Weekly Hit & Run Archive 2012 August 22-31

Remember all that brouhaha over Ron Paul needing five states to nominate him, according to the old "Rule 40"? Well, today six states (or entities with delegations) tried to nominate him--Nevada, Iowa, Oregon, Minnesota, Alaska and the Virgin Islands.

What happened then? A rule change was adopted saying you need eight. Sorry Ron!

The Las Vegas Sun and New York Times both reported on this. From the Sun:

Paul supporters, lead by Nevada delegate Wayne Terhune, succeeded in putting together petitions from six states to put Paul’s name up for nomination. But earlier this week, the Romney campaign won a critical rules change requiring eight states to put a candidate up for nomination.

At the last moment, Paul supporters handed the petitions to the convention secretary. Then, the convention voted to adopt the eight-state rule, crushing the Paul effort.**(see update II, below)

That's apparently why Paul's 190 or so votes, announced by various state leaders, were not announced from the podium to the convention assembled.

For the story of how Ron Paul got this far, see my book Ron Paul's Revolution: The Man and the Movement He Inspired.

UPDATE: Nevada's delegation leader talks about the six states in his "great state of Nevada" peroration on the floor as he announces 17 votes for Ron Paul (just five for Romney). Bound delegates, anyone? Note the secretary ignoring him as she refuses to announce the Paul votes:

UPDATE NUMBER TWO: Commenter Westmiller points out that both the New York Times and the Las Vegas Sun Times mislead their readers, including me, on the exact cause and effect of the rule change and refusal to nominate Paul, since the rule change from five to eight, which did happen, is not meant to go into effect until the next national convention. While rule change and denial of nomination both occurred, they are not directly causally connected. 

"RNC Debt Clock vs GOP Delegates" is the latest video from Reason TV.

Watch above or click on the link below for video, full text, supporting links, downloadable versions. and more Reason TV clips.

The 2012 Republican platform, released today, promises "A Restoration of Constitutional Government." If that sounds good to you, you may not want to spoil the warm feelings by delving into the disturbing details.

The Republicans insist, for example, that every act of Congress "cite the provision of the Constitution which permits its introduction," but they still manage to support all sorts of constitutionally unauthorized programs, including subsidies for farming, education, adoption, and home ownership. The Republicans love federalism, except when it comes to physician-assisted suicide, which they want to prevent via the Controlled Substances Act, and marriage law, where they insist on the one man, one woman definition enshrined in the Defense of Marriage Act—which, according to its author, "has become a de facto club used to limit, if not thwart, the ability of a state to choose to recognize same-sex unions." Republicans are very big on limits to executive power, except when the president claims to be protecting national security, an area where he is "the lead instrument of the American people." They are keen on freedom of speech, as long as it does not involve sex or flag desecration. They like the Fourth Amendment insofar as it might be relevant to unmanned surveillance aircraft (except near the border, of course); otherwise (as it pertains to warrantless interception of email and phone calls, say, or to collection of third-party records such as geolocation data), not so much. They are fans of the Fifth Amendment's Takings Clause but cannot spare a word for due process, perhaps because it might raise uncomfortable questions about their support for indefinite detention and summary execution in the name of fighting terrorism. To be fair (if that is the right word), the fact that Republicans favor such policies even when a Democrat occupies the White House suggests their authoritarianism is even stronger than their partisanship. 

Perhaps the Republicans should get credit simply for mentioning the Ninth Amendment, except that they claim it "codifies the concept that our government derives its power from the people and all powers not delegated to the government are retained by the people." That is closer to the meaning of the 10th Amendment, which says, "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." The Ninth Amendment, by contrast, says, "The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." In other words, people have certain rights that must be respected even if they are not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution—a concept Republicans might accept as long as they never have to identify any.

Well, the rumors were true. That is to say, here is one thing Morality in Media (and The Daily Caller back in July) got right, the 2012 GOP platform does in fact mention obscenity and pornography beyond just being opposed to the child kind (not exactly a daring stance to take, that). 

Straight from the the elephant's mouth, the wording under "Renewing America's Values" and then "Making the Internet Family-Friendly" reads, after a call to outlaw Internet gambling, as follows:

The Internet must be made safe for children. We call on service providers to exercise due care to ensure that the Internet cannot become a safe haven for predators while respecting First Amendment rights. We congratulate the social networking sites that bar known sex offenders from participation. We urge active prosecution against child pornography, which is closely linked to the horrors of human trafficking. Current laws on all forms of pornography and obscenity need to be vigorously enforced.

Isn't just the Republican party for you? Being opposed to sex trafficking, even being okay with social networking sites booting "known sex offenders" (such people, of course, are not guaranteed to be convinced serial rapists, or anyone vile like that) is opposing harm and or just wanting to let websites choose their terms of service.

This is a call to make sure laws against consensual activities are good and followed. This is a call to use government resources to further crack down on consensual activities. And it's not just obscenity, mind you, it's "laws on all forms of pornography." Pornography, if not classified as "obscenity," has First Amendment Protections. So, even if you buy the "know it when I see it" Miller Test nonsense, laws against porn are particularly absurd and censorious. 

Head of the Family Research Council, Tony Perkins, who is apparently responsible for this flashback to the Bush Department of Justice, is too chicken to call for new laws against porn and obscenity, though one can guess that he's for them. But the much more sensible thing is always to call for enforcing laws already on the books. People invariably have a harder time arguing with that. But consider that to this day, people are prosecuted and threatened with draconian jail time, simply for making an extreme or disturbing form of speech (porn). That is completely antithetical to the idea of "small government."

And this may be the executive we'll be getting if Mitt Romney beats Obama in November; a president who has a long history of approving of restrictions on pornography.

Even if Paul Ryan wasn't a small government fraud, even if Romney wasn't an opportunist, empty suit consultant, this little part of the platform is a nice reminder that the GOP is no more interested in individual choice than is the Democratic Party,

Early this morning, I wrote a blog post criticizing South Carolina State Sen. Tom Davis for calling Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke a "traitor" and a "dictator" at the Ron Paul rally near Tampa this Sunday. Davis, a small-l libertarian Republican and Reason subscriber, then sought me out to clarify his remarks. Long story short: He's alarmed by the Fed's interventionist powers, thinks the economy and dollar are headed for collapse, he'd never spoken to a crowd that big before, and he was kind of "jacked up." A portion of our conversation:

Q: All right, so! I beat you up this morning...

A: No, actually, I was just coming here to tell you that...I don't disagree with anything you said in that piece, really.

The frustration is that when you talk about the Federal Reserve–and I understand the Federal Reserve's historic operations: they purchase securities, control the money supply, they put money in, put money out by selling Treasury securities–but in the last three years, what Ben Bernanke has done, and I guess this is what I was driving at, is quantitatively different, qualitatively different than any other Fed chairman, in that they create money out of thin air and purchase toxic assets from specific banks. They don't just make Treasury security purchases to increase reserves...so that they lower the federal funds rate, they don't do that. They're much more interventionist. [...]

And I guess my point was is, I don't think a lot of people are aware of the more interventionist role the Federal Reserve has played. Not only in the monetary supply–and I'm an Austrian, I mean, I believe in the boom-bust cycle, I believe that artificially lowering the rates you send the wrong signals to capital producers, and they overproduce, then you have the boom, and then you have the bust; I buy into all that, I think that's bad–but what Bernanke has done is just exponentially worse, because he's introduced an element of discretion into it. The Fed will decide what banks and what businesses it wants to help out, and which they don't.

And of course I was speaking metaphorically when I said, you know, "traitor," or "dictator." I guess my frustration is, what word, or what way do you communicate the facts in a way that resonates with people and then has them sit up and say "This is really hurting us"?

Last week the New Jersey legislature passed a bill aimed at improving emergency response to overdoses by giving people who call 911 immunity from prosecution for certain drug offenses, and yesterday California's legislature approved a similar bill. If both states' governors (Chris Christie and Jerry Brown, respectively) sign the bills, that will make 10 states with such "Good Samaritan" laws. (The others: New York, Illinois, Washington, New Mexico, Colorado, Florida, Rhode Island, and Connecticut.) Roseanne Scotti, New Jersey state director for the Drug Policy Alliance (DPA), explains the rationale:

Calling 911 should never be a crime. Our current policies focus on punishment and drive people into the shadows and away from help. Saving lives should always take priority over punishing behavior. A Good Samaritan law will encourage people to get help.

The number of drug overdose deaths counted by the CDC doubled between 1999 and 2005. DPA notes that "the majority of overdose victims do not actually die until several hours after they have taken a drug, and most of these deaths occur in the presence of others, meaning that there is both time and opportunity to summon medical assistance." 

Both anti-overdose bills were supported mainly by Democrats but also by some Republicans. The New Jersey bill, which applies to charges for sharing drugs or drug paraphernalia as well as possessing or using them, seems in sync with Christie's criticism of the drug war's counterproductive harshness. It passed the Assemby by a vote of 67 to 8 and the Senate by a vote of 21 to 10. The California bill, which applies only to possessing or using drugs, passed the Senate by a vote of 21 to 16 and the Assembly by a vote of 55 to 24. Under the California bill, people who provide drugs to overdose victims could still be prosecuted, a potentially serious weakness given how frequently people share or jointly purchase drugs.

More on Good Samaritan laws from Brian Doherty here.

The GOP platform is out, so it's official now: The Republican Party wants to audit the Federal Reserve and consider new ways to "set a fixed value for the dollar."

Because the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy actions affect both inflation and economic activity, those actions should be transparent. Moreover, the Fed’s important role as a lender of last resort should also be carried out in a more transparent manner. A free society demands that the sun shine on all elements of government. Therefore, the Republican Party will work to advance substantive legislation that brings transparency and accountability to the Federal Reserve, the Federal Open Market Committee, and the Fed’s dealings with foreign central banks. The first step to increasing transparency and accountability is through an annual audit of the Federal Reserve’s activities. Such an audit would need to be carefully implemented so that the Federal Reserve remains insulated from political pressures and so its decisions are based on sound economic principles and sound money rather than on political pressures for easy money and loose credit.

Determined to crush the double-digit inflation that was part of the Carter Administration’s economic legacy, President Reagan, shortly after his inauguration, established a commission to consider the feasibility of a metallic basis for U.S. currency. The commission advised against such a move. Now, three decades later, as we face the task of cleaning up the wreckage of the current Administration’s policies, we propose a similar commission to investigate possible ways to set a fixed value for the dollar.

This may, it turns out, be the only semi-victory this year for Paulite values in the GOP, though the Internet freedom plank the Paul people also talked about as a goal is in the GOP platform as well, though whether it says all a libertarian might want to say about Internet freedom is unclear to me as I write. Excerpts:

We will resist any effort to shift control away from the successful multi-stakeholder approach of Internet governance and toward governance by international or other intergovernmental organizations. We will ensure that personal data receives full constitutional protection from government overreach and that individuals retain the right to control the use of their data by third parties; the only way to safeguard or improve these systems is through the private sector....

The current Administration has been frozen in the past. It has conducted no auction of spectrum, has offered no incentives for investment, and, through the FCC’s net neutrality rule, is trying to micromanage telecom as if it were a railroad network...

We call for an inventory of federal agency spectrum to determine the surplus that could be auctioned for the taxpayers’ benefit...

UPDATE: Former Reason intern Nick Sibilla points out to me that the "Internet freedom" talk is undermined by another part of the platform:

Millions of Americans suffer from problem or pathological gambling that can destroy families. We support the prohibition of gambling over the Internet and call for reversal of the Justice Department’s decision distorting the formerly accepted meaning of the Wire Act that could open the door to Internet betting. The Internet must be made safe for children....Current laws on all forms of pornography and obscenity need to be vigorously enforced.

Gov. Jerry Brown flew from Sacramento to Los Angeles today – God knows why -- to announce his pension reform plan that everybody has been waiting for. It's a lot of fanfare for something so lackluster. It’s not nothing, but the outcome is just slowing the growth of the pension disaster. This plan is a long, long way from getting California’s personnel expenses under control. The Sacramento Bee’s state worker blog provides the basics:

The salary of future hires that will be considered for pension purposes will be capped. The ceilings: $110,000 for employees who participate in Social Security and $130,000 for those who don't, such as fire fighters, police and teachers.

Brown's proposal to put new hires in hybrid pension plans won't happen. Instead, the pension formulas for new hires -- both safety workers such as police and firefighters and miscellaneous employees -- will be rolled back.

New employees will pay half of their normal pension costs. Employers would still have to bargain contribution rates for current employees.

Miscellaneous employees -- the largest category of workers -- would have to wait until their 67th birthday for maximum retirement benefits, compared with age 62 for most current workers. Future safety employees -- including police, firefighters and prison officers -- would would have to wait until age 57 to qualify for maximum benefits. Depending on their employer and contract, current employees in those jobs can retire as early as 50 years old and receive maximum benefits, although that happens relatively little.

Lawmakers embraced several proposals Brown made earlier this year, including:

Pensions will be figured using a three-year salary average that includes only regular recurring pay.

Retirees can work a maximum 960 hours per year.

Felons will lose their pensions.

No more retroactive pension enhancements.

No more "pension holidays" that allow employers and employees to skip contributions when pension funds are flush.

Additional service credit purchases will be eliminated.

These are not bad ideas, but a lot of what it does is prevent future abuses of the system and reduces the growth of the pension commitment moving forward. It doesn’t do anything to deal with the crisis as it stands now. Employees will not be pushed into a 401(k)-type system to reduce the state’s liability.

It's time to re-think the U.S. education system, blogs Tammy Erickson at the Harvard Business Review website.

If you can get past her cheesy nickname for kids born after 1995—they're the Re-Generation!—Erickson offers a tidy wrap-up of what's wrong with public education, including the prevalent notion that students should be discouraged from using their "kid" technology (e.g., texting) for educational communications because it will leave them unprepared for professional life. 

The most striking passage, on boredom:

The kids I've interviewed all say that they wish their classes were more entertaining, interesting and fun. They are living in the most stimulating period in the history of the earth — besieged with information that they multi-process through a wide variety of technologies. But most schools require them to put that all away and ask them to focus on one, often-not-that-engaging speaker. Then they penalize them for getting distracted. 

And this, on Google:

Kids have figured out that the adults in their world — whether teachers or parents — are not necessarily the most reliable source of knowledge. Adults can be wrong — or at least warrant double checking. Parents have told me that even very young children will ask a question, listen to the answer, then suggest that they Google it "just to be sure." Technology leads to a new role for teachers (and parents): that of a learning facilitator and coach, rather than of an authoritative source of information.

In short: If you're serving up boring sludge, kids will hate it. And, despite an "eat your peas" mentality, there's no reason you should force them to consume the non-authoritative information their teachers are offering in archaic formats. We can do better.

For a more promising model, check out these stories on the future of online education.

Reason Senior Editor Peter Suderman appeared on the Coffee and Markets podcast today: The subject of discussion? The Romney campaign's decision to go back to highlighting Romney's role in crafting and passing the 2006 Massachusetts health care reform. The problem for Romney, as always, is that his health care plan looks an awful lot like ObamaCare, which Romney has promised to repeal.

What's the story? Why is Romney circling back to tout a policy that his base dislikes? What might actually happen to ObamaCare should Romney take the White House.

Peter Suderman discusses these questions and more with Coffee and Markets hosts Brad Jackson and Ben Domenech.

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Tampa - The Ron Paul delegates lost their first two major fights of the Republican National Convention. 

Their efforts to seat the disputed Maine delegation failed on a voice vote when the Report of the Committee on Credentials was accepted. Boos rained down on the floor immediately after its passage. Chants of "Seat them now" and "point of order!"erupted from all over the arena while Mitt Romney delegates attempted to chant "USA!" The entire convention morphed into a cauldron of dueling chants and noise that continued into Zori Fonalledas' presention of the Report of the Commitee on Permanent Organization. 

Gaveling several times, RNC Chairman Reince Prebius pleaded with delegates to show respect to Fonalledas.

A calm lasted briefly until John Sununu came to the podium to present the Report of the Committee on Rules. Paul delegates throughout the hall told Reason that they were unhappy with several of the proposed changes, particularly Rule 12 and Rule 16. 

Rule 12, they said, offered the party the ability to changes rules after the passage of them at the convention.

"These rules allow the RNC to change the rules without our approval," said Luis LaRott, 31, of Houston and a Ron Paul delegate. 

The other rule many of them were unhappy with, Rule 16, restructures the way delegates are distributed at caucuses and primaries. Paul delegates were concerned with the changes that would eliminate the ability of the states to choose delegates. 

These two votes caused a major uproar on the floor but Prebius ignored calls from Paul delegates, many that had spent months studying parliamentary procedures, that challenged the rules. 

Americans are not just getting poorer and broker. We're also earning more than 7 percent less than we were during the worst part of the recession, according to a report from two former U.S. Census Bureau officials. 

