Weekly Hit & Run Archive 2012 June 8-31

Last week, my column, Union of Concerned Scientists Cooks the Books, Media Swallow It, dissected the artful way in which UCS analysts had used corporate giving data to imply that General Electric executives were climate change hypocrites, by allegedly supporting think tanks that endorse the scientific consensus on man-made global warming and others that are skeptical. In the UCS study the Reason Foundation, the non-profit that publishes this website, was specifically cited as garnering GE corporate support and was also accused of "misrepresenting" climate change science 

Setting that accusation aside, going through the figures it turns out that the Union analysts were counting $325 in corporate matching funds for employee donations to Reason as damning evidence of corporate climate change hypocrisy. I called up Francesca Grifo, the UCS' scientific intergrity officer, to ask her if the report was seriously counting those donations? She replied yes. By the way, it turns out that GE executives and employees had contributed $497,744 to the non-skeptical think tanks. To get the rest of the story read my column.

Yesterday afternoon, Dr. Grifo sent an email correcting the record with regard to General Electric. The relevant portions are below:

I wanted to let you know that we’ve clarified one of the findings in our report, “A Climate of Corporate Control”. 

As you pointed out, originally, we counted funds General Electric gave to several non-profit groups through an employee matching gift program. These matching gift programs allow individual employees to choose where their money (and GE’s matching money) go. By contrast, funds from GE and its corporate foundation are directed by company executives. Our updated report removes the matching gifts, which affects our analysis of which climate-engaged groups GE ultimately gave to. We also reviewed the rest of the data related to non-profit group support and found no further need for clarification beyond GE.

We now conclude that GE has only funded non-profit groups that support climate science. Previously, we had concluded they were funding groups that misrepresent climate science, too. However, GE has still taken contradictory actions on climate change overall, including its support for Proposition 23 in California and its membership in and board service to various trade organizations that work against one another on climate change. ...

We have alerted reporters who covered this aspect of our findings and provided them with updated information as well. We will post a blog with a fuller explanation of the update later today.

I have added this email as an update to the column and I say: Well done. The corrected UCS report can be found here.

However, I ended my original column with the observation....

...that the Union of Concerned Scientists asserts in this study that a hallmark of misrepresenting science is "emphasizing unknowns" while simultaneously "ignoring what is known." Yet this seems to be precisely the strategy that the UCS pursues in its campaign against biotech crops. Perhaps Dr. Grifo, as the Union’s scientific integrity officer, could usefully spend some time getting the UCS to accept that scientific consensus.

So the question remains: What about getting the UCS to stop its denialism with to the scientific consensus with regard to biotech crops?

New Zealand's classical-liberal/libertarian ACT Party, founded by people who introduced free-market ideas to a once-statist country and dragged it back from the brink, is hanging on by its fingernails. Always a smaller party after its founders left their original home in the Labour Party (yes, really), ACT only has one seat left in parliament. But if ACT helped to bring libertarianism to New Zealand, it also brought libertarians into government — which helped turn at least one of them into an anarchist.

Rodney Hide, who led ACT from 2004 to 2011, is now a columnist for the New Zealand Herald, and his inaugural column for the paper, on April 29, revealed some details about his life — and about his take-away impressions of politics.

I started in Parliament a libertarian. That means I wanted government nice and small and confined to just a few keys tasks such as protecting us from the thugs and bullies.

I ended up an anarchist. I have concluded we would do better with no government at all. New Zealand before 1840 had some downsides. But the downsides were small beer compared to the social and economic devastation wrought by big, bloated and out-of-control bureaucracy.

I reckon we could fix the down sides of no government without having to give a small bunch of people enormous power over the rest of us. I have no doubt I was the first Anarcho Government Minister. It is a great contradiction.

By the way, you have to have a soft spot for a country where a former high-profile politician turned anarchist can run into the Prime Minister while sneaking a shower in the basement of the parliament building.

And wouldn't it be encouraging if more politicians took away the same lessons from government that Hide learned?

Following some lengthy, in-depth investigative work, USA Today has discovered more than 60 North Carolina men serving federal sentences for violating gun laws it turns out they didn’t actually violate:

The legal issues underlying their situation are complicated, and are unique to North Carolina. But the bottom line is that each of them went to prison for breaking a law that makes it a federal crime for convicted felons to possess a gun. The problem is that none of them had criminal records serious enough to make them felons under federal law.

Still, the Justice Department has not attempted to identify the men, has made no effort to notify them, and, in a few cases in which the men have come forward on their own, has argued in court that they should not be released.

Justice Department officials said it is not their job to notify prisoners that they might be incarcerated for something that they now concede is not a crime. And although they have agreed in court filings that the men are innocent, they said they must still comply with federal laws that put strict limits on when and how people can challenge their convictions in court.

"We can't be outcome driven," said Anne Tompkins, the U.S. attorney in Charlotte. "We've got to make sure we follow the law, and people should want us to do that." She said her office is "looking diligently for ways, within the confines of the law, to recommend relief for defendants who are legally innocent."

Hat tip to Radley Balko, who tweeted that horrifying, eye-catching quote from Tompkins. Of course, prosecutors are never “outcome driven” when they’re trying to throw defendants into prison, are they?

North Carolina’s unusual sentencing system is partly the cause of the problem. In order to try to standardize a federal law forbidding gun ownership by felons, the U.S. government needed to craft legislation that accounted for different states’ definitions of felonies. They settled on a law that made it illegal for a person to own a gun if they commit a crime that could have landed them a year or more of prison time:

Figuring out who fits that definition in North Carolina is not as simple as it sounds. In 1993, state lawmakers adopted a unique system called "structured sentencing" that changes the maximum prison term for a crime, based on the record of the person who committed it. People with relatively short criminal records who commit crimes such as distributing cocaine and writing bad checks face no more than a few months in jail; people with more extensive records face much longer sentences.

For years, federal courts in North Carolina said that did not matter. The courts said, in effect: If someone with a long record could have gone to prison for more than a year for the crime, then everyone who committed that crime is a felon, and all of them are legally barred from possessing a gun.

Last year, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit said federal courts (including itself) had been getting the law wrong. Only people who could have actually faced more than a year in prison for their crimes qualify as felons under federal law.

Read through the story for the case of Terrell McCullum, a minor criminal who ended up in federal prison for possessing a firearm. Even his own lawyers thought he had broken the law due to a previous conviction for gun theft. (He’s not exactly the most sympathetic case. After a supervised release, he ended up back in jail for robbery and can probably no longer be considered a minor criminal.)

Whether McCullum — or the dozens of others like him — can go home depends on federal laws that put strict limits on when and how people who have already been convicted of a crime can come back to court to plead their innocence.

Those laws let prisoners challenge their convictions if they uncover new evidence, or if the U.S. Supreme Court limits the sweep of a criminal law. But none of the exceptions is a clear fit, meaning that, innocent or not, they may not be able to get into court at all. Federal courts have so far split on whether they can even hear the prisoners' cases.

So apparently misapplying the law in the first place doesn’t count as “new evidence.”

• Claims for jobless benefits climbed last week by 6,000 to 386,000 as the private sector does "just fine."  The previous week's claims were revised upwards, too, which is, it seems, even finer.
• Now that meddling in the Middle East is becoming a bit old-hat, the U.S. military is expanding its horizons with intelligence operations and a string of small Special Operations bases in Africa.
• California's budget woes are attracting municipal-bond investors who see soaring yields as a attractive counter to the possibility that the state with the lowest S&P rating just won't be able to pay its debts. If state lawmakers can't hammer out a deal to close the deficit by tomorrow, they risk losing pay.
• With Spain and Italy competing to be the next European economy to go tits-up, Germany is showing signs of rescue fatigue, all adding up to signs that the euro project may be ending.
• The Arab Spring is looking a little Autumn-y as Egypt's Supreme Court rules last year's parliamentary elections unconstitutional and dissolves the body. The military claims full power.
• The University of Cincinnati's "free speech zone," which rendered the rest of the campus unfriendly to the stuff, is no more. U.S. District Judge Timothy Black said the policy is a clear violation of students’ free speech rights. The decision may have implications for college speech codeas around the country.
• In the latest federal tactic for bypassing state medical-marijuana laws, all four U.S. attorneys in California are threatening landlords with the loss of their property if they permit marijuana dispensaries to operate. The technique is seen as a low-profile means of enforcing an increasingly unpopular policy.
• Former Minnesota Governor — and, more importantly, "Predator" star — Jesse Ventura's endorsement of Gary Johnson's presidential candidacy was edited out of online videos by CNN.

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The United States has intelligence operations, often run through the military, throughout the African continent, according to the Washington Post, which “pieced together descriptions of the surveillance network by examining references to it in unclassified military reports, U.S. government contracting documents and diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks, the anti-secrecy group. Further details were provided by interviews with American and African officials, as well as military contractors.”

The operations are run largely out of African military bases and small civilian airports, with refueling often occurring “on isolated airstrips favored by African bush pilots, extending their effective flight range by thousands of miles.” While some Predator and Reaper drones are used (likely largely in Somalia), most of the surveillance planes are manned and disguised as civilian aircraft, and the Post reports a central hub of the operations in Ougadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso. America established its presence there in 2007 for “medical evacuation and logistics requirements.” Other bases are in Mauritania, Djibouti (where more than 200 Marines are based for forward operations in the Middle East), Uganda (where a hundred U.S. troops are hunting the war criminal Joseph Kony), Ethiopia, Kenya and the Seychelles. The U.S. hopes to expand its facilities there and open new ones elsewhere.

The Bank of England will launch two stimulus packages amid the worsening economic situation in Europe and just two days before the Greek election. The packages will take the form of cheap credit for banks. The hope is that such measures will boost lending and insulate the U.K from the potential fallout that could follow Sunday’s election in Greece.

The British government has tried similar measures before. Hundreds of billions of pounds have already been injected in the economy via the quantitative easing program. The new plans differ in that the credit will now be dependent on banks lending the credit they receive.

Mervyn King, the governor of the Bank of England, has resisted such measures for some time. However, the situation in Europe and the U.K’s return to recession has panicked policy makers into the move.

George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, said that the packages will “inject confidence” into the financial system. When the plan is officially announced tomorrow we will see how the markets respond.

The U.K is preemptively acting ahead of the Greek elections that will almost certainly deliver bad news for the eurozone. It would not be surprising if the U.S. government were to undertake similar measures. Commenting on the announcement David Enrich, Jason Douglas, and Ainsley Thomson writing for the Wall Street Journal said:

The new series of measures announced Thursday appears to be taken partly from playbooks designed by European and U.S. central bankers. 

And:

The coordinated announcement by Messrs. Osborne and King signals that, with the crisis threatening to escalate, the Treasury and Bank of England are trying to work in lockstep.

Last week Obama and Cameron addressed the need for swift action on the eurozone and "agreed on the need for an immediate plan to tackle the crisis and to restore market confidence, as well as a longer-term strategy to secure a strong single currency". We should not be surprised when a new round of stimulus packages are announced or proposed by the Treasury Department in the coming days and weeks.

Asked what sort of health reforms he supported, Wisconsin Republican Gov. Scott Walker said he thought guaranteed issue, a rule which requires health insurers to sell to all comers and is a key part of ObamaCare, was a good thing at the state level. He also said that states could consider the possibility of imposing a health insurance mandate. Via TPM:

“Whether it’s done through the Affordable Care Act or done separate from that with Congress and the states — I think that things that allow you to go over state lines, certain things in terms of guaranteed issue and things of that nature,” Walker said at a breakfast in Washington, D.C. hosted by the Christian Science Monitor. “I think there are good elements. I just don’t think you need the federal government to do most of those things.”

Walker said that it was possible to keep “guaranteed issue,” in which patients are guaranteed the ability to purchase coverage, but without a national requirement that Americans maintain health insurance.

“Certainly not a federal mandate,” Walker. “I think those are debates people can have at the state level.”

Is it a problem that Walker is endorsing state-driven versions of the president’s health law? Yes. But the bigger problem is that the debates Walker imagines people having are debates that Republicans haven’t really had — at the state level, at the federal level, or anywhere outside of a few think tank panels. And awkward comments like Walker’s are the result.

Let’s get a couple things out of the way: Regardless of whether or not a state-level insurance mandate is an objectionable policy or a bad idea, unlike ObamaCare’s federal mandate it is not an obvious constitutional problem. That’s why the Massachusetts mandate that GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney fought for and signed into law is not threatened by any Supreme Court ruling against ObamaCare. And state-level mandates have the distinct advantage of federalism: A world in which some states choose to mandate health insurance coverage, and in which the details of the mandate vary by state, is more flexible and diverse than one in which the federal government forces the same policy on residents of every state.

But Walker’s comments yet another reminder that the basic shape of ObamaCare — controls on the insurance market, mandatory purchase of insurance, and subsidies for private insurance delivered through government-run exchanges — was developed by Republicans and passed as RomneyCare by the party’s presidential nominee. And they show that GOP officials, a number of whom have spent the last month or so trying to reassure people that of course they don't want to throw out the good parts of ObamaCare, haven’t moved beyond those ideas except to oppose President Obama’s federal version of them.

It remains a serious problem for the Republican party that a national figure like Walker, who has opposed the implementation of ObamaCare in his own state, doesn’t have much in the way of answers about how to handle health policy except to endorse state-level versions of the plan that the GOP bitterly opposes at the national level. 

Sure, we'd still have some wretched villainy from the private sector, but it rarely has the resources or will to devote to life-destruction on the level of this story of the theft of Shannon County, Missouri's, Camp Zoe, as told by William Grigg:

Entrepreneur and musician James Tebeau, whose Camp Zoe concert venue was one of Shannon County, Missouri’s largest employers, has accepted a plea agreement in which he will forfeit his 350 acre property and serve a prison sentence for “maintaining a drug-involved premises.”

Tebeau played bass in an ensemble called the Schwag Band and hosted a number of concert events including the annual “Schwagstock” festival. The agreement stipulates that Tebeau neither participated in drug sales, nor did he profit from them. Yet he faces a prison term of two and a half years and the loss of his property.

According to the Feds, Tebeau’s crime was to permit the sale of marijuana, LDS and mushrooms, while instructing employees to evict people who sold heroin, cocaine, crack, meth, and nitrous oxide. However, the same can be said of the Missouri State Highway Patrol, which abetted the sale of many controlled substances for four years following an August 2006 arrest of two people at the camp for selling hallucinogenic mushrooms. Over that four-year period, informants employed by the State Police conducted hundreds of undercover purchases, including many of the hard drugs Tebeau was seeking to ban from his premises.

Why do we hire people to sell buy drugs to fuck up people's lives for selling drugs? It's the only way to do it, alas, since people involved in a mutually desired trade of drugs for money usually aren't going to turn themselves in....

Besides, it's all thoughtcrime anyway. Selling the right drugs with the right permission is cool, while using certain words marks one as guilty:

The “Justice” Department’s press release (which was reproduced nearly verbatim by the few media outlets that covered the story) made a point of noting that Tebeau “was aware that the term `schwag’ was a slang term for low-grade marijuana and he purposely adopted that name for his music festivals and band.” If this is evidence of evil intent, the Feds should begin criminal proceedings against the Doobie Brothers and the management of any venue where that classic rock band performs.

Be of warm heart, liberals, because it's true: it takes a village to raze a peaceful village:

At about 7:30 a.m. on November 1, 2010 – a few hours after the finale of the annual “Spookstock” music festival -- a multi-jurisdictional task forceinvaded Camp Zoe. According to one eyewitness, "Every letter of the alphabet was represented…. There were people from the DEA, the IRS, the Highway Patrol, from Homeland Security, the local police and country Sheriff's Office. There was a group from the Rolla Police Department, which is two counties away from here." 

