Reason Magazine - Staff

From the Top: City of Rats

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Tue, 06 May 2008 07:00:00 EDT

Washington, D.C., is lousy with rats, and not just of the human variety. I knew that before moving here—you’d always see them scampering around sidewalks and alleys when walking around town—but it took living full-time in the city to appreciate both the awe-inspiring magnitude of the infestation and the jaw-dropping indifference of a municipal government more focused on giving free money to billionaires than addressing the capital’s legendary civic rot.

On my very first trip to the supermarket as a bona fide Beltway resident, a little black rat darted between the feet of everyone in the checkout line. While the customers eeked, the Safeway employees just laughed and laughed. At my new rowhouse, I noticed packs of the critters clattering through the neighborhood’s front yards, including my own. There were scores of gaping rat-holes in the dirt, and the trees were full of day-rats (otherwise known as squirrels) during sunlight hours. Some time soon after the beginning of the Chinese Year of the Rat, my pregnant wife walked downstairs and reached for her bag on the couch, and out jumped a plump young rodent.

I began making inquiries to exterminators, colleagues, and panicky urban websites, and what came back was a Stephen King hellscape. “We can trap what’s inside right now and plug up some holes and establish a perimeter outside,” the first rat-assessor told us. “But there’s no way to keep them out of your house in this neighborhood—they just come right up through the sewers.” Yep, the old rat-in-the-toilet urban legend, only this time it was true. Another exterminator just shrugged and told us to “put pressure on the city,” though he knew it was futile.

My colleague Michael Moynihan had rats build a complicated nest inside the engine of his car, chewing through various wires and hoses. While throwing the contents of a second engine-nest into an open dumpster (D.C.’s trash-management tidiness being just a step or two above that of Naples, Italy) he noticed dozens of beady rat-eyes inside staring up at him disapprovingly. Recently, his wife slammed on her brakes in front of an intersection, and a rat plopped out from under the hood.

Vermin complaints to the city government were up 8 percent in 2007. In October of that year, self-described “rodent experts” Dale Kaukeinen and Bruce Colvin released a nationwide study naming Washington the fifth-most- vulnerable city to a major spike in rat population, a prediction that seems more likely than ever after yet another mild winter. The National Zoo has such a bad infestation that two adult pandas were killed by rat poison a few years back. “Mayor Anthony A. Williams declared war on the rats in the late 1990s,” Washington Times columnist Tom Knott wrote in February, “and the rats won.”

What made my reacquaintance with rodents much more difficult to accept was that it came during the very month that the city was congratulating itself for a gleaming new expenditure of local taxpayers’ money—a $611 million stadium to house the Washington Nationals baseball team. Actually, that figure is much too low: Eminent domain settlements with in-the-way property owners added $43 million to the cost, and a handful of outstanding cases could tack on $24 million more. There were also $32 million in municipal infrastructure improvements.

So how much is $710 million in the scheme of D.C.? More than 12 percent of the city’s annual local budget. (It receives an additional $4 billion or so from the federal government.) It’s almost as much as the $773 million that Mayor Adrian Fenty is proposing this year to spend on the District’s notoriously awful public schools. Less than 10 days before Nationals Stadium first flung open its doors, Fenty announced various remedies for a $96 million budget shortfall: postponing a tax cut on commercial property, doubling the cost of a business license, increasing ambulance fees, charging an extra 23 cents for every phone line that can call 911.

Oddly, the Washington Post and other local newspapers didn’t draw any connections to the stadium, despite the $38 million in annual debt service it requires—a figure certain to go up during the current credit crunch. Perhaps the paper was too busy with its multiple gushing special sections about the facility, including such headlines as “The City Opens the Ballpark, And the Fans Come Up Winners.”

It’s not like the non-baseball services Washington provides are famous for their effectiveness. The potholes in the roads would embarrass a Romanian. The neighborhood papers are filled with complaints that violent crimes like carjacking and assault don’t rise to the level of police interest. (In 2000, when I reported being mugged during my first visit to the city, the police told me there was nothing they could do except check the Lost and Found once in a while for my wallet.) Our local library admitted that the online book-reservation system is not tethered to physical reality, and that in fact they have no real idea at any given time whether or not they have a book.
It has taken us four visits to the Department of Motor Vehicles to come even close to registering our car locally.

Unfortunately for the rest of you, the chasm between unsexy nuts-and-bolts services and dazzling new municipal-built edifices is the rule, not the exception, of big-city governance. In Los Angeles, my former city representative, Tom LaBonge, was tolerated as an eccentric for being the only member of the 15-member City Council to express genuine interest in street repairs (though the road in front of my house still had craters large enough to hide a baby). When a coalition of black, brown, and lefty-white politicians took over city government early this decade, one local alternative weekly urged the council to “think big” and not get bogged down in mere “pothole politics.”

It’s a startling mindset to observe up close, as I did for two years of jawboning with civic leaders on the L.A. Times editorial board. Councilmen always talk of “doing deals” and “putting together projects,” by which they mean real estate. Nearly two dozen governmental authorities—city, regional, county, state—have some power of eminent domain over the area, and they use it to build five-star hotels, reward campaign contributors, and erect schools that declining enrollment levels have rendered utterly unnecessary. Civic leaders are always proposing some new property-related “moratorium”—on converting apartments into condominiums, fleabag hotels into attractive rentals, and unused patches of hillside into homes. “Thinking big” inevitably means horse-trading bits of the city’s famously onerous red tape in return for developers delivering preferred social goals, such as guaranteeing “living wage” union jobs, building “green” rooftops, and providing for “affordable housing” units.

After a while, one starts to feel like a lonely crank constantly criticizing a city for delivering ever-worse essential services while spending ever-more money on government salaries and ever-more time butting into the private sector. Especially when the private sector has given up the intellectual fight.

One of my last editorial board visits was with Tim Leiweke, who owns the Staples Center, the Los Angeles Kings hockey team, and the largest new real estate development in town, a project called L.A. Live. I expected a guy who works with the famous conservative tycoon Phil Anschutz to be at least halfway skeptical about the intersection of City Hall and private real estate development, but when I asked him about his biggest frustration with public policy downtown, he replied: “The gap between the haves and the have-nots.” If we don’t have more affordable housing and living wage union jobs, Leiweke warned, “There’s gonna be a day of reckoning here that’s not going to be pretty.”

Maybe that’s why local politicians line the pockets of billionaire sports tycoons like Leiweke: Give ’em enough money, and intrude enough into their business, and they’re almost bound to go native. Now if only they could be trained to care a little less about stadiums and a little more about rats.

Matt Welch is reason’s editor in chief.

Attn: SoCal Reasonoids -- Last Chance to Catch the Myth of a Maverick Mini-Tour!

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Thu, 15 May 2008 18:14:00 EDT

I'll be talking about McCain: The Myth of a Maverick tonight at 7 p.m., in the Mark Taper auditorium of L.A.'s beautiful downtown Central Library, as part of Zocalo L.A.'s "Deconstructing McCain." Yer address and map: 630 W. 5th St. Come out and heckle!

