hinkle. It has lifted hundreds of
millions of people from bare subsistence to astonishing wealth. It
has given us life-saving medical marvels, grocery shelves groaning
with plenty, and phones that let you dial long-distance in the
middle of a cornfield. Better yet, it has done it all without the
help of a central planning board. The fact that some of us want to
enjoy various flavors of potato chips means that our local chip
aisle will contain a dazzling bounty.
Why Wash Post's Dana Milbank is the Fed's Ultimate Lapdog; Plus, Correction of the Decade!
Miami Herald
columnist and Reason contributor
Glenn Garvin takes a look at the Washington Post's Dana Milbank and
his bizarro coverage of the Federal Reserve:
When it comes to the Fed, the press plays more like one of those toy poodles that sits in your lap. Just last week, Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank, who regularly entertains readers with his astounding ability to insert his head further up the digestive tract of the inside-the-beltway establishment than anyone ever thought possible, reached new heights in a paean to the Fed. “Bernanke’s Fed has been a model of good government: apolitical, efficient, brutally effective — and transparent,” Milbank wrote.
If, by transparent, Milbank meant “somewhat more open to public inspection than the space-alien cemetery in Area 51,” he has an arguable case. Otherwise, he’s suffering from journalistic dementia. The Fed has been the most compulsively furtive part of the U.S. government since the plans for it were hatched during a secret 1910 meeting of powerful bankers and Taft administration officials on a private island....
“The Fed is so inscrutable that big banks employ PhDs whose entire lives are dedicated to trying to figure out what the Fed is doing,” says Johns Hopkins economist Steve H. Hanke, himself a venerable reader of Fed tea leaves....
Bernanke has fought like a tiger to keep the Fed shielded from the prying eyes of the American peasantry. When Bloomberg News and Fox News filed Freedom of Information Act requests to find out exactly how much money the Fed spent on bailouts after the 2008 financial meltdown and to whom it went, Bernanke stonewalled them for two years before a court order forced him to comply. He also battled ferociously against a proposal for an audit of the Fed proposed by a couple of strange ideological bedfellows — socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders and libertarian GOP Rep. Ron Paul — united by their disgust at the Fed’s stealth policy-making.
When the Occupy movement and the tea party agree on something, maybe the rest of us ought to pay attention.
Garvin's recent work generated
what just may be
the greatest correction of the decade so far:
A column by Glenn Garvin on Dec. 20 stated that the National Science Foundation “funded a study on Jell-o wrestling at the South Pole.” That is incorrect. The event took place during off-duty hours without NSF permission and did not involve taxpayer funds.
Black Hole Sun: Germany Spends €100 Billion in Solar Subsidies
Step aside Solyndra. Germany is the true leader when it comes to solar boondoggles. Over the past decade, Germany has spent over €100 billion subsidizing solar energy. In 2011 alone, these subsidies topped €8 billion ($10.2 billion). Yet solar is still a niche industry in Germany, generating only 3 percent of its electricity. That's about the size of two nuclear power plants.
The main source for these subsidies have been feed-in tariffs (FiT). One blogger vividly described FiT:
Imagine if the government forced supermarkets to buy bread from plain white bread bakeries, ordered them to pay these bakeries a fixed price that’s 5 times higher than normal for 20 years, and forced them to buy up all the white bread these bakeries could produce, whether needed or not...that's exactly what Germany is doing with electricity.
First used in the early 1990's, FiT became a lavish subsidy after the German Renewable Energy Act (EEG) was enacted in 2000. Basically, FiT mandate utilities to buy renewable energy at a higher cost, with the tariff benefiting the owner of the renewable energy project. As a sweetener, these tariffs are locked in for 20-year contracts. Because of this, the German think tank RWI estimates that the contracts for solar installations just in 2011 will top €18 billion over the next two decades.
Technically, utilities are supposed to bear the higher costs, not the ratepayer. But as RWI elaborates:
While utilities are legally obliged to accept and remunerate the feed-in of green electricity, it is ultimately the industrial and private consumers who have to bear the cost through increased electricity prices.
Unsurprisingly, Germany has the second-highest electricity prices in Europe. (Denmark, another heavy green energy subsidizer, is first.) Currently, this green energy surcharge is 3.59 cents per kilowatt hour of electricity. Each year, this surcharge adds up to €200 more in electric bills.
To justify these higher rates, proponents claim that FiT for solar are essential to thwart global warming and incentivize clean energy innovation. But even by the logic of reducing carbon emissions, heavily subsidizing solar is a poor choice:
To avoid a ton of CO2 emissions, one can spend €5 on insulating the roof of an old building, invest €20 in a new gas-fired power plant or sink about €500 into a new solar energy system.
Meanwhile, using renewable energy avoided 120 million tons of carbon in 2010. But solar energy represents just 7.6 percent of these avoided emissions, even though solar took more than half of all renewable energy subsidies.
In addition, the spurring innovation argument falls flat. German solar manufacturers only re-invest 2-3 percent of their revenues in research and development. By comparison, German car manufacturers spend 6 percent and Silicon Valley invests more than 15 percent on R&D. Besides, if energy innovation requires government intervention, then why not directly subsidize energy R&D?
However, the feed-in tariff has been very successful in installing new capacity. Currently, Germany has 25GW of solar capacity—half of all solar capacity on the entire planet. In fact, Germany installed more capacity last December than the United States did in all of 2011.
But capacity isn't the same as actually generating energy. Der Spiegel explains:
Solar lobbyists like to dazzle the public with impressive figures on the capability of solar energy. For example, they say that all installed systems together could generate a nominal output of more than 20 gigawatts, or twice as much energy as is currently being produced by the remaining German nuclear power plants.
But this is pure theory. The solar energy systems can only operate at this peak capacity when optimally exposed to the sun's rays (1,000 watts per square meter), at an optimum angle (48.2 degrees) and at the ideal solar module temperature (25 degrees Celsius, or 77 degrees Fahrenheit)—in other words, under conditions that hardly ever exist outside a laboratory.
Unsurprisingly, Germany rarely has peak conditions for solar power. While FiT might work in places that are actually sunny (e.g. Gainesville, Florida), Germany averages only 1,528 hours of sunshine a year, or one-third of all daylight hours. That's actually less sun than Seattle gets. One utility CEO even compared subsidizing German solar to "growing pineapples in Alaska."
Thankfully, fiscal sanity is starting to catch up with FiT. In Germany, a proposed new reform would slash FiT rates each year by 24 percent, and ultimately end the program by 2017.
Reason on subsidizing renewable energy. Ronald Bailey on feed-in tariffs.
Politics + Music = Pain
We knew he wouldn't shut the hell up about "America the Beautiful," but now Mitt Romney is actively warbling in public:
What's worse–that slice of canned ham, or President Obama's choreographed leg-tingler to his fans?
Well, let's not leave out the Rick Santorum Fight Song! Do it for the children!
Me, I prefer Newt Gingrich's version of "Like a Virgin":
And of course, the terrific new Autotune the News number, "Cash Money," starring Newt (and featuring John Stossel and Ron Paul).
Speaking of the doctor-congressman, did you know that there is something called "The Ron Paul Song"? And that one time, probably in the late 1990s, his grandchildren sang it, to him, with the cameras rolling?
In case you need a quick memory scrub after that, please allow me to introduce May Palmer, "The Queen of Ivory Soul":
Yay democracy!
It's Primary Day in the Gunshine State
Polling places in Florida opened at 7 a.m. this
morning. Newt Gingrich stopped by one at the First Baptist Church
of Windemere, where ABC's Jon Karl
asked him about his post-Florida plans:
I asked Newt Gingrich how much longer the battle for the Republican nomination will go on. He told me “six or eight months” and then added: “unless Romney drops out earlier.”
When I asked what he says to those who say the race will effectively be over if he loses big in Florida, Gingrich said, “You mean those who said I was dead in June? Those who said I was dead in December? They are about as accurate as they were the last two times they were wrong.”
