Reason Magazine - Staff

2007: The Year in Videos

Tue, 01 Jan 2008 12:06:00 EST

It's the first day of 2008, and outside of Iowa and Pakistan there's not much news and not much to worry about. Kick back and click the "play" button as reason editors and friends of the magazine remember the most striking, funny, historic, stupid, or impactful videos of 2007.

Update on January 2: Due to an editing error, some video picks were not included in the original posting of the article. Submitted for your viewing pleasure are three new selections:

Radley Balko
reason senior editor

I'm nominating the lot of police brutality and taser videos. The most popular this year were probably the "Don't Tase Me, Bro" video from a John Kerry event in Florida (see below) and a Missouri teenager's recording of an abusive police officer who had pulled him over. The genre as a whole is the result of the mass democratization of technology, and represents an important shift toward transparency and accountability in law enforcement. More than a few abusive police officers have lost their jobs after a video went viral, which likely wouldn't have happened were we still in the pre-Internet age. Mass watching of the watchers is a good thing, and we ought to be encouraging more of it, both to weed out bad cops and to protect the good ones from frivolous claims of abuse.

Ronald Bailey
reason science correspondent

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez' weekly television talk show, Alo Presidente, infamously runs on for hours. In September, 2007 viewers were treated to more than eight hours of presidential bloviation. Chavez' hero, the notoriously long-winded Fidel Castro, has never even gotten close to that record.

In November at the Ibero-American Summit, Spain's King Juan Carlos told Chavez, "Why don't you just shut up!" Juan Carlos' words have been turned into a popular ring tone. I nominate it as the "best" video of 2007 because it was way past time that someone told Chavez to just zip it.

Nick Gillespie
reason editor-in-chief

I continue to laugh every time I watch the meeting of minds between singer-songwriter John Mayer and Justin Long (the Apple Computer guy) outside an L.A. nightclub. Mayer--drunk on booze or maybe just strict construction of the Constitution?--goes on a pro-Ron Paul rant that is magical not just for its intensity and heartfeltness but for its very existence in the first place. Years ago in reason, we excerpted Tyler Cowen's What Price Fame?, a study in how contemporary celebrities are impotent puppets we pay astronomical amounts to entertain us (Cowen's piece is not, alas, online). This is true, even when we agree with them. It's a great world where this sort of footage is widely available.

Katherine Mangu-Ward
reason associate editor

This mashup of the classic Apple 1984 ad and Hillary campaign footage ends with Obama's website address but wasn't approved by his campaign. When the maker's identity was feretted out by the Huffington Post, he said: "This ad was not the first citizen ad, and it will not be the last. The game has changed." Ne'er were truer words spoken in 2007.

Jeff Taylor
reason online columnist

A perfect creation of ad hoc media -- found it via Fark.com, builds on a previous YouTube upload of Hubble telescope images set to the Tool song Lateralus -- and adds immense value, meaning, and insight, all because some guy -- philriehl -- decided to do it. The 9:24 vid -- that number is important -- illustrates and explains a Fibonacci number sequence clearly enough for everyone to feel their inner gnostic stir. Beautiful, powerful, and inspiring.

Jesse Walker
reason managing editor

Who is the YouTube candidate? It might be Ron Paul, thanks to his ability to inspire hundreds of homemade videos, some of them gloriously weird. But Mike Gravel is the guy who makes weird videos, or at least sends them out with his stamp of approval. My favorite is this Lennonist rap featuring psychedelic animation and clips from Duck and Cover.

Matt Welch
incoming editor-in-chief of reason

I can never tell whether this surrealist attack on/celebration of John "Walnuts" McCain was based on any particular knowledge or point of view, or whether it was just a one-time burst of inspired guesswork, but I do know that it only gets better -- and creepier -- on the 200th viewing. "I want to help people... in their lives" may yet go down as one of the most chilling predictions of the 2008 presidential campaign.

Tyler Cowen
author of Discover Your Inner Economist

The best video clip I saw this year was John McLaughlin playing "Cherokee."