Question Time With the Republican President Who Will Appoint Democrats and Reject the Unitary Executive

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Thu, 15 May 2008 17:58:00 EDT

John McCain gave an interesting speech this morning dreaming out loud what the world will look like in January 2013, after the first four years of his administration. The headlines from it will mostly (and inaccurately) be about "Troops Home From Iraq by 2013: McCain," on which more from me here, but there are some more concrete, semi-radical promises of interest in the speech. For instance:

I will ask Democrats to serve in my administration. My administration will set a new standard for transparency and accountability. I will hold weekly press conferences. I will regularly brief the American people on the progress our policies have made and the setbacks we have encountered. When we make errors, I will confess them readily, and explain what we intend to do to correct them. I will ask Congress to grant me the privilege of coming before both houses to take questions, and address criticism, much the same as the Prime Minister of Great Britain appears regularly before the House of Commons.

Wowza! While I am a huge fan of Question Time With the Redcoats, I would worry somewhat that the Rolling Fireside Chat Revue would place even more "bull" in the Bully Pulpit, aggrandizing an already inflated office in which (as Gene Healy taught us in this month's cover story) presidents before Woodrow Wilson thought it a bit too presumptuous to deliver the State of the Union in person.

More from McCain today, on that question of executive power:

The powers of the presidency are rightly checked by the other branches of government, and I will not attempt to acquire powers our founders saw fit to grant Congress. I will exercise my veto if I believe legislation passed by Congress is not in the nation's best interests, but I will not subvert the purpose of legislation I have signed by making statements that indicate I will enforce only the parts of it I like.

Besides being a direct (and welcome) rebuke to George W. Bush and the Unitary Executive theory, this also somewhat contradicts McCain's long track record of supporting a line-item veto, which the Supreme Court ruled in 1998 gave the executive branch powers our founders did not see fit to include in the Constitution. And more relevantly, it would seem to be in contradiction of McCain's own longstanding belief that presidents have too little power vis-a-vis Congress in the planning of foreign policy and the waging of war. Here are some of his thoughts on that subject, from his 2002 political memoir Worth the Fighting For:

My disdain of congressional interference in the conduct of the war in Vietnam made all the stronger my natural antipathy to the notion of 535 self-styled secretaries of defense second-guessing and hamstringing the president's authority in national security matters.
*
At timies, my despair [about Bill Clinton's feckless foreign policy], and the disdain it provoked, caused me to doubt principles I had held for a lifetime about the president's preeminence over Congress in the conduct of foreign policy and the imperative that American power never retreat in response to an inferior adversary's provocation.
*
On October 14, 1993, eleven days after the ambush of our rangers in Mogadishu, I offered an amendment on the Senate floor restricting funds for American forces in Somalia to the purpose of their "prompt and orderly withdrawal." [...] [I]t was an encroachment on presidential authorrity and a retreat in the face of aggression from an inferior foe that I would never have contemplated in the past. [...] In hindsight, I wish I had not undertaken so drastic a step.
*
[Theodore Roosevelt] invented the modern presidency by liberally interpreting the constitutional authority of the office to redress the imbalance of power between the executive and legislative branches that had tilted decisively toward Congress in the half century since the Civil War.

McCain ain't no John Yoo, but he agrees with Dick Cheney that the War Powers Act is unconstitutional, and he won't lightly brook any shackles on his ability to move troops hither and yon.

Oh yeah: Here's McCain's terrible 2013 ad:

Here's a better version:

McCain's Phony Withdrawal

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Thu, 15 May 2008 16:45:00 EDT

John McCain announces timetable for withdrawal from Iraq!

Well, actually, he did no such thing, and probably will never do any such thing, but this morning, in an interesting speech (and crappy companion commercial) dreamcasting ahead to the year 2013, the presumptive Republican nominee cleverly set bait for the national media to undo his most enduring campaign blunder to date: Letting slip the bedrock truism that McCain sees no downside whatsoever to having U.S. troops stationed in Iraq in the year 2109.

The Arizona senator's ongoing political challenge this year is to maintain his strong support and feelings of empathetic good will from independents and Democrats who hate the war (and the mindset behind it) that he so adamantly supports and even embodies. It's a tough nut to crack, trying to convince people who hate George W. Bush that your foreign policy is more "moderate" than the president's when in fact it has been more radical and interventionist for a full decade running, but McCain is banking on the power of suggestion, and above all the remarkable potency of the benefit of the doubt, to obscure his rock-solid neo-conservative credentials and expansionist foreign policy.

Here's how he did it today. By January 2013, after the first McCain term, he says:

America has welcomed home most of the servicemen and women who have sacrificed terribly so that America might be secure in her freedom. The Iraq War has been won. Iraq is a functioning democracy, although still suffering from the lingering effects of decades of tyranny and centuries of sectarian tension. Violence still occurs, but it is spasmodic and much reduced. Civil war has been prevented; militias disbanded; the Iraqi Security Force is professional and competent; al Qaeda in Iraq has been defeated; and the Government of Iraq is capable of imposing its authority in every province of Iraq and defending the integrity of its borders. The United States maintains a military presence there, but a much smaller one, and it does not play a direct combat role.

That's the sole basis of the "McCain announces departure date" interpretation. It doesn't take a cynic to note that this is not remotely a tangible roadmap for drawing down forces, but rather an "I have a dream" laundry list of wonderful things he'd love to see. In fact, his speech today is chock full of such locutions, covering events roughly as likely as President Bush's Mission to Mars. Some other examples of McCain's wishcasting:

* The increase in actionable intelligence that the counterinsurgency produced led to the capture or death of Osama bin Laden, and his chief lieutenants.

* Concerted action by the great democracies of the world has persuaded a reluctant Russia and China to cooperate in pressuring Iran to abandon its nuclear ambitions, and North Korea to discontinue its own.

* After exercising my veto several times in my first year in office, Congress has not sent me an appropriations bill containing earmarks for the last three years.

* U.S. tariffs on agricultural imports have been eliminated and unneeded farm subsidies are being phased out.

* Public education in the United States is much improved thanks to the competition provided by charter and private schools.

It sure would be pretty to think so! And obviously, it's better to have a prospective president mouthing platitudes about free agricultural trade than a political hack demagoguing a lousy farm bill. But as concerns the policy question du jour—and McCain's political necessity of scrubbing the word "neo-con" from his resume, without actually changing any of his neo-conservative policies or foreign policy team—the 2013 drawdown from Iraq should be seen as the strategic and process-free campaign cheap-talk that it is.

And how's it working out? By a quick look at the headlines, Mission Accomplished!

McCain sees Iraq combat over, U.S. troops home before 2013

Troops home from Iraq by 2013: McCain

McCain Sets a Date

The funny thing is, as routinely happens with our straight-talking friend, the press has buried the foreign policy lede by skipping over McCain's interventionist bluster in the very same speech. For instance, did you know that President McCain intends to lead NATO forces into Darfur, and use that as a stepping-stone to various humanitarian interventions?

