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Jimmy McMillan Annoys Everyone At CPAC
Washington, D.C. - Former New York
gubernatorial fringe candidate Jimmy McMillan stormed into the CPAC
Bloggers Lounge on Saturday and began yelling about bailouts and
housing and how everything is unfair. McMillan is one of those side
shows you really should ignore, but he made that impossible. As you
can see in the video below some people were not happy with his
stunt.
McMillan is famous for being part of The Rent Is Too Damn High party of New York State. His bombastic appearances in the gubernatorial debates made him a viral sensation on the internet. He appeared at CPAC in 2011.
Even Though Paul Is Not At CPAC His Presence Is Still Felt
Washington, D.C. – In previous years Ron Paul
supporters have dominated the annual Conservative Political Action
Conference by gobbling up booth space and flooding the place with
flyers. Paul’s organization helped bring his supporters to CPAC in
droves by paying their way just so they could vote for him in the
meaningless straw poll. This year is different, though, as he
skipped the conference to campaign
in Maine. Neither Paul nor his various organizations have
reserved booth space.
The lack of an organized Paul presence means a lack of young libertarians. Many attendees say that there is a lack of buzz at the event though it is a presidential year. The void has hurt business for some vendors, too.
“It hasn’t nearly been what we've experienced in past years. It’s honestly about a third of what we are use to,” said Daniel Williams, part owner of MASSHQ, a Houston based marketing firm.
In between selling various Paul knick-knacks like golf balls, Zippo lighters, and shirts for his other venture, RonPaulSwag.com, Williams said that many people booked their CPAC trips because they expected Paul to be here and if they knew he was going to skip the conference they would have done the same.
“I am disappointed he is not here but it’s probably better that he spend his time in Maine campaigning,” said Megan Puffield, 25, a Paul supporter.
Her partner, Wes Messamore, 25, agreed with Paul’s decision to go to Maine but lamented his absence from CPAC.
“It’s a much different feel this time. There is less energy, the crowd is older,” he said.
Backers of the other candidates noticed the lack of a Paul presence, too.
“I’m a moderate Republican so I tend to like libertarian views more than social conservatives,” said Jessica Fugate, 29, a Romney supporter.
Fugate fumbled with her phone while waiting in the lobby to catch a glimpse of actor Allen Covert.
“It’s bad that he’s not here because he tends to bring out more young people. Libertarians tend to attract more young people,” she said.
Outside Rick Santorum’s booth Paul supporters were heckling a stand up of him with a sign mocking his Google problem. Santorum’s staffers continued to pick at their lunch while Paul supporters posed to take pictures with the standup. Eventually a Santorum staffer stood up and shooed them away
When asked how he felt about Paul supporters pranking their booth, a Santorum staffer said, “They are free to do it. It’s a free country.”
Mitt Romney Wins the CPAC Presidential Straw Poll, Absent Ron Paul Gets Fourth
According to The Washington Times:
Mr. Romney won 38 percent of the straw poll, which counted the votes of 3,408 activists gathered for the Conservative Political Action Conference, which ran from Thursday through Saturday at a hotel in Washington.
Mr. Santorum was second with 31 percent, Newt Gingrich was third with 15 percent and Rep. Ron Paul was fourth with 12 percent — far below his showing the last two years, when he won with 31 in 2010 and 30 percent in 2011.
In the national survey, meanwhile, Mr. Romney barely topped Mr. Santorum 27 percent to 25 percent, with Mr. Gingrich in third place at 20 percent and Mr. Paul again trailing at 8 percent.
The rest here.
Scott Walker Defends Union Reform Efforts in CPAC Address
Washington, D.C.
– Embattled Wisconsin
Governor Scott Walker defended his efforts to reform government
employee unions while addressing the Reagan Banquet at CPAC as the
keynote speaker tonight. Walker’s move to bring about reform in
Wisconsin has resulted in him facing a
major recall effort that could see him removed from office
before the fall, making him a cause célèbre for conservatives
and right-to-work activists.
Walker noted that since he started challenging the entrenched government employee unions, he has received all kinds of threats involving him and his family, but that his support is still strong in the Badger State.
“Every week when I am out visiting the factories and farms of my state and there are people that come up to me and tell me ‘Governor, we are praying for you and your family,’” he said.
When Walker took office he was staring down a major state budget deficit of approximately $3.6 billion. When this came up as an issue on the campaign trail Walker said that one of the ways he would plug the hole was by asking government employees to pay more toward their pensions. To those paying attention it was not a secret that Walker was going to change the way budget problems were addressed in Madsion. Walker felt that long term changes needed to be made instead of using short term stopgaps.
“Some states have also chosen budget gimmicks to balance the budget. We did not do this in Wisconsin because that is part of what caused the budget deficit in the first place,” he said.
Sounding like a presidential candidate, Walker explained how the collective bargaining reforms helped local communities.
“We chose long-term structural reforms that helped us balance both our state and our local governments budgets for years to come. We thought more about the next generation than we did about the next election,” he said
Walker mentioned how he has made Wisconsin more hospitable for private businesses, but the heart of his speech was about his budget reform efforts.
“Collective bargaining is not a right. In the public sector collective bargaining is an expensive entitlement,” he said.
Walker’s reform efforts severely limited the ability of unionized government employees to collectively bargain, increased the amount they pay toward benefits, and altered the way union dues were collected.
Before closing Walker made a pitch to those present to help him beat back his recall effort, saying, “This election is about making courageous and bold decisions now and in the future.”
Walker's complete prepared remarks are here. Be beware: He deviated from them frequently.
Breitbart on Libertarians in 2012
Washington, D.C. - In his speech at CPAC
conservative activist and online publisher Andrew Breitbart called
liberals the "the least tolerant people you will ever meet in your
entire lives." When asked about libertarians in American politics
and the fight with the left, Breitbart said that he thinks
libertarians need to develop a free speech movement on college
campuses.
"I have no problem with them entering the political fray at the highest possible levels and saying 'We want Ron Paul for the presidency,' but they seem conspicuously absent from the trenches where it really counts, where they really exist right now," he said.
Breitbart, who admits to having libertarian leanings, thinks libertarians should not be discouraged by the media's portrayal of the conservative movement. "[Libertarians] don't want to be in the same room as conservatives because it will hurt their street cred. Conservatives, especially right now, have a hell of a lot more in common with libertarianism than Barack Obama and what the progressive left stand for," he said.
There is more in the video below.
More on Breitbart from Reason here.
The Inside and Outside of CPAC 2012
"The Occupy movement, if it weren't so dangerous to the American ideal, would be comical," says John Thompson, a Rick Santorum supporter who attended The Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), which kicked off in Washington, D.C. on Thursday, February 9th, 2012.
CPAC is the premier annual gathering of the conservative movement, but this year not all the action was inside the convention center. Occupy D.C. was joined by the AFL-CIO, SEIU, National Nurses United, Metro Labor Council, and OurDC for a demonstration right outside. The group says it was protesting a "gathering of bigots, media mouthpieces, corrupt politicians, and their 1 percent elite puppet masters."
Reason's Lucy Steigerwald was on hand to see what all the fuss was about.
Produced by Jim Epstein, with help from Joshua Swain and Julie Ershad.
Approximately 4.30 minutes.
Go to Reason.tv for downloadable versions and subscribe to our YouTube channel to get automatic updates when new material goes live.
Why Did the Times Switch This Solyndra-Program Headline?
When Neela Banerjee’s summary of a Department of Energy audit went up on the Los Angeles Times site at two minutes after noon on the west coast, it seemed to imply that Energy Secretary Steven Chu had a less-than-sure hand on the DOE’s green loan guarantee program:
Then, maybe sometime before three minutes after noon, the same story shed its headline and grew a new one, which retroactively manages expectations of how damaging the audit was going to be:
In my day a switch like that might have been necessitated by another story competing for paper real estate, or to avoid butting headlines, or due to the cancelation or addition of an advertisement. I don’t miss those days, but sometimes I miss the non-malleability of paper and ink.
I don't imagine such scarcities apply at a news web site, but I did hear a while back that the FCC is in charge of the internet now. So there's that.
Otherwise, why did this headline change?
Gingrich Delivers Stump Speech at CPAC
Washington, D.C. –
Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich speechified about
“bold solutions” to close out the second day of CPAC. His speech
was so close to what he delivers on the campaign trail that some in
the media
room Bloggers Lounge groaned that there was nothing new
in his speech.
“This is straight from the campaign trail. I’ve heard this all before,” one grumbled.
The crowd reacted differently giving him long applause and standing ovations throughout the speech. It was a very different scene compared to Rick Santorum’s speech earlier in the day. Santorum was received warmly; Gingrich made them roar.
While Santorum’s speech zeroed in on social issues, Gingrich focused on reviving the American economy with a multipoint plan that included proposals to lower the corporate income tax to 12.5% and reform the unemployment system.
“Unemployment compensation should be changed so you sign up for a business led training program. Never again should we pay somebody for 99 weeks for doing nothing. In 99 weeks you can earn an associate’s degree,” he said.
In the remainder of his speech Gingrich did not attack the other Republican candidates including Mitt Romney, who spoke before him. Gingrich is the only candidate at CPAC with a campaign booth in the exhibit hall.
One Possible Reason There Are So Few Liberals, Starring Jonathan Chait. And Some Stuff About Tax Progressivity.
About a
month ago, New York Times' columnist David Brooks asked
"Why
aren't there more liberals in America?"
Leaving aside partisan politics, this is an interesting question. The Harris Poll has been surveying Americans on the topic of "political philosophy" since 1968 and the percentage calling themselves liberal had never risen above 20 percent through 2008 (the latest year for which I could find data online).
Part of the reason might be that people who publicly identify themselves as liberal often come across as smug, self-righteous jerks who, even when they swear they are not being patronizing, are in fact being patronizing.
For a recent example, consider New York magazine's Jonathan Chait, who writes:
People often ask, “Why is Jonathan Chait so mean?” It is a fair question, one that...merits a suitably thoughtful reply....
[T]his is why I am forced to be so mean. There are just a lot of people out there exerting significant influence over the political debate who are totally unqualified. The dilemma is especially acute in the political economic field, where wealthy right-wingers have pumped so much money to subsidize the field of pro-rich people polemics that the demand for competent defenders of letting rich people keep as much of their money as possible vastly outstrips the supply. Hence the intellectual marketplace for arguments that we should tax rich people less is glutted with hackery.... A similar problem exists, perhaps to an even worse extent, with climate change denial.
Most people don’t follow these issues for a living and have a hard time distinguishing legitimate arguments from garbage. I don’t mean this patronizingly: I certainly would have trouble distinguishing valid arguments from nonsense in a technical field I didn’t study professionally. But that's why there’s a value in signaling that some arguments aren’t merely expressing a difference in values or interpretation, but are made by an unqualified hack peddling demonstrable nonsense. Being so mean is a labor of love, I confess, but also one with a purpose.
This sort of thinking is about as convincing as Newt Gingrich's claim that he cheated on his wives out of surfeit of patriotism.
Chait, late of The New Republic, is no stranger to these pages, as he semi-regularly spews contempt, anger, exasperation, and Lucy Van Pelt-level psychologizing in Reason's general direction. To the extent that he exemplifies character traits associated with liberals, it's no surprise that self-described liberals are few and far between. That he quickly received an attaboy from economist-cum-insult-comic Paul Krugman only underscores the assocation of liberalism with an off-putting, holier-than-thou mentality. "Actually," wrote Krugman at his Conscience of Liberal blog, "I think [Chait']s not mean enough here; some of the hacks know that they’re being hacks, and are putting out deliberate falsehoods." This from the Nobel prize winner who just earlier this year said "I've never gone ad hominem," a demonstrably false assertion that Bloomberg Businessweek has some fun with in this infographic.
The object of Chait's ideological noblesse oblige during this particular blood-sugar spike is Veronique de Rugy, Reason columnist, Mercatus Center economist, and my frequent collaborator. Or, as Chait prefers to call her, that "ubiquitous right-wing misinformation recirculator."
De Rugy had the temerity to cite OECD data suggesting that contrary to the conventional wisdom, the U.S. federal tax system is more progressive than those in most developed countries. What do we mean by "progressive?" Chait defines it as "the degree to which a tax system increases tax rates on higher-income earners."
Which is what de Rugy is talking about. Specifically, the spread in effective tax rates (that is, the progressivity in the system) is greater over here because the U.S. gets most of its revenue from income taxes and because the U.S. gives all sorts of exemptions to lower- and middle-class citizens, many of whom pay no income tax (note: de Rugy is talking about all taxes, including payroll taxes, and not just income taxes). In contrast, the higher marginal income tax rates common to Europe kick in at much lower levels of income, large chunks of the overall revenue is raised via universal consumption taxes such as the V.A.T., and exemptions and refunds common to the American system are minimal.
So the effect is that the spread in effective tax rates in Europe is smaller than in the U.S. For more on this, check out Greg Mankiw's discussion of the OECD data (check the data out here) at the heart of things and Scott Sumner's Money Illusion blog. Sumner, a Bentley College economist, writes that "many American progressives keep insisting that we can get closer to the (egalitarian) European model by making the US tax system more progressive, by having the rich pay more."
Throughout her work on the topic, de Rugy notes that the European system is more regressive and raises more revenue as a percentage of GDP. And she's interested in calling attention to the paradoxes of such a situation. To wit,
Progressive public finance experts like Peter Lindert have shown that most European tax regimes are able to collect more revenue than ours (as a share of gross domestic product, not in total) by having a more regressive -- not progressive -- tax system.
In other words, European Union governments understand that in order to feed their welfare states, governments must collect taxes from all citizens, including those at the bottom of the income ladder.
At the same time that the U.S. revenue mechanism charges higher rates to the wealthy (that is, is more progressive), however
Government spending here is significantly less progressive than it is in Europe. According to the OECD, European countries devote a significant share of their budget to progressive social transfers.
In the United States, on the other hand, only 14 percent of the budget goes to lower-income Americans. That's because much of the budget is spent on the middle class and better-off members of our society -- among other things in the form of Social Security and Medicare payments.
If you can stand the blatant, obvious hackery and ideologizing-uber-alles embedded in such prose, read more here, here, and here.
Over at The Atlantic, Clive Crook, who stresses that he respects Chait, weighs in on the matter thus:
When Chait, with all the authority of a leading light of the intellectual world, says "Rich Americans pay a bigger share of the tax burden because they earn a bigger share of the income, not because the U.S. tax code is more progressive," he is making the same kind of sloppy bias-driven error he falsely accuses de Rugy of making. (I'll refrain from wondering whether he made the mistake deliberately.) According to the OECD, rich Americans bear a bigger share of the tax burden because they earn a bigger share of the income and because the US income tax system is more progressive....
Why, according to the OECD, is the US system so progressive? Not because the rich face unusually high average tax rates, but because middle-income US households face unusually low tax rates--an important point which de Rugy mentions and Chait ignores.
Crook concludes that "on the topic in question, De Rugy is right and Chait is wrong....I'd say he owes de Rugy an apology."
Yeah, well, here's hoping. Indeed, in his latest foray on the subject, Chait brushes aside Crook and writes:
It’s possible that, by pairing my critique of de Rugy’s error (which I would describe as an extremely elementary error) with a broader disparagement of her credentials, I have made it impossible for her to actually concede error. Or possibly she genuinely does not understand the problem here. I’m not sure. My general experience is that the conservative movement is filled with polemicists who repeat very basic statistical fallacies like this, and seem immune to correction regardless of the level of politeness that correction takes. But, she is an individual and deserves the chance to be judged on her own terms.
What a big, big man with a heart as big as all outdoors. I think that Chait is flatly wrong in his analysis in this situation, but even if that weren't the case, his reflexive belligerence and quickness to cry hack, misinformation recirculator, and what have you - along with his grandiosity and sense of being embattled despite a perch at a high-profile establishment outlet - undermines his persuasiveness. I'm not making a plea for civility here; I'm simply observing that people who comport themselves like Chait make it excrutiatingly hard for anyone to agree with them. Even on the rare occasion when they're right.
Which returns us to the question with which this post starts: "Why aren't there more liberals in America?"
Certainly, there's no shortage of big-spending politicians (Democratic and Republican) who see the federal government as an instrument of social and economic transformation, which accords with one contemporary definition of liberal. But if the Harris numbers are even vaguely right that only about one-fifth of Americans are willing to call themselves liberal and Jon Chait is a liberal, then the question pretty much answers itself, doesn't it?
And suggests the next question: Why are there so many conservatives in America?
Buffett Makes Bank on Foreclosure Deal, Not All Catholics Feel Exactly the Same About Obama's Birth Control Concession, Kim Jong-Un Possibly Dead: P.M. Links
Warren Buffett made $154 million off Obama's
foreclosure fraud settlement. - Catholics do not all feel exactly the same about Obama's concession on birth control mandate.
- Kim Jong-Un may have been assassinated, but nobody knows for sure.
- A Sioux Tribe in South Dakota is suing beer manufacturers and sellers for making them alcoholics.
- L.A. school paid alleged teacher-molester $40,000 not to appeal his firing.
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Sheldon Richman on the Debate Over Obama’s Contraceptive Mandate
Controversy rages over the Obama administration’s
proposed (and then modified) mandate that all employers—including
Catholic hospitals and universities—include free contraception in
their employee health insurance policies. Catholic officials object
that since their church forbids contraception, the decree violates
the First Amendment’ s protection of religious freedom. Others have
joined in the protest, prudently anticipating that this violation
of freedom of conscience could spread to other matters and other
faiths. As Sheldon Richman argues, the principle that no one should
be forced to finance that which he or she finds abhorrent is sound.
In fact, it should be generally applied.
Mitt Romney’s Tea Party CPAC Speech
Today Romney spoke before a large and applauding audience at the American Conservative Union’s CPAC 2012. Careful attention to his speech’s underlying themes revealed a core focus on upward economic mobility being the crux of the American Dream. While some speakers focused on societal virtue, foreign policy, and Democrats ruining America, Romney strategically re-weaved many of the same rhetorical phrases used by other CPAC speakers to focus specifically on upward economic mobility. I would argue he did so with good reason.
My research of the Tea Party movement and interviews with dozen of Tea Party leaders across the country have revealed Tea Partiers are most concerned over losing what they like best about America: upward economic mobility. Certainly other issues play a role, but concern that government’s response to the 2008 financial crisis would hinder the American Dream is what fundamentally brought libertarian and conservative Tea Partiers together and drove their mobilization. (I’ve written about this here and here). In speaking to concerns over upward economic mobility and the American Dream, Romney reveals he's done his homework for how to resonate with Tea Party voters.
For instance, he began by talking about how his father was born in Mexico, moved to the U.S. when he was five, and—although he never earned a college degree—went on to own a successful car company and eventually become governor of Michigan. Just one generation later, Mitt Romney attended the country’s top business and law schools and then embarked on a very successful private sector career. He spoke about how he turned around failing business, a troubled 2002 Winter Olympics, and a struggling state. He explained that he believes in the American Dream because he’s lived the American Dream and understands what makes it possible: founding principles that secure peoples’ freedom to “achieve success in their own way, propelling themselves forward.” Because of this, Romney said, “one’s birth is not prohibitive for one’s ability to achieve their dreams.”
Theda Skocpol, writing in a recent Washington Post op-ed, agrees with me to an extent that Mitt Romney is angling himself (maybe successfully) to be a Tea Party candidate. Skocpol writes, “Romney has become the stealth tea party candidate, endorsing the essence of the movement while remaining unburdened by its public label.” Where Skocpol and I disagree is that the essence is less about immigration fears and more about the American Dream of upward economic mobility.
Although Romney is surely not the “Tea Party Candidate” he appears to be taking conscious measures to connect with Tea Party voters, but discreetly enough to continue resonating with non-Tea Party voters as well.
Source: CNN Exit Polls
Montana Supreme Court Ignores Citizens United. Will the U.S. Supreme Court Set It Straight?
Last December the Montana Supreme Court decided to ignore the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United v. F.E.C. and instead allow Montana’s 99-year-old ban on corporate spending in political campaigns to remain on the books. It’s not everyday that you see a state court dodging applicable Supreme Court precedent with such gusto, so it comes as no surprise that the losing side in that decision has now asked the Supreme Court to step in and set things straight. As Lyle Denniston reports at SCOTUSblog:
The application and motion were filed with Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who is the Circuit Justice for the part of the country that includes Montana — the Ninth Circuit. It will be up to Kennedy to decide whether to act alone on the controversy, or to share it with his eight colleagues.
The Montana law at issue — the Corrupt Practices Act enacted by the states’ voters in 1912 — was interpreted by the state court as a flat ban on independent spending of corporations’ internal funds to support or oppose specific candidates for state office (independnet in the sense that the financial effort was not coordinated with a candidate). The measure thus was nearly identical to the ban in federal law that was struck down by the Citizens United ruling....
In suggesting that the full Court reach out and overturn the state decision without delay, the new filing argued that the state court’s “refusal to follow Citizens United” is such an obvious, blatant disregard of its duty to follow this Court’s decision that summary reversal is proper.”
Read the whole story here. Read Reason on Citizens United here.
Chef Geoff Tracy vs DC Speed Cameras
Over a three day period in January, Washington, D.C. celebrity chef Geoff Tracy received three $150 tickets from a single newly installed traffic camera. In an attempt to alert other motorists of the speed trap, Tracy hired a sign spinner for a full week to caution passing drivers. But helping people avoid costly tickets doesn't sit well with at least one fan of D.C.'s $43 million revenue generating traffic cameras .
About 2:25 minutes. Written and produced by Rob Raffety
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Mitt Romney, Super-Duper Conservative
Mitt Romney knows how to sell a client on
his services. He did it countless times as a business consultant
and the head of the private equity firm Bain. Romney’s
business partners have told me that one of Romney’s greatest
strengths was delivering delicate messages to potentially difficult
partners and clients. As his Bain colleage Eric Kriss told The
New York Times in 2007, “Mitt ran a private equity firm, not a
cement company…He was not a businessman in the sense of running a
company. He was a great presenter, a great spokesman, and a great
salesman.”
Today, his job was to sell his conservative credentials to wary activists and attendees at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, D.C. And although he wasn’t great, he was pretty good. His over-capacity main stage speech this afternoon probably didn’t seal the deal with conservatives, but I doubt it scared anyone away: Romney portrayed the coming election as a “fight for America” and said that now is “a time to reaffirm what it means to be conservative.” He insisted on the inherent conservatism of his career and family background, touted selected elements of his record, and made vague promises to cut government spending, and declared his willingness to get rid of ObamaCare—without once mentioning the near-replica health care law he signed as governor of Massachusetts. “I know conservatism,” he said, “because I have lived conservatism.” In other words, he told the audience more or less what it wanted to hear.
Will that be enough? Romney still has the most plausible path to the nomination, but it remains hard to make any prediction with great confidence. A new survey from Public Policy Polling shows that Santorum has taken a lead nationally. Here at CPAC, people started lining for a small-space Santorum meet-and-greet at least two hours early; by the time it was scheduled to start it stretched hundreds deep. Nearly every person in line had skipped Romney’s speech to wait in a long line for a chance to hear Santorum.
Read my cover feature on Romney from Reason's March issue.
Santorum Talks Contraception and Obamacare at CPAC
Washington, D.C. - After being introduced by
SuperPAC benefactor Foster Friess, Republican presidential
candidate Rick Santorum took the podium here surrounded by his
family and delievered a speech that went after both his nearest
rival for the Republican nomination, Mitt Romney, and President
Obama. Santorum, coming off three major-but-delegate-free victories
in Colorado, Minnesota, and Missouri, talked briefly about fiscal
matters, but eventually returned to his bread and butter: social
issues. He really drove things home with his red meat comments
about Obamacare.
"We've seen the president of the United States tell what insurance coverage you should have, how much you are going to pay, how much you will be fined if you don't. He's now telling the Catholic Church that they are forced to pay for things that are against their basic tennants and teachings," Santorum said after comparing Obamacare to the National Health Service of Great Britian.
Santorum excited the crowd but it was not at the rock star level you would expect from somebody with so much momentum at his back. His only standing ovation during the entire speech came when he talked about social issues, in particular the Obama administration's moves on contraception.
"Ladies and gentleman, this is the type of coercion we can expect. It's not about contraception. It's about economic liberty, it's about freedom of speech, it's about freedom of religion, it's about government control of your lives and it's got to stop," he said, bringing the crowd to its feet.
Last night Public Policy Polling tweeted that they have a new poll in the field and it shows Rick Santorum is, again, the front-runner nationally for the Republican nomination.
Mike Riggs on Sheriff Mack, the Oath Keeper Running Against Lamar Smith
The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), authored by
Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) at the behest of Hollywood and the
recording industry, inspired one of the largest and most organic
opposition campaigns in recent memory. Twitter users put "STOP
SOPA" banners on their user avatars; numerous sites—including
Wikipedia, Google, and Reddit—"blacked out" in protest; and
Congress eventually tabled the bill. While Smith bore the brunt of
the backlash, writes Associate Editor Mike Riggs, his primary
opponent, Oath Keeper Richard Mack, has ridden the outrage like a
wave.