One camp staffer was briefly stopped by police on nearby Highway 19 as he was driving his children to school. He was separated from his wife and children at the point of an M-16 rifle. The detainee was taken into the camp and briefly questioned before being released.

Camp Zoe was placed under lock-down while the raiders rummaged through every corner of the campground, intimidating staff and visitors and seizing personal items (including cash). As this was going on another federal contingent was dispatched to clean out the personal and business accounts of Jimmy Tebeau, the musician and entrepreneur who owns and operates the campground.

The Feds "just siphoned away all of his money, and then filed a civil asset forfeiture lawsuit seeking to seize his property," protests attorney Dan Viets, who has volunteered to represent Tebeau. "This would mean that he wouldn't have the money needed to fight the seizure in court." The Feds clearly sought to confiscate Camp Zoe from the beginning, and they took exceptional care to guarantee that Tebeau couldn't mount an effective defense of his property.

All's well that ends well: peaceful entrepreneur who enriched many lives through his hiring and the services he provided destitute and in jail, and the government--without whom we would have enjoyed none of this, at our expense--has a bunch more cash and land. They might need it to launch the next vital life-destroying assault on the innocent.

From a longer Grigg report on the Camp Zoe case:

"If they succeed in seizing Camp Zoe, we can expect the same tactics to be used against music venues nation-wide," Dan Viets told Pro Libertate. "This is a major test case that is being watched very carefully by people who hold music festivals and other large events, and who might find their property and profits subject to seizure without even being accused of a crime, let alone convicted of one."

Reason archives on asset forefeiture.

Economist David Henderson writes at The Freeman about the vital importance of liberalizing immigration policy to make a richer, better world. Highlights:

Relaxing immigration laws is the most pro-growth measure the rich countries’ governments could take. Not only would it enhance well-being in the rich countries, but it would also be the most effective antipoverty measure any wealthy country’s government could take....

There is copious evidence that people in poor countries—from engineers down to unskilled laborers—could earn three to ten times as much in the United States as they do in their home countries. If they were allowed to come to the United States, they would clearly benefit themselves. So, for example, there are people near starvation in Sudan, Haiti, and Cambodia who in the United States would earn what many of us would regard as a pittance but many of them would regard as riches....

When an American buys a service from an immigrant, it is not just the immigrant who gains. The American gains too, or else he wouldn’t have bought the service. Boston University economist Patricia Cortes, in a study published in the Journal of Political Economy, found that cities with larger influxes of low-skilled immigrants had lower prices for labor-intensive services such as dry cleaning, childcare, housework, and gardening. In a later study, Cortes and coauthor Jose Tessa found that these low-price services allowed Americans, especially women, to spend more hours working in high-skilled, high-paying jobs.

The gains from eliminating barriers to immigration are huge. In a recent article in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, economist Michael Clemens finds that getting rid of all immigration restrictions worldwide would approximately double world GDP.....

Still, relaxing immigration laws doesn't get nearly the respect of newer, sexier, less effective means of helping the non-American poor:

Immigration reform would dwarf any other measure economists have considered to help people in poor countries. Take microcredit, the lending of small amounts to small businesses. In his recent book, Borderless Economics, Robert Guest notes Harvard University economist Lant Pritchett’s observation that the average gain from a lifetime of microcredit in Bangladesh, such as that provided by Nobel Peace Prize winner Mohammed Yunus’s Grameen Bank, is about the same as the gain from eight weeks working in the United States. Asks Pritchett, “If I get 3,000 Bangladeshi workers into the US, do I get the Nobel Peace Prize?”

Zing!

Reason's classic 2006 cover story "Immigration Now, Immigration Tomorrow, Immigration Forever."

James Sherk of the Heritage Foundation and Todd Zywicki of the Mercatus Center have a fascinating analysis in the Wall Street Journal today demonstrating that Obama administration’s claims that the auto bailout is a “success” is mendacious bullshit. They note that had the administration given auto unions the same treatment as other equivalent creditors, as it would have been required to do in a standard bankruptcy court, taxpayers right now would have been  $3.5 billion in the black instead of $23 billion in the red.

They note:

 A bedrock principle of bankruptcy law is that creditors with similar claims priority receive equal treatment. If you owe $1,000 each on two credit cards, in bankruptcy you cannot choose to pay $900 to Citi and only $200 to Chase. Each of the creditors is entitled to an equal percentage recovery.

In the auto bankruptcies, however, the administration gave the unsecured claims of VEBA [union pension fund] much higher priority than those of other unsecured creditors, such as suppliers and unsecured bondholders.

What’s more:

 The same thing happened at Chrysler, only to a greater degree. Chrysler's junior creditors recovered none of their $7 billion in claims. In normal bankruptcy proceedings, the UAW would have also collected nothing. Instead it walked away owning almost half of new Chrysler and a $4.6 billion promissory note earning 9% interest.

And:

The UAW did accept sharp pay cuts for new hires. But they only made modest concessions for their existing members, like eliminating the much-maligned Jobs Bank that paid workers even when they were laid off.

As a result, GM still has higher labor costs ($56 an hour) than any of its competitors. Indeed, Steven Rattner, the Obama administration's former "car czar," told the Detroit Economic Club last December, "We should have asked the UAW to do a bit more. We did not ask any UAW member to take a cut in their pay."

Had bankruptcy brought GM compensation in line with its competitors' (approximately $47 an hour), we estimate the resulting savings would have increased the value of the taxpayers' stake in GM by $4.1 billion. This would still leave UAW members making 40% more than the average American manufacturing worker.

Their bottomline?

The funds diverted to the UAW account for the taxpayers' entire net loss.

Read and weep!

ObamaCare, to paraphrase Joe Biden, is still a big flippin’ deal — especially for the tax authorities at the Internal Revenue Service. A Government Accountability Office report on IRS efforts to manage its $881 million implementation of the law opens by describing ObamaCare as “a massive undertaking that involves 47 statutory provisions and extensive coordination across not only IRS, but multiple agencies and external partners.” That sounds exciting! 

Under the law, the IRS is expected to do a lot of the heavy bureaucratic lifting, especially when it comes to the law’s health insurance exchanges, where tax credits will be doled out based on income. That’s no small task. “To support the exchanges,” the GAO report notes, “IRS must modify existing or design new IT systems that are capable of transmitting data to and from HHS, help HHS craft eligibility determinations and related definitions, and engage in new interagency coordination, such as with HHS and the Department of Labor.”

It’s a Rube Goldberg, in other words, and the IRS is one of the central components. The GAO gives the IRS so-so marks for its work thus far: Some of its risk mitigation goals have been checked off, for example, but GAO also notes that the tax agency has only "minimally met" its goal of producing "credible" cost estimates for implementation work. 

Yet this doesn't tell the whole story. As we already know, the great and powerful government machine imagined by the legislators who authored the bill turns out to be easier to imagine than to build. A recent study warned that under the most likely methods of calculating the law’s insurance subsidies, large numbers of people were likely to end up being given the wrong credits. And the network infrastructure necessary to run the exchanges is more of a headache than expected. (Who could have imagined that designing a large-scale IT project intended to instantly assess the personal data of millions of Americans and coordinating it across multiple state and federal government entities would turn out to be a mess?)

ObamaCare represents a sort of all-hands-on-deck moment for America’s technocrats and government administrators — a challenge for everyone from the chin-stroking policy wonks to the administration messaging operations to the federal and state worker bees tasked with carrying out the directives and assembling the individual parts. But even forgetting the legal and political barriers to the law, it’s not at all clear that they’ll be able to pull it off. 

Federalism is often associated with conservatives and libertarians, but on issues ranging from gay rights to medical marijuana, writes Senior Editor Jacob Sullum, federalism can advance progressive causes. Like representative democracy or the federal government’s “checks and balances,” federalism is a means to an end: By keeping most political decisions at the state and local levels, it promotes responsiveness, diversity, innovation, and competition among jurisdictions. And precisely because federalism is useful to people with different political agendas, Sullum observes, it should be possible to strike a deal: I will not use the federal government to interfere with your local policy choices if you grant me the same leeway.

A California epidemiologist who lost his job with UCLA not long after challenging the science behind claims that diesel pollution was responsible for 2,000 deaths a year in the state is suing to get his job back.

The American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ) announced today it had filed suit Wednesday in Los Angeles against UCLA officials for violating Dr. James Enstrom’s constitutional rights:

"The facts of this case are astounding," said David French, Senior Counsel of the ACLJ. "UCLA terminated a professor after 35 years of service simply because he exposed the truth about an activist scientific agenda that was not only based in fraud but violated California law for the sake of imposing expensive new environmental regulations on California businesses.  UCLA's actions were so extreme that its own Academic Freedom Committee unanimously expressed its concern about the case."

Dr. Enstrom, a research professor in UCLA's Department of Environmental Health Sciences, published important peer-reviewed research demonstrating that fine particulate matter does not kill Californians.  Also, Dr. Enstrom assembled detailed evidence that contends powerful UC professors and others have systematically exaggerated the adverse health effects of diesel particulate matter in California, knowing full well that these exaggerations would be used by the California Air Resources Board (CARB) to justify draconian diesel vehicle regulations in California.  In addition, the complaint argues that he exposed the fact that the lead author of the key CARB Report used to justify the diesel regulations did not have the UC Davis Ph.D. degree that he claimed.  Instead, according to the suit, this “scientist” bought a fake Ph.D. for $1,000 from a fictional "Thornhill University."

Finally, Dr. Enstrom discovered that several activist members of the CARB Scientific Review Panel on Toxic Air Contaminants have exceeded the legislatively mandated three-year term limits by decades. The suit contends that shortly after Dr. Enstrom revealed this systematic wrongdoing, UCLA not only issued a notice of termination, it denied him any compensation for his work by systematically and wrongfully looting his research fund accounts.  Dr. Enstrom worked for more than a year without pay as he in good faith appealed his wrongful termination using UCLA procedures.  Ironically enough, the fake "scientist" was only suspended for his misconduct while Dr. Enstrom was terminated for telling the truth.

The legally inclined can read the lawsuit here [pdf].

Reason.tv interviewed Dr. Enstrom in 2011 and detailed the controversy, as well as the economic disaster California truckers face in the wake of CARB’s diesel guidelines.

On Tuesday, the World Health Organization waded into the subject matter, releasing a study declaring diesel fumes a carcinogen akin to second-hand smoke, so it’s possible truckers in other states (or countries) may soon be fighting this fight as well.

Hat tip to Adam Kissel of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) for the Twitter tip. FIRE has been heavily involved in both covering and assisting Enstrom’s fight.

UPDATE: UCLA has posted their response here.

"I think there's every reason to believe that Seattle will be the capital of social entrepreneurship in the next ten years," says Brian Howe, an adjunct professor at Seattle School of Law and founder of Hub Seattle , which rents space to social entrepreneurs.

Reason.tv sat down with Howe and Michael "Luni" Libes, a "serial entrepreneur" who has helped build five technology start-ups, to talk about #SocEnt Weekendan an event modeled on the very popular Startup Weekend that endeavors to offer an environment for entrepreneurs to collaborate and bring their ideas to fruition.

Libes and Howe discussed the idea of the "social enterprise," which involves using for-profit enterprise to solve social problems.

"Business men and women think about, 'How am I going to take this small thing and create leverage? How is this going to scale?'" said Howe.

 About 5 minutes. Interview by Zach Weissmueller. Filmed and Edited by Weissmueller.

Visit Reason.tv for downloadable versions and subscribe to Reason.tv's YouTube channel to receive automatic notifications when new material goes live. 

Contrary to what some Republicans say, we didn't have a free medical market before Obama came to power. We had a system that limited competition through occupational licensing, FDA rules and other government intrusions, while stimulating demand through tax-favored employer-based "insurance," Medicare and Medicaid. If we want affordable and cutting-edge health care, there's only one approach that will work: open competition. That means eliminating both bureaucratic obstacles and corporate privileges. Only free markets can give us innovation at the lowest possible cost.

CNN reports:

Egypt's highest court declared the parliament invalid Thursday, and the country's interim military rulers promptly declared full legislative authority, triggering a new level of chaos and confusion in the country's leadership.

The Supreme Constitutional Court's ruling means that parliament must be dissolved, state TV reported....

The court found that all articles making up the law that regulated parliamentary elections are invalid, said Showee Elsayed, a constitutional lawyer.

Parliament had been in session for just over four months. It was dominated by Islamists, a group long viewed with suspicion by the military.

The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, in control of the country since Mubarak's ouster, announced that it now has full legislative power and will announce a 100-person assembly that will write the country's new constitution by Friday.

Elsewhere in Reason: In the last days of the Hosni Mubarak regime, I warned what could happen if the military co-opted the revolution and kept control of the country.

CORRECTION: I need my eyes checked. The Obama infoboxes are still there, but they appear to have been redesigned to look less like part of the other presidents' biographies. My apologies for the temporary blindness.

***

It appears as though the White House has decided that maybe the official biographies of other presidents are not the best place to campaign for President Barack Obama’s reelection.

In May, several folks took note that the White House’s web site had quietly added USA Today-style factoids promoting Obama’s accomplishments at the bottom of the biographies of other presidents, Democrat and Republican alike. The discovery caused a small flurry of negative publicity and a parody Tumblr by the GOP. (Which, disappointingly, they did not sustain. They finally did something actually funny and sharp with viral potential, but they couldn’t stick with it.)

But as quietly as the Obama boasts appeared, they have been removed. The bullet points are now gone from all the biographies on the White House’s website. But that’s okay; there appear to be plenty of other tone-deaf campaigns coming out of the Obama administration, like asking us to praise our king wish Daddy Obama a happy Father’s Day.

When White House press secretary Jay Carney stood up in front of reporters and said, "Do not buy into the B.S. that you hear about spending and fiscal constraint with regard to this administration," Steve Chapman naturally assumed someone would come out with a hook and drag him away before sending him on a long vacation to recover from whatever was addling his mind. Fools rush in where angels fear to tread, and Carney's attempt at celebrating the administration's budget record—not excusing, mind you, but celebrating—amounted to climbing the fence into the lion enclosure at the zoo.

President Obama was only regurgitating his party’s conventional wisdom when he remarked that the private sector was doing just “fine” -- but the public sector needed stimulating to create jobs and boost economic growth. Why he should get lampooned for something Harry Reid and others have said a million times is unclear. But repetition does not make a stupid idea less stupid, suggests Reason Foundation Senior Analyst Shikha Dalmia in her latest column at The Daily. Obama’s statement “manages to pack in virtually every 'progressive' economic fallacy — and then some,” she writes:

For starters, his claim that private-sector job growth is hunky-dory is hooey. It is true that private companies have added 4.3 million jobs since February 2010. However, this represents a 2.8 percent rate of job growth compared to the 8 percent average after previous recoveries — despite (or perhaps because of) $800 billion in stimulus spending.

But instead of asking whether the effects of his own policies — like uncertainty over the extension of the Bush tax cuts and the compliance costs of Obamacare — might be choking the private sector, Obama wants to apply his stimulus therapy to the public sector. This won’t produce overall growth. Indeed, more government spending means a shrinking private sector, and there are three main reasons why.

 Go here to find out what they are.

