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Ron Paul Leads Obama In Iowa, According to New Poll
A new poll of Iowans
shows three of the four remaining GOP primary candidates ahead of
President Obama in a head-to-head contest—and Ron Paul winning by
the largest margin. The results of the latest Iowa Poll show the
Texas Congressman up by seven points over Obama, while Mitt
Romney's two point lead over the president is within the poll's
margin of error. Santorum leads the president by four points. The
Des Moines Register reports:
The Republican with the biggest lead: Ron Paul, who would defeat Obama by 7 percentage points, 49 percent to 42 percent. Rick Santorum, winner of the 2012 Iowa caucuses, leads Obama 48 percent to 44 percent. Mitt Romney, edged in the caucuses by Santorum, leads Obama 46 percent to 44 percent.
The president defeats only Newt Gingrich, 51 percent to 37 percent.
Maybe Ron Paul is the most effective not-Romney after all?
More on the poll here.
Paul Wins Washington County, Still Loses Maine
East Machias, Maine - Ron Paul won the controversial Washington County caucus by a 2-1 margin, but it does not appear that the results will be enough to give the libertarian Republican his first ever statewide win as a presidential candidate. Results from other Maine caucuses are still being computed, but as of this moment Mitt Romney is poised to confirm his prematurely declared victory in Maine by somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 votes.
Paul finished first in Washington County with 167 votes, followed by 86 for Romney, 59 for Rick Santorum, and a paltry five for Newt Gingrich. Two votes went to unnamed candidates.
The Washington caucus was originally scheduled to take place with all the other Maine caucuses last weekend, but was postponed due to inclement weather. After the results for the rest of the state were in, it became unclear whether the Maine Republican Party would even include Washington County. The county chairman, Chris Gardner, had made it clear that his county would be counted. "Today is about assuring our voices our heard," County Chairman Chris Gardner said. "As you can see we are a county that needs to be heard."
The controversy surrounding whether the Washington County votes would be tallied became a focal point for the Paul campaign. All week pro-Paul websites were leveling accusations of voter fraud. The Daily Paul, a popular Paul activist website, implored rural Maine voters to turn out. Paul supporters were wearing stickers that said "You Will Count ME," a play on the abbreviation for Maine.
A person close to the Paul campaign, speaking on background, told me that efforts in Washington County were largely driven by the grassroots. "I would say it's been 70% grassroots, 30% campaign here," the Paul campaigner said. "I am very confident we will win the delegates here. This stuff, it's a beauty contest."
Maine has 24 delegates to the Republican National Convention in Tampa. Three of those are already spoken for by state party officials, while the remaining 21 will be awarded at the state convention in May. "We've got a large number of delegates, a large number of delegate chairs," said Paul Madore, chairman of Paul’s Maine campaign. "We're optimistic that they will be able to find delegates for Ron Paul."
Madore, dressed more like a college professor than a party boss in his corduroy jacket and tie, was pleased with the result of the Washington County caucus even though it probably won't be enough to push Paul into first place. "We're optimistic, but this is a victory for us here," he said. "Washington County is solidly behind Congressman Paul and this is what we need to remember."
The uproar over how the caucuses were handled will lead to some changes in the hierarchy of the state Republican Party. Paul sympathizers will be there to make sure that happens, Madore says. "Ron Paul supporters have to understand what happens in a caucus, what takes place in a county committee, and how things are run in order to keep the movement going in the right direction," he said.
Mitt Romney's campaign, meanwhile, was pleased that Maine remains in the victory column, and expressed eagerness to compete for delegates in the next stages. "We take each state very seriously and we go in with no preconceived notions," said Greg Gallivan, a Romney campaign aide in Maine. "We go into each state and then we need to perform well in each state. We don't like to preordain by any means."
Before the caucus began Romney supporter and RNC committee member Ron Kaufman said that the results of the caucus did not matter much, but it would still be good to win. "It's a beauty contest, there are no delegates awarded," Kaufman said.
When asked about the large Ron Paul presence at the caucus he said, "God Bless 'em. The enemy is at 1600 Pennsylvania avenue, it's not other folks trying to get other Republicans elected."
Iranian Web Designer Faces Imminent Death After Judicial Swindle
Earlier this month, I
wrote about Saeed Malekpour, an Iranian-born Canadian resident
who was issued a death sentence by the Iranian Supreme Court for
creating photo-uploading software that was then used without his
knowledge to upload pornography. Despite the enusing uproar,
Iranian authorities have continued in their effort to take his
life.
Yesterday, the Saeed Malekpour Campaign, whose aim is to earn the software developer a fair trial in Iranian courts, issued a press release stating that the situation has become dire:
Saeed Malekpour, a Canadian Resident from Iran who has been living with the threat of death in Evin prison since October 2008, can be executed at any moment. When Saeed Malekpour’s lawyers visited the Revolutionary Court two days ago to follow up on their client’s case file, they discovered that the file containing the death sentence ruling was no longer there, and it was not in the possession of the Supreme Court either. Saeed Malekpour’s lawyers were informed that this only meant that the case file was sent to the Circuit Court for Execution of Sentences.
One of the lawyers said: "...Since Saeed Malekpour’s sentence is in the possession of the Circuit Court for Execution of Sentences, this means that they are capable of executing Saeed at any moment they wish."
Malekpour's case has been mired in bureaucratic convolution up to this point. After a torturous back and forth between the Iranian Supreme Court and a lower court over the lack of evidence needed to properly evaluate the charges, the Supreme Court finally approved the death sentence by a 3-2 ote. The problem, says Maryam Yazdi, coordinator for the Saeed Malekpour Campaign, is that the three judges who upheld the death sentence had never been seen in the judicial branch of the Iranian government. They are believed to be members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the paramilitary force responsible for terrorizing Iranians in the street and for extracting Malekpour's apocryphal confessions. These confessions are, incidentally, the only evidence against him in the case. How these three men inserted themselves into such a crucial part of the judicial process is anybody's guess. According to Nayeb Yazdi, they "came out of nowhere."
In the normal judicial process in Iran, defense lawyers would have had an opportunity to review the case one last time before it moves on to the Circuit Court for Execution of Sentences, given that "the death penalty is an irreversible punishment," says Nayeb Yazdi. Even if the lawyers saw the file, "they couldn't do much.... With the file open, they would be able to make sure everything is in order, but this case has been illegal and out of order from the start, so obviously they [the authorities] don't want that. The regime has done a very tricky thing." Now that Malekpour can legally be executed as soon as they find the right gallows (for in Iran, public hangings are common), "Saeed's only hope for survival is the international community."
The Canadian Parliament gave a unanimous vote on a motion "expressing concern for Saeed's situation," which was "their strongest move yet." Amnesty International called for Malekpour's release last month. The State Department, European Union, and the Foreign Affairs offices of Britain, Canada, and Italy have issued official statements condemning the death sentences of Malekpour and other people in prison on Internet-related charges.
Nayeb Yazdi emphasizes that "This is a sensitive time in Iran. The political and economic time is tense." The unrest has led to calls to boycott the upcoming parliamentary elections, "yet the government has no protests in the street to crack down on anymore. Everyone has moved online, so they [the regime] are cracking down on the Internet." This has involved increasingly stringent censorship and the creation of a cyber army branch of the IRGC, in addition to increased arrests and death sentences for Internet users. "Executing Saeed would instill the maximum amount of fear in people," Yazdi says. "They would really think twice before plugging in [to the Internet]. If Saeed were executed for these Internet charges, it would set a huge precedent."
Read more about problems in Iran and the Middle East here, here, and here.
Russian City Bans Protests Held by Toys
[Update: I incorrectly claimed that protests have contested President Vladimir Putin's reelection when in fact they contest the parliamentary election results. Change made below.]
Political activism has reached new heights (well, technically new lows) in Russia: Colorful little plastic geegaws have entered the arena of conflict.
Russian authorities banned public demonstrations by groups of dolls, action figures, and toys, with special disdain for those not made in Russia. The ban was prompted by the appearance in Barnaul of dozens of toys holding banners that questioned the Russian status quo last month in response to controversies over accusations of fraud in the recent parliamentary elections. According to Andrei Lyapunov, a spokesman for the Siberian city of Barnaul, quoted in the Guardian:
"Toys, especially imported toys, are not only not citizens of Russia but they are not even people."
Go figure.
A recent petition to hold another protest was rejected, but this isn't nearly the end of it, the Guardian reports:
The response to the original ban is typical of the new wave of demonstrations in Russia characterised by witty banners and a degree of absurdist humour. After a mass Moscow rally in December, the protest was re-enacted with Lego models and posted on YouTube within days. Toy rallies have caught on and taken place in four other Russian towns in the wake of the Barnaul protest.
And if you see a tiny puff of smoke, be careful, there may have been a toy suicide bombing.
Previously: In Iran, the government won't let you buy Simpsons figurines but a pro-regime company will sell you a a replica of the downed American spy plane.
Sheldon Richman on Negative Versus Positive Rights
What we have in the debate over employer-provided contraception is a clash not between two liberty interests, but rather between two rights-claims – one negative, the other positive. All that is required for the exercise of a negative right (to self-ownership and, redundantly, liberty and one’s legitimately acquired belongings) is other people’s noninterference. But the fulfillment of positive rights requires that other people act affirmatively even if they don’t want to, writes Sheldon Richman. Say, by providing products or paying the bills.
Where Dr. Paul's Inflation Might Be
Shikha Dalmia asked earlier today: "Where is Dr. Paul's Inflation?," focusing on the most recent measures of core CPI rise, which are not alarmingly high.
Economist Bob Murphy explained a few months back from a roughly Paulite perspective why he and others fear that the stunning rise in monetary base is indeed likely to eventually show itself in unignorable price inflation. While the numbers, as they always do, have shifted, the logic goes like this:
To understand the potential problem, we need to review some basic facts. Back in the fall of 2008, when Lehman collapsed and the entire financial system appeared in jeopardy, the Fed began bailing out investment banks through massive asset purchases and extraordinary lending operations. These activities rescued the major banks that would otherwise have gone bankrupt, by taking bad assets off their books (at inflated prices) and by propping up the new "market" price of the assets remaining on their books.
When the Fed buys an asset, it writes a check on itself. This action creates new electronic reserves in the banking system. For example, if the Fed buys $10 million in mortgage-backed securities from Joe Smith, then Smith will deposit the check in his own checking account. His bank will credit Joe Smith's checking balance by $10 million, but at the same time the bank'saccount with the Fed itself will rise by $10 million too.
At any time, regulations insist that commercial banks in the United States keep a minimum amount of reserves set aside in order to "back up" the demand deposits (think of checking accounts) of their customers. For example, if a commercial bank's customers think they have a total of $1 billion in their checking accounts, then the Fed's regulations force the commercial bank to keep (roughly) $100 million set aside in reserves....
Notice that "excess reserves" are historically very close to zero. This reflects the tendency (assumed in textbook discussions of "open market operations") for commercial banks to quickly lend out any reserves they have, over and above their legally required minimum. Yet as the chart above clearly indicates, since the onset of the present crisis the commercial banks have notbeen making new loans. Instead, they have allowed the huge injections of new reserves to sit parked at the Fed.
There are several (possibly overlapping) explanations for this break from the past. Keynesians such as Paul Krugman argue that this was the predictable outcome during a liquidity trap. Proponents of MMT (modern monetary theory) argue that the economic textbook discussions have things upside down, and that banks are never constrained by reserves when deciding on making new loans. Quasi monetarists lament the Federal Reserve's decision in October 2008 to start paying interest on excess reserves — a policy whereby the Fed actually bribes banks not to make loans to their customers. Free-market guys like Mish (as well as some card-carrying Austrians) have argued all along that significant price inflation was never on the table, so long as the financial system worked through a painful process of deleveraging.
Regardless of their specific explanations for why commercial banks hadn't been lending out the trillion-plus in new reserves Bernanke created, just about every pundit agreed that this fact was a major reason that what seemed to be incredibly inflationary policies weren't leading to skyrocketing prices.
Murphy thought back in August that the reserve-leaking was about to start happening in spades, which does not seem to be the case; in fact the latest figures show excess reserves continue to pile up, increasing by nearly 50 percent in the past year, as has the monetary base, by slightly slightly more. So as long as that leakage isn't actively happening, the inflationary effects predicted by Paul are staved off, goes the story.
And let us not forget the possibility of Cantillon effects, as Murphy says:
we must remember that there are millions of different prices in the economy. The specific impact of money creation on various sectors can be very different, and operate on different time frames.
For example, during the present crisis, we had the Fed create more than a trillion dollars on behalf of rich investment bankers. At the same time, middle- and lower-class households were plagued by high unemployment, large debts, and underwater homes. In this environment, it's not surprising that the various rounds of "quantitative easing" went hand in hand with huge jumps in stock and commodity prices, but were muted in the retail sector.
If and when the inflation arises, by the way, it will not be some nutty "lucky guess" by someone who just keeps repeating himself; it will because Paul (and the Misesian monetary tradition from which he derives) recognized what he saw as the necessary end of the process the Fed has been indulging in for years now. But there are reasons within the logic of the story (for which, admittedly, Paul is far from the most complicated and sophisticated explainer on the stump) that we aren't crushed by high inflation yet. (Though, as many in the comment threads pointed out, that core CPI figure doesn't match most people's experience actually buying the things they buy the most in the real world these days, food and energy.)
Casino Mogul Gives Gingrich PAC Another $10 Million, Journalists Quit Journaling to Work for Obama, FBI Foils Its Own Terrorist Plot: P.M. Links
PAC for dark horse candidate
Newt Gingrich receives another $10 million from
Sheldon Adelson. - 19 journalists have quit their jobs in order to work for Obama.
- Obama administration refuses to defend law blocking benefits for gay soldier couples.
- FBI gives man fake bomb, arrests him for bomb plot.
- Former Romney backer now can't get enough Santorum.
- 21 Dumb Street: Cops seduce teens, get them to buy pot, arrest them.
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Tim Cavanaugh Talks Green Lobby On Russia Today: 4 PM Eastern
Reason managing editor Tim
Cavanaugh will talk about the green lobby with Kristine Frazao
today on Russia Today's Evening News with Kristine
Frazao.
Topics:
Why isn't the Keystone pipeline in Pennsylvania?
Is the Green Lobby a special interest?
How many more Solyndras are out there?
Who's smearin' who in this East Anglian Heartlandian trash-talkin' hill o' beans world?
Does nuclear power really need subsidies to survive?
Is Energy Secretary Steven Chu's energy plan [pdf] as ridiculous as he made it sound yesterday?
Was Club For Growth justified in criticizing Rep. Fred Upton (R-Michigan) even though upton has a smoking hot niece? Does smoking hotness contribute to carbon emissions?
Time: Today, 4 PM Eastern, 1 PM Pacific.
Place: Russia Today. Check local listings.
Update: D'oh! Did not show at 4 PM but will cablecast at 7 PM Eastern (4 PM Pacific) and be up on the cybernational YouTubes later tonight.
Citizenship for Sale: St. Kitts and Nevis, Plus Seasteading
St. Kitts and Nevis is one of only two nations, along with the island of Dominica, that formally sell citizenship ("citizenship-by-investment"). As tax consultants Henley & Partners points out, these West Indies locales are very enticing for libertarians:
The Government grants tax breaks, guaranteed repatriation of profits and concessions on import duties. There are no income or capital gains taxes, no net wealth taxes and no inheritance or gift taxes in St. Kitts & Nevis.
Plus, unlike the Free State Project in frigid New Hampshire, St. Kitts and Nevis are islands in the Caribbean. And Lysander Spooner fans can rejoice: There's even a secession movement for Nevis to split away from St. Kitts.
To become a full-fledged Kittian, future citizens have two options: You can 1) donate at least $250,000 to the Sugar Industry Diversification Fund (a program that assists retired and displaced sugar workers) or 2) buy upwards of $400,000 worth of real estate on those islands. After filing a bit of paperwork and waiting as little as three months, you become a citizen of St. Kitts.
Meanwhile, Dominica has a basic investment price of $75,000, but its passport is less valuable for international travel. In addition, Austria, the home of Hayek, Mises, Schumpeter, and Bruno, has a similar, albeit unofficial citizenship-by-investment program. Austrian citizenship has been offered to those of "extraordinary merit," which can include investing over $10 million in Österreich. But Henley's CEO cautions:
The candidate has to have all the right trimmings...It's been done, it's possible, but it's fairly rare.
In addition to the minimal tax burden, Kittian citizenship is surprisingly useful for globetrotting. Henley & Partners have a Visa Restriction List, which ranks the countries where citizens can travel visa-free. On that list, Austria is 6th, St. Kitts and Nevis is 28th, and Dominica is 54th. (Meanwhile, Denmark, Sweden, and Finland are tied for first, with the United States and Ireland in fifth.) So while Kittians can travel visa-free to fewer countries than Americans, they can still travel to the E.U. and Canada and even visit Cuba for up to three months without a visa.
Since the United States is the only industrialized country that taxes income earned abroad, more Americans are beginning to renounce their citizenship. In the words of one offshore tax attorney:
It's not enough to just move your assets anymore...Today, you have to move your ass.
Back in 2011, 1,788 Americans renounced their citizenship—a sevenfold increase from 2008. However, even those who renounced their American citizenship might still have to pay taxes. (Yes, the IRS is that powerful. Needless to say, always consult an attorney before doing anything that might provoke the wrath of the United States government.)
All this has some intriguing implications for seasteading. Currently in the planning stage, seasteads are ocean-based, self-governing communities popular among libertarians and Peter Thiel. Set in international waters, one goal is to escape the regulatory clutches of the state and experiment with polycentric law. Yet unless American-born seasteaders renounce their citizenship, they would still be liable to pay taxes to the United States. By investing in Kittian or Dominican citizenship, sovereign individuals could obtain some much needed legal protection. (Being completely stateless can be a real burden.)
If there's actually a surge in anarcho-capitalist Kittians, this would be a double irony: Thomas Jefferson's rival and national bank advocate Alexander Hamilton was born on Nevis, while St. Kitts and Nevis are technically still governed by the Queen of England.
Reason on seasteading. The Seasteading Institute on why it won't become Rapture.
Fracking Doesn't Harm Drinking Water, Study Says.
Citizens
who are concerned that fracking -- pumping a mixture of water,
sand, and small amounts of chemicals into deep wells to break open
natural gas and oil supplies -- should be happy with the findings
of a new study just released at the American Association for the
Advancement of Science conference today. As ScienceNow
reports:
A controversial method of drilling for natural gas, called fracking, has boomed in recent years—as have concerns over its potential to cause environmental contamination and harm human health. But a major review of the practice, released today, uncovered no signs that it is causing trouble below ground. “We found no direct evidence that fracking itself has contaminated groundwater,” said Charles Groat of the University of Texas, Austin, who led the study. ...
As part of the review, 16 researchers at UT Austin, in fields ranging from air quality to hydrology, reviewed the scientific literature and regulatory documents for three major areas of fracking, in Texas, Louisiana, and Pennsylvania and New York. They could not find evidence of drilling fluids leaking deep underground, and methane in water wells in some areas is probably due to natural sources. The team did not see a need for new regulations specific to fracking, but for better enforcement of existing regulations of drilling in general—such as those covering well casing and disposal of wastewater from drilling.
The report did identify problems that can occur with drilling any hydrocarbon well:
The report...suggests that problems aren't directly caused by fracking, a process in which water, sand, chemicals are pumped into wells to break up deep layers of shale and release natural gas. Instead, the report concludes, contamination tends to happen closer to the surface when gas and drilling fluid escapes from poorly lined wells or storage ponds.
For more background on the science and policy of fracking, see my columns, What the Frack!, and Natural Gas Flip-Flop.
Kennedy on Whitney Houston, Adele, &...Michelle Obama?
What do Whitney Houston, Adele, the First Lady - plus crooner Tony Bennett and fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld - have in common?
KYSR DJ and former MTV VJ Kennedy connects the dots as Houston fans prepare for the songbird's funeral, Adele polishes her six Grammys, and Michelle Obama hula-hoops her way across the nation, pushing kids to eat less and exercise more.
About 3 minutes.
Written by Nick Gillespie and Kennedy, who also hosts. Edited by Meredith Bragg.
Visit Reason.tv for downloadable versions and subscribe to Reason.tv's YouTube Channel to receive automatic updates when new material goes live.
The Dumbest Generation: Gen Y's Political Stupidity In a Single Chart
A new survey from the Pew Internet Center confirms every suspicion I harbor about people my age: Despite unprecedented access to information, technology, wealth, and food, we are basically retarded.
That young people voted for Obama en masse in 2008 is excusable; he was young and charismatic while John McCain was (and still is) repulsively old and cranky. (Insert obligatory Churchill paraphrase here.)
Everything else on that chart is an indictment of our right to vote. If only 50 percent of young Obama voters (between the ages of 18-29) believe Obama has not changed "the way Washington works," it stands to reason the other 50 percent believe he has. This means half of young Obama voters either do not know "how Washington works," or they are stupid.
Of the young Obama voters who believe The One has failed to Revolutionize Politics In America, only 25 percent blame Obama for (presumably) bolstering the system he inherited with kevlar, handouts, and IOUs. That is a very tiny percentage of young people—probably only a dozen or so. If they have not all become public choice extremists in the last three years, or pledged their allegiances to Ron Paul, I hope they stay home in November (it would also be fitting if they cast a resigned vote for Obama out of fear that Rick Santorum will take away all the condoms).
The other 60 percent of you are dead wrong. Sure, Congressional Republicans are appalling in their own way, but so much of what's abhorrent about "the way Washington works"—crony capitalism, regulatory overreach, needless wars, bankster fellatio, the systemic violation of civil liberties—comes straight from Obama's mouth to your ears via various and sundry federal agencies.
For a smattering of what Obama's done that should appall young progressives, see:
- Oh Hey Look, the President Is Fibbing About Getting Money From Lobbyists
- Why Is Obama Championing Sexist Progressive Era Laws?
- Congress, Obama Codify Indefinite Detention
- The Obama Administration’s Prosecutorial Overreach
- Obama's Administration Continues Its Record of Criminal Cases Against "Leakers"
- Obama Admits U.S. Drone Program Exists, But It's Definitely Just for Special Terrorist Occasions
- Bummer: Barack Obama turns out to be just another drug warrior
- Obama's Thought Police: The trouble with the White House's "Attack Watch" initiative
The good news, Gen Y, is that it is not too late to form a different opinion. Obama has done it quite a few times since you elected him.
David Cameron's Drug-Induced Idiocy
Writing
in The Telegraph, Tom Chivers
notes that British Prime Minister David Cameron's drug policy
views changed even more dramatically than
Barack Obama's once he took power. In 2005, when Cameron was
seeking to lead the Conservative Party, he advocated "alternative
ways—including the possibility of legalisation and regulation—to
tackle the global drugs dilemma." He added: "Politicians attempt to
appeal to the lowest common denominator by posturing with tough
policies and calling for crackdown after crackdown. Drugs policy
has been failing for decades." Today Cameron illustrates his own
observation about politicians:
Every time [it is confronted with pro-reform evidence], the Home Office deadbats with bland statement on the lines of: drugs are bad, mmmkay. This time it's: "We have no intention of liberalising our drugs laws. Drugs are illegal because they are harmful – they destroy lives and cause untold misery to families and communities. Those caught in the cycle of dependency must be supported to live drug free lives, but giving people a green light to possess drugs through decriminalisation is clearly not the answer. Through the cross-government drug strategy, we are taking action through tough enforcement, both at home and abroad, alongside introducing a temporary control power and robust treatment programmes that lead people into drug free recovery."