Reason Writers at the Movies: Peter Suderman Reviews Safe House
Associate
Editor Peter Suderman reviews the new Denzel Washington action
thriller Safe House in today's Washington Times:
The producers of “Safe House” have done potential viewers exactly one favor: They’ve turned the movie’s title into a hint as to where it’s best viewed — in the safety and comfort of one’s own home.
“Safe House” is the sort of mostly competent but entirely skippable cinematic trifle that’s better enjoyed as a cable-matinee complement to an afternoon nap: You probably won’t be sorry if you see it, but you won’t be missing anything if you don’t.
Those who do venture out of their own domains will be treated to a ho-hum mashup of “Training Day” and the Bourne series that’s not as tough or engaging as either.
Ron Paul Roundup: Ahead to Maine, Back to Nevada, and vs. Obama (in T-Shirt Sales)
Maine has been caucusing for a week now and will announce the results tomorrow. Turnout tends to be very, very low, and Paul was third there in 2008 with 18 percent, one of his best states when it was still a three-way race then.
The Washington Post speculates on yet another defeat for frontrunner Romney:
Neither former House speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) nor former senator Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) has made a play for Maine, meaning that Saturday’s contest will essentially be a battle between Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, and Rep. Ron Paul, the libertarian-leaning Texas congressman whose enthusiastic supporters have made caucus states a focus of their efforts.
In an interview Thursday with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, Paul – who has not held a campaign-trail event since Tuesday night – said that he believes he has a shot at winning in Maine.
“Are you going to win the Maine caucuses Saturday?” Blitzer asked.
”I think we have a chance to do that,” Paul responded. “And I’ll be up there and struggling up to the last minute. But every time I’ve been up there so far, it has been wonderful. And I’m so pleased that they’re very receptive to the ideas of liberty, and I’m cautiously optimistic about Saturday.”....
In 2008, only about 5,500 voters participated in the Maine GOP caucuses -- a turnout of just over 2 percent of the state’s roughly 253,000 registered Republicans.
Paul held six town hall meetings in the state over two days at the end of January. Meanwhile, Romney’s town hall in Portland Friday night will be his first visit to the state this cycle, although he held a tele-town hall and has sent surrogates – including his son, Tagg – to campaign on his behalf....
With 17 days between tomorrow’s caucuses and the next nominating contests in Arizona and Michigan, the caucus results in the Pine Tree State could resonate on the campaign trail well past Saturday night — particularly if Paul ekes out his first-ever win in a nominating contest.
*A Nevadan writes about his caucus experiences with a positive spin, though he believes the campaign overemphasizes phone calling far too much over door-to-door interaction with voters. (I have heard the same from other locals in both Iowa and New Hampshire, that the weeks of advanced phone work aren't as optimal as the Paul campaign's strategy and tactics seem to believe.)
*Good magazine reports on the phenomenon of former Obama folk turning in their grief to Ron Paul. Meantime, Cafe Press notes that for the first time, in the wake of his highly publicized State of the Union address, that Obama merch is now outselling Ron Paul's. In a press release received via email from MBooth communications that I was not able to find online, they note:
CafePress, an e-commerce platform that powers user-designed merchandise, has been tracking 2012 election presidential candidate support via the 2012 Meter graph. With an average of over 137,000 new designs uploaded every week, it’s no surprise many of them are political in nature.... The Meter graphs track merchandise sales trends for each presidential candidate and, through such trends, successfully predicted Barack Obama’s victory in 2008......
Since The Meter poll launched in November, Ron Paul has held the top spot in product sales (e.g., t-shirts, etc.) each week in a commanding fashion—a testament to his loyal supporters, as they’ve been able to counter surges from the rest of the Republican field, as well as the incumbent, President Barack Obama...
However, since Obama’s SOTU speech, Paul has fallen to 2nd place for the first time ever, demonstrating a sudden and significant surge in Obama support. Last week, Obama edged out Paul 46% to 33% and now, this week, we see that Paul is still runner-up. His numbers rose slightly, from 33% to 36%, but so did Obama’s—from 46% to 47%...
In total, Paul still dominates Obama 57 to 27 in the Cafepress T-Shirt metric.
Reason's Paul archives. My forthcoming book, Ron Paul's Revolution.
Steven Greenhut on Making State Officials More Accountable in California
One of the most frustrating things about
California, writes Steven Greenhut, is seeing how every serious
public policy issue is driven by what’s best for government
employees, not what’s best for the public. Thankfully, Greenhut
reports, one California judge is introducing a new level of
transparency that will bring some much-needed scrutiny to
government officials working in the children and family services
system.
15 Tons and What Do You Get?
This week Mexican
drug warriors are bragging about a record seizure of
methamphetamine. The New York Times
describes it as "15 tons, found in pure powder form at a ranch
outside Guadalajara." That supposedly amounts to "13 million doses
worth $4 billion—more than double the size of all meth seizures at
the Mexican border in 2011." Progress? Not really:
While the authorities proudly showed off the seizure to local reporters, the sheer size of the find set off alarm among experts and officials from the United States and the United Nations. It was a sign, they said, of just how organized, efficient at manufacturing and brazen Mexico’s traffickers had become even after expanded efforts to dismantle their industry.
"The big thing it shows is the sheer capacity that these superlabs have in Mexico," said Rusty Payne, a spokesman for the Drug Enforcement Administration. "When we see one lab with the capability to produce such a mass tonnage of meth, it begs a question: What else is out there?”...
"It's important to keep the seizure in perspective," said Eric Olson, a security expert at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. "It's huge. Eye-popping. But seizures, even huge ones, don’t generally change the demand for the drug in the long run. If a seizure of this magnitude raises the street price, consumption may go down for a time, but it is only a matter of time until the market adjusts and the supply comes back up."
Those Mexican superlabs got a boost from the U.S. government's restrictions on retail sales of cold and allergy medications containing pseudoephedrine, a meth precursor. That policy inconvenienced people with colds and allergies, hurt domestic mom-and-pop labs, shipped meth jobs across the border, and encouraged a shift to a more dangerous production method here in the U.S. But it had no discernible impact on meth consumption. According to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, meth use by Americans 12 or older has been flat or falling since 2002, with the exception of a spike in 2006, the year the federal restrictions took effect. Numbers for high school seniors from the Monitoring the Future Study show a similar pattern, but with no uptick in 2006. Yet back in 2008 Bush administration drug czar John Walters was claiming (per A.P.'s paraphrase) that "laws restricting the sale of cold medicines containing pseudoephedrine...and efforts to thwart drug trafficking from Mexico have disrupted the market for meth."
No matter. Ever-bigger seizures, indicating utter failure, only mean drug warriors must redouble their efforts.
Contraception Coverage and the Stupid "War On Religion" Redux
My colleague Nick Gillespie
made the
excellent point two days ago that if health insurance coverage
were de-linked from government funding and mandates, then the
current "war on religion" nonsense that some politicians are
peddling with regard to the requirement that organizations run by
the Roman Catholic Church buy health insurance the covers
contraceptives would never have occurred. People could use their
own money or (as Nick suggested) vouchers to buy whatever kind of
health insurance they wanted.
One more issue: health insurance is just a form of compensation offered by an employer. It's not the employer's money; it belongs to the employees. Since that is so, why should the employer's views on the morality of health insurance coverage trump that of their employees?
University of Pennsylvania bioethicist Art Caplan has posed an interesting hypothetical in his latest MSNBC column:
Imagine that the Governing Body of Jehovah's Witnesses, which is based in Brooklyn, NY, creates a printing company that happily employs people from many faiths and cultural backgrounds. The company’s sole task is to print all the Witness literature that its followers distribute door-to-door all over the world. That literature clearly states the Jehovah’s Witnesses adamant opposition to blood transfusion. Then the federal government then issues a national set of minimal standards which all companies operating as public entities must provide as part of the health insurance coverage they offer.
The Governing Body is outraged because on that list are blood transfusions. They issue a statement accusing the President of trying to crush religious liberty by forcing their printing company, which employs many non-Jehovah’s witnesses, to cover transfusions.
In that instance, would politicians be rushing to slam the health care plan on the basis of religious freedom? Would anyone in the media be sympathetic if the entire leadership of the Jehovah’s Witnesses said they would not budge an inch in including coverage of blood transfusions at their printing company no matter what government, doctors or even their own employees believe that ought to have covered? I doubt it.
And yet, this is exactly the reaction that has greeted the pronouncement by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops that they feel persecuted by the inclusion of birth control in the list of covered benefits that they need to provide when they operate institutions in the public arena.
Get employers out of the business of buying health insurance and the whole stupid issue goes away. But as far as I know none of the members of the Roman Catholic hierarchy nor any of the grandstanding politicians on either side is making that sensible suggestion.
Massachusetts Licensing Board Punishes Embalmer for Keeping It Real
Unless things have changed
dramatically since the last time I attended an open-casket funeral,
the process for preparing a body for burial still involves
injecting a corpse with preservatives, draping it in an ill-fitting
suit or dress, and smearing its face with clown makeup. Which is to
say, whatever dignity there is in being dead is still derived
solely from the imaginations of the living.
If you have ever seen a body that’s been cold for more than a day, you probably know this. (If you haven’t, I both envy you and advise you to find a less visceral way to pay respects to your deceased Pep Pep.)
In Massachusetts, acknowledging the reality of death is apparently a no-no, at least for embalmers. Troy Schoeller, frontman for punk band Razors in the Night and a licensed embalmer, got real on the topic with the Boston Phoenix, telling the alternative weekly that he does not enjoy embalming fat people and that a dead baby is like a "bearskin rug.”
God love Schoeller for inhaling the stink of mortality on a daily basis, and for his honesty. Unfortunately no one will ever have to pretend to like his handiwork ever again, as the Massachusetts board that gives licenses to embalmers has revoked Schoeller’s:
After his comments were published in The Boston Phoenix, the state board that licenses funeral directors and embalmers revoked his license. Now Schoeller is challenging that punishment before the highest court in Massachusetts, arguing the revocation violates his constitutional right to free speech.
"I didn't lie about anything," he said. "I didn't say anything that was wrong."
Schoeller argues that state regulators chose to enforce a vague and overly broad provision of the code of conduct that prohibits funeral directors and embalmers from commenting on the condition of a body entrusted to their care.
Funeral directors and embalmers routinely talk about their work in trade journals and other publications to inform a curious public, and the provision should not be interpreted as barring them from ever talking publicly about what they do, said his lawyer, Jason Benzaken. Schoeller is the first embalmer in Massachusetts to be disciplined on those grounds, the lawyer said.
Schoeller's statements were truthful, did not disclose confidential information and pertained to a matter of "legitimate public concern," and were therefore protected by the First Amendment and the state constitution, Benzaken said.
"People are interested in it; people have a right to know what happens to their deceased family members when they are brought into a funeral home," he said.
But the state Board of Registration of Funeral Directors and Embalmers found that Schoeller violated the code of conduct by talking about bodies in his care in an "unprofessional" manner.
"Sensitivity, dignity, respect are at the very heart of this profession," Assistant Attorney General Sookyoung Shin said.
The dignity claim is a lark. Shortly after the soul evacuates the body, shit and urine follow. Rigor mortis sets in, blood pools in the ass, and the flesh turns sheet white. These are not secrets. That dead bodies are less pleasant to look at than live ones is not a secret either. Surely the same imaginative powers that allow us to see remnants of joy in a powdered and waxy visage can provide folks who don’t work in the embalming business with a sense of how unpleasant it might be to inject a corpulent husk with formaldehyde; of the psychological distance required to handle a dead infant.
If the funeral home that employs Schoeller canned him after reading the Phoenix story, that would have been unfortunate for Schoeller (these are hard times we’re living in!), but perfectly acceptable. It would also be perfectly acceptable for Boston families to rebuke Schoeller by taking their dead loved ones to a different mortuary.
Not only is this an obvious First Amendment violation, it's a perfect example of mission creep in occupational licensing regulations. If there's a role for the government in the embalming business (and I'm not sure there is), it's (perhaps) overseeing the use of chemicals, protecting records, and responding to allegations of necrophilia and the like. Policing the speech of embalmers is a ridiculous overreach.
Can You Pass the Beverly Hillbillies Test? Virginia Postrel on Charles Murray
Charles
Murray has a new book out:
Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010. I
haven't read the whole thing yet, but it's very much of an update
of basic themes in The Bell Curve (read
Reason's review by future Nobel Prize-winner James J.
Heckman). For a taste of Coming Apart, read Murray's
recent Wall Street Journal piece.
Former Reason editor Virginia Postrel writes up Murray's latest in her Bloomberg column. Anything she writes is worth a read, especially when it relates to how elites interface with the hoi polloi. At the heart of Murray's take is the belief that America's "new upper class" is pulling away from the rest of the culture (a theme that pervades The Bell Curve as well). Postrel argues that the notion that elites are somehow more alienated from the masses than they used to be is wrong.
Snippets:
“Instead of feeling sorry for the exceptionally able student who has no one to talk to,” Murray writes, “we need to worry about what happens when exceptionally able students hang out only with one another.”
As someone known for writing defenses of chain stores and explaining Plano, Texas, to puzzled pundits, I agree that way too many smart people, particularly on the coasts, are quick to condemn middle-American culture without understanding why people value one or another aspect of it. But they were even worse in 1963.
That’s the second problem with Murray’s fable: The cultural consensus was not just an illusion. It was an unhealthy one. Instead of promoting understanding, it fed contempt.
One piece of evidence is right on page 2 of the book: “The Beverly Hillbillies,” the highest-rated TV show the week Kennedy was killed. As Murray points out, nearly a third of American households watched it on CBS every week -- astounding numbers by today’s standards. “The Beverly Hillbillies” was not just popular. It was, by most measures, the biggest hit in sitcom history. By its fourth week on the air, it had knocked Lucille Ball out of her top spot, and it only fell from the top 10 in its ninth and final season. It even saved “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” a flop in its original slot, by providing a big lead-in audience in an era when it was hard to change the channel. In a true consensus culture, everyone would have loved it....
With five decades’ distance it’s clear that books as seemingly different as “The Organization Man,” “The Lonely Crowd,” “The Feminine Mystique” and “Atlas Shrugged” were really all about the same thing: the alienation and discomfort of gifted, independent-minded individuals in a society in which the “normal” ruled. The “cognitive elite” felt left out of or oppressed by the country’s culture and, as a result, scorned it.
Now these people have one another. “People like to be around other people who understand them and to whom they can talk,” Murray writes. “Cognitive segregation was bound to start developing as soon as unusually smart people began to have the opportunity to hang out with other unusually smart people.” If you care about happiness, that seems like a good thing.
Interestingly, when smart people feel less alienated, they seem to buy different sorts of books. Instead of condemning American society for not honoring the author’s personality or tastes, the new bestsellers explore the mysteries of human behavior. Think of Malcolm Gladwell’s various books or Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking, Fast and Slow.” Perhaps once you accept that people really are different -- that nobody’s normal and, at least when it comes to food or entertainment or vacations, there’s no one best way to live -- you can, paradoxically enough, start to think about the commonalities known as human nature.
The title of Postrel's piece comes from a quiz that Murray includes in the book (take it here). The goal of the quiz is to ascertain just how thick your "bubble" is - how hived off from mass culture you are. It's worth taking, especially if you fancy yourself either close to the masses or oh-so-alienated from them.
As something of a public service, I include below a full episode of The Beverly Hillbillies. It's the one where Granny mistakes an escaped kangaroo for a giant-sized jackrabbit. I read somewhere that when it aired, it became the highest-rated episode of TV (discounting specials, finales, etc) for many years. Certainly it showcases that The Beverly Hillbillies was a pretty smart and funny show, Newton Minow be damned.
Tribe Sues Beer Companies for Supplying Too Much Beer
Yesterday the Oglala Sioux
Tribe of South Dakota
sued five big beer companies—Anheuser-Busch InBev, SAB
Miller, Molson Coors , MillerCoors, and Pabst—for making crappy
beer. Just kidding. The tribe actually blames the brewers for
making too much beer, enough to supply Oglala
Sioux on the officially dry Pine Ridge Reservation. The lawsuit,
which was filed in the U.S. District Court of Nebraska, also names
four beer stores in Whiteclay, a tiny Nebraska town near the
reservation where nearly 5 million cans of beer were sold in 2010.
"You cannot sell 4.9 million 12-ounce cans of beer," says the
tribe's attorney, "and wash your hands like Pontius Pilate, and
say, 'We've got nothing to do with it being smuggled.'"
If you think the tribe's demands that people outside the reservation help enforce its ban on alcohol are unreasonable, consider how the U.S. treats "source countries" that provide the illegal drugs Americans want. Its efforts to destroy and intercept those drugs go well beyond filing lawsuits. If the Oglala Sioux had the resources to wage a War on Alcohol that involved bombing breweries and raiding liquor stores, on what moral grounds could the U.S. government object?
A. Barton Hinkle on the State College Ripoff
“You can observe a lot just by watching,” said
Yogi Berra. A national group has been watching Virginia’s colleges
and universities, and much that it has observed is not flattering.
Grumpy old skinflints and youthful Occupy protesters alike should
take note. A new report by ACTA, the American Council of
Trustees and Alumni, notes research indicating nearly half of all
college students make no learning gains in their first two years,
and 36 percent show no significant intellectual growth even after
four years. Yet, writes A. Barton Hinkle, GPAs have been trending
upward.
Saudi Writer Could Be Executed for Blasphemous Tweets
After tweeting about the Prophet Muhammad, 23-year old Saudi writer Hamza Kashgari could face the death penalty for blasphemy. His tweets ignited a firestorm of controversy in Saudi Arabia, leading to over 30,000 tweets in less than 24 hours. In response, Kashgari lost his job as a columnist for the Jeddah-based al-Bilad, while the Saudi Information Minister has censored reprinting and carrying Kashgari's writings. Meanwhile, Saudi Sheikh Nasser al Omar pulled a Ed Muskie as he asked the Saudi King Abdullah to execute Kashgari for his "apostasy."
Al-Jazeera has translated a few of Kashgari's tweets:
On your birthday I find you in front of me wherever I go, I love many things about you and hate others, and there are many things about you I don't understand.
On your birthday I won't bow in front of you, I won't kiss your hand. Instead, I will shake it as an equal, I will smile at you and you will smile back and I will talk to you as a friend, no more.
All the great gods that we worship, all the great fears that we dread, all the desires that we wait for impatiently are but figments of our imagination.No Saudi women will go to hell, because it's impossible to go there twice.
Kashgari has since deleted the tweets and has recanted:
I deleted my previous tweets because after I consulted with a few brothers, I realized that they may have been offensive to the Prophet (PBUH) and I don't want anyone to misunderstand.
I swear to God, I wrote what I wrote because I love the Prophet, but I made a mistake and I hope that God forgives me and all those who were insulted forgive me as well.
After receiving death threats and finding his home address leaked to the public, Kashgari fled the country and sought asylum. However, he was just arrested in Malaysia. His extradition is currently being coordinated with the Saudi government. If he returns to Saudi Arabia, the Islamic Fatwa Committee is calling for Kashgari to be punished in accordance with Sharia law, which could be execution.
Reason on Islam and censorship. Human Rights First on blasphemy laws worldwide.
America's Unsung Industrial Might; Or, Take a Half-Bow, Bob Dylan!
For a while now, John Merline at Investors Business Daily has been putting out always-interesting charts and data.
His latest is over there on the right. Despite claims by politicians ranging from Barack Obama to Rick Santorum that U.S. manufacturing is dead and buried, Merline shows that sector is alive and kicking.
"By all relevant measures of economic performance — growth in profits, output gains, employment growth, and unemployment rates — American manufacturing remains the shining star of the U.S. economy," said Mark Perry, an economist at the University of Michigan and a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, who closely tracks this industry.
Others have noted that, even without Obama's tax code inducements, manufacturers are starting to bring some jobs back from overseas, known as "on-shoring."
And while Santorum is right that fewer people work in manufacturing — the industry lost more than 7 million jobs since its peak in 1979 — and the industry accounts for less of the nation's GDP than it once did (less than 13% today compared with nearly 25% in 1970) — these aren't necessarily bad indicators.
Indeed, for those of us who have worked in factories, it most certainly is not a bad thing that fewer of us work in such places. A lot of industrial work is necessary and not awful, but getting off an assembly line is rarely a bad thing. Even in terms of wages. As this Cafe Hayek post from a couple of years back notes, service-sector jobs, which typically have easier conditions, also typically pay better.
It's always the right time to listen to Bob Dylan's incredibly non-prescient "Union Sundown" which proclaimed circa 1983,
Well, you know, lots of people complainin' that there is no work.
I say, "Why you say that for
When nothin' you got is U.S.-made?"
(click to listen)
If the Maestro was as wrong about American manufacturing as he was about the spelling of John Wesley Hardin, he was dead-on in another fevered premonition from "Union Sundown":
They used to grow food in Kansas
Now they want to grow it on the moon and eat it raw.
I can see the day coming when even your home garden
Is gonna be against the law.
Reason's Nanny of the Month for September 2010 covered the travails of a DeKalb, Georgia man who got busted for growing...vegetables.
A.M. Links: Banks to Resume Foreclosing, Congress Critter Bachus Under Investigation for Insider Trading, Romney Downplays Losses to Santorum
With a foreclosure fraud settlement all but done,
U.S. banks will
resume foreclosing on delinquent properties.- The chair of the House Financial Services Committee is under investigation for insider trading.
- Mitt Romney is only mildly worried about Rick Santorum.
- White House to water down birth control mandate.
- Rand Paul gave a rousing speech at CPAC yesterday.
- The LAPD has a "war room." Because, says Chief Charlie Beck, "We are targets on our own soil."
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New at Reason.tv: "Halftime in America: Remy Chrysler Ad Parody"
Take a Look at Frontline's Nuclear Afterschocks
I meant to blog this when it first aired in January (go here for Frontline's page). It's an interesting documentary about the Fukushima, Japan nuclear plant wipeout and what lessons might be drawn for a U.S. audience.
From a Boing Boing review of the documentary:
[We] need a better grid that can store electricity for later or transport it far more efficiently than is currently possible. Until we get that, we'll need to rely on some source of power that is completely controllable, that can produce exactly as much electricity as we need. No more. No less. There are four options for that: Coal, natural gas, hydro, and nuclear power. Hydroelectric power can't operate everywhere. And the other three all come with serious risks, to local health and to the planet**.
Yet we will still need them for decades to come. So how do we decide which risks we're willing to live with? The only way to do that is to set aside reactionary fear and anger and start having conversations that account for all the risks in an honest way. We have to talk about mitigating risks as best we can—because, as Nuclear Aftershocks points out, we aren't currently doing that in relation to nuclear power, at least not consistently. We have to prioritize our fears. And we have to recognize that, for right now, there is no such thing as a right decision. No such thing as eliminating risk. No matter what we choose, someone will get hurt.
HT: Boing Boing's Xeni (who didn't write the review quoted above).
Could Ron Paul Win Maine?
Washington, D.C. – Before trekking down
to CPAC I asked Ron Paul's national campaign chair why the Texas
congressman was skipping out on a convention that the other
candidates are attending. His quick one sentence response:
Too much campaigning to do across the country.
Paul's absence is notable at this CPAC because in previous years he has packed the place with supporters to assure that he would win the meaningless straw poll, often paying their way. His campaign website calendar does not list any events through Sunday but in a follow up email Benton said that Paul will be in Maine this weekend.
Meanwhile, in Vacationland, speculation is running rampant that Paul could win the caucuses on Saturday. In 2008 Paul finished third in Maine, just three points behind eventual nominee John McCain. Romney won Maine with 52% of the vote. Paul won the northernmost county, Arostook.
If Paul wins Maine it will validate his caucus strategy and likely lead to a surge in campaign donations. It does not mean that Paul is suddenly a serious contender for the GOP nomination as Paul has styled his run more as a movement-building campaign. It would be Paul's first time winning a state in any of his presidential runs.
While a Paul victory brings him closer to his goal of having some serious leverage at the nominating convention in Tampa, it also helps his rivals Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich by creating another problem for Romney. On paper Maine is a state that Romney should win easily and not have to campaign or spend resources in. Paul's strong grassroots operation has forced him to campaign there when he could be spending time and money in states where his support, historically, is not as strong.
Chip Bok on Obama's Super Pac
When it comes to groups with "super" in their
name, Obama only likes to listen to the one that ends in PAC, jokes
Chip Bok.
"America deserves a choice."
Here's a snippet of what GOP House Budget
Committee Chairman Paul Ryan said in tonight's big speech at the
Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington. Via
the Washington Examiner:
Everybody knows this is politically risky territory. Republicans have their battle scars on entitlement reform. That’s why some argue that we should downplay bold agendas and simply wage a campaign focused solely on the President and his party.
I firmly disagree. Boldness and clarity offer the greatest opportunity to create a winning coalition. We will not only win the next election – we have a unique opportunity to sweep and remake the political landscape.
Of course we will highlight the President’s failed agenda. But Americans deserve to choose an alternative agenda – one that aligns with our needs. One we can rally behind.
...My friends, America deserves a choice – and if it is an honest choice between these two visions, well, then we win, they lose.
Yes, the challenge before us is daunting. The President and his allies will do all in their power to try to make our philosophy of freedom seem radical.
But I believe the President and his party’s leaders are profoundly mistaken.