• Democrats are starting to fear President Obama may lose. Maybe they didn’t see all the polls showing Obama tied with Mitt Romney, Ron Paul and generic Republican. Still, it’s only June. Except the perception (gut feeling?) looks like it’s cutting into fundraising.
• An NYPD cop was indicted in the killing of Ramarley Graham. Officer Richard Haste shot Graham as the teenager was flushing the small amount of marijuana he was chased into his grandmother’s house for down the toilet. He faces charges of first and second degree manslaughter. Neighbors, meanwhile, are suing the city for trauma. Victory in the drug war is just around the corner!
• Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, the former president of Tunisia, was sentenced to life in prison for suppressing protests during the Arab Spring, and I guess not for all the other shitty things he did? Irrespective, the decision was made in abstenia, the former dictator is in Saudi Arabia.
• Greeks are stocking up on canned food ahead of an election between their tweedle dee, tweedle dum parties. Many expect Greece will exit the eurozone no matter the results of Sunday’s election.
• Tropical hydrocarbon lakes were found on Saturn’s moon Titan in new images sent by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft.
• The Human Microbiome Project released findings of its census of microbes like bacteria, viruses and amoeba that live in the human body.
• Matt Cain pitched the San Francisco Giants' first perfect game, striking out 14 along the way.

Don’t forget to sign up for Reason’s daily AM/PM updates for more content.

New on Reason.TV: Ben Huh on Culture, Morals and Politics of the Internet

Today's New York Times has a front-page story by James B. Stewart called "How Broccoli Landed on the Supreme Court Menu," which discusses the unlikely route that the "broccoli mandate" has taken as a central argument again President Obama's health-care reform, now under review by the Supreme Court. (A decision is expected any day now.)

The vegetable trail leads backward through conservative media and pundits. Before reaching the Supreme Court, vegetables were cited by a federal judge in Florida with a libertarian streak; in an Internet video financed by libertarian and ultraconservative backers; at a Congressional hearing by a Republican senator; and an op-ed column by David B. Rivkin Jr., a libertarian lawyer whose family emigrated from the former Soviet Union when he was 10....

[A 2010 exchange between Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) and Supreme Court nominee Elana Kagan] caught the attention of Austin Bragg, 33, a producer for Reason TV. He proposed a video to his editor, Nick Gillespie. Reason TV and its magazine and Internet outlets are subsidiaries of theReason Foundation, a libertarian research organization whose largest donors are the David H. Koch Charitable Foundation ($1,522,212) and the Sarah Scaife Foundation ($2,016,000), according to its most recent disclosures. Both finance conservative and libertarian causes....

The video, “Wheat, Weed and Obamacare: How the Commerce Clause Made Congress All-Powerful,” was shown on YouTube and the Reason Web site in August 2010. “Legal titans John Eastman and Erwin Chemerinsky slug it out to determine whether or not Congress has been abusing the commerce clause,” Reason’s Web site proclaimed. Professor Eastman, a conservative, teaches at Chapman University in Orange, Calif., and clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas of the Supreme Court. He is also chairman of the National Organization for Marriage, which opposes gay marriage. Professor Chemerinsky, a liberal, is dean of the law school at the University of California, Irvine.

In the Reason video, Professor Chemerinsky got the worst of it. The clip shows Senator Coburn asking Ms. Kagan about eating vegetables and fruits, and cuts to Professor Chemerinsky. He appears to struggle with the question of limits to Congressional power, saying at one point, “Congress can force economic transactions,” and at another, “power can be used in silly ways and the Constitution isn’t our protector.” Professor Eastman comes off better, as he questions whether Americans want “an unlimited, amorphous government that can make us do whatever it wants?”

For Mr. Gillespie, the video had the desired effect. “Based on that video, Chemerinsky is the best screen villain since Hannibal Lecter,” Mr. Gillespie said. “But he got his chance to make his case.”

Read the whole thing here.

And check out the latest is of Reason print magazine, which asks in a great cover package (click on to go to Table of Contents):

The Libertarian Futurist Society, which gives out the annual Prometheus Award for the best libertarian-themed science fiction, is putting the back issues of its newsletter Prometheus online. You can see what they've posted so far here, along with an index of the issues they haven't uploaded yet. Several Reason contributors have articles in the collection, including yours truly.

Republicans and Democrats in Congress have blasted the White House for leaking to The New York Times and others the existence of President Obama's secret kill list and his cyber-warfare against Iran. According to those doing the blasting, the leaks were made in order to bolster the president's war-on-terror credentials with voters. So, asks Judge Andrew Napolitano, who has violated the Constitution and federal law, who has caused more harm and who has performed more of a disservice to the nation: those who leaked the truth to the media, or the president, who caused death and destruction among those he hates and fears?

When Sabrina Grant read the email from a teacher's aide at Woodrow Wilson Elementary School in Framingham, Massachusetts, she was furious. The aide said Grant's 10-year-old autistic son kept playing with one of his loose baby teeth. The aide added it was very distracting, so they yanked the tooth out. Grant got even even angrier when her son got home. She found the loose tooth was still in his mouth, but a molar next to it was missing.

Brickbat Archive

Writing at The Atlantic Wire, Elspeth Reeve suggests that marijuana reform measures on several state ballots this fall could help Barack Obama win re-election by drawing young voters to the polls. If that happens, the headline says, "legalizing weed" could be "Obama's secret weapon." Well, not so secret anymore, now that people are writing about it. In any case, Reeve warns, "past attempts to bong the vote have been disappointing, in part because stoners aren't the group anyone would most count on to bother filling out a ballot." Ha ha! It's funny because it's true: Voters who think it's absurd that the government continues to arrest 750,000 or so people every year for possessing a plant can never get it together, because they are constantly high. Likewise, it's amazing that drinkers in Washington state managed to pass a ballot intitiative privatizing liquor sales last fall, because everyone knows those people are so wasted all the time they don't even know when it's Election Day.

In fact, pot smokers are so stupid that even if they manage to put down their bongs, get up off their couches, turn off their Xboxes, dust off the Dorito dust, and meander to the polls, they won't realize that Barack Obama, despite his own extensive history of drug use and his promises of a more enlightened and compassionate approach, has been no better than George W. Bush on drug policy and in some respects worse. They probably don't even know that Obama cracked down on medical marijuana instead of letting states go their own way (as he said he would when he ran for president), that so far he has commuted only one drug offender's sentence (despite his pre-presidential criticism of excessively harsh penalties), or that he literally laughs at the very notion of legalizing marijuana (despite his past support for decriminalization)—in much the same way that Reeve laughs at people who are misguided enough to let the ongoing outrage that is the war on drugs guide their votes. If such people exist, they sure as hell should not vote for Barack Obama. 

Peter Schiff, the investment seer and radio show host best known around here for engaging with Occupy Wall Street scenesters, got a chilly reception at a House hearing on Oversight of Federal Housing Administration's Multifamily Insurance Programs the other day, and has posted a highlight reel at the Youtubes. 

Schiff breaks out his plays of the day: 

6:06 - My Opening Statement

11:16 - "I don't know whether to go to Mr. Schiff or not, but I guess I will" - Judy Biggert (R)
I explain to Chairwoman Judy Biggert why federal involvement in home lending has created more problems than it has solved.

16:22 - "Despite all the sound and fury, there's not a lot of details..." - Robert Hurt (R)
My proposals that old regulations be repealed, rather than new ones proposed, in order for the free market to come up with solutions are repeatedly lost on Congressman Robert Hurt. 

25:16 - "Mr. Schiff, I just have one question..." - Emanuel Cleaver (D)
Congressman Emanuel Cleaver II unsuccessfully tries to 'nail' me. Instead, a spirited discussion ensues in which I remind the congressman of the moral hazard and economic costs of government subsidies. 

30:38 - "Maybe that happens in an Ayn Rand novel..." - Dan Sherman (D) 
Congressman Dan Sherman asserts that as a practical matter the federal government, in one way or another, insures all homes, and that only characters in an Ayn Rand novel would believe otherwise. 

Correction: That's not Dan Sherman but Rad Brad Sherman, the Sherman Oaks Democrat, occasional critic of Obama Administration policies and weather machine expert who I was interested to see seems to have a substantial lead over smart-money favorite Howard Berman in their squabble over a jerrymandered San Fernando Valley seat.

Sherman, who voted against the 2008 TARP bailout, is refreshingly post-ethical in his calls for taxpayers to support lifestyles and political structures he knows to be unsustainable. In 2009, when I asked about the wisdom of having the Federal Housing Administration continue to underwrite loans on million-dollar houses, Sherman replied, “The economy of Los Angeles would tank if prices fell another 50 percent.” The pattern holds here. His argument to Schiff is that government must subsidize insurance because to avoid doing so would subject Washington, DC to extortion during "front-page natural disasters." 

Who says I don't like Anna Wintour and Mariah Carey? It's classist stereotyping for President Obama to use my clothing bills from Ross Dress for Less and my pledge-drive donations to KUSC against me. 

ProPublica is calling for alternate versions of the White House's relentless emails. There are many subtle textual variants of the invitation to tonight's presidential dinner at Sarah Jessica Parker's New York residence, and reporter Jeff Larson wants to get them all: 

For instance, last Monday, the Obama campaign sent out an email about a dinner with the President at Sarah Jessica Parker’s house this coming Thursday. Participants in our Message Machine project forwarded over 100 copies of this mailing to us and we found seven distinct variations of the message. The Obama campaign refused to comment on the email but you can explore the differences in the Message Machine.

Some versions of this message promise, in a postscript, an after-dinner concert by Mariah Carey, while others barely mention the concert. The mailings show the campaign tailoring its message for different audiences — variations of the message ranged from a very brief introduction and a link to a video, to a longer email asking for a donation. Recipients who had recently donated to the Obama campaign received emails with slightly different wording than those who had not, but just who is being targeted with some of the variations is hard to decipher. For instance, one variant mentions that Sarah Jessica Parker is a mother, while another that Anna Wintour is attending the dinner. These changes in wording suggest that the campaign is optimizing their messages, but we need a bigger sample to figure out how.

I got an invitation from the Sex and the City trouper (her email address is info@barackobama.com) back in May, but I didn't get around to responding. A few days later Obama campaign director Katherine Archuleta followed up. 

Since I got the version in which Parker outs herself as a mother, I should point out that I share my eight-year-old kid's skeptical view of Obama's more-than-daily email requests: "I've never heard of a president asking for three dollars."

I also think Wintour's 86ing of her Asma Assad profile was not just bad faith but bad journalism.

And I'll cop to having believed in the nineties that Mariah Carey ripped off Whitney Houston's act, though I have since gained some respect for her staying power. 

But in addition to misgauging my taste (dinner with Parker's Square Pegs co-star Jami Gertz would be more up my alley), the Obama team doesn't even seem to know my zip code. Parker's email bore the neighborly subject line "My place" even though I would have needed to make a transcontinental journey to attend her dinner. But when inviting me to George Clooney's Obama bash just a few minutes from my apartment, Rufus Gifford, the bank president's son who now helps protect the 99 percent as the president's chief fund raiser, promised, "We'll take care of airfare." 

President Obama's two programs to keep mortgage borrowers in mortgaged homes have failed, but post-mortems from the mainstream media refuse to say why. Instead, whole books have treated the programs' execution, without considering the possibility that the Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP) and Home Affordable Refinance Program (HARP) failed because they were designed to do the impossible. 

Bloomberg's Clea Benson takes the wayback machine to 2009, and reveals that the HA'Ps did not, as advertised, avert 9 million foreclosures, support home prices in most states or budge the percentage of underwater borrowers, which remains stubborn at 23 percent. CoreLogic examines its most recent data and finds

that 11.1 million, or 22.8 percent, of all residential properties with a mortgage were in negative equity at the end of the fourth quarter of 2011. This is up from 10.7 million properties, 22.1 percent, in the third quarter of 2011. An additional 2.5 million borrowers had less than five percent equity, referred to as near-negative equity, in the fourth quarter. Together, negative equity and near-negative equity mortgages accounted for 27.8 percent of all residential properties with a mortgage nationwide in the fourth quarter, up from 27.1 in the previous quarter. Nationally, the total mortgage debt outstanding on properties in negative equity increased from $2.7 trillion in the third quarter to $2.8 trillion in the fourth quarter.

Several of these numbers are unchanged from 2009, when the Obama Treasury Department deployed its $75 billion Homeowner Affordability and Stability Plan (HASP), which encompasses HAMP, HARP and Home Affordable Foreclosure Alternatives (HAFA). 

Benson puts a brave face on the lifeless performance of government loan modification, for example by repeating the administration's vague claim of having "reached" [pdf] more than 2 million borrowers. But Treasury admits [pdf] that just under 600,000 loan mods have been canceled, and 20 percent of successful modifications end up back in default. 

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency is behind schedule in releasing the first quarter 2012 Mortgage Metrics Report, but here's my own finding about the most recent report: 

As you can see from the latest OCC/OTS Mortgage Metrics Report [pdf], modifying loans continues to do what it did in 2009, 2010, 2011 and earlier this year – drag out the pain of mortgage default without doing much to keep bad borrowers in the homes they don’t want to pay for. Redefaults (starting at page 34) are ticking back up across all categories. That goes for both voluntary modifications and loans modified under the Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP). 

One bright spot for the government is that the redefault rates for HAMP and HARP loan mods are lower than the redefault rate for all loan mods. (Disclosure: I am currently in paperwork turnaround trying to refinance my home under HARP.) 

Benson tells us what went wrong: 

While his plan was undermined in part by the weak U.S. economic recovery, it also lacked broad and aggressive measures. 

In the latest missive from the White House, David Plouffe, a senior advisor to the president, writes:

For many of us, buying a home is about more than a roof over our heads. It's the place where we'll watch our kids grow up and an investment that will guarantee our long term financial security. There's a reason that a home is an essential part of the American dream…

[The President’s mortgage refinancing plan is] the kind of change that can have an outsized impact on the entire country. With a little extra money each month, our friends and our neighbors will be able to do more for their families. That means stronger communities and a stronger national economy.

So even if you don't own a mortgage or don't need to refinance, it's important to add your voice.

We need to show that this is the kind big, national priority that transcends petty partisanship. Republicans and Democrats alike own houses, and they call each other neighbors. It will mean good things for all of us if every responsible homeowner can get some relief.

So speak out beside President Obama. Tell us why you support refinancing, and we'll make sure your story resonates here in Washington and around the country.

Nick Gillespie explained how we got to this point in the first place:

Our story thus far: Thanks to a combination of tulip-bulb-style mania among investors (either stupid or greedy, depending on your predilections), government policies (mortgage-interest deductions for two homes, subsidized loans, giant agencies instructed to buy up all private mortgages, etc.), and Fed policy (keep interest rates as low as possible for as long as possible), record numbers of Americans bought houses (read: took on debt), typically at inflated prices (partly due to other government policies that restricted supply).

You know the next part: The housing bubble popped, leaving lots of people underwater (owing more than their houses are worth at the moment) and triggering a financial crisis (panic probably a better term) that somehow was solved by bailing out big financial houses in such a way that there are fewer of them but they are bigger and more powerful than ever.

After spending most of 2011 in a kind of kabuki theater over government funding, the federal debt limit and expiring tax breaks and other assorted minutiae, President Obama shifted into election mode with the “We Can’t Wait” for Congress campaign, and more mortgage refinancing became a part of that, so though this e-mail comes from the White House, it’s hard to read as other than a campaign letter.

About 65% of Americans own their own home, a historical low, even though the federal government has spent decades propping up “affordable housing.” While David Plouffe may claim only more government intervention (even in the form of seemingly “free money” for the economy) can alleviate the housing crisis, there’s pretty solid evidence government is actually the culprit.