[T]he United States, acting in concert with a newly formed League of Democracies, applied stiff diplomatic and economic pressure that caused the government of Sudan to agree to a multinational peacekeeping force, with NATO countries providing logistical and air support, to stop the genocide that had made a mockery of the world's repeated declaration that we would "never again" tolerant such inhumanity. Encouraged by the success, the League is now occupied with using the economic power and prestige of its member states to end other gross abuses of human rights such as the despicable crime of human trafficking.

Note here the process difference from the Iraq quote above: Not only is he wishing how something might be true, he's spelling out the procedural road map as well.

As George Will pointed out in yet another recent scathing critique of McCain, the "never surrender" candidate has pledged to stay the course in Iraq until "the establishment of a generally peaceful, stable, prosperous, democratic state"—a perfect recipe for the 100-year occupation he's so furiously back-pedaling from—while vowing to use force against Iran if the mullahs develop nukes. The question Will wants answered, and the rest of us should too, is not "is it true you are more moderate than George W. Bush?", but (in Will's words) "how long is your list of nations eligible for 'rogue-state rollback'?"

McCain is lobbying hard, and with some success, to be seen as an "Eisenhower Republican"—a doctrine-straddling "moderate" between idealists (a.k.a. "neo-cons") and Henry Kissinger-style realists (in his March attempt to square his foreign policy circle McCain uncorked the marvelously nonsensical new term "realistic idealist").

The problem is, aside from saying that as a veteran he "hates" war—a preamble that he used to great effect in his March 1999 speech unveiling rogue-state rollback—and staking out some stylistic differences with his predecessor (today's example: "I will not subvert the purpose of legislation I have signed by making statements that indicate I will enforce only the parts of it I like"), the candidate continues to advocate and pine for interventions that would make even Eisenhower blush.

The strain between these two incompatible positions is beginning to show. In a very long Matt Bai profile of McCain's foreign policy in this Sunday's New York Times Magazine, the senator kicks off the interview even before Bai asks a question with an irritable five-minute rant about how he is not so a warmonger, that he's really an Eisenhower Republican, and that he's taken close counsel from Henry Kissinger for 30 years. "Anybody is free to write whatever they want and form whatever opinions they want to form," McCain tells Bai. "But facts are facts. And the fact is that I know war, and I know the tragedy of war. And no one hates war more than veterans."

But then, later in the interview, when Bai asks him about possible U.S. interventionism into such strategically unimportant yet undeniably dictatorial countries as Zimbabwe and Burma, McCain laments that a Zimbabwe invasion would be seen as "colonialism," and that "I'm just not sure the American people would support a military engagement in Burma, no matter how justified the cause." As Bai comments:

Most American politicians, of course, would immediately dismiss the idea of sending the military into Zimbabwe or Myanmar as tangential to American interests and therefore impossible to justify. McCain didn't make this argument. He seemed to start from a default position that moral reasons alone could justify the use of American force, and from there he considered the reasons it might not be feasible to do so. In other words, to paraphrase Robert Kennedy, while most politicians looked at injustice in a foreign land and asked, "Why intervene?" McCain seemed to look at that same injustice and ask himself, "Why not?"

Will President McCain draw down combat troops from Iraq by 2013? Only if Iraq becomes the kind of prosperous and stable democracy that few if any humans are predicting will happen in the foreseeable future. In other words, when cows fly. Americans who vote for McCain based on that promise will surely get the president they deserve.

Matt Welch is the editor-in-chief of reason and the author of McCain: The Myth of a Maverick.

The Battle of Minneapolis?

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Mon, 12 May 2008 10:02:00 EDT

L.A. Times political blogger Andrew Malcolm, one of the most active Ron Paul-watchers in the EmmEssEmm, sees a quiet revolution brewing on John McCain's libertarian flank:

[Q]uietly, largely under the radar of most people, the forces of Rep. Ron Paul have been organizing across the country to stage an embarrassing public revolt against Sen. John McCain when Republicans gather for their national convention in St. Paul at the beginning of September. [...]
The last three months Paul's forces [...] [have] been fighting a series of guerrilla battles with party establishment officials at county and state conventions from Washington and Missouri to Maine and Mississippi. Their goal: to take control of local committees, boost their delegate totals and influence platform debates. [...]
They hope to demonstrate their disagreements with McCain vocally at the convention through platform fights and an attempt to get Paul a prominent speaking slot. Paul, who's running unopposed in his home Texas district for an 11th House term, still has some $5 million in war funds and has instructed his followers that their struggle is not about a single election, but a longterm revolution for control of the Republican Party.

Whole thing here. McCain jokes here that he hopes his opponent come Novemeber is the good Dr. Congressman. Brian Doherty's "Scenes from the Ron Paul Revolution" here.

Insert Cock Joke Here

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Fri, 09 May 2008 20:09:00 EDT

In the same week that the city of Los Angeles criminalized home remodeling over a certain size, dreary Councilwoman Janice Hahn is trying to see to it that homeowners only get one cock per walk:

Under her proposal, residents would need a permit to keep one rooster, and people who wanted to keep up to three would need to seek special permission from the city.

Speaking of "affordable housing" illiteracy, this L.A. Times story on Washington's latest subprime bailout bill contains a gem of a quote from Republican Congressperson Ginny Brown-Waite of Florida:

No one wins when a house in the neighborhood is foreclosed. Absolutely no one, because it brings down the value of those properties.

Ron Paul Un-endorses White Supremacist

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Thu, 08 May 2008 13:57:00 EDT

Bill Johnson, who is running for Superior Court judge in Los Angeles (with the help of campaign manager Holly Clearman, who is a California coordinator for Paul's presidential campaign), was the author of the 1980s Pace Amendment to the Constitution, which read in part:

No person shall be a citizen of the United States unless he is a non-Hispanic white of the European race, in whom there is no ascertainable trace of Negro blood, nor more than one-eighth Mongolian, Asian, Asia Minor, Middle Eastern, Semitic, Near Eastern, American Indian, Malay or other non-European or non-white blood, provided that Hispanic whites, defined as anyone with an Hispanic ancestor, may be citizens if, in addition to meeting the aforesaid ascertainable trace and percentage tests, they are in appearance indistinguishable from Americans whose ancestral home is in the British Isles or Northwestern Europe. Only citizens shall have the right and privilege to reside permanently in the United States.

"Thought-tormented Ron Paul fan" Tim Cavanaugh extracts a statement from Paul chief of staff Tom Lizardo:

Over the past several weeks, I have also been involved in assisting Dr Paul with the consideration of candidates who are seeking his endorsement for their campaigns. We have gone through the process of setting up a method by which candidates are to be considered for such endorsements. During that period, we have also received and reviewed requests from dozens of candidates.
Although Bill Johnson's name ended up on the endorsement list, he did not go through this process. In light of this fact, and in light of the revelations regarding his past statements and associations, Dr Paul has retracted the endorsement and hopes that, in the future, the process that has been put into place will mitigate the likelihood of similar errors.

Cavanaugh spars with angry Paul supporters here; Paul supporters argue amongst themselves here; other coverage of Johnson by the Metropolitan News-Enterprise and the L.A. Times' Opinion L.A. blog.