They are growing increasingly isolated from the American mainstream. They just don’t understand that Americans are seeking political leaders whose solutions are reassuring precisely because they are bold.
The President’s partisans are underestimating the ability of Americans to do basic math. They don’t realize that the sheer magnitude of our challenges has shifted the center of gravity under their feet, putting them at a disadvantage. The history of our own movement shows that we can win these fights – if we are willing to fight them.
As constitutional conservatives, let’s offer Americans the choice they deserve. This is the moment we were made for. It is time to prove that the Founders got it right, both for centuries past and for centuries to come.
Let’s contrast the President’s path to decline with our own path that lifts the debt, promotes prosperity, and restores the greatness of the American Idea.
Ryan has been delivering similar messages—be specific, be bold, take risks—for a while. But it's hard to avoid seeing this speech as a challenge, and perhaps a warning, to all of the potential Republican presidential nominees, and to Mitt Romney in particular.
Read my 2010 feature, "Paul Ryan: Radical or Sellout?"
The Second Amendment Cases the Supreme Court Doesn't Want to Hear
The Supreme Court late last month declined petition to take up more Second Amendment cases. A news release I received today from the Michel and Associates law firm (that does not seem available yet on its web site dedicated to gun law) explains what was at stake. It also discusses other Second Amendment cases that people have tried, and failed, to take all the way to the Supreme Court since 2008's Heller case created a brand-new landscape for weapons possesion law:
On January 17, 2012, the Supreme Court of the United States declined to accept and review People v. Delacy...
In his Petition for a Writ of Certiorari, lawyers for Mr. Delacy asked the Supreme Court to decide whether language from its 2008 opinion, District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008), concerning "presumptively lawful" restrictions on the right to keep and bear arms allowed courts to simply hold restrictions on the Second Amendment rights of those with certain misdemeanor convictions constitutional without applying any level of heightened judicial scrutiny. The Delacy case also touched on what level of judicial scrutiny should apply to an Equal Protection challenge asserting the government is creating discriminatory classifications that deprive those so classified of their Second Amendment rights.
Even though the Supreme Court requested a response to the Delacy petition from the government in October 2011. Delacy ended up being another in a line of recent Second Amendment-related cases which the Supreme Court declined to accept for review.
Certiorari was also denied on the same day as Delacy in Lowery v. United States....The Lowery case sought review of whether the right to keep and bear arms as set forth in Heller applied retroactively to a person convicted of possessing a handgun in his home in violation of the very restriction struck down as unconstitutional in Heller.
Other Second Amendment-related cases recently denied review by the Supreme Court include Williams v. State (Maryland), U.S. v. Masciandaro, and Winters v. Willis.
Williams v. State (Maryland)....asked the Supreme Court to decide whether the Second Amendment protects a right to carry or transport a registered handgun outside the home. Mr. Williams was appealing his conviction for possessing a handgun in public without the required state permit allowing him to do so.
United States v. Masciandaro...involved a man convicted of violating the federal prohibition on carrying or possessing a loaded weapon in vehicles in National Parks after he was found asleep in his vehicle with a loaded handgun in a national park. He sought review from the Supreme Court of whether that prohibition violates the Second Amendment right to bear arms; asking the high court, like the petitioner in Williams, whether the right extends beyond the home.
Willis v. Winters....involved a group of Oregon sheriffs asking the Supreme Court to clarify whether they could disregard an Oregon State Supreme Court decision requiring them to issue licenses to carry firearms to medical marijuana patients, which would arguably make them violate federal law. One question that potentially would have had to be resolved – as with several other cases seeking review from the Supreme Court – was whether there is a right to carry firearms outside the home for self-defense. Willis also could have potentially had a wide-reaching effect regarding who is considered an unlawful user of or addicted to a controlled substance (a disqualifier for firearm possession under federal law).
While you might think these decisions on the Court's part to not hear these Second Amendment cases means it's reluctant to reconsider the Amendment at all, that's not quite right:
Despite the of certiorari denials in all the aforementioned Second Amendment cases, the fact that the Supreme Court has been requesting responses in these cases shows the Justices are paying unusually close attention to the Second Amendment issue. Of the roughly 8,000 petitions for review filed with the Supreme Court every year, only in a few hundred cases does the Court request a response from the opposing party. When the Court requests a response brief, it is a strong sign that the Court is interested in hearing argument in that case. And, such a request increases the probability that the Court will grant oral argument by roughly 9 times, from 0.9% to 8.6%....
The fact that the Supreme Court requested a response in all these cases suggests the Court is interested in further clarifying the scope of Second Amendment rights after Heller and McDonald v. City of Chicago...but is searching for the right case vehicle to do so.
The Court has two cases awaiting its consideration that might finally mark the return of the Second Amendment to the Supreme Court since McDonald:
Perhaps one of the two remaining Second Amendment cases pending before the Court that we are aware of (United States v. Portillo-Munoz, 643 F.3d 437 (5th Cir. 2011), petition for cert. filed, No. 11-7200 (Nov. 2, 2011) (a challenge to federal law prohibiting gun possession by illegal aliens) or United States v. Booker, 644 F.3d 12 (1st Cir. 2011), petition for cert. filed, No. 11-6765 (Oct. 3, 2011) (a challenge to federal law prohibiting gun possession by persons convicted of domestic violence)) will become the case that settles some of the issues that remain outstanding in the wake of the Heller ruling.
Indeed, Heller and McDonald raise so many questions about the reach of and proper standard of review of laws that infringe on the Second Amendment that a revisit is certainly in order, and I hope one happens soon, and the right way. I've written about the newly wide-open field of Second Amendment law here and here (this latter specifically mentions Willis v. Winters, and another burgeoning case in federal court about whether medical pot card holders can be denied Second Amendment rights, Wilson v. Holder).
An interview by me with Heller and McDonald lawyer Alan Gura on the immediate post-Heller shape of Second Amendment law.
Reason's gun archives.
I wrote a book about the Heller case, Gun Control on Trial.
Damon Root from last week on why the Second Amendment does too protect us from states and localities.
Dating at CPAC
Washington, D.C.
- Are you young, single, and conservative? Are you
uncomfortable around women? Do you struggle when asking members of
the liberal media out on a date? If you answered yes to any of
these questions and you skipped the conservative dating seminar at
CPAC you probably missed out on some of the most important advice
you will ever receive. Ok, not really. But you still missed an
entertaining time.
Wayne Elise, founder of Charisma Arts “a company devoted to helping people become more charismatic though fun online content and in-person instruction,” gave attendees an overview on how to approach and deal with members of the opposite sex. He briefly performed what seemed like a comedy routine before he explained to people not only how to act on a date, but how to get a date with an attractive member of the opposite sex.
"Rick Santorum, isn't he the handsomest man running for president now? Isn't that how it goes? The best looking guy wins?” he asked.
He continued talking about the attractiveness of the candidates before a young woman chimes in.
"Mitt Romney's sons."
"Can we talk to security and get Mitt Romney's sons in here? I am sure that guy can, he looks important."
"They are all married," replies the woman, sounding disappointed
Then there was an awkward silence before he moved on with his routine.
The hour long presentation was heavy on political references but it could have worked with any audience. The former juggler and street performer encouraged people to just “be themselves” on dates.
“When you’re on a date, instead of trying to impress your date, make her feel more comfortable. That means you can make fun of yourself,” he said.
Elise encouraged those present to be more assertive with others but not to the point where you scare them off. “You don’t have to be a pick up artist. When you’re at a bar don’t go talk to the hot girl immediately,” he said
It was an event that, at first glance, looked as if was designed to distract members of the press from covering Rick Perry’s speech rather than help awkward conservative singles. During the question and answer session most of the questions asked were by media rather than participants.
In this video a member of the British press asks Elise why dating for conservatives is dating for others. Elise said conservatives tend to be too stiff and referenced how he had a good time at a party with a socialist. He then talks about what would be a good date for a couple. One of the attendees at the event suggests going to a gun club.
Fox Business Network Cancels Judge Andrew Napolitano's Freedom Watch
Bad news, freedom
fighters! Judge Andrew Napolitano's Freedom
Watch, the best damned daily libertarian news &
argument show in the history of television (name a better one!),
has gotten the axe from Fox Business Network. From the
press release:
FOX Business Network (FBN) will debut a new primetime schedule featuring encore presentations of the channel's top post-market programs, announced Kevin Magee, Executive Vice President of the network. Starting February 20th at 8 PM/ET, viewers will find additional airings of The Willis Report (5PM & 8PM/ET), Cavuto (6PM & 9PM/ET) and Lou Dobbs Tonight (7PM & 10PM/ET). The new lineup will replace FreedomWatch with Judge Andrew Napolitano, Power & Money with David Asman and Follow the Money with Eric Bolling. [...]
In making the announcement Magee said, "Neil Cavuto, Lou Dobbs and Gerri Willis are the most trusted names in business news and this new lineup affords FOX Business viewers additional access to their no-nonsense take on the day's financial events. We look forward to Judge Napolitano, David and Eric continuing to make significant contributions to both FOX Business and FOX News. In addition to daily branded segments, each of them will be showcased throughout future programming on both networks."
Currently one of the leading judicial analysts on television, Judge Napolitano will continue his role on both FOX Business and FOX News, providing key legal insights surrounding the growing intersection between Washington and Wall Street. [...] Stossel, hosted by John Stossel, will continue Thursdays at 10PM/ET.
Well, boo (except for that last sentence).
Freedom Watch was a great friend to Reason, of course, but more importantly to anyone worried about the size and growth of government in all aspects of our lives. And despite (or maybe because of?) the show's stronger-than-usual ideological/philosophical content, the judge knew (and knows!) how to run a perfectly respectful debate with people who disagree strongly with him, which is a rarity in the cable world. Television needs more spaces like that.
Read Judge Napolitano's cover story in the January 2012 issue of Reason. Here's Nick Gillespie interviewing the judge in November:
And here's the judge speaking at a Reason event in 2007:
Kurt Loder on In Darkness and Safe House
In Darkness, Poland’s submission for this
year’s Best Foreign Film Oscar, is a movie that drives home the
abomination of the Holocaust in a freshly chilling way, based on
true events as recalled by survivors in a 1991 book. Safe
House, on the other hand, is a faux Bourne movie,
starring Denzel Washington as the ace CIA operative condemned as a
rogue and now hunted by the Company throughout colorful foreign
locations. Kurt Loder reviews them both.
Catholic TV Network Sues Obama Administration, FBI Releases File on Steve Jobs, Santorum Shoots to the Top of a Poll: P.M. Links
Global Catholic Network files
suit against the Obama administration over
contraception rule. - FBI releases its file on Steve Jobs.
- Poll: New Yorkers love NYPD Chief Ray Kelly, despite his organization's mounting problems.
- Poll: Santorum has it all over Gingrich.
- U.S. and Pakistan are murder-droning together.
- Stocks close high!
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More Upsides to Zero Privacy: GPS Tracking for Cheaper Insurance
A couple of weeks ago, Senior Editor Jacob Sullum
explained "How
GPS Tracking Threatens Privacy":
The case decided [by the Supreme Count] this week involved Antoine Jones, a Washington, D.C., nightclub owner who was convicted of cocaine trafficking in 2008 and sentenced to life in prison based largely on information that investigators obtained by surreptitiously attaching a GPS tracking device to his Jeep Grand Cherokee. All nine justices agreed that a warrant was constitutionally required for this surveillance.
But what about situations where users give permission to slap a GPS on thier cars to monitor their driving habits in exchange for cheaper insurance?
Welcome to installment #4,762 of the Upsides of Zero Privacy series.
The service would provide users with cheaper quotes, but prices could be pushed up if driver logs show recklessness or dangerous driving....
Drivers on the scheme will be given a TomTom PRO 3100 as part of the package, and the device will include Active Driver Feedback and LIVE Services to warn drivers when they were cornering too sharply or braking too hard.
The TomTom will also have a LINK tracking unit fitted in their vehicles, allowing driver behaviour and habits to be monitored.
This particular deal is taking place in the U.K., where group profiling to set insurance prices—charging more for men than women, for instance—is now verboten. (Similar developments are underway in the U.S.)
Via
BoingBoing
"This is a sad case of the South Korean authorities’ complete failure to understand sarcasm.“
South Korea is significantly less awful
than North Korea— though what country or thing isn't?
— but it can't be all giving money to escaped North Korean
refugees and
helping them resettle; in their efforts to be the superior
Korea, South Korea is overcompensating.
In early February, 24-year-old Socialist Party member and South Korean Park Jeonggeun was charged under his country's 1948 National Security Law which criminalizes any glorification of North Korea. Pro-North Korea sites are also blocked in the South.
One of his crimes? He retweeted "Long Live Kim-Jong Il" from the official North Korean twitter account. He also doctored photos of North Korean soldiers when he "replaced a smiling North Korean soldier’s face with a downcast version of my own face and the soldier’s weapon with a bottle of whisky.” Jeonggeun is a member of a party which opposes North Korea (it takes extra effort to spin slavery and gulags into worker solidarity, in spite of the dire associates that "socialist party" brings up.) He pleads that his retweets and other forms of expression were just mocking his cousins to the North. But he also is making the argument that he has the right to do this; “Even though I disagree with North Korean communism, I'm interested in North Korean culture and have a right to know about it," he said.
Jeonggeun faces up to seven years in prison for his crimes. Amnesty International have taken up his case and their Asia-Pacific director summed it up, “This is not a national security case, it’s a sad case of the South Korean authorities’ complete failure to understand sarcasm."
South Korea has stepped up enforcement of the NSL in recent years. According to Amnesty, there were a rash of tortures and forced confessions over the law in the '70s and '80s when South Korea's military ruled; today it's often used to squish people who are not keen on every single aspect of South Korean policy toward the North; the BBC says prosecutions under the law "tripled under the current administration."
Of course it's not all oppression in response to satire or honest questioning of foreign policy. Sometimes it's oppression in response to this guy who is accused of building a shrine to sincerely honor Kim Jong-Il.
Reason on North Korea
Peter Suderman on the Constitutionality of ObamaCare's Medicaid Expansion
When the Supreme Court hears the state challenge to ObamaCare later this year, most of the attention will likely be on the challenge to the law’s individual mandate to purchase health insurance and its implications for the Constitution’s Commerce Clause. But, writes Associate Editor Peter Suderman, in a somewhat unexpected move, the Supreme Court has decided to allow for a full hour of oral argument regarding another part of the case: the expansion of Medicaid, the joint federal-state health program for the poor and disabled, which is expected to account for half of the law’s health coverage expansion.
Rick Perry At CPAC: Running For President Was a "Great Experience"
Washington, D.C. – Former Republican presidential candidate and current Texas Governor Rick Perry took some questions from the Bloggers Lounge at CPAC today. Perry, a one-time frontrunner, addressed issues ranging from the Keystone pipeline to helping Republicans get elected in the fall.
“I’m going to be working all across this country asking men and women who are running for Congress or are in Congress to sign on to a Tenth Amendment effort, that they’re going to devolve power out of Washington, D.C., give this back to the states, and allow the states to be the deciders on a huge number of issues,” he said when asked about his efforts to influence the 2012 campaign.
“You have an administration that has taken the most sweeping steps to impede states rights from the standpoint of our environmental issues. There are about ten or eleven rules coming out of the EPA that are not the EPA’s business,” he said.
When asked about what he would have done differently during his presidential run he said, “Oh yeah I would have probably have do a lot of things differently.”
Perry called his run for president a “great experience” and he said he does not regret running.
Peter Schweizer on How Warren Buffett Uses Politics to Make Money
Warren Buffett is often seen as a grandfatherly
figure above the rough-and-tumble of politics. He lives in Omaha,
Nebraska, in a house he purchased in 1958 for $31,000. He made a
fortune for himself and his investors through the humble-sounding
approach of value-based investing. He uses folksy expressions. He
frequently takes to the nation’s op-ed pages with populist-sounding
arguments, such as his August 2010 plea in The New York
Times for the government to stop “coddling” the “super-rich”
and start raising their taxes.
But as Peter Schweizer observes, this grandfatherly image does not always reflect reality. Warren Buffett is very much a political entrepreneur; his best investments are often in political relationships. In recent years, Buffett has used taxpayer money as a vehicle to even greater profit and wealth. Indeed, the success of some of his biggest bets and the profitability of some of his largest investments rely on government largesse and “coddling” with taxpayer money.
Guantánamo Bay is Popular and Going Green
One of the world's most
infamous prisons is quite popular among Americans. A new
Washington Post/ABC News
poll found that 70 percent of Americans support President's
Obama decision to keep the prison at Guantanamo Bay open.
This is actually one of its highest levels of support, even though Obama campaigned that he would close Gitmo. More surprisingly,
The poll shows that 53 percent of self-identified liberal Democrats — and 67 percent of moderate or conservative Democrats — support keeping Guantanamo Bay open, even though it emerged as a symbol of the post-Sept. 11 national security policies of President George W. Bush, which many liberals bitterly opposed.
But's there's a silver lining for progressives: Guantanamo Bay is going green!
The Miami Herald elaborates:
“From my perspective certainly the greening of Gitmo is important,” says U.S. Navy Capt. Kirk Hibbert, the base commander. National security is paramount, he said, but the Navy mandate to curb consumption “has an effect on almost everything we do here.”
The Navy wants to halve its reliance on fossil fuels by 2020, primarily to reduce costs. (Meanwhile, the military has no plans to reduce its dependency on indefinite detention.) Guantanamo Bay is the most expensive prison on Earth, costing 30 times as much as the average American prison to detain the 171 captives there. On diesel fuel alone, Gitmo spends $100,000 each day.
To go green, the base has installed solar panel arrays, smart meters, LED lights, and windmills. Electric car use is on the rise, while Navy cops have been riding bikes instead of SUVs for patrols. Gitmo has also acted a testing ground for energy efficiency and innovation, including a possible NASA experiment to "grow algae, as biofuel, inside a floating field of wastewater discharged into Guantánamo Bay." Glad to see the Navy has its priorities straight.
Reason.tv on Obama's national security policy. The ACLU has a devastating infographic on Gitmo.
People Can Live Underwater, Although They May Not Like It
In a
story anticipating the home mortgage deal that was
announced today, The New York Times conflates
"the millions of borrowers who are delinquent and facing
foreclosure," many of whom presumably are delinquent because they
can no longer afford their payments, with "borrowers owing more
than their houses are worth," who may be perfectly capable of
paying their mortgages, although perhaps not eager to do so given
the crappy investments they have made. This seems to be a common
error in press coverage of the housing market, perhaps because the
decline in home prices and the recession are tied together in
people's minds. But the fact that your house is suddenly worth half
what you paid for it does not mean you are suddenly unable to make
your payments, unless you have lost your job or suffered some other
misfortune that reduced yor cash flow or increased your living
expenses. Conversely, people whose mortgages are smaller than the
value of their homes might nevertheless be struggling to make ends
meet because of recent financial setbacks. Yet the
Times says "about one in five Americans with
mortgages are underwater," implying that all of them, including
multimillionaires who bought mansions at the height of the bubble,
are the intended beneficiaries of the loan modifications to which
the banks have agreed.
John Stossel on Why Government Can't Make Us Happy
In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas
Jefferson called the pursuit of happiness an unalienable right.
This was a radical idea. For most of history, most people didn’t
think much about pursuing happiness. They were too busy just trying
to survive. Then came the liberal revolution based on the idea
of individual freedom. Only then did they start thinking that
happiness might be possible on earth. Unfortunately, somewhere
along the way, writes John Stossel, the right to pursue happiness
has been perverted into a government-backed entitlement to
happiness.
Talking Toxic Sugar at KUOW in Seattle Yesterday
Yesterday, I participated in The
Conservation run by host Ross Reynolds at the Seattle public
radio station KUOW. The topic centered on regulating sugar in much
the same way that the government already regulates alcohol and
tobacco based on a new article published in Nature,
The Toxic Truth About Sugar [sub required]. The program
featured Laura Schmidt, a sociologist working at the San Francisco
School of Medicine arguing in favor of regulation. She outlined
some of her proposals in a
CNN op/ed including a "substantial tax on products loaded with
sugar," imposing age limits on purchasing high sugar products, and
controlling the opening hours of fast food outlets near schools.
I was called in to "balance" the discussion. First, excessive consumption of sugar is bad for you. So don't do it. That's what public health officials should be focusing on rathering than figuring how to jigger taxes and regulations to make our behavior conform to their views on what's best for us. The chief problem is that nearly everything we do or don't do can affect our health. That means from public health bureaucrats' points of view there is no aspect of our lives in which they may not meddle for "our own good."
In any case, during the segment of the program in which I got to speak, I argued against further infantalization of Americans by health nannies who assume that people are too stupid to know what's best for them. I note that Schmidt's editorial says, "We think that the public needs to be better informed about the science of how sugar impacts our health." Yes. That is the proper role for public health bureaucrats. And they have had notable successes. For example, per capita cigarette smoking began to decline from nearly the moment that the Surgeon General declared it a health hazard back in 1964.
During the program, I argued that I surely must be considered a shining example of a public health success. I took to heart all the warnings about tobacco. I used to be a 3-pack per day smoker, but I stopped smoking 27 years ago. And I quit when cigarettes cost under a dollar per pack.
With regard to public health warnings about excessive consumption of sugar and carbohydrates, I again took public health warnings to heart. In the last three years I have lost 45 pounds dropping my body mass index from nearly 30 (borderline obese) to a healthy normal 23 now. (It's only been a couple of years, so let's see if I can keep the weight off.)
I expect that public health information about various disease risks posed by eating too much sugar can and will help my fellow Americans to make the same sorts of risk/reward decisions on their own.
During her segment, Schmidt pointed out that excessive sugar consumption is associated with metabolic syndrome, a kind of pre-diabetes, if you will. She's absolutely right. But so are a lot of other activities (or inactivities). For example, as I pointed out during the program, television viewing is also associated with metabolic syndrome. Is the next proposed public health recommendation going to be regulations on how much TV people may watch per day?
The host Ross Reynolds, asked me about the possibility of adding sugar warning labels to sweets the same way the government requires warning labels on cigarettes. I asked if this meant that he would favor big pictures of morbidly obese people on the front of cookie packages? He responded (jokingly), what about tiny pictures of morbidly obese people? The conversation ended there.
Go here to listen to the KUOW segment, Just How Bad Is Sugar?
For a superb discussion of the totalitarian implications of public health read "An Epidemic of Meddling" by my colleague Jacob Sullum.
Throw a Football or Frisbee on an L.A. Beach, Pay a Thousand-Dollar Fine
The
politicians of Los Angeles should be placed on a garbage barge
and set adrift on the Kuroshio
Current:
The Board of Supervisors this week agreed to raise fines to up to $1,000 for anyone who throws a football or a Frisbee on any beach in Los Angeles County. [...]
The updated rules now prohibit "any person to cast, toss, throw, kick or roll" any object other than a beach ball or volleyball “upon or over any beach” between Memorial Day and Labor Day.
Exceptions allow for ball-throwing in predesignated areas, when a person obtains a permit, or playing water polo "in or over the Pacific Ocean". [...]
Your kids could also end up costing you big bucks: the ordinance also prohibits digging any hole deeper than 18 inches into the sand except where permission is granted for film and TV production services only.
Read the disgusting ordinance here [PDF].
Do you know what's a pretty great movie? Dogtown and Z-Boys, a 2001 documentary about how various '70s teenaged latchkey nogoodnik locals-only surf trash helped create modern skateboarding by breaking into rich people's backyards and various cement drainage ditches to try out some surf moves on wheels. Go ahead, watch the trailer:
Like West Coast punk rock (and the surf/garage rock from two decades before that), it was the creative product of blissfully neglected suburban semi-hoodlums making the best (and worst) out of free-range boredom and a mild climate. As viewers of either Dogtown or The Bad News Bears can tell you (let alone connoisseurs of Heroes and Villains or The Karen Carpenter Story), it frequently ended and almost always began in tears. There is much about that era we should be grateful to have moved past.
But
criminalizing frisbee-toss and overly deep sandcastle-moats is more
than just idiotic and impeachable. It's a Malathion-blast on what
has been the very idea of Southern California since before it
became a state. People go there to be free of all the suffocating
bullshit back home, maybe chase some crazy dreams (I know, cliche,
right?). There has never been a time when that weird combo of
ambition and latitude didn't produce world-altering culture and
creativity, in addition to stupid fun for kids at the beach. You
have to have an almost Tatum
O'Neal-level of dedication to squander an advantage that big,
but I'm afraid that SoCal politicians, and way too many of the
citizens that tolerate them, are proving equal to the task.
Some previous thoughts about California's debased political culture here. Some more ocean trash below.
Medical Marijuana Laws Send 'the Wrong Message': Don't Smoke Pot, Kids!
A
new study reported in Annals of
Epidemiology finds that, contrary to drug czar Gil
Kerlikowske's warnings,
passage of medical marijuana laws is not associated with increases
in adolescent pot smoking. Analyzing data from the National Survey
on Drug Use and Health, researchers at McGill University found that
teenagers in states that enact such laws are more apt to smoke pot,
but that is because of pre-existing differences. It seems "states
with higher use are more likely to enact laws." The
researchers found little evidence that allowing patients to use
marijuana as a medicine makes teenagers more likely to use it
recreationally. "If anything," they write, "our estimates suggest
that reported adolescent marijuana use may actually decrease after
passing MMLs [medical marijuana laws]." They say such an effect
"could be plausibly explained by social desirability bias or
greater concern about enforcement of recreational marijuana use
among adolescents after the passage of laws." Evidently Kerlikowske
is wrong to worry
that linking a drug to cancer and AIDS patients makes it seem
cooler to the kids.