The cult of homeownership also makes the labor force less mobile, having the effect of limiting opportunities for employment. It is not a source of wealth creation, despite the White House’s “investment” refrain. The government’s insistence that homeownership is essential to the American Dream is misguided and even destructive, and above all, wrong, David Plouffe’s invocation of some kind of Voodoo economics where refinancing mortgages and further distorting the housing market will lift all boats notwithstanding. 

Via Politico:

The Justice Department has dropped its prosecution of former Sen. John Edwards over nearly $1 million in payments his backers made to support his pregnant mistress during the 2008 presidential campaign.

The formal dismissal of charges was filed in federal court in Greensboro, N.C., Wednesday, less than two weeks after Edwards’s trial on the campaign finance-related charges ended with a jury deadlocked on five felony counts and voting to acquit him outright on one charge.

“We knew that this case — like all campaign finance cases — would be challenging. But it is our duty to bring hard cases when we believe that the facts and the law support charging a candidate for high office with a crime,” Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division Lanny Breuer said in a statement. “Last month, the government put forward its best case against Mr. Edwards, and I am proud of the skilled and professional way in which our prosecutors from the Criminal Division’s Public Integrity Section and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of North Carolina conducted this trial.”

See our previous coverage of scumbag (but not felon) Edwards.

Earlier this week the Supreme Court handed down its decision in the case of Armour v. Indianapolis. At issue was a property assessment levied by Indianapolis in order to pay for a sewer project in a housing subdivision. Property owners in that subdivision were given the option of paying the $9,000 assessment in installments or in a lump sum. Most selected the installment plan. When the city announced a revised and cheaper assessment plan a few years later, the small group of property owners who initially paid a lump sum asked for a refund. Their request was denied so they took the city to court. In its ruling on Monday, the Supreme Court sided with Indianapolis. Writing at the Hoover Institution’s Defining Ideas journal, New York University law professor Richard Epstein explains why this ruling “encapsulates what goes wrong when the Supreme Court abandons its constitutional obligation to prevent the nonstop shenanigans of local governments.” Epstein writes:

The moment local governments can renege on promises with impunity, no one in his right mind would choose the lump sum payment. At this point, two bad consequences follow. First, a deep sense of social unfairness leads to a net loss in public confidence in government. Second, wealth transfers wholly gratuitously from one group of citizens to another. At this point, wasteful lobbying could set in to make those transfers happen. The best way to think about Armour is not as some sterile equal protection case, but as a taking of property, through the conscious maladministration of the city, from the members of group A to those of group B. That level of misconduct deserves more scrutiny than the rational basis test supplies....

Some skeptics might ask why anyone would get bent out of shape in a case where the claims of all class members total less than $300,000. The answer is because bad rules in small cases lead to horrific consequences in bigger ones. As a matter of first principle, the rational basis test lets all courts turn a blind eye to various programs of business and fiscal madness.

Read the full story here.

How screwed is the federal budget? Despite increased tax revenues, Washington is expected to run a $1.17 trillion deficit this year—and that's an improvement.

In the first eight months of this fiscal year, the budget gap clocked in at $844.5 billion, according to the Treasury Department, and is on its way toward another trillion dollar-plus total. USA Today offers yet another update on the budgepocalypse:

The federal budget deficit is approaching $1 trillion for a fourth straight year even though the government is collecting more tax revenue than last year.

The Treasury Department said Tuesday that the deficit grew by $124.6 billion in May. That put the deficit through the first eight months of the budget year at $844.5 billion, or 8.9% below last year's imbalance for the same period.

Still, the Congressional Budget office forecasts that the deficit for the entire 2012 budget year, which ends Sept. 30, will total $1.17 trillion. That's only a slight improvement from the $1.3 trillion deficit recorded in fiscal 2011....So far this year, government receipts are running 5.3% higher than a year ago.

Well, at least the federal government's collecting more in taxes. 

Recent notes from the budgepocalypse here and here. 

The City of Orlando spent almost $200,000 fighting a federal lawsuit after violating the first amendment rights of an Occupy Wall Street protester. 

Orlando police arrested Timothy Osmar in December for writing revolutionary slogans on the sidewalk in front of city hall (where I was once an urban planning intern). According to the Orlando Sentinel, Osmar was charged with violating an ordinance that prohibitis "writing or painting advertising matter on streets or sidewalks." The city jailed him for 18 days, then dropped the charges. Osmar turned around and filed suit, alleging that his First Amendment rights had been violated. He won, and the city paid big: 

Osmar...was paid $6,000 in damages, and the three First Amendment attorneys who took his case split $35,000.

But the biggest expense was the two high-powered law firms hired by City Hall: Akerman Senterfitt was paid $83,293, and King, Blackwell, Zehnder & Wermuth was paid $72,070.

Osmar's attorneys argued that the ordinance was wrongly applied to political speech and he was protected by the First Amendment. U.S. District Magistrate Judge David A. Baker agreed and ruled in Osmar's favor in April.

A spokeswoman for Mayor Buddy Dyer defended the cost by pointing out that the city wasn't the one to file the lawsuit.

"The city of Orlando was the defendant in the lawsuit and had no choice but to provide a defense," Cassandra Lafser said.

The two firms hired by the city, one of which had a good connection in City Hall, spent six weeks on the case: 

The city first hired King, Blackwell, Zehnder & Wermuth — City Attorney Mayanne Downs' former law firm — to handle the case. When partner David King had a scheduling conflict, the city hired Akerman Senterfitt.

It wasn't a lengthy case. Each firm worked on it for about six weeks, according to invoices reviewed by the Orlando Sentinel. King, Blackwell, Zehnder & Wermuth attorneys billed for 230 hours of work, and Akerman Senterfitt billed for 196 hours.

The two firms each had multiple attorneys working on the case, with hourly fees ranging from $375 to $625 at Akerman Senterfitt, and $260 to $400 at King, Blackwell, Zehnder & Wermuth. As a courtesy, the firms reduced those fees by 10 percent.

 It really is cheaper to respect a person's constitutional rights. 

In an effort to bring about an end to the “Isn’t this entire idea absolutely absurd?” news coverage, backers of a high-speed train from California to Las Vegas have announced efforts to put the California end of the train someplace Los Angeles residents might actually drive to.

The XpressWest train – formerly known as DesertXpress – had been proposed to run between the middle of the Mojave Desert near Victorville, Calif., and Las Vegas. The route required potential Los Angeles customers to drive about a quarter of the distance of Las Vegas (the part with the worst traffic, at that) in order to pay for a train trip to take them the rest of the way. For this, the train’s backers wanted a Federal Railroad Administration loan to help pay for the $7 billion project.

Now, XpressWest has announced an agreement with the Los Angeles Metropolitan Transit Authority to attempt to extend the line to Palmdale, north of Los Angeles, making it more accessible to the people they hope to actually ride the thing.

Backers claim the train will divert 25 percent of the traffic (two million car trips annually) off the stretch of Interstate 15 leading to Las Vegas. Remarkably, whoever is responsible for that projection is still permitted to walk around among us sane folks. And what do we make of this comment from Federal Railroad Administrator Joseph Szabo?:

Szabo said there are 44 rail projects in 16 states that are under way or set to break ground. He added that Generation X and Generation Y consumers consider it a “badge of honor” not to own a car and to rely on mass transit or bicycle sharing programs.

You know how those crunchy environmental types treasure the opportunity to visit Las Vegas. But XpressWest’s ambitions no longer end in Las Vegas, hence the new name. Their site now proposes a Southwest Network, which would extend their train eastward, connecting to Phoenix, Salt Lake City, and Denver. (XpressWest's marketing plan also involves referring to their train rides as "an EXPERIENCE" in all-caps as often as humanly possible.)

Of course, the ultimate California goal would be to connect XpressWest’s line to California’s proposed high-speed rail service stretching from San Francisco down to Los Angeles. So how’s that going? Let’s ask Ken Orski over at California business and political site Fox & Hounds:

On June 2, came a new poll showing that fifty-nine percent of voters would now oppose building high-speed rail if the measure were placed on  the ballot again. Sixty-nine percent said that they would “never or hardly  ever” ride the bullet train if it were built. (USC Dornsife/LA Times survey). The poll made news throughout the state, and indeed nationally.  The public was treated to headlines such as “Voters have turned against  California bullet train” (LA Times); “California high speed rail  losing support” (Bloomberg); “California high speed rail doesn’t have the  support of majority of Californians” (Huffington Post); “Voters don’t  trust state to build high speed rail” (CalWatchdog) and “Poll finds  California voters are experiencing buyers’ remorse” (Associated Press).

Furthermore:

The Sierra Club, traditionally a loyal supporter of Gov. Brown,  announced it was “strongly opposed” to Brown’s proposal to eliminate  California environmental (CEQA) requirements for the high speed rail  program and its Central Valley construction project. The Brown administration has made its proposal despite a solemn promise to the  legislature by the Authority’s Chairman, Dan Richard, that they would  never try to bypass CEQA (“We have never and we will never come to you and  ask you to mess with the CEQA requirements for the project level”).

And finally:

A series of editorials and opinion pieces by some of California’s most influential columnists has reinforced the public’s growing disenchantment with the bullet train project and with the Governor’s stubborn determination to defy public opinion.

So, there you go.

Losing their market dominance, according to this Businessweek article, the University of Chicago's Law and Economics division launches "Law and Economics 2.0." Details:

Chicago Law...Dean Michael...Schill’s big idea is to open new frontiers, both intellectual and geographic. This summer the school will play host to 75 Chinese legal scholars, who will get to meet stars like professor emeritus Ronald Coase—still writing in the field at the age of 101. “Coase is a god in China,” says Omri Ben-Shahar, who is directing a newly created University of Chicago Institute for Law and Economics.

Meanwhile, Chicago Law professors are lobbing new bombs into the arena—fresh ideas for injecting economic thinking into law and regulation. Chicago Law professor Todd Henderson proposes paying bank examiners in part with “phantom” securities linked to the banking companies they regulate. The phantom bonds, essentially derivatives, would rise and fall in concert with a bank’s debt. If banks took too much risk, regulators would feel a hit to their own wealth. To keep regulators from getting so cautious that they ban legitimate transactions, Henderson would throw some phantom stock into their pay packages as well. “There is no reason we can think of why bank regulators should not be paid for performance,” he wrote...

Lee Anne Fennell, a specialist in property law....daring to challenge a central tenet of law and economics, has written that sometimes property rights can be too strong—say, allowing irrational homeowners to block worthy projects even when accommodating them somehow would be better for all. Her solution: Create an exchange where property owners could surrender certain veto powers over land use for a price before conflicts ever arose.....

The human actor in some of the newest law and economics writing is truer to life. Henderson, for example, acknowledges that for some people money isn’t the motivation: “Once diligence has been priced, perhaps some regulators will slack,” he wrote in Regulation.

But Hanson wonders whether law and economics scholars on the whole have gone far enough in incorporating humanity. A case in point: Should the question of motivation matter in assessing damages? A dispassionate law and economics analysis still might say no, while an ordinary juror would say unequivocally yes...

Defenders of Chicago-style law and economics want to be seen not as ideologues, but as realists. Posner again: “We ask not whether the economic approach to law is adequately grounded” in any particular ethical system, “but whether it is the best approach for the contemporary American legal system to follow.” 

Best why and for what goals, of course, a question that economics qua economics can't answer.

In April 2001, Steve Kurtz interviewed law and economics pioneer Richard Posner for Reason. Posner's own hint about the question of what the legal system is for, and how sure we can be about that question:

When people say Americans are pragmatists, they don't mean they are postmodernists with strong philosophical views about the correspondence theory of truth. They mean they are not interested in large theoretical questions; they are interested in practical solutions to current problems. That is the lay sense of pragmatism and also my sense. I don't want to get tangled in metaphysical questions. I didn't always feel this way, but today I don't want to argue that efficiency is the most important thing in the world and aggregate wealth is the only thing society should care about. I can defend an emphasis on efficiency in the law on practical grounds, which will create results most people like, but I'm not prepared to erect a metaphysics of efficiency that will prove that's the only thing we should be worrying about.

In reality, people's sense of justice often flies far away from that sort of efficiency question--and sometimes that's probably a good thing. As the old joke about Ronald Coase goes: I wonder if anyone has ever gone up to him and threateningly asked him how much he would charge to get punched in the face? (That is, sometimes questions of rights and propriety should overwhelm sheer economic efficiency. Or not, of course.)

Sweden has often been dismissed by free marketers and embraced by the left. Yet as Matthew Feeney explains, Sweden actually provides one of the best recent European examples of how privatization and sensible banking policy can lift a country out of a slump. As Greece's economic crisis gets worse, Greek officials would do well to learn from the Swedish experience.

• Independent voters, considered up-for-grabs in the political cage match between Battling Barack Obama and Mighty Mitt Romney, are unimpressed by the incumbent's economic policies. They also don't like the GOP challenger's plans.
• Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) blocked the five-year extension of a law that allows the warrantless interception of communications between Americans and people overseas. He wants a formal estimate of the number of Americans surveilled, and a requirement that surveillance of U.S. residents who were unintentionally intercepted can be continued only with a warrant.
• The world's four major central banks — U.S. Federal Reserve, European Central Bank, Bank of England and Bank of Japan — have created $6 trillion in new money since 2008 in an effort to buy the world back to prosperity. There's no end in sight.
• Greek voters will pick the politicians who will preside over the country's daunting effort to pay a decade's worth of past-due bills. In anticipation, people are stocking up on cash, canned goods and ammunition. Well ... maybe not ammunition.
• Baby boomers hoping to inherit their way out of debt are likely to be disappointed — Mom and Dad already spent the dough.
• In an effort to rein-in the shadow economy, Russian officials plan to limit cash transactions to the equivalent of $18,750 or less, with larger transactions requiring easier-to-track electronic transfers. Critics argue the move will inconvenience average Russians, while leaving under-the-table deals untouched.
• Alaskans are asking why an Anchorage man was shot dead by police after brandishing a stick.
• In West Virginia, a Concord University police officer was charged with sexually abusing a teenage girl who was under his care.
• Watch all of yesterday’s Ask a Libertarian videos here.

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Joe Scarborough of MSNBC's Morning Joe says the unsayable: He voted for Ron Paul. Why? He reveals all in this Politico piece:

I... would never vote for a GOP candidate who was the godfather of Obamacare, or another who added $7 trillion to Medicare’s debt or yet another who bashed Paul Ryan one week and venture capital the next. Faced with this truckload of big government Republicans, I cast my vote for the only candidate who spent his entire public career standing athwart history yelling “stop” to an ever-expanding centralized state.

While Romney was distancing himself from Ronald Reagan, Paul was fighting with Republicans to balance the budget for the first time in a generation. While Santorum was supporting an unprecedented expansion of entitlement spending, Paul was warning of a great recession that would be caused by government interference in the housing market. And while Gingrich was talking about how he would build up the federal government to push his conservative agenda, Congressman Paul spent all his waking hours focused on dismembering that big government beast.

It was the first “protest” vote I’ve ever cast, and it felt … well, it felt good...

Do I think a Ron Paul presidency is ever possible? No, I don’t. But I do want some of the Pauline virtues of candor and non-poll-tested conviction to play a larger role in our politics.

Scarborough speaks a deep truth: pretty much any Republican or right-winger who actually takes any of the supposed core values of its party in terms of limited government or fiscal probity, or who respects some signs of a coherent philosophy and values and understanding of how and why we are in the fiscal and debt mess we are in, should have been for Paul by acclimation. A shame a dedication to herd thinking or managing the world through military force kept too many of them from doing the right thing, which Scarborough to his credit not only did, but told the world why. Good show, Mr. Scarborough.