Dave Weigel has been all over the ongoing Ron Paul Republicans story, including a forthcoming column in the July issue.

Why Does Aspirin (and Hillary Clinton Supporters) Work?

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Thu, 08 May 2008 12:19:00 EDT

Hillary Clinton is well on her way to becoming the most reviled politician in the country. Not because she's resisting establishmentarian calls to step aside and let Prince Obama stride toward coronation − hell, I'd keep competing too, if I was that close to the mechanical rabbit. No, it's more that she will leave no faux-populist-bullshit-hardhat-Scranton-antitrade-what's-an-economist-Pabst-in-my-lunchbucket-Obama=Jesse stone unturned in her (and her husband's) quest to debase each and every molecule in their bodies, and snuff out every last positive memory we might have had of the way the federal government managed its affairs in the 1990s (when we, meaning me, never really liked her to begin with, and never voted for her husband).

The latest from Hitlery:

"I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on," she said in an interview with USA TODAY. As evidence, Clinton cited an Associated Press article "that found how Sen. Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me."
"There's a pattern emerging here," she said.

Yes, there is. When mincing little twerps like Paul Begala posit this rancid crew of Beltway power-mongers as the too-legit-to-quit anti-"egghead" faction representing the vast non-latte-drinking values of Real America, it's almost enough to make a guy pine for the authenticity of John Edwards.

I sincerely hope Hillary takes it all the way to the convention, even if that means I won't be able to watch cable TV for a few months. Few prospects would delight me more than seeing the Clintons stand up on a national stage in front of the political party they've long dominated and then get showered with richly deserved boos.

In Soviet Los Angeles, Housing Affordables You!

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Wed, 07 May 2008 16:19:00 EDT

When I used to write editorials for the L.A. Times about the city's buttinskyite approach to property rights in the name of preserving "affordable housing," I went to extraordinary lengths to ask each and every relevant local official and activist I met the same question: How many affordable housing units -- however you care to define the term -- exist right now?

The answer was as you'd expect: They really, truly, have no idea; not even when you break it down into categories like rental units. No one keeps track of the numbers. Still! Must do something!

This week, by unanimous votes, we get the L.A. City Council's solution to the affordable housing crisis: Prevent owners of fleabag residency hotels from upgrading their properties into higher-priced condos and lofts; and prohibit home-owners from increasing the size of their houses to any more than one-half the size of their property. After all, if owners are free to buy, sell, and expand on their properties as they see fit, then how in the heck will we get more housing stock built in Los Angeles?

The War-Spending Debate You Won't Hear This Week

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Wed, 07 May 2008 15:44:00 EDT

The Iraq War is being paid for via the most fiscally irresponsible method in modern American history -- a series of "emergency" supplemental bills, outside the normal vetting of the budgeting process, several years after any of the costs could at all be described as being unplanned "emergencies." You knew all this, because you read Veronique de Rugy's groundbreaking May cover story about how congressional Republicans ripped the lid off of all previous restraints on a system that is as easy to abuse as the phrase "support our troops."

This week we are experiencing the ugly results -- Democrats are cramming into the latest $195 billion emergency supplemental bill $11 billion in unemployment benefits, among other non-defense items. That likely pales in comparison to the cost of unvetted weaponry goodies that the Department of Defense is shoving into the package; meanwhile, President Bush has also thrown in extraneous crap, such as $770 million for international food aid.

If the federal government was playing by rules that were in effect as recently as 2000, emergency expenditures would mostly be offset by cuts elsewhere in the budget, war funding would have been enveloped into the normal defense-budgeting process by no later than 2005, and -- this bit is underappreciated -- we might actually know the real-world price tag of the war, because budgeteers would have made at least a half-assed attempt at filing war-related expenditures under the same category, instead of willfully blurring the lines.

Instead of any of that, politicians this week, including the major-party presidential candidates, will argue about withdrawal timetables that'll never become law, then eventually agree to spend another couple hundred billion dollars without anything resembling oversight or basic fiduciary responsibility. And if Democrats aren't making even the slightest noises about reforming this system now, it's hard to imagine them suddenly getting religion only after increasing their majorities in Congress and re-taking the White House.

Ancient Aztec Ritual Harshed by Narcs

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Tue, 06 May 2008 17:46:00 EDT

Huge drug bust at San Diego State -- a six-month undercover DEA investigation into seven fraternity houses nets 96 arrests (75 of them students), plus "4 pounds of cocaine, 50 pounds of marijuana, 48 hydroponic marijuana plants, 350 ecstasy pills, psilocybin (mushrooms), 30 vials of hash oil, methamphetamine, various illicit prescription drugs, one shotgun, three semi-automatic pistols, three brass knuckles and $60,000 in cash."

This DEA quote caught my eye:

"Our children are our biggest asset and absent a safe, drug-free learning environment, their chances of succeeding are greatly diminished," said Ralph W. Partridge, special agent in charge of the Drug Enforcement Administration in San Diego. "The university police and SDSU administration are to be commended for their swift actions in confronting the drug use problem on campus."

Funny, I thought that cheap access to frat-boy drugs were the whole point of SDSU.... At any rate, if having illegal narcotics in your post-high school learning environment "greatly diminishe[s]" your chances at success, then California has been doomed to failure since what, 1959? Somehow the state, and its college graduates, manage to muddle through.

More seriously, I always wonder what happens to these guys who are arrested in their early 20s for meeting a sliver of the insatiable undergraduate demand for pot-smoking. I was never any dealer, nor much of a user, but I've known and worked with quite a few perfectly successful people who dealt drugs in college. I have also known a couple who were unlucky (and/or careless) enough to get carted off to jail, but those guys I lost track of. (Though through the magic of Google I see one former mushroom-dealing colleague running a successful business in Texas, so hopefully it all turned out well.)

So I leave the question open to the floor: What ever happened to your drug dealing friend or aquaintance who got arrested in or around college? And by what year in our glorious future will the act of purchasing marijuana be a perfectly legal transaction between consenting adults?

Out of the Cellar on WBAL

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Tue, 06 May 2008 15:33:00 EDT

Attn. Bal'moreans: I'll be on Ron Smith's terrific 1090-AM radio show at ~~12:45~~ 3:45* Inner Harbor time, to talk about Rat City.

* sorry about that.

Beet on the Brat

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Tue, 06 May 2008 12:06:00 EDT

The good news? A boneheaded proposal in the lousy $300 billion-plus farm bill seems to be holding up its passage. The bad news? We live in a country where anyone within barfing distance of power thinks that what the U.S. sugar industry needs is more protection from the federal government. From the Wall Street Journal:

A proposal to sweeten government support for American sugar producers is emerging as a major sticking point between Congress and the White House in final negotiations on the farm bill.
The initiative is a priority for House Agriculture Committee Chairman Collin Peterson, a Democrat whose rural Minnesota district is among the nation's top producers of sugar beets. [...]
Rep. Peterson is proposing to increase what sugar farmers can borrow from the government, an amount that hasn't been raised in 20 years. He wants to lock in allotments for domestic producers at about 85% of the U.S. market.
He also proposes a mandate that sugar imports be used for ethanol production. The provision would shield the domestic industry from foreign competition, which has increased after a trade agreement with Mexico and several Central American countries. [...]
The sugar industry is lobbying strongly for Rep. Peterson's proposals. "It's been our No. 1 priority," said Phillip Hayes, a spokesman for the American Sugar Alliance, which represents domestic producers, processors and refiners. "We have an administration that seems more interested in supporting foreign producers, than producers right here in America."