These results are consistent with the conclusions of reports from the Marijuana Policy Project and the Institute for the Study of Labor, both of which found no increase in adolescent use attributable to medical marijuana laws. The latter study did, however, find an increase in adult consumption, which was associated with a decline in traffic fatalities.
[via Paul Armentano at NORML]
Libertarian Explains Why We Need Santorum Now Less Than Ever
Via Instapundit comes this "Open
Letter to GOP Primary Voters From a Libertarian," by Nate
Nelson of United Liberty, about why former Sen. Rick Santorum
(R-Pa.) just ain't rocking in the free world when it comes to the
Free Minds and Free Markets crowd.
Some snippets:
Santorum’s record in the U.S. Senate reveals consistent opposition to the principles of limited government, fiscal restraint, and individual liberty. That’s why libertarians can’t support him now or in the general election and why you shouldn’t either....
Rick Santorum was happy to vote in favor of Medicare Part D along with other big government establishment Republicans in the U.S. Senate....[r]educing the role of the federal government in American children’s education wasn’t on Rick Santorum’s agenda in the U.S. Senate. Santorum voted for the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, described by the Associated Press as “a symbol to many of federal overreach and Congress’ inability to fix something that’s clearly flawed.” Nothing says big government GOP establishment like voting for an expansion of federal education policy backed by Bush and coauthored by the late Senator Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.).
Santorum has also been a consistent opponent of individual liberty....In October 2011, Santorum went on the record about “the dangers of contraception in this country,” arguing that birth control is “a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.” These far outside the mainstream views may be excusable if they were just his personal opinions, but they’re not. Santorum told ABC News’ Jake Tapper late last year that he opposed Griswold v. Connecticut, the Supreme Court decision that overturned state bans on discussing birth control with and providing it to married couples. President Santorum would favor letting states dictate what legally married heterosexual couples can and can’t do in the privacy of their own bedrooms. How’s that for big government?...
Santorum has made a litany of proposals that are questionable at best from a constitutionalist point of view. He wants to use taxpayer dollars to support adoptions; “to incentivize the states to promote parental choice and quality educational options”; to create a public-private partnership between the Department of Health and Human Services and private organizations “for the purpose of strengthening marriages, families, and fatherhood”; to reinstate “2008-level funding for the Community Based Abstinence Education Program”...
If Rick Santorum was in fact "Tea Party before there was a Tea Party" (as he likes to say), then let this cup pass the country's lips.
Over at the Daily Caller, Cato's John Samples tucks his tongue in his cheek like Santo eating an ice cream and makes the libertarian case for a Santorum nomination. It would, suggests Sample, create such a massive electoral loss that it might "open the door for a different kind of GOP...a party of free markets, moral pluralism, and realism in foreign affairs."
Obama Leads All Candidates With Ooodles of Campaign Money; Pledges to Let Rich Friends Raise Even More
For all the
gnashing of teeth about Super PACs and the outsized influence
of money on the good old politicial process by many would-be
campaign-finance reformers, sometimes it's a good idea to just take
a peek at which candidates have how much money in their pockets to
spend on buying votes.
According to the chart below from USA Today, President Obama has a commanding advantage over all possible challengers for his flop space in the White House (as of the end of 2011). Obama has about four times the cash on hand (always a good thing!) as the likely GOP nominee Mitt Romney. Indeed, Obama has enough cash on hand that he should qualify as a flight risk the next time he dials up Air Force One to make a burger run.
Now it's true that Obama, who beats fundraising records like cyclist Lance Armstrong beats drug tests and poorly conceived and executed federal investigations, is going to need a helluva lot of dough to keep his current job. He's only been president for just the past few years and so he doesn't have much in the way of name recognition or time in office to run on. He spent more than twice as much as John McCain in 2008 and that was when he only had to defend two-and-a-half years in the U.S. Senate. He'll likely have spend at least four times as much as Romney to beat such a tough challenge.
After all, Mitt Romney is the son of famous politician who may have been brainwashed (the father's words) and who once ran the legendary carmaker AMC (you all remember AMC, don't you? Any Gremlin fans out there?). Obama has been chained to a day job at least since January 2009 while Romney has taken an indefinite leave of absence from roaming the country and slashing payrolls all over the place (I learned that from a documentary). I mean, Romney doesn't even have to shave every day anymore if he doesn't want to. He hasn't touched a Winter Olympics in a very long time and it's not even clear if he still lives in Massachusetts, a state he hasn't governed in years.
So when the campaign-finance zealots start carping about the need to reduce the disparity in money available to candidates, please remind them that incumbents at every level of office need significantly larger amounts of cash to counteract the twin effects of being in office and having ready access to free media. For many incumbents it's a killing combination. Did you know that in 2010, just 85 percent of House incumbents and 84 percent of Senate incumbents were re-elected? And going back to Richard Nixon, presidents who won their first term have only been re-elected four times out of possible six times? Nobody can feel safe with those odds.
What about the Super PACs that threaten to swallow the electoral process like Galactus swallows whole planets in Marvel Comics? Remember that Super PACs can raise and spend unlimited amounts of money during elections as long as they don't cooridinate with particular candidates or campaigns. According to the New York Times, in 2011 GOP-friendly Super PACs raised a total of $70 million and spent $22.5 million while Democratic-friendly Super PACs raised $18.3 million and spent $12.7 million. But not to worry. Obama, reports the Times,
is signaling to wealthy Democratic donors that he wants them to start contributing to an outside group supporting his re-election, reversing a long-held position as he confronts a deep financial disadvantage on a vital front in the campaign....
“We’re not going to fight this fight with one hand tied behind our back,” Jim Messina, the manager of Mr. Obama’s re-election campaign, said in an interview. “With so much at stake, we can’t allow for two sets of rules. Democrats can’t be unilaterally disarmed.”
I know what you're thinking: I guess now
that Jim Messina is running Obama's campaign, the odds are pretty
strong that Kenny Loggins is
going to play at Obama's victory party.
As important, it means that Obama isn't going to just sit around and count up his own four-to-one cash-on-hand advantage over Mitt Romney. He's going to sit around and let his really wealthy friends help him win re-election. Which isn't a bad thing, if you agree that restricting speech and gutting the First Amendment especially in regards to overtly political speech is a bad idea.
But I'm betting that as the general election gets underway, we will hear barely a peep out of the people who think there's something deeply distressing about the role in politics of Super PACs and money and corporations and all that jazz. Or they'll (independently!) use the same logic that Jim Messina trots out: that Obama is only playing catch up with his money-grubbing GOP adversary.
Here's a recent Reason.tv video, "3 Reasons Not to Get Worked Up Over Super PACs."
A.M. Links: U.S. Considers Military Options for Syria, Feds Reach Foreclosure Fraud Settlement With Banks, 10 States Leave Children Behind
"The Pentagon and the U.S.
Central Command have begun a preliminary internal review of U.S.
military capabilities"
in response to Syria. - Meanwhile: Liberated Libya slipping into chaos.
- Pentagon to allow more women in more combat roles.
- The DNC convention will have million-dollar tickets.
- Obama Administration reaches a settlement with banks engaged in foreclosure fraud.
- Ten states leave children behind.
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New at Reason.tv: "Halftime in America: Remy Chrysler Ad Parody"
Reason Writers Around Town: Shikha Dalmia on Ayn Rand and GOP Restrictionists
Last week was Ayn Rand’s birthday, the Russian emigre who did more to restore the faith of Americans in America than any contemporary figure, regardless of where one stands on her philosophical ideas. But Reason Foundation Senior Analyst Shikha Dalmia notes in her latest column, if anyone from the current field of GOP candidates had been president then, Rand would have likely been booted out of the country. Why? Because Rand lied and bent every rule to gain entry into the United States.
What this shows is just how intellectually and morally bankrupt the restrictionist case is. Writes Dalmia:
The restrictionist rhetoric is so out of whack with ordinary common sense that most people instinctively recoil from it. They sense that visa violations are victimless crimes that won’t usher in anarchy if not zealously prosecuted. Murder is always and everywhere wrong; no one needs the government to make it so. That’s not the case with an act like crossing the border, which is legal under one set of policies and illegal under another. Cubans escaping political oppression, for example, become legal the minute they set foot on American soil. But Mexicans fleeing economic oppression should be regarded as criminals forever?
Read the whole thing here.
Steve Chapman on the Myth of Obama the Appeaser
The appeasement line is a
treasured and durable GOP theme. Republicans used it successfully
in the 1970s against George McGovern and Jimmy Carter. They
revived it to pummel Democrats who opposed aid to the Nicaraguan
rebels in the 1980s, the first war with Iraq in 1991 and the second
war with Iraq in 2003. It’s a mystery why they expect this
claim to work in 2012, writes Steve Chapman. In his approach to
foreign policy and national security, Obama has done many things
that, if President McCain had done them, would evoke thunderous
ovations at this year’s Republican convention.
Reason Writers at CPAC Tomorrow!: Katherine Mangu-Ward on the Regulatory State
Managing Editor Katherine Mangu-Ward will
be speaking on a panel at CPAC 2012 tomorrow at
10:00 a.m. Anyone who has made the pilgrimage to Washington, D.C.'s
glamorous Marriott Wardman Park hotel, is welcome to come by and
hear a few grisly tales of the nanny state:
The deets:
Thursday, February 9th
10:00-11:00 a.m. American for Tax Reform Panel: The Red Tape War: How the Regulatory Burden and Growing Nanny State Threaten Prosperity
Wilson Ballroom C
Panel:
Katherine Mangu-Ward, Reason
Sam Kazman, Competitive Enterprise Institute
Phil Kerpen, Americans for Prosperity
The Reason.tv team will also be on the prowl, so this could be your chance to make a cameo.
Big Surprise: Industries Benefiting From Tax Breaks Want to Keep Them
Just as Big Oil would like to keep its tax
breaks, so too do the chief executives of renewable energy
companies. The
pleading press release issued by the special interests, ah,
that is, the representatives of the hydro, geothermal, and biomass
companies that generate electricity explains:
Executives from the hydropower, geothermal and biomass power industries called on congressional leaders to extend the production tax credit through 2016 for hydropower, geothermal and biomass.
The three industries operate in parts of the country not often associated with renewable energy — particularly the Southeast and Mountain West — and company and trade association leaders expressed concern for a looming crisis that has put thousands of jobs in these states at risk. The call comes as opponents of renewable energy tax policy place the future of these industries in jeopardy, according to the group.
Of course, the executives are not concerned about protecting their grubby profits; it's all about JOBS!
Go here for a superb article, The Difference Between a Tax Break and a Subsidy, by Reason contributing columnist A. Barton Hinkle in which he explains how tax credits an ideologue doesn't like are "subsidies" and ones that the same ideologue does like are mere "tax benefits." If tax credits are a subsidy to Big Oil, they are also a subsidy to Sanctified Renewables, or they are not for both.
David Harsanyi on Obama's Halftime Hypocrisy
On Super Bowl Sunday, America was treated to the
most expensive political commercial in history. In a series of
vapid non sequiturs, Clint Eastwood's gravelly voice pinned the
promise of a city to government dependency, claiming that "the
people of Detroit" lost almost everything but because "we" pulled
together and the "Motor City is fighting again," we
survived. Or, as David Harsanyi argues, after screwing
stakeholders, rewarding failed business models, and sticking
taxpayers with the unions' fat pension tab, America got a heaping
spoonful of the Obama administration's economic policy.
Dan Abrams on 'the Media's Shameful, Inexcusable Distortion' of Citizens United
In a
new Mediaite column,
ABC News legal analyst Dan Abrams—whose father is Floyd Abrams, the
legendary First Amendment champion who helped make the case against
the speech restrictions that the Supreme Court overturned two years
ago in Citizens
United v. FEC—objects to "the media's shameful,
inexcusable distortion" of that decision. Abrams highlights two
common misconceptions: 1) that Citizens
United abolished disclosure requirements, when in fact it
explicitly upheld them, and 2) that Citizens
United let rich people spend unlimited amounts of their
own money on political messages—a right they have always had, as
recognized in the 1976 decision
Buckley v. Valeo. As an example of the second
misstatement, he cites a New York Times story
that I mentioned last
month, along with similar glosses by Times columnist
Gail Collins, Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank,
and NBC analyst Michael Isikoff. Abrams, who says he thinks
Citizens United should have been decided on narrower
grounds and has argued with his father about the decision, is
nevertheless indignant about persistent journalistic
misrepresentations of what the Supreme Court said, and he
marvels at the response to his father's participation in the
case:
I have also been amazed at the vitriol directed at my civil libertarian dad from the left over his defense of a constitutional principle he firmly believes in. Defend a Nazi’s right to march? No problem. Defend the most repugnant members of our society’s right to speak? Absolutely. Defend a corporation’s right to engage in the political process? Inexcusable.
See my December 2010 Reason cover story for more on over-the-top reactions to Citizens United. Speaking of which, one of the journalists Abrams criticizes, Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne Jr. (whose "screed against free speech" Ron Bailey noted on Monday), claims Citizens United "tore down a century's worth of law aimed at reducing the amount of corruption in our electoral system." One of the statutory provisions the Court overturned, McCain-Feingold's ban on "electioneering communications," was enacted in 2002, while the other, the ban on "express advocacy" by unions and corporations, has its roots in a 1947 law—still 37 years shy of a century before Citizens United. President Obama was even further from the truth when he claimed, in the part of his 2010 State of the Union address that made Justice Samuel Alito shake his head, that the Court had "reversed a century of law," apparently referring to the Court's own precedents. In fact, the decisions that Citizens United reversed, Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce and McConnell v. FEC, date from 1990 and 2003, respectively.
Boehner Slams Obama's Birth Control Mandate, Santorum Scrambles for Dollars, UK Stands Firm on Falklands: P.M. Links
House Speaker John Boehner and
President Obama butt heads over
birth control. - Rick Santorum needs more money.
- UK refuses to relinquish the Falklands (again).
- Israel president extends olive branch to the people of Iran.
- TSA fires bigoted air marshals.
- CNN suspends bigoted Roland Martin.
- Georgia (the state) to get two new nuclear reactors.
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.
If You're Reading This, You're (Probably) a Terrorist
You're in the latest hot spot in the war on terror.
A new report from the UK Home Affairs Committee claims the Internet is the "main forum for radicalisation" for terrorists and right-wing extremists. Even more than prisons, universities, and places of worship, "the internet does seem to feature in most, if not all, of the routes of radicalisation." The Home Office describes how people are radicalized by this series of tubes:
The internet "plays a role in terms of sustaining and reinforcing terrorist ideological messages and enabling individuals to find and communicate with like-minded individuals and groups."
Of course, that's true with any political or religious viewpoint. Just replace the word "terrorist" with conservative/libertarian/progressive/evangelical/atheist, etc. and you've basically described the entire Internet and its appeal. Congrats.
Loz Kaye, leader of the UK Pirate Party, tweeted his disappointment with the Committee's report:
Violence is born of too little information, not too much. We need a free functioning Internet if the aim is to engage.
But the fact that the Internet facilitates freedom of expression is troublesome for statists. The Home Affairs study also reports that the Internet is "now one of the few unregulated spaces where radicalisation is able to take place." Ergo, regulation. Right on cue, Keith Vaz, the chairman of the committee (who has a long history of censorship), argues:
More resources need to be directed to these threats and to preventing radicalisation through the internet and in private spaces. These are the fertile breeding grounds for terrorism.
Because of this, the Home Affairs Committee wants Internet service providers (ISPs) to actively monitor and remove "extremist" content and websites, even without a court order. Jim Killock, executive director of the Open Rights Group, argues that content take-downs would be very ineffective, and, of course, Orwellian:
Very little can be done to take down websites that are extreme: because they are rarely hosted in the UK...The alternative to takedown is censorship, which is both ineffective and hands a propaganda victory to the targets of that censorship.
Obviously, defining terrorism and extremism can tricky. One darkly comic example was when the London police labeled the Occupy movement as terrorists and extremists, on par with al-Qaeda and FARC.
But the invocation of terrorism and right-wing extremism is really just the pretense for greater control of the Internet. Indeed, that very same Home Affairs report also notes:
Most radicalisation does not take place in fora at all; it takes place in private premises.
Not to mention that its findings:
...seemed to be contradicted by more recent Home Office-commissioned research, which concluded that the internet "does not appear to play a significant role in Al Qa'ida-influenced radicalisation." Even those witnesses who attributed a significant role to the internet tended to support that report's conclusion that some element of face-to-face contact was generally essential to radicalisation taking place, including with regards to the extreme far right...
Since al-Qaeda has been rendered "operationally ineffective," new scares are needed. Hence, the renewed focus on the far right and even links to "criminal gangs."
Reason on the Internet, terrorism, and censorship. Back in December 2011, Glenn Greenwald detailed a similar attempt by the Obama administration to control the Internet to eradicate the scourge of "Twitter terrorism."
Brian Doherty on Getting the U.S. Out of Afghanistan
Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta
announced last week an unexpectedly early deadline of summer
2013 for winding down the U.S. military presence in
Afghanistan.
Well, kind of, supposedly, or perhaps with the same amount of seriousness that the administration took the July 2011 drawdown deadline that never was. The same New York Times story reporting on Panetta’s announcement also notes that “Mr. Panetta said no decisions had been made about the number of American troops to be withdrawn in 2013, and he made clear that substantial fighting lies ahead.” In other words, there are plenty of American soldiers and Afghans alike who will be dying for a mistake. Senior Editor Brian Doherty argues that it's time for all U.S. forces in Afghanistan to come home.
Iranian Parliament Summons President as Economy Sputters
Iranians have been feeling the
crunch of foreign sanctions on the country's economy. Prices
for gold
and American dollars are way up.
Reuters reports food shortages and word of mouth carries
stories of the frantic stockpiling of meat, rice, and other
staples. According to
one Iranian service employee, "We know they want to pressure us
so we rise against our government, but we are not in a position to
do that." The New York Times reports:
Ordinary Iranians complain that the sanctions are hurting them, while those at the top are unscathed, or even benefit. Many wealthy Iranians made huge profits in recent weeks by buying dollars at the government rate (available to insiders) and then selling them for almost twice as many rials on the soaring black market. Some analysts and opposition political figures contend that Mr. Ahmadinejad deliberately worsened the currency crisis so that his cronies could generate profits this way.
The Iranian parliament appears to have caught wind of some of these grievances. On Tuesday the deputy speaker announced a successful vote to summon President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Al Jazeera reports that he will face "questioning over a long list of accusations including mismanagement of the nation's economy." Though Parliament has the constitutional power to call the president in for questioning, no president has been summoned since the inception of the current regime in 1979.
Meanwhile, other branches of the Iranian government have been demonstrating increasing anxiety in the run-up to the March 2 parliamentary elections. As I've previously noted, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei has stepped up arbitrary arrests of journalists, activists, and foreign nationals. The judiciary has been upholding their death sentences. Khamenei has warned against protests surrounding the March elections more than once, urging voters and losing candidates not to repeat the uprisings of 2009:
The last issue relating to the elections: The authorities should not ignore the conspiracies of the enemies against the elections. Those who do not receive enough votes in the elections should also be aware and should not be fooled like those who did not get any votes in 2009. They should not be deceived... Don't blame the elections, don't help the enemy, and an atmosphere of conflict and hopelessness should not be displayed in the campaign so we can, God willing, have a good election. [Emphasis added]
It is unclear to which enemy Khamenei is referring, but given the context, it's likely he is referring to civil unrest and not his other main preocuppation, Western influence. Ahmadinejad's allies have been campaigning in the boonies to secure some kind of success for themselves in the election. This gesture of summoning Ahmadinejad for questioning may be the existing Parliament's attempt to influence the outcome of the elections.
Read more on Iranian foreign relations, inflation, and questionable election strategies.
Ron Paul's Campaign Defends Its Successes
A press release from the Ron Paul campaign on the heels of the three nonbinding votes of yesterday (in which Paul came in a strong second in Minnesota, above supposed frontrunner Romney but still far behind the mysterious rise of Rick Santorum) makes the case for a Paul campaign that has been more successful than the media or public might recognize:
[Paul's campaign manager John Tate says]:
“As people across the country view the results of yesterday’s contests, it is important to consider a few facts that have not been clearly reported. Not one single delegate was awarded yesterday, instead the caucuses in Minnesota and Colorado were the very first step in the delegate selection process. And there are still over 40 states left to go. The Ron Paul campaign plans to continue to vie for delegates nationwide....
1) The Missouri primary means nothing. It was a non-binding beauty contest, and the contest that matters in the ‘show me’ state won’t take place for another month. The Ron Paul campaign is well positioned to win delegates in Missouri’s caucus a month from now.
2) As in Iowa where not 1 of the 28 delegates has been awarded yet, in Colorado and Nevada the Paul campaign will do very well in the state delegate counts. We will have good numbers among the actual delegates awarded, far exceeding our straw poll numbers.
3) In Minnesota where we have finished a solid second, we also have a strong majority of the state convention delegates, and the process to elect delegates has also just begun, the Paul campaign is well-organized to win the bulk of delegates there.
“We are confident in gaining a much larger share of delegates than even our impressive showing yesterday indicates. As an example of our campaign’s delegate strength, take a look at what has occurred in Colorado:
In one precinct in Larimer County, the straw poll vote was 23 for Santorum, 13 for Paul, 5 for Romney, 2 for Gingrich. There were 13 delegate slots, and Ron Paul got ALL 13.
In a precinct in Delta County the vote was 22 for Santorum, 12 for Romney, 8 for Paul, 7 for Gingrich. There were 5 delegate slots, and ALL 5 went to Ron Paul.
In a Pueblo County precinct, the vote was 16 for Santorum, 11 for Romney, 3 for Gingrich and 2 for Paul. There were 2 delegate slots filled, and both were filled by Ron Paul supporters.
We are also seeing the same trends in Minnesota, Nevada, and Iowa, and in Missouri as well.
“We may well win Minnesota, and do far better in Colorado than yesterday’s polls indicate.
“In the latest national poll from Reuters/Ipsos Poll, Ron Paul places a strong second with 21 percent, gaining ground on his main competitor nationally, Mitt Romney, whose support seems to be fading at 29 percent. Congressman Paul’s support has grown by 5 percentage points nationally since January, while Romney has seen a 30 percent decline in his support since January.
“This poll follows a January 30th Gallup Poll showing Dr. Paul within the margin of error of defeating Obama. Also, a January 16th CNN/ORC Poll showed Congressman Paul and Obama in a virtual tie in a general election showdown.
Politico on Paul's Minnesota efforts that led him to second place there. My forthcoming book, Ron Paul's Revolution.
Reason Writers on TV: Peter Suderman Talks Federal Education Spending with David Asman on Power & Money
President Obama wants to spend more federal tax dollars on public education. But will more spending produce better results? On Tuesday, February 7, Reason associate editor Peter Suderman appeared on Fox Business' Power and Money argues that decades of increases in federal education spending has yet to increase overall educational attainment—and there's no reason to think that this will be any different. Approximately four minutes.
Peter Suderman on Mitt Romney, Consultant in Chief
In 2010, the GOP successfully unified around an
anti-spending message that helped it retake the House. Yet now,
writes Associate Editor Peter Suderman, as Republicans frame the
2012 elections as a referendum on the size and scope of government,
the party allegedly in favor of reducing both is on the verge of
nominating for president not a small-government firebrand or a free
market apostle but former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, a
management consultant more interested in tweaking hated policies
than doing away with them.
Synfuel Company With $25 Million Green Loan Calls Emergency Conference
An East Bay synthetic petroleum
company that received $25 million from the Department of Energy’s
controversial loan-guarantee
program may be headed for trouble after calling a special
investor conference.
Emeryville, California-based Amyris Inc., which describes itself as an "integrated renewable products company...providing sustainable alternatives" using "industrial synthetic biology," has a regularly scheduled earnings conference on February 27. But the company will hold "an investor update regarding its progress and near term goals" this Friday.
It could be good news! The company's most recent report claims $31 million in product sales for the third quarter of 2011 — a 41 percent increase over the previous-year period. But Amyris, which is in the business of "commercializing" (greenspeak for "trying to sell") its No Compromise® line of synthetic petroleum products, has been clobbered in the stock market lately. Following the conference announcement, a Raymond James analyst downgraded the company.
Then again, those analysts hate America. And what bureaucrat’s imagination wouldn’t be fired by a company that converts plant sugars into hydrocarbon molecules to produce a range of renewable ingredients with potential uses in products from diesel and jet fuel to cosmetics, flavors and fragrances?
But it does raise a few questions: If Solyndra was Bush’s fault and Ener1 was China’s fault and Beacon Power was Solyndra’s fault, will Amyris be the first official victim of the Natural Gas Genocide? Also, does natural gas have an official villain yet? The Emir of Qatar, maybe? And finally: Amyris? Will the cutesy names never stop?