"[R]eal median annual household income, while recovering somewhat during late 2011 and the first half of 2012, has fallen by 4.8 percent since the 'economic recovery' began in June 2009," says the report [pdf] from Sentier Research, an analytical company founded by former U.S. Census Bureau officials Gordon Green and John Coder.  "The overall decline since June 2009 was larger than the 2.6 percent decline that occurred during the officially defined recession lasting from December 2007 to June 2009.  Adding this post-recession decline to the 2.6-percent drop that occurred during the recession leaves median household income 7.2 percent below the December 2007 level."

This is early confirmation of my column in the October issue of Reason, "Worse Than the Recession." It's not online yet, but here's a sample: 

Against this slow (and sometimes fast) dribbling away of wealth, we are supposed to believe the economy is improving because U-3 unemployment is "holding steady" at more than 8 percent, or because of a small spike in real estate settlements. 

Don’t believe it for a minute. It’s a step in the right direction that lenders have finally increased the pace of foreclosures (according to RealtyTrac, foreclosures jumped 6 percent in the first quarter), but it will take many years to work through the backlog of distressed mortgages. The percentage of Americans even looking for jobs, let alone holding them, continues to fall, and the 80,000-a-month rate of private-sector job creation doesn’t come close to keeping up with population growth. 

That the recovery is more painful than the recession (and over a longer time duration, a point many people don't take into consideration) is something I've discussed before. 

The Sentier report quantifies the decay brought on by Keynesian recovery in terms that only seem quaint: How much people are making, how much they're saving, and how much they have. "Less" is the short answer to all of those. 

"This latest report continues our efforts to help chronicle one important dimension of the economic hardships now being experienced by a large number of American households," Green explains. "Our data complement data on the unemployment rate, GDP estimates, leading economic indictors, etc.  In many ways, median household income provides a measure of the net effect of economic activity on the middle class and how well they are able to buy food, housing, and other necessities every month, especially now during this unprecedented period of economic stagnation. Based on our data, almost every group is worse off now than it was three years ago, with the exception of households with householders 65 years old and over. For some groups of households—Blacks, men living alone, younger and upper-middle age brackets, those with some college but no degree, the unemployed, the self-employed, and those living in the West—the declines tended to be larger than average."

So why is the drumbeat of the housing-led recovery getting louder? I think this may be another case where traditional economic wisdom about leading and lagging indicators turns out to be a bunch of baloney. Unless somebody can explain how a spike in real estate closings is going to be sustainable, given near-daily bad news about earning power and wealth formation, I say we're going to be looking at another "unexpected" decline in housing data before the year's out. 

Consumption be done about it? Of cough, of cough: The government has decided that people are too likely to use their savings and support from family members in tough times. "Given that only 15 percent of you turn to government assistance in tough times, we want to make sure you know about benefits that could help you," USA.gov announced yesterday in unveiling its new "government made easy" website designed to give us all “help for difficult financial times.” 

Related: It turns out China's full of deadbeats too.

• Tropical Storm Isaac is now officially Hurricane Isaac. New Orleans preps to get drenched. We’re not the only ones though – a typhoon in South Korea has killed nine.
• Republican voters choose their Senate candidate in today’s Arizona primaries. Rep. Jeff Flake is the front-runner.
• A deaf 3-year-old named Hunter in Grand Island, Neb., has been told by school officials that he needs to change the gesture he uses for his own name because it looks like a weapon. If you are stupid.
• Proposed pension reform for California public employees will raise retirement ages and cap the salary level used to determine benefits, but will not shift to a 401(k) program.
• The U.S. military wants the whole world to know about its l33t hacking skills. Does anybody still use “l33t” anymore or has the “Get on my level!” raging supplanted it?
• Britain’s press watchdog received thousands of complaints from citizens that publishing naked photos of Prince Harry violated his privacy. Also, his abs needed a touch more tone. Really, the Olympics have made them all body-conscious.

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

The Obama EPA is getting ready to formally raise the CAFÉ standards that auto companies have to meet from the current 34.5 mpg by 2016 to 54.5 mpg by 2025, reports the Washington Post. Even the 34.5 mpg requirement – that the Bush administration imposed in its waning days to foster “energy independence” and deflect attention from its Iraq debacle -- required the auto industry to expend $85 billion for retooling. So what a 50 percent increase over that will cost car companies is anyone’s guess – although be prepared, dear taxpayers, to open up your wallets to provide retooling loans.

But how is the pioneer in the genre of cars with an engine capable of meeting these new standards – to wit, the electric-hybrid Chevy Volt – doing? Not too well. In March, the Wall Street Journal reported :

General Motors Co. will idle production of its Chevrolet Volt battery-powered car for five weeks beginning this month because of slow sales amid an effort to boost the vehicle's consumer appeal, the company said Friday.

Launched last year with great fanfare, the Volt has had a rocky start as sales stalled, and the car became a lightning rod for critics of the Obama administration's auto-industry bailout and support for alternative energy.

GM said around 1,300 workers at the Hamtramck, Mich., factory where the Volt is built will be out of work between March 19 and April 23, a spokesman said. The plant had just resumed production on Feb. 6 after a prolonged holiday shutdown.

Mark Reuss, GM's North American chief, said in an interview the auto maker remains committed to the Volt and is taking a number of steps to improve lagging sales. GM will launch a new national ad campaign this month that features Volt owners praising the car. It also recently dropped the monthly cost of leasing the vehicles to $350 from $399 for a 36-month lease.

But a few short months later, GM is idling the plant yet again. That's hardly a surprise. GM, under pressure from the Obama administration, had a target of selling 45,000 Volts this year. Actual sales? Around10,600 sales through July. This was – triple the 2,870 sold in 2011, but only because California gave the car an artificial boost by allowing lone Volt drivers on the car pool lanes.

But what is GM planning to do when the plant is idled? Retooling it to manufacture cars that people actually want and can afford – even without the $7,500 subsidy that the $40,000 Volt gets. Reports Reuters:

GM…will continue to "match supply with demand" for both the Volt and the Chevrolet Malibu sedan that is also made at the plant. The automaker declined to specify how long the plant will be closed.

During the shutdown, GM will do some retooling and other work to prepare for production early next year of the 2014 Chevrolet Impala sedan. The plant will begin building preproduction prototypes of the redesigned Impala this fall.

Welcome to Obama’s green economy where products that sell can’t be made – and the ones that are made, don’t sell.

Tampa – As a possible floor fight at the Republican National Convention simmers, a dozen or so Ron Paul backers greeted media members as they entered the security perimeter surrounding the Tampa Convention this morning with signs and chants of support for the Texas congressman. Paul backers of all stripes are unhappy with what they perceive as attempts by the Republican establishment to stifle the strength of their movement by limiting their ability to attend future conventions. Others are still optimistic that the paleoconservative and libertarian icon can secure the nomination today.

“He’s got a very good chance,” said Michael Heiss, cradling a bullhorn.

“I mean it’s a long shot, but of course, of course,” said Dana Costello.

 “Ron Paul winning is a long shot but there is still a chance but when people say he’s got no shot I’d like to remind them that Buster Douglas knocked Mike Tyson the fuck out,” said Heiss.

Late last night it was believed a floor fight would be avoided but Erick Erickson of RedState is reporting that Paul delegates, or “the grassroots” as he calls them, are not happy with any of the agreements.

Follow me on Twitter for all the latest updates from the floor of the convention. 

Arguably, the national Democratic and Republican conventions have dramatically declined in importance since the 1968 Democratic National Convention, when Hubert Humphrey managed to win the Democratic presidential nomination without winning a single state primary. The McGovern-Fraser commission was established following the 1968 debacle to democratize the convention delegate selection process. Reforms set in motion laws requiring state primary elections to select delegates rather than party leaders. Eventually the Republican Party followed suit. Today, the Republican and Democratic party conventions are an amalgamation of political theater, posturing, but also a competition for power among intra-party groups.

Although some doubt the relevance of the conventions, I would argue there is still something to be learned. One first has to recognize that political parties are not ideological monoliths, but rather an amalgamation of diverse interests and groups that don’t always obviously go together. However, the only way for these different groups to get what they want is to win elections, and they can only win elections by forming coalitions.

Coalitions are difficult to maintain and different groups within the party compete for relative dominance. For instance, social conservatives and foreign policy hawks arguably have for a number of years been the dominant forces of the GOP. However, with the 2008 financial crisis and government’s excessive and likely ineffective response, socially moderate steadfast fiscal conservatives and libertarians have emerged as a formidable force threatening to take the dominant lead in the Republican Party (at least for now).

Consequently, the Republican and Democratic conventions showcase the dynamic interplay between competing groups and ideologies within each party. Observing the respective strategic approaches the Romney and Obama campaigns take are indicative of how they are managing their internal party quarrels while also trying to appeal to the general public.

The individuals selected to speak at the convention, the order and timing of each speech, and each speeches’ content will reveal a great deal about which political groups are likely winning the battle for internal dominance. Moreover, the response to the convention speakers will also reveal how the media and the public is responding to the dynamic interplay within parties to build coalitions while also catering to the general public.

Politico has a list of tonight’s speakers scheduled to open the 2012 Republican National Convention; several deserve extra attention.

1)    Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker: Walker withstood a recall after taking on public sector unions to balance the state budget. Despite unions' impressive political power, funded by mandated membership dues, Walker kept the governorship indicating to political officials throughout the country that it’s politically feasible to reform public sector unions. (Read here for Shikha Dalmia’s clever description of Walker as a panicked accountant.)

2)    Republican Texas Senate Candidate Ted Cruz: Although the Texas political establishment liked Cruz, they had chosen Lieut. Gov. David Dewhurst as their next Texas Senate candidate. However, former Solicitor General of Texas Ted Cruz had the support of grassroots tea party groups throughout the state which propelled Cruz into the primary run-off and to an unlikely yet dramatic win in July 2012.

3)    South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley: Haley also rode the Tea Party wave, but back in 2010. However, she has since angered many tea partiers and libertarians in the state. For this reason, her approach at the convention will be especially interesting.

4)    Mrs. Ann Romney: The wife of presumptive GOP nominee Mitt Romney for 43 years, many expect Ann Romney to help reveal the real Mitt Romney, to the extent possible in one speech.

5)    New Jersey Governor Chris Christie: entertaining, hard-hitting, and sometimes offensive. He says things that need to be said and other things that shouldn’t, but does it regardless of others' expectations. 

Catalonia is asking for 5 billion euros and says it will reject any political conditions. The northern province, which represents one fifth of Spain’s economy, is looking to receive funds from the proposed but yet to be realized eighteen billion euro liquidity fund announced by the central government back in July.

Data released today showed that Spain’s economy as a whole contracted 0.4 percent in the last three months. Spain and its constituent provinces have cuts spending, but it is unlikely to be enough to avoid some intervention from international bodies. Over a Bloomberg Andrew Davis and Angeline Benoit explain:

Rajoy has introduced the most aggressive austerity measures in Spain in more than 30 years, though without the regions curtailing their shortfalls, the government is at risk of missing its 2012 deficit goal of 6.3 percent of GDP. Earlier this month, Rajoy imposed debt ceilings on the regions, with Catalonia limited to total borrowing of 22.8 percent of output this year, compared with 21 percent in the first quarter.

Catalonia indicated that it would need bailout funds back in July, when it was already clear that the province was unable to pay for social services. As pointed out above, Spain may very well miss its deficit reduction goal, and many think that Spain will be the next country in line for a sovereign bailout. The Spanish government has said that it will wait for the European Central Bank to outline its plans before any formal request is made. However, Prime Minister Rajoy has said he is open to all options. A few days ago Reuters reported on talks between the Spanish government and European officials on conditions for a possible bailout. Rajoy’s office refused to comment.

The mechanism for provincial bailouts the Spanish government proposed back in July would use bank loans and lottery funds to help indebted provinces. Although Catalonia has made the request many were expecting the liquidity mechanism is still not active.

The recent request for funds from Catalonia comes as representatives from the troika (European Commission, International Monetary Fund, and the European Central Bank) visit Lisbon to oversee Portugal’s reforms and the President of the European Council, Herman Van Rompuy, visits Spain. For today at least all eyes are on the Iberian Peninsula. Greece can enjoy a rare day out of the spotlight. 

"These conventions are not supposed to be coronations. They are supposed to be fights on the floor," says one Ron Paul supporter Reason TV caught up with on the floor of the Republican National Convention.

Watch above or click on the link below for video, full text, supporting links, downloadable versions. and more Reason TV clips.

Dinesh D'Souza's documentary 2016: Obama's America burned up the box office in a very slow movie week. Nikki Finke reports that the film took fourth place in U.S. ticket sales Friday and eighth place for the weekend. (The drop over three days indicates the film's heavy reliance on pre-sales.) On the chance that my more or less positive review helped drive those impressive numbers, let me just point out that you'll definitely want to see Home Run Showdown, the stand-up-and-cheer movie of the year for the whole family, when it bows in L.A. the day after tomorrow. 

In an Associated Press "Fact Check," Beth Fouhy lives up to her last name by saying "Fooey!" to many of the claims D'Souza makes against President Obama in the film. But most of the facts she refers to are matters of emphasis rather than specific truth claims. 

"The assertion that Obama's presidency is an expression of his father's political beliefs, which D'Souza first made in 2010 in his book 'The Roots of Obama's Rage,' is almost entirely subjective and a logical stretch at best," Fouhy writes. I said as much in my review, which judged that the film persuasively makes a case I don't agree with. (I'm a New Critic. What's up on the screen, not what we know from outside the theater, is what matters.) But a subjective claim by its nature is not susceptible to verification. 

Here are Fouhy's fact claims: 

- D'Souza rightly argues that the national debt has risen to $16 trillion under Obama. But he never mentions the explosion of debt that occurred under Obama's predecessor, Republican George W. Bush, nor the 2008 global financial crisis that provoked a shock to the U.S. economy.

- D'Souza says Obama is "weirdly sympathetic to Muslim jihadists" in Afghanistan and Pakistan. He does not mention that Obama ordered the raid that killed Osama bin Laden and the drone strikes that have killed dozens of terrorists in the region.

- D'Souza wrongly claims that Obama wants to return control of the Falkland Islands from Britain to Argentina. The U.S. refused in April to endorse a final declaration on Argentina's claim to the islands at the Summit of the Americas, provoking criticism from other Latin American nations.

- D'Souza says Obama has "done nothing" to impede Iran's nuclear ambitions, despite the severe trade and economic sanctions his administration has imposed on Iran to halt its suspected nuclear program. Obama opposes a near-term military strike on Iran, either by the U.S. or Israel, although he says the U.S. will never tolerate a nuclear-armed Iran.

- D'Souza says Obama removed a bust of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill from the OVAL OFFICE because Churchill represented British colonialism. WHITE HOUSE CURATOR William Allman said the bust, which had been on loan, was already scheduled to be returned before Obama took office. Another bust of Churchill is on display in the president's private residence, the White House says.

In reverse order: 

Fouhy is drawing on a "Fact Check" that appeared in June on the White House blog, trying to clear up the controversy over the Churchill bust. (The Obama Administration is never too busy to attend to The People's business.) The Obama folks, as they did with Solyndra, try to push the decision regarding the bust back to the Bush Administration. Jake Tapper notes that there are actually two Churchill busts, and points out that the original news was not anti-Obama propaganda but a claim from the British Embassy itself. (As far as I'm concerned any president who gets rid of a bust of Churchill – a figure far more beloved on this side of the Atlantic than in the island nation he actually ruled – is A-OK.) 

The claim about Obama's having done nothing to prevent Iran from getting nukes is itself subjective. Unless Fouhy can demonstrate that sanctions have actually slowed Iran's nuclear weapons program (unlikely, given that the program's very existence is in doubt), it's perfectly fair to say that, from the standpoint of an Iran-nuke hawk, Obama has achieved nothing. 

Fouhy is correct about Falklands policy, which has been one of neutrality going back to the Reagan Administration, when Argentina and the United Kingdom went to war over the islands. Prime Minister David Cameron somewhat complicates this narrative by saying the U.S. supports both the "status quo" and "self-determination" – which, since the overwhelming majority of Falklands residents want to remain with the U.K., could be considered British-leaning neutrality rather than the pro-Argentina position D'Souza implies. Neither Fouhy nor D'Souza mentions the president's biggest Falklands embarrassment: when he tried to call them the "Malvinas" but it came out "Maldives." (As I pointed out, D'Souza is more fair to his subject than any of his leftwing counterparts ever were to George W. Bush.) 

The correction about Islamists is, again, subjective. D'Souza says Obama "seems weirdly sympathetic." That's one weasel word, an adverb and an adjective. If you're on D'Souza's side (I'm not), the statement is not controversial. But it makes no factual claim. D'Souza is under no obligation to burnish Obama's terror-fighting reputation, and the killing of Osama bin Laden is not some obscure event that audiences would not have known about otherwise. 