Gingrich has a handful of events scheduled for the rest of the day—his election HQ in "Imperial" Polk County, Fred's Southern Kitchen in Plant City (home of the world-famous Strawberry Festival), the Disney-founded rich-person oasis known as Celebration, and a vote tally party on International Drive. Seeing as all four of those stops are on the I-4 corridor, there's a good chance Gingrich will actually be on time to some of them; I'll be reporting from the latter two. (He's been chronically late to events for the last several days, in some cases as late as an hour. As my grandmother said yesterday, "That will not do. Old folks down here are always on time. We don't like to be kept waiting.")
Drive-time DJs this morning are dedicating their programming to talking about the election, even though 603,000 early voting ballots had already been cast as of yesterday (that's more than the 601,000 GOPers who voted in all of South Carolina.) Polls will stay open to 7 p.m.
Some quick takes:
- SaintPetersBlog: "51 percent of people who voted early say they voted for Romney."
- Nine candidates appear on the ballot, according to the St. Pete Tampa Bay Times, which has already done some exit polling: "I voted for Newt Gingrich but I'm honestly not sure why," one woman told the paper.
- Five Thirty Eight gives Romney a 97 percent chance of winning Florida, and currently has him polling 44 percent to Gingrich's 29.3 percent.
- Immigration advocacy group America's Voice has Romney winning the Cuban vote, both in the primary and the general, but losing the wider Hispanic vote: "The Hispanic Florida primary voter is a Cuban American voter. However, Cubans comprise only 5% of the nation’s Hispanic voters, and not all of them vote Republican in the general. This share is a far cry from the 40% of Hispanic voters needed by any GOP nominee to win the White House."
- Tampa's WiLD 94.1, a hip-hop station that broadcasts as far east as Lakeland (where Gingrich's Polk County HQ is located), dedicated their morning show to discussing candidates' personal lives. A number of callers said that Romney strapping his dog's kennel to the roof of the family vehicle for a road trip was unforgivable. But the most fascinating call came from a woman who said her close friend trains service dogs, and that Newt Gingrich once complained to an airline employee that the woman got to board the plane with her service dog before he was allowed into first class.
Romney Most Electable Candidate, Yet Gingrich in Statistical Tie Among GOP Voters
Although national polls find Romney the most favored GOP candidate among the general electorate, and the most likely to beat Obama, Gallup finds Gingrich and Romney statistically tied among GOP primary voters. Perhaps this will signficantly change today if Romney succeeds in his predicted 13-point margin win in Florida.
The Electable Mitt Romney
According to the Real Clear Politics’ poll aggregator, averaging national polling numbers from hypothetical match-ups between Obama and the GOP presidential candidates respectively, Romney is the only GOP presidential candidate to come within the margin of error of beating Obama. In contrast, Gingrich is the least likely to beat Obama, losing on average by 12.8 percentage points.
A new USA TODAY/Gallup Swing State survey, polling registered voters in the nation’s most competitive battleground states including Florida, Colorado, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin, finds Romney tying Barack Obama. In contrast, Newt Gingrich trails by 14 percentage points. According to this poll, Ron Paul and Rick Santorum both lose to Obama by only 7 points.
Florida’s primary polls show Romney leading Gingrich, again, by an average of 13 percentage points.
By these measures, we should expect Romney to be clearly winning in polls of national GOP primary voters as they seek out the least objectionable candidate who can also beat President Obama in November.
Gingrich Slides But Maintains Slight Lead Among GOP
Somehow, however, Gingrich has managed to stay atop of national polls among GOP primary voters, only recently sliding into a statistical tie with Mitt Romney. A January 24th NBC/WSJ poll found Gingrich leading 37 to 28, a January 26th Gallup poll found Gingrich with 32 percent and Romney with 24 percent, and as of January 29th, Gingrich and Romney were statistically tied with 28 and 27 percent respectively. Newt is sliding, but not sliding as fast as some might have expected.
It may be useful to recap the recent timeline of Newt’s rise and decline:
- As I explained in an article on Newt’s second surge, the January 16th and 19th South Carolina debates indicate to primary voters that a candidate other than Romney could be electable.
- Gingrich closes Romney’s 23-percentage point lead in less than a week to win with 40 percent to Romney’s 28 percent in the January 21st South Carolina primary.
- Immediately after South Carolina, the Florida primary polls flip in Newt’s favor: Romney’s 15 point lead on the 16th turns into a 9 point Gingrich lead by the 22nd.
- Then the next day, January 23rd, Florida holds its GOP debate and Romney trounces Gingrich. Romney also takes to the stump in Florida town halls aiming to tie Gingrich to the establishment and reminding voters of Gingrich’s failed leadership in the 1990s.
- Two days after, January 25th, Romney is again leading in Florida by 7 points (Monmouth/Survey/USA), 8 points (Insider Advantage and Rasmussen) and 9 points (Quinnipiac), but continues to trail nationally 24 percent to Gingrich's 32 percent (Gallup). (Averages found here).
- By January 26th major GOP establishment players break silence and levy mounting condemnatory charges against Gingrich, including: Elliot Abrams in the National Review, editors at the National Review, R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. in the American Spectator, Ann Coulter, Bob Dole, and Tom Delay to name a few. Their charges echoed the same theme: 'Gingrich is no outsider, but rather an insider just like us, and we can tell you he’s not fit to be President.'
Despite Newt’s decline in Florida and inability to obtain traction among general voters, he maintains his statistical tie with Romney among national GOP primary voters. It may take a definitive loss in Florida today before GOP voters nationwide will be willing to admit Gingrich is not the electable alternative to Mitt Romney they hoped he'd be.
Mike Riggs on Why the ACLU Likes Gary Johnson
On January 29 the Miami Herald ran a
full-page ad excoriating Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney for their
“abysmal” constitutional records. The ad wasn’t paid for by Ron
Paul or his supporters, but by the American Civil Liberties Union,
which invited the GOP field to its annual staff convention in
Orlando to “face the nation’s largest gathering of real experts on
the Constitution and explain yourselves.” Neither Gingrich nor
Romney showed up. But as Mike Riggs reports from Orlando,
Libertarian Party presidential candidate Gary Johnson did appear,
and he charmed the ACLU crowd with his positions on executive
power, drug policy, gay marriage, and abortion.
Even If Stimulus Works in Theory, It Doesn’t Work in Practice
I’ve spent a fair amount of
time looking at problems with various arguments making the case
that the stimulus worked. But in some ways, debates about the
effectiveness of Keynesian stimulus spending just don’t matter.
Because even if stimulus spending works in theory (and there
isn’t strong evidence to suggest that it does), it still
doesn’t work in practice. The every day headaches of bureaucracy
and government oversight virtually guarantee that stimulus dollars
will be spent ineffectively.
In his new book, “Money Well Spent? The Truth Behind the Trillion-Dollar Stimulus, the Biggest Economic Recovery Plan in History,” ProPublica reporter Michael Grabell looks at how poor planning, poor management, and layers of red tape ensured that the 2009 stimulus package would go to waste. The New York Post carried an excerpt over the weekend; here’s a sample:
Obama billed the stimulus as a program that would “immediately jumpstart job creation” with “shovel-ready” projects to rebuild “our crumbling infrastructure.” Such rhetoric conjured New Deal images of blue-collar workers heading out to the heartland with sledgehammers and pickaxes over their shoulders.
Indeed, minutes after the president signed the bill, sparks flew on a rusty Depression-era truss bridge in Tuscumbia, Mo., as construction crews went to work on the nation’s first stimulus project.
But other projects were more like the bridge over the Conodoguinet Creek in central Pennsylvania, which Biden had highlighted, but which was delayed to avoid detouring school buses that depended on the bridge for their routes.
The timing of the stimulus was poor to bring about the flood of construction projects everyone expected in the first year. States had to advertise the project to allow contractors to submit bids. They needed to review those bids and sign the contracts.
Then, they had to go back to the US Department of Transportation for the final OK.The red tape had noble intentions. But it also delayed the program’s impact and may have even prevented more workers from being hired. Some projects in public housing, waterworks and home insulation remained paralyzed for six months to a year as short-staffed agencies reviewed Buy American waiver requests and calculated prevailing wages for weatherization work in every county in America.