Read reason's six great reasons to unilaterally dismantle all U.S. farm subsidies here.

UPDATE: Did you need a reason to hate Hillary Clinton more?

Hillary Clinton today said that Sen. John McCain was wrong to say yesterday that he would veto the 2008 farm bill as President, noting it would provide American family farms with priorities like permanent disaster relief, country of origin labeling, renewable energy advances and rural development broadband deployment. [...]
"Rural America is struggling in the face of skyrocketing energy prices, an economic downturn and rising food prices," Clinton said. "Saying no to the farm bill would be saying no to rural America." [...]
"This Farm Bill needs to move and the president needs to get out of the way so that we can start taking care of rural America."

Hmmm. What Changed??

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Mon, 05 May 2008 20:31:00 EDT

W magazine writes about Arianna Huffington:

It wasn't that long ago that Huffington was variously dismissed as a social climber, "intellectual lap dancer" and political opportunist

Next up: W reveals how it wasn't that long ago that David Brock was dismissed as a partisan hack!

Bonus Arianna-ana: 1) Time's classic mid-'90s Margaret Carlson piece, "Should the Huffingtons Be Stopped?" 2) Watch ex-hubbie Michael call B.S. on her post-facto opposition to Proposition 187. 3) Jacob Sullum tells you what you really need to know about La Huffington's 2003 anti-SUV ads.

Attn: SoCal Reasonoids -- McCainapalooza Tour!

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Fri, 02 May 2008 10:19:00 EDT

This Sunday, May 4, I will be at the Palm Springs Book Festival, hawking McCain: The Myth of a Maverick, and appearing on two panel discussions: 1) "The Presidential Race," at 1:00 p.m., featuring Hugh "A Mormon in the White House?" Hewitt, Robert "The Pornography of Power" Scheer, Greg "Armed Madhouse" Palast, and John "Pure Goldwater" Dean. And 2) "American Imperialism and its Consequences," at 4:30 p.m., with Chalmers "Nemesis" Johnson. Between those sessions there will be an interesting-sounding discussion on Barry Goldwater.

Can't make it to the land of shag carpets and fabulous waiters? There will be other opportunities to hurl pricey foodstuffs in my general direction. On Saturday, May 10, I'll be speaking at a meeting of the Rancho Palos Verdes Democrats (both of them?), details to come. On Wednesday, May 14 at 7:00 p.m., I'm apparently delivering a lecture at the Pasadena Public Library.

And on Thursday, May 15 at 7:00 p.m. comes the big enchilada -- "Deconstructing McCain," a Zocalo L.A. event at the gorgeous Los Angeles Central Library.

Each and every one of thse will feature plenty of time for cross-examination, semi-hostile discussion, and book signing. Most will involve (please Jeebus) some post-game libations.

Speaking of John Dean, he's got a new piece out today about the testy relationship between McCain and the maverick senator he replaced, Barry Goldwater; something you can basically read about in our two books, and nowhere else. Here's an excerpt:

Although Goldwater initially supported McCain's run for the Senate, Goldwater knew an opportunist when he saw one, and did not like any of them. We chose not to dwell on the McCain/Goldwater relationship in Pure Goldwater, but we did report how, after assisting McCain win his Senate seat, Goldwater was forced to pull McCain up short for using his good name for fundraising, when McCain had tarnished his own name because of his involvement with the Keating Five. We also included correspondence to shows that McCain is not very good at keeping his word.
To know Goldwater -- as we believe those who read his unpublished private journal will -- is to understand how different these men are, and to see that McCain is cut from very different cloth than Goldwater. Goldwater considered public service a high calling, not an ego trip or power play. McCain was fortunate that Goldwater never publicly exposed him, but Goldwater was too good a Republican to do that and he thought too highly of McCain's father to sink his successor in the Senate.
Had Goldwater publicized what I believe to be his true feelings about John McCain, I doubt McCain would be the presumptive nominee of the GOP in 2008. Goldwater's political perceptions of others have proven extraordinarily prescient, so his reaction toward McCain is telling.

Look for Daniel McCarthy's review of Pure Goldwater in our June issue. And check out Nick Gillespie's 2006 review of Dean's Conservatives Without Conscience.

Fiscal Discipline: Use Only in Case of Surplus

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Thu, 01 May 2008 19:33:00 EDT

Some surprisingly straight campaign talk from The Associated Press:

Republican John McCain is making promises that would cost billions of taxpayer dollars, yet he is vague about how he would pay for them. [...]
McCain has pledged to balance the federal budget, although he has backed off an earlier promise to do so in his first term and now says he would do it within eight years. [...]
[He] proposed a new mortgage refinancing program for struggling homeowners that could cost the government $3 billion to $10 billion. He proposed to suspend federal gas taxes for the summer months at a cost of $8 billion to $10 billion.
And McCain has several proposals whose costs are unknown, such as his pledge to give all veterans a plastic card to get medical treatment anywhere they choose, a new student loan program and tax write-offs for companies that provide Internet service to rural areas.
How would he pay for it? New user fees could pay for the gas-tax holiday, McCain adviser Doug Holtz-Eakin said. [...]
[F]or all the numbers he has provided, McCain has been reluctant to say exactly which programs he would cut.

Whole thing, with plenty more details, here. I might also add that trillion-dollar wars tend to be expensive, as do plans to boost the standing military by 150,000 troops, etc.

It is perhaps noteworthy to point out that this is almost precisely the opposite of John McCain's tax/budget philosophy of 2000, when he was a big (and convincing!) budget hawk and debt-payer-downer. Here he is in his 2002 memoir Worth the Fighting For, talking about his differences with George W. Bush on that score:

He and I disagreed on tax policy. My position invited greater hostility from conservatives in the party and in the press than my support for campaign finance ever had. Republican primaries had long featured a bidding war to see which candidate could promise the biggest tax cut. I chose to offer the smallest, targeted to middle- and lower-income families, so that we could use most of the budget surplus to pay off the national debt, build our defenses, and begin to pay the transition costs of reforming Social Security and Medicare for the sake of future American generations.
Lest anyone think my positions were brave, if self-defeating, honesty obliges me to note that every poll my campaign conducted (and we took as many as we could afford) found greater support for paying down the debt than cutting taxes for upper-bracket incomes, among Republican voters as well as Democrats and independents. [...] You will have to trust me that I held and expressed these views before I had survey research proving their popularity.

Readers of this website might also find of interest the selection immediately preceding the passage above:

I welcomed a greater, if still limited, role for government in national problems, anathema to the "leave us alone" libertarian philosophy that dominated Republican debates in the 1990s. So did George W. Bush, I must add, who challenged libertarian orthodoxy with his appeal for a "compassionate conservatism." He based much of his more activist government philosophy in an expanded role for the federal government in education policy and in his support for contributions that small, faith-based organizations could make to the solution of social problems. I gave more attention to national service and to a bigger role for government as a restraining force on selfish interests that undermined national unity. But his positions did him much credit, as well they should have, and they do him much credit now as he uses his presidency to advance them.