David Harsanyi
author of Nanny State

My favorite video of the year:

Markos Moulitsas
netroots paterfamilias

The Huckabee parody ad. Nothing captured better the absurdity of the GOP's entire field.

Brendan O'Neill
editor of Spiked Online

Mia Farrow in Second Life talking about Darfur: It's not my favourite video of the year. But in capturing the naked narcissism of celebrity activism, it's one of the most startling. Mia Farrow's young-looking, sexy avatar addresses a virtual audience of students, activists and lizards in Second Life. Like most Save Darfur activists Farrow says precisely nothing about the politics driving the conflict in Sudan; instead she describes horrific occurrences and shows photos of distressed Darfurians. As Mahmood Mamdani wrote in the London Review of Books (Essay of the Year), activists like Farrow "obscure the politics of the violence and position [themselves] as a virtuous, not just a concerned observer." It's fitting that Farrow's speech takes place in the cartoon world of Second Life, since the aim of Darfur activists is not to get to grips with the reality on the ground in Sudan but to create a virtual plane of moral superiority that they can occupy. Darfur is a "defining moment for the human family," says Farrow. She's so vain she thinks somebody else's war is about her. Watch this vid to glimpse Kipling's colonialism updated: the Web Surfer's Burden.

The Amateurs' Hour

david@davidharsanyi.com (David Harsanyi) — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 10:17:00 EST

The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture, by Andrew Keen, New York: Currency, 228 pages, $22.95

Andrew Keen’s website claims, without a hint of humility, that he’s “the leading contemporary critic of the Internet.” No kidding? The entire Internet? A curious reader might wonder whether such an all-inclusive battle is similar to taking on, say, “music” or “radio waves.” It is.

More specifically, Keen’s depressing book, The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture, laments techno-utopianism, free content, and the rise of citizen journalists, filmmakers, musicians, and critics as cultural arbiters. It is a book, in other words, of spectacular elitism.

Keen, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur turned full-time critic of user-generated Internet content, argues that our most “valued cultural institutions” are under attack from the hordes of lay hacks, undermining quality content with garbage. His central argument is—to pinch a word he loves to use—seductive. He’s right that the Internet is littered with inane, vulgar, dimwitted, unedited, and unreadable content, much of it fueling outrageous conspiracy theories, odious partisan debates, mindless celebrity worship, and worse. And then there’s the stuff that’s not even entertaining.

Keen refuses to confess that there’s even a smattering of intellectually and culturally worthy user-driven content online. If you do find something decent in the “digital forest of mediocrity,” he attributes it to the infinite monkey theorem: Even simians, if permitted to indiscriminately hit a keyboard for an infinite amount of time, will one day bang out Beowulf or Don Quixote. (Silly me, I was under the impression that monkeys had hatched the idea for VH1’s Scott Baio Is 45…and Single.) Apparently, these monkeys are discharging so much free content into the cyber-strata that they threaten to bury culturally significant work, dilute good craftsmanship, and cost me, a journalist and “cultural gatekeeper,” my job. So I guess I’d better take Keen’s thesis seriously.

Keen isn’t entirely wrong—of over the estimated 175,000 new blogs created each day, just a miniscule fraction are worthwhile—but in the midst of cobbling together statistics and disaster stories he ignores an otherwise promising tale of job creation, mass creativity, and the democratization of the media. He also fails to acknowledge that the rise of Web 2.0—Internet-based media, such as blogs, in which the content is largely generated by the users themselves—was prompted precisely by the lack of choices and quality programming from those gatekeepers he so adamantly defends.

Not long ago, I was presented a firsthand view of the gloomy fallout from Web 2.0. Another downsizing had fallen upon the newspaper industry, including my paper, The Denver Post. Colleagues and friends of mine were instructed to clear their desks and find a new line of work. Keen grieves over the fate of my well-trained coworkers. He pins the blame on a bunch of schmucks knocking out third-rate musings on politics and culture. How can The New York Times, with its multi-million-dollar operational budget, compete with a blogger, who typically operates for pennies in his or her spare time?