In Michigan, human services officials estimated that 90% of the homes in line for weatherization work would need a historic preservation review. But as of late fall 2009, the office responsible had only two employees.
Grabell seems to think the stimulus could have been designed in such a way that it would have been much more effective. I’m skeptical. The combination of administrative challenges and political pressures is just too great.
Getting the money out the door faster would have meant spending in ways that were clearly wasteful, or at least not ideal. At minimum, that’s a political disaster. Meanwhile, spending just to spend ultimately creates a greater long-term drag on the economy—not only do we end up adding to a debt that we have to pay down later, but we have nothing (or perhaps negative impact) to show for it. Jugging nearly a trillion dollars of spending on what amounts to an emergency basis is just too complex: As research from Dan Rothschild and Garret Jones of the Mercatus Center suggests, even the money that was spent wasn’t tracked very well, often resulted in useless make-work projects, and went to hire people who already had jobs rather than the unemployed. In the end, even President Obama was forced to admit that there’s “no such thing as shovel-ready projects.”
Link via Jim Pethokoukis. More on the practical reality of stimulus spending in my column, Use the Tiny Tiles, and Other Tales From the Stimulus.
Former DC Mayor Adrian Fenty: "What's Missing from Education Reform is Courage"
Last week was National School Choice Week
(NSCW), a non-partisan effort to increase support for all forms of
educational choice.
Reason Foundation, the nonprofit publisher of this website, was a sponsor of NSCW and we hosted events in DC and LA and traveled to the week's kickoff event in New Orleans, where political operative James Carville explained why he wanted more kids and parents to have more choices when it comes to K-12 education.
Here's our final NSCW video, featuring former Washington, D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty talking about the need for school choice and what it will take to push that agenda. He's joined by Reason's education analyst Lisa Snell and others at the Bel Air home of foundation friend Judd Weiss.
About 4 minutes; shot and edited by Zach Weissmueller.
After the vid, stick around for a full playlist of our NSCW 2012 videos.
Conservative vs. Libertarian: Ann Coulter Debates Nick Gillespie in Colorado on Feb. 16
On Thursday, February 16, I will debate Ann
Coulter on the question: Can fiscal & social
conservatives pull together in 2012?
It's happening at the Independence Institute's 27th Annual Founders' Night Dinner, in Glendale, Colorado.
Here's the full info breakdown:
Join us for the 27th Annual Founders’ Night Dinner
Thursday, February 16, 2012
International Ballroom, Infinity Park
Glendale, Colorado
Honoring Jake Jabs, President & CEO of American Furniture Warehouse
with special guests
Ann Coulter and Nick Gillespie
6:00 – 7:00 PM Patron Reception
6:45 PM Doors open for dinner
Tickets:
$250 – Patron (includes entrance to the Patron Reception)
$2,000 – Bronze Table for 8 Guests (includes entrance to the Patron Reception for all 8 guests)
$3,000 – Silver Table for 10 Guests (includes entrance to the Patron Reception for all 10 guests)
$5,000 – Gold Table for 10 Guests (includes entrance to the Patron Reception for all 10 guests)
$10,000 – Platinum Table for 10 Guests (includes entrance to the Patron Reception for all 10 guests)
For more info on the Independence Institute, please go here.
In 2010, I was honored to speak at the Independence Insitute's annual Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms bash (video and writeup here). It's a great group of people when it comes to limiting the size and scope of government and they sure know how to throw a party.
A.M. Links: Romney Leads in Florida, Political Ad Spending Rises, European Leaders Agree to New Deficit Pact, Occupy D.C. Still Occupying D.C.
Today is the Florida GOP primary. Polls show Mitt
Romney
in a comfortable lead. Here are
five counties to watch. Nearly 600,000 votes have
already been cast in the state. In related news, Romney
likes Cheetos. - Political ad spending by outside groups is up 1,600 percent this campaign season versus the 2008 election.
- Thanks to a new deficit treaty, 25 of 27 European leaders agree: They'll try to avoid letting their countries' public finances end up buried in debt. And this time they really mean it.
- Europe's commitment to the new treaty will be tested soon enough: New reports suggest that the euro zone might be on the brink of a recession.
- Occupy D.C. protestors remained in their tents after a noon deadline to remove camping gear from the park yesterday. "We're just having a great party," Occupy DC protester Sara Shaw told CNN.
- President Obama participates in Google chat, offers to help woman's out-of-work husband find a job.
- Things the U.S. government does: Pays contractors to design computer programs intended to train giant rats and puppies to sniff explosives.
- Stem cell experiments are beginning to see small successes.
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New at Reason.tv: Why geezers are Occupy Wall Street's true enemies:
Shikha Dalmia on Obama’s Flawed Case for Insourcing
President Barack Obama declared in his State of
the Union address that the U.S. has a major opportunity to bring
manufacturing back and fight unemployment. “Tonight, my message to
business leaders is simple: Ask yourselves what you can do to bring
jobs back to your country, and your country will do everything we
can to help you succeed,” he thundered. But as Shikha Dalmia
writes, all one can say to that is, “Good luck.” Maybe Obama can
also spin gold from hay and pay off the national debt. The truth is
that the president’s economics simply don’t add up.
Gingrich Blows Off Media in Tampa
Tampa, Fla.—The tension between Newt Gingrich's campaign and the traveling press corps has increased significantly in the last 48 hours. Whether this is a results of Gingrich's turbulence in the polls here is unclear but there is an increased level of stress emanating from his campaign staff. Gingrich's press secretary, R.C. Hammond, briefly held court with a restless media gaggle before telling everybody he was not hosting an availability himself and ordering all non-local press to go back behind the current to the main rally area. Here's a portion of that exchange:
This dust up stemed from a miscommunication between his campaign and the press. Gingrich's campaign said that they had to cut back on interactions with the press because they were running late. They were not particularly clear about this at their event in Tampa. Today's confrontation adds to Gingrich's press woes from yesterday when his campaign tossed the traveling press from his plane and disinvited them from their flight to Nevada. It is standard practice to accomodate the traveling press on campaign swings like this. Chris Moody was on the Gingrich charter when all of this went down:
Then, the campaign dropped a bomb: No reporters would be allowed to fly with Gingrich on his campaign swing on Monday, when his schedule calls for more than 1,000 miles of travel, complete with campaign stops from the panhandle near the Alabama border to Miami. Without a plane, it would be virtually impossible to cover Gingrich on the day before voting begins in the primary that political observers think will make or break his campaign.
Also, the press was no longer invited to fly with Gingrich to the next contest in Nevada, which will hold its Republican caucuses on Feb. 4.
Reporters who covered the former House speaker's campaigns in South Carolina and Iowa say Gingrich was very accessible during those contests. I found this to be the case in New Hampshire as well. The last two days have brought a substantial change in the way the campaign is dealing with the press.
Gingrich's speech at a rally here today was similar to his previous campaign events. He brought up eliminating White House Czars, promised to end President Obama's "war on religion", and attacked George Soros.
At one point he addressed a frequent punching bag for conservative activists, the author of Rules for Radicals, Saul Alinsky. "I'm a Reagan conservative, Obama is a Saul Alinsky radical," he said.
Near the end of his speech he brought up a Pam Geller favorite in the looming specter of Sharia Law being accepted in American courts.
"I am unalterably opposed to the use of Sharia in an American court," he said, eliciting one of the larger cheers of the afternoon.
"I am comfortable with legal immigrants of every background, including Islam, who want to come to America. I have no confusion in my mind about our background, our laws, our civilization. If they wish to join us, that's fine. We are not going to accept Sharia, " he said.
I tried to talk to Gingrich while he was shaking hands and talking to voters after his event. When he came down the line I talked to him about his unique lapel, the Federal Reserve holding rates at the current level indefinitely, as Gingrich's recent kind words Ron Paul. Gingrich did not respond:
Gingrich also declined to elaborate on his sharia law comments.