Just Sue Ellen Stories

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Thu, 01 May 2008 09:25:00 EDT

"How 'Dallas' Won the Cold War," the Nick Gillespie/me co-production in this weekend's Washington Post, drew some interesting testimonial responses. A sampling:

In 1987 [...] I visited Bukhara in Uzbekistan. At one point, we were invited into the living area behind a shop, where the owner took out a video cassette and played it for us. It was a grainy episode of "Dallas," dubbed in Finnish. (We learned later that Estonians would record the Finnish version of "Dallas"--and other Western TV shows also--off of Helsinki TV, easily seen Tallinn. These would then circulate throughout the USSR.) Our host grilled us intensely about each of the appliances in Miss Ellie's kitchen. Thus did visions of Southfork reach even unto Central Asia.
*
In the summer of 1983 I was traveling through Europe with my Brother. One of the countries we visited was Romania. I recall meeting [a] 20-30 year old Romanian male. His first question to me was "Who shot JR"? I was surprised to hear such a question. He said he watched the series however [the] episodes they see were a few seasons behind. It was unfortunate for I could not answer his question.
*
I was there when Dallas won the Cold War, with an American tour group, just after Dallas started running. Wherever we went--Moscow, St Petersburg, Odessa, Kiev, everywhere!--the touring day could not begin till after the morning episode was over, since neither the driver nor guide would stir till then. Same thing for the late-afternoon epidsode, the tour had to end before it began. And it was not only our driver and guide--auto and pedestran traffic just disappeared from the streets during those two hours. I think I remember being told it was Boris Yeltsin's party that sponsored the twice-a-day showing ... and ran political messages in the commercial breaks since they knew everyone in the, then, USSR, would be watching.
*
Do you remember a news story following the opening of Albania? Boat people from Albania started coming across to Italy and landing on the beaches in droves, causing a headache for the Italian police. One policeman reported that when he approached a group of Albanian boat people, they said, "Is this Dallas?"

*
In the late 80s, probably 1987, I was in Inverness, Scotland. My then wife and I went out to a pub. We walked in and saw the entire bar looking in our direction and up to a TV that was placed above the door. There was dead silence except for the American accents on the television. As we proceeded into the place and bellied up to the bar, we turned to look and on the screen was Dallas. The entire place was mesmerized.
*
It's probably the most important show ever, as ridiculous as that might sound. Its impact on the rest of the world was even more profound than its impact in the U.S.
I would propose that Baywatch continued the Dallas phenomenon in the late 80s and 90s. To people outside the U.S., and particularly in Germany, Baywatch symbolized the myth of California: A place to live freely and enjoy the abundance of the earth. Must have been very attractive to the East Germans who could get the program and wanted very much to travel, and to the West Germans who were sick of the whole big government, nanny state thing. When the Wall came down in 1989, David Hasselhoff (brilliantly) flew to Berlin right away to give a "Freedom" concert at the Brandenburger Tor.

Over in the comments at my personal blog, one of my favorite film writers, David Ehrenstein, adds:

The impact of Dallas cannot be underestimated. At heart it was little more than a louche retread of Sirk's Written on the Wind and Stevens' Giant but with the unabashed vulgarity of Russ Meyer thrown in for good measure.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder was obsessed with the show, assigning two of his most valuable boyfriends (Udo Kier and Raul Gimenez) all-important taping duties. He didn't want to miss a nanosecond. Needless to say Berlin Alexanderplatz is rather different in overall presentation. But its dark heart is much the same.

At Commentary magazine, Abe Greenwald searches for the new diverting Dallas in our modern twilight struggle, and comes up with ... Hillary vs. Obama! Still, my favorite response was probably this:

Good article, I enjoyed it but there is one failing. To wit: Contrary to popular belief, this is no evidence that Lee Harvey Oswald shot/killed JFK.

Some related nuggets from the reason vault: The Second Romanian Revolution Will Be Televised, and Charles Paul Freund's classic In Praise of Vulgarity.

Soundbite: Can You Hear the People Sing?

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Most people of a certain age remember Poland’s anti-communist Solidarity movement of the early 1980s and the day the Berlin Wall came down in November 1989. Others may recall Czechoslovakia’s inspiring Velvet Revolution a few weeks later, or the bloodier Christmas Day executions of Romania’s odious Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu. Yet when you tell people that the tiny Baltic country of Estonia engineered a Singing Revolution to cast off their Soviet oppressors, the typical response is a blank stare.

James Tusty, a commercial and corporate filmmaker whose father emigrated from Estonia in 1924, first started hearing about the ways Estonians used nationalist folk songs and modern rock to defy Moscow when he and his wife, Maureen Castle Tusty, taught a film course in the Estonian capital of Tallinn in 1999.

The Tustys realized they were in a unique position to tell the world an inspirational story it did not know. The result, a moving 90-minute documentary called The Singing Revolution, became the highest-grossing documentary in Estonian history and has drawn rave reviews upon its limited release in the United States. The film is scheduled to be shown April 18–19 at the Cleveland Museum of Art and April 18–24 at the E Street Cinema in Washington, D.C.

Editor in Chief Matt Welch spoke with James Tusty in January.

Q: How did songs become an essential part of the Estonian revolution?

A: Music has always been part of Estonian history. For thousands of years the Estonians have been singing folk songs. They have one of the largest collections of folk songs in the world, even though they’re a very small country. So it was very natural that music would become part of the weapon that they would use to fight the Soviets. They have this song festival every five years called Laulupidu, which is 30,000 singers coming on stage to sing in harmony. And it’s not any 30,000 people who want to sing; these people audition, so it’s the best 30,000 singers.

Well, in 1947 Stalin had already come in and occupied Estonia. He declared the song festival a “bourgeois tradition,” and he declared the first annual Soviet Song Festival, making the Estonians sing songs in Russian that glorified Lenin and Stalin and Marx. But the Estonians snuck one by. That song became the unofficial national anthem in Estonia, and for the next 50 years they always sang it to close the Song Festivals.

Q: So what happened in the late ’80s?

A: In June of 1988, there was a rock concert with, I don’t know how many, tens of thousands of youth who were there singing into the night. The Soviet authorities got worried, and they shut down the concert. So the people walked three miles to an open field to continue singing, and they sang until five or six in the morning. And it went on for a week. Every night more and more people came until there were maybe 100,000 to 150,000 people singing these rock ’n’ roll songs, as well as some traditional songs. The Soviet police saw this, but they didn’t know what to do. And the Estonians just kept on pushing that envelope, until eventually they contributed significantly to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Q: What broader lesson did you learn from this story?

A: What this film is about is humankind’s indomitable drive for independence. If there’s a reason to see the film, it’s to start understanding liberty and freedom at a base level. I reduce freedom to this reality: I don’t want my neighbor telling me what color to paint my living room. Let’s get it down to that, and then let’s move out from that slowly, and talk about what political systems give us all the individual freedom we need.