If you managed to read all the way through that, you'll notice it says nothing whatsoever about the evidence, despite my specifically asking for a response to the BMJ, WHO and IJDP studies and the Portugal experience. The Home Office, and the Government, is deliberately ignoring the reality of the drug laws' failure.
More on British prohibitionist orthodoxy here and here.
[Thanks to Richard Cowan for the tip.]
How Government Corrupts Gambling
Washington, D.C., was supposed to be one of the
jurisdictions closest to taking advantage of the Justice
Department's recent
reversal regarding federal law and online gambling. But last
week the D.C. Council nixed the iGaming program, which would have
allowed District residents to play poker, blackjack, and bingo
online. The plan ("approved in 2010 in an amendment added to a
budget bill at 2:17 a.m.," The New York
Times notes) was misbegotten to begin with, since it
involved extending the government's lottery monopoly instead of
simply legalizing online gambling and allowing businesses to
compete for customers. The Times
reports that the selection of a vendor to operate the gambling
monopoly was clouded by charges of cronyism, corruption, and
spiteful obstruction:
The turmoil began in 2007 after earlier security breaches allowed individuals to claim prizes for lottery tickets they never bought. As a result the city decided to put the contract for running the lottery out to bid, for the first time in years. But the process quickly became ensnared in procedures requiring Council approval for large contracts. Critics say the requirement, created as a check on mayoral power, encourages influence-peddling.
The winner of the new contract was a joint venture anchored by the Greek gambling giant Intralot. Its local partner, headed by a businessman named Warren C. Williams Jr., had had a series of run-ins with the city, and had antagonized Councilman Jim Graham, whose district included a nightclub Mr. Williams owned.
Mr. Payne's lawsuit says that Council members and Mr. Gandhi wanted a more favored partner. According to the inspector general’s report and e-mails published in The Washington Post, Mr. Graham also made a proposal: he would support the lottery contract if Mr. Williams’s company withdrew from an unrelated housing project with the area transit authority, whose board Mr. Graham served on.
In one e-mail, Mr. Williams's lawyer, A. Scott Bolden, called the overture “very close to corruption, bid rigging and other inappropriate conduct."...
The contract languished until the Council rejected it in December 2008. The city reopened bidding, and Intralot won again, but without a partner. Byron E. Boothe Jr., Intralot’s vice president of government relations, said it became clear the Council would reject Intralot if it lacked a local minority partner.
"That's important to D.C., and so we just understood and it's just part of the process,” he said.
The company selected a start-up called the Veterans Services Corporation and formed a company called DC09; Veterans Services owned 51 percent, and Intralot owned the rest. Veterans Services’ president is Emmanuel Bailey, a Maryland businessman whose mother had worked for the city and was the company chairwoman.
City inspectors certifying Veterans Services' small-business status found the company based in the family room of Mr. Bailey’s mother’s home. Inspectors found no sign of bookkeeping, payroll records or company stationery, according to their report.
Whatever else it shows, this kind of nonsense hardly confirms Frank Wolf's thesis that gambling is inherently corrupting.
Ronald Bailey on Bioconservatives vs. Bioprogressives
The conventional left/right ideological
categories are breaking down in our new age of biopolitics,
observes Science Correspondent Ronald Bailey. On one side stands an
uneasy “bioconservative” alliance of moralizing neoconservatives
and egalitarian left-wingers who fear that the new biotechnologies
threaten human dignity and human equality. On the other side are
“bioprogressives” who welcome the new advancements for their
capacity to confer greater freedom to flourish.
Free Speech? Ya right: Mitch McConnell Is a Poopy-head!
Granted, Jane Mayer had only
7,200 words to work with in her latest
New Yorker feature about how Citizens United
has imperiled democracy. But is this the best an acclaimed reporter
can do with the legitimate First Amendment objections to regulating
political speech?
Conservatives cast their opposition to campaign-finance restrictions as a defense of free speech, but one of the cause's biggest champions, Senator McConnell, occasionally revealed a partisan motive. McConnell once opened a college seminar by writing on the blackboard the three ingredients that he felt were necessary to build a political party: "Money, money, and money." In a Senate debate on proposed campaign-finance restrictions, McConnell reportedly told colleagues, "If we stop this thing, we can control the institution for the next twenty years." In the end, McConnell decided to wage his battle through the courts. He and a conservative lawyer, James Bopp, Jr., founded the James Madison Center for Free Speech, which mounted a legal challenge on behalf of Citizens United—yet another outside spending group created by McCarthy’s partner on the Willie Horton ad, Floyd Brown.
The case reached the Supreme Court, and its ruling, issued in January, 2010, rolled back a century of legislation limiting corporate money in federal elections. Citizens United argued, successfully, that political spending was a form of free speech protected by the First Amendment. In the past, the Court had balanced the free-speech argument against the need to protect American democracy from corruption. In Citizens United, a 5–4 decision, the Court essentially ruled that elections wouldn't be corrupted by independent expenditures made by outside groups. They could spend all the money they wanted, as long as the contributions weren't made directly to the candidates' campaigns.
Here's me in July 2010 on the faulty concept of "balancing" the First Amendment against other concerns.
Having once (shamefully!) held
Mayer's precise position–free speech objections to campaign finance
regulation are specious because screw that Mitch
McConnell!–I'll reiterate my
recommendation (which occasionally works!) to
those who are still in that camp:
Check out the free-speech objections by people who don't want Goldman Sachs to take over the West Wing, or Wal-Mart to bulldoze private residences. I'm talking about anti-corporatist crusaders like Tim Carney, anti-eminent domain-abuse litigators like the Institute of Justice, or even former Federal Elections Commission chief Brad Smith.
And for those many who claim to be First Amendment absolutists while also supporting McCain-Feingold--I'm looking at you, some of my fellow journalists--here's a question that the former begs of the latter: What if you're wrong?
Presuming of course that being wrong about an important topic is actively embarrassing to journalists.
Reason on Citizens United here, including Reason.tv's three reasons not to sweat it:
Ban Alcohol on the Grounds That It Is a Possible Abortifacient?
In today's New York
Times, there is an article headlined, "Groups
Equate Abortion with Some Contraceptives." Yesterday, a panel
of religious folks testified before a congressional committee
against the Obama administration's requirement (however finessed)
that religiously-affiliated groups offer health insurance that pays
for contraceptives. Part of their opposition results from their
belief that some contraceptives sometimes act as "abortifacients."
As the Times reports:
They contend that methods of contraception including morning-after pills and IUDs can be considered “abortifacients” because, these advocates say, they can act to prevent pregnancy after a man’s sperm has fertilized a woman’s egg.
“We object to the use of drugs and procedures used to take the lives of unborn children,” the Rev. Dr. Matthew C. Harrison, president of the Lutheran Church — Missouri Synod, said Thursday at a hearing of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
Their reasoning is that life begins the moment an egg is fertilized, and that if a contraceptive has the potential to prevent the implantation of a fertilized egg in the uterus, it is aborting a life. ...
... Catholic bishops and evangelical leaders say that if there is any chance that a method may result in the destruction of a fertilized egg they will oppose it.
Without arguing about the contestable science, assume that this does occasionally occur. How far are the believers willing to go to prevent people from engaging in activities that increase the likelihood that a fertilized egg will fail to implant? For example, a 2004 study published in The American Journal of Epidemiology reported that alcohol consumption by both females and males increases the risk of "spontaneous abortion." From the abstract:
Depending on the intake in the cycle of conception and the adjustment factors, female alcohol intake was associated with 2–3 times the adjusted risk of spontaneous abortion compared with no intake, and male alcohol intake was associated with 2–5 times the adjusted risk. Only the adjusted relative risks for 10 or more drinks/week compared with no intake were statistically significant. Both male and female alcohol intakes during the week of conception increased the risk of early pregnancy loss.
By the way, some 60 to 80 percent of naturally conceived embryos fail to implant.
A. Barton Hinkle on Culture War Propaganda
The Virginia General Assembly’s has passed bills
requiring an ultrasound and waiting period before an abortion.
Proponents pretend the measure is merely about medical
safety. If that were the case, then one would expect
physicians to be all for it, writes A. Barton Hinkle. You would
think groups such as the Medical Society of Virginia and the
Richmond Academy of Medicine would chime in, lending the weight of
professional expertise to the cause of patient safety. They
haven’t.
Is Obama's Medical Marijuana Reversal 'Shocking'?
In a new Rolling Stone piece,
Tim Dickinson rehearses Barack Obama's reversal on medical
marijuana, covering much of the same ground that I did in my
October cover
story for Reason (which also discusses other
disappointing aspects of Obama's drug policies). It's a good
summary, featuring outraged quotes from reformers and making the
point that Obama, despite his talk of deferring to state law, is
arguably worse on this issue than his predecessor. But I think
Dickinson makes too much of an anti-marijuana document produced by
the Drug Enforcement Administration:
In January 2011, weeks after [Bush administration holdover Michele] Leonhart was confirmed [as head of the DEA], her agency updated a paper called "The DEA Position on Marijuana." With subject headings like THE FALLACY OF MARIJUANA FOR MEDICINAL USE and SMOKED MARIJUANA IS NOT MEDICINE, the paper simply regurgitated the Bush administration's ideological stance, in an attempt to walk back the Ogden memo. Sounding like Glenn Beck, the DEA even blamed "George Soros" and "a few billionaires, not broad grassroots support" for sustaining the medical-marijuana movement—even though polls show that 70 percent of Americans approve of medical pot.
Almost immediately, federal prosecutors went on the attack. Their first target: the city of Oakland, where local officials had moved to raise millions in taxes by licensing high-tech indoor facilities for growing medical marijuana. A month after the DEA issued its hard-line position, U.S. Attorney Melinda Haag warned the city that the feds were weighing "criminal prosecution" against the proposed pot operations. Abandoning the Ogden memo's protections for state-sanctioned "caregivers," Haag effectively re-declared war on medical pot. "We will enforce the Controlled Substances Act vigorously against individuals and organizations that participate in unlawful manufacturing and distribution activity involving marijuana," she wrote, "even if such activities are permitted under state law."
This juxtaposition suggests the U.S. attorneys were following the DEA's lead, which seems unlikely. In any case, the DEA's position on medical marijuana has never really changed. The July 2010 version of this document, which appeared half a year before the U.S. attorneys' crackdown, is essentially the same as the current version, which (as Dickinson suggests) is essentially the same as the version produced during the Bush administration. Leonhart and her underlings were never on board with the forbearance promised by Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder, and neither were the federal prosecutors who are going after growers and dispensaries now. Obama would have had to make an effort to change the status quo, and he clearly didn't think it was worth it.
Was this failure "shocking," as the subhead over Dickinson's story says? That depends on your perspective. When my article on Obama's drug policies came out, Jeralyn at Talk Left had this reaction:
Jacob Sullum has the October cover story at Reason on President Obama: Bummer: Barack Obama Turns Out to Be Just Another Drug Warrior." As if anyone should be surprised.
I'm not. I've been writing since 2007 that he would do little to temper the War on Drugs. I would have called the article "Bummer: Barack Obama Is Still A Drug Warrior."
As I note in my Reason piece, there were indeed warning signs before Obama was elected. But many reformers were genuinely surprised that, with the exception of crack sentences, he turned out to be no better than Bush and in some ways worse. With medical marijuana especially, the political risks of a bit more tolerance seemed small, and there was even a sound conservative/constitutionalist argument for letting states make their own decisions. Obama seems to assume that supporters who care about this issue and other progressive causes he has betrayed (the anti-war movement and civil liberties, for instance) have nowhere else to go, but they could just stay home.
The Drug War Chronicle notes that Delaware has suspended its medical marijuana program in response to federal threats.
Norman Borlaug: Humanitarian Hero Versus Doomsayers
I am
always surprised (and disappointed) at the blank looks I get on
those occasions when I mention the name Norman Borlaug. As the
Father of the Green Revolution, he is the person who probably saved
the most human lives in all of history. You would think that
Borlaug's accomplishments would would occupy whole chapters in
history books. Borlaug
died at age 95 back in 2009.
Henry Miller, over at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, has written up a good brief bio of Borlaug which highlights how doomsaying environmentalists and naysaying bureaucrats tried to derail his ultimately successful efforts to prevent global-scale famines. How did Borlaug launch the Green Revolution? Borlaug directed a plant breeding project funded largely by the Rockefeller Foundation that created high yielding, disease resistant varieties of wheat. What did he achieve? Miller writes:
From 1950 to 1992, the world’s grain output rose from 692 million tons produced on 1.70 billion acres of cropland to 1.9 billion tons on 1.73 billion acres of cropland—an extraordinary increase in yield-per-acre of more than 150 percent. India is an excellent case in point. In pre-Borlaug 1963, wheat grew there in sparse, irregular strands, was harvested by hand, and was susceptible to rust disease. The maximum yield was 800 pounds-per-acre. By 1968, thanks to Borlaug’s varieties, the wheat grew densely packed, was resistant to rust, and the maximum yield had risen to 6,000 pounds-per-acre.
Without high-yield agriculture, either millions would have starved or increases in food output would have been realized only through the drastic expansion of land under cultivation—with major losses in pristine wilderness.
By the way, global per capita grain production leveled off in the 1980s. In 2011, global grain production reached nearly 2.3 billion tons. Borlaug believed that modern crop biotechnology would help spur a new Green Revolution, but worried that doomsayers and bureaucrats would once again try to stop progress. He was right to be worried, as Miller explains:
The need for additional agricultural production and the obstacles to innovation remain, and in his later years, Borlaug turned his efforts to ensuring the success of this century’s equivalent of the Green Revolution: the application of gene-splicing, or “genetic modification” (GM), to agriculture. As Borlaug and other plant scientists realized, the use of the term “genetic modification” to apply only to the newest genetic techniques is an unfortunate misnomer because plant scientists had been using crude and laborious techniques to obtain new genetic variants of wheat, corn, and innumerable other crops for decades, if not centuries. Products now in development with gene-splicing techniques offer the possibility of even higher yields, lower inputs of agricultural chemicals and water, enhanced nutrition, and even plant-derived, orally active vaccines.
However, small numbers of dedicated extremists in the environmental movement have been doing everything they can to stop scientific progress in its tracks, and their allies in national and United Nations-based regulatory agencies are more than eager to help. Activists have trotted out the same kinds of rumors to frighten rural illiterates that confronted Borlaug a half-century earlier—that gene-spliced plants cause impotence or sterility, or that they harm farm animals, for example. As Borlaug observed about opposition to modernizing agricultural practices in India in 1966, “The situation was tailor-made for demagogues, fear-mongers, second-guessers and hate groups. We heard from them all.” In the twenty-first century, they continue to spew their lethal venom. ...
Borlaug observed that the enemies of innovation might create a self-fulfilling prophecy: “If the naysayers do manage to stop agricultural biotechnology, they might actually precipitate the famines and the crisis of global biodiversity they have been predicting for nearly 40 years.” After slowing the progress of gene-splicing technology by advocating excessive regulation and after filing lawsuits to prevent the testing and commercialization of gene-spliced plants and even vandalizing field trials, activists have had the audacity to accuse the scientists and agribusiness companies of having overpromised technological advances.
Go here to read Miller's whole article on Borlaug's achievements and travails. And for more background see Reason's interview with Borlaug, Billion's Served, from back in 2000. Go here for my 2006 Wall Street Journal review of the Borlaug biography, The Man Who Fed the World
Where is Dr. Paul's Inflation?
Even more than an anti-war warrior, Ron Paul is an inflation warrior. Fighting inflation by eliminating the Federal Reserve and returning to the gold standard has been the one constant in his four-decade-long political career. Indeed, one big reason he jumped into the current presidential race is because he believes that the Fed’s loose monetary policy combined with Uncle Sam’s trillion-dollar-plus stimulus profligacy is certain to produce a dollar catastrophe.
He noted last March:
"I think the wave of the future is inflation. It's just beginning -- to the point that the dollar will be rejected as the reserve currency of the world. If there's a panic out of the dollar you will see the destruction of the dollar rather quickly. The end stages of a currency comes quickly." He continued, "We've seen this in Zimbabwe, Mexico and Central America. Today there's an illusion and false trust in our money."
In June he warned that inflation would “hit 50 percent.”
In August he said: “inflation may get out of control.”
But this morning Carpe Diem’s Mark Perry, no Keynesian enthusiast, examined the latest CPI report and found that inflationary pressures were falling at the end of last year. Notes Perry:
- For the six month period ending July 2011, the annualized inflation rate for CPI: All Items was 4.1%, and that fell to only 1.8% for the six month period ending last month.
- For the three month period ending July 2011, the annualized inflation rate for "food at home" was 5.5% and for the three month period ending January 2012, the annualized inflation rate was only 1.0%. Bottom Line: Compared to last summer for the three and six month periods ending in July 2011, inflationary pressures fell significantly towards the end of last year and in the first month of 2012 for the three and six month periods ending in January. Inflation for food at home has fallen to only 1% (at an annual rate) for the November-January period.
Likewise, Daniel Hanson on the American Enterprise Institute's The Enterprise blog, no Keynesian shill, earlier this month presented a series of charts -- including the one below -- tracking money supply and core inflation and concluded that the relationship between how much money there is in an economy and how much things cost is not very easy to track because “price changes are influenced by many things other than the supply of money.”
All of this raises this question: Is the runaway inflation that the good doctor has been worried about only a matter of time? Or has he misdiagnosed the corrosive effects that the twin cancers of out-of-control federal spending and over-easy monetary policy might produce on the body economicus?
Discuss.
Bonus Material: Paul Krugman on Paul's Monetary Madness here.
Target Knows Your Daughter Is Knocked Up: More Upsides to Zero Privacy
People are willing to sell
information about themselves quite cheaply—a couple of bucks off a
grocery bill will get them to consistently use a discount card tied
to their names, a coupon for in-store Starbucks coffee extracts a
usable email address.
The ideas that stores keep tabs on their customers can seem creepy, but reflect for a moment on this interesting tale from this week's New York Times Magazine in mind:
About a year after Pole created his pregnancy-prediction model, a man walked into a Target outside Minneapolis and demanded to see the manager. He was clutching coupons that had been sent to his daughter, and he was angry, according to an employee who participated in the conversation.
“My daughter got this in the mail!” he said. “She’s still in high school, and you’re sending her coupons for baby clothes and cribs? Are you trying to encourage her to get pregnant?”
The manager didn’t have any idea what the man was talking about. He looked at the mailer. Sure enough, it was addressed to the man’s daughter and contained advertisements for maternity clothing, nursery furniture and pictures of smiling infants. The manager apologized and then called a few days later to apologize again.
On the phone, though, the father was somewhat abashed. “I had a talk with my daughter,” he said. “It turns out there’s been some activities in my house I haven’t been completely aware of. She’s due in August. I owe you an apology.”
When people enter new phases of life—graduations, marriages, births—their buying habits are up for grabs. Target uses the mountains of data it collects to identify when those moments are about to occur and get people through their doors and into the habit of shopping at their stores. To do this, they send targeted ads and coupons for precisely the stuff that people in that phase of life want or need to buy.
For now, Target will even accommodate your need not to feel spied on, though I suspect that will diminish over time, much as it has with online advertising.
“We have the capacity to send every customer an ad booklet, specifically designed for them, that says, ‘Here’s everything you bought last week and a coupon for it,’ ” one Target executive told me. “We do that for grocery products all the time.” But for pregnant women, Target’s goal was selling them baby items they didn’t even know they needed yet.
“With the pregnancy products, though, we learned that some women react badly,” the executive said. “Then we started mixing in all these ads for things we knew pregnant women would never buy, so the baby ads looked random. We’d put an ad for a lawn mower next to diapers. We’d put a coupon for wineglasses next to infant clothes. That way, it looked like all the products were chosen by chance....As long as we don’t spook her, it works.”
Lots more Reason on the upsides of living in Database Nation.
Via Conor Friedersdorf.
Instapundit's Syllabus for the Occupy Movement
Glenn Reynolds, the wizard behind
Instapundit, is also a law prof at University of Tennessee.
Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Reynolds suggests a syllabus
for courses that are starting to be taught about the Occupy
Movement. Among the class sessions he recommends:
1) The Higher Education Bubble and Debt Slavery Throughout History. Since ancient times, debt has been a tool used by rulers to enslave the ruled, which is why the Bible explains that the borrower is the slave to the lender. One complaint of many Occupy protesters involves their pursuit of expensive degrees that has left them burdened by student loans but unable to find suitable employment. This unit would compare the marketing of higher education and student debt to today's students with the techniques used to lure sharecroppers and coal miners into irredeemable indebtedness. Music to be provided by Tennessee Ernie Ford.
2) Bourgeois vs. Non-Bourgeois Revolutions: A Comparison and Contrast. The Occupy movement left its major sites—McPherson Square in D.C., Zuccotti Park in Manhattan, Dewey Square in Boston—filthy and disheveled. By contrast, the tea party protests famously left the Washington Mall and other locations cleaner than they found them, with members proudly performing cleanup duties.
This unit would note that social-protest movements are sometimes orderly and sometimes disorderly as a matter of approach, and it would compare the effectiveness and ultimate success of such relentlessly bourgeois movements as the tea party, the pre-1964 Civil Rights movement, Women's Suffrage activists, and the American Revolution, against such anti-Bourgeois movements as the post-1968 Black Power and New Left movements, and the French Revolution.
Which accomplished more lasting good?...
4) Scapegoating and anti-Semitism in mass economic-protest movements. The Occupy movement began as an assault on "the 1%," a shadowy elite of bankers and financiers charged with running the world for their own benefit. Within a few months, the Anti-Defamation League was noting that anti-Semitic statements and sympathies seemed surprisingly widespread within the Occupy encampments. Compare with other such movements that led to similar results. Are such developments inevitable? If so, what strands in Western (and perhaps non-Western) culture account for this?
Read the whole thing (for free!) at the WSJ.
Speaking of anti-semitism, here's Reason.tv talking to a (now-former) L.A. Unified School District employee at Occupy LA:
For more Reason video coverage of the Occupy movement, including Peter Schiff among the protesters and Remy's protest song, go here.
For Reason.com coverage of Occupy, go here.
Mike Riggs on Gary Johnson's Mission to Build a Libertarian-Leaning Coalition
Compared to fellow former Republican Bob Barr,
who was tied for the presidential nomination through five rounds of
ballots at the 2008 national convention, getting the backing of the
Libertarian Party is going to be a cakewalk for Gary Johnson. What
about the rest of America? Johnson is hoping to poll high enough to
appear with President Barack Obama and the GOP nominee in a
televised debate, and pull 5 percent in the general election. But
the former two-term governor of New Mexico, writes Mike Riggs, is
having a hard time coralling people who lean libertarian, but
aren't quite.
President Obama’s No-Win Medicare Cuts
Joseph Antos, a health policy scholar at The American Enterprise Institute, helpfully explains the dual problems with the Medicare “cuts” proposed in President Obama’s new budget blueprint: On the one hand, even ignoring the near certainty that Obama’s budget plan won’t ever pass, the cuts aren’t likely to go into effect. On the other hand, if they did, they could screw up health care access for Medicare beneficiaries:
We have eight years of proof that Congress will never allow those payment reductions to go into effect. Unmentioned in the budget is the little matter of the 27.4% reduction in Medicare payments to physicians, scheduled to take effect on March 1. Whenever physician payments grow more quickly than the economy, Medicare is required to cut their fees using the “sustainable growth rate” formula. However, Congress has overridden those formula-driven payment cuts every year since 2003 and the uncollected bills have mounted up. It is now ludicrous to think that Congress could ever allow such a large payment reduction to take effect. It is equally ludicrous to think that Congress would enforce sizeable reductions in payments to hospitals and other health facilities on top of the hundreds of billions in reductions already levied on them by the Affordable Care Act (ACA).