Fouhy is wrong about the film's misstatement on the national debt. D'Souza's source for that stuff is a former comptroller who places the blame evenly on Bush 43 and Obama. D'Souza, who co-wrote and co-directed, left that statement in the film, and it is false to say he "never mentions" Bush's profligacy. 

Subjective assertions are worth arguing about. D'Souza's view of Obama as a Fanonian radical at war with the establishmentarian U.S.A. seems to me less plausible than a critique rooted in Chicago shakedown politics, and far less plausible than Thaddeus Russell's view that Obama is devoted to the traditional American empire of welfare and warfare. (These theories also strike me as better supported by Obama's history in office.) That's why there are 31 flavors. D'Souza blends his own autobiography with Obama's in a way that you will find either charming or narcissistic, depending on your political views. The title of his film is a year that hasn't happened yet.  It's clear that he is working subjectively. I'm not just concerned about the defining down of the "Fact Check" concept but also with the crumbling of the left's movie-reviewing skills. 

In other movie news: Werner Herzog can hypnotize chickens. 

Actually "record low" depends on the time period under consideration. In this case, the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) reports:

Arctic sea ice appears to have broken the 2007 record daily extent and is now the lowest in the satellite era. With two to three more weeks left in the melt season, sea ice continues to track below 2007 daily extents...

Arctic sea ice extent fell to 4.10 million square kilometers (1.58 million square miles) on August 26, 2012. This was 70,000 square kilometers (27,000 square miles) below the September 18, 2007 daily extent of 4.17 million square kilometers (1.61 million square miles).

Including this year, the six lowest ice extents in the satellite record have occurred in the last six years (2007 to 2012).

In November, 2011 researchers reported in Nature that summer Arctic sea ice cover in 2007 was the lowest in the past 1,500 years. From the abstract:

...we use a network of high-resolution terrestrial proxies from the circum-Arctic region to reconstruct past extents of summer sea ice, and show that—although extensive uncertainties remain, especially before the sixteenth century—both the duration and magnitude of the current decline in sea ice seem to be unprecedented for the past 1,450 years. Enhanced advection of warm Atlantic water to the Arctic⁶ seems to be the main factor driving the decline of sea ice extent on multidecadal timescales, and may result from nonlinear feedbacks between sea ice and the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation. These results reinforce the assertion that sea ice is an active component of Arctic climate variability and that the recent decrease in summer Arctic sea ice is consistent with anthropogenically forced warming.

However, another set of researchers analyzed driftwood on Arctic beaches to create a 10,000 year record of Arctic sea ice variability, [sub required] published in the August 5, 2011 issue of Science. Combining their data with climate models, the researchers report:

In this exercise, our records would correspond in the model to an Arctic Ocean sea-ice cover in summer at 8 ky B.P. that was less than half of the record low 2007 level [emphasis added].The general buildup of sea ice from ~6 ky B.P. agrees with the LOVECLIM model, showing that summer sea-ice cover, which reached its Holocene maximum during the LIA [little ice age], attained its present (~2000) extent at ~ 4 ky B.P.

During the Holocene Temperature Maximum (~8,000 years ago), Arctic temperatures are estimated to have been about 2 degrees celsius higher than at present. Those higher HTM temperatures are thought to have been the result of orbital shifts that increase the amount of sunlight hitting the Northern Hemisphere. The current temperature increases are thought to be the result of increased concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

As the Romney coronation gets underway today, spare a thought for the first political party to pick its presidential candidate at a convention. On September 25, 1831, the Anti-Masonic Party assembled in Baltimore to choose the man who would face Andrew Jackson and Henry Clay in the following year's election.

The Anti-Masons, as you may have guessed from their name, were devoted to fighting Freemasonry. Their party had formed in the wake of the apparent murder of William Morgan, an itinerant stonemason and former Freemason who had declared his plans to expose the order's secrets. Following this announcement, Morgan was abducted and never seen again. In the uproar that ensued, many Americans became convinced that Masonic vigilantes had murdered Morgan, that many Masons had perjured themselves to protect the assassins, and that highly placed Masons had abused their power in an attempt to cover up the crime. The movement attracted some big names, including former president John Quincy Adams, who commented privately in the early stages of the 1832 campaign that the "dissolution of the Masonic institution in the United States" was "really more important to us and our posterity than the question whether Mr. Clay or General Jackson shall be the president."

Being the first political party to hold a nominating convention is a footnote. The Anti-Masons' more substantial contribution to the American political tradition came a few days later, when they gave us the first nominating convention to sell out its party's principles. The candidate selected, former U.S. attorney general William Wirt, was a former Freemason. I don't mean he was an ex-Mason who had turned his back on the secret society; I mean he was an ex-Mason who didn't really find the order objectionable at all. In a letter to the convention, Wirt denounced Morgan's murder, but he attributed it to the acts of "a few ignorant and ferocious desperadoes." In "the quarter of the Union with which I am acquainted," Wirt insisted, Masonry included many "intelligent men of high and honourable character" who would never privilege their oaths to the order over "their duties to their God and their country." The Anti-Masons had nominated a defender of Freemasonry.

Well, at least he didn't tout RomneyCare as an alternative to ObamaCare. The Anti-Masons fell in behind Wirt, who went on to claim about 8 percent of the national vote, carrying Vermont. The Masons, of course, went on to assassinate Michael Jackson and fake the Moon landing, or so I hear.

Glenn Instapundit Reynolds has a col in today's NYPOST that reads in part:

In the United States...only 17 states even require identification in order to vote. Holder & Co., claim that requiring photo ID would be racist, because getting a driver’s license, etc., costs money. This claim has consistently been rejected by courts, and with good reason: If requiring photo ID to vote is racist, then what about requiring photo ID to exercise other constitutional rights, like buying a gun?

Of course, the real objection to requiring voter ID isn’t based in civil rights, but in civil wrongs. With elections often decided by narrow margins, the ability to produce a few thousand more ballots can often swing the results. (In Minnesota’s 2008 disputed US Senate election, won by Al Franken — who proceeded to cast the deciding vote in favor of ObamaCare — the margin of victory was 312, but it turned out that 1,099 votes were cast by felons who were ineligible to vote. Many of them have gone to jail, but Franken has remained in the Senate).

Voter ID makes that kind of trickery harder, which is why political manipulators oppose it.

Voters understand this. According to a Washington Post poll taken earlier this month, 74 percent of Americans support laws requiring voters to show photo identification.

Read more.

Related: How many dead voters are on the rolls (and hence open to manipulation and fraud)? Politico reports that one in eight voter registrations "is not valid or has significant inaccuracies." Plus:

There also are more than 1.8 million deceased people who still have active registration on voter rolls, Pew [Center on the States] found. And, [Pew's David] Becker said, the outdated, inefficient systems currently in place are “not designed to keep up with deaths as they occur.”

Read more.

I don't think voter fraud is the issue that many right-wingers and left-wingers claim (they call out different issues, but they both seem quick to claim some sort of fakery, from community organizers or Diebold machines or whatever, is at work).

Indeed, the far bigger issue to me is the candidates who are on the ballot and not voters literally have a pulse.

But voter fraud, especially involving clinically dead people - brain dead people, not so much - does seem like a relatively easy issue to address and fix.

Business leaders often talk about the “core competencies” of their organization. A firm’s core competency is not just what a business does best, it is a unique advantage over potential competitors, and it is also a skill or capability that can be reused, applied to multiple potential products and markets.

Core competence is often defined in relative terms: It’s what sets one business apart from other firms working in the same space, a strength when compared with the competition.

Political candidates also have core competencies. And one way to identify those core competencies is to look at the roles that the candidates play within their own organizations — the jobs they do, and also the jobs they want to be seen doing.

For example, the GOP contender, Mitt Romney, has put himself at the center of the campaign’s strategic planning. Unlike most campaigns, which rely on considerable direction from the candidate but are chiefly managed by a powerful staff strategist — an operative/visionary like Karl Rove or David Axelrod — Romney, as Politico put it, is his own top political adviser: “Romneyworld consists of a set of interlocking circles, created during his time in business and in government, tied together by a campaign manager with a clear mandate over the operation but with the candidate himself at the center.”

This isn’t just the way the operation works. It’s also the perception they labor to create. The Romney campaign dislikes process stories and tends to resist participating in media “coverage that focuses on the impact of particular advisers. As Jason Zengerle reported in his excellent GQ profile of senior Romney aide Eric Fehrnstrom, there was more than a little internal friction when a debate coach brought on to help Romney was highlighted in a prominent New York Times article. And Zengerle suggests that there were consequences: “A few days later, Romney's debate coach, who figured significantly in the Times story, got booted from the campaign. No one has crowed since.” The campaign wants to ensure that any credit for successful operations goes to Romney, not his aides.

Obama, in contrast, wants to be seen as a visionary rhetorician — a speaker and wordsmith whose candidacy revolves around both his grand ideas and his power to express them.

And in his campaign operations, that’s the role he seems to play. Obama famously wrote his career-making 2004 Democratic National Convention speech, insisting on drafting the speech himself after finding previous speeches and remarks written by advisers Robert Gibbs and David Axelrod to be insufficiently authentic and powerful expressions of his beliefs. Obama felt he could put his ideas into words better than anyone else. And his staff seemed to agree.

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Time’s Jay Newton-Small looked at Obama’s speechwriting process, writing that “Obama takes an unusually hands-on approach to his speech writing, more so than most politicians.” Axelrod, the campaign’s top strategist, reinforced this view, telling Newton-Small, "When you're working with Senator Obama the main player on a speech is Senator Obama. He is the best speechwriter in the group and he knows what he wants to say and he generally says it better than anybody else would."

Another way of saying this might be that Obama is selling ideas while Romney is selling action. You can see this reflected in their records. Obama is much more effective at conjuring up a powerful vision than he is at designing the details of legislation or its implementation. As the governor of Massachusetts and the head of Bain Capital, on the other hand, Romney seems to have managed and implemented policy well enough. But he hasn't been able to successfully pitch voters on a grand vision and doesn’t seem to be driven by one himself. In the end, then, their strengths suggest their weaknesses. Looking at the core competency of each candidate tells you as much about the gaps in their abilities as it does about what they think they do well. 

In a recent article at SCOTUSblog, New York University law professor Richard Epstein wondered if Mitt Romney’s selection of Paul Ryan as his running mate signals a broader return to limited government principles by the GOP, including when it comes to the selection of future Supreme Court justices. Epstein writes:

What will the future bring?  My hope is that the Republicans will run a principled campaign that stresses the need for sustainable social institutions, so that the task of national repair can take place not only on the executive and legislative fronts, but on the judicial front as well. There are many domestic issues that command attention but none is more important than the simple question of how big a government? And for what ends?  Much of the blame for the current economic impasse comes from the Supreme Court’s penchant to defer to the political branches when they hatch their multiple schemes of special taxation and special subsidy.  Change that attitude and over time a profound reorientation of our constitutional culture might help the United States get out of its current economic and social malaise. Do business as usual and there will be economic stagnation – the new normal – stretching into the indefinite future.

The Supreme Court’s repeated failure to act as any sort of meaningful check against regulatory overreach is indeed a very serious problem. But I’m not so sure Romney and Ryan are prepared to offer a viable solution. As Epstein noted in his article, judicial abdication on economic matters is a bipartisan affair. Both liberal and conservative justices now routinely “give both the federal and state government carte blanche on general economic regulation.”

That approach was evident most recently in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, where Chief Justice John Roberts joined the Court’s liberal bloc and cast the deciding vote to uphold Obamacare, a decision he justified as a matter of judicial deference. “It is not our job,” Roberts wrote, “to protect the people from the consequences of their political choices.” So much for checking the misdeeds of the other branches.

Yet if you visit Mitt Romney’s official campaign website, you’ll learn that if elected president, “Mitt will nominate judges in the mold of Chief Justice Roberts.” That’s not exactly reassuring.

It's also notable that the Romney campaign selected former federal appeals court Judge Robert Bork to head up its Justice Advisory Committee, which advises the campaign “on the Constitution, judicial matters, law enforcement, homeland security, and regulatory issues.” Bork is of course a revered figure among legal conservatives, but he’s also a strong advocate of the very same judicial philosophy practiced by Roberts in the Obamacare case. Indeed, Bork has long endorsed a majoritarian version of judicial restraint that grants lawmakers vast leeway to regulate both social and economic matters. As Bork once put it, “In wide areas of life, majorities are entitled to rule, if they wish, simply because they are majorities.”

So when it comes to the pressing issue of judicial pacifism at the Supreme Court, Romney and Ryan still appear to be on the side of business as usual.

In the spring of 2000, a bicycle cop in Arlington, Virginia stopped 19-year-old Lundy Khoy and asked her if she was carrying any drugs. "Having been taught to trust the police," Khoy writes of the experience, "I answered honestly." She told the cop that she had seven tabs of ecstasy, and that she planned to sell them to pay back some money she took from her mom.

In Virginia, possesion with intent to sell is an aggrevated felony.  

"On the advice of my lawyer and feeling that a trial would increase my family's suffering and embarrassment," Khoy writes, "I pled guilty and was sentenced to five years in jail."

Khoy served three months and was released for good behavior. She moved back in with her parents, got a job, and enrolled in community college. "I began to accept, forgive, and believe in myself," writes Khoy, who is now 31. She also completed four years of supervised probation without missing appointments or failing drug tests. 

If Lundy Khoy had been born in the United States--instead of in a refugee camp in Thailand for Cambodians fleeing Pol Pot's ethnic cleansing campaign--she would be free and clear. But Lundy Khoy didn't come here until she was 12 months old. She's not a citizen, only a "legal permanent resident." 

Because of her immigration status and the mistake she made when she was 19, Lundy Khoy could soon be separated from her mother and father and her American-born brother and sister, and deported from the only country she's ever known.

It's one thing for economists, pundits and politicians to gaze into their crystal balls and predict the future; they just don't have that much on the line. Sure, they have reputations to maintain, but those don't seem to suffer too terribly even when people are wrong time and again. If Paul Krugman can hold a gig at the New York Times after lo these many years, the consequences for being completely out of touch with reality are clearly not too high. But when people bet real money on their forecasts, you know they have faith in what they see. And what Unilever, the consumer goods giant, sees, is a Europe that's getting poorer.

From the London Daily Telegraph:

Unilever will adopt marketing strategies used in developing countries in order to drive future growth in Europe, as the head of its European business warned that poverty will rise in the region as a result of the debt crisis.

The company behind Persil, PG Tips and Flora said it will apply lessons from its Asian business as consumers change their shopping habits amid a financial crisis that has left Greece mired in recession for the past five years and Spain with the highest unemployment rate in the industrialised world.

"Poverty is returning to Europe," Jan Zijderveld, the head of Unilever's European business told the Financial Times Deutschland in an interview.

"If a consumer in Spain only spends €17 when they go shopping, then I'm not going to be able to sell them washing powder for half of their budget."

Unilever's new strategy is to offer low-cost brands and smaller serving sizes at affordable prices. Affordable even, that is, to the cash-poor Europeans that the British-Dutch company's economists see in the future.

There's no guarantee that Unilever is more right than any of the other crystal-ball gazers, but the company is putting its money where its predictions are.

(H/T: Lord Humungus)

Tampa - The Republican National Convention really begins today, as colorful New Jersey Governor Chris Christie delivers a highly anticipated keynote address. Meanwhile Republicans are keeping an eye on Soon-To-Be-Hurricane Isaac, which will make landfall on the Gulf Coast later today. Isaac was credited with limiting turnout at RNC protests yesterday.

Libertarian Party presidential candidate Gary Johnson has spent the last several days in Tampa going to various party functions. He leaves town today, just as the action takes off. 

Here is what's happening on on Day Two of the 2012 RNC: 

1.      Roll Call Day
The modern political convention is really a highly choreographed, largely predictable four-day paid advertisement. Today, though, all that planning could go out the window because it is party-business day, when the GOP actually rules on changes and nominates its 2012 ticket. Some Ron Paulers still believe that they will have a real chance to nominate their favorite guy, while others are looking for a floor fight over party minutiae.

Paul delegates are extremely upset over party rule changes that would alter the way delegates to the national convention are assigned. The rules would give presidential campaigns the power to pick state delegations and would tie the caucus and primary results to allotment of delegates. Paul did not perform well in the primary or caucuses but he did do very well at state party events that assigned and, in some cases, awarded bound convention delegates. If the changes proposed by the national GOP were in place, the Paul delegation in Tampa would be much, much smaller.