As I wrote here at Reason last month, by most rights Paul should be sweeping the MSNBC vote, including Rachel Maddow, if the progressive vision of rights, liberty, respect for civil liberies, not killing people because the president says so or ruining people's lives because of their personal choices, ending war and government propping up of plutocrats, actually means anything to them.

Mostly, I find, the "make government give people stuff" is the only part they care about, so sorry Ron Paul (and American lives and liberties).

My book, Ron Paul's Revolution: The Man and the Movement He Inspired.

Kerry Picket at the Wash Times notes that the lucky winner of a much-derided opportunity to dine with President Barack Obama, actress Sarah Jessica Parker, and Vogue magazine editor Anna Wintour has a ready-made conversation starter: What was up with Vogue's fawning profile of Asma al-Assad, the wife of murderous dictator Bashar al-Assad? Back in 2011, just as the latest cycle of state-sponsored violence was getting into full swing, Vogue profiled Asma as "Syria's Desert Rose."

The article, which I critiqued in "The Real Housewives of Arab Thugocracies," is full of grotesque, unintentend humor, such as the moment when Mrs. al-Assad explains away an ugly lamp in the tyrant's palace:

The household is run on wildly democratic principles. “We all vote on what we want, and where,” [Asma] says. The chandelier over the dining table is made of cut-up comic books. “They [our kids] outvoted us three to two on that.”

Ha, ha, ha.

Pickett notes:

The author of the original Vogue Assad piece, Joan Juliet Buck, admitted, “she regretted the “Rose in the Desert” headline that Vogue put on the article,” but that “Mrs. Assad was ‘extremely thin and very well-dressed, and therefore qualified to be in Vogue.’”

You got that? Fat, dumpy wives of dictators need not apply. Wintour disowned the piece, claiming that she apparently had no idea that Syria, in which the Assad family has ruled for decades and which has been rated as "Not Free" by Freedom House for years. Wintour sent a statement to the NY Times, which said in part:

"Subsequent to our interview, as the terrible events of the past year and a half unfolded in Syria, it became clear that its priorities and values were completely at odds with those of Vogue. The escalating atrocities in Syria are unconscionable and we deplore the actions of the Assad regime in the strongest possible terms.”

OK, so Wintour didn't realize that Syria has been mopping the lower reaches of any and all indices of freedom for decades. But here are some questions for dinner, which costs $80,000 a plate: 1. Are you seriously angling for an ambassadorship to Great Britain? Because if it took you until 2011 to realize Syria's "priorities and values were completely at odds with those of Vogue," you haven't read a newspaper in about 40 years. Or Vogue was until last year a murderous regime. 2. Let's assume the story was just one of those hilarious goof-ups that happen all the time in glittering world of high fashion. Why the hell would you have disappeared the offending piece off your magazine's website, so that readers have to go here to find it? Editorial mistakes aren't the end of the world, Amb. Wintour. They come with the territory. But coverups are just total bullshit, especially in a world with the internet. You may well be uninformed enough to be a diplomat, but you better bring your A game when it comes to lying about indefensible screwups.

Read the whole Pickett piece here.

Here's the Wintour invite to enter the sweepstakes for the free dinner with the prez and his special hosts. Not to be taken internally, though best taken on an empty stomach.

"This is one of the greatest food towns in the country, and we should be open to different things," says [Company Burger restaurant owner Adam Biderman], sounding clearly frustrated. "There’s no reason why there shouldn’t be food trucks running all over town."

Operating a food truck in New Orleans is tough. Mobile vendors fueled hungry workers in the aftermath of Katrina. But when order was (mostly) restored, so was a ridiculously restrictive permitting process. There are only 100 permits available for vendors of all kinds, The Atlantic reports. That means that coffee vendors and taco makers have to go head to head with souvenir sellers and t-shirt hawkers for their legitimacy.

Even if a food trucker manages to get a permit, he'll face a a 30-minute cap on the amount of time he can spend in one place, he'll be forbidden from returning to the same block twice in the same day, and he'll be barred altogether from the French Quarter and the Central Business District.

Frankly, it doesn't seem to bright to ban food trucks from the places where a quick, cheap, alcohol-absorbing meal would be the difference between the Best. Night. Ever. and a night spent passed out on a bench.

Help us, Baylen Linnekin. You're our only hope!

Via Radley Balko.

Sen. Rand Paul yesterday took to two different radio programs minded by core Ron Paul fans to defend his controversial Mitt Romney endorsement.

One was via the Daily Paul website, with host Kurt Wallace. You can listen to it here. 

My summation of the highlights for them that would rather read than listen: Rand Paul thinks that those fans who were disillusioned--or even got threatening--about his endorsement misunderstand politics and underestimate his own continued value to the liberty movement. They also misunderstand where the movement is right now.

The liberty movement's fight had shifted, Paul said, "from winning the nomination to fighting over the platform and the future of the Republican Party and the future of our country." He points out that the endorsement "doesn't mean anything in terms of my political philosophy and the things I support." To be able to be a player in the Republican Party--and expect any support from his fellow Republicans and many Republican voters--being a member in good standing and supporting the nominee was essential; he points out he made a similar vow in his 2010 Senate race, and has been saying for a year he would support the party's nominee whoever it turns out to be.

More important to the liberty movement, he thinks, should be what he's doing as senator. He talked up four bills he's introduced or supported just this week: to require search warrants for domestic drone use, legalize industrial hemp, end federal mandatory minimum sentences for all non-violent crimes, and end the TSA. He would ask his detractors to focus more on those things, and less on "politics, a messy business that is not what everyone would want it to be." His dad, Rand points out, also supported or endorsed Speaker candidates and congressional candidates within his party who clearly don't agree with him on much. Such collegial games are the price of electoral politics and don't mark one as traitor to the liberty movement where it counts. 

The Romney endorsement "doesn’t change me at all or any of the issues I'm fighting for, but it changes the ability of the liberty movement to have a voice" and he hopes he can get explicit Romney endorsement of the current Federal Reserve audit bill.

He says he has no idea if his father will or would endorse Romney, but that he, Rand, did discuss his own endorsement with Ron and waited til the campaign admitted that Ron Paul winning was not going to happen.

Rand admits the hardcore Paulites are not likely to be swayed by his endorsement, and assures Wallace that he will continue to fight both a President Romney and the rest of his Party if they try to do things he cannot support. He will also, he says, fight hard to end indefinite detention and will refuse to vote for any budget that does not have a five year glide path to balanced, no matter what the rest of his Party does.

He wishes his detractors would look more at things like his role in stopping an amendment that would have allowed the Guantanamo detention of people tried and found innocent in American courts. He can have such successes, he says, because he doesn't go around being pointlessly bellicose to his colleagues, even the ones terrible on most liberty issues. He hopes that he can win the continued trust of the liberty movement because of his actual voting record, not these issues of internal party politics, and alludes to being angry at implied death threats among the more high-strung anonymous folk on the Internet.

He also appeared on former Senate candidate and investment guru Peter Schiff's show to talk about this, saying many of the same things. Video of that interview:

Some highlights from that: Rand says he knew he'd get some Paulite backlash, but largely from the types who still believed there was some chance of turning Romney delegates to Paul in Tampa, something he saw as grossly unrealistic. He again says they still have a chance to be the most effective and loud liberty-minded contingent within the Republican Party there, and possibly move the party on issues such as auditing the Fed, eliminating the Department of Education, Internet freedom, and ending the war in Afghanistan. (He continues to think that platform changes are important, though in this day and age I'm not sure what real influence such things have--what defines the GOP are what GOP candidates say and do, not the "platform" per se, which no one looks at.) 

While Rand has denied the straight-up libertarian label in the past, here he almost calls himself a libertarian ideologue--then scrambles to say more properly, "libertarian conservative." (My favorite small detail: when talking about the good sides of even such bad politicians as John McCain, he refers to McCain's imprisonment as a result of "fighting for what he thought was fighting for his country"--respectful while still not buying into the nobility of the Vietnam mission.)

I don't expect, nor I think did Rand Paul expect, either of these interviews to mollify those who consider him a traitor to the Ron Paul cause. But in the end--and four years from now--what will matter far more is his continuing to be an introducer of and voter for the sort of good bills he references above, and being a public spokesman for the ideas of responsible, limited, constitutional government.

For more on Rand Paul and Ron Paul revolution, see my new book Ron Paul's Revolution: The Man and the Movement He Inspired.

Sen. Paul and I discussed that book at a Cato Institute book forum last month:

Private Bradley Manning’s attorney, David Coombs, posted a message to Manning’s supporters as the private’s court martial continues:

I would like to publicly thank all those who have supported my client over the past two years.  I also want to pass on the following message from Brad:  “I am very grateful for your support and humbled by your ongoing efforts.”  Brad also asked me to specifically thank on his behalf the unflinching support of Courage to Resist and the Bradley Manning Support Network.

Private Manning was arrested in May 2010, accused of leaking various State documents to Wikileaks. Army investigators claim the private is responsible for Wikileaks’ receipt of video showing U.S. strikes killing Iraqi civilians and Reuters journalists. The military confirmed the video’s authenticity, but apparently couldn’t find its own copy. Manning is also accused of leaking the State Department diplomatic cables Wikileaks released later that year.

Manning was detained for nearly two years before being ordered to stand trial in February. His trial starts in September November and the “Article 39” pre-trial hearing began in April. Manning’s attorneys said they’ve received only 28 of 63 requested documents, and that they show the damage caused by the Wikileaks leaks was minimal. Government prosecutors admit they’ve only made 8,741 of more than 40,000 pages available to Manning’s defense attorneys.

Meanwhile, the origin of a wide array of timely and politically beneficial leaks on sensitive national security workings of the executive branch is disputed, with the president calling the notion that the leaks would come from the White House “offensive”. A pair of federal prosecutors are nevertheless likely to include the White House in their probes of the leaks.

Evil forces are conspiring against the fine police officers of Fayetteville, North Carolina. In that community, a three-time winner of the All-America City Award (and what greater endorsement is there?), "police officers are under attack by drug dealers, lawyers representing drug dealers and by the City of Fayetteville." Well, at least that's according to John C. Midgette, Executive Director of the North Carolina Police Benevolent Association, and a man who brings a strong dose of crazy to his organization's campaign against the establishment of a citizen review board — and of any criticism at all of the thin blue line.

The above quote is from a letter (PDF) Midgette sent to the the chairman of the state senate's State & Local Government Committee, opposing SB 939, a bill that would establish a police oversight committee. In that letter, he also charged that "a handful of anti-police individuals in Fayetteville are attempting to create a Board with an effective mission of interfering with and obstructing traditional police operations."

Also part of that obstruction, apparently, was the city council's moratorium on the cops' charming practice of "asking" (no pressure there) primarily African-American drivers for permission to search their vehicles without cause. The PBA sued to overturn the moratorium and actually won an injunction.

Midgette took his campaign against the forces of darkness to a press conference, at which he called for official action against critics of the police department. Reports the Fayetteville Observer:

The head of the N.C. Police Benevolent Association said Thursday he will ask for a federal investigation into what he described as a conspiracy to undermine the Fayetteville Police Department.

Executive Director John Midgette levied harsh criticism against a small group of people who continue to raise racial allegations against police officers.

Midgette said false accusations - including a recent complaint that was proven to be unfounded that an officer called a driver a racial slur - have pushed officer morale to an all-time low and have made it difficult for police to stop heavily armed "thugs" and other criminals "preying on Fayetteville, many of those thugs with high-powered weapons."

He described the city as awash in crime, calling it a "cesspool of corruption and anti-police hatred."

That was about enough to get the Fayetteville Observer over the press's usual infatuation with anybody in a uniform. The paper editorialized:

John Midgette, head of the N.C. Police Benevolent Association, has treated us to a doozy of a warm-up act. Let's watch and see what else he's got.

Midgette, presumably speaking for the organization and its membership, last week delivered himself of an oration against unnamed conspirators bent on undermining the Fayetteville Police Department. ...

For now, we're left to speculate - based on his extreme unhappiness with the City Council's decision to heed the advice of its consultant - that this all harks back to the long-running controversy over "consent" traffic stops and the great racial disparities found in police stop data. Midgette seems to be implying that it was somehow wrong of public officials and city residents in general to concern themselves with those disparities.

Some of us think leaning on people to agree to allow the forces of law and order manhandle their belongings is wrong even without a racial disparity, but Midgette clearly lost the local press on that one. And he's probably still a few years early on calling for federal investigations of people who merely voice their dissatisfaction with law enforcement.

I should point out that this kind of crazy may be contagious. Ed Krayewski found a similar case in Philadelphia.

Sean Higgins of Investors Business Daily talks with the Libertarian Party's presidential candidate, former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson.

A snippet:

“I promise to veto any expenditures that exceed revenue,” he said, citing his background as governor. He vetoed some 200 bills in his first six months of office....

Johnson said he would challenge both parties by drawing away core ideological voters disappointed with the party’s compromises: fiscally conservative Republicans on the right and anti-war, civil libertarian Democrats on the left.

He’ll focus his campaign on the western and mountain states: His home state of New Mexico, Arizona, Montana, Nevada and others. He thinks he’ll make inroads in Alaska too.

“I’m the only candidate that doesn’t want to bomb Iran. I’m the only candidate that wants to get out of Afghanistan tomorrow,” he said. “I’m the only candidate that wants to repeal the Patriot Act. I’m the only candidate talking about marriage equality as a constitutionally guaranteed right.”

Whole thing here.

Yesterday during "Ask a Libertarian 2012," Matt Welch and I responded to a question asking whether a vote for Gary Johnson was a vote for Barack Obama:

Your daily sweet leaping Jesus comes from First Lady Michelle Obama, who sent an email this morning asking Americans to wish President Barack Obama a happy father's day:

Friend --

From coaching basketball to knowing how many Jonas brothers there are, Barack is a pretty cool dad.

But more importantly, Barack is a wonderful father and partner. No matter what's on his plate, he puts the kids first, and they know how much he loves them.

This Father's Day, I want Barack to know how much we love and appreciate him, so I hope you'll join me in wishing him a happy Father's Day:

http://my.barackobama.com/Fathers-Day

Thanks for all your hard work, and happy Father's Day to all the wonderful dads out there.

- Michelle

There is only one problem with this, and it is that BARACK OBAMA IS NOT MY DADDY. 

What happens if the Supreme Court overturns the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act? In some ways, very little: The architects of the constitutional case against the law designed their argument as a precision-guided missile that would take out ObamaCare while leaving the surrounding legal and policy edifice standing. Politically, however, writes Senior Editor Peter Suderman, a ruling against ObamaCare could have a huge effect. Would health policy simply return to its pre-2010 state? Yes, but with one major difference: ObamaCare would be discredited, legally and politically—potentially clearing a path to more effective health care reforms.

"Internet culture is an absolute threat to existing power structures," says Ben Huh, CEO and founder of Cheezburger, the popular web humor brand responsible for I Can Haz Cheezburger, FailBlog , and much more. "People are finally realizing that they have power in their voice."

Reason.tv sat down with Huh to talk about internet culture, why the ability of individuals to create their own content is a good thing, the common ideology that should unite all internet users, and why we have to learn to live with internet trolls.

Approximately 4:30 minutes.

Produced 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.