Enjoy [?] the soothing [?] harmonies of William Byrd’s "Though Amaryllis Dance in Green"...
Cheap Tickets to Space, Coming Soon
In
Popular Mechanics, space journo and consultant Rand
Simberg—who wrote
about the future of NASA in the era of private spaceflight in
last month's print magazine—explains some of the nifty technical
details he picked up from entrepreneur Elon Musk
about SpaceX's reusable rockets and spacecraft.
But perhaps of greater interest to the less technically inclined spaceophiles among us, Simberg wraps up the piece like this:
Last week, the company announced the successful test of its new SuperDraco rocket engines, which will power the launch–abort system for the Dragon, making it safer for human occupation, and also act as the landing engines. The idea is that Dragon will land vertically on the pad, like the Falcon rocket components, as opposed to landing in the water with parachutes.
So what does that mean for ticket prices in the future? Musk tells us that with daily flights, the cost will run about $100 per pound. For the average male, that means about 20,000 bucks. Start saving your money.
In other words, none of the many players in the private space industry have actually taken paying customers off the surface of the Earth yet, but ticket prices are already experiencing some serious downward pressure. Virgin Galactic's $200,000 price tag is already starting to sound downright extravagant in the face of Simberg's back-of-the-envelope math. And the $63 million we're playing to the Russians to ferry American astronauts back and forth to the International Space Station right now? Horrifying.
Get the scoop on the whole scene from our Very Special Space Issue. (Now available online!)
Has Obama Declared "War on Religion" by Insisting Catholic Employers Cover Abortions and Condoms?
One of the reasons I oppose
government-run health care is that it automatically politicizes
every aspect of medical treatment, lifestyle, and more. When
taxpayers are footing the bill, they rightly have an interest in
what gets funded and what doesn't. Should human-growth hormone
shots for short kids be covered? Viagra for old men? And what sort
of research should be conducted? It takes a situation that is
already full of moral an practical ambiguity (one doctor's
experimental treatment is another's quackery on a cracker) and puts
it on steroids (which I'm guessing shouldn't be covered, unless
it's for a "good" cause). God, what a tedious conversation!
Which brings us to the latest imbroglio involving President Barack Obama's health-care reform: the administration's insistence that most employers provide coverage for things that many religious organizations oppose, especially when it comes to reproduction. There seems little doubt that the law will have very few exemptions in its coverage for contraceptives and elective abortions. So while Catholic dioceses may not have to shell out for IUDs for nuns, Catholic hospitals and other closely-related outfits may well have to offer insurance plans that cover birth control and more that's against church doctrine.
Indeed, here are Democratic Sens. Jeanne Shaheen (N.H.), Barbara Boxer (Calif.), and Patty Murray (Wash.), three champions of the new law, trumpeting that
It was a historic victory for women's health when the Obama administration changed the law to require private health plans to provide preventive services including breast exams, HIV screening and contraception for free. This new policy will help millions of women get the affordable care they need.
They note "it can cost $600 a year for
prescription contraceptives. That's a lot of money for a mother
working as a medical technician in a Catholic hospital, or a
teacher in a private religious school."
It sure is a lot of money. And there's something obviously wrong with forcing an employer - say, the Catholic church - to cover contraceptive or abortion services that it patently objects to. Indeed, there's something wrong with forcing employers and employees to offer or buy coverage in the first place. We all know that it's monstrously stupid - and an artifact of idiotic wage-and-price controls enacted during World War II - that health insurance is tied to the workplace. Way back when, separating work from health coverage was supposed to be one of the goals of reform, wasn't it? For god's sake, most businessess can't make good decisions in their chosen area of competition. Why should they be picking people's insurance?
Writng in National Review, the libertarian, pro-life Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) says that Obamacare's rules are nothing less than a "war on religious freedom":
[The] Obama administration’s recent edict requiring nearly all employers — including Catholic hospitals, schools, and charities — to cover sterilizations and contraception in their employees’ health-care plans. Because “contraception” includes abortifacients, this decision — made under the powers granted to the executive branch under Obamacare — also threatens many Protestant employers.
I'm an admirer on Rand Paul, who I think is without reservation the most libertarian member of the Senate (and I don't mean that as a backhanded compliment, given the generally low level of freedom-loving in the Senate!). He's the real deal when it comes to limiting the size, scope, and power of the federal government, and I'm glad he's gonna be around for a long time.
Yet I'm not convinced that Obamacare is the equivalent of a war on religious freedom. The individual mandate is unambiguously a war on freedom, for sure: the requirement that you buy coverage as a condition of being alive is clearly that. But as long as various health-care providers pull money directly from the federal government, it seems to me that they can be required to follow certain regulations. And most hospitals, whether private or public, religious or secular, are getting chunks of money from the federal government, through Medicaid and Medicare payments at the very least.
That's a strong argument, of course, for getting
the government out of areas such as health care and education,
where a similar problem obtains: Shouldn't K-12 schools and
colleges that get government funding have to follow certain
government rules? If you want that money, say, you shouldn't be
allowed to discriminate on the basis of race or gender, right? And
if you don't want that control, then opt out of the system, as
colleges such as Hillsdale and Grove City have done by setting up
replacements for Pell Grants and federally guaranteed student
loans.
When it comes to education, though, most conservatives and libertarians challenge the idea that public money necessarily means strict government control. Indeed, the preferred argument when it comes to state-funded voucher programs is that as long as the money is being used by the individual, the state shouldn't be allowed to bully the schools that ultimately get paid into following a particular curriculum.
So I'm left wondering: If Obamacare was structured in such a way that it gave individuals vouchers to cover all or part of the cost of a health-care policy of their own choosing, would that solve this particular objection? I think such a policy would cause all sorts of problems, including a general increase in health care costs (just as easy, government-backed student loans have given rise to a "higher education bubble"). But would switching to a voucher plan for health-care obviate the issue of religious freedom? It seems to do the trick when it comes to education.
Of course, looking over what I've just written really drives home two different but related points:
First, that any health-care reform which doesn't de-link insurance from the workplace is really not serious in transforming a system that everyone seems to hate but won't fully jettison.
Second, even if Obamacare is booted by the Supreme Court later this spring or repealed upon the ascension to the White House of his royal highness Newt Gingrich, we'll still be facing a situation in which government at all levels is already spending about 50 cents out of every health-care dollar. Which means that reform will still be a top priority come 2013 whoever is actually getting sworn in.
Another Example of How New York Cops Make Their Own Law
In my
column today, I note that police in New York City are still
arresting people for "public display" of marijuana in
circumstances that Commissioner Ray Kelly says make the charge
inappropriate. Yesterday a federal judge
approved an agreement that settles a class action lawsuit by
New Yorkers who were busted on another kind of bogus charge: Long
after courts overturned anti-loitering laws on First Amendment
grounds, the NYPD continued to arrest people for loitering. The $15
million settlement could mean up to $5,000 for each person who was
the victim of an illegal arrest. The legal battles over
loitering bans in New York go back three decades:
The settlement came after a federal judge held the city in contempt in 2010 for "obstinance and uncooperativeness," as the police continued for years to make arrests under laws that had been declared unconstitutional. The laws had banned loitering to panhandle or to search for a sex partner, or while in a bus or train station.
Federal and state courts struck down those laws between 1983 and 1993 as violating First Amendment rights, but some 22,000 people were charged with the offenses from 1983 to 2012....
Some of those who were caught in the web of laws that had been declared invalid testified about the frustration of being rounded up when they had not broken the law.
One panhandler described an evening on Roosevelt Avenue in Queens during which officers recited their flawed understanding of the law: "'You can’t be begging.'"...
The lawyers who filed the suit claimed that the police hierarchy was not aggressive enough in training officers and challenging the police culture. They noted that officers often carried "cheat sheets," handed down from one generation of officers to the next, that included simple descriptions of the laws used most often by officers on a beat for summonses and arrests. The sheets, still in use, are seldom updated.
You can begin to understand how it is possible that the NYPD is still arresting people for a bit of pot in their pockets 35 years after the state legislature supposedly decriminalized marijuana possession.
New Paper Finds Stimulus Spending Funds Government Employment, But Not Private Sector Growth
It’s common enough to find
discussions of economic stimulus that revolve around the assumption
that government spending produces a positive multiplier: Spend one
dollar, boost the larger economy by two. But at the very least, the
aggregate evidence that government spending consistently produces
positive economic growth is murky. When University of California
economist Valerie Ramey reviewed
the literature on stimulus spending for the Journal of Economic
Literature last year, she found that the literature suggested
that temporary, deficit-financed government purchases result in
multipliers somewhere between 0.8 and 1.5, but that “reasonable
people can argue” that the data indicate multipliers as high as 2
but as low as 0.5.
This sort of variation doesn’t tell us whether the multiplier is positive or negative. Instead, it tells us that the evidence isn’t clear, that economists don’t agree, and that sweeping conclusions about the positive effects of stimulus spending don’t hold up.
Now Ramey has found additional evidence that the lower range is more likely to be the correct one. In a new paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research, Ramey asks two questions. First, does increased government spending result in an economic stimulus that increases private sector spending? Second, does more government spending increase employment?
Ramey, who’s been criticized in the past for her choice of samples and variables, addresses those concerns here by running the numbers using multiple statistical techniques and historical samples. But no matter how she arranges the data, she finds the same result: “An increase in government spending never leads to a significant rise in private spending. In fact, in most cases it leads to a significant fall.” The upshot? According to Ramey, the evidence suggests that the multiplier for government spending is probably below the even-money mark. It’s a bad investment.
There are some benefits, however—just not for the private sector. Ramey finds evidence that government spending can increase employment—mostly by hiring people to work for the government. “Increases in government spending raise government employment,” she writes, “but not private employment.” This is contrary to President Obama's 2009 promise that "more than 90 percent of jobs created under this recovery act will be in the private sector." Stimulus spending: Good for the government, not so great for the rest of us.
(Thanks to Cato's Tad DeHaven for the pointer.)
Slave the Whales!
Does the
13th Amendment apply to critters? Can whales be plaintiffs? People
for the Ethical Treatment of Animals thinks so, and has
filed suit in a San Diego court to emancipate killer whales
from Sea World facilities in San Diego and Orlando:
PETA argues that continuing the whales' "employment" at SeaWorld violates the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution, which prohibits slavery.
District Judge Jeffrey Miller heard arguments in the complaint Monday and reviewed the response from SeaWorld, which asked that the lawsuit be dismissed. His ruling is expected to come later.
The suit, filed in October 2011, asked that the court declare that the orcas are "held in slavery and/or involuntary servitude by defendants in violation of the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution."
"It's a new frontier in civil rights," said Jeff Kerr, PETA general counsel, who described the hearing as a "historic day."
"Slavery does not depend on the species of the slave any more than it depends on race, gender or ethnicity," he argued. "Coercion, degradation and subjugation characterize slavery and these orcas have endured all three."
The complaint says the five killer whales are represented by their "friends" at PETA, which include three former killer whale trainers, a marine biologist and the founder of an organization that seeks to protect orcas.
The complaint demands that the court "appoint a legal guardian to effectuate plaintiffs' transfer from defendants' facilities to a suitable habitat in accordance with each plaintiff's individual needs and best interests."
Does Tilikum, who killed an Orlando Sea World trainer in February 2010, have the right to a trial by a jury of his peers? Can whales vote? Can they be president? Do they have the right to bear arms? Does PETA have the right to arm bears? This is so exciting!
Justice Anthony Kennedy and the Future of Gay Marriage
In his 1996 majority opinion in
the case of Romer
v. Evans, Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy struck
down a Colorado constitutional amendment that had forbidden state
officials from taking any action designed to protect gays and
lesbians from discrimination. “The amendment imposes a special
disability upon those persons alone,” Kennedy wrote. “Homosexuals
are forbidden the safeguards that others enjoy or may seek without
constraint.” Several years later, in his majority opinion in
Lawrence
v. Texas (2003), Kennedy struck down that state’s ban on
sodomy for violating the liberty protected by the Due Process
Clause of the 14th Amendment. "In our tradition the State is not
omnipresent in the home," Kennedy wrote. "Liberty presumes an
autonomy of self that includes freedom of thought, belief,
expression, and certain intimate conduct."
So when 9th Circuit Judge Stephen Reinhardt sat down to write yesterday’s decision nullifying California’s Proposition 8, which had amended the state constitution in order to forbid gay marriage, Kennedy’s words were not far from his mind. Indeed, Reinhardt repeatedly cites Romer while making the case against Prop. 8. But Reinhardt does not make similar use of Lawrence. Why not?
As I noted yesterday, Reinhardt’s decision did not recognize a constitutional right to gay marriage, it simply holds that in this specific case California has violated the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause by allowing gay marriage and then later taking it away. Had Reinhardt wanted to the address the larger question of gay marriage’s constitutionality, he undoubtedly would have cited Kennedy’s sweepingly libertarian decision in Lawrence. That he did not do so suggests that Reinhardt does not believe that Kennedy is currently ready to vote in favor of that constitutional right. Thus the 9th Circuit offered Kennedy a narrower argument relying on the narrower precedent in Romer. Should the Supreme Court take up the Prop. 8 case on appeal, there’s no way Kennedy is going to go against his previous line of argument in Romer. It was a crafty—if transparent—move by Reinhardt. We'll see if it works.
Climate Scientists Violate Own Advice: Opine On Topics About Which They Have No Expertise
Back
on January 27, the Wall Street Journal ran an
op/ed by some distinguished researchers arguing that climate change
is no big deal. The op/ed,
No Need to Panic About Climate Change, asserted:
...the number of scientific "heretics" is growing with each passing year. The reason is a collection of stubborn scientific facts.
Perhaps the most inconvenient fact is the lack of global warming for well over 10 years now. This is known to the warming establishment, as one can see from the 2009 "Climategate" email of climate scientist Kevin Trenberth: "The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't." But the warming is only missing if one believes computer models where so-called feedbacks involving water vapor and clouds greatly amplify the small effect of CO2.
The lack of warming for more than a decade—indeed, the smaller-than-predicted warming over the 22 years since the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) began issuing projections—suggests that computer models have greatly exaggerated how much warming additional CO2 can cause. Faced with this embarrassment, those promoting alarm have shifted their drumbeat from warming to weather extremes, to enable anything unusual that happens in our chaotic climate to be ascribed to CO2.
If there is not all that much warming, then why is there so much brouhaha about it? The op/ed continued:
Alarmism over climate is of great benefit to many, providing government funding for academic research and a reason for government bureaucracies to grow. Alarmism also offers an excuse for governments to raise taxes, taxpayer-funded subsidies for businesses that understand how to work the political system, and a lure for big donations to charitable foundations promising to save the planet. Lysenko and his team lived very well, and they fiercely defended their dogma and the privileges it brought them.
Speaking for many scientists and engineers who have looked carefully and independently at the science of climate, we have a message to any candidate for public office: There is no compelling scientific argument for drastic action to "decarbonize" the world's economy. Even if one accepts the inflated climate forecasts of the IPCC, aggressive greenhouse-gas control policies are not justified economically.
Not too surprisingly, those accused of being bought-and-paid for alarmists were annoyed. Earlier this week, the Journal published a response from 38 of the perturbed alarmists, Check with Climate Scientists for Views on Climate. Their letter asserted:
Do you consult your dentist about your heart condition? In science, as in any area, reputations are based on knowledge and expertise in a field and on published, peer-reviewed work. If you need surgery, you want a highly experienced expert in the field who has done a large number of the proposed operations.
You published "No Need to Panic About Global Warming" on climate change by the climate-science equivalent of dentists practicing cardiology. While accomplished in their own fields, most of these authors have no expertise in climate science. The few authors who have such expertise are known to have extreme views that are out of step with nearly every other climate expert. This happens in nearly every field of science. For example, there is a retrovirus expert who does not accept that HIV causes AIDS. And it is instructive to recall that a few scientists continued to state that smoking did not cause cancer, long after that was settled science.
So, there! And what do "real" climate scientists believe?
Climate experts know that the long-term warming trend has not abated in the past decade. In fact, it was the warmest decade on record. Observations show unequivocally that our planet is getting hotter. And computer models have recently shown that during periods when there is a smaller increase of surface temperatures, warming is occurring elsewhere in the climate system, typically in the deep ocean. Such periods are a relatively common climate phenomenon, are consistent with our physical understanding of how the climate system works, and certainly do not invalidate our understanding of human-induced warming or the models used to simulate that warming.
Thus, climate experts also know what one of us, Kevin Trenberth, actually meant by the out-of-context, misrepresented quote used in the op-ed. Mr. Trenberth was lamenting the inadequacy of observing systems to fully monitor warming trends in the deep ocean and other aspects of the short-term variations that always occur, together with the long-term human-induced warming trend.
Question: How long before the short-term variation with minimal warming [PDF] suggests that there may be something wrong with the climate computer models? Just asking.
In any case, the climate experts then go on to become the equivalent of dentists practicing cardiology:
It would be an act of recklessness for any political leader to disregard the weight of evidence and ignore the enormous risks that climate change clearly poses. In addition, there is very clear evidence that investing in the transition to a low-carbon economy will not only allow the world to avoid the worst risks of climate change, but could also drive decades of economic growth. Just what the doctor ordered.
Really? Scanning the list of signers of the letter one does not find that any seem to have any special expertise on economics and public policy. Perhaps the climate "dentists" are recommending open heart surgery to treat tooth decay. Interestingly, the op/ed to which they object does cite economic expertise in reaching its conclusions:
A recent study of a wide variety of policy options by Yale economist William Nordhaus showed that nearly the highest benefit-to-cost ratio is achieved for a policy that allows 50 more years of economic growth unimpeded by greenhouse gas controls. This would be especially beneficial to the less-developed parts of the world that would like to share some of the same advantages of material well-being, health and life expectancy that the fully developed parts of the world enjoy now. Many other policy responses would have a negative return on investment. And it is likely that more CO2 and the modest warming that may come with it will be an overall benefit to the planet.
I will also mention that the public policy side of the Reason Foundation which publishes this website released a report back in December looking at the economics of climate change that reached similar conclusions:
"Using the IPCC's own highest emission scenario, we show that by 2100 the Gross Domestic Product per capita of today's 'developing' countries will be double that of the U.S. in 2006, even taking into account any losses resulting from climate change. Thus developing countries will have significantly more resources and better technology to cope with climate change than even the U.S. does today," Goklany says. "But these advances in adaptive capacity and what they'll mean for our ability to cope with any potential warming are virtually ignored by the IPCC when it assesses the possible impact of global warming."
The study outlines three approaches to tackling climate change: cutting emissions of greenhouse gases; focused adaptation; and economic growth. "The best strategy by far to combat climate change is economic growth," says Julian Morris, the study's project director and vice president at Reason Foundation. "Economic growth is the best way to eliminate poverty; meanwhile, the resulting wealth and technological advances will enable people better to address all the problems they face, including any challenges that global warming may present."
For what it's worth, the climate experts asserting consensus about the reality of man-made global warming cannot, on the basis of their climate expertise, assert a consensus on the policies needed to address the problem.
Go here to read the Reason Foundation study on the best policies to handle future climate change.
Come See the Matt Welch/Jonah Goldberg Libertarian/Conservative Smackdown Tonight in D.C. at AEI! Or at Least Watch the Live Podcast! Also, Listen to the Pre-Interview!
As
mentioned
previously in this space, I will be debating Jonah Goldberg
tonight at the American Enterprise Institute on the question of
"Are Libertarians Part of the Conservative Movement?," for one hour
beginning at 6:30 pm sharp. I hear RSVPs are filling up, so
get on in there if you care to bolster the libertarian hissing
(or finger-wiggling!) section. It's at the AEI Conference Center,
at
1150 17th St., NW, Washington, DC 20036, two blocks from
Farragut North metro station. There will be wine & cheese
after, perhaps as an olive branch to the "cheese-eating
surrender monkeys" contingent.
For those not near the evil Beltway, there will be a live video feed at this link. From what I understand they might even be taking questions (or reading hilarious insults) from the online rabble.
Yesterday, I got the ball rolling with a lively podcast interview with the AEI folks, which you can listen to here.
Sheldon Richman on Stopping Israel from Attacking Iran
Israel’s highest officials tell American
journalists their air force may attack Iran’s nuclear facilities
this spring, although Israeli and American intelligence agencies
say the Islamic republic has no plan to build a bomb. The officials
might be bluffing, but the threats pose a problem for the Obama
administration. As Sheldon Richman explains, it would take courage
hitherto uncharacteristic of this president to withstand the
pressure to get involved and instead keep America out.
A.M. Links: Santorum Smothers the Midwest, Payroll Tax Cut Fails Again, U.S. Embassy in Iraq Faces Splenda Crisis
After big wins in Colorado, Minnesota, and
Missouri,
Santorum is on everybody's lips.- Pilots object to FAA bill's authorization of unmanned drones in U.S. skies.
- No extension for payroll tax cut (yet).
- Ben Bernanke has been vindicated, claims Bloomberg.
- The U.S. embassy in Iraq is facing a sugar/Splenda shortage. Also the salad bar sucks.
- CDC declares bread/dinner rolls gastronomic enemy number one.
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New at Reason.tv: "Jim DeMint: Why Republicans Must Become More Libertarian"
Jacob Sullum on New York's Illegal Pot Crackdown
Thirty-five years ago, New York's
legislature decriminalized marijuana possession. Senior Editor
Jacob Sullum says numbers released last week show the New
York Police Department continues to flagrantly flout that policy,
wasting resources on a pointless, unjust, and illegal crusade
against pot smokers.
It's Santorum Time!
The come-from-behind kid, Sen. Rick Santorum, though still third or last in most national polls and severly underfinanced, wins non-binding contests in Minnesota, Colorado, and Missouri.
Minnesota's and Colorado's were nonbinding caucus straw polls; Missouri's a completely confusing and meaningless vestigial result of their state's inability to act fast (that nonetheless drew well over 200,000 voters with nothing better to do), with the state's real caucus to happen next month.
Ron Paul came in second in Minnesota, with 27 percent, as his campaign figured he would. From his speech tonight Paul seems to think that he'll end up with more delegates when the whole selection process ends. They will not be bound by the results of today's straw poll. Paul continued to do much better in percentage terms than 2008 everywhere.
Romney's appeal everywhere versus either 2008 or a month ago seems to be slipping; he won Minnesota in 2008 but was third today, and won Colorado in 2008 but was a close second to Santorum today.
It's still a race, for better or worse. If Santorum keeps doing well, certainly for worse.
Halftime in America: Remy Chrysler Ad Parody
It's halftime.
Both teams are listening to a Madonna performance that sounds eerily similar to a Lady Gaga song they'll hear 10 years from now.
It's halftime in America too.
People are out of work and they're hurting.
And they're wondering where all their money went.
Well, $12.5 billion of it went to Chrysler.
In the form of a bailout.
But it's okay, because Chrysler is all-American.
Though technically 58.5 percent of Chrysler is owned by an Italian corporation.
And Chrysler manufactures many of it's vehicles in Canada. And Mexico.
But I guess that doesn't make for a great commercial.
Unlike polar bears. Or dogs. Or that digestive yogurt.
Yeah, Americans are hurting.
And their dollars are being used to bail out the chosen ones.
Instead of themselves.
What happened to freedom?
What happened to choice?
Yeah.
We need to guard them like Ben Roethlisberger's friends guard a bathroom door.
Allegedly.
Written by Remy and produced by Meredith Bragg.
About 1.30 minutes.
"Halftime in America" is one of a series of collaborations between Remy and Reason.tv. To watch all of them, including "Grandma Got Indefinitely Detained (A Very TSA Christmas)," "The Occupy Wall Street Protest Song," "Raise the Debt Ceiling Rap," and "Why They Fought," go here now.
To watch Remy's other videos, go to youtube.com/goremy
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"Tim Tebow Law" Would Let Homeschooled Virginia Kids Play Public School Sports, Already Lets Columnists Complain About Too Much Choice
Sometime this
week Virginia
lawmakers are expected to vote on a law which would allow the
state's "tens of thousands of" homeschooled kids to play
sports on public school teams; in fact it would prevent public
schools from being part of any intramural-type organizations which
barred the presence of homeschoolers.
HB 947 is known to its friends as as the "Tim Tebow law" because the Denver Broncos quarterback was homeschooled in Florida, but played on his local school's football team after pushing for the bill which gave him permission to do just that. Said bill is expected to pass in in the State House, having already cleared the House Education Committee.
Fourteen states allow for homeschooled kids to play public school sports. Thirteen more allow kids to play with certain conditions attached.
So, who are the folks objecting to this bill? (You know they're out there.) Various news reports summarize objections along the lines of: hey, public school kids have to keep up certain academic standards to do extracurriculars, why do those pajama-clad-until-noon, weirdo spelling champs get out of that? The Governor of Virginia supports the bill, but the 60,000-strong Teacher's Association is not keen for reasons both tentatively practical (public schools say their belts are tight enough as it is) and school spirit-heavy (you didn't want to be a part of this whole experience, so no, you don't get to play soccer!).
Washington Post columnist John Kelly is also displeased with this legislative notion. After mentioning the problem with Teacher Mom or Dad grade-inflating so that little Josiah can be the school's starting quarterback, and comparing the bill to Kelly's old drama teacher casting students from a girl's school and a college student in high school plays, the columnist continues:
[M]y main objection is philosophical.