But suppose the implausible happened and Congress accepted the president’s cuts. The cumulative effect of the ACA and the 2013 budget would drive providers out of Medicare, making it increasingly difficult for seniors to get the care they need. Medicare’s actuary reported that in 2019 the ACA reductions by themselves would cause 15 percent of hospitals, nursing facilities, and home health agencies to lose money. Piling on with more cuts will only make the problem worse.
So the proposed cuts won't work, because they won't pass. And even if they did, they still wouldn't work, because they'd cause other problems.
It is imperative that the United States reduce its long-term commitment to spending on Medicare and Medicaid; even the Obama administration admits that in the long run, the country's current commitments are totally unsustainable. But centralized cuts to provider payments are both politically difficult and likely to have significant unintended consequences on health care and access—and yet as I reported in my recent magazine feature on Medicare price setting, policymakers have been trying to control spending by controlling prices for decades without much success. Indeed, Antos, who talked to me for the piece, helped implement one of the major price-setting that he now believes has failed. The problem Antos outlines is the problem with giant-size health entitlements that rely heavily on technocratic price setting, especially as those programs expand coverage and benefits: Policymakers end up having to choose between budget problems and big health system problems.
A.M. Links: Obama Rakes in $29 Million, U.S. Provides Loan Guarantee to Indonesian Airline, German President Resigns
Super PAC-besieged Obama raised
only $29.1 million
in the first month of 2012. - U.S. finances $22 billion deal between Lion Air and Boeing.
- ICE agent shoots other ICE agent, gets shot by third ICE agent.
- CNN asks, "Is Mexico's Drug War Working?" Fails to answer the question.
- Syrian troops continue shelling opposition forces.
- Germany's president resigns.
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New at Reason.tv: "Is Harrisburg's Nightmare America's Future?"
Henry Payne on Mitt Romney and the Fickle GOP
Former front-runner Mitt Romney now can't get the
time of day from the GOP, writes Henry Payne.
Ron Paul: His Opponents Don't Even Know They've Been Beaten
Business Insider with details on the Ron Paul campaign's stealth efforts for total Republican Party dominance, after explaining again all the reasons to doubt the legitimacy of the announced straw poll vote (nonbinding on eventual delegates) in Maine:
The Paul campaign believes it has won the majority of Maine's delegates....
Caucus chaos has also proved to be fertile ground for Paul's quiet takeover of the Republican Party. Since 2008, the campaign and Paul's Campaign for Liberty PAC have made a concerted effort to get Paul sympathists involved in the political process. Now, tumult in state party organizations has allowed these supporters to rise up the ranks.
"We like strong party leadership when it comes from us," Paul campaign chair Jesse Benton told Business Insider. "Our people work very hard to make sure that their voice is heard."
The fruits of this labor are evident in Iowa, where Paul's former state campaign co-chair A.J. Spiker was just elected as the new chairman of the Iowa Republican Party. Spiker replaces Matt Strawn, who stepped down over this year's Iowa caucus dustup. In Nevada, the state chair has also resigned over caucus disaster, and several Ron Paul supporters are well-positioned to step up to fill the void. These new leaders not only expand Paul's influence at the state level, but also help protect Paul and his hard-won delegates from state party machinations as the delegate-selection process moves to district and state conventions, and eventually the Republican National Convention this summer.
"We are always trying to bring people into the party," Benton said. "I think that is a very positive thing for Republicans. Ron is the person who can build the Republican base, bring new blood into the party. That's how you build the party."
In Maine, the caucus disaster has made the state GOP prime for a Ron Paul takeover. And that means that Paul's hard-won delegates will be protected as the delegate selection process
"We are taking over the party," Wead told BI. "That's the important thing — and that is what we are doing in Maine."
Daily Beast has more on this angle of Paul's ongoing secret victory, focusing not on the GOP per se but his ideological conquest of the young and the wired:
According to the Election Oracle, Paul has played online with remarkable consistency, staying entirely in positive territory and avoiding the volatile shifts and dips of his opponents. One reason is obvious: The 20- and 30-somethings who ardently support the free-market platform of the aging candidate are heavy web users who gush about him on political blogs, in news comments and on Twitter. But less clear is how for weeks, Paul, despite his controversial and provocative ideas to massively reign in the size of government, has escaped any online controversy or sustained attack.
To determine its favorability ratings, the Election Oracle tracks 40,000 news sites, blogs, message boards, Twitter feeds, and other social-media sources to analyze what millions of people are saying about the candidates—and determines whether the web buzz is positive or negative. That rating is weighted, along with the Real Clear Politics polling average and the latest InTrade market data, to calculate each candidate’s chances of winning the Republican nomination. (See methodology here.)
The downside of Paul's web popularity is that it isn't quite a representative sample. The positive web rating comes from his enthusiastic fans, but few others are talking about him....
Meanwhile, a CNN poll has Paul coming on top on the question of whether his policies are perceived as good for the middle class, above all his GOP opponents as well as President Obama. See this CNN clip, in which the graphic amusingly places the number one Paul at the bottom of the list:
My forthcoming book, Ron Paul's Revolution.
Relax, Liberal Metalheads. Dave Mustaine Did Not “Endorse” Rick Santorum
All you
contraceptive-using headbangers out there can breathe a sigh of
relief. Although it was
widely reported yesterday that Megadeth frontman Dave Mustaine
had endorsed social conservative darling Rick Santorum for
president, it turns out Mustaine was just the latest victim of the
media’s well-known
bias against right-wing rockers. According to the statement
Mustaine
released today:
Contrary to how some people have interpreted my words, I have not endorsed any presidential candidate. What I did say was that I hope to see a Republican in the White House. I've seen good qualities in all the candidates but by no means have made my choice yet. I respect the fact that Santorum took time off from his campaign to be with his sick daughter, but I never used the word “endorse."
So don't go burning your copy of Rust in Peace just yet (burn everything Megadeth released after it, of course, if you already haven't).
Kurt Loder on Thin Ice and The Secret World of Arrietty
Set in the wintry Midwest, Thin Ice is a
dark, twisty crime thriller that recalls the Coen brothers’
snowbound Fargo and features colorfully comic performances
by Greg Kinnear, Alan Arkin, and especially Billy Crudup, who
charges the film memorably as a menacing psycho. The Secret
World of Arrietty, on the other hand, is a lustrous animated
adaptation of English author Mary Nortion’s 1952 fantasy novel
The Borrowers, featuring a script co-written by
Princess Mononoke director Hayao Miyazaki. It’s a great
kids movie, but it’s not in any way just for kids. Kurt Loder
reviews them both.
Rick Santorum: Against Contraception, Against Online Gambling
We know Rick Santorum casts
a gimlet eye on contraception because he feels "it’s a license
to do things in the sexual realm that is counter to how things are
supposed to be."
Now we know that the GOP presidential candidate - leading his party's nominating race in some polls - is also against online gambling. From the Las Vegas Sun via Jim Geraghty at the National Review, here's Santo's proclamation on the evils of cyberspace wagering:
Just as we’ve seen from a lot of other things that are vices on the Internet, they end to grow exponentially as a result of that. It’s one thing to come to Las Vegas and do gaming and participate in the shows and that kind of thing as entertainment, it’s another thing to sit in your home and have access to that it. I think it would be dangerous to our country to have that type of access to gaming on the Internet.
Santorum is against non-marital sex and gambling. What's next, banning step aerobics? Exactly how is this great nation supposedly to unwind?
One point worth making: Santorum makes a classic prohibitionist's mistake. He thinks that the law dictates the status of activity. When it comes to online gambling, Americans already had access to it long before there was definitive ruling on whether it was legal or not.
Prohibition doesn't squelch a targeted activity, even as it can reduce the number of participants. It drives an often-smaller number of people to more desperate measures, and introduces all sorts of criminal or black or gray market problems. And it makes anyone with an problem to seek help. I'd like to have a president who is capable of understanding that, or at least debating it.
Occupy Wall Street Forms a PAC, CNN Cancels GOP Debate, Underwear Bomber Gets Life Sentence: P.M. Links
Georgia
Alabama man forms
Occupy Wall Street PAC. - Would-be underwear bomber sentenced to life in prison.
- The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau picks its first target.
- CNN cancels GOP debate.
- Congressman doesn't want HHS head attending Super PAC fundraising events.
- Santorum's biggest fundraiser has interesting ideas about birth control.
- Obama campaign unveils secret weapon.
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Mandatory Drugs Tests by Record Companies, Media Scoldings, and Other Helpful Suggestions for Preventing Further Whitney Houstons
Creepy media-leech/medical
professional Dr. Drew Pinsky has been covering the death of Whitney
Houston because that's just what he does.
One of Dr. Drew's recent show guests suggested that record companies start mandatory drug testing. Drew said "I love that."
It's never as offensive when it's just two people talking, instead of people who get to enact destructive drug laws laws, but still, any actual effects of that benign-sounding policy (say who is going to institute it and how when label folks want to sign and retain major musicians who may not be interested in pissing in a cup) were breezed by as they often are when people are trying to fix the unfixable. Drug warrior and certain media folks tend to be big fans of social engineering.
So is Bill O'Reilly, who got into an argument with Matt Lauer on The Today Show about celebrities and drug use.
According to the Fox News blog, said O'Reilly:
"This is ridiculous, Whitney Houston killed herself. Do we all understand that? You don’t use hard drugs for decades, decades. You don’t spend $100 million on them not wanting to kill yourself. So why aren’t we telling the truth to young people in America?”
Bill noted that there aren’t any celebrities putting out public service announcements telling kids not to do drugs. He said all we see are “creeps” like Snoop Dogg and Willie Nelson who are celebrated for getting high. “There’s no one in the media saying this could lead to death and if it doesn’t lead to death, 75 percent of all child abuse and neglect is done by substance abusers,” argued Bill.
O'Reilly loves his moral outrage. Celebrities are obligated to just say no, media is obligated to shame and scold, and somehow a 25.6 billion (federal) dollars a year drug war, including millions spend on propaganda campaigns and $7million spend on a "Prescription Drug Monitoring Program", is not "telling the truth" to the kids? What facts exactly are being shielded? What does O'Reilly suggest? A mass-shunning of all famous people who also have used or abused drugs so that the kids don't get any ideas?
Possibly. Now let's look back at that awkward moment when musician Sting seemed less repellent after he and other celebrities participated in the Drug Policy Alliance's no more drug war video. Here's O'Reilly debating Ethan Nadelmann from the DPA last year over that PSA and drug policy in general:
And please enjoy Jacob Sullum — the man who eats drug warriors for breakfast — debating with O'Reilly, with much disdain on the pundit's part towards Sullum, who not only supports legalization, but even wrote a book called Saying Yes: In Defense of Drug Use.
In June 2010, Sullum noted that the 70-80 percent of child abuse cases involve substance abuse statistics that O'Reilly clearly favors when it comes to arguing drug policy, are bunk:
Sullum:
According to Childabuse.com, "Among confirmed cases of child maltreatment, 40% involve the use of alcohol or other drugs." According to Childhelp USA, "Nearly one-half of substantiated cases of child neglect and abuse are associated with parental alcohol or drug abuse." According to the Child Welfare Information Gateway, "Substance abuse may be a contributing factor for between one-third and two-thirds of maltreated children in the child welfare system." Furthermore, these estimates refer to "substance abuse" generally, the vast majority of it involving alcohol, not "narcotics." Finally, the causal interpretation of these associations remainscontroversial, so O'Reilly's assumption that more drug use means more child abuse is unsubstantiated.
Over at Slate, meanwhile, there's a piece which cuts straight to the heart of this media hand-wringing in which O'Reilly angrily and Dr. Drew sorrowfully engage. The piece is headlined "Did We All Kill Whitney Houston—Or Did We Prolong Her Life?"
We remember all those creepy-awkward "crack is whack" jokes, and the tabloids also seemed particularly hungry for Amy Winehouse to kick the bucket, but still, writes Danial Engber:
The case against the American public ignores the fundamental benefit of having tabloid headlines and network TV shows and all the other trappings of celebrity. Being famous—whether it’s the good, Star-Spangled-Banner kind or the bad, rapid-weight-loss kind—is worth a lot of money. And money is, broadly speaking, very good for your health. Speaking on national television in 2002, moments before her infamous declaration that “crack is wack,” the freshly-rehabbed diva made a revealing statement about the nature of her addiction: “Crack is cheap,” she said. “I made too much money to ever smoke crack. Let’s get that straight.” Yes, she’d been taking drugs, but she’d been doing it in the way that a rich person does.
Drug abuse has much more dire consequences, on average, for those who live in poverty. Epidemiological studies have repeatedly shown that the higher your socioeconomic status, the less likely you are to die from your addictions. Low-income users are more likely to share needles and cookers; they’re more likely to take speedballs; they have higher rates of HIV and lower rates of treatment for it; they tend to inject their drugs in shooting galleries; and they lack the friends and family-members who might encourage them into treatment or even cart them off to the ER in case of overdose. If you’re an addict who’s stuck on the street, you’re more vulnerable to all the morbidity and mortalitythat comes with your disease.
To the extent that a public fascination with Houston’s drug use kept her in the newspapers and on television, it also kept her income from dropping to zero even during her darkest days. Before Saturday, who’s to say how many times her platinum records and celebrity status had already saved her life?
The rest here.
Reason on drugs, prescription drugs, and the drug war
Free-Range Parenting: You're Going to Go to Jail. Maybe.
Hey look, here's a big omnibus
article by David Pimentel of the Florida Costal School of Law
on all
the ways you are potentially legally screwed if you let your kid do
stuff that was considered normal at some point in the less
intensively parented past.
Choice tidbits:
Even one generation ago, the norms were different for determining the age at which a child no longer needed a babysitter. The expected minimum age for babysitters has gone up as well, although in the few states that have legislated specific ages, the thresholds vary widely. In Illinois, it is illegal to leave a child under 14 unsupervised for an “unreasonable period of time”; in Maryland, in contrast, a 13-year-old is considered old enough not only to care for himself, but to babysit infants. The days when 11- and 12-year-old neighborhood kids were considered competent babysitters appear to be long gone. This development is all the more marked considering that mobile phones have created a virtually instant line of communication between the sitter and the parents, something unheard of in earlier eras, when younger sitters were considered acceptable.
And:
Vague statutes do not provide sufficient guidance to parents to know what matters remain in their discretion, or sufficient guidance to prosecutors and jurors to know when a parental lapse rises to the level of criminal conduct. For parents, the vagueness problem may prompt paranoia. For the legal system, the vagueness problem results in overreliance on the discretion of the prosecutor, on the judge’s attempt to give meaning to the statute via jury instructions, and on the judgment of a jury venire already tainted by media hysteria over child protection.
Reason-tastic name drops include Free-Range Kids blogger Lenore Skenazy and security expert Bruce Schneier. Plus childcare expert and statistician Josef Stalin!
Via Bryan Caplan, who says "In absolute terms, I'm not worried about being persecuted by child welfare services. But power-mad bureaucrats probably outnumber kidnappers and serial killers at least a thousand to one."
Geithner Admits Obama Budget Leaves America With "Unsustainable" Entitlement Commitments
During congressional testimony
today, Obama administration Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner
touted the alleged deficit savings in President Obama's new budget
proposal. But under questioning, he admitted that even if that
budget were to pass, the country would still be left with a totally
unsustainable fiscal burden thanks to the two big health
entitlements, Medicare and Medicaid: "Even if Congress were to
enact this budget, we would still be left with—in the outer decades
as millions of Americans retire—what are still unsustainable
commitments in Medicare and Medicaid," he said.
Given continued warnings from the Congressional Budget Office about the nation's treacherous long horizon fiscal path, this is not exactly a surprise. Indeed, it's not even a new admission from the administration: As the Free Beacon's Andrew Stiles, who flagged the exchange, notes, Geithner admitted the same thing to Congress last year. Essentially, the administration's position seems to be: Sure, we know these programs are huge long-term budget busters—but don't expect us to do anything about it.
Chuck Norris and R. Lee Ermey Team Up with the NRA
Chuck Norris and R. Lee Ermey want you to save
the Second Amendment. Or else.
The two actors have been starring in videos for "Trigger the Vote," a voter registration campaign. Sponsored by the National Rifle Association, Trigger the Vote is aimed at youth voters (well, figuratively speaking).
Ermey was most famous for his 1987 role as Gunnery Sgt. Hartman in Full Metal Jacket, while Norris was once a meme (and a TV Texas Ranger). Norris has been politically involved before, endorsing Mike Huckabee in 2008 and Newt Gingrich in 2012. He has also said some nice things about Ron Paul.
Despite Michael Bloomberg's efforts, gun control doesn't seem to be a top priority for the Democrats in 2012. In fact, gun rights are becoming more popular among Americans. Back in October 2011, a Gallup poll found record low support for gun control, including bans on handguns and "assault" rifles: 73 percent of Americans opposed banning handguns, while 53 percent were against a ban on semiautomatic weapons. Meanwhile, only 39 percent of voters under 30 favored increasing gun regulations; back in 1991, that number was 62 percent.
Reason on gun rights. Thaddeus Russell on how gun control can be conservative.
Obama's 'Absolutely Critical' Investments Include the Violent Suppression of Politically Incorrect Drug Habits
In my column
yesterday, I cited President Obama's proposal to increase the
budget of the National Endowment for the Arts as evidence that he
is less than fully committed to making the "hard choices" and
"difficult decisions" he says are necessary in light of "the fiscal
realities we face." The Drug War Chronicle notes
another example that's even more disheartening because it involves
a program that is not just pointless but pernicious: Obama wants to
raise federal
anti-drug spending from $25.2 billion this fiscal year to
$25.6 billion next fiscal year. The increase, 1.6 percent, is not
big, but if ever there were a program that was begging for cuts,
the never-ending, always-failing war on drugs surely
qualifies. Obama even wants to increase spending on
interdiction, probably the most futile
part of this pharmacological crusade.
Previous coverage of Obama's drug control budgets here and here. More on his more-of-the-same drug policy here.
Sheldon Richman on Big Government Forcing Us to Act Against Our Consciences
A question arises from the recent controversy
between President Obama and the Catholic Church that aches for an
answer, writes Sheldon Richman. If a Catholic institution should
not be forced to pay for contraception because it regards birth
control as morally repugnant, why should anyone be forced
to pay for what he or she finds morally repugnant?
Guatemala's President Says He Wants to Legalize Drugs, U.S. Imperialism Be Damned
Guatemalan President Otto Perez
Molina is bucking
the neighborhood hegemon:
"We are not doing what the United States says, we are doing what we have to do," said Perez, who was elected on promises of an "iron-fist" approach to rampant crime and surprised observers by proposing drug legalization.
Perez, a retired army general who took office one month ago, said his proposal to legalize drugs does not represent an about face from his campaign, in which he promised to get tough on crime.
He said he has always focused on a more comprehensive approach for addressing one of the highest murder rates in the world.
"Hunger is also violence, and is also a security problem," he said.
The outside world "has only focused on the fact that I am a retired general and participated in the domestic armed conflict," he said, referring to Guatemala's 1960-1996 civil war, in which an estimated 200,000 people were killed.
Guatemala needs "to find alternate ways of fighting drug trafficking. In the last 30 years with a traditional combat with arms and deaths, it can't be done, and we have to be open to viable alternatives."
On Monday, Perez said he will try to win regional support for drug legalization at an upcoming summit of Central American leaders next month.
The U.S. Embassy in Guatemala issued a statement Sunday saying that legalizing drugs wouldn't stop transnational gangs that traffic not only drugs, but also people and weapons.
The U.S. embassy's response is deeply deceptive, considering that the rise in kidnapping and weapon trafficking are drug-war externalities, as Sylvia Longmire wrote last year:
Legalization would deliver a significant short-term hit to the cartels — if drug trafficking were the only activity they were engaged in. But cartels derive a growing slice of their income from other illegal activities. Some experts on organized crime in Latin America, like Edgardo Buscaglia, say that cartels earn just half their income from drugs.
Indeed, in recent years cartels have used an extensive portfolio of rackets and scams to diversify their income. For example, they used to kidnap rivals, informants and incompetent subordinates to punish, exact revenge or send a message. Now that they have seen that people are willing to pay heavy ransoms, kidnapping has become their second-most-lucrative venture, with the targets ranging from businessmen to migrants.
Longmire isn't a legalization advocate as far as I know, but her research suggests that ending prohibition is an increasingly good idea; not just because it would deprive transnational criminal organizations of revenue, but because it would allow law enforcement agencies in Central America to prosecute activities that should actually be crimes, such as kidnapping and extortion.
Watergate's Deep Throat: Maybe Not So Heroic After All
Reason Contributing Editor
and Deputy Most Interesting Man in the World Glenn Garvin has a
fine piece up at the Miami Herald about a new book by
Max Holland called
Leak: Why Mark Felt Became Deep Throat. The upshot? That
the image of Felt as a high-minded truth-teller is wrong, wrong,
wrong. Excerpt:
The real story is "considerably messier and less than a fairy tale," Holland writes in Leak. Through interviews, declassified documents and Nixon's White House tapes, he demonstrates convincingly that Felt's objectives were covetous rather than civic: He desperately wanted to be director of the FBI.
Less than a month before the Watergate break-in, the top FBI job had come open for the first time in 37 years with the death of J. Edgar Hoover. Enraged that he hadn't gotten the job, Felt saw Watergate as an opportunity to shatter the career of the man who did, Nixon's friend L. Patrick Gray.
Felt began systematically leaking material from the FBI's Watergate investigation. He knew Nixon, whose paranoia about leaks was legendary in Washington, would figure out that the source was somewhere in the FBI. Gray would be blamed, lose his job (he hadn't yet been confirmed by the Senate and was officially only acting director) and Felt would be the logical replacement.
Felt played the Washington media like a mighty Wurlitzer, planting his leaks not just with the [Washington] Post but Time magazine, the Washington Daily News and anybody else who would take them. As his scheme began to work, with Nixon pressing Gray hard to plug the leaks, Felt stood smugly by as other FBI officials were demoted or threatened with the loss of their jobs. [...]
Even more damning to the romantic image of Deep Throat as the guy in the white hat standing up to the Nixon Gang at high noon is what he didn't leak. For instance, the unsuccessful but quite genuine blackmail the FBI used against Martin Luther King Jr., using illicit tapes of sexual incidents to try to force his resignation. Or the FBI campaign of burglaries ("black-bag jobs," they were called) against anti-war groups, which were directed by Felt himself.
Read the whole thing here.
Charles Paul Freund surveyed the Deep Throat guessing-game as it stood in 2002. Jesse Walker talked about the Felt unveiling when it happened. I compared Bob Woodward to Judith Miller (doh!) in 2006. A conspiratorial passage from the latter:
Woodward met Mark "Deep Throat" Felt not as a reporter but as a visitor to the White House on Navy intelligence business in 1970. At the time Felt led an FBI "goon squad" charged with making impromptu visits to the agency's field offices to make sure they were following director J. Edgar Hoover's dictates, according to Woodward's June 2005 recollection for the Post. "Here was someone at the center of the secret world I was only glimpsing in my Navy assignment, so I peppered him with questions about his job and his world," he wrote. "I turned it into a career-counseling session." Within months, Woodward's career received a surprisingly powerful boost: The Post hired him, despite his glaring lack of journalism experience.