We can agree, to a point. There are plenty of schmucks out there. But the ability to receive only the content you want while ignoring the rest of the package, combined with the migration of ads to services like Craig’s List, has done far more damage to newspapers than any pajama-clad scribblers ever could. And since the citizen journalist relies heavily on more traditional journalistic sources, I doubt the industry is nearing its demise. (In fact, by acting as freelance fact-checkers, all those bloggers have arguably transformed the medium into a more reliable dispenser of the news.)

In the face of economic realities, newspapers have been co-opting the blogger model—transforming a once-rigid daily newsroom cycle into a constant, 24-hour process, constantly posting updates, using video and audio as well as text, and bringing on bloggers of their own. Meanwhile, many high-profile bloggers, looking for ways to make their sites financially viable, are moving toward an old-media model, emphasizing professionalism and co-opting some of the conventional elements of news services. From the megapopular left-leaning Huffington Post to the conservative-oriented Pajamas Media, bloggers have pooled their talents and transformed into news agencies.

Whatever Keen (or I) may believe the future holds, it’s not society’s job to ensure that journalism remains profitable. It’s journalism’s job to entice readers and viewers with a product that’s worth the price of admission. These struggles, as important as they may be to some of us, do not signal the cold-blooded murder of “our culture.”

That brings us to Keen’s most glaring weakness: his lack of faith in the culture he defends. Keen is concerned not just with journalism but with a wider range of creative expression, from film to music. Readers of The Cult of the Amateur may be surprised to learn that the barbarians capable of obliterating thousands of years of Western culture in their spare time are a horde of porn-addicted, gambling-happy, ungrateful, musically challenged yokels. What worthwhile culture could be so easily knocked off its perch?

Like most snobs, Keen doesn’t have much confidence in markets either. To accept his argument, we must believe that the common consumer, able to make thousands of informed decisions in everyday life, can’t differentiate between crap and Cristal when the choice is made on a computer screen.

In other contexts, Keen is a romantic. Consider his rhetoric regarding the supposedly bygone local bookstore. (A quick search of BookSense.com, a site sponsored by independently owned bookstores, shows five such stores within a 10-mile radius of my home.) “Instead of 2,500 independent bookstores with their knowledgeable, book loving staffers, specialty sections, and relationships with local writers,” Keen writes, “we now have an oligarchy of online megastores employing soulless algorithms that use our previous purchases and the purchases of others to tell us what to buy.”

Shopping at the convivial local bookstore might be a heartwarming experience, but the notion that such places offer us better choices is a fantasy. On Amazon, you can perform super-exact searches or browse endlessly (so at some point even the commoner may stumble across something worthwhile). You are guided not only by rough algorithms but by book lists and reviews written and compiled by other human beings who share your hyper-specific interests. And aren’t Amazon’s reviewers, list compilers, and bloggers a lot like helpful, educated bookstore staffers, leading us, by hyperlinking, to stories and ideas we otherwise might never have known about?

But Keen’s most persistent grievance is that free content undermines the accuracy of information. “Can a social worker in Des Moines really be considered credible in arguing with a trained physicist over string theory?” he asks, referring to Wikipedia, the online, user created encyclopedia. “Can a car mechanic have as knowledgeable a ‘POV’ as that of a trained geneticist on the nature of hereditary diseases? Can we trust a religious fundamentalist to know more about the origins of mankind than a PhD in evolutionary biology?”

Well, yes and no. I, of course, have the prerogative to trust whomever I want. In the same way I once gathered my news from The National Inquirer and listened to Art Bell’s late-night radio broadcasts for clues to my place in the universe, today I can ferret out similarly useless information webwide.

The more significant point, one that Keen ignores, is that the Web 2.0 explosion has provided me with something I’ve never had before: access to ongoing discussions between and among trained physicists, trained geneticists, and religious fundamentalists. Laymen as well as experts are now invited to sit in on these conversations. On occasion, the amateurs get it right, triggering dramatic results. Matt Drudge can announce the Monica Lewinsky scandal while Newsweek dithers about publishing it. Or a blog like Little Green Footballs can help catch Dan Rather peddling forged documents about the president’s service record. Rather than undermining information, this new access has expanded users’ understanding of the world.