This is not a political film. This is a story. And you will cry in the beginning and feel uplifted in the end, I promise.

Attention DC-area Reasonoids: The Singing Revolution is coming to Washington, D.C, playing at the Landmark's E Street Cinema starting this Friday. Check here for showtimes in other cities.

When Coalitions Dissolve

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 15:00:00 EDT

“Victory has 100 fathers,” the Italian proverb goes, but “defeat is an orphan.” It’s an old battlefield saw, trotted out by blame-taking commanders after ignominious defeats, such as President John F. Kennedy following the 1961 Bay of Pigs fiasco. But it’s no less true when it comes to politics.

Anxious conservatives this year are evincing a powerful nostalgia for Ronald Reagan, giving the former president credit for fathering the modern era of consistent Republican victories. Reagan, the myth goes, kept together the three “legs” of the GOP “stool”: social conservatives, free marketeers, and national security hawks. As a result, Republicans held the White House for 20 of the last 28 years, broke the Democrats’ stranglehold on the House of Representatives, cut income taxes, and won the Cold War.

But in 2008 the stool seems on the verge of breaking apart. Less than two years after holding the White House and both houses of Congress, the Republican Party is threatening to squander all three. Already down 33 seats in the House of Representatives, Republicans are losing 26 incumbents to retirement compared to the Democrats’ five and as of early March were behind on congressional fund raising by a ratio of 5 to 1, according to The Wall Street Journal. Democrats are widely expected to extend their 51-49 advantage in the Senate, and President George W. Bush is maintaining a dismal approval rating of around 30 percent. The party that once brought forth such tepid poindexters as John Kerry and Michael Dukakis is on the verge of nominating a charismatic fellow preaching change, who, not coincidentally, also happens to be that rare national politician on the public’s side against the trillion-dollar war.

This prospective defeat has 100 fathers, if you listen to the nation’s pundits. During the presidential primary season, the GOP abandoned decades of precedent by failing to coalesce around an Establishment front-runner, leaving each leg of the stool kicking viciously at the others in a contest for the party’s soul.

Former Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson attempted to claim the Reagan mantle, attacked big-government evangelical Mike Huckabee for running against the other two legs of the Reagan coalition, and then promptly dropped out. Huckabee strategist Ed Rollins, a former Reagan official himself, declared to The New York Times that the coalition was “gone” and deserved to “go by the wayside” because of its insufficient social conservatism. Conservative talk show giant Rush Limbaugh predicted that either a Huckabee or a McCain nomination would destroy modern Republicanism as we know it.

And the libertarian long shot in the race? “I don’t take Ron Paul’s ideas seriously,” Daniel Casse wrote on the website of Commentary magazine, “but his presence in this debate really is the best proof that…the Reagan coalition is gone.”

Paul’s candidacy—which drew the eye-rolling treatment from McCain, Rudolph Giuliani, and “serious” conservatives nationwide—showed just how marginalized libertarianism has become in the party of Barry Goldwater. Paul’s lonely apostasy on foreign policy was greeted with hoots of derision on one debate stage after another. His calls for abolishing the Internal Revenue Service and hacking back the federal bureaucracy rolled right off the standard-bearers of a party that retook the House of Representatives in 1994 on a platform of reducing government.

Yet despite raising $30 million, Paul and his limited-government supporters got their clocks cleaned by Huckabee and the social cons, who were treated with much more deference by eventual nominee McCain and the party establishment. Twenty-seven years after Ronald Reagan famously said that “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem,” the GOP’s appetite for rolling back the regulatory state appears as dead as the era of federal budget surpluses. Even former revolutionary Newt Gingrich agrees. “The Republican Party cannot win over time as the permanently angry anti-government party,” he writes in his latest book, Real Change.

In Comeback, one of several new whither-the-party books by traumatized Republicans, former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum points out that the very Bush policies that fiscal conservatives like him despise—the prescription drug entitlement, the No Child Left Behind Act, campaign finance reform—were overwhelmingly popular among the American people. “On issues from Social Security to healthcare to environmental protection, conservatives find themselves on the less popular side of the great issues of the day,” Frum writes.

The solution? Surrender: “There are things only government can do, and if we conservatives wish to be entrusted with the management of the government, we must prove that we care about government enough to manage it well.” Republicans should cave on new spending and regulations, says Frum, in exchange for tax cuts. “This is not 1964,” he writes. “The ideal under threat today is not the nation’s liberty, but the nation’s security, its unity, its effectiveness, and…its equality and beauty.”

As Sasha Issenberg wrote in a perceptive Boston Globe story last November, “With Republicans no longer preaching suspicion of Washington, a new consensus has emerged, as both parties have come in their ways to stand today for a more robust, aggressive federal government. As a result, Goldwaterism is without a natural home in the two-party system.”

The remaining libertarians in Reagan’s shrinking big tent aren’t just being ignored or marginalized; they’re being blamed for the Reagan coalition’s crackup. While John McCain was heading toward the nomination in January, The Weekly Standard published an online piece by the political scientists Benjamin and Jenna Silber Storey slamming McCain’s critics as “strict free-market” ideologues whose rigidity jeopardized the conservative movement. “The moral vacuity of dogmatic libertarianism is poisonous to public life,” the Storeys wrote. “Conservatives who forget that the free market is properly a piece of policy rather than an ideological end-in-itself not only obscure the importance of individual virtue, they undermine it.”

Intentionally or not, the blame-economists argument mirrors a popular critique of George W. Bush from the progressive left: that his presidency is an example of free marketeers run amok. In her best-selling book Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein lays the original sin of Bushite misgovernance at the feet of an unlikely source: Nobel Prize–winning economist Milton Friedman, the “grand guru of the movement for unfettered capitalism and the man credited with writing the rulebook for the contemporary hypermobile global economy.” Never mind that Friedman, in his 10th decade on the planet, exerted little or no influence on the free-spending, government-growing Bush administration.

On some level, there is no use worrying about other people’s economic fantasies. But on another, Klein’s rant points to the downside of joining big-tent coalitions: Even if your ideological bloc-within-a-bloc is dwindling and disrespected, when it supports the party in power it will inevitably be branded with that government’s failings.

Voting and political party membership are deeply personal and arguably bizarre public signaling rituals. There is no right or wrong way to do them. My own bizarreness tends toward single-issue obsessives and third-party long shots, and away from political parties (which I’ve never joined). Meaning, I’m much more likely to write in Ron Paul than let the dog whistle of Supreme Court appointments lure me grudgingly back to a major-party nominee. Not the most responsible approach, I agree.

But I wonder how responsible it is to add libertarian votes to a shrinking coalition whose dominant rhetoric and political standard-bearer stand in increasingly explicit opposition to the party’s libertarian strand. McCain, whose National Greatness conservatism is openly hostile to individualism, has recently hit some encouraging free market notes. Nonetheless, a Republican defeat this November might just leave fiscal conservatives more orphaned than people yet realize.

Matt Welch is the editor in chief of Reason.