School does a lot of things, just one of which is educating students. School is a place children learn to get along, learn what it means to work in a group, to navigate the shoals of cliques and conflicts. It’s where you learn some of the basics of what it means to be a citizen.
We often despair about our public schools in this country, but they’ve been a common experience for millions of us. If you happen to not agree with that common experience, you might decide, as is your right, to home-school your child.
You may have all sorts of reasons. Perhaps our public schools are too secular for you. Or maybe our public schools aren’t rigorous enough for you. Maybe our public schools aren’t safe enough for you. Maybe you love your children more than the rest of us love ours and you just want them around you all the time.
Whatever the reason, you’ve made a decision. You have the courage of your convictions. Except now, supporters of this bill want to loosen their convictions a bit.
“They just want to try out,” the bill’s sponsor, Del. Robert B. Bell (R-Charlottesville), told The Washington Post’s Anita Kumar. “They just want a chance to participate with their friends, their neighbors, their community members.”
Guess what: They do have the chance. They can go to public school.
And the vital point, which everyone else who objects to the bill seems to be making in one way or another:
I’m not against home-schooling. I’m against people wanting to pick and choose the parts of a public education they agree with.
Libertarians or homeschoolers who vehemently dislike public schools are often accused of being purists, but the people making these arguments are real hard-liners.
One choice is being opened up to students here, the choice to be
homeschooleled and also to play sports with 
kids their own age. Even
without the compelling hey, my parents pay the taxes which help
this school exist argument, what's so terrible about one more
choice for kids and their families? Kelly's column is carefully in
favor of homeschooling's legality, but he really doesn't seem to
like the practice, he's more wearily resigned to it.
Bob Cook over at Forbes.com is initially less snotty about the fact of homeschooling, but this attitude of "you made your education bed, now lie in it" still lingers throughout. That gets real, as the kids say, about here:
I just find it so rich that homeschool advocates are more than happy to run down public schools and explain why they’re just not good enough for their little budding geniuses, yet they’re begging to lean on and cherry-pick the public school for things they can’t provide.
"So rich" is a pretty strong rhetorical cue. Cook thinks homeschoolers are elitist egg-heads! But he then goes on to make the point that private school families have to pay taxes but are not offered this option.
Fair point.
But why aren't they? If a private school doesn't have a football team or a soccer team, but the local school does, well, why not let kids get their chance to play? Or even let each school decide instead of mandating at the state-level, which the Tebow bill admittedly does?
Maybe that's a bad idea, but having just celebrated School Choice Week at Reason DC, I'm feeling particularly keen on choosing. The columnists and other dissenters say kids can't have an education buffet, but why can't they? Why can't they take physics at school, but read history at home, or any another variation?
I suggest that with super-optimism and a general love of freedom but also, dammit, if you want the parents' tax dollars, there should be some education options. Parents pay, so you had better let in a thousand homeschooled Christian dorks so that they too can be future football stars who provoke an ire I cannot began to understand. That's fair. And that's one small step towards real school choice.
(Still, in my day in Pennsylvania we played touch football in the park near the house where we had our homeschool group. We didn't need no dad-gummed public school for that. Sometimes we didn't even have shoes. Really, there was a memorably muddy spring day in about seventh grade where we all played shoeless.)
Reason on education and homeschooling; Veronique de Rugy on how increased school spending doesn't seem to produce smarter kids.
Orwellian Irony in the Extreme Double-Plus-Good Update: It's a fake!
Picture of the the day, courtesy the Twitter feeds of Libby Jacobson, Soren Dayton, and Radley Balko.
Update!: So it turns out the picture above is a photoshopped image. For a shot of the building's front, go here and here for an explanation.
And here's a 2007 story from the Daily Mail about the proliferation of closed-circuit TV cameras (CCTV) in Orwell's old neighborhood.
Ronald Bailey Reviews Abundance: Why The Future Will Be Much Better Than You Think
The end is not nigh argues X Prize guru Peter
Diamandis and journalist Steven Kotler in their new book,
Abundance. Instead they assert that humanity stands on the
threshold of a period of radical transformation in which technology
has the potential to significantly raise the basic standards of
living for every man, woman, and child on the planet.
Reason Science Correspondent Ronald Bailey explains why he
thinks that the two techno-idealists are on to something.
DOJ Continues Investigation of Rupert Murdoch, Komen VP Resigns Over Planned Parenthood Flap, Obama Staffers Defend About-Face on Super PACs: P.M. Links
The DOJ is dedicating still
more resourches to
investigating Rupert Murdoch. - SCOTUS likely won't hear Prop 8 appeal.
- Organizing for America defends Obama's super PAC decision.
- Rick Santorum replaces Newt as Not-Romney of the week.
- Komen Foundation VP resigns over Planned Parenthood kerfuffle.
- Argentina to restart the Falklands War.
- Russian envoy makes nice with Syrian butchers.
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University Sells Plan B in Vending Machine
At Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania,
students can now buy
the morning-after pill from a vending machine.
"We had some conversations with them and did a survey of the student body and we got an 85 percent response rate that the students supported Plan B in the House Center," said Dr. Roger Serr, Vice president of Student Affairs at Shippensburg.
The university does not profit from the sales. It pays $25 for one dose and that's exactly what the student has to pay.Dr. Serr says that somewhere between 350 and 400 doses are sold each year to the female population. The pill can be legally sold over-the-counter to anyone 17 or older.
We're a little bit obsessed with vending machines here at Reason. I reviewed the Senate's hotdog vending machine, and hollered about the provision in the House health care bill requiring nutrition labeling on vending machines. I've celebrated veterans who get their beer from vending machines. I've also written about machines that vend gold in Abu Dhabi, pizza in Rome, and meat in Spain.
Plus, we reviewed a book chronicling the empowering effect of being able to buy stuff without the complicity another human being:
For nearly a century before the Internet put the anonymous consumption of vices literally at the world’s fingertips, vending machines dispensed taboo wares, experiences, and entertainment free from the gaze of prying eyes....
Be it the condom machine in the gas station bathroom, the coin-operated peep show, the pinball craze that prompted a moral panic in the 1940s, truant hoods spending afternoons in smoke-blanketed video game arcades in the 1980s, or the rebellious rock ’n’ roll dispensing jukebox, there has always been a subversive element to coin-operated commerce.
The Plan B machine continues this theme (whether or not you consider the use of the pill a vice) letting consumers make their own moral choices, on their own schedule, with the company they choose to keep.
Ron Paul Second in National Poll
As Colorado and Minnesota caucus today (educated expectations have Ron Paul doing not so well in the former, probably second in the latter), a Reuters/Ipsos poll has the libertarian leaning congressman second place. Extra special good for the rest of the campaign, if and when it gets to just Romney and Paul, Romney is dropping (while Santorum also gains a lot).
Romney was backed by 29 percent of Republican voters in the telephone poll conducted February 2-6, down from 30 percent in a survey in early January. The former Massachusetts governor's three rivals in the race to oppose President Barack Obama in November were in a close race for second, the poll showed.
Texas Congressman Ron Paul's support grew by 5 percentage points to 21 percent, moving him into second place and ahead of former House of Representatives speaker Newt Gingrich, whose support slipped to 19 percent from 20 percent.
Former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum also rose by 5 points to reach 18 percent, just behind Gingrich, according to the poll.
Big margin of error, though, of 4.9 points for Republicans, which Paul's lead over both Gingrich and Santorum falls within. Still, it marks a candidacy by no means out of the running.
Bonus video making the rounds of Paul fans: a collection of pretty blatant media ignoring of Paul:
Ninth Circuit Won't Say If “Same-Sex Couples May Ever Be Denied the Right to Marry”
As Peter Suderman noted below, a 3-judge panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals voted today to strike down California’s Proposition 8, which had amended the state constitution in order to forbid gay marriage. While this is a big win for the cause of gay rights, it is not a definitive judicial ruling in favor of gay marriage. As Judge Stephen R. Reinhardt states in his majority opinion, the court refused to touch the big question of whether the Constitution protects a right to gay marriage:
Whether under the Constitution same-sex couples may ever be denied the right to marry, a right that has long been enjoyed by opposite-sex couples, is an important and highly controversial question. It is currently a matter of great debate in our nation, and an issue over which people of good will may disagree, sometimes strongly. Of course, when questions of constitutional law are necessary to the resolution of a case, courts may not and should not abstain from deciding them simply because they are controversial. We need not and do not answer the broader question in this case, however, because California had already committed to same-sex couples both the incidents of marriage and the official designation of ‘marriage,’ and Proposition 8’s only effect was to take away that important and legally significant designation, while leaving in place all of its incidents. This unique and strictly limited effect of Proposition 8 allows us to address the amendment’s constitutionality on narrow grounds.
In other words, Reinhardt attempted to craft a relatively narrow decision both to minimize the likelihood of the Supreme Court hearing an appeal in the case (if one is filed), and to postpone the ultimate battle over the constitutionality of gay marriage until some later date. Had he issued a sweeping opinion that found gay marriage to be a protected right, the Supreme Court would almost certainly have agreed to hear the appeal. So why not force the vote? Perhaps Reinhardt doesn't think there are five current Supreme Court justices in favor of gay marriage and he doesn't want to give the Court a chance to rule on the issue just yet.
Maldives President and Climate Change Activist Resigns Under Pressure
The president of the Maldives, Mohamed
Nasheed, has just resigned after facing weeks of violent protests
and policy mutiny. The first democratically elected president of
the Maldives, Nasheed was also a darling for environmentalists.
Back in 2009, Nasheed donned scuba gear and held an underwater
press conference to protest
inaction on global warming. He even planned for the Maldives to
become the first
"carbon-neutral" country by 2020. Since most of the Maldives is
just a few feet above sea level, climate change could overwhelm
this island nation. According to Nasheed, “If we can’t save the
Maldives today, we can’t save London, New York or Hong Kong
tomorrow.”
But it looks like Nasheed couldn't save the Maldives today. Uprisings began after he ordered the arrest of Judge Abdulla Mohamed, chief judge of the Criminal Court. Mohamed had recently released an illegally detained a government critic, so his arrest was incredibly controversial in the Maldives:
The vice president, Supreme Court, Human Rights Commission, Judicial Services Commission and the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights all called for Mohamed to be released.
Outraged, demonstrators took to the streets, and
were soon joined by rebel
police, Islamic fundamentalists, and a few soldiers. To keep the
peace, Nasheed decided to resign and has been replaced
by his vice president, a former top official at UNICEF.
Bill McKibben, a leading climate activist (and Keystone XL opponent) founded 350.org, which helped organized the press conference under the sea. He weighs in:
No government has been more forthright in the climate fight than President Nasheed's. He is a hero of our time.
Aside from unknowingly comparing Nasheed to a manipulative, cynical Russian antihero, McKibben overlooks a few inconvenient truths about the Maldives. Like its struggles with Islamic fundamentalism. Only Islam can be practiced publicly in this archipelago. So when a restaurant put up Christmas decorations last year, a riot broke out. (The war on Christmas is real! It's just on the other side of the planet.)
In addition, alcohol is outlawed through the island nation (except for tourists). In December 2011, the tourism ministry banned all spas and sports centers, after Islamists claimed they were fronts for prostitution and featured "lustful music." But perhaps the most troubling practice is that the Maldives publicly flogs women accused of adultery. Nasheed's Foreign Minister, Ahmed Naseem, even blasted the UN for suggesting that the Maldives should ban flogging:
What’s there to discuss about flogging?...There is nothing to debate about in a matter clearly stated in the religion of Islam. No one can argue with God.
It's clear that residents of Maldives are more worried about the role of religion and the rule of law today than uncertain sea level changes in the future. The Maldives was long portrayed as the first possible casualty of global warming. But Maldivians have more pressing concerns:
An Asian diplomat serving in Male told Reuters on condition of anonymity: “No one remembers the underwater cabinet meeting. They remember Judge Abdulla Mohamed,” a reference to the arrested judge.
Meanwhile, concern about climate change is falling amongst Americans. In a recent poll by the Pew Research Center, only 25 percent of Americans viewed global warming as a "top policy priority" for 2012. Five years ago, that figure was 38 percent.
Reason on climate change.
Nick Gillespie Talks Politics of Homeowning on Freedom Watch w Judge Napolitano
Last Friday, I appeared on Fox Business' Freedom Watch with Judge Andrew Napolitano to talk about the politics of home ownership and how it's distorted the economy to bad ends.
The short version: There's no way that the government can guarantee or heavily subsidize a class of assets without it all ending in tears.
Check out this blog post: "If Housing Was Overpriced, Is it a Bad Thing that Fewer Americans Own Homes?"
About 4.30 minutes.
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Gene Healy on Why Law Professors Make Bad Presidents
Constitutional law professors should be kept as
far away from nuclear weapons as possible. The skill-sets they
bring to the presidency just gives them the sophistry and
brazenness necessary to invent new and creative ways of violating
the constitutional oath of office. Obama is the fourth former
con law prof to serve as president, joining William Howard Taft,
Woodrow Wilson, and Bill Clinton. While Taft did comparatively
little damage, writes Gene Healy, the rest hardly inspire
confidence that familiarity with constitutional scholarship
encourages fidelity to the national charter.
Court Declares California's Gay Marriage Ban Illegal
Gay marriage gets a win: A federal appeals
court ruled today that California's ban on gay marriage, known as
Proposition 8, is illegal. Via
The Los Angeles Times:
The 2-1 decision by a panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals found that Proposition 8, the 2008 ballot measure that limited marriage to one man and one woman, violated the U.S. Constitution. The architects of Prop. 8 have vowed to appeal.
The ruling was narrow and likely to be limited to California.
“Proposition 8 served no purpose, and had no effect, other than to lessen the status and human dignity of gays and lesbians in California,” the court said.
Read Jacob Sullum on the weakness of the defense of Prop. 8 here. Reason on gay marriage here. Check out the full decision below.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt Teams With ACLU to Promote Your Right to Photograph Cops
Forever Child Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Auto-Tune the News pioneers the Gregory Brothers, the ACLU, and Ben Franklin have made a music video promoting your right to take pictures of cops:
Reason.tv on the War on Cameras:
Sen. Jon Kyl: “What I’m proposing is using one budgetary gimmick to pay for another.”
That’s Arizona Republican Sen. Jon Kyl’s
proposed method of “fixing” Medicare’s physician reimbursement
scheme, the sustainable growth rate (SGR), which has been
causing multi-billion dollar budget headaches for roughly a decade.
Sen. Kyl’s idea is to use
imaginary war spending that’s currently included in the federal
budget baseline to pay for the actual spending on Medicare’s
physician payments. Problem solved!
Kyl’s revealing remark comes via The New York Times, which has a yet another lengthy report on the latest iteration of the long-running fight over what’s become known as the “doc fix.” The wonky details are there for those who want them, but the larger picture remains depressingly familiar.
As usual, it’s total gridlock on Capitol Hill, even though both parties in Congress agree on what they want: Giving doctors a slight raise from their current temporary reimbursement rate, and permanently resetting Medicare’s physician payments at a much higher level than the SGR formula calls for. (If no changes are made, physicians will take a 27 percent cut in March.) Doctors, of course, insist on being paid more too, and say they might not be able to take Medicare payments if the low rates go into effect. The hangup, as always, is how to pay for the increased rates.
But the larger problem that tends to go unmentioned is the technocratic mindset, shared by both parties, that assumes that Congress should control payment rates for Medicare, the single largest health payer in the country. As I reported in my January story, “Medicare Whac-a-mole,” Congress has been fiddling with centrally set Medicare payment schemes for decades, only to find that each new plan produces a new and unexpected set of unintended consequences, which then have to be fixed through more technocratic tinkering. But surely "fixing" the SGR's problems through an obvious gimmick swap will work where previous attempts to control the system have failed.
Occupy DC Promises to Bring the Revolution—and Big Labor—to CPAC
Having been driven out of McPherson Square in Washington, D.C., Occupiers are now planning to set up camp at the Marriot Wardman Park Hotel, where they will harass the "bigots, media mouthpieces, corrupt politicians, and their 1 percent elite puppet masters" slated to attend this year's Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC.
Occupiers will join up with the "AFL-CIO, SEIU, National Nurses United, Metro Labor Council, [and] OurDC" at Malcolm X Park (located at Euclid and 16th Streets NW). From there they will march to the Marriott in Woodley Park (that's a 1.2 mile hike.)
Once at the hotel, the Occupiers and their Big Labor compadres will "have actions" and "make our voices heard."
Occupiers are inviting "ANYONE WHO HAS EVER BEEN SUPPORTIVE OF REAL DEMOCRACY, EQUALITY AND POSITIVE DISCOURSE" to help them shout out people whose politics they find intolerable.
Here is 1-percenter (and friend of Reason!) Peter Schiff speaking to the 99 at Occupy Wall Street:
Bonus: Here's a video of me asking women at CPAC 2010 if they were there to find boyfriends; a question that got me flogged by every corner of the Internet for being a leering misogynist. (Not a single one of those sites, nor the conservative commenters who lit into my ass in the Youtube comments, awarded me mitigating points for having soundtracked the video with Jemina Pearl-led Be Your Own Pet.)
A. Barton Hinkle on Obama's Unchallenged Religiosity
George W.
Bush had one small office devoted to faith-based initiatives, and
was savaged for it, writes A. Barton Hinkle. By 2004, several
million gallons of ink already had been spilled warning that Bush’s
“faith-based presidency” was “nudging the church-state line”
(The New York Times) and was “turning the U.S. into a
religious state” (Village Voice) and was “arrogant” and
“troubling” (St. Petersburg Times) and was “pandering to
Christian zealots” (Salon). Barack Obama, on the
other hand, says faith drives much of his domestic agenda—and no
one even blinks.
RomneyCare: Exploding Costs, Higher Taxes
In the wake of budget overruns in the
Massachusetts health care overhaul Mitt Romney signed in 2006,
Romney's successor, Democratic Gov. Deval Patrick, has already
raised business and cigarette taxes in order to help fund the
program. Problem solved? Hardly. In fact, Gov. Patrick is now
proposing yet more tax hikes to help pay for the program. Via
yesterday's Boston Herald:
Senate President Therese Murray declined to say Monday whether she’d support a 20 percent increase in the state cigarette tax proposed last month by Gov. Deval Patrick to help fund the exploding cost of health care programs.
Supporters of the tax defend it by pointing to estimates that suggest higher taxes on cigarettes will reduce smoking. Given that neighboring New Hampshire recently cut its cigarette tax, it may be that the effect turns out to be shifting cigarette purchases across state lines. But what if it works, and smoking rates drop? That means that cigarette tax revenue will also drop. Gov. Patrick's proposal seems to be an attempt to raise revenue by taxing behavior that he'd like to discourage. It's not a defense, but Massachusetts isn't the only state to try funding public health programs with smoking revenues. In the late 1990s, Arizona attempted to pay for an expansion of its Medicaid using revenues from the Master Settlement Agreement between the tobacco industry and the states. The state ended up with an odd public health problem: Too few smokers.
Sen. Jim DeMint: Why Republicans Must Become More Libertarian
"The new debate in the Republican party needs to be between conservatives and libertarians," says Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.). "A lot of the libertarian ideas that Ron Paul is talking about...should not be alien to any Republican."
Yet right after the 2010 midterm elections, the influential Tea Party favorite proclaimed that "you can't be a fiscal conservative and not be a social conservative," a comment that was widely viewed as a slap at libertarians. And South Carolina's junior senator is also a staunch pro-lifer, has favored a constitutional ban on flag burning, and is on the record saying that gays shouldn't be allowed to teach at public schools.
More recently, DeMint has been leaning libertarian. His new book, Now or Never: Saving America from Economic Collapse, is a warning to the nation that we need radical spending cuts (including putting defense spending on the table) or else face economic oblivion. And he was instrumental in getting Tea Party Republicans elected in 2010, including the most libertarian member of the caucus, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who also wrote the foreword to DeMint's book.
Reason's Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch sat down with DeMint for a wide-ranging discussion about fiscal vs. social conservatism, cutting spending, the GOP presidential nomination, whether the Tea Party still matters, and much more.
Approximately 29 minutes.
Shot by Meredith Bragg and Jim Epstein; edited by Epstein.
Go to Reason.tv for downloadable versions and subscribe to Reason.tv's YouTube Channel to receive automatic notification when new material goes live.
Matt Welch on Why Independent Voters Are Turning to Libertarianism
It’s hard to imagine a more favorable climate for
an opposition party to gain voters than an election year with an
unpopular White House incumbent under whose watch the economy has
been and likely will continue to be awful. Yet a mere nine days
before the beginning of 2012, a USA Today study found that
Republican registration in the 28 states where party affiliation is
recorded was down 800,000 since 2008, including 350,000 in eight
swing states.
Who’s gaining? Not the governing Democrats, who deservedly lost twice as much. It’s the ranks of the unaffiliated that have grown by 400,000, including 325,000 in those eight swing states. Even amid the clarifying up-or-down, Team Blue or Team Red exercise of high-profile politics, Americans are increasingly choosing to jump off the political pendulum, reject tribalism, and declare themselves swing voters. And if the first week of 2012 is any guide, writes Reason Editor in Chief Matt Welch, these are the people most likely to support practical libertarian politics.
Attn: D.C.-area Reasonoids! Come See Matt Welch Debate Jonah Goldberg at AEI Wednesday Night on the Question, "Are Libertarians Part of the Conservative Movement?"
On Wednesday, Feb. 8 (tomorrow!), at 6:30 p.m., I
will be locking horns with National Review columnist (and
American Enterprise Institute scholar) Jonah "Liberal
Fascism" Goldberg over where us libertoodlians belong in the
American political scheme of things. The
event is in the belly of the beast AEI
Conference Center, at
1150 17th St., NW, Washington, DC 20036, two blocks from
Farragut North metro station, so I need all the minority
rooting-section support I can get!
Registration begins at 6:15, debate from 6:30-7:30, wine & cheese reception to follow. The good folks at America's Future Foundation are co-sponsoring.
Goldberg was one of our three contributors to the contentions "Where Do Libertarians Belong?" cover package in August 2010, which you can read here. He then debated co-debaters Brink Lindsey and Matt Kibbe live at Reason D.C. HQ, which you can watch below, and he also tussled with Reason columnist Veronique de Rugy over the subject six months prior to that.
Maryland Cops Conduct Drug Raid for $829 Worth of Pot
Corporal Rick Alexander of the Anne Arundel County Police Department has been arrested and charged with obstruction for tipping off five men about an impending drug raid on their house. Phone records showed that Alexander had been communicating with one of the men, and all five suspects confirmed to police that Alexander had given them a heads up. After the 10 p.m. raid turned up nothing, police made their way to a second location, where the suspects had moved the drugs.
There they found and seized a grand total of $829 worth of marijuana.
The Bird's The Word: Obligatory Post About MIA Flipping Off Global Audience During Super Bowl Half-Time Show
It wasn't a wardrobe malfunction but it's close enough, especially given that there's really nothing else going on in the world or the country right now.
The singer in question, M.I.A., is British-born and of Tamil descent, and the NFL and NBC have apologized and tried to blame each other.
"The obscene gesture in the performance was completely inappropriate, very disappointing and we apologize to our fans," said Brian McCarthy, spokesman for the NFL, which produced Madonna's halftime show. He said that M.I.A. had not done anything similar during rehearsals and the league had no reason to believe she would pull something like that during the actual show.
The risque moment came during the biggest TV event of the year. The screen briefly went blurred after M.I.A.'s gesture in what was a late attempt — by less than a second — to cut out the camera shot.
"The NFL hired the talent and produced the halftime show," NBC spokesman Christopher McCloskey said. "Our system was late to obscure the inappropriate gesture and we apologize to our viewers."
Isn't it about time we cut ties with England
anyway?
It was an excellent Super Bowl game and the only thing that worries me about all this is that the Supreme Court will be ruling on the FCC's ability to police the broadcast airwaves this session. Given that part of the current cycle of fear of fleeting expletives and nipple slips stems from Janet Jackson's and Justin Timberlake's half-time show from what frankly seems like a thousand years ago, this probably ain't good for that.
Rather than building on already onerous content regulations and ultimately arbitrary speech restrictions ("fleeting expletives" have no place in a world filled ExtenZe ads featuring Jimmy Johnson, right?), can we just agree that next year, the Super Bowl will carry a warning sticker noting that despite high-level of play, some viewers may be disturbed by on-field activities? That should solve it.
A.M. Links: Rick Santorum Could Take Minnesota and Missouri, Obama Embraces a Super PAC, Nepotistic Congress Critters Exposed
Rick Santorum is shaping up to be the winner in
Missouri and Minnesota.- Obama now loves Super PACs.
- WaPo unveils a massive pork-documentation project.
- White House reminds GOP of triggered defense cuts.
- The right-wing response to Think Progress launches.
- Catholic League is ready to go to the mat over birth control.
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: "Arab Spring Update: Freedom House's Arch Puddington on How 2012 Will Be Like 1989."