2.      Chris Christie
All eyes will be on the Garden State's governor tonight when he gives the keynote address of the convention. During the primary season several big-money Republicans tried to nudge Christie into the race but he didn’t budge. As a northeastern Republican, Christie is part of a dying species, but his take-no-prisoners demeanor has helped propel him to national rock star status in the conservative movement. There’s a chance Christie’s gruffness and shoot-from-the-hip nature could overshadow Romney later in the week

• With Tropical Storm Isaac verging on hurricane status and heading in for some jambalaya, President Barack Obama has declared a state of emergency in Louisiana.
• Gary Johnson, Libertarian presidential candidate, points out that Republican immigration policy "borders on racist." You may actually be too nice with your description, Gary.
• Word has it that Joe Biden is planning his own presidential run for 2016. Please. No.
• In North Carolina, a prison guard was busted for smuggling marijuana to the inmates, hidden in his pants. What's the problem? It keeps them mellow.
• Greece will offer tax and administrative advantages in "special economic zones" to lure business and investment from overseas. Here's an idea, folks: Try that in your whole, damned country.
• Galway, Ireland plans to erect a statue to famed butcher and thug Che Guevara, so Florida-based philanthropist Elviro Sanchez, a Cuban refugee, is offering to foot the bill for a Lindsay Lohan statue, instead. He points out that Lohan has actual roots in Galway and hasn't killed anybody. Yet.
• The family of Rachel Corrie will not be getting any damages from the Israeli government, the Haifa District Court ruled. She was killed by a military bulldozer while protesting on behalf of Palestinians.

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

Matt Welch lays out the three big issues at this week's Republican National Convention in Tampa:

1. Where do Ron Paul supporters go?

2. Will the GOP get serious about debt and spending?

3. What about social issues and immigration?

Click above to watch or go below for full links, more resources, and more.

And go here to follow all of Reason's RNC Convention coverage.

Privacy encompasses the real and virtual spaces where you can think your most heretical thoughts without the fear of social and political consequences and where you can seal the bonds of love and friendship. In Privacy, Garret Keizer, a curmudgeonly contributing editor to Harper's, grapples with the meaning and importance of maintaining places where we are left alone to think what we will, love whom we must, and bear the indignities of life's pratfalls. Reason Science Correspondent Ronald Bailey reviews the book.

So said State Sen. Tom Davis (R-South Carolina) at Sunday's Ron Paul rally on the eve of the Republican National Convention. Davis also said of the Federal Reserve Chairman that "he's hollowing us out, he's destroying our liberty, he's destroying our economic freedom and he has to be stopped." Ron Paul, he said, "has opened up my eyes to who the most powerful man in the world is." Watch the video:

In Senior Editor Brian Doherty's account of the rally (which I joined for the last couple of hours), he described Davis' performance like this: 

Davis gave a very angry peroration against the "traitor" Ben Bernanke and called for advance support in his plan to unseat Sen. Lindsay Graham in 2014. While Davis' style was very un-Ron Paul in its intense shouty anger bordering on rage, many attendees told me it was their favorite non-Paul part of the day.

That "favorite" bit gives me pause. Facts are damning enough without hyperbolic embroidery, IMO, and untruths lead you to bad places. Ben Bernanke is many things, even many bad things, but the man's actions are not covered by this language: 

Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.

That's in the United States Constitution, a document whose carefully written text was invoked with some frequency at the Ron Paul rally. Did QE2 amount to "levying War"? Did it involve the conscious adherence to, say, China? I see no literal way of getting to the answer "yes." To the more serious (though less statutorily defined) charge of The Bernank being a "dictator," one can only congratulate Sen. Davis for having the good fortune of not really knowing what living under one of those sonsabitches is like. 

The Paul rally's dual tone–"both apocalyptic and hopeful," in Doherty's apt phrasing–was fascinating to observe, and there is no question after the truncated Day One of the RNC where the political enthusiasm (including genuine enthusiasm for broad-brased freedom) lies in Tampa: it's with the Paul delegates. (Who, unlike the vastly larger Romney faction, disregarded instructions to not show up to the convention floor Monday, waving Ron Paul signs in front of various GOP messaging.) I look forward to cheering on the Paulites as they fight to get their voices heard figuratively and literally during today's roll call and related events.  

But if the movement that remains after Ron Paul exits the stage rewards politicians for shouting "traitor," and allows targets of its righteous wrath to become obsessions all out of proportion to reality, then many Americans will have a difficult time understanding just what such exertions have to do with liberty.

Officials at Oklahoma's Prague High School have refused to give a diploma to Kaitlin Nootbaar, the valedictorian of the 2012 graduating class. They say they won't give it to her until she writes an apology for saying “hell” in her graduation speech.

Brickbat Archive

The Obama EPA is getting ready to formally raise the CAFÉ standards that auto companies have to meet from the current 34.5 mpg by 2016 to 54.5 mpg by 2025, reports the Washington Post. Even the 34.5 mpg requirement – that the Bush administration imposed in its waning days to foster “energy independence” and deflect attention from its Iraq debacle -- required the auto industry to expend $85 billion for retooling. So what a 50 percent increase over that will cost car companies is anyone’s guess – although be prepared, dear taxpayers, to open up your wallets to provide retooling loans.

But how is one of the few cars with an engine capable of meeting these new standards – to wit, the Chevy Volt – but crappy in every other respect doing? As of yesterday, not too well, according to the Wall Street Journal:

General Motors Co. will idle production of its Chevrolet Volt battery-powered car for five weeks beginning this month because of slow sales amid an effort to boost the vehicle's consumer appeal, the company said Friday.

Launched last year with great fanfare, the Volt has had a rocky start as sales stalled, and the car became a lightning rod for critics of the Obama administration's auto-industry bailout and support for alternative energy.

GM said around 1,300 workers at the Hamtramck, Mich., factory where the Volt is built will be out of work between March 19 and April 23, a spokesman said. The plant had just resumed production on Feb. 6 after a prolonged holiday shutdown.

Mark Reuss, GM's North American chief, said in an interview the auto maker remains committed to the Volt and is taking a number of steps to improve lagging sales. GM will launch a new national ad campaign this month that features Volt owners praising the car. It also recently dropped the monthly cost of leasing the vehicles to $350 from $399 for a 36-month lease.

The idling, second time this year, is hardly a surprise. GM, under pressure from the Obama administration, had a target of selling 45,000 Volts this year. Actual sales? Around10,600 sales through July. This was – triple the 2,870 sold in 2011, but only because California gave the car an artificial boost by allowing single-occupany Volts on car pool lanes.

But what is GM planning to do when the plant is idled? Retooling it to manufacture cars that people actually want and can afford – even without the $7,500 subsidy that the $40,000 Volt gets. Reports Reuters:

GM…will continue to "match supply with demand" for both the Volt and the Chevrolet Malibu sedan that is also made at the plant. The automaker declined to specify how long the plant will be closed.

During the shutdown, GM will do some retooling and other work to prepare for production early next year of the 2014 Chevrolet Impala sedan. The plant will begin building preproduction prototypes of the redesigned Impala this fall.

Welcome to Obama's green economy where the products that sell can't be made -- and the ones that are made can't be sold.

Tampa—Mike Huckabee has said some really caustic things about libertarians in the past.

In 2011:

To the contrary, the governor gave an all-out defense of his tax hikes while governor of Arkansas on the grounds that they were the only responsible course of action to repair state roads. He snorted with derision at "libertarians" who fail to recognize that "we don't have a health-care crisis in this country, but a health crisis." He spoke with passion and knowledge on the need for preventative care to bring down exorbitant costs.

In 2010 on how CPAC is awful because of libertarians:

"CPAC has becoming increasingly more libertarian and less Republican over the last years, one of the reasons I didn't go this year," Huckabee said in an interview with Fox News, where he is a paid analyst and has his own show.

In 2008 in his book Do The Right Thing:

The real threat to the Republican Party is something we saw a lot of this past election cycle: libertarianism masked as conservatism. And it threatens to not only split the Republican Party, but render it as irrelevant as the Whig Party.

Yet when Reason caught up with Huckabeee on an escalator at the Tampa Convention Center earlier today, he turned out to be surprisingly neutral on the subject of libertarians.

Asked for his view on the topic of Ron Paul supporters and other libertarians feeling like they’ve been pushed out by the GOP, Huckabee said, “I don’t think they been disrespected. Elections are about numbers. I lost four years ago. I didn’t feel disrespected as much as I felt defeated. You have to accept that the voters make a choice and the voters made a choice.”

What about Libertarian Party presidential candidate Gary Johnson? “I like Gary, he’s a good guy, he’s good friend of mine," Huckabee declared. "We were governors together. All I can tell you is if he gets enough votes he wins, if he doesn’t, he doesn’t. It’s a math issue.”

family photoOn May 19, twenty-four-year-old Seth Adams was shot four times by an undercover deputy, Michael Custer, who said in an interview with an investigator two days later that he felt his life was threatened, according  to transcripts provided to the Palm Beach Post (some of the audio is available here), part of hundreds of pages of documents from the state attorney and Florida Department of Law Enforcement, which investigated the shooting. That investigation cleared Custer of any wrongdoing in the shooting, naturally.

Seth Adams noticed the undercover deputy’s car in the parking lot of his family business on his way home from a local watering hole. Custer says he identified himself “verbally” and “visually” and that he “had a radio out.” He claims Adams grabbed him by the throat and that Adams’ “intentions were dangerous." When Adams returned to his vehicle, Custer said he recognized the maneuver from training videos and thought Adams was going for a gun. He shot him four times in under two seconds, saying “I think I basically tried to push away and just went boom, boom, boom, boom.”

Attorneys for Adams’ family claim police stood idly by while Adams crawled across the parking lot after being shot, and that police impeded the arrival and departure of EMS. Custer says Adams told him there were “cameras here” and that ”this is all being recorded.” Police seized video equipment from the Adams’ family business on a warrant looking to prove a felony was committed; “battery on a law-enforcement officer.” Police later said no video of the incident was found.

The family rejects the findings of the state investigation, and their attorney said they want to conduct their own. They reject the claim that Adams was violent or that he would resist arrest (Custer claims he told Adams he was being placed under arrest). “Both sides agree that Adams told Custer to get off the property,” the Palm Beach Post reported, and the family attorney says that means Custer had become a trespasser.

Custer was conducting surveillance, but the documents show it was not targeting Adams, his family or their business, but rather an ATM theft ring, run by white males in their twenties known to be violent, according to police. The Palm Beach Post also reports that police believed that ATM ring was conducting counter-surveillance and wanted to target a deputy’s home. Custer said he wasn’t sure if Adams belonged to that ring, though the family attorney points out he was wearing a bright green shirt from the garden store in whose parking lot the deputy was conducting surveillance.  

Palm Beach County Sheriff Ric Bradshaw, meanwhile, said of the situation: "It was just very bad from the outset with Seth Adams' demeanor towards the deputy."  Shortly after the shooting, Bradshaw noted "there's only two witnesses here: the suspect and the deputy. And the suspect was not able to be interviewed. Why he decided to assault the deputy? We may never know that." When the investigation was well underway, Bradshaw claimed it would “verify exactly what I thought from the beginning.”

The Adams’ family attorney also pointed out the final report claimed “physical evidence were partially predicated on Sergeant Custer’s account of the incident,” saying that “the forensics in this case should not be made to fit Deputy Custer’s account."

And nothing else happened?

Over at National Review's The Corner, Reason columnist and Mercatus economist Veronique de Rugy points to more work from Alberto Alesina, Carlo Favero, and Francesco Giavazzi about the relative merits of cutting spending versus raising taxes as a means of reducing debt-to-GDP ratios. Alesina, Favero, and Giavazzi write:

Fiscal adjustments based upon spending cuts are much less costly in terms of output losses than tax based ones. In particular, spending-based adjustments have been associated with mild and short-lived recessions, in many cases with no recession at all.Instead, tax-based adjustments have been followed but prolonged and deep recessions. 

De Rugy comments:

Another interesting finding in the Alesina/Giaviani paper is the correlation between spending cuts and business confidence. They find that “business confidence (unlike consumer confidence) picks up immediately after an expenditure-based adjustments.” They are going to look more into this question in order to determine whether there is a direct causation or simply an interesting correlation.

Why? Because businesses seem to respond to the idea that the government is getting its house in order, which means less volatility in the political arena, less threat of new taxes (hard to estimate) and new regulations. Reducing regime uncertainty is something that governments can always do regardless of the business cycle or macroeconomic trends.

Surely even the Obama administration's most ardent supporters must be asking themselves whether constant interventions into the economy may have prolonged the recovery rather than hastened it.

Related: How Regime Uncertainty is Killing Businesses.

The platform that the Republican Party is expected to approve this week includes a plank declaring that "the unborn child has a fundamental individual right to life which cannot be infringed" and calling for "a human life amendment to the Constitution" as well as "legislation to make clear that the Fourteenth Amendment’s protections apply to unborn children." That language is closer to the position taken by vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan (and Missouri Senate candidate Todd Akin) than the one taken by presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who says he would allow abortion in cases of rape and incest. It is hard to see how those exceptions can be reconciled with a "fundamental individual right to life which cannot be infringed."

Does it matter? As The New York Times notes, the GOP's two most recent presidential nominees, George W. Bush and John McCain, were both more flexible on abortion than their party's platform. So were Bob Dole and George H.W. Bush. Ronald Reagan, by contrast, took the Ryan/Akin position, saying abortion should be illegal except when necessary to save the mother's life. It was under Reagan that the current version of the abortion plank was originally adopted:

1972 (before Roe v. Wade): no abortion plank

1976: "We protest the Supreme Court's intrusion into the family structure through its denial of the parents' obligation and right to guide their minor children. The Republican Party favors a continuance of the public dialogue on abortion and supports the efforts of those who seek enactment of a constitutional amendment to restore protection of the right to life for unborn children."

1980: "There can be no doubt that the question of abortion, despite the complex nature of its various issues, is ultimately concerned with equality of rights under the law. While we recognize differing views on this question among Americans in general—and in our own Party—we affirm our support of a constitutional amendment to restore protection of the right to life for unborn children."

1984: "The unborn child has a fundamental individual right to life which cannot be infringed. We therefore reaffirm our support for a human life amendment to the Constitution, and we endorse legislation to make clear that the Fourteenth Amendment's protections apply to unborn children."

That plank has remained essentially the same since then, although it did not reflect the presidential nominee's publicly stated views from 1988 on. A constitutional amendment to ban abortion is, in any case, a highly improbable scenario, and any legislation construing the 14th Amendment to cover fetuses (such as the bill supported by Ryan and Akin) would be subject to Supreme Court review in the unlikely event that Congress approved it. The abortion plank, like the porn plank, is aimed at appeasing social conservatives without unduly alarming potential Republican voters who do not share their views. The assumption is that such voters, assuming they notice the pro-life lip service, will understand it has little practical significance.

Newsweek columnist Kathleen Parker, in an essay titled "What the *#@% Is Wrong With Republicans?!," argues that such appeasement is a big mistake. Parker concedes that "the human life amendment is actually a relic, having been part of the platform since 1984," but worries that the 2012 platform "also includes new language for the first time declaring abortion bad for a woman's 'health and well-being.'" I doubt that paternalistic judgment will upset many voters who are not already alienated by the nearly absolute ban on abortion that the party officially favors. But maybe Parker is right that the temporal conjunction of the platform's approval with Akin's widely ridiculed comments about rape will make the abortion plank more damaging than it would otherwise be.   

It is often said that one of the goals of the political project that is the European Union is to establish a “United States of Europe”. This analogy is misleading. While the United States has become increasingly centralized at least on paper the states are granted some established rights and responsibility.

The federal government is too large and its influence too prominent, but states still set their own laws on some of this country’s most contentious issues such as abortion and gun rights. Were Europe to emulate such a model the constituent parties (nation states) would retain local authority over at least some of their affairs. However, as recent cases demonstrate, European federalism is far from the federalism of the United States.

Over in Ireland, like the United States, abortion is a hot topic. Ireland is alone in Europe when it comes to the severity of its restrictions on abortion. Abortions are illegal under all circumstances except in the case pregnancy endangering the life of the mother.

While the abnormally religious Irish do have some unorthodox legislation relating to abortion you would think that the sort of federalism European officials say they are practicing would allow for the Irish to make their own laws on abortion. After all, the European Union has an open border policy and Europeans can vote with their feet when it comes to policies. Thousands of Irish women already do this every year, travelling to England to have abortions.

The European Court of Human rights, which has one Irish judge out of the forty seven on the court, ruled in 2010 that a woman with cancer had her rights violated when she was unable to get an abortion in Ireland. The court is set to report on its findings next month. Depending on the findings the court might demand the Irish revise their abortion laws.  The current government has vowed to oppose any suggestion from the court.

The European Union has done a poor job at implementing federalism. As a political entity it is highly centralized. It ignores referendums and locally supported policies. The truth is that American-style federalism is not really what the European political machine wants. As the current euro-crisis has been demonstrating, the European political establishment has no respect for democracy and a fetish for centralized control, whether it is economic, political, or judicial.  