Keen raises the stakes of his argument when he blames some of society’s serious ills on the Internet. He asserts, for instance, that the “tasteless nature” of social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook have “infested” Web 2.0 with “anonymous sexual predators and pedophiles.” No doubt a small fraction of those who participate in social networks are sexual predators and pedophiles—roughly the same as the percentage of people in local bookstores, playgrounds, and libraries who are sexual predators and pedophiles. Yet I don’t think I’ve ever heard an advocate for children’s rights blame libraries and playgrounds for sexual abuse.

Despite a heavy load of scaremongering, Keen claims he’s not a “techno-moralist” but a “techno-scold”—as if there’s much of a difference. The problem, he maintains, is that those involved in Web 2.0 live in an echo chamber. “There isn’t a debate, and there isn’t a conversation,” he says. “They’re just listening to themselves.” If only mainstream media outlets had debated their future as often and as intensely as bloggers debate theirs, we might not have needed Keen’s book.

David Harsanyi, a Denver Post staff columnist, is the author of Nanny State: How Food Fascists, Teetotaling Do-Gooders, Priggish Moralists, and other Boneheaded Bureaucrats are Turning America Into a Nation of Children (Doubleday/Broadway).

Prohibition Returns!

david@davidharsanyi.com (David Harsanyi) — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 12:42:00 EDT

On a May night in 2005, Debra Bolton, a lawyer and single mom from the Washington suburb of Alexandria, Virginia, was leaving the Café Milano in Georgetown after socializing with some friends. She had driven her SUV only a few hundred yards before she was pulled over by D.C. police for driving with the headlights off. She told the officer the parking attendant at Café Milano probably had turned off her vehicle's automatic light feature.

Not mollified, the officer asked Bolton to step out of the car, walk in a straight line, recite the alphabet, stand on one foot, and count to 30. He checked her eyes for suspicious jerkiness and insisted on a breath test for alcohol.

The breath test revealed that Bolton's blood alcohol content (BAC) was 0.03 percent, a level a 120-pound woman could expect after drinking one glass of wine. It was well below the 0.08 percent limit that marks a driver as legally intoxicated in D.C. It was not low enough for the arresting officer, however. This middle-aged mother of two, who hadn't drunk to excess, who hadn't run a red light or run a stop, was arrested, handcuffed, and fingerprinted for an innocent mistake. She sat in a jail cell for hours and was finally released at 4:30 a.m. Bolton spent four court appearances and over $2,000 fighting a $400 ticket. She then spent a month fighting to get her license back after refusing to submit to the 12-week alcohol counseling program.

The arresting officer, inaptly named Dennis Fair, insists: "If you get behind the wheel of a car with any measurable amount of alcohol, you will be dealt with in D.C. We have zero tolerance....Anything above 0.01, we can arrest." Fair recognized that nearly everyone in D.C. was unaware of this zero tolerance policy. Still, he told The Washington Post, if "you don't know about it, then you're a victim of your own ignorance."

Bolton's arrest was not the result of a single cop's overzealousness. In 2004 D.C. police arrested 321 people with BACs below the legal limit of 0.08 percent for driving under the influence. The year before, the number was 409.

After the Bolton incident, James Klaunig, a toxicology expert at the Indiana University School of Medicine, told The Washington Post, "There's no way possible she failed a [sobriety] test from impairment with a .03 blood alcohol level." Fair had claimed that Bolton swayed and lost her balance when taking the sobriety test, triggering the breath test.

A BAC test, one of the main tools used by law enforcement to catch drunk drivers, determines how much alcohol is present in the bloodstream. A BAC of 0.08 percent, for instance, means 0.0008 of your blood is alcohol. At that level, though, you're hardly slurring your words or staggering.

In 2000 President Clinton signed a federal law aimed at pressuring states to lower their BAC limits from 0.1 percent to 0.08 percent. States that didn't go along were threatened with the loss of federal highway funds. Karolyn Nunnallee, president of Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), predicted that a nationwide 0.08 percent standard "will save nearly 600 lives every year."