Bissinger's Buzz-Kill

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 15:10:00 EDT

Wow. I didn't think there was any sports-twit more irritating than Bob Costas, but along comes non-astronaut auteur Buzz Bissinger, on Bob Costas' show last night, blowing a gatekeeper-gasket at the very existence of unwashed, non-jocksniffing bloggers like Deadspin's Will Leitch (who is actually a very good writer in addition to running one of the most successful sports blogs on the planet). First segment here; then watch the mid-life crisis unfold in real time:

Leitch reacts here; world piles on. As always, few things are more hilarious than watching the defenders of a deeply degraded form (newspaper sportswriting? Are you kidding me?) bust veins about modernity they understand not, while the kids laugh and laugh....

I'd never really heard of Bissinger (though he's the author of the famous Friday Night Lights), until I picked up a copy of the International Herald Tribune on vacation a couple weeks back and beheld the single most rancid column you will probably ever read about the Olympic Games. Sample:

There is only one way left to improve the Olympics: to permanently end them.
True, in the world of sports, any plan that puts morality over money is unlikely to happen. Commissions are formed only once the problem is over (see Major League Baseball) and the cheaters will always find another angle -- you can bet that some lab somewhere is working on the design of a new steroid undetectable to testing (see every professional sport and many "amateur" ones). The loftier the rose-colored rhetoric, which in the Olympics has become an Olympian growth industry, the worse the underlying stink. And this is an institution that is rotted in so many different ways.

Bissinger then goes on to list every (unrelated) bad thing that's happened at Olympiads over the past 40 years, and concludes:

Would some athletes become innocent victims with the loss of the Olympics? Yes. But it would be nothing close to the number of innocent victims killed in Darfur with Chinese-supplied weapons, or in Iraq during the American occupation.

Sounds like someone forgot to take his performance-enhancing sedatives!

Unionizing the Village in Order to Democrat it

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 12:53:00 EDT

The Washington Post's resident Labor toady, Harold Meyerson, is refreshingly direct today about our coming union/Democrat world:

[H]ow, Democrats wonder, can they secure the white working-class vote?
Well, they could start by re-unionizing it.
[bunch of numbers showing unionized whites voting Democrat, unlike their non-unionized co-racialists]
What do unions do that has such an impact? Chiefly, they remind their members what's at stake.

That's the ticket! Meyerson goes on to let slip what a Democratic-run Washington would do within the first 100 minutes of a Hillbarry Clinbama presidency:

Today, the party is united behind the Employee Free Choice Act, which, by enabling workers to join unions again without fear of being fired, would also greatly help Democratic prospects at the polls.

What is the Employee Free Choice Act, a.k.a. "card check"? Get ready to read all about it in the June issue of reason, care of David Weigel! In other words, subscribe today, for less than 20 bones a year.

If You Must Have a Failing Organ, Don't Go Taking Legal Pain Medication!

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 15:49:00 EDT

At least not the kind that gives you the munchies. If you do, they'll just let you die:

SEATTLE - Timothy Garon's face and arms are hauntingly skeletal, but the fluid building up in his abdomen makes the 56-year-old musician look eight months pregnant.
His liver, ravaged by hepatitis C, is failing. Without a new one, his doctors tell him, he will be dead in days.
But Garon has been refused a spot on the transplant list, largely because he has used marijuana, even though it was legally approved for medical reasons. [...]
With the scarcity of donated organs, transplant committees like the one at the University of Washington Medical Center use tough standards, including whether the candidate has other serious health problems or is likely to drink or do drugs.

Whole outrage here; thanks to commenter "sage" for the tip. Drew Carey explains the benefits of a liberalized organ market here.

Nice Shot, J.R.

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Let us now pause in somber tribute to the 30th anniversary of a momentous—and shockingly unremembered—turning point in the long twilight struggle between communism and capitalism. An event every bit as important as the Nixon-Khrushchev Kitchen Debate, Ronald Reagan's "Tear Down this Wall" speech and Yakov Smirnoff's defection to the West.

We write, of course, about the debut of "Dallas," the 13-year soap opera that shook the world.

Read the rest of this article in The Washington Post.

Radicals for Interventionism

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EDT

Fareed Zakaria, an intelligent fellow, lets hyperbole get the best of him in the Washington Post, in a discussion about John McCain's big foreign policy speech last month:

It contained within it the most radical idea put forward by a major candidate for the presidency in 25 years.... [T]hat the United States expel Russia from the G8, the group of advanced industrial countries.

Why is this hyperbole? Because kicking the Russkies out of an international talking club is not remotely as radical or consequential as, say, articulating a doctrine for pre-emptive war across multiple fronts several years before it occurred to George W. Bush.

Zakaria goes on to make a good point and an arguable point, respectively:

We have spent months debating Barack Obama's suggestion that he might, under some circumstances, meet with Iranians and Venezuelans. It is a sign of what is wrong with the foreign-policy debate that this idea is treated as a revolution in U.S. policy while McCain's proposal has barely registered. What McCain has announced is momentous--that the United States should adopt a policy of active exclusion and hostility toward two major global powers. It would reverse a decades-old bipartisan American policy of integrating these two countries into the global order, a policy that began under Richard Nixon (with Beijing) and continued under Ronald Reagan (with Moscow). It is a policy that would alienate many countries in Europe and Asia who would see it as an attempt by Washington to begin a new cold war.

Why, this almost seems like a bracing slap across the kisser of a man who foreign-policy chin-strokers like Zakaria usually adore! Until you read the next paragraph:

I write this with sadness because I greatly admire John McCain, a man of intelligence, honor and enormous personal and political courage. I also agree with much of what else he said in that speech in Los Angeles. But in recent years, McCain has turned into a foreign-policy schizophrenic, alternating between neoconservative posturing and realist common sense. His speech reads like it was written by two very different people, each one given an allotment of a few paragraphs on every topic.

Here's a new experiment for our journalistic pals: Try to write a piece about John McCain as if you didn't greatly admire him, and instead had only to go from his actual words, votes and initiatives. (In a few months, we'll repeat the exercise with Barack Obama.) One probable result: There would be much less of this alleged neoconservative/realist "schizophrenia," since there ain't been much of anything "realist" about McCain's foreign policy in over a decade. (And indeed, Zakaria provides zero evidence of "realism" from McCain's speech.) It's funny; "neocon" has become so debased and misused a term, that I bet there are many people who just find it impossible to believe that it can very accurately apply to someone they actually admire.

My reaction to the first wave of silly reaction to McCain's foreign policy speech here.

We Get Letters....

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 14:14:00 EDT

From an R.G. Bethany, subject line of "Peace":

The Movie "HAIR" is Psychological Anti-Warfare at its finest. Here's how it works. Two hours of very exciting music and dance. Nothing bad is said or implied. Everything is happy. You will notice alot of movement in every scene. Several things are always moving. You are being conditioned. Knowing this does not matter. Then the series of scenes at the end and...BAM. It hits you hard. Remember this is Psychological Anti-Warfare.

Me, I'm even more shocked that the movie came out in 1979. After, for example, the first season of Dallas....