We have a pretty good handle on Miller's motivations: She loves intrigue, is intoxicated by power, and believes Islamic terrorism is the biggest threat to the country. But what of Woodward's?
Afghan Detainees Are in a Lose, Lose, Lose Situation
After a U.N. report showing widespread torture and abuse of detainees in Afghanistan, NATO has decided to keep sending prisoners to these sites, The New York Times reports. NATO temporarily stopped sending people to facilities named in the report last fall. Instead, many detainees were kept in NATO custody, where there have also been allegations of abuse in the past.
Others were sent to an alternative American-run detention facility in Afghanistan known as Parwan, where detainees have also reported being mistreated. From the CBC News article in January:
Detainees interviewed during two visits to the U.S.-run portion of the Parwan detention centre outside Bagram Airbase — about 40 kilometres north of Kabul — complained of freezing cold, humiliating strip searches and being deprived of light, according to Gul Rahman Qazi, who led the investigation ordered by Karzai.
Now, after a four-month period of assessment and "retraining" for the Afghan-run detention centers implicated in the U.N. report, NATO officials think the guards, interrogators, and administrators are capable of detaining people without abusing them. Well, probably. According to The New York Times:
NATO said that it had resumed transferring detainees to 12 of the 16 detention centers, but that for four of them it was conditional, meaning that NATO could reverse that decision after further checks. Four places, including three where detainees reported routine abuse and in some cases torture, have not yet been certified for transfers. [Emphasis added]
So detainees will effectively serve as bait in a test designed to determine the Afghan centers' true commitment to humane treatment of prisoners. Presumably, if prisoners are abused at any of those four sites, they'll end up either back in NATO custody, where they may be abused, or at Parwan, where mistreatment is also possible.
Read more about the occupation of Afghanistan, detainee abuse, and after that you should probably lighten up with this Reason Weekend 2012 video.
John Stossel on Obama's Misleading Deficit Reduction Promises
President Obama said in his State of the Union
speech, “We’ve already agreed to more than $2 trillion in cuts and
savings.” That was reassuring. The new budget he released
this week promises $4 trillion in “deficit reduction”—about half in
tax increases and half in spending cuts. But like most politicians,
writes John Stossel, Obama misleads.
Noting An Historical Irony on Interracial Marriage
The Pew Research Center has released a new report
on trends in interracial marriages in the United States. The
Washington Post
reports:
According to the Pew study, about 15 percent of new marriages in 2010 crossed racial or ethnic lines, double the rate from three decades ago. Intermarriages comprise 8 percent of all marriages now, up from just 3 percent in 1980. And most Americans tell pollsters they are untroubled at the prospect of intermarriage in their own family.
At one point 41 states outlawed interracial marriages. Back in 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled in the case Loving v. Virginia that banning interracial marriage violated the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. The Virginia judge who had upheld the ban repugnantly argued [PDf]:
“Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.”
As a resident of the Commonwealth, I happily note, 45 years after Loving v. Virginia, that the Post reports this wonderful historical irony:
Virginia leads the nation in the percentage of marriages between blacks and whites....
Go here to see the full Pew report.
Is Harrisburg's Nightmare America's Future?
The city of Harrisburg is Ground Zero for America's municipal debt crisis.
Pennsylvania's capital city has liabilities estimated at $610 million, which is nearly ten times its annual budget. The city is so deep in the red that last year it attempted to file for bankruptcy. Reckless spending did more than ruin Harrisburg's balance sheet; it crowded out private industry and distracted from the city's core functions. Today, Harrisburg is a dangerous, poverty-stricken city, with failing schools and a shrinking population.
Harrisburg's fiscal nightmare may be a harbinger of things to come for American cities. In the mid-90s, local governments embarked on a spending binge, bringing total municipal debt in the United States to more than $2.8 trillion. Along with Harrisburg, Jefferson County, Alabama, Vallejo, California, and Central Falls, Rhode Island have filed for bankruptcy in the past few years. Several more cities are on the brink of default, largely thanks to taxpayer-financed stadiums, museums, housing, commercial complexes, other misconceived economic development projects, and runaway public sector salaries, pensions, and benefit packages.
Is your hometown the next Harrisburg?
Click above to watch the video or click here for a full discussion of Harrisburg's woes.
Shot, edited, written, and produced by Jim Epstein, who also narrates.
Approximately 7 minutes.
Go to Reason.tv for downloadable versions and subscribe to Reason.tv's YouTube Channel to receive automatic updates when new material goes live.
New Poll: GOP Enthusiasm Behind Santorum
The latest CNN/ORC Poll finds Santorum in first place, and Gingrich is last place. Santorum edges out Romney 34 percent to 32 percent, but this is still within the survey’s margin of error. Paul comes in at 16 percent and Gingrich at 15 percent.
Santorum enjoys much more enthusiastic support, with 55 percent of his supporters “strongly” supporting his candidacy. In stark contrast only 38 percent of Romney’s voters “strongly” support him. Nevertheless, Romney still clearly leads in perceived electability, with 68 percent of Republicans expecting him to eventually clinch the GOP nomination, and 55 percent expecting him to have the best chance of beating Obama. In comparison, only 13 percent believe Santorum will win the GOP nomination and 18 percent believe he has the best chance of beating Obama.
It is notable that Santorum has garnered so much enthusiastic support, with 32 percent of Republicans saying they would be enthusiastic if he won the nomination, compared to the 21 percent who would be enthusiastic for Romney. This is particularly notable because, as Gene Healy recently cited,
“In a Pennsylvania Press Club luncheon in Harrisburg last summer, Santorum declared, "I am not a libertarian, and I fight very strongly against libertarian influence within the Republican Party and the conservative movement."
Despite the upswing of libertarian rhetoric within the Republican Party, and the emergence of the Tea Party shifting the balance of power within the party away from social issues and toward economics, Santorum still gets many Republicans excited.
Brian Doherty on How the Hayek-Keynes Debate Shaped Modern Economics
British journalist Nicholas Wapshott’s new book,
Keynes Hayek: The Clash That Defined Modern Economics is
about a heated debate, eight decades past, between two of the most
influential economists in modern history. That debate, which took
place in the midst of the Great Depression, concerned the causes
and cures of business cycle downturns. Today’s economic crisis,
observes Senior Editor Brian Doherty, raises many of the same
questions that fueled the intellectual duel between the
British-born liberal lion John Maynard Keynes and F.A. Hayek, his
free market Austrian friend and opponent. The confluence between
subject matter and current events surely helped Wapshott sell his
book to a publisher and likely will sell many copies to readers.
But potential buyers should be aware that the book says nothing
about how the economic dispute between Keynes and Hayek might apply
to today’s economic situation. And as Doherty explains, this
omission proves fatal.
George Will on the Unconstitutionality of Rent Control
Writing in The Washington Post, columnist George Will urges the Supreme Court to take up the legal challenge filed against New York City’s rent control laws by property owner and landlord James D. Harmon Jr.:
Rent control is unconstitutional because it is an egregious and uncompensated physical occupation of property. The Constitution says that private property shall not “be taken for public use, without just compensation.” The Harmons get no compensation for being coerced into privatized welfare: The state shows compassion to tenants — many of whom are not needy; one of the Harmons’ entitled tenants owns a house on Long Island — by compelling landlords to subsidize them.
A property right in a physical thing is a right to possess, use and dispose of this thing. Because government-compelled possession of property by a third party is an unambiguous taking, the Harmons’ property right has been nullified....
The Harmons’ case illustrates government’s steady and no longer stealthy desire to transform property from a fundamental right into an attenuated, conditional privilege. Government would like the right to be contingent on whatever agenda it has for ameliorating “emergencies” it causes.
Read the whole thing here. For more on rent control and the Constitution, see here, and also check out the video below.
Reason Writers Around Town: Shikha Dalmia on Romney's Troubles in Michigan
Many commentators are attributing Mitt Romney's plummeting poll numbers in his birth state to his opposition to the auto bailout. But, Reason Foundation Senior Analyst Shikha Dalmia disputes that in her latest column at The Daily. She notes:
This is a primary contest, where Romney has to prove his bona fides to conservative voters, not union diehards, although Michigan does not prohibit cross-party voting. And even though more conservatives in Michigan supported the bailout than elsewhere, they did so out of fear and desperation, not conviction — something that no doubt induced a fair amount of cognitive dissonance in them. It is highly unlikely, therefore, that they would turn this issue into a litmus test for their candidates. Indeed, if that were the case, Santorum wouldn’t be in the lead, since he is no fan of the bailout either. In fact, like Romney, he is on record saying that he would have let the auto industry fail.
So what is Romney's problem? It's a vision thing, she argues.
Romney seems singularly incapable of articulating broad themes. He comes across as an utterly prosaic man who thinks in concretes, unable to abstract grand principles. When Michigan voters are pining for soaring rhetoric, Romney is rattling off his “private sector” accomplishments. When they want uplifting poetry, he is busy making trite hometown-boy appeals, asking them to vote for him because he is “a son of Detroit.”
Read the whole thing here.
A.M. Links: Congress Critters Announce Payroll Tax Cut Deal, Gun Owners Stage Starbucks "Buycott," Foreclosures On the Rise Again
Republican negotiator on
payroll
tax cut extension: "We have reached an agreement and we're
moving forward."- Gun owners for Starbucks.
- Many of the inmates killed in a horrific Honduras prison fire had not even been charged, were awaiting trial.
- GM earns record $9.19 billion profit.
- Foreclosures pick up the pace.
- (Black) Democrats in Maryland stand in the way of gay marriage.
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New at Reason.tv: "Wende Museum: An Archive of the Cold War"
Steve Chapman on the Pushback Against Factory Farming
Most Americans may not rank animal welfare high
on the list of their chief concerns. But given the choice of food
produced more humanely or less humanely, writes Steve Chapman,
enough people will choose the latter to make continued indifference
a bad business strategy.
Romney's Muddy and Muddled Message in Michigan
The Michigan primary is still almost
two weeks away but the mudslinging has already begun – literally.
Hoping to maintain his recent lead in the polls, Rick Santorum has
launched a pre-emptive attack ad against Mitt Romney, depicting the
Michigan native as a
bumbling Rambo who, in the process of shooting mud balls from
an assault weapon at Santroum, ends up soiling himself.
Romney is certainly no stranger to negative ads but for now he is trying to regain his home advantage by emphasizing his Michigan roots -- never mind that he has lived in five states since he left Michigan and his primary home now is listed outside of Boston. He is airing a new ad called “Growing Up,” which shows him driving through Detroit’s abandoned neighborhoods while reminiscing about life in Detroit when he lived there. He concludes by saying: “I want to make Michigan stronger and better. Michigan’s been my home, and this is personal.”
At the same time that Romney is emphasizing his Michigan roots, he is hanging tough to his opposition to the auto bailout, even calling it “crony capitalism on a grand scale” in a column this week in The Detroit News. I appreciate that Romney is trying to borrow a page from Ron Paul’s book, but it is completely unclear to me why the bailout is an example of “crony capitalism.” Last time I checked, the providers of capital – the secured bondholders – got royally screwed while unions made out like bandits. If he is looking for insulting labels, wouldn’t it be more accurate to call the bailout “crony unionionism”?
But setting that aside, it is striking that Romney is not backing away from his anti-bailout message. In fact, The Detroit News op-ed pretty much echoes his 2008 New York Times column, “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt.” No doubt this is partly because Romney has already tapped out his quota of flip-flops for this election season and fears -- correctly -- that one more flip-flop might cause Michigan voters to flip and him to flop. But here’s what I really don’t understand. Romney says in The News column:
The dream of the Motor City is and always has been one of ideas, innovation, enterprise, and opportunity. It started with Henry Ford and continued with visionaries like William Durant, Walter Chrysler, and the Dodge Brothers. These giants never envisioned a role for government in their business, but relied on the hard work and commitment of private individuals.
Their dream is alive in all of us who have ever called Detroit home. And with a Detroiter in the White House, that dream can be realized once again.
But if he is opposed to the auto bailout and all the heroes he mentions “never envisioned a role for government in their business,” then why would it matter to Detroiters that a Detroiter is in the White House? Isn’t the whole point of limited government and free markets to make the White House occupant completely irrelevant to the success of an industry?
Obama Budget Director Undermines Legal Case For ObamaCare
Part of the Obama administration's legal defense of ObamaCare's individual mandate to purchase health insurance rests on the argument that the penalty for not paying is justifiable under the conressional power to tax. ObamaCare doesn't actually require anyone to purchase anything, the argument goes; the law just makes people pay a tax if they don't.
Courts have so far not been kind to this argument (in part because taxes must be intended to raise revenue rather than control behavior), and now a senior member of President Obama's staff seems to deny it as well. Here's an exchange between GOP Rep. Scott Garrett and newly appointed White House budget chief Jeffrey Zients from a congressional budget hearing earlier:
If Zients seems confused here, it's understandable: One the one hand, he's stuck with the administration's repeated promise that those with annual incomes of less than $250,000 won't face tax hikes. On the other hand, the administration's legal team is set to argue in front of the Supreme Court that a provision in President Obama's most prominent legislative achievement is justifable as a tax. Of course, Zients isn't exactly alone in his confusion: President Obama has in the past denied that the mandate is a tax too. At this point, I imagine the administration's official position on the question is—look! A blimp!
(Thanks to Jim Antle for the pointer.)
Update: More on this from Philip Klein at The Examiner, who caught it first.
A Reverse Climategate for "Deniers"?
Quintillions (at least) of photons
are streaking throughout the Internet bearing claims that the
nefarious plans to undermine climate change science being hatched
by the Chicago-based Heartland Institute in cahoots with its
corporate masters have been revealed - in leaked documents no less.
Much merriment (and hatred) is
being expressed by those called AGW "alarmists" by the
Heartlanders. The folks whose intemperate emails were leaked from
the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in the
Climategate scandal must be reveling in schadenfreude.
Particularly damning is a leaked document entitled "Confidential Memo: 2012 Heartland Climate Strategy" which purports to detail, among other things, what would amount to a disinformation campaign aimed at developing a counter climate change curriculum aimed K-12 education. According to this document:
Principals and teachers are heavily biased toward the alarmist perspective. To counter this we are considering launching an effort to develop alternative materials for K-12 classrooms. We are pursuing a proposal from Dr. David Wojick to produce a global warming curriculum for K-12 schools. Dr. Wojick is a consultant with the Office of Scientific and Technical Information at the U.S. Department of Energy in the area of information and communication science. His effort will focus on providing curriculum that shows that the topic of climate change is controversial and uncertain - two key points that are effective at dissuading teachers from teaching science.
Some "alarmist" blogs chortle knowingly that this "strategy" is a mirror image of that of the creationist Discovery Institute which aims to undermine the teaching of biological evolution in public schools. Some "alarmists" particularly highlight the last damning phrase, "two key points that are effective at dissuading teachers from teaching science."
Ah, but is the document real? The Heartland Institute says it's a fake:
One document, titled “Confidential Memo: 2012 Heartland Climate Strategy,” is a total fake apparently intended to defame and discredit The Heartland Institute. It was not written by anyone associated with The Heartland Institute. It does not express Heartland’s goals, plans, or tactics. It contains several obvious and gross misstatements of fact.
Singling out this document implies that some of the less incendiary documents may be real. Will keep Reason readers posted as this story develops.
For some background see my column, "Lukewarmers, Denialists, and Other Climate Change Skeptics" in which I report from last summer's Sixth International Climate Change Conference put on by the Heartland Institute.
Minnesota Lawmakers: Kill Regulations, Create Jobs
A bipartisan coalition in
Minnesota has introduced a new bill to repeal some
occupational licensing laws. Called the Licensing Relief and Job
Creation Act (SF
1629/HF
2002), this would
protect "the right to engage in a lawful occupation free from
any substantial burden."
Since these regulations tend to heighten income inequality between the licensed and unlicensed, University of Minnesota Professor Morris Kleiner even calls occupational licensing a "reverse Robin Hood." By eliminating "unnecessary regulations," some legislators have suggested that this law could create over 15,000 new jobs in Minnesota.
Due to the growth in the service economy, a surprisingly high number of Americans need a license to work. According to the Institute for Justice (IJ), 29 percent of American workers are licensed by state or federal government. In the 1950s, that number was 5 percent. In fact, there are more licensed Americans than Americans who are union members (12 percent) or earn the minimum wage (2.5 percent).
Defenders of licensing laws argue that these laws are essential to defend consumers' health and safety from unscrupulous businesses. However, there are two major problems with this reasoning. First, many occupations that require licenses are hardly threats to public health, like masseuses, tour guides, hair braiders, and tree trimmers, among many others. Furthermore, the process to obtain a license can be unnecessarily arduous and complex. For example, a manicurist in Alabama needs 700 hours of training before she can be licensed.
Second, consumer protection is better accomplished through other means. Lee McGrath, a staff attorney for the Institute for Justice, explains:
If you want to protect consumers, vigorously enforce existing laws against fraud, but don’t limit entry in to the marketplace, especially by imposing academic tests that often have nothing to do with the services provided.
In addition, occupational licensing creates a significant economic burden. Everyone, except for the incumbent cartel, suffers. Since licensing artificially restricts competition, on average, Minnesotans pay 15 percent more for licensed goods and services. These higher prices cost consumers more than $3.6 billion each year, just in Minnesota, according to a legislative brief published by IJ. Nationwide, the occupational licensing is responsible for 0.5-1 percent of the unemployment rate, according to research conducted by Professor Kleiner, Alan Krueger, chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, and Alexandre Mas, a former Chief Economist at the Office of Management and Budget under President Obama.
Reason's voluminous coverage of occupational licensing. Damon Root on why these licensing laws are unconstitutional (short answer: the 9th and 14th Amendments). And be sure to check out the Institute for Justice for more on defending economic liberty and property rights.
Reason.tv on the dangers of throw pillows.
World Bank Head to Resign, Boehner Defends Lack of Offsets in Payroll Tax Cut, DHS Admits "Lots of Mistakes" In Gun-Running Operation: P.M. Links
World Bank president to step
down
in June. - House Speaker John Boehner defends unpaid-for $100 billion payroll tax cut extension.
- Greece and Germany trade insults.
- Obama staffer makes "chimichanga" joke, GOP goes loco.
- Janet Napolitano admits "lots of mistakes were made" in Fast and Furious.
- Parents are borrowing more than their children for their childrens' college educations.
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.
Greg Beato on America's Costly Immigration Bureaucracy
The U.S. government's war on illegal immigration
is characterized by chronic uncertainty, observes Greg Beato. No
one knows exactly how many illegal immigrants reside in the U.S. or
precisely what causes their numbers to wax and wane. What is clear,
however, is that eliminating illegal immigration creates more and
more bureaucratic infrastructure. And as Beato notes, federal
employees are even harder to remove than illegal immigrants once
they’ve gained a foothold.
Former Drug Czar William J. Bennett Says Legalization Wouldn't have Saved Whitney Houston Or Anyone Else
Call it Bennett on Bennett on
Houston on drugs. That is to say, former U.S. Drug Czar William J.
Bennett had some harsh words in response to singer Tony Bennett's
comments about legalizing drugs so as to prevent tragedies like the
deaths of Amy Winehouse, Michael Jackson, and now Whitney
Houston.
Singer Bennett said at a Grammy awards party last week:
I'd like to have every gentleman and lady in this room commit themselves to get our government to legalise drugs. So they have to get it from a doctor, not just some gangsters that just sell it under the table.
Drug Czar Bennett is not keen on this argument, referring to Singer Bennett's "idiotic comments" in a piece on CNN.com today. The former Bennett notes that Arianna Huffington agreed, saying "the war on drugs is a failure."
Bennett and Huffington's misguided solutions would result in more tragic deaths like Houston's. Illicit drugs are not harmful because they are illegal, they are illegal precisely because they are harmful. It is my hope that in the national dialogue surrounding Houston's death, our country's loudest voices would speak honestly and seriously about the drug problems in America.
In the 1980s and '90s, the U.S. beat back the cocaine and heroine epidemics, not by legalization or decriminalization, but by tough law enforcement, strong prevention and education programs and public outcry. You could hardly watch TV without seeing the Partnership For a Drug-Free America's famous "This is your brain on drugs" advertisements. If we are to be successful today, we must reignite that same national effort.
Maybe William Bennett isn't entirely wrong about Tony Bennett beng too hasty. After all, Winehouse died from alcohol, Jackson from a legal painkiller administrated directly by his doctor. And Houston, though she admitted to and clearly suffered from addictions to illegal drugs such as cocaine, still has a big question mark around her cause of death. Maybe it was prescription drugs mixed with alcohol, maybe it was something completely shocking. We won't know for a few weeks. But can't we at least be certain that the war on drugs didn't help Houston?
Writing over at the Huffington Post, Law Enforcement Against Prohibition executive director Neil Franklin, along with the president of Columbia University's Students for Sensible Drug Policy, take issue with the notion that Singer Bennett was trying to score political points (which is only acceptable when you're anti-legalization!) or was simply being irrelevant:
Some of those criticizing Bennett's remarks don't seem to understand the role that prohibition of some drugs plays in stigmatizing all people battling addiction -- whether to legal or illegal drugs -- and how punitive drug laws create roadblocks to recovery.
For example: "Bennett's remarks were misleading because in every case he mentioned we are talking about legal prescription drugs or alcohol," addiction specialist Marty Ferrero told Fox News.
"No, sorry. She got legal drugs from her doctor," said songwriter Diane Warren. "So that was inappropriate," she told the Los Angeles Times.
These well-meaning folks sadly miss the point. It doesn't matter if you're hooked on alcohol, Xanax or illegal drugs like heroin and cocaine -- prohibition for some drugs stigmatizes all people struggling with addiction. Period. Addicts are not defined simply by their drug of choice nor the drug that is or is not their ultimate cause of death. Their entire lives are tragically plagued by the stigma that criminalization heaps upon them, and the marginalized underworld prohibition thrusts them into.
That is a painful and deadly component of the experience of anyone unlucky enough to live with a disease that, unlike cancer, our government tries to battle with handcuffs.
Maer Roshan of TheFix.com -- a great news source on addiction and recovery issues -- rightly explains, "We can't tackle this epidemic in a piecemeal kind of way. At detoxes and rehabs across the country, prescription pill addicts and alcoholics and meth-heads are coke-heads all share the same plight, and suffer from the same scatter-shot treatment."
If drug warriors wanted to make drug use a grand moral issue, then they can't complain when people point out the reprecussions of the stigma of an addiction to drugs, legal or otherwise.
More Reason on LEAP, on prescription drugs, and on the drug war.
How Super PACs Are Good for Democracy and Transparency
In a
recent Slate piece, Reason Contributing
Editor David Weigel argues that
super PACs, contrary to conventional wisdom, are good for democracy
and transparency, making races more competitive while attracting
press attention that discourages corruption. "Take away the super
PACs," the Sunlight Foundation's Bill Allison concedes to Weigel,
"and Santorum would have probably had to drop out after Iowa.
Gingrich might have had to drop out after South Carolina." Weigel
adds that rich guys writing big checks to super PACs, such as
Gingrich supporter Sheldon Adelson and Santorum backer Foster
Friess, receive much more scrutiny than the "bundlers" who put
together small contributions to candidates' campaigns, who would
not exist but for the legal limits on donations. Allison, whose
view of super PACs is far less sanguine, again helps Weigel make
his case. "Take Solyndra," he says. "There's not a single story
that mentioned how an Obama bundler invested in this solar company
that got a huge government loan guarantee. That only happened when
the thing went bankrupt." Bundlers, like super
PACs, are an outgrowth of the futile attempt to purge politics
of money's taint.