It hasn't worked out that way. In the July 2007 issue of Contemporary Economic Policy, Sam Houston State University economist Donald Freeman examines the most recent data available and concludes "there's no evidence that lowering the BAC limits...reduced fatality rates, either in total or in crashes likely to be alcohol related." This is true, he found, both in states that adopted a 0.08 percent BAC standard on their own and in states that did so under federal pressure.

During the last decade, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), alcohol contributed to between 16,000 and 17,000 traffic-related fatalities a year, about two-fifths of the total such deaths. It used to be a good deal worse. Back in 1982, three-fifths of all traffic related fatalities were attributed to alcohol. Since then, ad campaigns and education have raised public awareness about the dangers of driving smashed. States have instituted stricter punishment for drunk driving, and law enforcement officials are also better prepared to ferret out drunk drivers. A lot of the credit must be given to the hard work MADD did in educating the public about the menace of drinking and driving.

But the decline in alcohol-related deaths persisted only until 1997. Since then the vehicular death toll attributed to alcohol has remained stable at around 40 percent. This stagnation in drunk driving deaths has caused considerable consternation among activists and law enforcement officials. Lately, the fight against drunk driving has shifted from serious alcohol abusers with no regard for the law toward responsible drinkers.

Neoprohibitionists aim to muddle the distinction between drunk diving and driving after drinking any amount of alcohol. Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) endorsed the idea at a Senate Environment and Public Committee hearing way back in 1997, contending that we "may wind up in this country going to zero tolerance, period." Former MADD President Katherine Prescott concurred, in a letter to the Chicago Tribune, where she stated "there is no safe blood alcohol, and for that reason responsible drinking means no drinking and driving."

Technically she's correct. Driving is never completely safe, and many things drivers commonly do-including speaking on a cell phone, talking to passengers, applying lipstick, eating a sandwich, drinking coffee, adjusting the radio, reprimanding the kids in the back seat, and daydreaming about weekend plans-can make it riskier. As states and cities have begun focusing on zero tolerance (or "driving while distracted" laws, which target the diversions laid out above) they are losing focus on the real threat, namely habitually drunk drivers.

Drinking is under attack these days in ways we haven't seen since the failed experiment with national alcohol prohibition in the 1920s. Indeed, for many neoprohibitionists, that experiment wasn't a failure at all, since it did cut alcohol consumption, which is all that matters. We can see that mentality today in policies that go beyond preventing drunk driving or punishing drunk drivers and aim to discourage drinking per se.

Founder's Remorse
Although alcohol nannies generally support zero tolerance, one dissenting voice doesn't. "I thought the emphasis on .08 laws was not where the emphasis should have been placed," Candace Lightner told the Los Angeles Times in 2002. "The majority of crashes occur with high blood-alcohol levels, the .15, .18 and .25 drinkers. Lowering the blood-alcohol concentration was not a solution to the alcohol problem."

Lightner's views can't be easily dismissed by anti-alcohol activists. In 1980 her 12-year-old daughter, Cari, was killed by a hit-and-run driver on a suburban street in Southern California. When the perpetrator was apprehended, he was drunk. It turned out he had been convicted of driving while intoxicated four previous times-once just days before he killed Lightner's daughter. Even after his fifth, fatal offense, he received just a two-year sentence and avoided prison by serving time in a work camp and a halfway house.

The light sentence her daughter's killer received spurred Lightner to "fight to make this needless homicide count for something positive in the years ahead." She did that by founding MADD in 1980. She changed the world for the better by raising public awareness about the serious nature of drunk driving and promoting tough legislation against the crime. Due to Lightner's potent grassroots work, aggressive campaigning, and popularization of the concept of designated drivers, MADD grew rapidly in its first five years. By 1985 it boasted 364 chapters, 600,000 members, and a $12.5 million budget.