Nigel Farage MEP from UKIP outlines the EU’s political and economic treatment of Greece below:

Tampa – At one point during the Ron Paul Revolution there was no bigger advocate for the advancement of the Texas congressman than Adam Kokesh. He was the poster boy for disaffected military veterans and agitated twenty-somethings who gravitated to Paul’s unique blend of paleoconservativism and libertarianism. Kokesh organized Veterans for Ron Paul, donated an estimated $1,000 to the campaign, led marches, and even ran for Congress in New Mexico in 2010.  He was Mr. Ron Paul for President.

Sitting backstage at the unofficial Ron Paul Festival at the Florida State Fairgounds in a tight “Liberty” t-shirt Kokesh tells me that’s all over.

"I am not a Ron Paul supporter anymore," said Kokesh while waiting for a band to go on.

"I support his message, love the man but there was a point that turned for me back in January and if anything I should have been more upfront about it sooner. I used to be able to say no matter how much money or support you invested in him he would use it as effectively as you would to forward the message, advance the cause. I can’t say that anymore," he said.

Kokesh referred to the Paul political organization as "Ron Paul Inc." and said he was attempting to transition over to "Rand Paul Inc.," something he is not thrilled about.

"I like Rand but he’s not one of us. He’s not a voluntaryist like his father. He’s an ally and a principled conservative."

Is Rand a libertarian?

"No, absolutely not," said Kokesh.

Ron is though, right?

"Absolutely," he answered.

What about Gary Johnson?

"In the intellectual sense but not in the philosophical sense," he said.

According to various Paul fan sites Kokesh was banned from the official Paul campaign event at the Sun Dome. Kokesh poo-pooed the rally, noting all the empty seats at a venue that was smaller than the one used for a similar rally in 2008. When reached by phone, Paul campaign manager Jesse Benton declined to comment on these claims but did say, "We respect Adam’s service but he's a very troubled young man. We just hope he can get his life together."

Kokesh didn’t want to talk about his relationship with the campaign but had harsh words for Benton. "If [Benton] wants a career as a political operative, that's fine," he said, "but nobody that donated to Ron Paul for the right reasons, because they believe in the message, is going to give money to anything that Jesse Benton has his name on."

Though disaffected with the Paul campaign, Kokesh said he plans to stay active in electoral politics.

"I feel like I am behind the curve of the movement. I had an unhealthy emotional attachment to the campaign, to the idea of the Ron Paul presidency and what he represented. I let it affect my decisions in a negative way," he said.

*Author's note: An earlier version of this post said that Kokesh was having a beer during this interview. He was not. 

I've criticized the Romney campaign on a number of occasions for refusing to offer crucial details on major policy proposals. But it's worth reiterating that the Obama team is also dancing around numerous difficult questions about what policies President Obama would pursue in a second term. 

In particular, Obama has been dicey about what he would do to manage the long-term deficit. As Obama's Treasury Secretary told Rep. Paul Ryan earlier this year, "We don't have a definitive solution...We just don't like yours." There are also numerous holes in the plans the White House has put forward. As The Wall Street Journal reports: 

President Barack Obama's most recent budget called for spending equal to 22.3% of GDP in 2016. But it didn't specify what tax breaks would be cut as part of a proposal to lower the corporate tax rate from 35% to 28% or detail how to slow the growth of spending on Medicare or Social Security.

Nor has Mr. Obama made public the details of proposals he made in unsuccessful talks with House Speaker John Boehner (R., Ohio) last summer, such as raising the eligibility age for Medicare from 65 to 67, a notion both Mr. Romney and Mr. Ryan have endorsed.

Administration officials are preparing new deficit-reduction proposals to be released if Mr. Obama is re-elected, but see no political advantage in previewing them now, people familiar with the process said.

So Obama has a deficit plan. But it's a secret deficit plan. 

So the Americans that survived Valley Forge and stormed the beaches of Normandy and Iwo Jima have gotten so soft that the mere threat of heavy rain is enough to cancel an entire day of a national political convention.

A charitable interpretation is that this is a secret stroke of strategic genius by Republican operatives who realized that they were not going to help their party’s electoral chances by interrupting regularly scheduled network programming to broadcast speeches by a bunch of politicians who were also-rans in the vice-presidential contest. For better or worse, writes Ira Stoll, Mitt Romney is finding ways to tell us about himself and his plans for the country even if his fellow Republicans aren’t willing to risk getting damp to hear about it.

• Even though they’re tied in the polls, most Americans believe President Barack Obama will beat Mitt Romney in November.
• Children at an Australian school may not do cartwheels, handstands or somersaults unless under the supervision of a gymnastics teacher. But … but … childhood obesity!
• A Utah television station will not be running new fall show The New Normal because of gaaaaaay.
• A honcho at Duetsche Bank is suing the City of Los Angeles for $50 million after getting beaten to a pulp by the LAPD.
• This week probably marks the end of Ron Paul’s presidential aspirations, but that does not mean the end of his movement.
• Due to budget problems, Camden, N.J., is eliminating its police department and contracting with the county.
• There was a lion wandering around the England countryside, but maybe not.

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

"The middle class can’t regain its self-confidence and financial health without a strong economic recovery," writes Washington Post economics columnist Robert Samuelson. "But the economy can’t recover strongly without a financially healthy middle class, which provides most consumer spending. Not surprisingly, the economic expansion is glacial. Household debt is reduced gradually. Wealth is slowly rebuilt through higher saving and stock prices — and the hope that home values will follow." 

Those last two sentences need clarification. Household debt is barely being reduced at all. The Department of Commerce's monthly personal savings rate [pdf], which had topped $600 billion in every month during the second half of 2010 and the first quarter of 2011, has not gone above $600 billion in any month since June 2011. The percentage of personal savings (disposable personal income less expenditures) has not been above 5 percent since June 2011. (Our colonial ancestors in the 1980s saved more than 10 percent per month.) A trio of professors says half of retirees die with less than $10,000 worth of personal assets. 

And hope does not rebuild wealth any more than faith generates net sales. We can debate whether higher saving or stock prices rebuild wealth: Savings accounts are paying less than one percent interest while inflation has robbed your dollar of ten cents since 2007; and although imaginatively valued stock prices rebuild paper wealth, they vanish like the gambler's lucky streak. But there's no debate on hope: It doesn't rebuild anything. 

This gloomy column continues Samuelson's welcome streak of out-of-the-park jeremiads. The historian of the great inflation described the "Withering of the Affluent Society" in a recent Wilson Quarterly thinker: 

For millions of younger Americans—say, those 40 and under—living better than their parents is a pipe dream. They won’t. The threat to their hopes does not arise from an impending collapse of technological gains of the sort epitomized by the creations of Fulton, Ford, and Gates. These advances will almost certainly continue, and per capita income—the average for all Americans and a conventional indicator of living standards—will climb. Statistically, American progress will resume. The Great Recession will be a bump, not a dead end.

The trouble is that many of these gains will bypass the young. The increases that might have fattened their paychecks will be siphoned off to satisfy other groups and other needs. Today’s young workers will have to finance Social Security and Medicare for a rapidly growing cohort of older Americans. Through higher premiums for employer-provided health insurance, they will subsidize care for others. Through higher taxes and fees, they will pay to repair aging infrastructure (roads, bridges, water systems) and to support squeezed public services, from schools to police.

I distinctly remember the mellow of my own generation's youth being harshed by numerous think pieces pronouncing that we would be the first generation in U.S. history not to live as well as our parents. I suspect if I had a time machine I could find newspapers in the 1960s saying the same of the baby boom generation. The first popular use of the term Lost Generation was to describe the World War I-era cohort. 

Still, Samuelson's fire and brimstone is needed medicine for so many of my media colleagues who find it hard to put away their belief that a Long Boom created by a Post-Scarcity Economy has ushered in an Age of Abundance that is sustained by debt-driven Purchasing Power. 

You'll have to wait for my Reason print column "Rise of the Five-Dollar Pizza" to find out just how well the deep-discount retail sector (stores with "Dollar" in the name) has been doing since the Keynesian death throes began in the early aughts. Much of that growth is coming as Americans from higher income quintiles resort to 99-cent shopping, and not just to pick up the occasional Jesus candle but to purchase the food and supplies they need to survive. A Family Dollar representative told me: 

We’ve certainly benefitted from the economic backdrop, as sales growth has been very strong, among the best in retail. Our value proposition has really resonated in this environment. The primary strength has been in our consumables areas, i.e., food, health, beauty, personal care, and household products and chemicals. Things you need to buy every day to run a household. We’ve been aggressively increasing our assortment in these areas over the last few years to provide a broader and more complete assortment...

We are working hard to drive consumables sales higher through an increased assortment. We have significantly increased our SKU counts in food and healthy, beauty, and personal care over the last 5 years. 

Samuelson concludes his Post column with the good news that Americans remain tougher than they were believed to be: 

For now, what’s telling is the resilience of middle-class norms. About 11 million homes are “underwater,” reports CoreLogic: Their mortgages exceed their values. Still, most owners make monthly payments even though defaulting might be advantageous. Similarly, long-term unemployed workers send out hundreds of resumes despite repeated disappointment.

Elsewhere, celebrated investor Jim Rogers supports public bankruptcy as the way forward: "The solution to too much debt is not more debt... What would make me very excited is if a few people [in the government] went bankrupt..."

Meanwhile, back at The New York Times, Floyd Norris does his part to boost house prices. But Reason commenter John notices that Fannie Mae has less than a quarter of its REO inventory on the market and is unable to sell nearly half of it.

So the Republicans are heading to Tampa to whoop it up at their “Yes We Did Too Build It Ourselves” convention.

Florida in late August? Goodness gracious, it’s not about the heat, or the humidity – it’s about the nudity!

There’s a reason that Tampa was the backdrop for Magic Mike, the hard bodied hit movie of the summer: The city is packed ass-cheek to jowl with strip clubs catering to every customer niche. That’s capitalism at its finest and something the GOP pretends to understand.

Watch Reason TV's latest vid by clicking above or click below for more links, downloadable versions, and other resources.

About 2 minutes long, narrated by Kennedy.

Well, somebody has to pay for those farmers to stream porn on their Macbooks, and if you follow America’s agricultural policies, you know it’s obviously not going to be them. Via The Hill:

The Federal Communications Commission is eyeing a proposal to tax broadband Internet service.

The move would funnel money to the Connect America Fund, a subsidy the agency created last year to expand Internet access.

The FCC issued a request for comments on the proposal in April. Dozens of companies and trade associations have weighed in, but the issue has largely flown under the public's radar. 

The Connect America Fund declares on its website: “Broadband has gone from being a luxury to a necessity for full participation in our economy and society – for all Americans.” Citation needed, perhaps, maybe? The site also claims there are 18 million Americans without “robust broadband” access. It does not point out that this is just five percent of the U.S. population. It does have a photo of a farmer sitting on a tractor wheel looking at a laptop, though.

The use of the word “robust” is important. This isn’t just about providing infrastructural access to broadband for people who don’t have broadband. It’s about the federal government using taxes and fees to subsidize the improvement of existing private transmission systems:

Julius Genachowski, the FCC's chairman, has made expanding broadband access his top priority. He argues that a high-speed Internet connection is critical for succeeding in the 21st century economy and that expanding Internet access is the country's next great infrastructure challenge.

But the money for the new Internet subsidy is still coming from the fees on phone bills.

And in recent years, with more people sending emails instead of making long-distance phone calls, the money flowing into the program has begun to dry up. The Universal Service fee has had to grow to a larger and larger portion of phone bills to compensate.

So they’re talking about ideas like taxes on broadband or even taxes on text messages to pay for this venture. The next time your overly credulous aunt sends you a forward from her AOL account warning that Congress is going to start taxing e-mails, she might not need to be reminded to visit Snopes now and then.

On Friday the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled that graphic cigarette warning labels proposed by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) violate the First Amendment. The court concluded that the labels, which would occupy half of each cigarette pack's front and back panels as well as one-fifth of each cigarette ad, go well beyond the "purely factual and uncontroversial" disclosures that the Supreme Court has said the government may require to prevent "deception of consumers." Instead, Judge Janice Rogers Brown wrote for the two-judge majority, the labels "are primarily intended to evoke an emotional response," thereby encouraging smokers to quit and deterring nonsmokers from picking up the habit. This anti-smoking message, she said, "raises novel questions about the scope of the government's authority to force the manufacturer of a product to go beyond making purely factual and accurate commercial disclosures and undermine its own economic interest...How much leeway should this Court grant the government when it seeks to compel a product's manufacturer to convey the state's subjective—and perhaps even ideological—view that consumers should reject this otherwise legal, but disfavored, product?"

Assuming that "such compulsion is constitutionally permissible," Brown said, it still must satisfy the test established by the Supreme Court for regulation of commercial speech: It must be narrowly tailored to serve a substantial government interest. "The First Amendment requires the government not only to state a substantial interest justifying a regulation on commercial speech," Brown noted, "but also to show that its regulation directly advances that goal." Yet the FDA "has not provided a shred of evidence—much less the 'substantial evidence' required by the [Administrative Procedure Act]—showing that the graphic warnings will 'directly advance' its interest in reducing the number of Americans who smoke." Although the FDA "makes much of the 'international consensus' surrounding the effectiveness of large graphic warnings," it "offers no evidence showing that such warnings have directly caused a material decrease in smoking rates in any of the countries that now require them."

The Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act of 2009 required the FDA to create the new warnings, which feature disturbing images such as diseased lungs, an autopsied cadaver, a crying baby, and a man smoking through a hole in his throat, along with the phone number for the National Cancer Institute's “Network of Tobacco Cessation Quitlines." The D.C. Circuit was reviewing a decision by U.S. District Judge Richard Leon, who reached similar conclusions last February, although he applied "strict scrutiny" to the warnings instead of the "intermediate scrutiny" the appeals court deemed appropriate. In March the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit upheld the statutory requirement for new warning labels, although it did not address the designs picked by the FDA.

[Thanks to Michael Siegel for the tip.]

Last month, The Daily Caller reported some whispers from former Department of Justice official and current president of Morality in Media Patrick Trueman, who said that a Mitt Romney presidency would be one that "vigorously" enforced obscenity laws and would prosecute purveyors of "obscene" adult pornography.

Now, according to a Morality in Media press release, the 2012 Republican Party platform — a portion of the draft of which was recently leaked —has been changed to reflect a new commitment to fighting not just child pornography, but also technically illegal adult pornography. Morality in Media is, unsurprisingly, a big fan of this kind of crackdown.

Their press release claims:

“Distribution of obscene or hardcore pornography on the Internet is a violation of current federal law,” explained Trueman.  “Yet, most children in America have free access to obscene pornography as soon as they learn how to use a computer.  The average age of first exposure to obscene Internet pornography is now eleven,” Trueman said. 

The new language replaces previous platform wording, which only opposed child pornography.  It will now read,  "Current laws on all forms of pornography and obscenity need to be vigorously enforced."  Trueman noted that current federal obscenity laws not only prohibit distribution of hardcore pornography on the Internet but also on hotel/motel TV, on cable/satellite TV, and in retail shops.

"We are most grateful to Tony Perkins, President of the Family Research Council who led the effort to get the tough new language into the platform," said Trueman.  “Without enforcement of federal obscenity laws, pornographers have had a green light to target our children and families,” he added. 

The rest of it is a tearjerker saga about the untreated porn "pandemic" in America.  No mention is made of how the GOP, or Morality in Media, or the Family Research Council intends to solve this tragedy. The logical assumption is that they will do so either by a torrent of federal crackdowns, or some sort of actual policing of the Internet, in the spirit of the eventually struck-down 1996 Communications Decency Act. Considering their website's list of "past accomplishments" and the above wording from Trueman, the group is clearly, blatantly pro-censorship, so they're probably keen on both solutions to this moral panic. 

If true, this is bad news for any small government fans who were hoping to bite the bullet, choke back the bile, and vote Republican, in the endearingly naive hope that the GOP will be the small government fans that they pretend to be on occasion.

Watch Reason TV's video on the silliness and subjectivity of the word "obscenity":

Politico reports that some states with known concentrations of Ron Paul supporters in their delegations--Nevada, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Maine and Minnesota--are getting stuck in the cheap seats at the Republican National Convention that will, apparently, be happening in Tampa, Florida this week.

Various Paul delegates in Tampa for the weekend Paul-oriented festivities tell me that even many Romney delegates or other representatives of the GOP mainstream seem a little put off by the Party's desire to mess with Paul's delegations and change rules to its benefit. Especially aggravating is the rule to make sure no Ron Paul-type insurgent campaign can rack up delegates through intelligent caucusing by binding delegations in the future to preference polls and giving winning candidates say over specific delegate seating. 

One begins to wonder if the "Paul tribute video" promised for Wednesday night won't be marked by GOP powers-that-be as a memorial: Ron Paul Revolution, 2007-12. We loved you Ron! You will be missed! We are very, very sorry that we will never have to hear from you or think about you again!

For his part, Ron Paul never said the name Mitt Romney once in his over an hour talk in Tampa yesterday.

Some past blogging on delegate fight details.