Liberals vs. ObamaCare
This may be the exception that proves the rule, but as George Mason University law professor Ilya Somin reports, at least one cohort of liberal activists has come out against ObamaCare and filed a friend of the court brief urging the Supreme Court to strike down the individual mandate. Their reason? They’d rather see the U.S. with a single payer health care system. As Somin writes:
The organizations represented in this brief (Single Payer Action, It’s Our Economy, and a group of fifty physicians who support a single payer system) do seem to believe that getting rid of the mandate would help pave the way for a single payer system – though the legal arguments in their brief don’t rely on this idea. So there are at least some single-payer advocates who want to abolish the mandate and believe that this will help their cause in the long run.
Read all about it here. Read about the conservative case for upholding the individual mandate here.
Former MTV VJ Kennedy on Her Libertarian Evolution
As current drive time radio host on KYSR in Los Angeles and former MTV VJ Kennedy explains it, early reactions to her political leanings were pretty consistent. "Your name is Kennedy, and you're a Republican, and you're on MTV? What?!"
At Reason Weekend 2012, Reason Foundation's annual donor event, Kennedy sat down with Reason's Nick Gillespie to discuss her transformation from Dan Quayle fetishist to hardcore libertarian, a Republican tattoo, and her recent fight with HBO's Bill Maher over atheism.
About 28 minutes. Filmed by Joshua Swain and Anthony Fisher. Edited by Meredith Bragg.
http://www.facebook.com/Kennedynation
Go to Reason.tv for downloadable versions and subscribe to Reason.tv's YouTube channel to receive automatic notifications when new material goes live.
The Missing Parts of the Drug Czar's Whitney Houston "teachable moment"
Drug Czar Gil Kerlikowske blathered about the "teachable moment" inherent in the death of pop star Whitney Houston. The Drug Policy Alliance's Meghan Ralston writing at Alternet thinks our czar dropped the ball:
Gil Kerlikowske, speaking with CBS News about Houston’s untimely death, referred to it as a “teachable moment." Ah, the “teachable moment” message. I knew it would surface eventually. It always gets trotted out when someone famous dies of a drug overdose....
But he misses an enormous opportunity by failing to specify what Americans can teach or learn from Houston’s alleged overdose.
He could have talked about the importance of providing basic information about how to prevent, recognize and respond to an overdose at places like high schools, colleges, drug treatment facilities and homeless shelters. He could have said that people should never mix alcohol with sedatives because it can significantly increase the possibility of an accidental, or even fatal, overdose.
He could have taught us how to recognize warning signs of an overdose in progress, like lips and nail beds turning blue, or very slow or labored breath. He could have explained that the chances of surviving an overdose, like those of surviving a heart attack, depend greatly on how fast one receives medical assistance. And he could havementioned that states like New York, Illinois, New Mexico, Connecticut and Washington have recently passed “911 Good Samaritan” laws to encourage people to immediately call 911 without fear of arrest and prosecution for minor drug law violations.
At the very least, he could have said that – contrary to popular belief – it’s not teenagers who die from drug overdose in the greatest numbers, but their parents. People in their 40s and 50s are more likely to die from an accidental drug overdose than adolescents. Parents are constantly being cautioned these days to “lock up your medicine cabinets,” as a way to reduce the likelihood of potentially dangerous drugs getting into young hands. But do parents themselves realize their own risks if they improperly use those same drugs?
But all of that would have required admitting that lots of people can and do use, or even in his own mind "abuse," these drugs safely, and that's never something the Drug Czar wants to teach.
Reason's Jacob Sullum did make such points and much, much more in his classic book Saying Yes: In Defense of Drug Use.
Nick Gillespie from the other day on how the drug war likely made it harder for Ms. Houston to seek help, if she thought she needed any.
Tim Cavanaugh On the Road with Jerry Doyle at 4:30pm Eastern (1:30 Pacific)
Reason.com
managing editor Tim Cavanaugh will appear on the Jerry Doyle radio
show at 1:30 PM Pacific Time today (4:30 PM Eastern).
Topic: It's 4:30 PM. Do you know where your federal gasoline tax is? How many billions of small unmarked bills will fit on a light rail line? Why are we paying for a transit program that seems to have gotten fewer people using transit? If Ronald Reagan came back from the dead, would liberals still love him? And is the Atlanta "Smart Card" system you paid for even smart?
As always: Big-L Libertarians, Greens, Florida Whigs, Grid Epsilon Irregulars, Copperheads, Communists, Anti-Masonites, Nullifiers, America Firsters, Proletarians, Free Soilers and others are urged to join in.
Time: 1:30 PM Pacific Time today (4:30 PM Eastern).
Place: Jerry Doyle's show is on 230 radio stations around the country. Times seem to vary and are shrouded in mystery like radio itself. To find a local station, click here.
To listen live, click here.
For archives, click here.
Who Knew?: European Carbon Market Is An Expensive Failure
At the United Nations climate change conference
in Durban last December, the European Union graciously agreed to
keep the faltering Kyoto Protocol alive by committing to continue
operating its European Trading Scheme (ETS) carbon market. At
Durban, the EU essentially agreed to
impose higher energy prices on its citizens in the hope that
somehow this would encourage the rest of the world to do the same
thing by 2020. The principle seems to be: "If I bash my head with a
baseball bat now, maybe you'll bash yours in a couple of years." Go
figure.
One of the chief goals of boosting the price of energy produced by burning fossil fuels is to encourage a shift toward energy generated by "cleaner" solar and wind power. How's that working out? Not so well, according to the Financial Times. The FT reports:
Johannes Teyssen, chief executive of Eon, the German energy group that is one of Europe’s largest, stunned an audience in Brussels last week when he pronounced the market broken. “Let’s talk real,” he said. “The ETS is bust, it’s dead.”
Upon its launch seven years ago, the market was supposed to work on a simple premise. Proponents hoped that by putting a price on carbon and forcing companies to pay for their emissions, it would prod Eon and others to pour money into green technologies and greater efficiency. But, as a result of a subsequent recession and poor management, the market is saturated – and could be for years to come – with permits that give companies the right to emit carbon without penalty. That has led to a prolonged slump in the carbon price. At roughly €7 per tonne, compared with a peak of nearly €30 in July 2008, it is a fraction of what policymakers and analysts had forecast it would have reached by now – and well below the levels necessary to justify the desired investments.
“I don’t know a single person in the world that would invest a dime based on ETS signals,” Mr Teyssen declared.
So how to fix this broken "market" in carbon permits? Impose government price controls, of course.
Go here to read the whole excellent FT article.
David Harsanyi on Commerce As Culture War
If you believe that the Obama administration's
decision to force Catholic institutions to pay for and offer
(directly or indirectly) products the church finds morally
objectionable is an assault on religious freedom and free speech,
you probably also realize the importance of consumer choice. After
all, writes David Harsanyi, when government dictates what people
buy and sell, it dictates much more.
The Most Vile and Inhumane Immigration Story You Will Read This Week
Felipe Montes lived and worked
in the United States for nine years. During that time, he held a
full-time job, paid his bills, and fathered two children with his
wife, Marie. He failed, however, to pay several traffic tickets, or
to acquire a driver's license or car insurance. As a result, a 2010
traffic stop ended with Montes being taken to a detention center
where he was scheduled for deportation.
Marie Montes gave birth to the couple’s third child while her husband was behind bars. Six weeks later Felipe Montes was deported. Two weeks after that, the Allegheny County child welfare department took all three children from Marie Montes on the grounds that she could not afford to take care of them, and put them in foster care, where two of them have already been abused.
Color Lines, the publication put out by the immigration reform think tank Applied Research Center, interviewed Montes, his wife, and their neighbors in Sparta, North Carolina. “He was a real good guy and as a worker he could do anything,” said Montes’ former boss. “He loved those kids more than anything. We’d be doing tree work and it’d be kind of dangerous and he’d say, ‘I’ll do this but if something happens you have to take care of the kids, ok?’”
“I love my kids to death,” Montes told Color Lines. “When they were born, it’s something so wonderful you can’t explain.”
Apparently, love and dedication doesn’t qualify Montes to be a dad anymore, as the state of North Carolina is putting his children up for adoption:
Allegheny County has already convinced a judge to end family reunification efforts with Marie Montes. She wants the children to be placed with their father. “If they can’t be with me, I want them to be with him,” she said. “Nobody is a better father than he is.”
But next week, on February 21, the county’s Department of Social Services plans to ask a judge to cease all efforts to reunify the family and put the children into adoption proceedings with foster families. Though Felipe Montes was his children’s primary caregiver before he was deported and has not been charged with neglect, the child welfare department nonetheless believes that his children, who have now been in foster care for over a year, are better off in the care of strangers than in Mexico with their father.
For Montes, this feels tantamount to kidnapping.
“I cannot find the words to tell you how important my kids are to me. I would do anything for them,” he told Colorlines.com, speaking on his cell phone in Mexico while on a break from his job at a farm.
“In this world there are many injustices. At the very least, I would like them to send my kids to Mexico."
Read the full Color Lines report on the growing number of children who have been stolen from their immigrant parents and put up for adoption, which I blogged here.
Reason Writers on The Alyona Show: Matt Welch Talks Obama Budget; Wears Questionable Sweater
On Feb. 13, Reason Editor in Chief Matt Welch appeared on a new segment of RT's The Alyona Show called "Monday Hangover," where he and young smarty Jake Brewer talked about Barack Obama's fictitious new budget, the lack of institutional brakes on military spending, and more. Watch below:
Two Decades of Attempts to Enforce Copyright
Over at Ars Technica,
Reason contributor Tim Lee has an
excellent brief summary of the last twenty years worth of
attempts to use legislation and the court system system to protect
copyright. Lowlights include the increasing copyright infringement
fines in 1997; the passage of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act
(DMCA) in 1998, which gave copyright owners effective control over
the design of playback devices; the music industry forcing an early
cloud music service out of business and pursuing legal action
against a DVD jukebox manufacturer for violating the DMCA; and the
2008 passage of the PRO-IP act, which gave way to a series of
domestic Internet domain seizures beginning in 2010. In other
words, legislators have bought into the industry's digital piracy
panic and given copyright owners all sorts of legal powers and
enforcement help over the years. But as we saw with the recent
debate over the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), the film and music
industries are continuing to demand more legal power and government
protection, arguing that they can't compete without it—despite
evidence suggesting that these industries are in many ways doing
fine.
President Santorum Would Talk "About the Dangers of Contraception."
Your Republican frontrunner (according to some
polls, at least for the moment), ladies and gentleman:
One of the things I will talk about that no President has talked about before is I think the dangers of contraception in this country, the whole sexual libertine idea. Many in the Christian faith have said, “Well, that’s okay. Contraception’s okay.”
It’s not okay because it’s a license to do things in the sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be. They’re supposed to be within marriage, they are supposed to be for purposes that are, yes, conjugal, but also [inaudible], but also procreative. That’s the perfect way that a sexual union should happen. We take any part of that out, we diminish the act. And if you can take one part out that’s not for purposes of procreation, that’s not one of the reasons, then you diminish this very special bond between men and women, so why can’t you take other parts of that out? And all of a sudden, it becomes deconstructed to the point where it’s simply pleasure. And that’s certainly a part of it—and it’s an important part of it, don’t get me wrong—but there’s a lot of things we do for pleasure, and this is special, and it needs to be seen as special.
Again, I know most Presidents don’t talk about those things, and maybe people don’t want us to talk about those things, but I think it’s important that you are who you are. I’m not running for preacher. I’m not running for pastor, but these are important public policy issues. These how profound impact on the health of our society.
Whole thing, via Time's Swampland blog via CaffeinatedThoughts.com (a Christian blog). Video here. The vid went live in October 2011.
Note that Santorum is not talking about mandatory coverage of contraceptives under Obamacare. It's the very idea of non-procreative sex that his knickers in a twist. Which is something one can expect from a Roman Catholic. And it's personally nothing I've got a problem with (different strokes for different folks, anything that's peaceful, and all that).
But when you're talking about a politician who is talking about being president and this rises to the level of policy noodling...
Calling all conservatives: Is this the sort of anti-Obama limited-government candidate you really want to get behind? And indeed, Santorum is out of touch in at least two distinct ways: First, the president shouldn't be concerning herself with rubbers, IUDs, and birth control pills (whether she's a Republican or a Democrat). Second, all the social indicators he seems to be worried about - including sexual activity among teens and teen pregnancy rates - have been declining.
Several Fearless Christians
Newt Gingrich's Faith
Leaders Dream Team is
ready to rumble:
Speaker Newt Gingrich has unveiled his Faith Leaders Dream Team — rallying several fearless Christians including Don Wildmon, Tim and Beverly LaHaye, George Barna, JC Watts, Chuck Norris, Mat Staver and others as he takes on the the radical secularism of the Obama Administration.
The Gingrich Faith Leaders Coalition is Newt Gingrich's official advisory coalition on issues pertaining to life, marriage, and religious liberty.
Lord knows Gingrich needs as much advice about marriage as he can get. Why Chuck Norris? Because Steven Seagal is Buddhist. Duh.
[Thanks to Richard Cowan for the tip.]
A.M. Links: Flood of Santorum Support Continues, Chris Christie Vows to Squash Gay Marriage, Ron Paul PAC Plans a "Million Dollar Marathon"
Santorum is leading in Ohio and Michigan; victory
in both states would
"destabilize" Romney. - Chris Christie shows his socon side and promises to veto gay marriage bill.
- Ron Paul PAC plans a million-dollar fundraiser to by ads for Super Tuesday.
- The Examiner calls yesterday's payroll tax-cut deal a win for conservatives.
- Obama's Department of Energy is infested with venture capitalists.
- Iran one step closer to going nuclear.
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New at Reason.tv: "Wende Museum: An Archive of the Cold War"
Reason Writers on One of the Last Freedom Watches: Matt Welch Talks to the Judge About Rick Santorum's Anti-Libertarianism
On Friday, Feb. 10, Reason Editor in Chief Matt Welch went on the penultimate episode of Judge Andrew Napolitano's Freedom Watch program to discuss how Rick Santorum is both the most explicit anti-libertarian running in the GOP presidential race, and the embodiment of a significant strain within modern Republicanism. Watch below:
Jacob Sullum on Obama's Fiscal Fakery
Decrying
"a decade of deficits" on Monday, President
Obama declared that "my budget lays out a path for how we
can pay down these debts." Senior Editor Jacob Sullum says it is
hard to see how that can be true, since Obama's plan
would add $6.7 trillion to the national debt during the
next decade. The president thus begins his fourth year in
office the way he began his first, Sullum writes: preaching
prudence while practicing profligacy.
LAUSD Principal Focuses On Real Miramonte Criminals: The Children
One of the many privileges of
having kids in the Los Angeles Unified School District is the
accelerated education they get in official corruption, the
stupidity of grownups, union strong-arming and many other topics –
any topics other than reading, writing and arithmetic, that
is.
The recent sex-abuse arrests of two teachers at Miramonte Elementary have become a feature of playground scuttlebutt and official conniptions. The school my children attend (separated from Miramonte by more than 15 miles, though both schools score in the “Least Effective” category in the L.A. Times’ value-added assessment) is no exception.
Yesterday my daughters brought home copies of a flyer containing the principal’s thoughts on the scandal. I guess this page of skylarking was intended to reassure us or something. I wouldn’t take note of it at all except that one paragraph illustrates the pathology of public employees with stunning clarity:
As I reflect on the disturbing occurrences at Miramonte, I am more confused over the fact that the children did not report. How is it that the children did not believe that what the teacher was doing to them was wrong? How could being blindfolded, placed in a closet, and having cockroaches placed on them not be wrong? I believe that the teachers involved in these heinous acts preyed on the most vulnerable of the children; children of poverty, children of abuse, children with uninvolved parents, and children of undocumented parents.
The principal’s insistence on repeating lurid details from the newspapers is between her and her god. This person is a martinet with a habit of logorrhea that expresses itself in nightly robocalls and long assemblies during which parents are upbraided for such crimes as parking on the street while delivering and picking up students, cutting into the school’s funding by keeping kids home from classes, not contributing during fundraisers, and so on.
But look again at that paragraph. There is no way around the logic: She is arguing that it was the kids’ fault for not reporting the incident. And since public school is a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims, the children are also described as victims who have suffered from the depredations of poverty and abuse, of “uninvolved” and undocumented parents. Her focus on the kids’ purported failure to speak up may be intended as an “if you see something say something” advisory, but the focus itself is what is revealing. The inadequacy of the students and their parents, not the negligence of the school or the district, is to blame.
As it happens, my kids’ principal is wrong on the facts: Mark Berndt, the more prominent of the two accused teachers at Miramonte, was the subject of complaints on at least two occasions: in 1994 and 2008. Administrators at the school and the district failed to take action either time.
Another thing that the principal fails to note: Berndt has been accused, not convicted. For criminal purposes he is presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law, and that would be true even if he were not represented by a public-sector union. The difference between a schoolteacher and, for example, an employee of Disneyland or Burger King, is that Berndt couldn’t be fired when the suspicions first came up. That’s not an idle comparison. Here’s what happened to a Burger King employee, his co-workers, and his manager, when he was caught doing something a lot less objectionable than what Berndt is accused of:
I generally dislike this principal’s jawboning (and I’m particularly bothered that her campaign of petty discipline has coincided with a nose dive in the school’s Academic Performance Index score). But in this case I appreciate her candor. That both teachers and administrators view parents and students as the enemy is an open secret. But it’s rare that you see it expressed so baldly.
L.A. teachers doing what comes naturally — telling lies:
North Carolina Food Inspector Rejects Little Girl's Home-Packed Lunch in Favor of Chicken Nuggets
Carolina
Journal reports
that a state inspector at West Hoke Elementary School in Raeford,
North Carolina, recently deemed a 4-year-old girl's home-packed
lunch nutritionally inadequate, decreeing that it be replaced by
food from the school cafeteria. The magazine, which is published by
the John Locke Foundation, explains the source of this lunch review
authority:
The Division of Child Development and Early Education at the Department of Health and Human Services requires all lunches served in pre-kindergarten programs—including in-home day care centers—to meet USDA guidelines. That means lunches must consist of one serving of meat, one serving of milk, one serving of grain, and two servings of fruit or vegetables, even if the lunches are brought from home.
But Jani Kozlowski, the division's fiscal and statutory policy manager, tells Carolina Journal the rejected lunch—which consisted of a turkey and cheese sandwich, a banana, potato chips, and apple juice—did in fact meet USDA guidelines, which call for one serving of meat, one serving of milk, one serving of grain, and two servings of fruit or vegetables. By contrast, the meal the girl ending up eating thanks to the state employee's prodding—three chicken nuggets—did not. Adding insult to injury, the school billed the little girl's mother (who complained to her state representative but did not want to be publicly identified) $1.25 for the mandated substitution.
Veronique de Rugy on America’s Invincible Military Industrial Complex
During his 1961 farewell address, President
Dwight D. Eisenhower famously warned the American people that one
of the greatest threats to freedom came not from enemies abroad but
from “the conjunction of an immense military establishment and a
large arms industry,” which over time would lose sight of defending
the United States and become devoted only to its own perpetuation.
Today, writes Contributing Editor Veronique de Rugy, we are living
Ike’s nightmare. Defense spending is not just one of the most
sacrosanct parts of the budget but also one of the largest and most
inscrutable. Adjusting for inflation, military spending has grown
for an unprecedented 13 consecutive years and is now higher than at
any time since World War II.
The President of Guatemala Wants to Legalize Drugs, the President of El Salvador is Okay With Talking About It
While
the United States frames their
drug legalization debates around the still-news-hooky
premature demise and possible overdose of Whitney Houston, Central
Americans still have that whole cartel thing and that
particularly-literal war aspect to their drug problems.
Sometime next month, newly-elected Guatemalan President Otto Perez plans to propose legalization of drugs, including the decriminalization of drug transportation, to other Central American leaders.
It took Perez just one month in office to shift to calling for drug legalization. The retired general ran for the presidency on a platform of hard-line action against drug smuggling, but it seems like the sheer force of the drug trade has changed his mind; 95 percent of all cocaine sales to the United States go through Mexico, the most prominent and bloody face of the drug war, but 60 percent of them begin in central America.
The cartels, including the fearsome Zetas, are really not just in Mexico anymore. And like former Mexican presidents Vincente Fox and Ernesto Zedillo, Perez can clearly see that the policies which lead Mexico and Central America towards this literal drug war are not working and are not helping anyone. So why not legalize?
Perez recently met up with El Salvador's president, Mauricio Funes, who at least was willing to talk legalization. According to the Associated Press:
After returning to El Salvador, Funes said he personally doesn’t support legalization because it would “create a moral problem,” though he supports Perez’s right to bring up the issue for consideration.
“Imagine what it would mean,” Funes said. “Producing drugs would no longer be a crime, trafficking drugs would no longer be a crime and consuming drugs would no longer be a crime, so we would be converting the region in a paradise for drug consumption. I personally don’t agree with it and I told President Otto Perez so.
Hell, being open to discussing legalization means that Funes is doing better than most U.S. politicians. But no matter how fast things move towards legalization, it's always going to be too slow for the people caught in the crossfire of this God damn unnecessary war.
Reason on the drug war; Mike Riggs on what legalization would and wouldn't do when it comes to sapping the cartels' power in Mexico.
Reason.tv on the drug war in Guatemala
Congress Nears Deal on Payroll Tax Cut, Former Obama Advisor Starts Flacking for Wall Street, Colorado Man Jailed for Not Getting Dog License: P.M. Links
Congress critters near deal on
payroll tax cut, Medicare reimbursement rates, other
stuff.- Gov. Chris Christie pooh-poohs the idea of a brokered GOP convention.
- Former Obama staffer Anita Dunn stops crapping on Wall Street, starts flacking for it.
- Syrians fear an out-and-out war.
- Elie Wiesel tells Romney to tell the other Mormons to stop baptizing dead Jews.
- Colorado man pisses off local animal control, spends seven hours in the clink.
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Ronald Bailey on 100 Years of Natural Gas
In his State of the Union speech last
month, President Obama touted natural gas, claiming that the U.S.
has an estimated 100-year supply of it. Critics responded that
natural gas is an evil fossil fuel and that a 100-year supply is a
"myth" anyway. Reason Science Correspondent Ronald Bailey
looks into the matter and finds that the president knows what he's
talking about.
NYPD Stop-and-Frisk Encounters Have Septupled Since Bloomberg Took Office
The Wall Street Journal
reports that police in New York City stopped and questioned a
record 684,330 people without probable cause last year. Judging
from the pattern in previous years, about half of the stops
included pat-downs, ostensibly for weapons. Ninety-two percent of
the people stopped were male, and 87 percent were black or
Hispanic. Only 12 percent of the stops resulted in an arrest or
summons. Although the NYPD says this strategy has reduced crime,
Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties
Union, notes that "crime rates were going down before the
skyrocketing stop-and-frisk campaign."
The NYCLU says these stops have increased more than 600 percent since Michael Bloomberg's first year as mayor. Arrests for pot possession, which the New York legislature supposedly decriminalized in 1977, have shot up during the same period—not coincidentally, since many of the arrests stemming from the stop-and-frisk program are for "public display" of marijuana, a charge that transforms what would otherwise be a citable offense into a misdemeanor. As I noted in my column last week, New York cops frequently trick or coerce people into committing that offense by instructing them to take out any contraband they are carrying or by removing it from their pockets during pat-downs—a tactic Police Commissioner Ray Kelly tolerates even though he says it's illegal.