Lightner has moved on from MADD, and since then has protested the shift from attacking drunk driving to attacking drinking in general. "I worry that the movement I helped create has lost direction," she told The Cleveland Plain Dealer in 1992. BAC legislation, she said, "ignores the real core of the problem....If we really want to save lives, let's go after the most dangerous drivers on the road." Lightner said MADD has become an organization far more "neoprohibitionist" than she had envisioned. "I didn't start MADD to deal with alcohol," she said. "I started MADD to deal with the issue of drunk driving."

While it seems safe to assume that nearly every parent in the United States opposes drunk driving, the same cannot be said for MADD's efforts to stop drinking. Neither is every politician on board. In October 2005, responding to noisy complaints from local residents and negative national publicity, the D.C. Council decided, by a 9-3 vote, to abandon the zero tolerance policy that snared Debra Bolton. "D.C. is once again open for business," said council member Carol Schwartz. She said visitors "can come in and have a glass of wine and not be harassed or intimidated."
That's good news. Sadly, it's not the case everywhere.

Ignition Failure
More than 40 states require convicted drunk drivers to install ignition interlock devices: The driver breathes into a tube attached to the device, and if his blood alcohol concentration is measurable the vehicle won't start. Considering the high recidivism rate among drunk drivers, the interlock system may be a reasonable preventive measure for those who have proven they pose a danger to others. But what about people who have never been arrested, perhaps never even had a ticket, or who never drink under any circumstances? Can they be trusted to start their cars without taking a breath test?

In 2004 New Mexico state Rep. Ken Martinez (D-Grants) introduced a bill that would have forced every driver in his state to install an ignition interlock device. In addition to the indignity and inconvenience of breathing into a tube every time they start their cars, this requirement would cost drivers about $1,000 each to install the device, according to estimates by the states that require them. Incredibly, the bill breezed through the state's House of Representatives by a 45-to-22 vote. "Honestly, I put forward this bill to start some dialogue," Martinez told Wired.com. "And it became a very thought-provoking process....We want New Mexico to be a leader at using technology to curb some societal ills."

The New Mexico Senate, thankfully, let the bill die. But soon legislators in New York and Oklahoma were making noise about a universal interlock requirement. "If the public wants it and the data support it, it is literally possible that the epidemic of drunk driving could be solved where cars simply could not be operated by drunk drivers," Chuck Hurley, MADD's executive director, told USA Today in 2006. "What a great day that would be."

Pre-emptive War on Drunk Driving
Unfortunately, there is considerable precedent for such pre-emptive measures. In 2005 a Pennsylvania court rejected an appeal from a man whose driver's license was revoked by the state after he told doctors he knocked back more than a six-pack of beer a day. State law requires doctors to report any of a patient's physical or mental impairments if the doctors think it could compromise his ability to drive safely. Keith Emerich hadn't gotten in any legal trouble, related to drinking, driving, or anything else, and his job attendance was as exemplary. Yet a three-judge Commonwealth Court panel said the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation was justified in taking away Emerich's license-not because he had driven while intoxicated but because he might.

Numerous anti-DUI law enforcement tactics now taken for granted are not only unduly invasive but ineffective. Consider roadblocks, a well-intentioned preventive measure that does little more than waste time and create pollution. This form of anticipatory law enforcement intimidates social drinkers and fails to address hardcore drunks, who often simply avoid roadblocks, turning on side streets when they see the flashing sideshow ahead. It targets those who aren't driving recklessly, haven't had a single drink, and have places to go.

According to numerous studies and reports dating back to 1987, the chance of getting picked up at a roadblock for being intoxicated is minuscule. MADD is nonetheless an enthusiastic supporter of sobriety checkpoints. It claims roadblocks reduce fatal alcohol-related crashes by as much as 20 percent. Yet recent fluctuations in such crashes have no correlation with states that do or don't use checkpoints.

During the Christmas season of 2003 in Fairfax County, Virginia, a suburb of Washington not far from the site of Debra Bolton's arrest, local police took pre-emptive law enforcement to an absurd extreme, launching a sting operation that targeted 20 local bars and restaurants. The mission: apprehend "drunk" patrons before they try to drive. These drinkers were far from their cars and in some cases did not even own cars. What type of evidence did the police use to measure intoxication? According to one law enforcement official involved in the sting, the determination could be made based on unflicked cigarette ashes, an excessive number of restroom visits, noisy cursing, or a wobbly walk.