At his "crossing the finish line rally" in Orlando Gingrich avoided interacting with the press again, shaking hands and leaving quickly after the event finished.
Gingrich is slated to attend a series of campaign events in the Orlando area tomorrow before attending an election night party at the Rosen Centre Hotel in Orlando. Mitt Romney is holding court in Tampa at the Tampa Convention Center.
Update: NO! Will Obama Finally Answer a Question About Legalizing Pot at Today's Online Interview (5.30pm ET)
Update: The answer is no, Obama didn't answer the top vote-getting YouTube question, which was about drug prohibition. As the link and headlines below indicate, there just wasn't enough time, especially since the president, an admitted drug user, had to talk more pressing matters such as late-night snacks. Emphasis in original posting from Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP).
YouTube Ignores Cop's First Place Marijuana Legalization Video Question for Obama
Posted by LEAP
Site Finds Time for Questions About Dancing, Late-Night Snacks and Playing Tennis
Back before he was president, admitted drug user Barack Obama was known to question the sagacity of the drug war. Now that he's occupying the Oval Office, Obama regularly laughs off the subject of legalizing marijuana when it comes up. Which might be kind of funny if his Justice Department wasn't busy cracking down on medical marijuana dispensaries with a ferocity that easily surpasses anything evinced by the Bush or Clinton admins.
Today, maybe he'll actually talk about this issue at his latest gimmicky online town meeting, which takes place at 5.30pm ET.
As it happens, the good folks at Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP) had one of their members submit a YouTube vid question to today's event. Stephen Downing is a retired deputy chief of the Los Angeles Police Department and his question about legalizing pot
came in first place for video questions and ranked second out of all questions (with the overall top spot going to a text question about copyright infringement). Many of the other top-ranking questions are about marijuana policy or the failed "war on drugs," as has been the case every other time the White House has invited citizens to submit and vote on questions via the web.
In similar past situations, Obama has either literally joked away the question or bluntly said he's not in favor of legalization of marijuana, which is a position that puts him at odds with most Americans.
Last year, in response to a LEAP question, he acknowledged that legalization is a "legitimate" topic for discussion, but then went on a long, rambling answer about "shrinking demand" and treating drug use as a public-health issue. That's not promising on its own but is especially bad when put in the context of his actual drug war bona fides. The simple truth is that Barack Obama, the latest in an increasingly long line of presidents and candidates who have admitted using illegal drugs, is every inch a drug warrior.
Read Jacob Sullum's great article on Obama's drug war.
Watch Downing's question here:
Latest Hare-Brained Scheme: Use Cap-n-Trade Loot to Pay for High-Speed Rail
As California’s high-speed rail project runs out of steam, you’d expect a savvy politician to shunt the thing onto a siding and earn points with the voters for making a tough-but-necessary decision.
Not Gov. Jerry Brown.
Taking a page out of President Obama’s
green-loan-guarantee
playbook, Brown only fights harder to keep the California
High-Speed Rail Authority doing whatever it is that the authority
does. Most recently, Brown took to the airwaves to say that his own
team’s estimate of the project’s projected cost is “way
off.”
In an interview with ABC 7 News in Los Angeles, Brown laid out a new plan for funding a project whose projected cost has more than doubled since voters approved a rail bond offering in 2008. "Phase 1, I'm trying to redesign it in a way that in and of itself will be justified by the state investment," Brown said. "We do have other sources of money: For example, cap-and-trade, which is this measure where you make people who produce greenhouse gasses pay certain fees - that will be a source of funding going forward for the high speed rail…It's going to be a lot cheaper than people are saying."
To recap: The high-speed rail authority recently lost its top brass and has been panned in reviews by the state auditor, the legislative analyst’s office, the Institute of Transportation Studies at UC Berkeley and the state inspector general. The state is facing a September deadline to break ground or lose more than $2 billion in federal funds for the project.
Brown has responded by
shutting down the inspector general’s office and accusing rail
skeptics of calling for the decline of California. When Brown
refers to Phase 1, he means what is now optimistically named the
Bakersfield-to-Fresno (formerly Corcoran-to-Borden) line, a route
selected by Washington rather than Sacramento. When he refers to
cap-and-trade Brown means a piece of legislation called AB 32, the
signature achievement of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, which made
California the first and only state requiring generators of carbon
to pay hefty taxes.
At his inestimable CalWhine blog, Chris Reed follows the money, only to find that the money is both reelin’ in the years and out where the woodbine twineth:
I’ve been waiting for years to see what Sacramento did with the billions of dollars in cap-and-trade fees that will roll in if AB 32 is allowed to proceed even though its original rationale is now preposterous and demonstrably false. (No, it didn’t inspire the rest of the world to copy California by forcing residents to accept a broad switch to cleaner but costlier energy.)
I remember a discussion with former Schwarzenegger adviser David Crane and other fans of AB 32 about the fact that higher energy costs are going to be much harder on poor people than the middle class or rich. I was told, no, the cap-and-trade fees would be used to insulate them from the economic pain caused by the regressive effects of higher energy costs.
And I snickered. Yeah, sure, that’s who is going to benefit. Yeah, sure.
I always assumed cap-and-trade billions would be diverted to government employees’ compensation instead of to poor people. Now, hilariously enough, the governor wants the billions to go for a boondoggle transportation project of the sort favored by wealthy suburbanites and rail cultists.
A point I have tried to emphasize in my own Calwhining about Jerry Brown’s proposed budget [pdf] is that its revenue assumptions do not appear to have accounted for the depressive effects of cap-and-trade. But Reed points out an equally dangerous assumption: the budget refers to "potentially $1 billion" in annual revenues from this new exhalation tax. Is there any reason to believe this revenue estimate is accurate?
Meet Roscoe Filburn, the Dead Farmer at the Center of the ObamaCare Case
ABC News introduces its readers to Roscoe Filburn, the Ohio farmer whose 1942 loss at the Supreme Court now serves as one of the key legal precedents cited by the Obama administration in its defense of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate:
[Filburn] felt wronged by Congress and, particularly, a law that was meant to regulate wheat prices. It had been Filburn's practice to grow wheat in the fall and use it in part to feed livestock on his farm and make flour for home consumption.
But the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1938 limited the number of acres Filburn could plant. The law allotted him 11.1 acres, and he harvested 23 acres. He was subject to a penalty of 49 cents a bushel for the wheat that went over the limit. He sued.
Filburn said the law went beyond the reach of Congress. He argued the government had no business regulating wheat that was local in nature with only an indirect effect upon interstate commerce. His wheat was not being sold on the open market, it was for his own personal use.
The Supreme Court unfortunately disagreed, ruling in Wickard v. Filburn that growing and consuming wheat entirely on your own farm still counted as interstate commerce that could be regulated by the federal government under the Commerce Clause. In 2005, the Court reinforced this decision, holding in Gonzales v. Raich that medical marijuana cultivated and consumed entirely within the state of California also counted as commerce “among the several States” and was therefore open to regulation under the Controlled Substances Act. That’s the case where Justice Clarence Thomas remarked, “If Congress can regulate this under the Commerce Clause, then it can regulate virtually anything—and the Federal Government is no longer one of limited and enumerated powers.”
The legal challenge to the health care act therefore faces a significant hurdle. If Wickard and Raich do in fact allow Congress to “regulate virtually anything” under the Commerce Clause, why can’t Congress force us to buy health insurance? The answer, according to the law’s opponents, is that while Wickard and Raich allow Congress to regulate economic activity, the failure to buy or secure health insurance is by definition an inactivity, which means that Wickard and Raich do not apply and the mandate may be struck down for exceeding Congress' powers under the Commerce Clause without violating those precedents. Since Justice Antonin Scalia famously sided with the majority in Raich, he may find this approach particularly attractive. The problem with it, as my colleague Jacob Sullum has pointed out, is that while the activity/inactivity distinction may defeat the individual mandate, it will not correct the Court’s previous errors in Wickard and Raich. Old Roscoe Filburn may have to wait a little longer for justice.