The Journal reports that "critics of stop-and-frisk say the tactic is used disproportionately among minority men." That's an odd way of putting it, since that point is not a matter of dispute. According to the 2010 census, New York City is 23 percent non-Hispanic black, 29 percent Hispanic, and 33 percent white. By contrast, the breakdown for people detained by the police under the stop-and-frisk program in 2011 (88 percent of whom turned out to be innocent) was 53 percent black, 34 percent Hispanic, and 9 percent white. The proportions in prior years were similar. Lieberman comments:
It is not a crime to walk down the street in New York City, yet every day innocent black and brown New Yorkers are turned into suspects for doing just that. It is a stunning abuse of power that undermines trust between police and the community.
[Thanks to Richard Cowan for the tip.]
ObamaCare vs. Consumer-Driven Care
A fair amount of evidence suggests that consumer-driven health plans, which typically pair high-deductible insurance with health savings accounts (HSAs), offer one of the most promising mechanisms for controlling the growth of health insurance premiums as well as overall health spending. Naturally, it looks like ObamaCare's insurance regulations will impact people with consumer-driven plans more than others, and make it hard for CDHP plans to survive.
According to a new study prepared for the American Bankers Association (ABA) by analysts from the consulting group Milliman, high deductible health plan costs are likely to increase faster than on other types of plans thanks to new rules governing health plans' medical loss ratios (MLRs), which require health insurers to spend at least 80 or 85 percent of their total premium revenue on federally defined clinical services. One reason why the MLR rules are expected to hit CDHPs is that they don't count HSA dollars, despite the fact that high-deductible plans are often matched with HSAs. That makes it harder for the the high-deductible plans to meet the MLR standards. That could have consequences for many of the roughly 10 million individuals enrolled in such plans: In a statement, the ABA warned that "consumers who rely on HSA-qualified plans to finance their health care may experience greater costs in their current health plans and may eventually have to find more expensive replacement coverage."
Study link via John Goodman of the National Center for Policy Analysis. More on ObamaCare's MLR regs here and here.
Top 1 Percent Pay 37 Percent of Income Taxes
Tax cheat Tim Geithner, the only
member of the Obama economic brain trust who has not yet been
fired,
testified to the Senate Finance Committee today in favor of the
president’s proposed trillion-dollar-deficit budget.
Geithner, a Dartmouth man esteemed more for his tennis skills than for his understanding of markets or business, peddled much Keynesian voodoo before a nation whose economy he helped destroy while employed by the Federal Reserve Bank and then the Department of the Treasury. To get a sense of the mixed metaphors and confused logic that characterized the treasury secretary's testimony, ponder the Reuters headline “Geithner: Year-end fiscal cliff to hit U.S. growth,” and tremble to reflect that this word salad accurately describes Geithner's comments.
Mostly, Geithner pressed the need to lay heavier tax burdens on the “top 2 percent” of Americans. In proof that the second version of history is farce, the same rhetoric that characterized the birth of the modern central banking system – that the income tax would be levied only on the rich – is being used again at its death. But the Tax Foundation, citing data from Geithner’s Internal Revenue Service, suggests why the political goal of raising taxes on people who earn more than $340,000 in a year will not achieve the fiscal goal of raising more revenue:
Earners in the top 1 percent pay 37 percent of the income tax. Earners in the top 5 percent pay 59 percent. Raising tax rates for these people may feel good, but the iron judgment of history is that it will not increase the total tax haul. As you can see from the chart here, top marginal rates have varied from above 90 percent to below 30 percent over the past 70 years, but federal revenue as a percentage of GDP has remained steadily in the 19-percent neighborhood.
The chart also gives strong evidence of what brought Uncle Sam’s cut of GDP from the single-digit range to the 19-percent range. That happened in the mid-1940s, when the government and the Federal Reserve broke their original promise to soak the rich and broadened taxable income to include every penny earned by every American.
While the Geithner plan will not succeed in raising revenue, it does have the capacity to raise the volatility of revenue collections. High earners experience more severe ups and downs in their income than the rest of us. This is the particular danger in California’s own effort to service its spending addiction through higher top rates, as I explained a few weeks ago:
Geithner’s top-2-percent strategy risks putting federal revenues on the same roller coaster. Here is a look at just how contingent and temporary millionaire status is in the United States. As Geithner knows from his own experience using TurboTax to conceal income from Washington, high earners also have more opportunities to earn in ways that will not be captured by the IRS – even though in the final stages of its decadence the U.S. government is becoming far more punitive on overseas earnings, charitable donations, expatriation of wealth and people, and other hallmarks of personal freedom.
This is not novel stuff. Even First Baron Keynes understood that the relationship between tax rates and revenue raised is not one-to-one. In fact, if Keynesians were truly attentive to their master, they would have a better understanding of the importance of depressive taxation in centrally planning an economy. What’s truly worrying is that Geithner doesn’t seem to grasp the concepts he’s trying to put into practice. Plenty of people want to soak the rich:
But if Warren Buffett or Hillary Clinton or even Stephen King believes in garbage, that has at most a tangential effect on me. Geithner, on the other hand: He’s the guy who takes money directly out of my pocket.
Wende Museum: An Archive of the Cold War
"The fall of the (Berlin) Wall only occurred 20 years ago. It's very recent, but it's very important, perhaps one of the most important historical events of our age," says Justinian Jampol, the founder and Executive Director of the Los Angeles-based Wende Museum.
The Wende's mission is to preserve Cold War artifacts and personal histories from the Eastern side of the Iron Curtain, with a special emphasis on the former East Germany. Many of the materials that make up the museum's collection come from former Stasi secret police agents, Berlin Wall border guards, and members of the other Eastern European and Soviet communist regimes that would have otherwise been lost to history.
Jampol describes one of the museum's treasures: the Berlin Wall border guards' log books from the day the Wall fell. These books demonstrate the devotion some guards had for defending the Wall, both as an idea and a physical presence, as they continued to detail the thousands of "illegal border crossings" that took place after the Wall had already fallen.
The museum is also behind the "Wall on Wilshire Project," where 10 pieces of the monstrous Berlin Wall were flown to LA, reconstructed along a stretch of Wilshire Boulevard and painted over by street artists to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Wall.
Approximately 4.25 minutes. Produced by Anthony L. Fisher. Shot by Sharif Matar.
Music: "Warzaw Express" by Pharaos
Go to http://www.reason.tv for downloadable versions of this video and subscribe to Reason.tv's YouTube channel for automatic notifications when new material goes live.
Trial Begins for the Hutaree Militia
The latest trial in what seems like an endless series of ginned-up "domestic terror threats" is under way now in Detroit. Let's check in with some details.
From the Huffington Post, summing up the charges and the defense's basic line:
The seven are charged with conspiring to commit sedition, or rebellion...
A Midwest militia whose members prosecutors say were willing "to go to war" against the U.S. government was more like a "social club" whose talk was little more than fantasy, defense attorneys say.
Displaying guns, vests and other military gear, Assistant U.S. Attorney Christopher Graveline told jurors Monday that members of anti-government Hutaree wanted to kill a police officer as a springboard to a broader rebellion against the U.S. government...
Two defense attorneys offered an opening rebuttal to the government's introduction, telling jurors there was no specific plan to do any harm to anyone in authority.
Jurors will hear more opening statements from defense attorneys Tuesday in the case against seven members of the Hutaree.....
Graveline showed the jury a video clip of leader David Stone declaring, "Welcome to the revolution." The government placed an undercover agent inside the Hutaree and also had a paid informant. More than 100 hours of audio and video were recorded....
Todd Shanker, attorney for David Stone Jr., acknowledged there are "offensive statements" on the recordings but said the words were "almost fantasy" made among people who were comfortable with each other....adding later that the Hutaree really was more of a "social club" than any organized militia.
William Swor, attorney for David Stone...told jurors the government was displaying weapons in court to "make you afraid." Swor said members lived hand-to-mouth and couldn't even afford transportation to a regional militia meeting in Kentucky, a trip that wasn't completed because of bad winter weather. He said it was the undercover agent who supplied the van, gas and a secret camera that captured Stone on video.
Of the original nine defendants, Joshua Clough, of Blissfield, Mich., is the only one to make a deal with prosecutors. He pleaded guilty in December to illegal use of a firearm, faces a mandatory five-year prison sentence and could be called as a witness to testify for the government.
Besides the Stones, the other defendants are Tina Mae Stone and Joshua Stone, both from Lenawee County; Thomas Piatek, of Whiting, Ind.; Michael Meeks, of Manchester, Mich.; and Kristopher Sickles, of Sandusky, Ohio. Jacob Ward, of Huron, Ohio, will have a separate trial. Besides conspiracy charges, all face at least one firearm charge and some have more.
More from the defense, via the Detroit Free Press:
"You will have to decide whether this is a real conspiracy or David Stone exercising his God-given right to blow off steam and open his mouth," Stone's lawyer William Swor of Detroit told jurors. "The United States government has never been the enemy of David Stone or his family. ... These are ordinary people living ordinary lives. Doing this stuff was merely their form of recreation."
Details from the Free Press on the jury selection process.
"Patriot movement" mag Republic sums up some of the issues with the government's legal case:
Rather than charging the Hutaree members with overt criminal acts, the Feds are prosecuting them for “sedition” – that is, criminal “offenses” that consist of expressing opinions about government corruption and making physical preparations to for self-defense against criminal violence by government authorities.
Lloyd Meyer, a Chicago attorney and former terrorism prosecutor, points out that this kind of prosecution is very unusual:
“How often do American citizens get charged with sedition or inciting discontent and resistance against big government? Heck, most citizens are discontented with the government. In this case, no one pulled a trigger and no one got hurt. … A jury could believe that the feds went after this group with a meat cleaver instead of a scalpel.Federal prosecutors initially attempted to have all nine members of the Hutaree militia held without bail as a severe threat to public safety. In May 2010, Federal District Judge Victoria Roberts granted them bail...
Defense attorneys, citing the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1969 Brandenburg v. Ohio decision, maintain that seditious speech — including speech that constitutes an incitement to violence — is protected by the First Amendment as long as it does not indicate an “imminent” threat.
The prosecutors’ brief, invoking the the 1995 seditious conspiracy trial of Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, maintained that it was not necessary to demonstrate a threat of imminent harm, but rather only that the defendants had formed an “agreement to oppose by force the authority of the United States.”
Jesse Walker wrote here at Reason all the way back in May 2010 after the arrests were first made. Key takeaway:
There are signs that the judge is unimpressed with the state's case, and she has stressed that prosecutors must demonstrate that the arrestees were guilty of an actual conspiracy to kill cops, not just loose talk. Even "hate-filled, venomous speech," she said, is "a right that deserves First Amendment protection."
Obviously we don't know what evidence has yet to be introduced at trial. Perhaps there really is more at issue here than some chest-beating chatter; perhaps there's a good reason to think a genuine murder plot was underway. But either way, we've learned enough about the Hutaree in the last month to know that the media narrative that greeted their arrests hasn't held up. Assume the worst-case scenario: that the defendants really were planning a massacre and that they really were capable of carrying it out. They still aren't the vanguard of the right-wing revolution. The Hutaree are isolated and despised, not just by the American mainstream but by the bulk of the groups on the SPLC's Patriot list. Indeed, the government may have had the help of some anti-Hutaree militiamen as it forged its case against the accused.
More Reason on the Hutaree.
This month's Esquire has the best extended reporting on another case of sleazy government informants enticing some angry white men into saying or planning things that the government can then make a "big terror bust" on, the Georgia "Waffle House terrorism" case. As with the Hutarees and even more so, this arrest and prosecution is much government effort expended in a way that isn't really protecting anyone from anything.
Gene Healy on Rick Santorum, Enemy of Libertarianism
In a Pennsylvania Press Club luncheon in
Harrisburg last summer, Santorum declared, "I am not a libertarian,
and I fight very strongly against libertarian influence within the
Republican Party and the conservative movement." In that
regard, writes Gene Healy, Santorum has a pretty impressive
record.
Medicare Payment "Cuts" In New White House Budget Don't Cover the Cost of Medicare Payment Increases
Has President Obama finally come around on
entitlements? Last week, The Wall Street Journal
reported that the new White House budget plan was expected to
"duck big benefit cuts" and "leave largely unchanged the biggest
drivers of future government spending"—entitlements like Medicare,
Medicaid, and Social Security. But now I see Reuters
reporting that the new budget blueprint proposes "more
aggressive deficit reductions through savings from Medicare,
Medicaid, and other federal healthcare programs." Obama is indeed
backing some $360 billion worth of cuts, mostly provider payment
reductions, to health programs over the next decade, much as he did
during the debt ceiling showdown last year.
But even ignoring the virtual certainty that Obama's budget won't pass, I wouldn't call these payment reductions "aggressive," or anything like it. The president himself has insisted that he only supports "modest" changes to Medicare. And as I reported in my January feature on Medicare's payment history, "Medicare Whac-a-Mole," federal policymakers have been attempting to control health costs and spending through various payment games for decades with minimal success.
Indeed, the federal government is still hundreds of billions in the hole thanks to ongoing problems with a payment formula instituted more than a decade ago, the sustainable growth rate (SGR). Thanks to the SGR's convoluted rules, doctors are continually set to take Medicare pay cuts, and every time Congress overrides those cuts, the long-term cost of fixing the system permanently goes up: At this point, a long-term fix would cost at least $316 billion (according to the Congressional Budget Office) and perhaps as much as $522 billion (according to GOP Sen. Jeff Session, although I'm not sure where he got the number). The administration's budget pegs the ten-year cost at $429 billion, and assumes that it will be covered—but, as it has done before, provides no way to pay for the full cost. What that means, though, is that using the administration's own numbers, the proposed provider payment "cuts" don't even add up to the price of the payment system fixes it assumes will be made.
What Obama's 2013 Budget Says About the Drug War, Police Militarization, and Intellectual Property
The Drug War
President Obama’s budget for Fiscal Year 2013 contains something akin to good news for Americans affected by the drug war. While light on specifics, the summary for the Department of Justice’s FY2013 budget mentions several provisions to reduce America’s appalling incarceration rate:
The Budget provides $153 million in prisoner reentry and jail diversion programs, including $80 million for the Second Chance Act programs and $52 million for problem-solving grants supporting drug courts, mentally ill offender assistance, and other problem-solving approaches. With 2.3 million people in U.S. prisons and 1 in 32 American adults under some kind of correctional supervision, these programs aim to divert individuals from incarceration, reduce recidivism, and achieve public safety in a more sensible way.
The section addressing federal prisons also hints at a public-health approach to drug law enforcement. While the the budget increases federal prison spending by 4 percent over FY2012 “due to projected growth in the Federal detainee population,” the section also says “the Administration will also continue to explore opportunities to reduce the prison population, with a focus on non-violent offenders.”
Police Militarization
Typically when we refer to police militarization, we’re talking
about raids, the rush to violence when dealing with citizens who
may or may not have committed crimes, and the use of military grade
weapons/vehicles/toys. Obama’s budget calls for specific
militarization of police, by promising local law enforcement more
federal funds if they hire veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan:
The Budget provides $257 million to support America’s first responders and the hiring and retention of police officers and sheriffs’ deputies across the country, and includes a preference for the hiring of post–9/11 veterans. This funding builds on the $166 million in COPS Hiring Grants funding enacted in 2012. These investments assist in building capacity to enable State and local law enforcement partners to make the most of their resources and encourage their most promising and effective public safety efforts. The Budget includes $4 billion in immediate assistance for the retention, rehiring, and hiring of police officers in 2012, as requested by the President in the American Jobs Act. States and localities will gain a preference for implementing programs and policies that focus on the recruitment of post–9/11 veterans for law enforcement positions.
If there’s evidence that veterans make worse cops than civilians, I haven’t seen it. But there is something disconcerting about shuffling veterans from the killing fields of Iraq and Afghanistan to American streets.
Intellectual Property
The raid and shut-down of file-sharing site Megaupload was likely
the first of many, if Obama’s budget is an indicator:
Recent technological advances, particularly in methods of manufacturing and distribution, have created new opportunities for businesses of all sizes to innovate and grow. These advancements, however, have also created new vulnerabilities, which tech-savvy criminals are eager to exploit. As a result, there has been an alarming rise in intellectual property (IP) crimes, illegal activities that not only devastate individual lives and legitimate businesses, but undermine our financial stability and prosperity. Therefore, the Administration is devoting nearly $40 million to identify and defeat intellectual property criminals, an increase of $5 million over 2012. The Administration’s efforts have already resulted in shutting down 350 websites engaged in the illegal sale and distribution of counterfeit goods and copyrighted works. Additionally, international partnerships and joint initiatives have enabled experts to train or educate in IP protection more than 2,500 foreign judges, prosecutors, investigators, and other officials from over 30 countries.
More reporting from Reason on Obama’s FY2013 budget proposal: Nick Gillespie with three "must-see charts" about Obama's budget; Peter Suderman on the claim that Obamacare reduces the deficit.
A. Barton Hinkle on the War Against Sugar
Self-appointed food police have been pitching
Twinkie taxes, soda taxes, and so on for years, writes A. Barton
Hinkle. And like advocates of every stripe, they are sometimes
prone to exaggerating. Last month researchers (including one
at Virginia Tech) claimed slapping a penny-per-ounce tax on soft
drinks would raise $13 billion in revenue, save $17 billion in
health costs, and prevent (kid you not) 2,600 premature deaths a
year—all because it would lead the average adult American to cut
nine calories a day. Nine.
OMG! Cyber War! Cyber War! We're Doomed! (Or Not.)
"Stop the apocalyptic rhetoric.
The alarmist scenarios dominating policy discourse may be good for
the cybersecurity-industrial complex, but they aren’t doing real
security any favors," write former Reason intern
Tate Watkins and Mercatus' Jerry
Brito today at
Wired.
The dynamic duo—who have debunked the cybersecurity threat in Reason's pages as well—lay out the mechanism whereby threats of cyber war are systematically inflated by the devout fearful and those who stand to gain—panicked Internet Baptists and their military-industrial-complex bootlegger buddies:
Rhetoric about cyber catastrophe resembles threat inflation we saw in the run-up to the Iraq War...
The media may be contributing to threat inflation today by uncritically reporting alarmist views of potential cyber threats. For example, a 2009 front page Wall Street Journal story reported that the U.S. power grid had been penetrated by Chinese and Russian hackers and laced with logic bombs. The article is often cited as evidence that the power grid is rigged to blow.
Yet similar to Judith Miller’s Iraq WMD reporting, the only sources for the article’s claim that infrastructure has been compromised are anonymous U.S. intelligence officials. With little specificity about the alleged infiltrations, readers are left with no way to verify the claims. More alarmingly, when Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) took to the Senate floor to introduce the comprehensive cybersecurity bill that she co-authored with Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), the evidence she cited to support a pressing need for regulation included this very Wall Street Journal story.
And now, some alarming large numbers in a paragraph studded with the names of defense contractors:
The U.S. government is expected to spend $10.5 billion a year on information security by 2015, and analysts have estimated the worldwide market to be as much as $140 billion a year. The Defense Department has said it is seeking more than $3.2 billion in cybersecurity funding for 2012. Lockheed Martin, Boeing, L-3 Communications, SAIC, and BAE Systems have all launched cybersecurity divisions in recent years.
Check out the smartypants academic version of Watkins and Brito's report.
Read lots more skeptical approaches to cyber war (plus a great deal of hate for the word cyber in any context).
Will Gay Marriage Become the Next Roe v. Wade?
Before joining the federal judiciary in 1980 and the U.S. Supreme Court in 1993, Ruth Bader Ginsburg got her start as a feminist Columbia University law professor and chief litigator for the American Civil Liberties Union’s Women’s Rights Project. Given that legal background, you probably wouldn’t expect Ginsburg to criticize the Supreme Court’s abortion-affirming 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade. But as the Associated Press reports, that’s precisely what she did last week:
"It's not that the judgment was wrong, but it moved too far too fast," Ginsburg told a symposium at Columbia Law School marking the 40th anniversary of her joining the faculty as its first tenure-track female professor....
Alluding to the persisting bitter debate over abortion, Ginsburg said the justices of that era could have delayed hearing any case like Roe while the state-by-state process evolved. Alternatively, she said, they could have struck down just the Texas law, which allowed abortions only to save a mother's life, without declaring a right to privacy that legalized the procedure nationwide.
"The court made a decision that made every abortion law in the country invalid, even the most liberal," Ginsburg said. "We'll never know whether I'm right or wrong ... things might have turned out differently if the court had been more restrained."
Answering historical “what ifs” can be a fun way to pass the time, but these comments from Ginsburg actually take on real weight in light of last week’s decision by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals striking down California’s Proposition 8, which had amended the state constitution in order to forbid gay marriage. If UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh is correct that the Prop. 8 case is definitely “going up to the Supreme Court,” the comparison to Roe v. Wade becomes more than just academic.
Let’s say the Supreme Court hears the Prop. 8 case in the next year or so and Justice Anthony Kennedy continues his trend of voting in favor of gay rights by authoring a sweeping five-justice majority opinion recognizing a right to gay marriage in the 14th Amendment. This landmark decision would strike down all state-level bans on the practice, much like Roe did for abortion laws. Should proponents of gay marriage favor this aggressive approach or should they heed Ginsburg’s warning about the political backlash from moving “too far too fast”?
Americans Also Enjoying Trade Offs That Come With ObamaCare
President Obama’s new budget proposal notes that
‘Americans are already enjoying many of the protections put in
place” thanks to the 2010 health care overhaul. But the White House
appears less keen to mention the trade offs that those alleged
benefits entail. For example, the proposal notes that “young adults
under age 26 can now stay on their parents’ policies.” This is
true, but what the report doesn’t note is that this requirement
contributes
to the rising cost of insurance. The same goes for the budget’s
brag that “all new private market health insurance plans now must
cover critical preventive care services such as mammograms and
colonoscopies without charging a deductible, copay, or
coinsurance.” Despite how ObamaCare boosters have described this
policy, the preventive care mandates in the law are far from free
to the patient, and, as Cato Institute health policy director
Michael Cannon has noted, not likely to be cost effective
either. The budget also touts changes to children’s health
insurance regulations: “Because of the ACA, insurance companies can
no longer deny coverage to children under the age of 19 due to a
pre-existing condition.” And because of that rule, many big-name
health insurers have decided to simply stop
offering child-only health insurance policies altogether.
Somehow I suspect that parents looking for individual health
insurance policies for their children aren’t exactly enjoying this
so-called protection.
Obama's Budget: More Phantoms than a Lon Chaney Flick
The AP does a fact check on Obama's budget
and concludes that like all such documents, this one is full of
"phantoms."
When a president introduces a budget, there are always phantoms flitting around the room. President Barack Obama's spending plan sets loose a number of them.
It counts on phantom savings from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It's underpinned by tax increases Republicans won't let happen and program cuts fellow Democrats in Congress are all but certain to block.
Specifically, Obama counts $850 billion in war savings and pushes a chunk of that "savings" toward road construction. The problem is that since the wars are being paid for by borrowing, there's no peace dividend this time around. And that's assuming defense spending goes down as planned.
Then there's this. The budget
Forecasts healthy growth in years ahead, with GDP growth predicted to reach a robust 4 percent in 2014 and 4.2 percent in 2015....