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

Today's pop quiz: A religious organization that seeks to influence public policy is (a) bravely "speaking truth to power" or (b) "trying to impose its values on the rest of us."

For many people writes A. Barton Hinkle, the answer to that question is: It depends. If the religious organization is, say, the Roman Catholic Church, the policy in question forces Catholic institutions to pay for employees' birth control, and the church is opposed, then conservatives (generally speaking) will praise the church for its principled stand in defense of religious freedom, while liberals (generally speaking) will denounce it for theocratic oinkery.

The TV-ready soundbite that Democrats like to use when attacking Paul Ryan’s Medicare overhaul plan, which would turn Medicare into a premium support program, is that it “ends Medicare as we know it” — or, when they’re feeling the apocalypse coming on especially hard, “ends Medicare.”

This tends to play well with seniors wary of any change to the program. But it ignores the sizable portions of Medicare that already work in basically the same way. Another way to describe Ryan’s proposed overhaul, then, would be to say that it expands on the idea behind two parts of Medicare that seniors know and like: Medicare Advantage and Medicare Part D, both of which offer seniors a menu of private plans to choose from.

And, as The New York Times made clear in an article over the weekend, these sections are working well enough that the administration has seen fit to brag about their successes. To some extent this is just political: Administrations want to be able to say that their programs work. but there are real successes here, especially relative to the traditional Medicare alternative. For example, The Times notes, the administration has pointed to a 10 percent increase in enrollment in Medicare Advantage, as well as a 7 percent decrease in average plan price. So average plan costs are decreasing, and more seniors are choosing to enroll in Medicare’s system of private plans. And as I noted last week, there’s new evidence to suggest that private insurers operating in the program provide equal benefits to traditional Medicare at lower cost.

Meanwhile in Medicare Part D, the prescription drug benefit passed under the Bush administration, plan prices have come in under expectations and a held steady even as health costs have gone up elsewhere. Overall the program costs almost a third less than originally predicted. Part of that disparity is probably due to the slowing of the drug development pipeline. But Joseph Antos of the American Enterprise Institute has made a strong case that the program’s reliance on competition between private insurers has also helped keep costs in check.

There’s another thing about these programs: Seniors seem to like them and want to use them. Currently about 50 million seniors are enrolled in one or both. Surveys consistently show that the vast majority of seniors of like their Part D plans; satisfaction levels hover close to 90 percent. As I already noted, enrollment in Medicare Advantage is increasing.

Just because beneficiaries like and use a program isn’t enough to justify it, of course. And there are real problems with Medicare Part D — one of the biggest being that when it was passed, Republicans in Congress didn’t even bother with the pretense of trying to pay for it. Nor is converting Medicare into a premium support system the ideal way to overhaul the government’s most expensive health entitlement, especially now that both Ryan and Romney are pushing plans that would leave a government-run, fee-for-service Medicare option in place. 

But given Medicare’s unsustainable long-term spending path, I’d say that restructuring the program in a way that attempts to end the program’s unlimited commitment is probably better than either of the other most talked about options: delaying reform (which means doing nothing), or betting that yet another technocratic overhaul of the program's reimbursement structure will restrain spending growth despite decades of evidence that these sorts of centrally planned price and payment systems never work as planned.

I would prefer a more comprehensive overhaul of the health system that focuses on restoring price signals to medical practice while diverting the bulk of public health resources to covering the poor and sick rather than the middle class. But until then, why not take a cue from the growing evidence that reforms harnessing competition between private plans can work — restraining spending growth and offering choices while keeping the people who use it (or soon will) happy, not ending Medicare as seniors know it but building on parts of it that they already like. 

"Ron Paul Says The REVOLution Isn't Over" is the latest offering from ReasonTV.

Watch above or click on the link below for video, full text, supporting links, downloadable versions, and more ReasonTV clips.

"Death metal, the sound of Tampa, won't be heard at Republican convention"

Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) rallied 8,000 or so of his supporters from around the country to Tampa’s Sundome the day before the planned official start of the Republican National Convention. After a week in which the Republican Party seemed less eager to welcome Paul supporters and delegates than Paul supporters were eager to help shape the GOP, the event seemed designed to both remind the Paul troops that they have been and are winning important victories within the establishment, and to steel them for a continued fight for respect and influence that was never going to be easy.

Paul advisor Doug Wead, working as MC, kept up a steady stream of references to the Paul delegations' grievances against the RNC insiders. This jabbing at the GOP happened even as the event, whose theme was “We are the Future” debuted a detournement of the grassroots “Ron Paul rEVOLution” stencil logo reading: “Ron Paul RepubliCAN.”

This was the divide the event danced around: Are they a full service independent revolution or a faction of the Republican Party? The only solid answer that arose from the rally was: both.

The speakers at the rally were all selected by Paul himself to make a point: that while the movement around him arose in the context of a Republican presidential run, the liberty cause for which he has fought for nearly 40 years is about more than electoral politics or politics at all.

Thus, Paul invited libertarian Austrian economist Walter Block to give an ill-received talk. Block chose to think through the proper libertarian ethical position on abortion (which is, Block figures, “evictionism”—roughly, as I understand it, that it’s morally permissible to eject a fetus from the womb if it’s unwanted, but you are obligated to try to keep it alive outside your body if possible).

It was the only speech to be (mildly) heckled, I think for confusing people more than for being about a hot-button topic. Even Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and his co-author and Paul campaign blogger Jack Hunter, reviled by many in the grassroots for perceived sins of being too quick to assimilate to the Republican Party (see: Rand’s early Romney endorsement), got through unscathed. It was overwhelmingly a feel-good crowd.

South Carolina Republican State Senator Tom Davis gave a very angry peroration against the “traitor” Ben Bernanke and called for advance support in his plan to unseat Sen. Lindsay Graham in 2014. While Davis' style was very un-Ron Paul in its intense shouty anger bordering on rage, many attendees told me it was their favorite non-Paul part of the day. Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.), the man considered most likely to be the next Ron Paul in congress when Paul is gone after January, humbly said there will be no next Ron Paul and got laughs by calling out, “Audit the RNC!” Amash advised Paul politicos and activists to learn how to not be at each other’s throats when they disagree. He also slyly commented on Davis’ tone with a reference to how Davis had “spoken eloquently—and sometimes not so eloquently….”

From the lower levels of grassroots and Party activism, Ashley Ryan, the youngest member of the RNC, from Maine, bragged about the Paul people’s victories at the state level and noted that in these internal party votes, tiny numbers of people can and do make the difference. She spoke openly of the Paulites need to “restore the Republican Party” to the values of liberty. Ryan is a living example of the balancing act of being in the Republican Party but not necessarily of it that Paul politicos will have to perform for the foreseeable future.

The Republican Party was famously described by Ronald Reagan as a "three-legged stool" comprised of fiscal conservatives, social conservatives, and national security conservatives. Rather than representing the triumph of any of those groups, writes Matt Welch, presumptive GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney is a consensus electability candidate who dabbles in all three with varying levels of conviction. As the party gathers in Tampa this week to coronate Romney at the 2012 Republican National Convention, keep an eye on the unresolved discord between the party’s competing factions. Though you will hear a lot this week about GOP unity against President Barack Obama, that masks an ideological peace that at best is fragile, unattractive, and unsatisfying.

• A government helicopter has been shot down in Damascus. Rebels have taken credit for bringing the chopper down as fighting intensifies in Syria.

• Samsung shares are down 7 percent on the first day of trading since a California jury ruled in favor of Apple in a recent patent suit. The loss is worth 10 billion euros. 

• Scientists can now "hack" the human brain and retrieve data, including bank details. 

• Nineteen people have been beheaded in Afghanistan by the Taliban for attending a mix-gender party.

• Texas may stop charging prostitutes as felons. Turns out those arrested and imprisoned for victimless crimes are using up valuable time and resources. 

• Iran is urging other members of the Non-Aligned Movement to oppose unilateral sanctions by "certain states". 

• A web comic has raised over $1 million for a Tesla Museum. New York’s state government will match funds raised by the campaign to "build a goddamn Tesla Museum." 

Why is it important to attach work mandates to welfare checks? One reason is that it weeds out people who are poor because they prefer not to put up with the demands of an employer. Weeding those out saves money.

Another is that it pushes recipients to do something that may be unappealing in the short run—take a low-wage job—but will serve their interests in the long run. Even in today's slow economy, writes Steve Chapman, only 12 percent of the nonworking poor say they can't find a job.

When Mitch Torbett applied for a construction permit in Tennessee, authorities ran his driver's license number and told him there was a federal arrest warrant out for him. Torbett told them the warrant must be for his deceased twin brother Mike. Local police arrested him anyway. But they released him two days later after figuring out the warrant really was for his dead twin brother.

Tampa - There is a chance the Republican National Convention could be extended through Friday if Tropical Storm Isaac continues to cause problems, according to a National Journal report: 

Republicans are leaving open the possibility of extending their Tampa convention by a day, a senior Republican official told National Journal. 

With Isaac expected to strengthen to a Category 2 hurricane and hit the Gulf Coast between Louisiana and Florida at midweek, Republicans are looking for flexibility in their schedule.

The Tampa Bay Times is reporting that this is not something that is being "advocated" by Republican officials.

During an appearance on Face the Nation, RNC Chairman Reince Prebius said that there was no chance the storm would cancel the convention, calling it "100 percent on." 

Meanwhile, the storm is tracking westward and expected to weaken before hitting the Tampa Bay area. The storm, according to forecasters, is poorly organized but still has the potential to pack a violent punch. 

At the Ron Paul "We Are The Future" rally at the University of South Florida we got a taste of what Isaac will be like when it soaked latecomers during a 30-minute downpour: 

Back in early 2010, Libertarian Party presidential candidate and former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson was starting to explore a White House run. He stopped by Reason's DC HQ to talk about his nonprofit "Our America," which he conceived as a platform to talk about political change, economic policy, and all sorts of issues.

Johnson is down in Tampa, hanging with Ron Paul supporters and other interested folks. This is a good time to take a look at what was on his mind when we released this video in February 5, 2010. Click above to watch the video or click on the link below for links, full text, and more resources.

When Ernest Hancock--a Libertarian Party guy and freelance anarchist revolutionary who does his Internet business over at Freedom's Phoenix--designed the very popular "Ron Paul rEVOLution" logo (as seen on the cover of my book Ron Paul's Revolution) I'm quite confident he never dreamed of this, the logo used for today's ongoing Ron Paul rally at the Sundome in Tampa, Florida:

Hancock told me in vivid terms when I interviewed him for my book he was very, very uninterested in any attempt to turn the Paul movement into something fully embedded in the Republican Party. I sought comment from him today but haven't gotten it yet; I'll update if I do.

But Hancock never wanted to claim ownership of that logo or idea. What's more important is whether all the Paul revolutionaries will see their future as being "good Republicans" or people trying to use the Republican Party as a tool for liberty. The talks so far here at the Paul rally--which I'll be reporting on more later today--are leaning nicely, for the most part, in recognizing that it's about liberty, not Party.

Tampa - Throughout Gary Johnson's presidential campaign he has talked about how he needs to be included in polls. Well, Rasmussen Reports appears as if it is adding the Libertarian Party nominee to its surveys. 

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 16% of Likely U.S. Voters have a favorable opinion of Johnson, while 20% offer an unfavorable view. Only one-out-of-10 have a strong opinion of him: Two percent (2%) have a Very Favorable view of Johnson, while eight percent (8%) have a Very Unfavorable one. (To see survey question wording, click here.)

Sixty-three percent (63%) don’t know enough about Johnson to have any opinion at all.

If Johnson is included by name in the presidential ballot question, up to four percent (4%) of voters might support him. However, the final results show 48% for Mitt Romney, 48% for President Obama, one percent (1%) for Johnson and 3% undecided.

When asked for comment on the new the Rasmussen poll, Johnson Press Secretary Joe Hunter said the campaign was happy.

"Simply being included in the survey  is more important than the number," Hunter said. "Just seeing Gov. Johnson in the poll will invite voters to learn more about him and that is our objective. It cannot be overlooked that we have not yet aired a single ad. Being part of the conversation is the first step, and an important one."

Tampa – If Gary Johnson is going to come close to cracking single digits in November’s presidential election the Libertarian Party nominee will need the backing of Ron Paul supporters like Sean Melancon, who watched Johnson speak yesterday afternoon at the Ron Paul Festival.

“I made the shift to Gary Johnson because Mitt Romney is way down on my list of people I’d want in charge of this country,” said Melancon, 20, shortly after Johnson finished speaking before several hundred people.

“You know, Gary wants to keep Guantanamo open, but he’s with Paul on like 98% of same stuff. But in the end, though, it doesn’t really matter because the establishment will be elected, Obama or Romney. I would guess [a] majority of the people here are here to support Gary Johnson and libertarianism and liberty,” he said.

Melancon’s friend, Blake Magnus, is a fan of Paul too, and is backing Johnson in the general election. “Gary Johnson is the only option on the ballot who will make our voice heard on the issues we really care about,” said Magnus, 20.

Magnus, a resident of South Carolina who joined the Paul movement when he was just 15 years old in 2008, thinks Paul supporters will get behind Johnson because of his foreign policy positions and his support for ending the Federal Reserve.

During his speech Johnson amplified the portion of his typical stump speech that focuses on the Federal Reserve while including several minutes on his relationship with Paul.

“I want you all to know that I am a Dr. Paul fan,” Johnson said, pausing to allow for loud applauses and cheers.

“Ron Paul asked me for my endorsement in 2008 and I readily gave that endorsement. When I dropped out of the Republican primary I asked everyone who was going to vote for me to vote for Ron Paul. When asked in the last debate that I got to appear in who I would pair up with for a vice presidential candidate I said Ron Paul,” he said, again, drawing overwhelming cheers from the crowd.

Then it got slightly awkward.

In Some Remarks, his new collection of essays, interviews, and short fiction, Neal Stephenson's topics range from the hazards of sitting down all day to the clash of worldviews in Waco when government agents had their standoff with the Branch Davidians, from China's absorption of Hong Kong to a midwestern college town's influence on the novelist David Foster Wallace. Together, Anders Monsen reports, these pieces showcase Stephenson's eye for detail, his ability to weave compelling stories from reams of research, and his excitement about the world of ideas. 

In 2008, the Republican Party held its national convention in St. Paul, Minnesota. Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) was there, bringing the house down at his "Rally for the Republic." And Reason's Matt Welch was there, too, surveying the skies for signs of optimism and engaging in what the Beats called "spontaneous bop prosody" and what you would likely call something else altogether.

As the Ron Paul Festival wraps up today in Tampa before the delayed Republican National Convention, click on the image above to take a listen to the greatest poem about Ron Paul that you will hear all day.

Or click on the link below for full text and more links.

Slate's Matt Yglesias furnishes the latest example of “vulgar liberalism,” as Kevin Carson calls it. This is the attribution of the evils of corporatism—big-business power, recessions, long-term structural unemployment, exploitation of labor, and more—to its antithesis, the freed market. Keynesians look around, see unemployment and idle resources, and conclude (often encouraged by libertarians) that since the “free market” let this happen and doesn’t seem to be doing anything about it, government stimulus is in order.

That’s like walking into a movie in the middle, thinking you understand the plot. There are certainly idle labor and idle resources today. But that mere observation says nothing about why they are idle. Ludwig von Mises and F. A. Hayek, bolstered by the anatomists of corporatism, provided an explanation. Critics are welcome to rebut it, writes Sheldon Richman, but they shouldn’t pretend it doesn’t exist.

ReasonTV talks with disgruntled Ron Paul supporters in Tampa at Paul Fest, a grassroots-organized sendoff to the Paul campaign in 2013.

The short version: These folks are unlikely to be voting for GOP candidate Mitt Romney, more likely to go with Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson (who makes an appearance).

For more details, text, links, and full story, go here.

At Saturday's day two of the Paul Festival--the grassroots celebration of Paulite ideas, officially named the "P.A.U.L. Festival" (People Awakening and United for Liberty), the Paul people waved the flag in larger numbers than yesterday—I estimate around three times the 800 or so I saw Friday. They were listening to various options for where to go forward from here in a world where Ron Paul is no longer running for president. (For other accounts of the first day, see the Los Angeles Times and Sunshine State News.)

Two speakers associated with the Ludwig Von Mises Institute (an Austro-libertarian think tank largely dedicated to free-market economic education and a more anarchistic approach to politics), Meltdown author Thomas Woods and Mises Institute founder Lew Rockwell, made the case that education, person to person and via the great texts of libertarianism such as Bastiat, Mises, and Rothbard, and great internet resources was the key moving forward. Ron Paul, Woods indicated, would not want to see the campaign of education in liberty he spearheaded to stop just because he was no longer a presidential candidate and no clear successor had arisen.