Why Geezers Are the True Enemy of the Occupy Movement
"When you look at government policies, there's a massive transfer of wealth from the young and relatively poor members of society toward the old and relatively rich members of society," says Veronique de Rugy, a Reason magazine columnist and economist at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.
In 1970, de Rugy notes, transfers from the young to the old took up about 20 percent of the federal budget. In a few years, that figure will break the 50 percent barrier as the population ages and Social Security and Medicare ramp up. Those programs are paid for by payroll taxes that suck up around 15 percent of every dollar most workers will ever make.
Yet the #Occupy movement spends most of its energy railing against "the 1 Percent" richest Americans, whose wealth is not gained at the expense of the "99 Percent." Rather, it comes from providing goods and services that people want to consume.
As transfer payments to elderly Americans - irrespective of wealth or need - increase in absolute and relative terms, de Rugy argues that we should scrap entitlements and replace them instead with a "social safety net" that helps poor Americans of whatever age. "There's absolutely no reason to continue paying for lots of people who have accumulated wealth their entire lives," de Rugy tells Reason's Nick Gillespie.
About 3.40 minutes. Shot by Meredith Bragg and Joshua Swain and edited by Swain.
Go to Reason.tv for downloadable versions of our videos. And subscribe to this channel to get automatic updates when new material goes live.
Lucy Steigerwald on Ron Paul, the Peacenik Republican
So far in the 2012 Republican presidential
campaign, Rep. Ron Paul has more than doubled the number of votes
he received in Iowa in 2008, more than tripled his vote count in
New Hampshire, and nearly quintupled his vote count in South
Carolina. The strength of his campaign has forced the other GOP
candidates into humiliating and unpersuasive attempts to parrot
Paul’s economic policies, his warnings on unsustainable government
spending, and particularly his attempt to end the reign of the
Federal Reserve. But as Lucy Steigerwald observes, the policy area
in which Paul seems to have the most trouble influencing the
conversation is on war and foreign policy, an area where Paul is a
staunch anti-interventionist. Would Paul go farther in the 2012
campaign if he toned down this anti-war stuff?
Mitt Romney on Track to Win Florida, E.U. Leaders Almost Reach a Budget Deal, U.S. Drones Anger Iraqi Officials: P.M. Links
Mitt Romney is going to win
Florida tomorrow. Almost everyone except
Newt Gingrich has accepted that.- European Union heads have almost reached a budget deal. They promise to be more austere in their spending this time, but there's still lots to figure out when it comes to fixing some busted economies.
- Representatives from the Afghan Taliban and the U.S. are chatting in Qatar.
- The U.S. Treasury says the government lost $170 million more on the auto bailout than previously thought, bringing the total tax-payer funded losses up to a cool $23.77 billion.
- That 16,000-person embassy the U.S. left when the war in Iraq "ended" also includes patrolling drones and Iraqi officials aren't happy.
- A new Gallup/USA Today poll ties Mitt Romney and Barrack Obama in a hypothetical match-up, with both receiving 48 percent of the vote; Ron Paul got 45 percent.
- Newsweek has discovered that secular, urban families homeschool sometimes, too.
Ira Stoll on How Newt Gingrich Borrowed a Page from the Left-Wing Playbook
In the closing stretch of the Florida campaign,
Newt Gingrich has stopped stressing his pro-growth plans to cut
taxes and has instead remade himself as a kind of Occupy Wall
Street Republican. “I do not believe Wall Street can give enough
money to run enough negative ads to hide from the truth,” Gingrich
said Sunday at a rally in a retirement community. But as Ira Stoll
explains, Gingrich’s new strategy is bound to fail. If voters want
a president who will demonize Wall Street, Stoll writes, they’ve
got a perfectly fine incumbent in Barack Obama.
Class Size Doesn't Matter, Plus Charter Schools as Laboratories of Education
There are good charter schools and bad charter
schools. But even the bad charter schools can do good, because they
provide data.
One of the underplayed benefits of broad national experimentation with charter schools is that having lots of schools trying lots of different educational philosophies means lots of fodder for folks like education scholars Will Dobbie and Roland Fryer. They write:
Charter schools were developed, in part, to serve as an R&D engine for traditional public schools, resulting in a wide variety of school strategies and outcomes. In this paper, we collect unparalleled data on the inner-workings of 35 charter schools and correlate these data with credible estimates of each school's effectiveness.
Their new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research finds that fretting about class size and per-pupil spending may be misguided, whereas teacher quality and classroom culture actually matter:
We find that traditionally collected input measures -- class size, per pupil expenditure, the fraction of teachers with no certification, and the fraction of teachers with an advanced degree -- are not correlated with school effectiveness. In stark contrast, we show that an index of five policies suggested by over forty years of qualitative research -- frequent teacher feedback, the use of data to guide instruction, high-dosage tutoring, increased instructional time, and high expectations -- explains approximately 50 percent of the variation in school effectiveness.
Of course, kids in bad charter schools deserve better than to just become data points in an economics paper. But hey, that's the nice thing about school choice—they choose try a different school next year. Plus, properly implemented school choice means charters that consistently fail to serve students and their parents can, and should, lose their charters and shut down. Their peers in places where a neighborhood public school is the only choice aren't so lucky.
Lots more on school choice, including last week's School Choice Week video extravaganza here.
Via Wonkblog.
Ron Paul vs. the Doonesbury Conspiracy
Is this Doonesbury strip from Saturday mocking Ron Paul and libertarianism, mocking the way the press treats Ron Paul (the Hedley character, in the days I followed th' Doones regularly, was always supposed to be a representative of media self-important jackassery), or both? You decide and/or deride. (Bonus guess: Garry Trudeau is part of the Rothschild-Rockefeller conspiracy.)
p.s. Buy my forthcoming book Ron Paul's Revolution, receive it in May.
Ron Paul: Good for the Constitution, Good for the Mormons
U.S. News and World Report on how the Baptist Ron Paul (only old-style Protestant in the GOP race, for those studying shifts in what's considered "normal" religiosity in American power centers) is reaching out to the Mormons:
He's the only Mormon in the presidential race, but that doesn't mean Mitt Romney is the only candidate Mormons support. Another favorite White House hopeful? Ron Paul, whose demand that Washington strictly adhere to the Constitution has some members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints singing his praise.
"You cannot grow up in the church and not hear of and be taught that the Constitution is an inspired document," says Connor Boyack, a Mormon who heads the Utah Tenth Amendment Center. "And when it comes to who best supports and defends the Constitution, Ron Paul is that guy."
In Paul's hunt for convention delegates, the Mormon vote will be key in early caucus states such as Nevada, where 25 percent of GOP caucus-goers in 2008 were LDS members. Exit polls from 2008 show nine of 10 Mormon voters cast ballots for Romney, but the Texas congressman is seeing a surge in support there and elsewhere.
While the Salt Lake City-based church does not officially endorse any candidate for president, members like Boyack have been preaching the gospel of Ron Paul. Boyack explains that Romney might be a brother in faith, but Paul's commitment to upholding the tenets of the Constitution make him a more ideological choice for Mormons.....
Paul's team has been quick to highlight the Mormon support,setting up a special "Latter Day Saints for Ron Paul" Facebook page ("liked" by over 1,300 fans). It's one of a number dedicated to pro-Paul coalitions, including evangelicals, Protestants, and Catholics, as well as truckers, gamers, and accountants. The candidate is also featured in a five-minute Web ad, recycled from the 2008 campaign, titled, "Ron Paul preserves, protects, defends LDS Constitution view."
Paul spokesman Gary Howard says, "Members of the LDSchurch make up one of those important coalitions, all of which are great assets in this campaign. Dr. Paul's message resonates with everyone who believes in the principles he espouses: limited government, personal and economic liberty."
Sweet Paul nostalgia: how Paul supporters led the Nevada GOP to shut down its own convention back in 2008. More on that and other things in my forthcoming book, Ron Paul's Revolution.