Last year, the administration built its proposed budget on a projection of 2.7 percent growth in 2011; it turned out to be 1.7. The forecast for 2012 was 3.6 percent, which the White House lowered in the new budget to 3 percent. IHS Global Insight, a leading forecaster in Lexington, Mass., projects 2.1 percent.
Rosy scenarios of economic growth are pervasive in government planning. They rarely come to pass.
The AP story also notes that the budget assumes that taxes will go up on the wealthy ("a non-starter before the election") and also that programs favored by influential congressfolks will be cut or zeroed out (no chance).
More on the budget from Reason here. The short version: flat spending for next year, but higher taxes on the rich. And lots more deficits and debt over the next decade.
A.M. Links: Obama Pushes for Payroll Tax Cut, Santorum Leads Romney and Scores NRO Endorsement, Moody's Threatens to Downgrade the UK
Obama is stumping for the
extension of the payroll tax
cuts. - Moody's threatens to downgrade the Brits.
- Rick Santorum is on top for the first time ever.
- NRO: Move over Gingrich, we want some Santorum.
- Pentagon to reduce troop numbers to meet so-called budget cut.
- WaPo fact-checks Obama on defense budget.
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: "Wende Museum: An Archive of the Cold War"
Tim Cavanaugh on Using Gas Taxes to Fund Public Transportation
There’s not a lot to like in this year’s federal
transportation bill, or for that matter in any year’s
transportation bill. But as Managing Editor Tim Cavanaugh reports,
there is one proviso that might get the lead out: The House version
of the "American Energy and Infrastructure Jobs Financing Act of
2012" could end the Highway Trust Fund’s transit account—a 1980s
concoction whereby a fifth part of your federal gasoline tax goes
to fund public transportation.
Shikha Dalmia on Ayn Rand, Illegal Immigration, and the GOP
Earlier this month was the birthday of Ayn Rand,
the controversial philosopher and novelist, who emigrated from the
Soviet Union in 1926. Regardless of what one thinks of her ideas,
there is no denying that she was a great American. When the
American intelligentsia was playing footsie with Soviet communism,
Rand unabashedly defended liberty and individual rights. But as
Shikha Dalmia explains, this proud naturalized American, who
arguably did more than any contemporary figure to restore the faith
of Americans in America, might have been hounded out of the country
if one of our current crop of Republican presidential hopefuls had
been president when she arrived. Why? Because Rand lied and bent
every rule to gain entry into the United States.
Ron Paul: Who Won Maine?
You have probably heard over the weekend that Mitt Romney won the nonbinding straw poll that arose from Maine's caucuses over the past week (or so), 39 to Ron Paul's 36, despite some hopes expressed by Paul's fans and campaigns he could win the poll outright.
Well, maybe. Some good old fashioned complications in the narrative from the world around Ron Paul:
*First, those results are nonbinding; the delegate selection
process won't be finished until May
.
Even if things fall our roughly proportionately, that still,
according to
the very useful Greenpapers, will have Romney and Paul each
snatching 8 of the state's 24 delegates.
*But Paul's campaign is confident that they will do far better than proportional, and that they will "control the Maine delegation" as per this press release:
Paul performed well throughout the state, although his campaign’s stronghold of Washington County did not report today for inexplicable reasons. Congressman Paul was barely bested by Gov. Romney by about 194 votes, a margin the campaign is confident it will make up with the 200 plus votes expected to come out of Washington County’s caucus.
“Today’s results show once again that Congressman Paul’s campaign for liberty and a return to Constitutional principles is strong and growing,” said Ron Paul 2012 National Campaign Chairman Jesse Benton. “We are confident that we will control the Maine delegation for the convention in August. Our campaign is so thankful to all of our supporters in Maine, and all over the nation, and we want them to know that we plan to take this message all the way to the White House.”
*More on the mystery of Washington County's caucus, from the Portland Press Herald:
The Paul campaign says a local caucus meeting in Washington County that was canceled Saturday afternoon because of a snowstorm would have provided the margin of victory over Romney.
But Maine GOP Chairman Charlie Webster is standing behind the results showing that Romney, a former Massachusetts governor, won the nonbinding presidential straw poll by 194 votes.
Washington County GOP Chairman Chris Gardner says he is pushing for his county’s votes to be counted next weekend, but conceded that it seems improbable those votes could provide Paul what he needs to overcome Romney’s statewide lead.
Still, “The people of Washington County, they certainly deserve to have their votes counted,” said Gardner. “We are going to proceed and we will push to have our votes counted."...
The Paul campaign also cried foul.
“In Washington County – where Ron Paul was incredibly strong – the caucus was delayed until next week just so the votes wouldn’t be reported by the national media today,” said John Tate, Paul’s campaign manager, in a statement late Saturday night. Tate dismissed the rationale that the caucus had to be canceled due to snow, saying the weather wasn’t that bad.
“The votes of Washington County would have been enough to put us over the top,” he said....
That would have been a great media victory--"frontrunner" Romney bested again, this time, for the first time, by Ron Paul--but again, nonbinding on the actual eventual delegates voting for candidates in Tampa later this year. John Tate's full comments on the Washington County non-count.
*Nate Silver at New York Times runs the numbers on the meaning of Washington County to the possible final straw poll results, and says Paul would have to pull out an Iowa-level turnout miracle of his folk to sway the outcome:
All if this will be moot unless Mr. Paul is able to make up 194 votes in the county.
Based on how the county voted in 2008, that seems unlikely. Just 113 votes total were cast in the county in 2008, and only 8 of those were for Mr. Paul. John McCain, instead, won the plurality.
In addition, Mr. Romney narrowly won the two counties, Hancock and Penobscot, that border Washington County to the west and which are probably the best demographic match for it — although Mr. Paul won sparsely-populated Aroostook County, which borders it to the north, where he took 81 votes to Mr. Romney’s 26.
However, Washington County might theoretically have some untapped potential for Mr. Paul. It is rural and relatively poor — demographics that tend to suit him more than Mr. Romney. And it is relatively conservative, having split its vote about evenly between Barack Obama and Mr. McCain in 2008 when Mr. Obama won Maine as a whole fairly easily.
What such an outcome would require is for Mr. Paul’s campaign to make a concerted effort to turn out any supporters it has in the area. There are 6,907 registered Republicans in Washington County, and another 8,247 unaffiliated registered voters, who are eligible to participate by changing their registration to Republican at the caucus site. Unregistered voters, for that matter, are also free to participate provided that they register at the caucus site.
Imagine, for instance, that voters turned out in the county at a rate comparable the Iowa caucuses, where Mr. Paul had a strong turnout operation. In Iowa, 122,255 Republicans participated in the caucuses as compared to a total of 644,220 voters who were registered as Republican prior to caucus night.
Were turnout in Washington County to occur at the Iowa rate, it would produce about 1,300 participants at the caucuses,
enough to swing the outcome if Mr. Paul received about 15 percent more of their votes than Mr. Romney.
*The Bangor Daily News on some delegate voting discrepencies in Portland.
*Waldo County, which held its caucus the week before, also had its votes not counted, organizer Raymond St. Onge explains, and says Paul won there, edging out Santorum by two votes.
*U.S. News and World Report on Paul's disappointment:
"You know, we were a little bit disappointed last night," theTexas congressman told CBS's "Face the Nation" Sunday, hours after losing Maine. "We did very well up there. But we're going to continue to do what we do, and do the very best and keep accumulating delegates."
He declined to criticize Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, but did throw some zingers at the other two candidates in the GOP presidential race, former House SpeakerNewt Gingrich and former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum.
"Their records are far from being conservative," Paul said.
*Although CPAC was Ron Paul-less, the head of the American Conservative Union tells the Washington Times they can't ignore him:
“It would be a dramatic error for the winning campaign to disavow Ron Paul’s contributions to the process,” said Al Cardenas, chairman of theAmerican Conservative Union, which hosted the CPAC gathering. “I am a firm believer that Ron Paul has found a niche and found a movement that he wants to have a voice. It may not be a majority movement, but it’s a growing movement. So, if we are smart, he’s going to have his fair opportunity at convention, and a platform committee to have his points of views discussed and expressed.
He added, “Any winning campaign of the nomination, if it is not his, should embrace him and his followers if we are going to win in November.”...
David Keene, former ACU chairman, said the party’s slow embrace of Paul supporters reminded him of how Republicans were reluctant to welcome the evangelicals who followed Pat Robertson into the political fray during his 1988 presidential bid. In one instance, Mr. Keene recalled, a national committeeman likened attending a Robertson campaign meeting to “the bar scene in ‘Star Wars.’ “
“Party leaders, like the leader of any club, love to have your dues, or your vote in this case, but they really don’t want you hanging around voting for the offices or the leadership,” Mr. Keene said. “[Evangelicals] came in, they were attracted by Pat Robertson, who couldn’t get nominated, but attracted hundreds of thousands of millions of people. Some of those people went home because they were just attracted to him, as will some of the Paul people, and some of them stuck around, and today a lot of them are leaders in the party.”
My forthcoming book, Ron Paul's Revolution.
Ludwig von Mises Approved of Birth Control, But So What?
The distant spheres of people deeply interested in birth control and Ludwig Von Mises met violently when blogger "Rortybomb" (Mike Konczal of the Roosevelt Institute) did some libertarian-baiting by claiming that libertarians should be against mandated insurance that covers birth control because Ludwig Von Mises didn't approve of birth control. (I am not a regular reader of his blog, so sophisticated strategic ironies that may or may not have been at work will zoom over my head.)
In the first place, Mr. Bomb's supposition is openly based on some intellectual sleight of hand to begin with, taking a stated opposition to "free love" as an alleged tool of socialism and extending it to birth control:
I think it is fair to lump “free love” as he means it with birth control. He writes Socialism in 1922, a year after Margaret Sanger founds the group that becomes Planned Parenthood (which she does after a decade of writing sex education for women columns in a variety of socialist and anarchist magazines while trying to evade arrest). He doesn’t mention Sanger but he’s pretty obsessed with this book Woman and Socialism (“no other German socialist book was more widely read or more effective as propaganda than Bebel’s Woman and Socialism, which is dedicated above all to the message of free love”).
Let’s get some more quotes onto the internets and then encourage our libertarian friends to have at it. Help that whole fusionist project by spending 2012 finding increasingly esoteric ways of denouncing birth control alongside the religious conservatives – the future of private property depends on it!
That daring leap was dead wrong, which Rortybomb later tweetmitted. See this, from Mises' longest book, Human Action:
Those fighting birth control want to eliminate a device indispensable for the preservation of peaceful human cooperation and the social division of labor. Where the average standard of living is impaired by the excessive increase in population figures. irreconcilable conflicts of interests arise. Each individual is again a rival of all other individuals in the struggle for survival. The annihilation of rivals is the only means of increasing one's own well-being. The philosophers and theologians who assert that birthcontrol is contrary to the laws of God and Nature refuse to see things as they really are. Nature straitens the material means required for the improvement of human well-being and survival. As natural conditions are, man has only the choice between the pitiless war of each against each or social cooperation. But social cooperation is impossible if people give rein to the natural impulse of proliferation. In restricting procreation man adjusts himself to the natural conditions of his existence. The rationalization of the sexual passions is an indispensable condition of civilization and societal bonds. Its abandonment would in the long run not increase but decrease the numbers of those surviving, and would render life for everyone as poor and miserable as it was many thousands of years ago for our ancestors. [p. 673]
Thanks to Gene Callahan for being the first to get that quote into the record in response to Rortybomb.
And Mises was a general fan of the basic feminist message, as Rortybomb himself quotes, from Mises' early opus Socialism:
So far as Feminism seeks to adjust the legal position of woman to that of man, so far as it seeks to offer her legal and economic freedom to develop and act in accordance with her inclinations, desires, and economic circumstances—so far it is nothing more than a branch of the great liberal movement, which advocates peaceful and free evolution.
Mises does go on to address "natural barriers" that socialists want to overturn, and doubtless some of his own personal opinions about what those natural barriers might be would differ from moderns, liberal or conservative, which is exactly why Rortybomb's entire implied point doesn't make any sense to begin with. Those concerns are far more matters of opinion, not political philosophy, and in no sense should bind even those who have sworn fealty to Mises' general views on economics and liberty. (For example, I'm quite the Misesian in most questions of politics and economics, but can imagine an intelligent conservative argument that the "rationalization of the sexual passions" is in some sense harmed by birth control, though not in the specific procreational sense he is addressing specifically.)
But let's address the larger point, if there is one, besides that atop all of our heads for even talking about this: That polemical points can rightly be earned laying some judgment, whether real or imagined, of an intellectual founding father or influence on a political movement or tendency on to the backs of its younger followers--either to mock them or to insist that, no, this is really what their intellectual mission is: not to promote liberty, but to work for whatever Ludwig Von Mises liked or didn't like.
It is interesting, for those interested in intellectual history, that Mises saw free love as part of some larger socialist mission to destroy the family. But for the libertarian the relevant question is, is this voluntary or not, does this infringe on anyone's life, liberty, or property or not? "Anything that's peaceful," baby, as Leonard Read, one of Mises' great popular disciples in Amerca, wrote.
Thus, there's a libertarian case to be made against forcing anyone to cover any specific medical care, birth control or whatever, in the insurance deals they make with their clients. But it has nothing to do with whether Ludwig von Mises was comfortable with free love, or birth control, or with catheters, or blood transfusions, or any other specific medical procedure that might or might not become a political controversy when the government tried to force people to sell insurance only on the condition that that insurance cover that procedure or medication's use.
That said, I won't even do the nyaa-nyaa-nyaa Keynes was into eugenics!
Much on Mises and more in my very long book Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the American Libertarian Movement.
Hugo Chávez Will Turn Planet Mars Red By 2030
Most Democratically
Revolutionary Bolívarian Father of the Presidency For Life Hugo
Chávez of Venezuela has
had enough of socialism on one planet:
"Venezuela has stepped onto the road to space," Chavez said on national television.
"Nobody has ever reached Mars but Venezuela will. It's our goal for 2030-2040."
People's Fifth Republican International Anti-Imperialist Communal Counciliar First Among Equals Chávez declared the opening of the interplanetary class struggle after agreeing to pay China's space agency $140 million to build and launch the Miranda spy satellite, which will "monitor troop movements and illegal mining as well as study climate change and the environment."
In 2008 Chávez paid China $406 million to launch the Chinese-made Simon Bolivar TV and radio satellite.
While expanding the glory of the Venezuelan people, Chávez also graciously acknowledges the social and scientific advancements won by his East Asian partners in the liberation of the Martian Proletariat. "One day Venezuela will arrive on Mars but China will do it first," Chávez says.
Obama's Spending 'Freeze' Leaves Room for an NEA Hike
In
the context of the federal budget, the National Endowment for the
Arts is a drop in the bucket, amounting to about 0.004 percent of
total spending. At the same time, the program is completely
unnecessary, so preserving it while
claiming to make "hard choices" and "difficult decisions"
signals a lack of seriousness. It should come as no surprise, then,
that President Obama's plan to "re-establish fiscal
responsibility" includes an $8 million increase in the NEA's
budget.
"The administration request of $154 million for the National Endowment for the Arts is a greatly needed increase of $8 million from the $146 million that Congress appropriated last year," says Robert L. Lynch, CEO of Americans for the Arts. "Since 2010 the NEA has been cut $22 million to $146 million, which threatens its ability to make critical grants throughout the county." He adds that "the higher appropriation enhances the ability of the NEA to fund projects in every congressional district," which presumably will improve its chances of getting more funding in the future.
Mitt Romney, Obama's likely opponent in November, is a not much better on this fiscally trivial but symbolically significant issue. Romney calls for "deep reductions" in the NEA's budget yet still cannot bring himself to abolish it, thereby implicitly putting it in the category of "absolutely essential" federal programs, which he says are the only kind he would preserve.
An Orange Country Deputy Shot an Unarmed Marine in Front of His Children Last Week
On February 7, an Orange County deputy, still unnamed, fatally shot an unarmed former Marine in front of the latter's children while all three of them sat in the Marine's car.
Sgt. Manuel Loggins Jr. was driving at 4:45 a.m. with his two children and he had apparently crashed his van through a gate and ended up in a school parking lot. He then exited the van, stood on the football field for a while, and then started to return to the van, ignoring orders from the deputy (and three others who had arrived) to stop.
The deputy says he feared for the safety of Loggins' 9 and 14-year-old children because Loggins has been making "irrational statements" and was about to drive away.
Loggins' friends say he was an extremely religious man who liked to take his daughters for walks in the early mornings at that school and talk to them about the Bible. Former colleagues also say he was great soldier who always listened and obeyed orders.
Some news reports suggested that the deputy's fears for his own safety were what motivated the shooting. However, no weapon was found on Loggins and sounds like the safety of the children is being made out as the main motivation by police (not that it couldn't have been both). The deputy is now on administrative leave pending an investigation.
It's possible that Loggins was having some sort of nervous breakdown. It's even possible that his children were in danger. But since it it apparently needs to be repeated, what good are police if they can't help someone in mental distress and turn so quickly to lethal force? Where were the deputy's less-lethal weapons if these now-fatherless children really were in trouble? Considering some recent, nasty police incidents in Orange County, you have to wonder how this investigation is going to turn out. Shooting into a van when there are children in the back seat is a very desperate move. Hopefully it was justified. It certainly makes you wish for mandatory cameras on every police officer.
[Updated] It seems that the dashcam captured "the entire incident." I guess we'll see.
Reason.tv on the killing of Kelly Thomas by Fullerton, California police:
Cathy Young on Obama’s Misguided Birth Control Mandate
Despite a proposed compromise last week, the
firestorm rages on over the Obama Administration rule under which
all employee health insurance plans, including ones at religiously
affiliated institutions such as Catholic charities and schools,
must include full coverage for birth control. The battle has been
framed as one of religious freedom versus reproductive rights. But
as Cathy Young observes, it also illustrates two troubling
phenomena unrelated to religion: intrusive micromanagement of
insurance options under the new federal health care law, and the
redefinition of contraception as a public good rather than a
personal choice.
Using Federal Money to Undermine Federalism
The Cato Institute’s Walter Olson highlights a little-known federal program aimed at encouraging the states to pass more restrictive swimming pool regulations in exchange for federal grant money. As he explains, the end result of this and similar arrangements has been the undermining of our system of checks and balances:
This forlorn little program is a tiny and failed example of a genre of federal initiative that all too often enjoys success: using federal tax dollars to bribe states and localities into raising spending and extending regulation. The proliferation of such programs helps explain why the earlier and sounder idea of federalism — which saw the national and state governments as checking each others’ overweening powers — has given way to a spirit of mutual enablement (“cooperative federalism”) at the expense of the citizenry and its freedom. Thus the Obama administration, realizing that public opinion is not yet ready for a federal-level campaign to demonize fattening and salty foods, is happy to drop millions of dollars on local governments like Mayor Bloomberg’s in New York City to do exactly that. And for decades Congress has been creating programs subsidizing local hiring of teachers, police officers and other public employees — with the presumably unintended result of saddling localities with unsustainable payrolls and pension obligations when times turn tough.
Watch the Final Freedom Watch with Judge Andrew Napolitano Tonight, feat. Nick Gillespie
I'm
greatly honored and deeply saddened to be part of the last episode
of Freedom Watch with Judge Andrew Napolitano. The show airs on Fox
Business at 8pm ET and reruns later in the evening as well. You
will not want to miss his end-of-show commentary, which is
certainly a speech for the ages. Go
here for more details.
Matt Welch gives some background on the show's cancellation here.
Freedom Watch was great in its early webcast days and it remained absolutely the greatest "daily dose" of liberty ever to grace the small screen so far. On behalf of Reason, I'd like to take a moment to thank the Judge and producers such as George Szucs and Patrick McMenamin for all they did to heighten the visibility of our staffers and broaden the reach of our ideas. Far more important, I'd like to thank them for all they did to inject a truly alternative viewpoint into ongoing debates about politics, culture, and ideas. Along with the weekly Stossel show (which will continue on Fox Business), Freedom Watch was unapologetically libertarian and also one of the most wide-ranging and provocative news programs anyone could want.
The Judge will continue to grace many Fox News and Fox Business programs. And he will certainly continue to appear in the pages of Reason magazine, Reason.com, and Reason.tv, where he has already done so much to further the debate about freedom and liberty. Read his Reason archive here and watch the most recent of our video interviews with him below.
Romney and Santorum Tied, U.S. to Hold Talks With North Korea, Obama Campaign Unveils "Truth Team": P.M. Links
Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum
are tied. - Catholic bishops reject birth control compromise.
- U.S. to hold talks with North Korea.
- Stocks rally following news of Greek austerity plan.
- Al-Qaeda wants to help Syrians overthrow Assad.
- Obama campaign has a "truth squad," and you can be part of it!
- Judge throws out part of BP shareholder suit.
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.
Ira Stoll on How Obamacare Is a Boon to Insurance Companies
Before shedding any tears for the insurance
companies, check their stock prices. One of the most remarkable
moments of the administration came on June 24, 2009, when Mr.
Obama told Aetna’s CEO, “Aetna is a well-managed company
and I am confident that your shareholders are going to do
well.” If you took that stock tip from President Obama, you
would have done pretty well, writes Ira Stoll. Shares in Aetna are
up 89% since then, assuming reinvestment of dividends, far
outpacing the 49% return of the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index
over the same period.
Blasphemous Saudi Tweeter Has Been Deported, Supporters Could Be Punished
On
Friday, I wrote about
Hamza Kashgari, a 23-year old Saudi writer who tweeted about
the Prophet Muhammad. His tweets were seen as "apostasy," which
could merit the death penalty under Sharia law. He soon
fled Saudi Arabia, but was arrested in Malaysia, while en route to
to seek asylum in New Zealand. Amnesty International even called
him a
"prisoner of conscience." However, on Sunday, the Malaysian
government deported Kashgari back to Saudi Arabia.
Malaysian Home Minister Hishammuddin Hussein defended the decision, arguing that Malaysia is not a "safe transit" for those wanted by their home nations. He also labeled Kashgari a "terrorist." In addition, Hishammuddin blasted the idea that Kashgari could be executed for tweeting as "illogic," claiming:
Allegations that he would be executed, abused, do not make sense. The country being accused is a dignified country. These are serious allegations against Saudi Arabia.
He added:
I hope this issue is not politicised on the basis of freedom and human rights...We received a
request from Saudi Arabia and we will not protect anyone who is wanted.
Unfortunately, capital punishment is all too common in Saudi Arabia. Since Wahabi Islam is the official religion of Saudi Arabia, it enforces a very strict (and literal) form of Sharia law. Between 2008-2010, Saudi Arabia executed almost 200 people, all by public decapitation. In December 2011, a Saudi woman was beheaded for practicing "witchcraft and sorcery," while in 2009, the leader of a jewelry thief gang was "crucified:" He was decapitated, his severed head was impaled, then his body was publicly displayed. As for Kashgari, if he is convicted of apostasy, he would be guilty of hadud, or "crimes against God." These crimes often led to the death penalty.
In addition, Kashgari's supporters in Saudi Arabia might also face a similar fate. According to Khaled Abu Rashid, "Those who supported the contents of Kashgari's tweets are considered criminal exactly like him," and thus, would merit the same type of punishment Kashgari receives. However, this comes with Kafkaesque legal contortions:
If the support was for general principles like freedom of expression, then this is a different matter, but if the support was for the attacks on Allah and His Prophet, then the supporters should be tried for apostasy.