Shikha Dalmia on Indiana Becoming a Right-to-Work State
Last week, Indiana became the first state in a
decade (and the first state in the Rust Belt) to adopt a
right-to-work law. This means that Indiana’s working men and women,
like their comrades in 22 other states, will no longer have to pay
mandatory dues to union bosses as a condition of employment. Big
Labor was apoplectic, but as Shikha Dalmia observes, regardless of
how the unions feel, Indiana’s law may very well go down in history
as the watershed moment that decisively stemmed the awesome power
Big Labor has exerted on American politics for about a century.
Ron Paul: Psychobiographized by the New York Times and Lives to Tell the Tale
The New York Times today introduces America to the mysterious Ron Paul, candidate for president.
It's a pretty positive piece, actually, certainly giving the reader sufficient reason to admire the man's character and steadfastness if not explaining the whys and whats of his ideas with much depth.
It also buries the lead a bit, I think, in stressing Paul's hard-working upbringing from parents of German descent with family tales of hyperinflation as the cause of his ideas first. That's explains too much, I think, as plenty of Americans were born in the Depression to parents with Old World memories and worked hard and ended up New Dealers.
Rather, I think, like most of his libertarian brethren, one should look a little more to those books Ron Paul read--Pasternak, Rand, Hayek, Mises--to explain Paul more precisely. And the story does get to them as well.
The New York Times's Paul comes across as a decent man--hard working all his life, treating destitute patients for free, married to his one and only youthful sweetheart for over 50 years, no angry voices from family or associates to be seen. Of course, they paint him as a good man with peculiar, though well-thought-out and consistent, beliefs, and the sort of guy who is going to let you know about them, whether you care or not.
It may or may not matter to anyone anymore whether Ron Paul is or isn't a card-carrying member of the John Birch Society, a matter the Times always finds fascinating, fighting old ideological wars being a great pleasure apparently for their readers (regardless, Paul has been on the masthead of the JBS's magazine, spoken at their gatherings, and praised their members). I suspect it might have been more useful to readers considering Ron Paul in the context of running for president in 2012, not 1964, to discuss his prescience on the dangers of our Middle Eastern wars and Federal Reserve policies, neither of which get specific significant play in the story.
All told, though, being psychobiographized by the Times is a hazardous situation, and Dr. Paul came through it mostly unscathed.
For my own book-length take on the whats, whys, and hows of Ron Paul, see my forthcoming book Ron Paul's Revolution.
Ron Paul's Nevada Disappointment
The end
results for Ron Paul in Nevada were nearly heartbreakingly
disappointing--third behind Gingrich with 18.7 percent, just 6,175
total votes in a
very low turnout caucus vote, with more than 10,000 fewer GOP
caucus goers than 2008. This was for a campaign and candidate
that expected at the least a strong second and, if they continued
their pattern of enormous state-by-state increases vs. their vote
totals in 2008, maybe even win. See this chart to see what a
bizarre outlier Nevada was in terms of Paul improving over
2008:
In some good news, Paul outperformed and Gingrich underperformed the last Public Policy Polling poll leading up to the vote, Paul outperforming by around 4 percentage points and Gingrich underperforming by the same.
What went wrong? Reports of general human error incompetence in the Nevada vote counting and caucus locations abound, and Paul fans more darkly suspect shenanigans that deliberately undercount Paul's vote. (Best I could gather from in-the-know campaign officials indicates that no one thinks there's enough evidence on the table of deliberate cheating to raise a public stink.) Some precinct irregularites might have resulted in precincts being "thrown out," reports the Las Vegas Sun, and Washoe County claimed the state was misreporting results and Clark County's counting process was suspiciously drawn-out over days.
What went wrong for Paul's team? Paul's vaunted ground game did what it usually did in terms of input--lots of bodies on ground, and calls made--100,000 of them in the three days prior to the vote, a one-day possible world record of 40,000 calls made from one location, according to one volunteer.
The campaign had identified as many as 24,000 supposedly committed voters in their phone call operation (that's far more than the 16,486 Romney got, which explains why wild dreams of a win for Paul's people were not so outrageous). But only a bit more than 6,000 actually voted. Unlike the Paul campaign's success in actually generating turnout in Iowa and New Hampshire, that final crucial step, the one that's up to the voters themselves, the one that no amount of Ron Paul campaign staff or volunteer work can do for them--getting off their ass and going to the caucus meeting--was neglected by far too many voters.
The result was a huge morale blow to the campaign and the candidate. It was also somewhat confusing and infuriating. "I don’t know, 6,000 just seems astonishingly low," one volunteer on the ground there says. "Out of all the different public events I went with him to, I swear well more than 6,000 attended those events. And I didn't even go to Reno and the west side of the state." This same activist said that though his and many other fans heads can't wrap their heads around how this happened, "I know the campaign's mentality is, just move on to the next state and get to work."
But the campaign did collect five committed delegates to Gingrich's six, Paul supporters (though bound to the state's proportional results at the Tampa national convention, if those candidates are still running) did their usual game of waiting it out to make sure delegates to the convention are disproportionately from the Paul movement, which will effect the shape of the party's ideology down the road in interesting and likely good ways whether or not Ron Paul is the GOP candidate. Maine and Minnesota and Colorado loom ahead, all nonbinding straw poll caucuses, where Paul is expected by some in the know to wrack up a possible win in Maine, very likely second places in at least Maine and Minnesota (and probably not much in straw vote terms in Colorado), with the usual caucus game of making sure Paul people move ahead to their state and later national GOP conventions as delegates.
In total, the result was disappointing, and bad for media expectations, and surely disappointing and aggravating to Ron Paul himself. (I witnessed in the Ames straw poll in Iowa how let-down he can feel when he has a realistic expectation of doing much better than he does.) All the campaign can tell their supporters is: it's great to express your support for Paul; please try to do it by showing up to vote for him.
And the larger game continues, with no foregone conclusions: collecting delegates, making sure Ron Paul people begin inhabiting the Republican Party in greater numbers, and showing the importance of the ideas of limited government, fiscal sanity, sound money, and sane foreign policy to politicians and media of all parties via the vehicle of Ron Paul. Candidates do not have to win elections to shape political parties and the political future, and despite Gingrich's "in it for the long haul" bravado, right now Ron Paul still seems like the most likely not-Romney to have the cash and juice to do it, because Paul people don't just give because they think he might or will win--they also give because they want to show their support for the ideas he uniquely represents in American politics.
Media bias lesson via Politico: When Paul people are well organized enough to show up and win a caucus, that means they "hijacked" it. CNN reports from that Paul-dominated late-night caucus:
My forthcoming book, Ron Paul's Revolution.
UPDATE: Some relevant info I didn't have in front of me when I posted this originally: youth turnout, always good for Paul, was dismal in Nevada Saturday; only one percent of under 30s voted, compared to 5 percent in 2008. And yes, Paul dominated that one percent, getting 41 percent of their vote.
Surveillance Video Shows the NYPD Kicking Down Ramarley Graham's Door Right Before They Killed Him
The death of 18-year-old Ramarley Graham in Brooklyn last Friday was the third time that week that a member of the New York Police Department shot a citizen. It now seems likely that that the Graham shooting will be the incident with the most controversial teeth. After all, the teenager was killed in his Grandmother's bathroom, and the Grandmother and Graham's six-year-old brother were in the apartment at the time.
And not only is the initial story — that Graham struggled with police before he was shot — already falling apart (even Police Commissioner Ray Kelly has admitted this) but some newly-released surveillance footage of Graham and the police on his trail makes the NYPD look very bad indeed, and like probable-violators of the Fourth Amendment.
(Though maybe not, thanks to Kentucky vs. King which upheld the right of police to kick down a door if they smelled marijuana; Justice Samuel Alito took the stance that if someone bars police entry on Constitutional grounds that's legal, but if they instead attempt to destroy evidence (making sounds to suggest they are doing that), a warrant-less home invasion is justified. Does the legality of entry also depend on how whether the drugs were visible during the alleged buy? Or the threat of Graham's non-existent gun which cops twice reported over the radio? I don't know, but I would be interested to see what brainier, more legal-minded people have to say, including the folks over at Volokh Conspiracy.)
The footage below shows Graham returning home at a walk. Two police officers are several seconds behind him, but they're running. Graham goes inside and then the cops spend several minutes trying to kick down the front door. They finally move to the back where they successfully broke into the apartment. Below is a New York 1 news report on the footage, and a WPIX report with clearer picture can be found here.
Then things gets hazier. Residents of the apartment say that police didn't identify themselves. You can see "police" on the back of their jackets in the video, but you could also understand some disorientation or confusion over the identity of two gun-toting people who just broke down your back door. Graham definitely was in the bathroom when he was killed, supposedly while trying to flush his recently-purchased marijuana. As mentioned, even Commissioner Kelly is backing away from the allegations that there was a scuffle. The officer who shot Graham, as well as his Sergeant, are both now on restricted leave (desk duty, with their guns and badges revoked). Again, no gun was found on Graham, or in the apartment.
The New York Post reports that NYPD Commissioner Kelly's verdict is promisingly not-100 percent in support of police. He said at a press conference that "the evidence will be presented to a grand jury" and “At this juncture, we see an unarmed person being shot. That always concerns us."
Further stoking the controversy are allegations about how poorly Graham's Grandmother was treated by police. She says she was held for seven hours and denied access to her heart medication.
Simpsons Figurines: Banned in Iran
Iranian kids can't watch The Simpsons; the government has been jamming satellite transmission of the cartoon sitcom for decades. But just to be sure that Iranians are protected from Western moral contamination, Simpsons merchandise is now being banned as well.
The anti-Simpsons edict comes from Mohammad Hossein Farjoo, Secretary for Policy-Making of the Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults (IIDCYA), an organization founded by the deposed Shah's wife in 1961 with the goal of shaping the cultural and intellectual landscape of Iran. The ban may overstep his mandate. Technically, the Iranian Department of Commerce, which actually is a government agency, has dibs on cultivating the selection of ayatollah-approved goods. Such goods include the traditional Iranian boy and girl pair Dara and Sara (pictured right), similar to Raggedy Ann and Raggedy Andy, but without the raggedyness. Reuters reports:
A range of officially approved dolls launched in 2002 to counter demand for Barbie have not proven successful, merchants told Reuters.
The dolls...arrived in shops wearing a variety of traditional dress, with Sara fully respecting the rule that all women in Iran must obey in public, of covering their hair and wearing loose-fitting clothes.
"My daughter prefers Barbies [which have been off the market since January]. She says Sara and Dara are ugly and fat," said Farnaz, a 38-year-old mother.
Supreme
Leader Ayatollah Khamenei has long been obsessed with what he sees
as a campaign of cultural infiltration by the West. That's
probably why he's been increasing censorship
and imprisonment of Iranian journalists, activists, and
computer programmers lately.
He's leaving the cutesy stuff to the private organizations, though: Last month, I reported on the intention of a private Iranian company to produce toy replicas of the American spy plane RQ-170 Sentinel which was captured by Iranian military forces last November. (I also erroneously identified the makers of the toy as Iranian officials, thereby perpetuating the crude misconception that the often disparate goals of a government and those of the civilians to which it lays claim are one in the same. Bad Julie.)
Thus the warning about the moral pitfalls hanging out with "the Simpsons, a famously self-centred and irreligious bunch" in the form of plastic figurines. The IIDCYA, an institution older than the Islamic Revolution itself, has enough influence over these matters that Iranian children may indeed have to settle for fat, ugly, conservatively dressed toys.
How Michael Bloomberg’s Gun Control Campaign Could Hurt Obama's Reelection
New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Boston Mayor Thomas Menino teamed up for a pro-gun control ad that aired during yesterday’s Super Bowl. At The Daily Beast, liberal UCLA law professor Adam Winkler argues that not only is the ad likely to backfire, it might just hurt President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign as well. He writes:
Gun-control proponents can only pray that Obama doesn’t take Menino and Bloomberg’s bait. Making gun control a more important issue in the election would be a terrible mistake for the president—and for the cause of gun control....
For many pro-gun independents, Obama is not seen as a real threat to gun rights. They are focused on more pressing issues, like the economy and jobs. If Obama starts talking about gun control, however, they may begin to believe the NRA’s dire warnings. And the impact will be felt not just in the presidential race. It will hurt Democrats all the way down the ballot. Recall that when the Newt Gingrich–led Republicans seized control of the House in 1994, President Bill Clinton blamed the gun-control laws he himself had pushed through during his first two years in office. Obama’s talking about guns would be a disaster for Democrats and—necessarily—for the prospects of new gun control.
Read the whole story here. Read Thaddeus Russell's review of Winkler’s new book Gunfight from our January 2012 issue right here.
L.A. Teachers Deliver for Kids by Blindfolding, Fondling Them
Two perverted teachers may not be enough to
make a sex ring, but it’s getting kids two days off from a Los
Angeles elementary school this week.
Miramonte Elementary, an L.A. Unified School District school in the unincorporated Florence neighborhood, will be closed tomorrow and Wednesday following the arrests of two teachers charged with sexual abusing their students. From the L.A. Times:
The district said the school would be closed to students Tuesday and Wednesday. It was open as usual Monday, and a number of parents went to the campus to protest the district's handling of situation.
Teacher Mark Berndt has been accused of feeding his students his semen, blindfolding them and placing cockroaches on their hands and faces. Berndt was put on leave a year ago and subsequently fired. He was arrested Jan. 30.
Teacher Martin Bernard Springer was accused of allegedly fondling students. He was ordered out of his classroom Thursday morning and was arrested Friday.
The New York Daily News has details on one girl whose parents complained about Berndt to Miramonte Principal Martin Sandoval in 2008. Rather than addressing their concerns, Sandoval transferred the girl to Springer’s class. Both teachers remained in place. During this time Berndt (not to be confused with an L.A. photographer of the same name) allegedly took more than 400 dirty pictures of children. Amazingly, Berndt was taking his photos in an archaic medium called “film” and was only caught when a CVS film processor blew the whistle on him.
Berndt’s activities first came to light in 1994, but for reasons that remain obscure, no action was taken against him at the time.
The story is getting national attention, and I don’t want to be too opportunistic in using it against United Teachers Los Angeles (whose law firm represented Berndt after he was removed from class and will probably ensure he continues to get his pension).
But a note about Miramonte: Florence isn’t the worst place in the world, but it’s a lower-income area where the kids actually do fit the description union activists invariably use when telling their sob stories. In my experience, every teacher claims that his or her students are the wretched refuse of the education system. Nobody ever has the grace to allow that one or two kids might be motivated workers with attentive parents. As I said a while back:
It's a math miracle: Every single teacher only teaches kids who are at risk or underprivileged or special needs or special ed. Using teacher math I calculate that every kid in L.A., my own included, would instantly become a drooling homicidal gangbanger if not for the teachers unions.
The vicious class-based slander about parental inattention is belied by the uproar among Miramonte parents. This is exactly the kind of school that supposedly is why we need to spend so much money on public education for the neediest. Yet the school’s customers couldn’t even get a response to credible evidence that their kids were being sexually abused.
Bloomberg Attacks Mormons Over Gun Sales, Judge Gives Shrinks More Time to Review Jared Loughner, Former White House Intern Reveals JFK's Pervy Side: P.M. Links
New York Mayor Michael
Bloomberg attacks the LDS Church for
selling guns.- Judge: Four more months to determine if Jared Loughner is sane enough to stand trial.
- Clint Eastwood's Detroit ad wasn't filmed in Detroit.
- Syrian violence causes world leaders to fidget with concern.
- Former JFK intern says he never kissed her on the lips, tried to make her service Teddy.
- Tea Partiers on Mitt Romney: "Meh."
Puerto Rico Job Plan: Hunt Iguanas, Sell Their Meat
Puerto Rico will soon allow people to hunt down iguanas and sell their meat. Interested hunters can earn up to $6 per pound of iguana flesh, which would be processed and then exported to the United States. Unlike Florida, which strictly limits hunting Burmese pythons, Republican Gov. Luis Fortuno sees the iguanas as a source for new jobs: "It is a way to generate self-employment."
With over 4 million iguanas on the island, they actually outnumber humans in Puerto Rico. These reptiles first came to the island as exotic pets, and were released into the wild by pet owners in the 1970s. But with no natural predators, the iguana population has blossomed. Puerto Rico's Department of Natural Resources and Environment banned importing iguanas in 2004, but their numbers kept growing.
Now these lugubrious lizards have become massive pests, causing blackouts by burrowing under electric plants and unsettling building foundations. Iguanas have even created flight delays, costing $80,000 annually to remove them from San Juan's airport. (Ironically, many iguana species are vulnerable or endangered throughout most of Latin America.)
Fortunately, iguana is a fairly common ingredient in many Latin American countries, earning the nickname, gallinas de palo, or "chicken of the tree." There's even a cookbook of iguana recipes. The author, George Cera, has personally killed over 16,000 iguanas in Boca Grande, Florida, often shooting them from a golf cart.
Iguana meat isn't quite legal in the United States. Last year, U.S. Customs officials seized over 200 pounds of tree chicken, worth $6,000, from two different individuals. Both were charged with violating the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora and the Lacey Act.
Ronald Bailey on invasive species. For more on culinary freedom, be sure to check out Keep Food Legal and its founder, Baylen Linnekin. And here's Reason magazine Editor in Chief Matt Welch with Gov. Fortuno for Reason.tv:
Ira Stoll on the New York Giants and Predicting the Future
The victory of the New York Giants in the
National Football League’s Super Bowl is the latest in a series of
recent news developments that underscore a principle that might be
called Manning’s Law, after the Giants quarterback Eli Manning: The
predictions of “experts” are often wrong. You can look it
up. Sports Illustrated, the venerable, highly
profitable jewel of the Time Warner Corporation’s magazine empire,
employs a veteran sportswriter named Peter King. The
magazine describes him as “one of America's premier pro
football writers,” writes Ira Stoll. And yet, Mr. King’s 2011
NFL preview predicted that the Giants wouldn’t even make
the playoffs.
Navy Plays Fantasy Game Guaranteed to Embolden America's Enemies
Tremble for your nation when
you reflect how the leaner, smarter, more adaptable military gets
into fighting trim. The 50-year-old carrier
USS Enterprise will start its final deployment with a training
exercise against a bunch of made-up civilizations Gene
Roddenberry himself would have found hard to dramatize. From
Navy Times:
The carrier and its entourage of support ships are in the Atlantic Ocean, somewhere east of Florida, with land completely out of sight. But for the purposes of the drill, they’re cruising near the fictitious Treasure Coast. Maps displayed on the bridge’s monitors show the contours of the Eastern Seaboard, the Gulf of Mexico and a good chunk of the Midwest, but all state borders have been removed and replaced with a handful of countries that come with their own boundaries and political allegiances.
Enterprise and its strike group are focused on Garnet and North Garnet, countries that support terrorism on the Treasure Coast. They’re fundamentalist Shahida states — a faux-theocracy — and they want to reunite with Pyrope, one of the nine other made-up countries.
On Enterprise, intelligence analysts evaluate the situation, fighter squadrons plan sorties, and the ship’s newspaper, “The Shuttle,” prints an extra section that details the international political situation. It’s a novella set at sea that grows more complex as hours past.
“Those pesky Garnetians,” strike group commander Rear Adm. Walter Carter Jr. told sailors after a day packed with maneuvers, launches and landings.
The Navy says the training isn’t specifically tailored to a possible U.S.-Iran scenario.
“We’re training for all the mission areas,” said Rear Adm. Dennis FitzPatrick, commander of Strike Force Training Atlantic. Those include anti-submarine warfare and counterpiracy missions.
The drills do have applications for potential tension with Iran, however. Treasure Coast includes a fake strait about 200 miles east of Orlando that, like the Strait of Hormuz, is about 35 miles wide at its narrowest point.
“There obviously is an emphasis on where we think the ship will go,” FitzPatrick said.
Thanks, Admiral. You might even put a little more emphasis on where the ship will go. Is there some pattern of revanchist governments looking to form a Bismarckian superstate in the Persian Gulf that the liberal media haven’t been reporting on? (And wouldn’t that be just like the liberal media?)
I’m no supporter of U.S. policy in the Middle East, but the situation there is pretty clear: A country (Iran) led by a demagogue with dwindling popular and political support may or may not be making the necessary effort to develop nuclear weapons while at the same time meddling in the affairs of one country (Syria) whose dictator appears to be on his last legs, solidifying its gains in another country (Iraq) whose hostile dictator was helpfully removed by force of American arms, and supporting a militia in another country (Lebanon) nobody cares much about.
Bonus points for blurring the distinctions between U.S. territory and that of other nations, however. That will certainly come in handy when the Navy finally cracks down on Occupy Guam.
Courtesy of Tyler Durden at ZeroHedge, who writes: "[T]he farcism that has defined capital markets for the past 3 years is slowly migrating to military planning."
Reason Writers on TV: Brian Doherty on CNN's Erin Burnett OutFront Show Talking Ron Paul
Reason Senior Editor Brian Doherty (author of the forthcoming book Ron Paul's Revolution and Reason magazine's forthcoming April cover feature on his campaign) appeared with fellow guest Leslie Sanchez on Friday on Erin Burnett's CNN show OutFront, focusing largely on where Paul's fans will or might go if he's not the GOP candidate. This was pre-Nevada vote:
Can Regulation Save California's Medical Pot Industry?
This week the backers of a California
ballot initiative aimed at regulating the medical marijuana
business are
expected to get the approvals they need to start collecting
signatures. The Medical Marijuana
Regulation, Control, and Taxation Act (PDF) would let
patients and their "designated primary caregivers" form
"collectives, cooperatives and other business entities in order
collectively or cooperatively to cultivate, acquire, process,
possess, transport, test, sell and distribute marijuana for medical
purposes." The initiative would create a Bureau of
Medical Marijuana Enforcement within the California Department
of Consumer Affairs to oversee these entities, collecting
application fees from them and issuing "mandatory registrations"
that would shield them from criminal penalties under state law. In
addition to the fees, the initiative would impose a special 2.5
percent sales tax, on top of the existing sales taxes (7.25 percent
state plus up to 2.5 percent local). It would allow cities and
counties to collect their own medical marijuana taxes of up to 2.5
percent and "enact reasonable zoning regulations and other
restrictions applicable to the cultivation and distribution of
medical marijuana based on local needs." But the initiative says
there has to be at least one dispensary per 50,000 residents, and
jurisdictions with populations above that threshold could ban
dispensaries only with voter approval.
The initiative's supporters, which include Americans for Safe Access as well as various growers and retailers, hope this system, which is similar to Colorado's but with less of a role for local regulation, will discourage federal interference by clarifying the rules for supplying medical marijuana. But as The Sacramento Bee notes, Colorado's regulations have not stopped that state's U.S. attorney, John Walsh, from threatening dispensaries that comply with state law. Although Walsh's threats so far have been aimed at dispensaries within 1,000 feet of a school, at least some of them are following state and local regulations. Walsh emphasizes that "the Department of Justice has the authority to enforce the federal law where appropriate even when such activities may be permitted under state law." I have been trying to get his office to clarify whether that means compliance with state law makes no difference to Walsh, but his spokesman, Jeff Dorschner, has not returned my calls. At this point it is not at all clear that Attorney General Eric Holder's assurances regarding medical marijuana suppliers who follow state law amount to anything in practice. The Bee's story reflects that uncertainty:
University of Denver law professor Sam Kamin said the federal actions are likely a surgical strike, not a broad assault. But he said "if the feds don't respect" Colorado's regulatory program, "they're not going to respect the watered-down version that we see (in the measure proposed) in California."
Democratic Assemblyman Tom Ammiano said he met recently with his region's top U.S. prosecutor, Melinda Haag of San Francisco. He said she "wasn't very encouraging" that an initiative – or legislation – could inoculate California's pot industry against federal actions.
Another possible problem with the California initiative is that it seems to conflict with the state appeals court ruling that overturned Long Beach's licensing system for dispensaries. Last October the 2nd District Court of Appeal said Long Beach violated the federal Controlled Substances Act because it went "beyond decriminalization into authorization." Specifically, the court cited the city's application fees and its awarding of permits via a lottery. The Medical Marijuana Regulation, Control, and Taxation Act does not call for a lottery, but it does establish application fees, and its "mandatory registrations" seem to be a euphemism for permits, since dispensaries could not legally operate without them. Then again, the California Supreme Court recently agreed to hear the Long Beach case, and it may overturn the 2nd Circuit's decision.
Arab Spring Update: Freedom House's Arch Puddington on How 2012 Will Be Like 1989.
"As significant as 1989 when the Berlin wall came down, overwhelmingly the story of 2012 is centered in the Middle East,” says Freedom House's Arch Puddington. "People were inspired by events in Egypt, they started demanding their rights.”
Puddington has helped record the long-overdue revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, and countries in the Freedom in the World 2012 index. Founded in 1941, Freedom House quantifies and ranks the political freedom and civil liberties of every country in the world as "Free," "Partly Free," or "Not Free."
Though the Arab Spring has led some regimes to respond with arrests and killings, Puddington remains confident political rights and civil liberties will succeed in the longer run. Since the first Freedom in the World index was published in 1973, he notes, free countries have doubled in number and not-free countries have declined. In the 2012 edition, 87 countries are listed as Free, 60 as Partly Free, and 48 as Not Free.
About 4.55 minutes.
Interview by Matt Welch. Camera by Meredith Bragg and Joshua Swain; edited by Swain.