Federal Jury Says Cops Can't Arrest People for Recording Police Encounters
Last week a federal jury in
Oregon
awarded damages to an environmental activist who sued the city
of Eugene after a police officer seized his video camera and
arrested him for wiretapping. In March 2009, Josh Schlossberg was
distributing leaflets outside Umpqua Bank in downtown Eugene when
Sgt. Bill Solesbee told him to move along. Schlossberg replied that
his lawyer had advised him he was not breaking any laws. Solesbee
then entered the bank and came back out. When he approached
Schlossberg again, Schlossberg took out his camera and announced
that he was recording the encounter. The
Oregonian describes
what happened next:
Solesbee told Schlossberg he needed a permit to set up a table in front of the bank and accused him of blocking pedestrian traffic. Then he asked, "Are you taping me?"
As the two men argued over whether Schlossberg had notified him he was shooting video, the sergeant pointed at the camera and said, "Gimme that. That's evidence."
Schlossberg's lawyer [Lauren Regan] said the sergeant then charged the activist, roughly grabbed for his camera and wrenched his arm behind his back. Schlossberg was thrown to the ground, where his head struck the pavement, and felt the sergeant's knee on his neck, Regan said.
Solesbee seized Schlossberg's camera and arrested him. He was jailed for five hours on charges of resisting arrest and intercepting communications. Prosecutors later dismissed the charges.
As Simon Glik did after he was arrested for recording an arrest in Boston, Schlossberg complained to the police department, which said Solesbee had not done anything unconstitutional or contrary to policy. Like Glik, Schlossberg filed a federal lawsuit to vindicate his constitutional rights when the police department was unresponsive. In a pretrial hearing U.S. Magistrate Judge Thomas Coffin ruled that Solesbee had violated the Fourth Amendment by examining the contents of Schlossberg's camera without a warrant. As a result of last week's verdict, in which an eight-person jury concluded that Solesbee arrested Schlossberg without probable cause and used excessive force, the city is supposed to pay Schlossberg $4,083 for injuries, $1,500 for pain and suffering, and $200,000 for legal fees.
Regarding the verdict's broader significance, Regan tells The Oregonian, "Across the country right now, legal scholars and lawyers are just eating it up, because it's actually a solid statement of the right to privacy in the age of technology." The outcome also reaffirms that photography is not a crime. In both the Glik and Schlossberg cases, courts found that trumped-up wiretapping charges against people recording public events are unconstitutional. Eugene Police Chief Pete Kerns says the department has changed its policy in light of court rulings since 2009 and now discourages such arrests.
Radley Balko covered "The War on Cameras" in the January 2011 issue of Reason. Reason.tv on the same theme:
[via Radley Balko's Twitter feed]
Reason Writers on Stossel: Matt Welch Talks State of the Union and Bailout Economics on Fox Business Network
On Thursday, Jan. 26, Reason Editor in Chief Matt Welch appeared on Fox Business Network's Stossel program, along with The Atlantic's Megan McArdle, to discuss Obamanomics in the year 2012. Around six minutes:
Mitt Romney Complains that Newt Gingrich Supported an Individual Mandate
I think my Irony Meter just
overheated: Mitt Romney, who signed into law the nation's only
mandate to purchase health insurance and has
continued to defend the provision, is
bashing Newt Gingrich for the former congressman's support of a
mandate to purchase health insurance.
Watching these two guys go after each other is like watching a fight between flip sides of the same coin.
Ron Paul Roundup: Moving into Colorado, Winning Straw Polls in Arizona and Tennessee, Supported by Superpacs
Continuing to ignore a Florida where he continues to poll badly, though now breaking 10 percent, Ron Paul is moving on to Colorado this week.
He also continues his ability to smash all rivals in straw polls, with 63 percent at the Tennessee Republican Assembly and more than five times as many votes as everyone else combined at the Arizona state GOP's "mandatory meeting."
In other Paul talk:
*Al Jazeera questions five economists about Paulonomics, focusing on the Federal Reserve and spending cuts.
*Conor Murphy at the Washington Times site presents the evidence that Paul is running to win.
*The Occupy movement fights the Ron Paul infection.
*Brent Budowsky at the Hill believe Paul will beat Romney in Virginia.
*Interesting roundup at Washington Times of Paul's often-controversial views on Israel.
*Paul-supporting SuperPAC RevolutionPAC will host a Paulcentric Florida election returns webcast event.
*The L.A. Times follows Paul on the campaign trail in Maine.
*Very interesting video being aired in Florida, sponsored by another Paul-supporting Superpac, Endorse Liberty, trying to sell Paul's foreign policy:
DFW Reason Readers: Come Hear Me Talk About Liquor Laws
I will be talking about "Loony Liquor Laws" at a
Liberty on the
Rocks event in Euless, which is about midway between Dallas and
Fort Worth, this Thursday night. Among other examples of
alcohol-control insanity, I will discuss Pennsylvania's "wine
kiosks" (one of which can be seen on the right) and Texas
restrictions on beer marketing that were recently
overturned on First Amendment grounds. The event is open to the
public and admission is free. Here are the details:
Liberty on the Rocks
8 to 11 p.m., Thursday, February 2
210 South Industrial Boulevard
Euless, TX 76040
817-858-0507
Piracy: It's Not Killing the Entertainment Industry
Mike Masnick at TechDirt discusses a new study of his, The Sky is Rising, that looks at the positive signs of growth in the entertainment industry, for both consumers and producers, in an age when we are told we need to empower the government to shut down the Internet because of digital piracy of (largely) entertainment goods.
Some details:
the overall entertainment ecosystem is in a real renaissance period. The sky truly is rising, not falling: the industry is growing both in terms of revenue and content. We split the report up into video & film, books, music and video games -- and all four segments are showing significant growth (not shrinking) over the last decade. All of them are showing tremendous opportunity. The amount of content that they're all producing is growing at an astounding rate (which again, is the most important thing). But revenue, too, is growing. Equally important is that rather than consumers just wanting to get stuff for free, they have continually spent a greater portion of their income on entertainment -- with the percentage increasing by 15% from 2000 to 2008.
This all points to the fact that what is happening within the industry is not a challenge of a business getting smaller -- quite the opposite. It's about the challenge of an industry getting larger, but doing so in ways that route around the existing structures....
Some of the key points:
- Entertainment spending as a function of income went up by 15% from 2000 to 2008
- Employment in the entertainment sector grew by 20% -- with indie artists seeing 43% growth.
- The overall entertainment industry grew 66% from 1998 to 2010.
- The amount of content being produced in music, movies, books and video games is growing at an incredible pace
Read the whole study, which is contained within the story itself.
As Nick Gillespie noted in Reason back in the last century with history-making scope and precision, the age of cultural abundance is still here, still clear, still great, and not destroying people's ability to sell as well as get for free cultural product.
Mike Riggs on "Who Needs SOPA?," noting the continuing dangers of government attempts to crack down on the piracy supposedly but not really killing the culture industries.
Kennedy on L.A. Requiring Porn Stars to Wear Condoms
OK boys, strap on your rubbers, it's raining
nonsense. The Los Angeles City Council voted 9-1 to require male
porn actors to wrap their rascals and wear condoms when they're
shooting. And when they're filming. As Kennedy explains, this
job-killing regulation is certain to force the profit-making porn
industry away from L.A.’s safe and welcoming bosom.
Proposed Legislation in Oklahoma Would Outlaw Using Human Fetuses in Food
Who knew this was a problem? The
anti-cannibalism bill [download]
introduced by State Senator Ralph Shortey (R), reads:
No person or entity shall manufacture or knowingly sell food or any other product intended for human consumption which contains aborted human fetuses in the ingredients or which used aborted human fetuses in the research or development of any of the ingredients.