Here is my original post on Hamza Kashgari. Reason on Islam and censorship. Back in 2003, the BBC interviewed Saudi Arabia's "leading executioner." A few choice quotes from that exchange:
The criminal was tied and blindfolded. With one stroke of the sword I severed his head. It rolled metres away...People are amazed how fast it can separate the head from the body.
No one is afraid of me. I have a lot of relatives, and many friends at the mosque, and I live a normal life like everyone else. There are no drawbacks for my social life.
3 Must-See Charts About Obama's Budget
Here are three charts prepared by Reason columnist and Mercatus Center economist Veronique de Rugy that are drawn from President Obama's budget plan for fiscal year 2013.
The first chart tallies up Obama's proposed spending and proposed "spending cuts" over the next decade. The spending is easy to calculate. The spending cuts are a little more dicey. Obama has said he will trim possible future debt by $4 trillion in this budget. About $1.5 trillion of that total will come from tax increases, so the other $2.5 trillion will come from foregone outlays. [Note: an earlier version of this first chart was mislabeled. The current title is correct; sorry for any confusion.]
This chart adds up the increase in debt held by the public over the next decade if everything goes according to Obama's plan. Though the president likes to stress the need to be responsible in fiscal matters, debt will increase by at around $8 trillion over the coming 10 years.
I find the chart below to be the most interesting of the bunch. Budget plans always include projections of outlays, revenues, shortfalls, etc. The blue bars represent Obama's projections of deficits in the budget he submitted for fiscal year 2010. The red bars are the actual deficits and, in the case of 2012 and 2013, the projections in this year's budget. In 2010 and 2011, the deficits were worse than projected. And the new projections for 2012 and 2013 are worse than what Obama figured they would be in 2010. Which hardly fills you with enthusiasm or confidence about his ability to figure out the budget, right?
Go here to read highlights of the plan and to access the full budget document.
You May Now Get Gay-Married in Washington State
Washington State Gov. Chris Gregoire signed into law late Monday morning legislation that would enable same-sex couples to marry in the Evergreen State as advocates prepare for a possible fight over the measure at the ballot.
“I’m proud that our same-sex couples will no longer be treated as separate but equal,” Gregoire said in her remarks. “They will be equal in the great state of Washington.”
Gregoire signed the legislation surrounded by LGBT advocates, including gay State Rep. Jamie Pedersen and gay State Sen. Ed Murray, champions of the legislation who introduced the governor at the ceremony.
After signing the bill, Gregoire exclaimed, “It is signed!”
Murray said during his remarks, “My friends, welcome to the other side of the rainbow!” Prior to the signing the legislation, the audience at the signing ceremony chanted “Gre-goire! Gre-goire!” Later during the event, they chanted, “Thank-you! Thank-you!”
Gregoire asserted during her remarks that the legislation enables gay couples to obtain marriage licenses while allowing churches and religious organizations to opt out of recognizing these unions. Repeatedly throughout the remarks, Gregoire thanked the legislature for approving and conducting a civil, respectful debate on the issue.
Related: Salon's excellent and surprisingly even-handed profile of hetero paladin Maggie Gallagher.
Under the Assumption that ObamaCare Will Reduce the Deficit, It's Safe to Assume that ObamaCare Will Reduce the Deficit
President Obama didn’t have much to say about his health care overhaul during his State of the Union this year, but his new budget plan makes sure to remind readers how fiscally responsible the trillion-dollar plan is and take credit for its alleged deficit reduction. Here’s what the introduction to the new budget proposal has to say about the health law’s budgetary impact:
We took many steps to re-establish fiscal responsibility, from instituting a statutory pay-as-you-go rule for spending to going line by line through the budget looking for outdated, ineffective, or duplicative programs to cut or reform. And, most importantly, we enacted the Affordable Care Act. Along with giving Americans more affordable choices and freedom from insurance company abuses, reform of our health care system will, according to the latest analysis by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, reduce our budget deficits by more than $200 billion in its first decade and more than $1 trillion over the second
This is true...or at least it’s true provided you make the right set of assumptions. For example...
- if you assume that the law will successfully raise roughly $500 billion in taxes
- and if you assume that it will reduce Medicare payments and other expenditures by another $500 billion
- and if you expect that the law's alleged delivery system reforms will keep producing savings year after year
- and if the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB) it sets up works exactly as planned and isn’t repealed
- and if you ignore the cost of the doc fix, which Obama’s new budget plan does.
But relying on this set of assumptions may not be the best way to project the law's actual budgetary effects, especially given that we now know for sure that President Obama signed off on the use of health care budget gimmicks right before the law passed. For example, the Medicare cuts may be difficult to sustain, and the delivery system reforms may not pay off. Members of both parties are already looking to repeal IPAB. And while the budget proposal is right to note that the CBO officially scores the law as a net deficit reducer, the CBO has also implicitly cautioned that the assumptions used to produce the deficit reduction projection might not be pan out, and that, in later years, ObamaCare may not be able to hold down Medicare spending.
Is This the Sort of Chip Manufacturer Obama Has in Mind?
Does the first lady know about
this? The Suffolk Times reports
that North Fork Potato Chips of Mattituck, Long Island, recently
received a $50,000 USDA grant to promote its salty, fat-laden,
calorie-packed products. The
grant, which the company will use to update its website and
brochures, was awarded under the Value-Added Producer Grant
Program, which is "designed to help companies expand their
businesses to a wider audience." Maybe the folks at the the
farmers' markets that the federal government is
subsidizing as a way of improving nutrition and curbing
obesity.
[Thanks to Ted Balaker for the tip.]
Reason.tv: "Markets Not Capitalism," Says Professor Gary Chartier
"The kind of economic arrangements that we see in our world today, which are dominated by cronies of those with state power, that's not the kind of economic arrangement that anyone who believes in freedom ought to favor," says Gary Chartier, associate dean at La Sierra School of Business and co-editor of the new book Markets Not Capitalism: Individualist Anarchism Against Bosses, Inequality, Corporate Power, and Structural Poverty.
Chartier, who co-edited the book along with Charles W. Johnson, sat down with Reason.tv's Zach Weissmueller to discuss why libertarians should stop embracing the word "capitalism," why there's reason to take the concerns of the political Left seriously, and why the economic system in the United States does not even begin to resemble a free market.
"If we want freedom, it's something to be achieved," says Chartier. "It's not a matter of celebrating what we have now. It's a matter of making something dramatically different and exciting happen."
Approximately 8 minutes.
Shot by Paul Detrick and Alex Manning; edited by Zach Weissmueller.
Visit Reason.tv for downloadable versions and subscribe to Reason.tv's YouTube Channel to receive automatic notification when new material goes live.
Highlights of Obama's 2013 Budget Plan: Flat spending, Higher Taxes
Go
here for the
full document (pdf). This is the budget "blueprint" or what the
president would like to see spent, raised, etc. for the fiscal year
that starts on October 1, 2012 and runs through September 2013.
The most important stuff - that is often maddeingly left out of articles about government spending - is the basic breakdown of overall outlays and revenues.
My first thought is that I'm glad to see spending (outlays) up by just a few nickels from last year: Obama is proposing spending $3.803 trillion dollars in the next year, up from $3.796 trillion this year. If we keep spending $3.8 trillion a year for the next 10 years, the budget would basically be balanced without having to change any current revenue streams (a.k.a. taxes). (For more on this, see "The 19 Percent Solution.")
Keeping 2013 spending flat still means the feds would be spending 23.3 percent of GDP, down as a percentage from the past two years but it's a number that would have been virtually unthinkable even five years ago.
For much of the post-World War II era, the feds rarely cracked the 20 percent-of-GDP figure when it came to spending (check table 1.3 here). Then came the 1970s and the 1980s and part of the 1990s. But between 1997 and 2005, spending didn't crack the 20 percent figure. The normalizing of such high levels of expenditures ain't good - government spending crowds out private spending and restricts the choices of supposedly free people. Big spending is especially bad when it's financed by debt, which is easy to get into and tough to get out of, both as an individual and as a country. As I've noted elsewhere, the best five-year-run of revenue (1997-2001) in the post-war era averaged receipts of 19.8 percent of GDP; the typical year came in around 18 percent. Look at the estimates above and you'll see that through 2022 even Obama is estimating nothing but big gaps between receipts and outlays. As a percentage of GDP, debt held by the public will be higher than it is right now. And these are under the rosiest projections imaginable.
In the budget, Obama proposes
increasing revenue through a variety of measures that are already
in play, including ending the current tax rates on high-income
earners (i.e. the Bush "tax cuts" that have been in place for a
decade), employing "the Buffet rule" (which will force millionaires
to pay effective rates of at least 30 percent), some changes in tax
expenditures, tax breaks, and eligibility requirements for some
other spending. None of that gets us close to balancing the budget
because, as the table above shows, spending goes up in each year.
And its increase outpaces the growth in receipts.
Yesterday, Obama chief of staff Jack Lew said that "the time for austerity is not today." He's right in at least one way: The time for austerity was yesterday. We've witnessed gratuitous increases in spending by the federal government for at least the past decade.
That was a mistake that will continue to have big consequences for years to come. But Obama's budget makes it clear that despite the president campaigning back in 2008 on a "net spending cut" and telling us all that we were going to have to stop spending like drunken sailors, we're not going to have to make any seriously tough choices for the next decade. Spending will continue above 22 percent of GDP for the foreseeable future with no way to pay for it, other than taxing future generations. Or getting lucky in Powerball.
Obama’s War on Whistle Blowers Could Send Investigative Journalism Back to the Stone Age
In November of last year the
Federal Trade Commission settled its suit against Facebook for
violating users' privacy. Among other things, the settlement
requires Facebook to undergo “privacy audits” for the next two
decades. There’s something deeply absurd about an agency under
President Obama hammering anyone for violating users’ privacy, much
less Facebook: This administration has snooped egregiously and
unlawfully since its earliest days; you’d think the FTC would be
too embarrassed to go after a site whose users give away
information voluntarily.
Take, for instance, the Obama administration's new tactics for catching and prosecuting whistle blowers. Gone are the days when reporters will be able to protect a source’s identity by refusing to comply with a subpoena. Hell, gone are the days when reporters will even be subpoened. By reading email, listening to phone conversations, and intercepting texts, security agencies already know who journalists are talking to, and what they’re talking about. The New York Times published a piece yesterday on the DOJ's increasing ability to prosecute with as little due process as possible. The standard is evolving in front of our eyes:
MR. ASHCROFT authorized a single subpoena for reporters' testimony or records in his four years in office, Mr. Corallo said. He would not say so, but that subpoena was probably the one that troubled Judge Sack in 2006. The reporters lost. In a dissent, Judge Sack said he feared for the future.
"Reporters might find themselves," he wrote, "as a matter of practical necessity, contacting sources the way I understand drug dealers to reach theirs - by use of clandestine cellphones and meeting in darkened doorways. Ordinary use of the telephone could become a threat to journalist and source alike. It is difficult to see in whose best interests such a regime would operate."
What he imagined may now be reality. Consider the most recent prosecution, of John C. Kiriakou, a former C.I.A. agent who is said to have disclosed classified information to journalists in 2008 about the capture and interrogation of an operative of Al Qaeda.
The criminal complaint in the case says it is based largely on "e-mails recovered from search warrants served on two e-mail accounts associated with Kiriakou."
Only one of the journalists involved in the Kiriakou case has been publicly identified: Scott Shane of The Times. A spokeswoman for The Times has said that neither the paper nor Mr. Shane had been contacted by investigators or had provided any information to them. The digital trail, it seems, was enough.
In a second case, against Jeffrey A. Sterling, a former C.I.A. officer accused of providing classified information to another Times reporter, James Risen, for a 2006 book, the government has been more aggressive, insisting that Mr. Risen must testify. He has refused to say anything about confidential matters, and Judge Leonie M. Brinkema of the Federal District Court in Alexandria, Va., has sided with him. She said there were other ways to prove the case against Mr. Sterling, including "numerous telephone records, e-mail messages, computer files and testimony that strongly indicates that Sterling was Risen's source."
The government has appealed that ruling. "The circumstantial evidence of guilt, though compelling, is simply not comparable to Risen's eyewitness testimony," prosecutors told the federal appeals court in Richmond, Va., in a brief filed last month.
The appeal in Mr. Risen's case may, at first blush, suggest that the new primacy of digital surveillance in leak investigations is overstated. But Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said the case was a vestige of another era.
She described a conference in June organized by the Aspen Institute that brought together lawyers, journalists and intelligence officials to talk about government secrecy. The ground rules, she said, were that the identities of those involved were to be kept confidential, but what was said could be reported.
"I was told in a rather cocky manner" by a national security representative, Ms. Dalglish recalled, that "the Risen subpoena is one of the last you'll see."
She continued, paraphrasing the official: "We don't need to ask who you're talking to. We know."
While rent seeking tech companies continue to partner with the Obama Administration (including one whose motto is "Do No Evil"), journalists and government employees will soon be reduced to "meeting in darkened doorways."
Obama Condemns Tax Loopholes While Calling for More
In today's
budget message, President Obama condemns "special
interest loopholes" and complains that "for too long we have
tolerated a tax system that's a complex, inefficient, and
loophole-riddled mess." The solution? More loopholes, including
"tax credits for businesses that hire unemployed workers," "tax
cuts...for small businesses," "tax credits to help
families make ends meet and afford to send their kids to
college," "extension of the American Opportunity Tax Cut,"
"tax incentives" for electric vehicles, "100 percent expensing on
the purchase of equipment" (including corporate
jets?), and "an extension of the research and experimentation
tax credit."
For more on this contradiction, see my February 1 column.
John Tierney on His New Book Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength
Are you an impulsive marshmallow eater?
Your success—or failure—in life may depend on how you
answer that question, says New York Times science
writer John Tierney. “The marshmallow test,” explains Tierney, was
an experiment “where 4-year-olds would be given a marshmallow. They
were told they could eat it but if they waited 15 minutes they
would get two marshmallows.…The kids who managed to resist the
marshmallow did much better in school, did much better in life.
That’s what really kicked off the modern self-control movement.”
From our March issue, Tierney discusses his new book on the
subject, Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human
Strength, with Managing Editor Katherine Mangu-Ward.
NY Times Columnist Joe Nocera Calls Out Obama on Keystone Pipeline
In
the past two weeks, New York Times columnist Joe Nocera
has published a couple of insightful columns about President
Obama's cave-in to the environmentalist lobby on the Keystone
pipeline. That pipeline would transport about million barrels of
oil a day from Canada to refineries in the U.S. Environmental
activists oppose the building the pipeline largely on the grounds
that the oil it transports will exacerbate man-made global warming.
The hope of activists is that stopping the pipeline will result in
keeping the petroleum derived from Canada's oil sands in the ground
forever. That won't happen
explains Nocera. Why? One word: China.
Instead of blithely assuming the United States would purchase its oil, Canada is now determined to find diverse buyers so it won’t be held hostage by American politics. Hence, the newfound willingness to do business with China. Canada has concluded that it simply can’t expect much from the United States, even on an issue that would seem to be vital to our own interests.
In fact, Canada's Prime Minister Stephen Harper was in China just last week to peddle his country's abundant energy supplies. As the National Post reported:
... with major U.S. media outlets covering his speech [in China], Harper also delivered a not-so-subtle reminder to the United States: if you don’t want Canadian oilsands crude, China is a waiting customer with a growing energy appetite....
Canada has an abundance of petroleum and is looking to “profoundly diversify” its trade relationships, Harper said, as well as deepen its economic cooperation with a booming China that needs resources to fuel its growth.
“We are an emerging energy superpower,” Harper told corporate leaders at the Canada-China business dinner in the city of 13 million people.
“We have abundant supplies of virtually every form of energy. And you know, we want to sell our energy to people who want to buy our energy. It’s that simple,” he said, to applause from the crowd....
Harper noted that virtually all of Canada’s energy exports currently go to the U.S. and that it’s increasingly clear the country’s commercial interests are best served by diversifying its energy markets.
In his second column, Nocera notes that his support of the Keystone pipeline has gotten him called a climate change "denier" in certain circles. As he notes, it is quite possible to believe that man-made global warming is a problem while simultaneously thinking that the trade-offs with regard to energy security and job creation currently favor buying oil from Canada. Nocera also points out:
You want to know another little secret about the tar sands? It’s already coming here, thanks to existing pipelines — and it is already doing us a great deal of good. The influx of Canadian oil is partly why our imports from OPEC are at their lowest level in nearly a decade. And because the crude from Canada is selling at a steep discount to Saudi Arabian crude, it is stabilizing the price at the pump.
Go here to read my column, The Miracle of Oil from Sand, about my industry junket to oil sands production facilities in northern Alberta earlier this year.
Reason Writers Around Town: Shikha Dalmia on Government Motors's Profit Targets in Bloomberg
General Motors released some very impressive profit targets for 2012. But does this mean that taxpayers will recover their “investment” in the company any time soon—or ever? Not a chance, notes Reason Foundation Senior Analyst in a column at Bloomberg. GM has many problems and is facing a very tough competitive environment going forward. But, she reports:
If GM manages to address all its issues, notes Sean McAlinden of the Center for Automotive Research, its share price might go up $40 to $45, leaving taxpayers still $5 billion to $8 billion in the red. But that’s under the best scenario. If stock prices remain at the current $25 level, the losses could mount up to $15 billion. That’s not counting the $15 billion in tax write-offs that GM got as part of the bankruptcy deal. All in all, taxpayers are facing somewhere from $20 billion to $30 billion in losses.
That’s not all the exposure that taxpayers will have going forward. The GM bailout has distorted the playing field so badly that its competitors are demanding their own handouts to even things out.
In fact, the taxpayer "investment" was designed not to be paid back.
Read the whole thing here.
"The Time for Austerity is Not Today" (And By Today, I Also Mean Tomorrow).
That's Jack Lew, White House chief of
staff, talking to David Gregory of Meet the Press.
Despite years of growing spending and growing deficits, this ain't the time to cut spending, says Lew, who offers up the hope that "Congress should take long-term deficit reduction seriously."
Obama's budget plan will be released sometime this morning. Check back here for analysis.
Return now to the thrilling yesteryear of January 2009, when the Wash Post titled a piece, "Stimulus Aside, Obama Vows Future Budget Restraint."
Tomorrow never comes, don't you know?
A.M. Links: Obama to Propose $4 Trillion in Deficit "Reductions," Romney's Record on Contraception Goes Under the Microscope, Greece Is on Fire
President Obama to propose
another
budget, pray that it passes. - Romney never objected to contraception mandates before.
- Athens burns as one in five employees of the Greek government learn they will have to find real jobs.
- Mitt Romney wins (absolutely meaningless) CPAC straw poll.
- Israel blames Iran for embassy attacks.
- Ahmadinejad's backers and Khamenei loyalists have their own spat.
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: "CPAC 2012: Occupy Protesters & Anti-gay Activists"
Steve Chapman on False Fears About a Nuclear Iran
The prevailing wisdom among policymakers on Iran
bears an eerie resemblance to the Iraq consensus of 2002. We and
the Israelis allegedly faced an intolerable peril from a rogue
state with weapons of mass destruction and a lust for aggression.
Fortunately, we were told, it was nothing that a short, sudden
military attack wouldn't solve. But in Iraq, writes Steve Chapman,
it turned out the solution was anything but quick or easy—and the
danger was vastly exaggerated. And in Iran? Ditto.
How Solar Power Can Pay Off Debts
Boulder City, Nevada has found a new way to
pay off its debt: solar power. The city is
home to not only Hoover Dam, but two of the largest solar power
plants in the United States, Copper Mountain Solar I (58 megawatts)
and Nevada Solar One (65MW). Both solar facilities are leased on
land owned by Boulder City in a specially designated "energy
zone."
Combined, these solar lease payments provide at least $12 million a year, increasing Boulder City's revenue by 50 percent. Since the leases last 20 years, Boulder City is expected to obtain $480 million in rent revenue. By comparison, in 2011, the city's total debt burden topped $96 million. If its spending levels don't increase (granted, a big if), the city could eventually eliminate its entire debt.
However, it's not always sunny in Nevada. Both solar facilities are pitiful sources of green jobs. Although they did create hundreds of temporary construction jobs, Nevada Solar One now employs only 30 people, while Copper Mountain Solar I has only 5 full-time positions.
Still, thanks to minimal regulations, both Copper Mountain Solar I and Nevada Solar One are expanding, while three Korean companies are finalizing plans for new solar projects. All together, these projects aim could soon have 1.4 GW of capacity, which could power 420,000 homes. (And unlike Germany, Nevada actually has sunlight.)
Since the land is owned locally by Boulder City, these firms can bypass the onerous Bureau of Land Management. One Korean investor explains:
The bureau's environmental impact studies take three or four years and the permits cost ($5 million to $6 million)...Boulder City did its due diligence in terms of who they do business with and the environmental impact, but the fact Boulder City doesn't require the environmental studies makes it a very preferable situation for Boulder City and the solar companies.
Unfortunately, this is rather rare in Nevada, since the federal government owns almost 85 percent of that state's land.
In addition, with no state corporate or individual income taxes, Nevada has the 2nd lowest tax burden in the United States, while its business tax climate ranks 3rd nationwide, according to the Tax Foundation. By comparison, neighboring California ranks 48th. In addition, Sempra Generation (the energy company behind Copper Mountain Solar I), was further enticed by state tax policies:
Incentives amounting to $12m came in the form of sales tax abatements for equipment purchases and a 55% property tax reduction for 20 years. These incentives were provided by the state officials.
Meanwhile, on the federal level, the devlopers of both projects were able to keep more of their money, thanks to the federal investment tax credit (ITC) program. This provides a 30 percent tax credit on a renewable energy project, which deducts the total amount of taxes owed to the federal government.
Of course, the ITC and other narrow tax policies still constitute a form of political favoritism. The best course of action would be to repeal all of these energy tax breaks and deductions, and lower rates for everyone. Speaking of which, this precisely is what Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) and Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-KS) hope to do with their new bill, the Energy Freedom & Economic Prosperity Act. Boulder City, Nevada is proof that low taxes, minimal red tape and federalism can boost a local economy.
Reason on solar power. For more on tax breaks, be sure to read A. Barton Hinkle on "The Difference Between a Tax Break and a Subsidy." And if you want to know more about municipal debt crises (as well as Portland microbrews and the Plastic People of the Universe), get a copy of The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What's Wrong with America.
Did the Drug War Make it Any Easier for Whitney Houston to Seek Help For Substance Abuse?
Pop
star Whitney Houston is dead at the age of 48. While the
official cause of death has not yet been announced, she had a long
history of drug problems and was in and out of rehab over the years
and it's likely that substance abuse played some role. As USA Today
reminds us
[In 2002]she did an interview with Diane Sawyer to promote her upcoming Just Whitney. She admitted using drugs in the highly watched TV interview, which included her infamous declaration, "Crack is cheap. I make too much money to ever smoke crack. Let's get that straight. OK? We don't do crack. We don't do that. Crack is wack."...
In a 2009 interview with Oprah Winfrey to promote I Look To You, Houston...confessed that she laced her marijuana with rock cocaine and revealed that she'd spent time in rehab and had undergone an intervention by her mother.
Here's a question for proponents of the drug war: Does prohibition - which demonstrably fails to keep illegal drugs out of the hands of people who want them - simply make it that much harder for people like Houston to admit and seek problems for their problems? Everyone knows that it's no easy thing for addicts or problem users of anything to admit they need help. Does criminalizing the behavior on top of everything else make it that much harder to for such people to seek the help they need?
Here's one of Houston's signature songs:
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