Woods humorously pointed out the Paul followers' dilemma: Paul doesn't really "lead" in the sense of telling them what they ought to do next. So Woods advised them to follow the path of individual libertarian education in whatever manner most suited their own interest. Rockwell was quietly optimistic that the ideological hold that Etienne de la Boetie told us in the 16th century was the key to state power was starting to loosen thanks to Paul's efforts and our ability to communicate information outside standard cultural or political power structures thanks to the Internet. He closed with a call for liberty activists to not "beg for scraps from the imperial table or seek seats" at it, but rather to "knock over the table."

I had another long talk about the Maine delegation's tortuous path to having their Paul delegation dismembered unceremoniously by the Republican National Committee's rules committee the other day. Mike Wallace, still a delegate and also a candidate for a state Senate seat in Maine this year, tells me he thinks the whole brouhaha was largely the result of hurt feelings on the part of GOP factions who did less well at the state convention.

A former delegate who got booted, and also a former Paul campaign director for Maine, Eric Brakey, says he's sure that the only reason that two state GOP bigwigs filed a challenge to the Maine delegation was that it was made up of Ron Paul supporters, and that Maine's ability to choose its own representation was stolen by the RNC's unilateral decision to name its own set of delegates, though an existing rule would have allowed the rump unchallenged set of delegates to pick the rest. Brakey is sure that would have resulted in the original batch being reinstated, so the RNC didn't let that happen. Brakey hopes, and expects, that the many inroads that liberty politicos made in Maine this year won't be completely stymied by the unfortunate fate of the delegation. Despite some other opinions I heard from other Maine delegates, both Wallace and Brakey were very satisfied that the Paul campaign and its lawyers fought as hard as they could to let the original Maine delegation be seated.

Tampa - The threat of Tropical Storm Isaac has forced Republicans to all but cancel the first day of the their convention. From GOP Chairman Reince Priebus:

Due to the severe weather reports for the Tampa Bay area, the Republican National Convention will convene on Monday August 27th and immediately recess until Tuesday afternoon, August 28th, exact time to follow. 

Our first priority is ensuring the safety of delegates, alternates, guests, members of the media attending the Republican National Convention, and citizens of the Tampa Bay area. RNC Convention officials and the Romney campaign are working closely with state, local and federal officials, as well as the Secret Service, to monitor Tropical Storm Isaac and preserve Florida’s emergency management resources. Officials have predicted participants may encounter severe transportation difficulties due to sustained wind and rain. 

The Republican National Convention will take place and officially nominate Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan, and the Party has other necessary business it must address. We also are remaining in constant contact with state and federal officials and may make additional schedule alterations as needed.

Tropical Storm Isaac, scheduled to make landfall Florida on Sunday, is currently battering Cuba.  

Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), who will retire at the end of his current term, is attending his last Republican National Convention as a sitting congressman and presidential hopeful. This weekend, Paul backers are holding several events in the Tampa, Florida area and he will also be a major presence at the Republican National Convention that starts on Monday.

Reason Senior Editor Brian Doherty's latest book is Ron Paul's Revolution: The Man and the Movement He Inspired. Back on May 2, 2012, he talked with ReasonTV about how the libertarian ob-gyn from the Lone Star State will continue to reshape the Republican Party, national politics, and America's youth long after he's left Congress.

Watch the vid by clicking above or by clicking below to go to page with more links, information, and resources.

Ron Paul may be libertarians’ and the Tea Partiers’ past, Rand Paul the future, and Paul Ryan—well, he may be the best the Republican Party can do at the moment.

The three Pauls represent a dawning realization among strategists and pollsters that libertarians are among the most important slices of the electorate, up and down the ticket—from the presidency to key Senate races to key House races. The data, write Emily Ekins and David Kirby, show why.

The Ron Paul grassroots are celebrating their final hurrah, at least during the actual political career of their inspiration, Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), at Tampa’s Florida fairgrounds this weekend. (Paul will be holding his own farewell rally on Sunday.) Day one of the Paul Festival showed a movement less unified, present, and excited than it wants to be. But most of them are still sure that, whether or not the Republican Party will continue to be the horse they ride, they’ll keep up a fight for political liberty that’s turning out to be more complicated and difficult than many expected.

The event was thinly attended on day one; my estimate is no more than 800 were present at any one time. The festival occupied two linked huge hanger-like buildings. One was filled with exhibitor booths of appeal to the Paul world—the Free State Project, Ron Paul candy bars and T-shirts, the Independent Institute, the Libertarian Party, and purveyors of hard money and soft beef jerky.

The other one had stage for speakers and musical entertainment. I didn’t spend a lot of time with the latter, whose connection with Paulism seemed more personal than ideological, but did sit in on speeches by two different claimants to the specifically political attention of the Paul forces: Libertarian Party national committee chair Geoff Neale, and a mystery “Plan B for liberty” named Robby Wells who was, even today, still hoping to encourage RNC delegates to nominate him if, as was clear, Ron Paul was no longer trying to win it. (Wells' policy statements were a perfectly acceptable batch of Paulite positions, from being for abolishing the Fed to being against abortion.)

That fact—that Ron Paul was no longer trying to win it—was the key to the concern and even sometimes anguish of most of the RNC delegates and alternates for Paul who I met at Paulfest. Some, including Oklahoma alternate delegate Porter Davis, think the campaign was infiltrated from the beginning with non-libertarians intent on making sure the campaign didn’t win, or even do very well. Davis and a fellow Oklahoma alternate, Michael Stopp, were full of complaints about the attitude and actions of the campaign’s official representatives in their state, and are sure that the Paul political machine were already more interested in setting up a future for Rand Paul than winning it for Ron this time around.

For a half hour I was literally caught between the two dominant visions of what a Paulite politico can or should do moving forward, sitting between two delegates telling their stories.

In the wake of yesterday's horrific carnage near the Empire State Building in New York City, the question of why any private citizen would or should carry a gun is again in the air.

Earlier this year, on June 5, ReasonTV and Kennedy talked with Emily Miller about that very question. Miller is a Washington senior editor and resident of Washington, D.C. which had been home to among the very most restrictive gun control laws in the nation until the Supreme Court ruling in Heller.

Click above to watch the video or click below to go to watch on a page with more links and resources.

Consumer interest in farmers markets has exploded across the state of Pennsylvania in recent years. According to the USDA, there are more than 250 farmers markets in the state—about two-dozen of which are located in Philadelphia. Yet in spite of these great numbers, writes Baylen Linnekin, Emily Broad Leib, and Nathan Rosenberg, Pennsylvanians should be grateful to have access to any farmers markets at all this year. That’s because the direct-to-consumer bounty farmers provide might have all but disappeared on account of an ill-conceived state law. Thankfully, Linnekin and his co-authors write, farmers and consumers dodged the regulatory bullet.

The murder of a 41-year-old import company vice president outside the Empire State Building, and the subsequent wounding of nine people when police closed in on the apparent murderer, doesn't appear to be a high point in public safety. But would it matter if some or all of the bystanders were shot by cops rather than the original shooter? 

With the caveat that first reports are usually wrong, the story appears to be that Jeffrey Johnson, 58, approached his former boss Steven Ercolino and shot him in the head. After that, Johnson put his .45 caliber handgun into a bag and walked away, but he was tailed by a construction worker who notified two police officers assigned to patrol the Empire State Building (per a post-9/11 New York Police Department policy of providing security around major landmarks). When the cops approached Johnson, he drew his weapon again and the cops shot and killed him. It was at this point that the nine bystanders were wounded. 

The murder of Ercolino seems straightforward. Johnson had apparently raised workplace harassment complaints and in any event had recently been laid off. But the exchange of gunfire with the cops is more complicated. There are differing accounts of whether Johnson actually fired, and the eight-round clip in his gun is said to have contained one round when it was searched by police. 

Assuming at least one round was used to shoot Ercolino, that leaves six rounds Johnson may have fired in the shootout. To wound nine people, Johnson would have had to hit a civilian with every bullet, and at least three of them would have continued flying and hit second targets. Mayor Michael Bloomberg has already speculated that some of the bystanders were hit by police fire. 

As noted above, the facts are not all in. There is surveillance camera footage of both Ercolino's murder and the subsequent shootout, and ballistics testing will settle most or all of these questions. And even by the most hands-off definition of a nightwatchman state, stopping a murderer who is walking around armed on a crowded street, probably not in the best of moods, seems to fall within the purview of proper police action. 

Still, the construction worker was apparently able to follow Johnson, whose weapon was in a bag, without incident. For me this sad story comes back, as so many sad stories do, to the scene in First Blood when Richard Crenna advises the cops to let Rambo get away, defuse the situation, and pick him up in a few weeks, "working at a car wash in Seattle." (In this case they might have had to wait 99 weeks until Johnson's extended unemployment benefits ran out.) 

Three-year-old crowd-funding site Kickstarter is not just for the creative class. Tech innovators are attempting to use the tool to draw attention (and potential backers) to hardware projects like new game consoles and video cameras. Scott Shackford takes a look at the Ouya, the oddly-named game console that has racked up $8.5 million in contributions from potential players and developers. Will it ever actually see the light of day—or the television screens of those who have pre-ordered it?

It is an odd political reality that a country roughly the size of New Mexico with a population a little more than Minnesota’s and home to cell phone throwing champions is positioning itself to wield dramatic influence over the future of an economy with 333,000,000 people worth almost $12 trillion (2012 estimate).

Finland has veto power over future bailouts, and Finnish politicians have openly said that they are preparing for a eurozone breakup. If the Greek government does not get a handle on its finances quick an interesting and unpredicted economic and political reality could begin to unfold.

Over at truthout Ethan Huff summarizes the dilemma:

Though Finland is relatively strong compared to many other EU member countries, it is weaker than its non-euro Scandinavian neighbors, which include Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. Each of these countries still has its own unique currency, and all of them are growing and thriving much faster than Finland, which is bound to a union currency that is constantly being dragged down by Greece, Spain, and other economically-failing countries.

With its neighbors doing comparatively well it is easy to see why Finland would be reluctant to continue bailing out out countries like Greece. Polling suggests that Finns do want to stay in the euro, but not if it means handing over cash to irresponsible countries like Greece. Indeed, were the bailouts to continue Finnish politicians are open about consdering a euro exit:

"There are no rules on how to leave the euro but it is only a matter of time," said Timo Soini, leader of the True Finn party, to the U.K.'s Telegraph. "Either the south or the north will break away because this currency straitjacket is causing misery for millions and destroying Europe's future. It is a total catastrophe. We are going to run out of money the way we are going. But nobody in Europe wants to be the first to get out of the euro and take all the blame."

Finnish Prime Minister Jyrki Katainen has reportedly expressed opposition to recent proposals that will continue bailing out the struggling Southern European members of the EU at the expense of the flourishing ones. A majority of Finns sampled in a recent poll also said they were tired of Finland having to help bear the financial load for everyone else, as the continued bailouts are greatly depressing the Finnish economy.

If Finland exits the euro it might encourage others to do so, or at least make such an option seem less unorthodox. It would be an interesting and bold precedent to set. I have written before on why it might be worth Germany considering the same move.

The FBI and police warn, in a vague, but ominous sort of way, that anarchists and other "extremist" folks are planning scary things for the upcoming Republican National Convention in Tampa, Florida.

Now, is there a good chance that when thousands of people, including some of the radical political persuasion, gather, some not okay property damage will happen? Of course. However, is there an even bigger chance that the rumored threats, which this time 'round include anarchists using improvised explosive devices and "acid-filled eggs" are wildly overhyped? Definitely.

Says CNN:

as of March, the FBI had intelligence indicating individuals from New York "planned to travel to Tampa and attempt to close" all of the Tampa Bay-area bridges during the Republican National Convention next week.

According to the document, the FBI's information as of March showed that anarchist extremists proposed "engaging in potentially destructive criminal activities against critical infrastructure outside the security perimeter throughout the Tampa Bay region because they expected access to the main RNC venue to be tightly controlled."

Now seems like a great time to point out what kind of "critical infrastructure" the RNC has. It includes A $50 million tax payer-funded"security perimeter" and other safety measure such as an eight-foot security fence, a $273,000 SWAT truck, and drones overhead. "Suspicious" bricks and pipes were recently seized by nervous Tampa Police, as were 16 prostitutes, for some reason. 

Also,

This story came up on the local cable news here today—the school district in Demarest, New Jersey is considering a program to administer random drug test on its high school students. But not just any students, the ones who participate in after school activities. Specifically, according to News 12, they want to test students who get parking passes (because of after school programming) and “anyone who volunteers.” School officials stress a positive test result wouldn’t be placed on the student’s permanent record (sparing some of the stigma caused by things like drug courts or even prosecution), though parents would be notified and students could face suspension from their after school activities.

In my schooling days, after school programs were meant to keep kids off the streets and out of trouble. Throwing them out of those programs for possible drug use seems counterproductive. Given how cheap at-home drug testing has become for parents, the entire exercise seems unnecessary. 

As the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency pushes to strip cycling great Lance Armstrong of his seven Tour de France titles, the man behind ubiquitous Livestrong bracelets continues to assert his innocence.

"There is zero physical evidence to support (the) outlandish and heinous claims," Armstrong has told the press. "The only physical evidence here is the hundreds of (doping) controls I have passed with flying colors."

As bureaucratic wheels—and the possibility of an Armstrong vindication—slowly move into action, Nick Gillespie calls roll for past cheaters in the world of sports.

This brief list isn't exhaustive, but it helps illustrate the lengths to which some athletes will go to earn top honors on the playing fields of their choice.

• Rather than file a grievance, complain to his buddies or just get drunk, a man who was fired yesterday shot his former boss and then opened fire on passers-by outside the Empire State Building.
• Let's take a break in our relationship, Germany is poised to tell Greece. It's just temporary, while we work things out.
• The GOP may give Mitt Romney the official nod a tad early in order to avoid the twin threat of Tropical Storm Isaac and Ron Paul supporters.
• Mamdouh Mahmud Salim, a former Osama bin Laden aide, will have to serve out his life sentence for stabbing a federal prison guard in the eye.
• Lance Armstrong may have been stripped of his Tour de France titles, but he still has his deal with Nike to keep him warm at night.
• Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian mass murderer, apparently considers himself an underachiever. He apologized for not killing more people. This is what evil looks like, folks.
• The guy brought in to clean up Miami's Code Compliance division has been paying for parties on his city account, taking freebies from restaurants, dating staff and generally not cleaning up the division.

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

Today Greek Prime Minister Antonis Samaras and German Chancellor Angela Merkel met for talks on the euro-crisis. Merkel reiterated her desire to have Greece remain in the euro, while Samaras repeated his pleas for more time to meet the austerity conditions attached to future bailouts. The markets have not reacted well, with European stocks and the euro falling.

Although Merkel might want Greece to stay in the euro, the troika audit might well make Greece’s membership of the eurozone a political as well aneconomic impossibility. There is considerable domestic political pressure on Merkel to be harsher on the Greeks, who have been unable to make the promised privatizations and cuts. Indeed, patience is wearing so thin that it is reported that German Finance Ministry might approach the Greeks and ask them to consider a temporary break from eurozone membership.

An unnamed official explained:

It would be better received politically within Germany, the Netherlands, Finland and other countries like Slovakia and Estonia if the new loan were sold as the final one and tied to a Greek exit from the Eurozone, which would be regarded as punishment.

While the German Finance Ministry might be planning on nudging Greece out of the eurozone on our own side of the Atlantic Obama is keen on Greece staying in, at least until Election Day. If the troika audit reveals that the Greeks have not kept to the austerity conditions attached to future bailouts, then German and/or Finnish political activism will almost certainly ensure a Greek default. The effects of a Greek default would hit the American economy hard. Europe is America’s largest trade partner, with Europe reeling from a Greek default there would be no way for the US to isolate itself from the effects. A Greek default is by no means guarantees a Romney victory, but it would make the election more competitive.

No one could have seriously thought that the Greek government would be able to make the necessary cuts to their budget or make the required privatizations. Greek government debt as a percentage of GDP has not dropped lower than 101 percent in seven years. The political establishment in Greece is immune to fiscal sanity and is institutionally incapable of doing what must be done. It is looking so bad that German officials are thinking of paying the Greeks to leave the eurozone, something the Greeks should consider a blessing in disguise. 

As a companion piece to yesterday's story of an ACLU attorney who was peppered with nosy questions at Burlington International Airport comes the tale of a Michigan journalist who took offense at this new approach to "security" and declined to play along. So, if you've been wondering just what would happen if you told TSA officers to take their 20 questions about your summer vacation and shove them where the sun doesn't shine, read on.

Steve Gunn, a former Muskegon Chronicle staff writer who now works for the Education Action Group, writes in the pages of his old paper:

At that point she asked me what my business would be in Grand Rapids.

"I'm headed home," I replied.

Then she wanted to know where home was. That's when the mental alarms went off and I realized I was being interrogated by Big Brother in drag.

I asked her why the federal government needed to know where I was going and what I would be doing. She explained that the questions were part of a new security "pilot program."