Apparently, the senator has heard that, Senomyx, a flavor research company in San Diego, has patented a taste receptor system using proteins derived from the cell line Human Embryonic Kidney 293 (HEK 293) as a way to test novel flavors. The Miami New Times reported that HEK 293 is:
... a cell line that started in the 1970s from human embryonic kidney cells. The line was cultured by scientist Alex Van der Eb in the early 1970s at his lab at the University of Leiden, Holland. Since then, the cell line has been cultured and grown in laboratories (you can buy some here). It's primary use is as a protein or a protein vessel -- sort of a natural test tube. It's also pretty common and seems to be available at most laboratory supply companies and used by many R&D facilities. In short, maybe not such a big deal.
Senomyx apparently works with leading food companies, including PepsiCo, Nestle, Kraft Foods, and Campbell Soups on flavor research. Introducing the bill has not too surprisingly garnered Sen. Shortey numerous headlines. The senator tells The Atlantic blog:
"The unfortunate thing is, this has been framed as 'this guy doesn't like fetuses in food,' " Shortey said via telephone on Thursday. "I'm under no delusion. I don't think that's actually happening. The headlines are phrased as 'this guy thinks there's chopped up fetuses in your food.'"
Well, yes. One might think that since the bill does say "contains aborted human fetuses."
Mea culpa: My colleague Nick Sibilla was much faster in addressing the fetal food ban.
OB/Gyn & Juice: Snoop Dogg posts pic of Ron Paul
Picture of the day, courtesy of Snoop Dogg's Facebook page.
To mix music styles, periods, and more: There's something happening here. What it is ain't exactly clear. But it's the shizznet.
The Arab League Quits Just When It Is Most Needed in Syria
The New York Times reported over the weekend that the Arab League was temporarily suspending its one-month-old monitoring mission in Syria pending a final decision this week. The League, apparently, is scared that its observers might get caught in the crackdown that the Assad regime is unleashing against its citizens. Notes the Times:
The head of the Arab League, Nabil al-Araby, said in a statement Saturday that after discussions with Arab foreign ministers, the 22-member body had come to its decision because of “a severe deterioration of the situation and the continued use of violence.” And he blamed the Syrian government for the bloodshed, saying that it had decided “to escalate the military option…
Their [the League’s] hesitation outside Rankous on Saturday, a town emptied of people after five days of clashes and government shelling, seemed to encapsulate the shortcomings of a mission accused by government opponents of providing cover to President Bashar al-Assad’s crackdown. Warned by army officers that insurgents could use explosives against them, a driver working with the observers refused to drive their heavily armored Mercedes into town.
Opposition activists in Rankous said they would have welcomed the visit. Despite the criticisms, the observers, with offices in several cities, were often the only outside witnesses to fighting that the United Nations said has killed more than 5,400.
But my question is: what exactly did the League expect? Rose garlands and olive tapenade? It’s entering a war zone for allah’s sake! Of course, its observers are going to be endangered.
The whole point of sending the mission was to force the regime to restraint its brutal tactics. Calling it off now when Assad is escalating his crackdown means that the League is turning tail just when it is most needed. This will do more damage than if the League had desisted from sticking its nose in Assad’s business in the first place. It has showcased its utter impotence to the world, signaling to all aspiring Mideast tyrants that they have absolutely nothing to fear from it, not even the prospect of being held to account later for crimes against humanity.
Sad.
Ronald Bailey on Putting Men on Mars
Does Mars have rights? The 1967 Outer Space
Treaty requires spacefaring nations to conduct exploration of the
moon and other celestial bodies “so as to avoid their harmful
contamination and also adverse changes in the environment of the
Earth resulting from the introduction of extraterrestrial matter.”
The goal of the treaty is to prevent both back contamination (the
introduction of extraterrestrial life to Earth) and forward
contamination (the introduction of Earth life to extraterrestrial
environments). From our February issue, Science Correspondent
Ronald Bailey makes the ethical case for terraforming the Red
Planet.
Meet the NYC Teacher Who Gets Paid $100K to Ogle 8th Grade Butts & NOT Teach
The NY Post introduces the
world to 66 year old New York City public school teacher Alan
Rosenfeld, the rajah of the city's "rubber room," or holding pen
for teachers on full pay who are kept away from the classroom.
In 2001, Rosenfeld was accused (but not convicted) of "ogling eighth-grade girls’ butts at IS 347 in Queens" and the typing teacher has been kept away from students as a result. He pulls a salary of $100,049 and can't be fired or forced to retire.
“It’s an F-U,” a friend of Rosenfeld said of his refusal to quit.
“He’s happy about it, and very proud that he beat the system. This is a great show-up-but-don’t-do-anything job.”...
Rosenfeld and six others whose cases have long been closed are “permanently reassigned.” Rosenfeld reports to the Division of School Facilities, which maintains DOE buildings, in a warehouse in Long Island City.
Asked what work he does, Rosenfeld laughingly told his friend, “Oh, I Xeroxed something the other day.”
Rosenfeld could have retired four years ago at 62, but his pension grows by $1,700 for each year he stays — even without teaching. If he quit today, his annual pension would total an estimated $85,400.
“Why not make it bigger?” the friend said.
The rubber room was officially closed in 2010, so the specifics of Rosenfeld's situation won't be repeated in exact detail. But does anybody - certainly anybody with kids in the New York City school system or the taxpayers who fund it - really think that the system has been or will be cleaned up of such atrocious outcomes?
Of course not. And until school systems start over, from the ground up with the kids' interests first and last, you can rest assured that some future monstronsity is busy being born.
In 2006, John Stossel showed how impossible it was for New York to fire incompetent teachers. Check out the incredibly funny-but-crying-on-the-inside-illustrated chart here.
Last week was National School Choice Week, a trans-partisan effort to increase interest in letting kids and parents pick their schools. If you want to avoid the Rosenfelds of the world, that's a good place to start. More info on school choice here.
Watching TV Probably Won't Kill You
The idiot box isn't a mortal
threat, at least in the medium term, according to a
new study by a researcher at the Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention. The study looked at adults over the age of 20, all
of whom were participants in the more comprehensive National Health
and Nutrition Examination Survey between 1999 and 2002. 7,350 of
those participants were then selected for further study, and were
asked about the their screen time, including television, videos,
and computer usage, through 2006. The result? Increased screen time
did not correlate with increased mortality; in fact, those who sat
in front of the screen for four or five hours a day actually showed
a lower mortality rate than those who watch one or two hours a day
(though this doesn't suggest that watching more TV is safer). The
study cautions that the mortality effects of sedentary viewing
remain somewhat uncertain, but conclude that within their
sample, "screen time did not significantly predict mortality
from all-causes and diseases of the circulatory system." So
tune in and turn on—you'll probably be fine. (Link
via Aaron Carroll.)
Independence Is a Fever, and Florida's Catching it!
The
Ocala Star-Banner
writes about a little-discussed phenomenon in advance of
Tuesday's Florida primary vote:
Whether voting or waiting, however, the faithful within the major parties are a dwindling lot.
The overall percentage of voters identifying with the Democratic and Republican parties — in Marion County and the state as a whole — has ebbed to its lowest point at any time in recent memory. [...]
Nearly one in four voters in Florida is registered as something other than a Democrat or a Republican, or not affiliated with any party at all, according to state Division of Elections records.
In Marion County, the rate is about one in every five.
Headed into Tuesday's Republican primary, the percentage of election-year voters in Florida who identify themselves with the GOP is at one of the lowest points since 1994, the last year of election-year voter registration data posted on the DOE's website.
I'll say it again–Republicans bleeding market share in this ridiculously favorable market is a bungle of truly historic proportions. And let's give it up for Paul Truesdell, chairman of the Florida Whig Party:
"Each day, more Americans are coming to the conclusion that duopolistic politics is more about profiteering through a spoils system disguised by a byzantine bureaucracy than maintaining government by the people rather than of the people," Truesdell said in an email.
"What we have are always-competing medusa-octopui that spin the media and general public opinion nonstop for the sole purpose of controlling the purse strings."
Read the whole article. Nick Gillespie and I on the duopoly metaphor here. Link to the pictured book here.
Elizabeth Warren Earns $429,000, Worth Millions but Not Part of 1 Percent
There's rich and there's really rich. As the poet
and well-paid insurance executive Wallace Stevens supposedly once
said, "There's a difference between appreciating art and owning
it."