Go to Reason.tv for downloadable versions, and subscribe to Reason.tv's YouTube Channel to receive automatic notifications when new material goes live.
Washington Insiders: Less Popular Than Ever!
From the good people at Pew: The American people are even less fond of Washington insiders than they were in 2007.
The public expresses mixed views of presidential candidates who have extensive Washington, D.C. experience -- 26% say they would be more likely to support such a candidate, while about as many (25%) say they would be less likely.
This is a change from 2007, when 35% of people said they would be more likely to support a candidate who has spent a long time in Washington; 15% said they would be less likely.
Maybe that's because of stuff like this:
Did You Know U.S. Federal Tax is More Progressive Than Most of Europe's?
Over at the Washington
Examiner, Reason columnist and Mercatus Center
economist Veronique de Rugy provides a crash course in tax
progressivity. It turns out that despite America's lower nominal
rates, top U.S. earners kick in more than their European
counterparts when it comes to federal taxes:
Over the last 30 years, the progressivity of the rate structure has decreased in the United States. In the 1980s, the top marginal rate used to be 70 percent while it stands at half that today....
However, this decline in nominal progressivity doesn’t tell you much about the actual progressivity of a tax system. That depends on the size of the exemptions, which are relatively large and frequent for U.S. taxpayers.
The OECD data shows that other countries tend to have much higher tax rates than the U.S. does but the threshold of income at which the top rate in applied is much lower.
For instance, it takes almost 3.4 times less income in France than in the U.S. to be taxed at the highest French rate. It means that other countries have higher rates but also more regressive systems.
By contrast, the United States has lower top lower rate but these lower rates kick at a much higher level—meaning that it take much more income to face the highest rates--hence the steeper progressivity.
Other factors, such as Europe's reliance on consumption-based taxes such as the V.A.T., also mean that a higher percentage of the tax burden in America is borne by high-income earners.
Read the whole thing, which was written in response to a blog post by New York magazine's Jonathan Chait (late of The New Republic and a frequent, if typically wrong, critic of Reason writings).
De Rugy's original article on progressivity is here. A snippet:
The richest 10 percent of U.S. households (those making $112,124 or more) contribute a greater share of taxes (45.1 percent of all income taxes) than their counterparts in any other industrialized nation.
Meanwhile, the average tax burden for the top 10 percent of households in OECD countries is 31.6 percent of the revenue collected, well below the percentage in America.
Interestingly, in France, a notorious welfare-state government, only 28 percent of revenue comes from the top 10 percent of income earners. As for the top 1 percent of Americans, their share of federal taxes paid is roughly 30 percent.
A week or so ago, I talked with my frequent collaborator de Rugy about why the Occupy movement should recognize the elderly rather than "the 1 Percent" as its true enemy:
E.J. Dionne's Screed Against Free Speech
Washington Post left-wing columnist E.J.
Dionne
explains today that people with whom he disagrees should not be
able to buy ad space to explain their political views and candidate
preferences to the public. Of course, Dionne is merely expressing
the dismay that the Left's decades-long efforts to shut up
political discourse that offends its minions or challenges their
policies was overturned in what he calls the "outrageous" Supreme
Court Citizens United decision. As Dionne expostulates:
The Citizens United justices were not required to think through the practical consequences of sweeping aside decades of work by legislators, going back to the passage of the landmark Tillman Act in 1907, who sought to prevent untoward influence-peddling and indirect bribery.
If ever a court majority legislated from the bench (with Bush’s own appointees leading the way), it was the bunch that voted forCitizens United. Did a single justice in the majority even imagine a world of super PACs and phony corporations set up for the sole purpose of disguising a donor’s identity? Did they think that a presidential candidacy might be kept alive largely through the generosity of a Las Vegas gambling magnate with important financial interests in China? Did they consider that the democratizing gains made in the last presidential campaign through the rise of small online contributors might be wiped out by the brute force of millionaires and billionaires determined to have their way?
“The appearance of influence or access, furthermore, will not cause the electorate to lose faith in our democracy.” Those were Justice Anthony Kennedy’s words in his majority opinion. How did he know that? Did he consult the electorate? Did he think this would be true just because he said it?
Actually, Dionne is right. In fact, the "justices were not required to think through the practical consequences of sweeping aside decades of work by legislators." What the justices are "required" to do is to determine if the laws conform to the restrictions established by the U.S. constitution. In this case, the Court correctly decided that the campaign finance laws violated the First Amendment. As the Court decided [PDF]:
Although the First Amendment provides that “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech,” §441b’s [McCain-Feingold campaign finance law's] prohibition on corporate independent expenditures is an outright ban on speech, backed by criminal sanctions [emphasis added]. It is a ban notwithstanding the fact that a [political action committee] PAC created by a corporation can still speak, for a PAC is a separate association from the corporation. Because speech is an essential mechanism of democracy—it is the means to hold officials accountable to the people—political speech must prevail against laws that would suppress it by design or inadvertence.
Dionne ends his screed against free speech:
In the long run, we have to hope that a future Supreme Court will overturn this monstrosity, remembering that the first words of our Constitution are “We the People,” not “We the Rich.”
Why do Dionne and his ilk have such a hard time remembering the plain words of the First Amendment?:
Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press....
What's so hard to understand about the phrase "Congress shall make no law"?
For lots of insightful Reason coverage on free speech and campaign finance go here.
Read Our Complete February Issue!
Our entire February 2012 issue is now
available online. Don’t miss Matt Welch on how the Moon landing
became a government-aggrandizing metaphor, Katherine Mangu-Ward on
the 21st-century pioneers who want to take you into space, and
Robert Zubrin on NASA’s irrational response to risk, plus Mike
Godwin’s review of Walter Isaacson’s new biography of Apple founder
Steve Jobs, the compete Citings and Briefly Noted sections, the
Artifact, and more.
Crooked New Orleans Cops Under Investigation for Theft and Extortion
Asset
forfeiture, when done by the book, is essentially a "license
to steal." Cops conducting or serving a drug-related raid or
warrant often don’t just confiscate drugs; they also seize cash,
computers, cars, and recreational electronics. While there’s no
apparent justification for confiscating these items, the law allows
it and police department higher-ups encourage it, so cops do it.
The only thing required of the officers who walk away with your
stuff is that they document what they’ve taken.
When cops fail to document their haul, it’s theft-theft. This appears to be the case in New Orleans, where NOPD officers serving a search warrant at the art studio of a suspected drug dealer walked out with two personal safes and a ton of other loot that likely wasn’t on the warrant, and that the officers then failed to document. The Times-Picayune reports:
Ashley Boudreaux, the caretaker at ArtEgg studios, said she was there when police arrived. Stefen Daigle had signed a "consent to search" form allowing police to search his unit.
Later, while outside smoking a cigarette, she watched the officers carry boxes of evidence out of the building, including two safes. At one point, one of the safes toppled off a handcart used to wheel it out, she recalled.
When Boudreaux went to check on the studio after police left, she found that a door between Daigle's unit and the neighboring unit had been forcibly opened. The baseboard that covered the locked door between the two units was removed, and scratches on the frame seemed to indicate it had been pried open, Boudreaux said.
The two units -- Nos. 215 and 216 -- were both leased by Scott Bean, a friend of Daigle's who has since died. Kitchens on Monday said most of the materials that police seized were taken from No. 215, which Boudreaux said was mainly used by Bean.
Boudreaux said she had been in that unit a few days before the police raid. The door appeared to still be closed and locked at that point.
In the police report about the raid, NOPD Detective Ray Veit wrote that he and three other officers went into No. 216 with Daigle, where they saw a partition and an open door that led to another room. The report describes officers seizing a substance they believed to be crystal methamphetamine, along with other containers. Veit and another officer then went into the other room and seized other drugs, along with digital scales and a black suitcase containing a food "sealer" from an open closet, the report stated.
Officers also reported seizing "three glass smoking devices," but photographs takens by Boudreaux show that police left behind what appeared to be at least a couple homemade pipes.
There is no mention of any safes in the report.
The theft of the safes from the ArtEgg Complex by New Orleans’ finest is not the most troubling thing about NoLa PD’s case against 24-year-old artist Stefen Daigle. That would be the video evidence of extortion, which led Orleans Parish District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro to drop charges against Daigle late last month:
[Daigle's attorney] Roger Kitchens said arresting officers extorted money from his client. He showed prosecutors a video that captured his client, Stefen Daigle, going into a French Quarter apartment with two law enforcement officers. When the officers return, one is holding a bag.
Kitchens says the bag contains $3,500 that was in Daigle's French Quarter apartment, money the officers forced him to turn over. The video -- obtained by WDSU-TV and first reported Friday -- does not show what is in the sack.
However, Kitchens says the video undercuts sworn testimony given last month by Detective Ray Veit, who Kitchens said was waiting in a New Orleans Police Department squad car outside Daigle's apartment while other officers went upstairs.
The three officers initially arrested Daigle outside his art space at the ArtEgg studios in Mid-City. But according to Kitchens, they then drove him to his apartment on St. Peter Street in the Quarter.
Veit testified "that they never went anywhere with my client," Kitchens said. "There is video of the cops leaving the apartment with a bag. Inside the bag, was the $3,500, my client will tell you. That money was never put into evidence. He dug himself into a hole as deep as the Grand Canyon.
"He was asked, 'Was there any other evidence, anything else?' He said no."
After the officers came back downstairs, they booked Daigle with distribution of methamphetamine and took him to lockup, Kitchens said.
WDSU reported that a "consent to search" form that authorities filed before entering Daigle's art studio listed the St. Peter Street apartment. But it was scratched out later, and Veit "testified it was a mistake, that they never went there," Kitchens said.
More on the ArtEgg/Daigle story, which has sparked a wide-ranging internal investigation, from Times-Picayune reporter Laura Maggi.
Detroit's Turn to Vigilantisim, Otherwise Called Private Justice
While the U.S. has been busy trying to bring order to failed states in Afghanistan and elsewhere, The Daily’s Mara Gay reports that its own failed city, Detroit, is continuing its steady descent into the state of nature. Residents, unable to rely on a dwindling police force to keep them safe, are taking matters into their own hands. Justifiable homicide in the city shot up 79 percent in 2011 from the previous year. The local rate of self-defense killings now stands 2,200 percent above the national average.
She writes:
How it got this bad in Detroit has become a point of national discussion. Violent crime settled into the city’s bones decades ago, but recently, as the numbers of police officers have plummeted and police response times have remained distressingly high, citizens have taken to dealing with things themselves.
What’s more, courts are doing the decent thing and looking the other way. Gay recounts:
Signs that vigilantism was taking hold in the city came earlier, around Memorial Day 2009, when former federal agent Alvin Davis decided he’d had enough of the break-ins at his mother’s home on the east side. She called the police again and again, but the brazen robberies continued. Davis, then a 32-year-old Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer, snapped.
Prosecutors said he spent days chasing and harassing the teenagers who were allegedly robbing his mother, even shoving his federally issued firearm into one of their mouths. No one was killed, but by the time he was done, Davis had racked up charges of unlawful imprisonment and assault. In August 2010, he was convicted and sentenced to four years in prison.
But many residents in his mother’s Jefferson-Chalmers neighborhood are sympathetic to Davis, whose case is on appeal.
“He basically did what a lot of us wished we could do,” said Ken Gray, 58, who lives down the street from Davis’ mother.
One high-ranking official in the county legal system, speaking to The Daily, said the rise in justifiable homicides mirrors a local court system that’s increasingly lenient of the practice.
“It’s a lot more acceptable now to get your own retribution,” the official said. “And the justice system in the city is a lot more understanding if people do that. It‘s becoming a part of the culture.”
Detroiters are arming themselves with shotguns and handguns and buying guard dogs. Anything to take care of their own. And privately, residents say neighborhood watch groups in Detroit are widely armed.
And as a neighbor of Detroit's, all I can say is more power to them.
Incidentally, I am not a connoisseur of the minarchy vs. anarchy debate. But it seems that if Detroit’s citizens can find some way to create a sphere of law and (spontaneous) order in the face of this massive government failure, they will offer some support for the viability of the latter.
Gaya’s whole story is well worth a read.
Is This Political Ad Racially Offensive? Or Just Intellectually Offensive?
In Michigan, a state that has
been an economic disaster for going on 30 years, there's a Senate
race gearing up between incumbent Democrat Debbie Stabenow and
Republican challenger Peter Hoekstra, a former long-time
congressman.
The ad below was paid for by Hoekstra, a.k.a. "Pete Spend It Not" and aired during the Super Bowl in certain Wolverine State markets. It attacks "Debbie Spend It Now" and uses a Chinese-American actress speaking broken English to drive home the idea that our government borrowing lots of money is helping the Chinese get rich.
Bonus points, too, for the using stereotypically "Chinese" music, including shimmering gong sound, and footage of rice paddies. In terms of cinematic cliches, about the only missing is a blind Shaolin monk, a ritual incantation that "we need more Calgon," and maybe Sir John Gielgud playing an inscrutable and unconvincing Asiatic.
But is it racist? The Detroit Free Press reports
Black ministers in Detroit and the Asian and Pacific Islander American Vote group’s Michigan chapter both called the ad racially insensitive. The other Republicans running for the Senate nomination said it proved that Hoekstra is not the best candidate to take on Stabenow in November. Democrats were united in their criticism and even some Republicans called the ad racist, xenophobic and “really, really dumb,” in social media postings.
To which Hoekstra says
the ad, which was filmed in California and featured an actress whose parents are 100% Chinese, was only insensitive to Debbie Stabenow, whom he called “Debbie Spend-it-now.”
“The Chinese benefit from the recklessness of U.S. spending. It doesn’t criticize the Chinese at all,” he said.
Regardless of the race issue, there's a tougher issue that "Pete Spend It Not" should be forced to confront:
Democrats were quick to challenge the premise of the ad, referring to Hoekstra's 18 years in the U.S. House and the fact that he joined a Washington-based law and lobbying firm last year.
"Hoekstra's ad is nothing more than a hypocritical attempt at a Hollywood-style makeover because the fact is, Pete spends a lot," Michigan Democratic Chairman Mark Brewer said. "Hoekstra voted for the $700-billion Wall Street bailout and voted for trillions more in deficit spending before quitting Congress to get rich at a Washington, D.C. lobbying firm."
Which really gets to the heart of the matter of why Michigan is such a sorry place: The folks there really don't have good choices to make, except to leave the state altogether. Which is of course what people have been doing.
Environmentalist Protection Racket: Sierra Club Takes the Money and Runs
Sierra Club executive director
Michael Brune tells
the world how painful it was for his lobbying group to stop
taking millions in donations from natural gas companies. And what
organization wouldn't be happy to rake in $26 million in
donations?
Now the Sierra Club has decided that natural gas is just another evil fossil fuel that it getting in the way of the solar, wind, geothermal future that the organization wants to impose on Americans. And that's OK. Environmentalism as an ideology is driven by the constant need to create an endless series of monsters to fear - natural gas is now one of the newer ones. The Sierra Club flip flop on natural gas as a "bridge fuel" to the low-carbon energy economy was motivated by NIMBY concerns of local chapters and the fact that cheap abundant natural gas makes the case for expensive renewable energy sources even less economically plausible.
Fred Smith, president of the free market think tank the Competitive Enterprise Institute, has an insightful article, Countering the Assault on Capitalism, on the puzzling fact of why corporations continue to supply millions of dollars to lobbying groups that are inimicable to their long term interests. Smith quotes economist Joseph Schumpeter's 1942 book Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy:
‘[Rather than educating its] enemies, [business] allows itself . . . to be educated by them. It absorbs the slogans of current radicalism and seems quite willing to undergo a process of conversion to a creed hostile to its very existence. . . . This would be most astonishing and indeed very hard to explain were it not for the fact that the typical bourgeois is rapidly losing faith in his own creed.
[Business leaders] . . . talk and plead – or hire people to do it for them; they snatch at every chance of compromise; they are ever ready to give in; they never put up a fight under the flag of their own ideals and interest.’
As a result Smith explains:
Entrepreneurs doubt the morality of their own endeavours and accept political restraints. They internalise the accusations flung against them and become, as Schumpeter described, ‘state-broken’. It need not be this way; an alternative is clear to see. Businesses spend vast sums crafting and disseminating narratives to reach consumers, to persuade them that their products and services are good and worthwhile.
Why don’t businesses seek to direct their advertising narratives to gain legitimacy? They are under political attack from government regulations as well as intellectual ideologues who blame them – and capitalism – for all society’s problems. As much as they employ Vice Presidents of Environment, Community Relations, Public and Government Affairs, Employee Relations and a host of other political positions, businesses should similarly hire agents to legitimise their social role.
So what to do? Instead of participating the protection rackets faithlessly run by the ideological enemies for free markets, Smith argues that business people should seek to save capitalism by supporting classical liberal intellectuals:
Schumpeter presciently warned that capitalism would create an unholy alliance of anti-market intellectuals and rent-seeking businesses. But he did not envision challengers to that view – a holy alliance of classical liberal intellectuals and pro-market entrepreneurs. Competing on a more level playing field, integrating more effectively with like-minded classical liberals offers a promising resolution to Schumpeter’s gloomy prediction.
Business and free market intellectuals together could create robust strategies to encourage experiments in the private sphere. To do so, the business community must understand the scope and consequence of their value in the political sphere. Incremental reforms that remove the rocks from the path to the future are the most likely way to restore capitalism and ensure a prosperous tomorrow. Emerging concerns and resources must be evaluated in the market – the world of voluntary exchanges – rather than in the public sphere.
Being a classical liberal, it is not surprising that I would find Smith's analysis compelling. The Sierra Club episode is just one more example showing that industries cannot permanently buy protection from their ideological enemies. The (self-serving) take-away lesson to business leaders: Support your friends.
Finally, why doesn't the Sierra Club give back the $26 million if it feels sullied by taking evil fossil fuel money?
Steven Greenhut on the Death of California’s Redevelopment Scam
After many political battles and court fights,
it’s finally over. California’s heavy-handed and arrogant
redevelopment agencies, which dispensed corporate welfare and
abused eminent domain, are kaput. There may be weeping and gnashing
of teeth in redevelopment circles, writes Steven Greenhut, but
other Californians should rejoice.
Super Bowl "Ad Leakage" Reaches Joe Paterno-like[*] Levels, Renders Big Game Even Less Fun
Reason
contributor and Miami Herald TV critic
Glenn Garvin weighs in on what used to be the best part of any
Super Bowl (before the Giants beating the Patriots became a regular
thing at least):
The Teleflora ad promising that your girlfriend will turn into a hypersexual supermodel if you just send her some flowers? Seen it. The college kid who thinks he’s just gotten a Chevy convertible for graduation but really it’s a mini-fridge? The Toyota Camry ad featuring a couch made of lingerie models, a poopless baby and a crime-fighting plant? The polar bears fumbling a Coke bottle like a pack of furry Dolphins wide receivers? Seen ’em all.
The ad leakage to the Internet was so profound that the website SuperBowlAdsForGeeks.com actually ran a list of ads that weren’t released on-line before airing. (The site’s name is no exaggeration; it also posted a list of frequently asked questions that started off: Q. What is the Super Bowl? A. A professional football championship game.)
As Garvin notes, it was hard not to see many, maybe most of these ads pre-game:
More than half of the 70-odd ads that aired during Sunday night’s Super Bowl telecast had been circulating on the Internet for days or even weeks. At $3.5 million a pop for a 30-second commericial, advertisers want to leverage every eyeball they can -- and they’ve discovered the way to do that is to preview the ads on-line.
Honda’s CR-V ad with Matthew Broderick reviving his Ferris Bueller’s Day Off character, goofing off from work instead of school? It had already been seen more than 10 million times before game time. No hyperbole — literally, 10 million mouse-clicks on American computers.
What's interesting about this to me is that for all the talk of the internet segmenting and isolating people, the fact is that it's created whole new audiences and extended the news cycle not just for news but for all sorts of cultural discussions and products. The Soft Launch has replaced the Grand Opening; thanks largely to the computer industry and the web, we expect things to be tested in real-time and go through various versions and iterations on the way to becoming truly useful. That's a good thing, rather than pegging so much of our time and hopes to the equivalent of a Hail Mary pass (sorry, Pats' fans).
A pet peeve regarding Broderick being used in a car ad: Do Americans really have that short a cultural memory that Matthew Broderick can now pitch autos? In 1987, he killed two people while driving (and not drinking[**]) in Ireland, and was let off with a $175 fine, leading to the memorable New York Post headline "Ferris Bueller Gets Off." He has reportedly made peace with the past and his victims' families, which is all to the good. But it's just kind of weird to see him hawking Hondas.
[*] Joe Pa headline allusion explained.
[**] Corrected dropped word.
In case you're not among the 13 million people who have watched the long version of the Honda ad:
A.M. Links: Obama Has Edge on Romney, "True" Conservatives Voted Ron Paul Over Gingrich, Occupy D.C. Winds Down
Barack Obama is polling above Mitt Romney
for the first
time "this cycle." - Organizing for America has its sights set on Mitt.
- Newt Gingrich plummets in the polls.
- Nevadans looking for the "true conservative" voted for Ron Paul.
- There's not much left at Occupy D.C.
- Ford didn't like GM's taxpayer-funded Super Bowl hit job commercial.
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New at Reason.tv: "Mormons for...Ron Paul?!"
Steve Chapman on the Flaws of Mitt and Newt
We know why most candidates undertake the race—Al
Gore to avert environmental catastrophe, George W. Bush to carry on
the family business, John McCain to serve his country and Obama to
heal racial and ideological divisions. Romney just seems like
a rich guy who needs a new challenge, writes Steve Chapman. About
Gingrich's motive, there has never been any doubt: to feed an
insatiable ego that makes him imagine he has a historic, God-given
mission to transform the country.
Ron Paul Limps to Third in Nevada
Las Vegas – Ron Paul’s distant third place finish in the Republican caucuses did not live up to the high expectations his campaign set for him in Nevada. For months now we have been told about his caucus state strategy and how it would allow him to gobble up delegates all the way to the convention. If a brokered convention went down Paul might be in a position to play kingmaker, we were told. Paul, with his devoted legions, was supposed to thrive in this tediously complex low turnout environment. It was Paul supporters that would not oversleep on a Saturday and show up to their caucusing station before 9:00 a.m.
At the time of this post Paul’s highly touted Nevada operation failed to overcome the nearly nonexistent operation of Newt Gingrich. We are still waiting on a quarter of the precincts to report their totals. But as it stands right now, Mitt Romney won with 47.6% of vote; Newt Gingrich placed second with 22.7%; and Paul finished third with 18.6%. Rick Santorum, who pretty much wrote this state off, finished in fourth with 11.1%.
If this result holds it is a significant setback for Paul, as caucuses like this are the core of his campaign strategy, one similar to Barack Obama’s in 2008. Paul supporters are the most fanatical of any of the candidates remaining but Nevada demonstrated that he cannot rely on them alone to carry him to victory in caucuses. His plans are running into another bump with at least one of the candidates taking the caucuse states very seriously. One bright spot for Paul is that his followers are versed in the state delegate process while most campaigns appear to be focused on just the ballot box. Paul may have finished poorly here but according to people in his campaign they are optimistic about their efforts to elect delegates to the state convention in Reno.
“We’re liking what we’re hearing,” one operative told me.
In emails, Paul supporters frequently reported disappointing caucus results but were giddy over the election of their compatriots to the convention in Reno. It was not uncommon to read or hear about every delegate at a caucus being a pro-Paul delegate. This is a positive development for his campaign but it is not a process that is replicated in every state. If Paul continues to struggle in caucus states he will have to find more unorthodox ways to increase his delegate count.
Takers vs. Makers in Today's America
In the Washingtion Examiner, Glenn Instapundit Reynolds writes about a new book arguing the real divide in today's America is between moochers and producers:
"Fifty thousand for what you didn’t plant, for what didn’t grow. That’s modern farming -- reap what you don’t sow.”
That’s a line from a song about farm subsidies, “Farming The Government,” by the Nebraska Guitar Militia.
But these days it applies to more and more of the U.S. economy, as Charles Sykes points out in his new book, A Nation Of Moochers: America’s Addiction To Getting Something For Nothing.
The problem, Sykes points out, is that you can’t run an economy like that. If you tried to hold a series of potluck dinners where a majority brought nothing to the table, but felt entitled to eat their fill, it would probably work out badly. Yet that’s essentially what we’re doing....
And, after a while, people who pay their bills on time start to feel like suckers. I think we’ve reached that point now:
* People who pay their mortgages - often at considerable personal sacrifice - see others who didn’t bother get special assistance.
* People who took jobs they didn’t particularly want just to pay the bills see others who didn’t getting extended unemployment benefits.
* People who took risks to build their businesses and succeeded see others, who failed, getting bailouts. It rankles at all levels.
And an important point of Sykes’ book is that moocher-culture isn’t limited to farmers or welfare queens. The moocher-vs-sucker divide isn’t between the rich and poor, but between those who support themselves and those nursing at the government teat.
Plenty of the wealthy are doing the latter, and that has its own consequences, which are often worse than those stemming from goodies for the poor.
In a world of bailouts and crony capitalism - which is to say, in the world we live in today - a rational businessperson has to compare the return on investment between improving a product or service, or lobbying the government for goodies....
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