I then told her I am an American citizen, traveling within my own country, and I wasn't breaking any laws. That's all the federal government needed to know, and I wasn't going to share any more.

Not because I had anything to hide. It was because we live in a free country where innocent people are supposedly protected from unwarranted government intrusion and harassment.

At that point the agent yelled out, "We have another refusal." One of my bags was seized and I was momentarily detained and given a hand-swab, which I believe was to test for residue from bomb-making materials.

I passed the bomb test and was told I could move on, but I hung around a moment and told everyone within listening range what I thought about this terrifying experience.

Note the yelled "we have another refusal" which has also become characteristic of TSA reaction to anybody who declines a turn in the hey-it's-perfectly-safe-we-promise body scanners. It's a pretty obvious attampt to draw attention to the dissidents and use embarrassment as a weapon to induce cooperation.

Gunn, who I've never come across before but I like just from the content of this piece, thinks he might have been targeted for his "chat down" because he has Bell's Palsy, which prevents him from smiling and gives him a grumpy expression. There's no proof of that, but it makes as much sense as anything else, given that racial characteristics were used as reasons for chatting down travelers in Boston.

"I'm starting to wonder what separates us from Russia or Cuba," asks Gunn in his piece.

Well, our plumbing is still better.

Remember when Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano promised that new technology would soon allow travelers to keep their shoes on at the airport? Well, forget about that:

After spending millions of dollars testing four different scanning devices that would allow airline passengers to keep their shoes on at security checkpoints, the United States government has decided for now that travelers must continue to remove their footwear, by far the leading source of frustration and delays at the airport.

The Transportation Security Administration said it had rejected all four devices because they failed to adequately detect explosives and metal weapons during tests at various airports. One of the scanners is now used in airports in 18 countries.

You might conclude that the U.S. government simply has higher standards, if it weren't for the fact that its full-body scanners cannot reliably detect the sort of explosives they supposedly are designed to detect, the fact that its edicts about what may or may not be carried into the cabin are ludicrously arbitrary, the fact that there is little rhyme or reason to its policies regarding electronic devices, and the fact that the humans it hires to screen passengers routinely miss knives, guns, and bombs during clandestine tests, possibly because they are so busy making sure everyone takes off his shoes, removes his tiny toiletry bottles, and discards his beverages, not to mention breaking bladder cancer survivors' urostomy bags, forcing incontinent old ladies in wheelchairs to remove their diapers, and making little girls cry. In fact, the rationale for rejecting the shoe scanners becomes more mysterious the more The New York Times explains it:

Here's a new video from ReasonTV alum (and maker of our Nanny of the Month vids) Ted Balaker and the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE).

Vanderbilt University, the self-proclaimed Harvard of the South, is meddling with freedom of association in a way that even the most hard-core aficianado of political correctness would find repugnant:

From the writeup of the doc at YouTube:

Religious and political groups in the United States have traditionally been free to choose their leaders and members without interference from authorities. That's no longer true at Vanderbilt University, where the school banned belief-based groups from making belief-based decisions about their members and leaders and drove 13 religious student groups off of campus. In this video, FIRE talks to Vanderbilt students and faculty about how this decision is affecting them. Country music legend Larry Gatlin and author and scholar Jonathan Rauch also explain why Vanderbilt has done both its students and the idea of pluralism itself a profound disservice.

More FIRE vids here.

Dinesh D'Souza's film 2016: Obama's America is made at a higher level of production than any of the many negative documentaries made about George W. Bush, Tim Cavanaugh writes. It treats its subject with much greater fairness than any of those filmst and is arguably a bigger box office draw than any of them. As 2016 breaks through a wall of mainstream media hostility and opens wide today, Cavanaugh says in his review that the film is made with great emotional and narrative power. But D'Souza's thesis that the president is still possessed by his late father's anti-colonial radicalism and to a lesser extent by his grandfather's mid-century-vintage leftism does not fully explain the extent of Obama's failures or the special awfulness of his presidency. 

"Free Speech Fight: Campus Anti-Zionism May Result in Hate Speech Ban" is the latest offering from ReasonTV.Watch above or click on the link below for video, full text, supporting links, downloadable versions, and more Reason TV clips.

So the Obama administration has insisted we need to invest in renewable energy so we don’t fall behind China, but then we discovered that China’s renewable energy industry is in an even worse financial state than ours.  China is better than us in transportation, U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood says, because they’ve built a high-speed rail system. But it turns out China’s trains are a scary, hastily built, dangerous mess whose construction was marked with corruption and are too expensive for the Chinese to actually ride.

But China’s infrastructure! Oh, man, China’s infrastructure! President Barack Obama has praised China’s infrastructure investments and has frequently argued that we’ve got to follow in their footsteps.

Cue the sad trombones (via BBC):

A section of a multi-million dollar bridge in China that opened in November has collapsed, leaving three people dead and five injured, state media say.

Four lorries fell off the Yangmingtan Bridge in Harbin City, Heilongjiang province, when part of it collapsed, Xinhua news agency said.

Shoddy construction and over-loading have been blamed for the incident, it added.

This is the sixth major bridge collapse in China in a year. We can only hope the firms who built these bridges aren't the same Chinese firms that have been contracted to build bridges here in America.

Here’s Obama the candidate back in 2008 using the traveling Potemkin village known as the Olympics as a springboard to talk about the infrastructure gap, declaring China’s to be “vastly superior” to ours. Wonder if he still feels that way:

(Hat tip to Scott Lincicome)

Why would the owner of a bar or restaurant that serves booze support restrictions on alcohol sales? 

(a) they are concerned about drunk driving

(b) they are annoyed by drunk patrons, but don't like the hassle of throwing them out

(c) they want to squelch upstart competitors seeking to attract customers with drink special

(d) All of the above

Let's charitably assume the answer is (d). Perhaps restaurant mini-magnate Steve DiFillippo, who owns Davio’s Northern Italian Steakhouse and Avila in Boston, means it when he says:

“There’s only one reason people go to happy hour, and that’s to get drunk."

Similarly, Austin O’Connor Jr., CEO of Boston’s Briar Group which owns City Bar, Ned Devine’s, the Green Briar, the Harp, M.J. O’Connor’s and Anthem Kitchen + Bar, is probably sincere it when he says:

"Happy hour is a very bad thing for our industry...Happy hour only encourages over-consumption." 

But sometimes the Baptists are also the bootleggers. Happy hours are a classic way for restaurants and bars to amp up the competition. And when you're already running a handful of the most well established restaurants in Boston, the last thing you wants is some jerk coming and and offering your customers a better deal, right?

Thank god that they have the people who pay the cops on their side. For now, Happy Hours are mostly banned in Boston, but the comments above are from a series of hearings by the Alcoholic Beverage Control Commission aimed at reopening the discussion about loosening those laws. The fancy restaurateurs are not amused.

Oh, and none of this applies in Philadelphia, apparently, where (as astute Boston Herald commenters noted) Davio's has another location that seems quite proud of its awesome happy hour specials.

Via Keep Food Legal

The same sad story has been playing out in Connecticut, where small liquor store owners want to keep Blue Laws in place so that they can close early and have a day off on Sunday without worrying about the competition. UPDATE: Sunday sales are now legal, after a long fight.

Back in 2003, Kansas University remote sensing researcher Jerome Dobson and University of Leicester professor of geographical information Peter Fisher debuted the creepy concept of "geoslavery" in the IEEE Technology and Society Magazine. A KU press release outlined the elements of geoslavery:

By combining GIS [geographical information systems] technology with a global positioning system (GPS) and a radio transmitter and receiver, someone easily can monitor your movements with or without your knowledge. Add to that a transponder -- either implanted into a person or in the form of a bracelet -- that sends an electric shock any time you step out of line, and that person actually can control your movements from a distance.

As of now, police are routinely requesting GPS data obtained from users' cell phones to track them. As Wired reported last month:

Mobile carriers responded to a staggering 1.3 million law enforcement requests last year for subscriber information, including text messages and phone location data, according to data provided to Congress...

The number of Americans affected each year by the growing use of mobile phone data by law enforcement could reach into the tens of millions, as a single request could ensnare dozens or even hundreds of people. Law enforcement has been asking for so-called “cell tower dumps” in which carriers disclose all phone numbers that connected to a given tower during a certain period of time.

Earlier this month, the U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals said that there's nothing wrong with police monitoring. The court ruled that the police did not violate a marijuana dealer's Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable searches and seizures when they tracked him using the GPS data from his cell phone. The court declared [PDF]:

There is no Fourth Amendment violation because Skinner did not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the data given off by his voluntarily procured payas-you-go cell phone. If a tool used to transport contraband gives off a signal that can be tracked for location, certainly the police can track the signal. The law cannot be that a criminal is entitled to rely on the expected untrackability of his tools. Otherwise, dogs could not be used to track a fugitive if the fugitive did not know that the dog hounds had his scent. A getaway car could not be identified and followed based on the license plate  number if the driver reasonably thought he had gotten away unseen. The recent nature of cell phone location technology does not change this. If it did, then technology would help criminals but not the police. It follows that Skinner had no expectation of privacy in the context of this case, just as the driver of a getaway car has no expectation of privacy in the particular combination of colors of the car’s paint.

Today's Washington Post reports:

The [Sixth Circuit's] decision riled civil libertarians, who warned that it opened the door to an extensive new form of government surveillance destined to be abused as sophisticated tracking technology becomes more widely available. On Monday, six days after the appeals court ruling, the U.S. attorney in Arizona cited it in defending the use of cellphone location data to help arrest a suspect accused of tax fraud...

Cellphones always have been trackable to some degree, as users moved among towers that carried the signals necessary to make the devices work, creating an electronic record in the process. But GPS technology is far more sophisticated, narrowing locations typically to within a few feet. Many smartphones relay location data to central servers throughout the day, as users check traffic, search for nearby restaurants or scan weather maps.

Combined with information from toll booths, credit card machines and security cameras, people in highly wired nations often move within a web of data that can allow governments to pinpoint individual movements down to the second.

So far, the dystopic vision of geoslavery enforced by GPS tracking combined with the abilty to administer an electric shocks to those being monitored has not come to pass. However, back in 2008, the Washington Times reported an inquiry from a Department of Homeland Security official Paul S. Ruwaldt of the Science and Technology Directorate, office of Research and Development about developing an "EMD Safety Bracelet". EMD stands for Electro-Muscular Disruption. The Times noted instead of receiving an airline boarding pass: 

The Electronic ID Bracelet, as it’s referred to, would be worn by every traveler “until they disembark the flight at their destination.”  Yes, you read that correctly. Every airline passenger would be tracked by a government-funded GPS, containing personal, private and confidential information, and would shock the customer worse than an electronic dog collar if the passenger got out of line.

But if you're not doing anything wrong, you've got nothing to worry about, right?

The Maine delegation to the Republican National Convention (RNC) in Tampa next week has been essentially unseated by the Republican National Committee's Committee on Contests, in a compromise intended to split the delegation 10 for Ron Paul, 10 for Mitt Romney.

The delegation intends to appeal to the credentialing committee today. I was told two days ago by delegation member (and in-coming national committeeman on the RNC from Maine) Mark Willis that "We were duly elected and we are all going to Tampa and we expect to be seated as a delegation, all of us or none of us. We are united and strong and the Romney campaign underestimate our resolve."

We'll see how that works out. My recent blogging on the Maine fight here and here.

Romney and Paul political operatives seem to have cooperated on feeding the angle to this long Politico story today: Ron Paul gets no actual role at the convention, and the Romney forces have successfully arranged it so a floor nomination for Paul seems impossible (although some in the Nevada delegation are apparently still going to try).

But! The platform (meaningless unless a specific candidate/politician really believes in it) has some sops to Paul's monetary policy ideas--audit the Fed, rethink gold--while little to his foreign policy or civil liberties stances, except for:

Internet freedom language adopted that is nearly verbatim to an Internet freedom manifesto published by the pro-Paul Campaign for Liberty.

For the first time, the platform has a whole section about the U.S. Constitution. Paulites also won on language opposing the use of domestic drones and protecting private property from being seized unfairly by government.

All, it seems, to make sure the Paul factions/liberty movement seem a loyal part of the Republican Party moving forward rather than an ignorable and hated rabble.

Back in May, when the Paul campaign began confusingly ramping back its efforts, some distrustful grassroots forces saw it as a deliberate sellout; I could detect then that to the Paul operatives it was a matter of how the liberty movement was going to be perceived by the GOP moving forward, what with all the talk of "respect" and "decorum" coming from Paul's political director Jesse Benton.

What you make of this depends on whether you believed there was still any chance whatsoever Paul could actually get the nomination as of May. If you did, anything less than full speed ahead was treason. 

If you did not--as Paul's political pros and Paul himself clearly did not--then the question became: do we move forward as bloody nuisances to the GOP power structure, shouting on the floor at the RNC, one that they will be desperate to marginalize and ignore? Or try to position ourselves as a meaningful "part of the coalition" even if little concrete (other than a Rand Paul speaking slot) comes from it?

Whether you agree that this strategy of staying firmly within the GOP tent is best for the liberty cause or not--and a huge part of the Paul activist grassroots does not--this Politico story that seems sourced from both within the Romney and Paul camps shows that's roughly what happened, from the perspective of the political operatives themselves. What value this path of polite cooperation will have for the libertarian cause within the Republican Party won't be clear in the next week, or next year. 

How the Ron Paul cause got to where it is now is a story told in my book Ron Paul's Revolution: The Man and the Movement He Inspired.

California residents, typically oblivious to events east of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, owe a debt of gratitude to the folks in Wisconsin, writes Steven Greenhut. Had Wisconsin voters replaced Gov. Scott Walker and other Republican officials, the message would have been heard nationwide: Pension reform, and efforts to rein in the public-sector union power at the root of the problem, would be dead for years. The time has now come for Californians to follow the Badger State and have their own defining debate over unions, or watch helplessly as cities go under and services deteriorate.

Today a Norwegian court ruled that Anders Behring Breivik, who killed 77 people and wounded more than 240 last year by setting off bombs in Oslo and shooting up a Workers' Youth League camp on the island of Utøya, was sane when he committed those crimes. The five-judge panel sentenced him to 21 years in prison, the maximum penalty allowed by law. He must serve at least 10 years of that sentence but could be imprisoned longer than than the full term under a provision that allows preventive detention of prisoners deemed to pose a continuing threat to public safety. The sentence, combining what looks like lenience with the potential for indefinite detention, looks quirky from an American perspective (although we have something similar with the civil commitment of "sexually violent predators" who have completed their sentences). Another aspect of the trial that may seem strange: We are used to hearing defense attorneys argue that their client should not be held responsible for his crime because it was the product of mental illness. But in this case, Breivik insisted that he was sane, driven not by psychosis but by ideology, while the prosecution argued that he was crazy. On that point, the judges unanimously sided with Breivik.

How did they make that determination? BBC News describes the process:

[Breivik] insisted he was sane and refused to plead guilty, seeking to justify his attacks by saying they were necessary to stop the "Islamisation" of Norway....

Court-appointed psychiatrists disagreed on Breivik's sanity. A first team which examined him declared him to be a paranoid schizophrenic, but the second found he was sane.

Before the verdict, Breivik said psychiatric care would be "worse than death"....

Breivik, 33, carried out the meticulously planned attack on 22 July 2011, wearing a fake police uniform, and methodically hunted down his victims.

He accused the governing Labour Party of promoting multiculturalism and endangering Norway's identity....

Experts in far-right ideology told the trial Breivik's ideas should not be seen as the ramblings of a madman.

That's a pretty fine line, as Brandon Raub could tell you. In this month's Cato Unbound debate about coercive psychiatry, Allen Frances, who led the panel that produced the current version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, says, "I believe that the recent run of mass murderers whose killings are based on fringe, extremist political beliefs are usually better handled as murderers in the legal system than as mental patients in the psychiatric—even if their beliefs seem offensive and bizarre." By contrast, D.J. Jaffe, executive director of MentalIllnessPolicy.org, cites Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, as an example of someone whose "untreated mental illness" drove him to murder. If Kaczyski, who produced a manifesto explaining in great detail the motivation for his crimes, does not count as a murderer “whose killings are based on fringe, extremist political beliefs,” who does?

My most recent contribution to the Cato debate is here.

We increasingly live in a world of real-time marketing. Soon you’ll even be able to turn your face into a customer loyalty card. That’s essentially the premise behind a new service called Facedeals, “an automated check-in system using passive facial recognition to notify you of in-store deals that are customized just for you.” But as Greg Beato reports, there’s also a growing market for privacy, such as encryption apps that hide your email and texts. As old-fashioned anonymity grows increasingly difficult to attain, at least without detaching yourself from the culture at large, Beato writes, the fetish value of privacy is likely to flourish.

McKay Coppins has a fascinating story in Buzzfeed on the politics of polygamy. The hook is that there are plural marriages in the recent family