So take pity on Harvard's Elizabeth Warren, the scold of the 1 Percent who is currently running for the Senate in Massachusetts after getting hosed by the Obama administration. Warren is widely credited with pushing for the creation of a Consumer Financial Protection Agency that would simplify credit offerings so that all of us idiots who bought houses we couldn't afford could blame somebody else. Faced with opposition from Republicans, Obama tossed Warren aside as the first hea of the CFPA.
Buzzfeed reports that Warren, like Marie Antoinette and Bruce Springsteen, only likes to play poor:
“I realize there are some wealthy individuals – I’m not one of them, but some wealthy individuals who have a lot of stock portfolios" she told [MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell].
Hard to see how Warren wouldn't be, by most standards, wealthy, according to the Personal Financial Disclosure form she filed to run for Senate shows that she's worth as much as $14.5 million. She earned more than $429,000 from Harvard last year alone for a total of about $700,000, and lives in a house worth $5 million.
She also has a portfolio of investments in stocks and bonds worth as as much as $8 million, according to the form, which lists value ranges for each investment. The bulk of it is in funds managed by TIAA-CREF.
Making a ton of dough - she's well into the 1 Percent of income earners based on her salary alone - doesn't mean she can't understand with special care the problems of the rest of us.
But it's worth pointing out that Warren is in fact out of touch with those for whom she claims to speak. She consistently says that folks "didn't know the deal" when they signed up for credit cards that charged interest on balances, mortgages that required monthly payments, or loans that charged interest. She is the embodiment of a paternalist (maternalist?) who thinks that jes' plain folks are dolts who are always getting screwed by mustache-twirling bankers that exist mostly in the imagination of Faulkner's Jason Compson. Hence, her longstanding desire to "simplify" the offerings of financial institutions down to a few types of loans, all of which can be read "by the average American" in a couple of minutes.
It may be quaint for a Harvard prof to want to help the great unwashed, but if she seriously thinks that people overextended on houses and more because they didn't understand their credit terms, she's fighting the wrong battle and we'll all be the poorer for having fewer credit options.
And for those of us who don't make $429,000 a year, or live in $5 million homes, or have as much as $8 million in stocks and bonds, that's not good.
Here's some vid of Warren commiserating with another honorary 99 Percenter, Lawrence O'Donnell of MSNBC:
Reason Writers on The Real News: Matt Welch Talks Romney, Gingrich, Obama, and Paul
On Friday, Jan. 27, Reason Editor in Chief Matt Welch went on The Real News program to discuss 2012 politics with host Paul Jay and The Raw Story Executive Editor Megan Carpentier. Just over 20 minutes:
A.M. Links: Gingrich Promises Wild Campaign, FDA Staffers Sue Agency Over Email Surveillance, New Orleans Bans Free Speech on Bourbon Street
After
slipping in the Florida polls,
Newt Gingrich promises a "wild and wooly" primary fight,
declares he won't be "namby-pamby." - Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush still hasn't endorsed any of the GOP candidates.
- F.D.A. doctors and scientists who warned Congress that the agency was approving dangerous medical devices have sued the agency for surveillance of their personal email.
- New Orleans has banned loitering on Bourbon Street "for the purpose of disseminating any social, political or religious message between the hours of sunset and sunrise."
- The SEC has filed a complaint against four online trading companies that unwittingly aided a hacker.
- Tweeps are upset after Twitter announced that it will block some messages in countries where those messages are illegal.
Do you want hot links and other Reason goodies delivered to your inbox twice a day? Sign up here for Reason's morning and afternoon news updates.
New at Reason.tv: Andrew Campanella explains why there is hope for education in America.
Steve Chapman on Obama’s Latest Bad Idea for Public Education
Many teenage kids regard school as the functional
equivalent of prison—where they are forced to endure oppressive
rules, bad food, and unpleasant company. For them, Barack Obama has
a message: There will be no parole. Obama wants every state in the
union to require that all students remain in high school until they
graduate or turn 18. As Steve Chapman explains, the issue here is
not whether most students are better off finishing high school;
it's whether the kids who otherwise would drop out are better off
being forced to finish.
Romney Bashes Gingrich, Ignores Occupy Wall Street Protestors in Florida
Naples, Fla.—On-again/off-again Republican front-runner Mitt Romney blasted his chief rival, Newt Gingrich, for his ties to the mortgage industry at a rally here this morning. Speaking before an overflow crowd Romney chided Gingrich for his "excuse making" about the debates before pivoting to his ties to Freddie Mac.
"The first debate audience was quiet and Speaker Gingrich said that threw him off, he can't debate before a quiet audience. The next audience was very loud, very loud, and he said that threw him off. He can't debate before a loud audience," Romney said, eliciting laughter from the crowd.
"He's like Goldilocks, ya know, and at this point it has to be just so," he said.
The woman behind me was puzzled.
"Goldilocks? I don't get it," she whispered to her companion.
Romney then began describing Florida's housing woes and foreclosure problems.
"One of the greatest contributros to the collapse of housing here and across trhe country was government," Romney said. "At the time some people were standing up saying we need to reform the system. Speaker Gingrich was being paid $1.6 million dollars to stand up and say, 'These programs should continue the way they are.'"
"BOOO!" came the response from the crowd.
"The people of Florida have had enough of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae and government interference, and it's time to get back to free-market princpiples!"
"WOOO!"
Moving on from Gingrich, Romney proceeded to give his standard stump speech attacking President Barack Obama for his handling of the debt and involvement with Solyndra's failure, all while Romney touted his own private sector experience.
Occasional shouts and murmurs could be heard in the crowd. At first this consisted mainly of people bitching about not being able to see.
Then the noise in the back began to sound more like yodeling. A handful of Occupy Wall Street protestors had arrived late to the event and were milling about at the back with fake dollar bills taped across their faces, supposedly representing how "money is speech".
One Occupier was carrying a poster that featured the words "OCCUPY" and was shaped like the solidarty fist.
One Romney staffer I talked to said the Occupiers haven't been a problem for them in Florida.
"New Hampshire was rough though," he said.
Matt Welch and Nick Gillespie on What Democrats and Republicans Should Learn From Kodak's Demise
When Kodak filed for Chapter 11 earlier this
month, it wasn't just the end for one of the longest-lived
blue-chip companies of the past 100 years.
It was an object lesson in what happens when firms with massive market share get too fat and happy and start to treat their customers as captives rather than as free agents who will go elsewhere given half a chance.
Reason's Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch, co-authors of The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What's Wrong with America, argue that the lessons of Kodak apply to partisan politics, where the Democratic and Republican parties are facing record-low levels of voter identification. Despite the high stakes of the 2012 election, Americans are in open revolt against a duopoly that's been around since the 19th century. If the GOP and the Dems want to keep their customers happy, they need to learn the lesson that Kodak ignored all the way to liquidation.
The Coming GOP Fratricide?
Reason contributor Terry Michael
conjures the ghosts of 1964 and warns about the coming GOP
fratricide:
The bitterness with which Mr. Obama is bludgeoned reflects a tunnel vision that shouts the third reason Republicans are in danger of blowing a serious chance: They’re losing touch with the sensible center - independents and leaners watching the spectacle from the sidelines.
When Mr. Gingrich and Mr. Santorum assert that only they are conservative enough to provide a winning contrast to Mr. Obama, both reflect willful ignorance of how you must campaign for November, focusing on persuadables. Possibly learning from his own fruitless pandering to social conservatives in 2008, Mr. Romney uses language that addresses independents as well as his own right flank. (On a libertarian mission, Ron Paul is fighting for a philosophy, not a nomination.)
Meanwhile, as the Republican cage-fight continues, Mr. Obama recently paid a YouTube-winning happy 90th birthday tribute to Betty White and performed a brief but crowd-pleasing rendition of Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together” - something the four warring wings of the Republican Party might want to consider.
Michael, an open "libertarian Democrat," wrote about why a former DNC press secretary is considering voting for Romney. Check that out here.
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