There’s a telling line in a new report on state budgets: “With the expiration of federal funding support provided by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA)” — a.k.a. the stimulus —  “states continue to realign spending plans with fiscal reality.” And the fiscal reality is that states are weighed down by unaffordable obligations that are wrecking their budgets.

Chief among those obligations is Medicaid. The National Association of State Budget Officers recently released a survey of state budgets, and, as with previous reports, Medicaid spending remains one of the biggest ticket items: Accounting for 23.6 percent of total state budgets, the jointly run health program for the poor and disabled represents the largest portion of total state spending. It’s the second largest general fund expenditure, chewing up about 17 percent of general fund spending. Thanks in part to last year’s expiration of temporarily increased federal Medicaid funding provided by the stimulus, state spending on the program increased by 20.4 percent in the 2012 fiscal year. States are working to reduce spending on the program, and a much slower growth rate rate of about 3.9 percent is expected in 2013, but as the report notes, even the reduced growth rate is still expected to outpace general fund expenditure growth.

This explains a lot about why states are cutting back. As Dan Crippen, director of the National Governor’s Association, told The Washington Post, “With the growth of Medicaid expenditures, spending priorities will again face competition for state budget dollars this fiscal year.” It’s the out of control growth of health spending obligations, primarily Medicaid, that’s weighing down these budgets and forcing states to make spending reductions elsewhere.

The report notes that total state tax revenues are on track to be above pre-recession levels next year, with general fund revenues close behind, which makes it hard to say that states budgets are somehow suffering from too little tax income. Instead, they’re stuck carrying the spiraling cost of pensions, education costs, and health care obligations born out of less frugal eras. The fiscal padding provided by the stimulus just put off these decisions a little while longer, and let states avoid making tough choices, and more stimulus would have done the same while adding even more to the total federal debt burden. But eventually, fiscal reality was bound to catch up.

Matt Welch has already noted David Brooks' creepy column on the supposed need for more monuments honoring authority. I have just one footnote to add: Isn't it interesting how quickly Brooks brushes past the one D.C. monument of the last half-century that almost everyone agrees is powerful? Maya Lin's Vietnam memorial gets just two sentences from Brooks: "Even the more successful recent monuments evade the thorny subjects of strength and power. The Vietnam memorial is about tragedy."

At least he acknowledges that it's successful. Brooks wants monuments that embody "just authority," and the Vietnam War was a time when Washington's just authority was in short supply. A commanding Lincoln- or Jefferson-style monument to Robert McNamara would be perceived as a perverse joke, and rightly so.

But the war inspired Maya Lin to create a brilliant memorial, and she did it by rejecting -- indeed, inverting -- the authoritarian style that Brooks loves. As James C. Scott wrote in Seeing Like a State, the most remarkable thing about Lin's design is

the way that the Vietnam Memorial works for those who visit it, particularly those who come to pay their respects to the memory of a comrade or loved one. They touch the names incised on the wall, make rubbings, and leave artifacts and mementos of their own -- everything from poems and a woman's high-heeled shoe to a glass of champagne and a poker hand of a full house, aces high. So many of these tributes have been left, in fact, that a museum has been created to house them. The scene of many people together at the wall, touching the names of particular loved ones who fell in the same war, has moved observers regardless of their position on the war itself. I believe that a great part of the memorial's symbolic power is its capacity to honor the dead with an openness that allows visitors to impress upon it their own meanings, their own histories, their own memories. The memorial virtually requires participation in order to complete its meaning.

The Vietnam memorial is the only "official" monument I know of that follows this pattern, but it's not hard to think of other memorials that inspire the same mixture of contemplation and participation. In the years following 9/11, Ground Zero became a vast do-it-yourself tribute to the fallen. Decoration Day, as Memorial Day was known back when holidays had interesting names, first emerged spontaneously rather than by dictat, as people in different towns selected days to decorate the graves of the Civil War dead.

"Maybe before we can build great monuments to leaders we have to relearn the art of following," Brooks writes. Maybe, if that's your priority. Meanwhile, Maya Lin's memorial reminds us what happens when Americans trust their leaders too much.

Soon after the president dropped his ill-advised "the private sector is doing fine" gaffe, White House press secretary Jay Carney scolded the media for failing to frame the comment in the proper "context." Which is weird, because the context is the worst part. Having a robust array of government services is a luxury, not an engine of growth. Though taking out a massive advance against future prosperity to artificially pump up employment statistics might be an effective way to win re-election, it is no way to judge economic well-being. A decline of wealth, writes David Harsanyi, is.

Greeks have withdrawn close to 800 million euros from major domestic banks just days before this weekend’s election. Rumors of a Syriza victory and a return of the drachma has lead to panic buying of canned foods in preparation for financial collapse. Much of the panic can be attributed to the lack of polling, which is banned in the run-up to elections. Unofficial polls are being leaked that provide contradictory predictions on the outcome of the upcoming election.

Both of the major parties, Syriza and the New Democracy Party, have pledged to remain in the euro. However, Syriza has pledged to abandon Greece’s austerity bailout agreement, a move that would greatly increase the likelihood of a Greek euro exit.

While both Syriza and New Democracy are almost certainly the two most popular parties, it is far from clear if either will be able to form a government after the upcoming election. Smaller and more radical parties may be needed to secure a functional government, and they offer nothing approaching fiscal or political sanity.

There are the communists, who believe that Syriza’s anti-privatization policies are too right-wing, and third way socialists, who are part of the socialist international. A left-wing coalition with Syriza and these two other left-leaning parties would almost certainly prompt a swift Greek exit from the eurozone.

Other parties include the nationalist Independent Greeks, who also campaign on an anti-austerity platform, and the Popular Orthodox Rally, whose platform combines tax cuts for individuals and businesses with a strong anti-Turk, anti-Macedonian, and anti-E.U. form of nationalism.

Then there is Golden Dawn, against which both Independent Greeks and Popular Orthodox Rally seem moderate. Recently a Golden Dawn representative, Ilias Panagiotaros, said:

If Chrysi Avgi [Golden Dawn] gets into parliament [as polls predict], it will carry out raids on hospitals and kindergartens and it will throw immigrants and their children out on the street so that Greeks can take their place. 

Golden Dawn, whose campaign slogan was “So we can rid this land of filth” in the last election, achieved some prominent international coverage after one of its MPs assaulted two panelists during a live TV show. The same MP is now suing both women for defamation. 

With all of these parties in contest there is no reason to be optimistic. Whatever government the Greeks manage to put together it will not be one capable or willing to make the reforms Greece needs. The recent bank withdraws indicate many Greeks think the same. 

This stuff will only stop when voters punish offending politicians:

The New York City Board of Health showed support for limiting sizes of sugary drinks at a Tuesday meeting in Queens. [...]

At the meeting, some of the members of board said they should be considering other limits on high-calorie foods.

One member, Bruce Vladeck, thinks limiting the sizes for movie theater popcorn should be considered.

"The popcorn isn't a whole lot better than the soda," Vladeck said.

Another board member thinks milk drinks should fall under the size limits.

"There are certainly milkshakes and milk-coffee beverages that have monstrous amounts of calories," said board member Dr. Joel Forman.

Link via the Twitter feed of Dan "Baseball Crank" McLaughlin. Do a Reason search on "nanny" and "Bloomberg."

In today's Washington Times, Reason Senior Editor Peter Suderman looks at TNT's revival of the long-running primetime soap, Dallas. An excerpt:

In the new “Dallas,” things have changed. It’s not just the Ewings who have money - it’s the whole state. In the opening-credits montage, modeled after the old one, everything has the sheen of newness to it. Skyscrapers watch imposingly over downtown Dallas while shiny streetcars zip through the streets. It’s a monument to the transformational prosperity created by the state’s decades-long oil and energy boom.

Yet aside from a few cosmetic updates - sleeker sports cars, more luxurious homes - the Ewings haven’t changed all that much. J.R. and David are still around, and while they remain rivals, the battle’s locus has shifted to their sons, J.R.’s scheming oilman son John Ross (Jesse Metcalf) and David’s earnest alternative energy entrepreneur Christopher (Josh Henderson). Both are young, rich, startlingly handsome, and dull beyond words.

It’s the bland and the beautiful, and their love interests are equally vapid: At one point, Christopher asks John Ross‘ girl, Elena (a sad, lost looking Jordana Brewster), about a thesis she wrote on - no, really - petroleum and waterflooding. Actual academic papers on petroleum recovery and waterflooding discuss things like procedures for “solving the transport-dominated diusion process generated by two-phase, incompressible, immiscible displacement in heterogeneous porous media.” Elena barely seems capable of pronouncing multisyllable words.

It doesn’t help that none of the star performers could act his or her way out of an automatic car wash: When John Ross declares portentously that “the fun is just beginning,” a line that is meant to suggest the devilishly amusing times ahead comes across more like one of those gunpoint videos in which a bloodied hostage attests to the virtues of his captors.

Like their patriarchs, the two sons are locked in perpetual struggle - but over nothing of consequence or meaning. There’s the familiar uninterrupted stream of incident and event, family traumas and hidden agendas: The subplots are as vast as the Texas deserts, and just as empty. The largest and smallest events are treated with the same petty urgency. Ultimately, the show’s plot contrivances exist to put the characters through endless traumas and social stresses. The characters exist to suffer for audience amusement, their wealth to excuse our pleasure.

Whole thing here. 

I have previously written about the "banal authoritarianism" and "anti-anti-authoritarianism" of New York Times columnist David Brooks, who has been railing against the individual and in favor of bold state action since at least 1997. Today Brooks adds to his own increasingly eccentric subgenre by spending several paragraphs lamenting that Washington's monuments and memorials no longer radiate sufficient power:

Why can't today's memorial designers think straight about just authority? [...]

Those "Question Authority" bumper stickers no longer symbolize an attempt to distinguish just and unjust authority. They symbolize an attitude of opposing authority.

The old adversary culture of the intellectuals has turned into a mass adversarial cynicism. The common assumption is that elites are always hiding something. Public servants are in it for themselves. Those people at the top are nowhere near as smart or as wonderful as pure and all-knowing Me.

You end up with movements like Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Parties that try to dispense with authority altogether. They reject hierarchies and leaders because they don't believe in the concepts. The whole world should be like the Internet — a disbursed semianarchy in which authority is suspect and each individual is king.

Maybe before we can build great monuments to leaders we have to relearn the art of following.

The sentiment here is bizarre enough (lead me, o Great Men, lead me!), but what really sticks out is the sell-by date on the cultural critique. The "old adversary culture of the intellectuals" was indeed pretty adversarial toward authority in the Me Decade, but is nowadays openly cheering on Big Government and the virtuous Nanny State. It's gotten to the point where the center-left political media is doing the president's dirty work for him, jumping down the throat of Democrats who dare stray from the Obama administration's message of the day.

And Sweet Baby Jane Fancy Moses, when's the last time you even saw a "Question Authority" bumper sticker?

UPDATE: Radley Balko has more.

The average person correctly perceives government as out of control. Spending and taxes go up, and most people have no real say in the matter. Where does a lot of that tax money go? To government employees, of course. In fact, writes Sheldon Richman, government employees are tax consumers, not taxpayers. Their pay is tax money. When government employees appear to pay taxes, they’re merely rebating some of the tax money to the government. Thus champions of real workers—those in the productive private sector—need not wring their hands over the limits put on government unions.

Psst, if you're a terrorist, don't read this story.

Five Transportation Security Administration workers at Southwest Florida International Airport have been fired and another 38 suspended after an internal investigation found they failed to perform random screenings last year.

The 43, a combination of front-line screeners and supervisors, represent about 15 percent of the roughly 280 TSA employees at the airport. The number of workers involved makes it one of the largest disciplinary actions TSA has taken in its 10-year history, TSA spokesman David Castelveter confirmed.

But travelers and all other people shouldn't worry, because it doesn't really matter that they don't follow procedure:

“It’s the random secondary that did not happen,” [a TSA spokesman] said. “At no time was a traveler’s safety at risk and there was no impact on flight operations.”

I'm not sure which is supposed to less of a relief: That gold-bricking workers finally got the heave-ho or that 15 percent of an airport's TSA crew could be goofing off without effecting security. Either way, it seems, we - the tax-paying traveler - lose.

Hat tip: Philippe Lacoude.

Reason on TSA.

ReasonTV's TSA vid playlist. Spoiler alert: Intermittent groping ahead.

• A multi-state federal raid targeted the horse breeding operation of Jose Treviño Morales, alleged to be the brother of the Mexican Zeta drug cartel’s second-in-command. Morales is accused of using his horse breeding operation to launder drug money for the Zetas. Time for a war on horseracing!
• Legislation to be introduced in the City Council today would establish an independent monitor for the New York Police Department, something the city’s Housing Authority and Education Department already have. The New York Times reports the Council would need a veto-proof two-thirds majority as its unlikely Mayor Bloomberg will support the bill. The City Council’s Speaker, Christine Quinn, likely to run for mayor next year, has also been muted in criticism of police practices in the city.
• George Zimmerman’s wife was charged with felony perjury. She is accused of lying to the judge about how much money was available for bond.
• A former Penn State assistant coach testified in the Jerry Sandusky trial that he walked in on Sandusky raping a child in the locker room in 2001. He said he told Gary Shultz, the vice president of business and finance at the university, and that in his mind “Mr. Shultz represented the police, without a doubt.”
• North Dakota said no, overwhelmingly, to abolishing property taxes and replacing the revenue some other way.
• Lawyers for Hosni Mubarak say they fear prison doctors are trying to kill the octogenarian ex-dictator.
• Scientists in Japan say they’ve discovered the universe’s oldest known galaxy just past Jupiter. They say it was formed 12.91 billion years ago.
• Watch all of yesterday’s Ask a Libertarian videos here.

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New at Reason.TV: What did we learn from Ask a Libertarian?

Last month, when President Obama finally endorsed gay marriage after years of equivocation, he emphasized that he still thinks states should be free to address the issue as they see fit. Since many voters strongly oppose gay marriage, says Senior Editor Jacob Sullum, it is clear why Obama advocates a federalist approach to the question. But it is not clear that he logically can.

Parents of a student at Manitoba's Walter Whyte School are demanding that the principal and two teachers be fired after their son and another student were tricked into eating moose droppings during a field trip. Superintendent Scott Kwasnitza says staff members have been disciplined after they watched, and did not stop, two adult chaperones trick the Grade 8 students into eating the moose droppings by telling them they were chocolate-covered almonds. He refused to say exactly what punishment they received, however.

Brickbat Archive

Last week I asked whether it is reasonable to expect that establishing a state system for licensing and regulating medical marijuana dispensaries in California will protect them from federal interference. I noted that federal prosecutors have shown little inclinatiion to respect state policy in this area, despite Attorney General Eric Holder's assurances (reiterated in congressional testimony on Thursday) that the Justice Department does not plan to target growers and distributors who comply with state law. In response to my post, Rob Kampia of the Marijuana Policy Project argues that, while U.S. attorneys may huff and puff that state law does not matter, the record of actual raids (as opposed to threats) suggests it does:

The key point is that in the three states that have issued state licenses for [medical marijuana] dispensaries [Colorado, Maine, and New Mexico], there have been literally zero federal raids [on licensed operations]....

In the states where there are no state licenses for [medical marijuana] businesses [California, Michigan, Montana, Oregon, and Washington], there have been federal raids.  And I'd bet money that there will be more federal raids in most of these five states....

Having a state license has, so far, protected [medical marijuana] businesses from being raided by the feds.  At a minimum, this is an important fact to note, even if one wants to be skeptical that this "line of demarkation" between state licenses and no state licenses will continue into the future.

In fact, this "line of demarkation" is so persuasive that it's actually allowed us to move forward with the licensing process of [medical marijuana] dispensaries in [Arizona, the District of Columbia, Vermont, and Rhode Island].  These four developments are a big deal.

In any case, when one wants to talk about [Colorado], it's important to note that there are no federal raids.  Rather, it's an instance of a federal official interfering with local zoning, whereby the fed is actually just saying, "I'm not raiding you, and I'm not even shutting you down.  I just need you to move a few yards."  The folks in [California] would love this kind of treatment by a fed!

I hope Kampia is right. But John Walsh, the U.S. attorney in Colorado, did threaten state-authorized dispensaries and their landlords with forfeiture and prosecution, citing their violation of federal law. Contrary to Holder's claim that "we limit our enforcement efforts to those individuals [and] organizations that are acting out of conformity with state law," Walsh did not argue that the dispensaries were violating state rules. What would have happened if the dispensaries had ignored Walsh's letters?

A social science study concluding that children of gay parents have suckier lives than those of straight parents, contradicting previous studies, has led to an outcry over some odd classification measures.

Mark Regnerus, associate professor of sociology at the University of Texas in Austin, recently published a study analyzing the lives of the adult children of same-sex relationships. He writes about the outcome at Slate:

Even after including controls for age, race, gender, and things like being bullied as a youth, or the gay-friendliness of the state in which they live, such respondents were more apt to report being unemployed, less healthy, more depressed, more likely to have cheated on a spouse or partner, smoke more pot, had trouble with the law, report more male and female sex partners, more sexual victimization, and were more likely to reflect negatively on their childhood family life, among other things.

Before you ask, yes, Regnerus is classifying smoking more marijuana and having more sexual partners as a negative outcome of being the child of same-sex parents. You’ve got to love it when an alleged scientific study is tainted from the very start with biases of what counts as a bad or negative experience.

But that’s not the main source of criticism of Regnerus’ science here. What has the blogosphere upset is how he classified same-sex families for his study. He compared across several different types of families – married heteros, lesbian parents, gay parents, single parents, adoptive parents, et cetera. But, in order to bolster the still-statistically-low numbers of adult children of gay parents, if either of the child’s parents had ever had a gay sexual encounter, it overruled any other classification. So a child raised by a lesbian couple was placed in the category of lesbian parents. But so was a child raised by a single mom who was a lesbian, or ever had a single same-sex encounter that the child was aware of. The children of any closeted politician or celebrity caught in a public gay scandal would be lumped in the gay categories, even though they likely bear absolutely no comparative resemblance to a child raised his or her whole life by a gay couple. If the child caught Daddy kissing Santa Claus: gay. So it’s not comparing apples to apples or even apples to oranges; it’s comparing apples to a whole fruit salad. He's comparing children of married straight couples to children of any number of different types of same-sex familes.

The objection that Regnerus is deliberately gaming the study to make gay families appear less stable than straight families by the nature of his classifications does appear valid, regardless of whether it was a deliberately sinister intent on his part.

The $800,000 study was privately funded by the conservative Witherspoon Institute and also the Bradley Foundation (which has donated money to a number of libertarian interests, including the Reason Foundation), so at least nobody’s tax dollars were wasted.

The larger question remains unaddressed: Aren’t these studies stupid? It’s probably going to take at least another decade or so to really get enough numbers to evaluate the experiences of kids of gay parents.  In justifying his research methods, Regnerus explains that he wanted to get a greater cross-section than other gay family studies have managed so far, due to the relatively small sample size. He may have succeeded in that one area at the expense of the credibility of the study's results.

Not that credibility really matters in studies like these. These studies, whether they show gay parents as the same, better, or worse than the heteros, are meant to be used as weapons in the culture war of gay marriage and adoption, to be excerpted in blogs and news stories, to be entered into evidence and quoted in court cases, and to be thrown out during message board debates that haven't been Godwinned yet. There’s nothing about them that actually serves any valid scientific purpose.

Welcome to Ask a Libertarian 2012 with Reason's Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch. They are the authors of the book, The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What's Wrong With America, coming out in paperback with a new foreword covering Occupy Wall Street and more, on June 26.

In this round, Matt and Nick reflect on this year's Ask a Libertarian series and what the questions they were asked can tell us about current trends in libertarianism. 

Produced by Meredith Bragg, Jim Epstein, Josh Swain, and Tracy Oppenheimer with help from Katie Hooks.

To watch answers from 2011's Ask a Libertarian series, go here.

Welcome to Ask a Libertarian 2012 with Reason's Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch. They are the authors of the book, The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What's Wrong With America, coming out in paperback with a new foreword covering Occupy Wall Street and more, on June 26.

In this lightning round, Matt and Nick discuss recalls, libertarian paternalism, and Tea Party v. Libertarians. 

Produced by Meredith Bragg, Jim Epstein, Josh Swain, and Tracy Oppenheimer with help from Katie Hooks.

To watch answers from 2011's Ask a Libertarian series, go here.

Welcome to Ask a Libertarian 2012 with Reason's Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch. They are the authors of the book, The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What's Wrong With America, coming out in paperback with a new foreword covering Occupy Wall Street and more, on June 26.

In this round, Matt and Nick answer the question: 

"How do we argue with our conservative friends without them screaming at us?" -submitted by @H0bbesthetiger

Produced by Meredith Bragg, Jim Epstein, Josh Swain, and Tracy Oppenheimer with help from Katie Hooks.

To watch answers from 2011's Ask a Libertarian series, go here.

Welcome to Ask a Libertarian 2012 with Reason's Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch. They are the authors of the book, The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What's Wrong With America, coming out in paperback with a new foreword covering Occupy Wall Street and more, on June 26.

In this lightning round, Matt and Nick discuss pop culture and politics. 

Produced by Meredith Bragg, Jim Epstein, Josh Swain, and Tracy Oppenheimer with help from Katie Hooks.

To watch answers from 2011's Ask a Libertarian series, go here.

Welcome to Ask a Libertarian 2012 with Reason's Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch. They are the authors of the book, The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What's Wrong With America, coming out in paperback with a new foreword covering Occupy Wall Street and more, on June 26.

"What is the most effective way libertarians can effect political change?" - Sent via facebook by Matthew Bellis and Angelo Butchikas

Produced by Meredith Bragg, Jim Epstein, Josh Swain, and Tracy Oppenheimer with help from Katie Hooks.

To watch answers from 2011's Ask a Libertarian series, go here.

Next week the United Nations is convening its Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio de Janeiro (Rio + 20). In advance of the meeting various activists and world leaders are asserting, “The current global development model is unsustainable," by which they mean free-market capitalism. Reason Science Correspondent Ronald Bailey points out that history shows that before the advent of democratic capitalism most of humanity had experienced precious little development and no societies proved themselves sustainable in the long run. Free-market societies are both. 

Welcome to Ask a Libertarian 2012 with Reason's Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch. They are the authors of the book, The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What's Wrong With America, coming out in paperback with a new foreword covering Occupy Wall Street and more, on June 26.

"Is voting for Gary Johnson essentially helping Barack Obama get reelected?" - Sent via email by Christina Tate

Produced by Meredith Bragg, Jim Epstein, Josh Swain, and Tracy Oppenheimer with help from Katie Hooks.

To watch answers from 2011's Ask a Libertarian series, go here.

Welcome to Ask a Libertarian 2012 with Reason's Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch. They are the authors of the book, The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What's Wrong With America, coming out in paperback with a new foreword covering Occupy Wall Street and more, on June 26.

"Where are the black libertarians?" - Sent via email by Mark Draughn 

Produced by Meredith Bragg, Jim Epstein, Josh Swain, and Tracy Oppenheimer with help from Katie Hooks.

To watch answers from 2011's Ask a Libertarian series, go here.

• Across the U.S. a bumper crop of marijuana legislation is loosening restrictions on the popular intoxicant. The laws frequently seek to take advantage of pot's medicinal properties, but with a solid majority of Americans favoring outright legalization, many measures go further.
• Soaring yields on Spanish bonds because of fears over that country's financial stability are fueling concerns over Italy's economic health, as the eurozone's woes grow worse.
• States expect to collect more tax revenue this year than they've seen since before the recession -- partially as a result of economic recovery, and partially due to hiked tax rates. Spending is also expected to increase, but to remain below pre-recession heights.
• Stuxnet and Flame — two malware programs believed to be state-sponsored attacks directed at Iran — share enough commonalities that their creators appear to have cooperated early in the development process, says Kaspersky Lab. U.S. officials have confirmed that Stuxnet was a joint American-Israeli effort.
• Criticism of convicted bomber and progressive political activist Brett Kimberlin has resulted in targeting of conservative bloggers for SWAT-ing attacks — elaborately staged bogus calls that have resulted in the dispatch of armed paramilitary police to their homes.
• Having shut down file-sharing company, Megaupload, and denied the firm's customers access to their data, U.S. government officials say they'll permit people to retrieve their files — if they pay. Meanwhile, it turns out FBI officials took evidence in the case from New Zealand despite a judge's instructions to the contrary, and Megaupload head Kim Dotcom won praise from the court.
• At Southwest Florida International Airport, five TSA supervisors are being fired and 38 face suspension for failing to perform random screenings at security checkpoints. Meanwhile, a new study says backscatter "nude" scanners pose no health dangers — but the study looked at TSA-supplied data, and not the actual machines.
• Cops in Prince George County, Maryland, allegedly handcuffed and roughed up a couple of teenagers — apparently, pretty much just because they could. (HT sloopyinca)

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Welcome to Ask a Libertarian 2012 with Reason's Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch. They are the authors of the book, The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What's Wrong With America, coming out in paperback with a new foreword covering Occupy Wall Street and more, on June 26.

"What about Sweden, which seems like a great place to live?" - Sent by Elijah William 

Produced by Meredith Bragg, Jim Epstein, Josh Swain, and Tracy Oppenheimer with help from Katie Hooks.

To watch answers from 2011's Ask a Libertarian series, go here.

Welcome to Ask a Libertarian 2012 with Reason's Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch. They are the authors of the book, The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What's Wrong With America, coming out in paperback with a new foreword covering Occupy Wall Street and more, on June 26.

"What do libertarians think about gay marriage?" - Sent by Andrew Ian Dodge 

Produced by Meredith Bragg, Jim Epstein, Josh Swain, and Tracy Oppenheimer with help from Katie Hooks.

To watch answers from 2011's Ask a Libertarian series, go here.

Welcome to Ask a Libertarian 2012 with Reason's Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch. They are the authors of the book, The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What's Wrong With America, coming out in paperback with a new foreword covering Occupy Wall Street and more, on June 26.

"What About Roads?" - Sent by Sarath Kirshnaswamy

Produced by Meredith Bragg, Jim Epstein, Josh Swain, and Tracy Oppenheimer with help from Katie Hooks.

To watch answers from 2011's Ask a Libertarian series, go here.

A new Rasmussen poll indicates that 61 percent of likely voters in Colorado would favor the legalization of marijuana if it were subject to similar regulations put on alcohol and cigarettes. Only 27 percent of likely voters oppose legalization even with government regulation. These findings are the latest in a trend of recent indicators suggesting that the decriminalization or legalization of marijuana is becoming a majority opinion throughout the United States. This poll is especially significant as Colorado is a swing state, and Obama’s respect for states’ rights has been far from impressive.

Connecticut and New Jersey have both made important steps towards decriminalizing marijuana possession, and Governor Cuomo has expressed sympathy with similar policies. Thirteen states, including Colorado, already have decriminalization policies in place for varying amounts of marijuana. Last year marked the first time that support for legalizing marijuana use passed 50 percent in the United States.

A policy that would legalize marijuana and subject it to ‘sin taxes’ similar to those put on alcohol and tobacco would save a huge amount of money. Jeffry Miron estimates that such a policy would save the government close to $43 billion it implemented nationally.  Alcohol prohibition ended during times of economic depression, and it looks like an increasing number of legislators are beginning to see how much money is wasted on the War on Drugs. However, in national level politics marijuana policy is rarely ever debated. 

The poll is especially significant as Colorado is a swing state in this year’s election cycle. While many marijuana activists supported Obama in 2008 thinking that he might relax the War on Drugs and respect states’ rights on the issue, the reality has been very different. To those that vote solely on the issue of sensible marijuana policy 2012 offers few options. The President has done a great job of alienating natural allies who are now more sympathetic to the states’ rights rhetoric offered by the Republicans. Although it is hard to know how many Colorado voters vote on this one issue, the poll is at least indicative of a nation-wide shift in attitude towards marijuana legalization. As per usual the two major parties are proving to be the last to catch on to public opinion.

Welcome to Ask a Libertarian 2012 with Reason's Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch. They are the authors of the book, The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What's Wrong With America, coming out in paperback with a new foreword covering Occupy Wall Street and more, on June 26.

In this video, they do a lightning round of questions. 

Produced by Meredith Bragg, Jim Epstein, Josh Swain, and Tracy Oppenheimer with help from Katie Hooks.

To watch answers from 2011's Ask a Libertarian series, go here.

Four years too late, Obit magazine gives Charlton Heston a sendoff that really isn't worthy of him. 

Kevin Nance breaks no new ground on the very dated consensus that Heston – on whose rock ribs a generation of conservatives, gun owners and bible-on-tape aficionados could rest their weary heads – was a wooden performer. There's the obligatory admission that Heston's Mexican cop in Orson Welles' Touch of Evil was one of his "better" parts, and the even more obligatory irony toward Heston's so-straight-it's-gay bearing, with which Gore Vidal and William Wyler allegedly had witty fun in Ben-Hur. (Emphasis on "allegedly." I've endured Ben-Hur all the way through, and it doesn't exactly sparkle with Noel Coward frothiness.) For Nance, Heston in his prime lacked the nuance and nervous energy of the method-acting mumblers who supposedly got uptight Hollywood to loosen up with their Soviet commitment to social realism. Instead, he got by on being a presence, a Hollywood star of the old school: 

For Heston, it had to be, since his bag of acting tricks was almost empty from the first. What could have saved him — as it has sometimes saved latter-day stand-and-modelers like Brad Pitt and Matthew McConaughey — was a sense of humor; alas, Heston seems to have had none, at least until his career was beginning to wind down in the late 1960s and early ’70s, when the rise of the New Hollywood was rendering him passé. 

It was then, in fact, that he gave some of his best performances — in sci-fi flicks, in which the relatively lower dramatic stakes seem to have loosened him up. In Planet of the Apes (1968), The Omega Man (1971) and Soylent Green (1973), you feel a trace of self-parody, conscious or not, beginning to creep into his style, a bud of irony that begins to bloom in the disaster movies Earthquake and Airport 1975 (both 1974) and reaches full flower in the mid-’80s on the campily glamorous “Dynasty” spinoff, “The Colbys.” 

This was the Heston I knew — the cynical grownup of counterculture dystopias – and I still say his awesomeness knew no bounds. I also don't see what's so deficient in his performances in Major Dundee or The Naked Jungle or a bunch of other movies from his heyday. (Heston was less a product of Old Hollywood than a player in the first wave of runaway production, when massive movies were being shot overseas with low-wage crews and extras. Part of the reason he was never taken seriously was that he consistently worked in TV when that was still considered humble labor.) If Ben-Hur and The Ten Commandments are leaden pictures, you can't blame that all on Heston, and several of his cast-of-thousands spectacles, notably 55 Days at Peking, are enjoyable slogs. As for his being rendered "passé" by sixties hipsters: Planet of the Apes was a massive blockbuster hit, which continues to spawn mind-expanding new products to this day, and in Heston's diaries it's clear he understood on the set that it had the potential to be an interesting piece of popular cinema. If he was a conservative in politics, Heston was notably forward in art, defending Sam Peckinpah (whose directing job on Major Dundee he saved) and Welles (who didn't exactly share his politics) when both were in bad odor with the movie industry. Nance says Heston made "a nuttily effective spokesman for the gun lobby." I'd say since his death the rest of America has moved closer to Heston's position on guns than he has to theirs. 

Just watch him emote over the death of Edward G. Robinson (another old pinko!) in a scene laced with horror, visual sarcasm and tragedy: 

Update: Read Reason's 1987 interview with Heston. 

Welcome to Ask a Libertarian 2012 with Reason's Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch. They are the authors of the book, The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What's Wrong With America, coming out in paperback with a new foreword covering Occupy Wall Street and more, on June 26.

In this video, they answer the question:

"How do you plan on uniting various libertarians?" - sent by Sebastian Harris

Produced by Meredith Bragg, Jim Epstein, Josh Swain, and Tracy Oppenheimer with help from Katie Hooks.

To watch answers from 2011's Ask a Libertarian series, go here.

Welcome to Ask a Libertarian 2012 with Reason's Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch. They are the authors of the book, The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What's Wrong With America, coming out in paperback with a new foreword covering Occupy Wall Street and more, on June 26.

In this video, they answer the question:

"With Ron Paul retiring, who will pick up the mantle of the libertarian movement?" - sent by Ken Kelley

Produced by Meredith Bragg, Jim Epstein, Josh Swain, and Tracy Oppenheimer with help from Katie Hooks.

To watch answers from 2011's Ask a Libertarian series, go here.

The New York Times Magazine profiles Jestina Clayton, an immigrant from Sierra Leone now living in Centreville, Utah, where state occupational licensing requirements prevent her from operating an African hair-braiding business. As the story notes:

A cosmetology license required nearly two years of school and $16,000 in tuition. But Clayton hoped for an exemption. After all, many Utah cosmetology schools taught little or nothing about African-style hair-braiding, and other states allowed people to practice it after passing a hygiene test and paying a small fee. Clayton made her case (via PowerPoint) to the exhaustively named governing body of Utah hair-braiding, the Barber, Cosmetology/Barber, Esthetics, Electrology and Nail Technology Licensing Board. The board, made up largely of licensed barbers and cosmetologists, shot her down.

This isn’t just a random Utah law. There are more than 1,000 licensed professions in the United States, partly a result of more than a century of legal work. As the country industrialized, state governments wanted to protect their citizens and create standards not just for lawyers and doctors but also for basic services. It didn’t take long for professional groups to find that they also stood to benefit from the regulations. Over the years, more and more started to lobby for licensing rules, often grand­fathering in existing professionals while putting up high barriers to new competitors. In fact, businesses contorting regulation to their own benefit is so common that economists have a special name for it: regulatory capture. “Everyone assumes that private interests fight like crazy not to be regulated,” says Charles Wheelan, who teaches public policy at the University of Chicago. “But often, for businesses, regulation is your friend.”

Read the whole story here. I wrote about Florida's bogus occupational licensing requirements for interior designers last year.

Two (white) police officers from Prince Georges' County, Maryland, are under investigation for threatening to kill and then basically kidnapping a (black) teenager, after the officers saw the teen walking through the Charles County subdivision where the officers live: 

Law enforcement sources say it all started at a house in the 2800 block of Merchant Court in Waldorf, where the teens say they were invited for a Memorial Day picnic.

As the afternoon turned to evening, the teens told investigators the homeowner accused them of taking items from the house and searched one of the teens.

The three then left.

About 20 minutes after the homeowner searched one of the teens, the three arrived in another section of the sub-division where two were on bikes and one was on foot.  As the off duty officers approached, one of the teens ran off, a second was detained by one of the off duty officers and a third teen, who we are calling J.L., arrived in the 3000 block of Miranda Place. That's where he says the officer said "Stop, or I will shoot you in the back." J.L. says he then sunk to his knees and the officer tackled him.

A man who says he witnessed the incident agreed to recount what he saw as long as fox 5 didn't identify him.

"Approaching the roundabout in Charles Crossing, I noticed a large Caucasian male chasing a younger black male and when I came around the roundabout I saw the officer--I didn't know he was an officer, but he was pounding on top of the victim."

J.L. says he and the other teen were then handcuffed and driven away.

"I was very scared and nervous sir; I didn't know where they were taking me or what they were going to do."

"I had to just sit back there and ride, I didn't know if I was ever going to see my parents again. I didn't know if I was going to die or live another day."

J.L. says the officers told him he would now get the worst of it since his friends got away and drove him to a gravel driveway where J.L. says he was told to get out of the cruiser and walk up to the fence. That's where his handcuffs were removed and the officers told him to put his chin against the fence and count to 100.

They then drove away.

FOX 5 in D.C. has more. 

When last we dropped in on Megaupload founder, Kim Dotcom, at his home in New Zealand, he was reaping the rewards of the Justice Department's lack-of-charm offensive, as well as from a seemingly strong legal strategy and growing public sympathy. Since then, while there are certainly no guarantees that he'll prevail in a high-profile battle against the United States government, his position has, if anything, improved because of American ham-handedness and Kiwi outrage.

For starters, having shut down Megaupload and denied the company's users access to their stored data — much of it unrelated to the copyright concerns that initiated all the fuss — the feds are now telling Megaupload customers around the world that they'll have to foot the bill to have their information retrieved. Responding to a lawsuit brought by journalist Kyle Goodwin, who is represented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, federal attorneys argue that, just because government efforts to build a case impose costs on third parties doesn't mean the government should be held liable for its actions. But they do more, as TechDirt points out, arguing that there's nothing the court can do, anyway, because the government is beyond reach. Specifically, in its brief, the government says:

No matter the merits of Mr. Goodwin’s argument, any such claim that the government must make him whole is plainly barred in the Fourth Circuit. Congress has not expressly waived the United States’ sovereign immunity against suits for money damages pursuant to Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 41(g). Thus, the Court lacks jurisdiction to order the government to provide the funds to Mr. Goodwin to make him whole.

A quick Google News search reveals that particular go-to-Hell is reaping non-rewards in a multitude of languages.

If the federal government doesn't especially care about its PR foibles around the world, it might want to pay a little closer attention to relations with New Zealand officials, who actually have possession of Megaupload founder, Kim Dotcom. According to the New Zealand Herald:

FBI agents sent cloned copies of computers seized from Kim Dotcom and his Megaupload colleagues offshore just days after a judge said a court needed to decide if the agents were allowed to take the material, a court heard.

Dotcom's lawyer Willy Akel said the FBI agents committed an "illegal act" when they sent the 18 cloned computers and other items to the United States by the courier company Fedex. ...

It's not completely clear yet, but it looks like the Yanks absconded with the evidence while their hosts were negotiating over the disposition of the stuff with the defense team, leaving egged faces all around.

By contrast, Judge David Harvey described Kim Dotcom as "upfront and transparent" and eased his bail restrictions. That's important, because the same judge is presiding over Dotcom's extradition hearing, and will decide whether the people who ignored his order about evidence have brought a sufficiently strong case to warrant shipping the "upfront and transparent" guy overseas to face trial — and the strength of the case isn't certain.

Welcome to Ask a Libertarian 2012 with Reason's Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch. They are the authors of the book, The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What's Wrong With America, coming out in paperback with a new foreword covering Occupy Wall Street and more, on June 26.

In this video, they answer the question:

"How should I respond to condescending liberals and conservatives who say I'll "grow out of" my libertarianism?" - sent by Dana Thompson

Produced by Meredith Bragg, Jim Epstein, Josh Swain, and Tracy Oppenheimer with help from Katie Hooks.

To watch answers from 2011's Ask a Libertarian series, go here.

Welcome to Ask a Libertarian 2012 with Reason's Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch. They are the authors of the book, The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What's Wrong With America, coming out in paperback with a new foreword covering Occupy Wall Street and more, on June 26.

In this video, they answer the question:

"What happens to us 'tweeners' who are too young to count on social security and too old to start saving?" - sent by Matt Connery 

Produced by Meredith Bragg, Jim Epstein, Josh Swain, and Tracy Oppenheimer with help from Katie Hooks.

To watch answers from 2011's Ask a Libertarian series, go here.

Welcome to Ask a Libertarian 2012 with Reason's Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch. They are the authors of the book, The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What's Wrong With America, coming out in paperback with a new foreword covering Occupy Wall Street and more, on June 26.

In this video, they answer the question:

"Do we have more to fear from an unrestrained majority or narrow special interests?" - Sent by Veronique de Rugy

Produced by Meredith Bragg, Jim Epstein, Josh Swain, and Tracy Oppenheimer with help from Katie Hooks.

To watch answers from 2011's Ask a Libertarian series, go here.

Erik Scott, a former army officer and Duke MBA, was shot to death by cops at a Costco on July 10, 2010 while shopping with his girlfriend. Scott was legally carrying a concealed firearm, but this was apparently against Costco policy. The family is suing Costco because they say no “no guns” policy was articulated in any signage in the store or when Erik signed up for a Costco membership, and because according to the family the 911 call placed by Costco’s Loss Prevention Officer, Shai Lierley was inaccurate and led to Scott’s death.

A Las Vegas Sun article reporting on the results of the initial coroner’s inquest (it found the shooting justified, as such inquests usually do) stated that “[p]olice confronted Scott… as he exited the store with other patrons who were being evacuated.”  Read that again. The store was apparently being evacuated because of a man with a gun, yet that man was among the patrons being evacuated.

Welcome to Ask a Libertarian 2012 with Reason's Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch. They are the authors of the book, The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What's Wrong With America, coming out in paperback with a new foreword covering Occupy Wall Street and more, on June 26.

In this video, they answer the question:

"How can I talk politics with my earnest lefty friends without them screaming at me?" - Sent by Scott Ross. 

Produced by Meredith Bragg, Jim Epstein, Josh Swain, and Tracy Oppenheimer with help from Katie Hooks.

To watch answers from 2011's Ask a Libertarian series, go here.

Welcome to Ask a Libertarian 2012 with Reason's Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch. They are the authors of the book, The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What's Wrong With America, coming out in paperback with a new foreword covering Occupy Wall Street and more, on June 26.

In this video, they answer the question:

"What happened to the 'libertarian moment'?" - sent via youtube by "Open Spirit"

Produced by Meredith Bragg, Jim Epstein, Josh Swain, and Tracy Oppenheimer with help from Katie Hooks.

To watch answers from 2011's Ask a Libertarian series, go here.

A worthy project needs your help:

Since last month, when [the Electronic Frontier Foundation] released a list of the sixty-odd public agencies that have already received from the FAA approval to fly domestic drones, the issue of drone surveillance has reached front and center in many Americans’ mind. Yet barely any information is known about what law enforcement agencies plan to do with these unmanned flying vehicles. So we want your help to gather this information into one place....

The FAA has so far not released any information on which model of drone or how many drones each public entity flies. We also don't have much information on the type of data these drones will collect. So we need to find this information out.

We've made a simple form for the questions we want these police agencies to answer. We need you to call your local police department and ask them these questions. Check your local police department's website for the "Public Inquiries" or "Community Relations" contact, and call or e-mail them these questions.

Our list of drone certificates includes police departments that we already know have a drone authorization from the FAA.

This is just the first step. Once we've collected the data, we will release it and tell you how you can contact your local municipal government to demand that they ban law enforcement drones or install robust privacy safeguards that will protect citizens from unwanted -- and unconstitutional -- surveillance.

Welcome to Ask a Libertarian 2012 with Reason's Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch. They are the authors of the book, The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What's Wrong With America, coming out in paperback with a new foreword covering Occupy Wall Street and more, on June 26.

In this video, they answer the question:

"Why would any sensible libertarian support abandoning Afghanistan to the Taliban?" - sent via email by Morgan Stanton 

Produced by Meredith Bragg, Jim Epstein, Josh Swain, and Tracy Oppenheimer with help from Katie Hooks.

To watch answers from 2011's Ask a Libertarian series, go here.

Due to a rule in Michigan that puts a timed deadline on when a candidate for office can change political parties, Libertarian Party presidential candidate Gov. Gary Johnson will likely not appear on the November ballot. His sin: missing the deadline by three minutes. Via Talking Points Memo:

Michigan Secretary of State Ruth Johnson (R) told the Libertarian Party last month that Johnson filed his paperwork withdrawing from the GOP presidential primary back in November 2011 three minutes too late (4:03 instead of 4 p.m., according to a letter from Johnson’s office to the Libertarian Party), and thus fell prey to the state’s “sore-loser law,” which bars candidates who lose in a party primary from switching to another party to run in the general election. Most other states have similar laws; but rarely are they used to keep presidential candidates off ballot the ballot, according to experts.

Johnson’s supporters accuse the Michigan GOP establishment of acting to keep their candidate from hurting Gov. Mitt Romney’s chances in the state. The Libertarian Party of Michigan plans to sue next week to try to get him back on the ballot. Even if they lose the suit, though, they have an awesome backup plan:

Johnson supporters located another libertarian named Gary Johnson (he’s a businessman in Texas) and are prepared to nominate him for the party’s Michigan ballot line if the New Mexican Gary Johnson doesn’t make it. Supporters of the former Gov. Johnson say they will allow a sham Johnson campaign in Michigan and still win votes away from major party candidates.

“Like other tools used to collect information in law enforcement, in order to use drones a warrant needs to be issued. Americans going about their everyday lives should not be treated like criminals or terrorists and have their rights infringed upon by military tactics,” said Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) in a statement released today. 

To that effect, Paul has introduced the The Preserving Freedom from Unwarranted Surveillance Act of 2012, which would do the following: 

1.       Prohibits the use of drones by the government except when a warrant is issued for its use in accordance with the requirements of the Fourth Amendment.

2.       Includes the following exceptions:

1)       patrol of national borders;

2)       when law enforcement possesses reasonable suspicion that under particular circumstances, swift drone action is necessary to prevent “imminent danger to life;”

3)       high risk of a terrorist attack

3.       Allows any person to sue the government for violating this Act.

4.       Specifies that no evidence obtained or collected in violation of this Act can be used/admissible as evidence in a criminal, civil, or regulatory action.

The dystopian fears these metal sentinels provoke might force us to get serious about new legal protections. Indeed, writes Gene Healy, Americans are becoming increasingly unsettled by this sort of military "mission creep." In February, a Rasmussen poll found voters opposed to the use of drones for domestic surveillance, 52 to 30. They're right to be nervous. As James Madison warned at the Constitutional Convention, "The means of defense against foreign danger have always been the instruments of tyranny at home."

Welcome to Ask a Libertarian 2012 with Reason's Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch. They are the authors of the book, The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What's Wrong With America, coming out in paperback with a new foreword covering Occupy Wall Street and more, on June 26.

In this video, they answer the question:

"Is there a growing income gap. If so, is it a problem?" - sent via email by Cason White

Produced by Meredith Bragg, Jim Epstein, Josh Swain, and Tracy Oppenheimer with help from Katie Hooks.

To watch answers from 2011's Ask a Libertarian series, go here.

So much for the claim that marijuana use reduces lung capacity: The One Hitters, the D.C. softball team made up of pot lobbyists, beat the White House softball team 25-3 last week, reports the Washington Post.

Last year, the Office of National Drug Control Policy refused to even show up to its game with the One Hitters. Now we know why.