The raids involved 10 cops in SWAT-like outfits. In an interview with The Reston Times, the general manager of one targeted establishment said "they tapped one lady on the shoulder-who was on her first drink and had just eaten dinner-to take her out on the sidewalk and give her a sobriety test. They told her she fit the description of a woman they had complaints about, and that they heard she was dancing topless."

In one raid, of the 18 drinkers tested for sobriety, nine were hauled to jail for public intoxication. When asked to explain the rationale for the raids, then-Fairfax County Police Chief J. Thomas Mange declared that you "can't be drunk in a bar." Where can you be drunk? "At home. Or at someone else's home. And stay there until you're not drunk."

Following the logic of such operations, watching television under the influence in your own home may soon be grounds for paramilitary raids. A Super Bowl party, a wedding shower, or a bachelor party can attract dozens of guests, many of whom will be drinking. Why not target those people as well? They have cars.

It's true that "public intoxication" is illegal. So is jaywalking. Police should use common sense, allocating their resources to protect citizens as efficiently as possible. It's hard to believe the most pressing problem in all of Northern Virginia that night was an inebriated and allegedly topless woman.
The immediate effect of hauling a few boozy bar patrons down to jail is insignificant. But the alcohol nannies are counting on the long-term impact: Once word gets out, people will be less inclined to get sloshed anywhere, anytime.

Such policies sometimes backfire. After the Fairfax County raids, the entire city council of Herndon, Virginia, criticized the practice of targeting law-abiding businesses and drinkers. "It is the unanimous opinion of the council that police overstepped their bounds and overreacted," one member said.

Yet numerous states and municipalities are experimenting with Fairfax-style intimidation. In 2005 the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission warned that it would be conducting "Sales to Intoxicated Person Stings" in various parts of the Lone Star State. "We believe responsible adults should drink responsibly," said Heather Hodges, a MADD victims advocate involved in planning the operation, in a MADD press release. "A bar is not intended to be a place to get fall-down drunk." In March 2006, one of the first sting operations was conducted in a Dallas suburb where agents infiltrated 36 bars and arrested 30 people for public intoxication.

"It's killed our business," one Dallas bar owner told a local TV station. "People are scared to come out. I don't even drink, and I'm scared to go out, and it's not right. We don't want to put drunks on the road, but we don't want people to be afraid to do something that's legal. If they don't want people drinking, they should outlaw alcohol."

Bar None
MADD officials say they "strongly support" the right of alcohol-related crash victims to seek "financial recovery from establishments and servers who have irresponsibly provided alcohol to those who are intoxicated or to underage persons, or who serve past the point of intoxication individuals who then cause fatal or injurious crashes."

I'm not sure if any MADD leaders have been to a saloon lately, but the local Cheers-style tavern where everyone knows your name is all but dead. In large cities, working at a bar can mean serving alcohol to hundreds, if not thousands, of patrons each night. Once we train servers to double as psychics, MADD's liability principle will make sense. Until then, we can have mandatory breath tests for patrons. Once again, the neoprohibitionists stand for seemingly sensible policies that in practice make the sale and consumption of alcohol nearly impossible.

Most states have dram shop liability laws, which generally allow lawsuits to be brought by those injured by an inebriated person against the establishment which contributed to that person's intoxication. In Texas minors can sue a drinking establishment for their own injuries should they get their hands on enough alcohol to be intoxicated and hurt themselves. Under Illinois law, plaintiffs don't even have to prove a bartender was aware of the consumer's inebriation. In other states, dram shop liability extends to serving the "habitually intoxicated," who will be a cinch to identify for all those clairvoyant bartenders.

If getting drunk in a bar is to be forbidden, it makes sense to ban happy hour. Back in 1984, the Massachusetts legislature banned the practice of offering cheaper drinks during the traditional "happy hours" of 4 p.m. and 7 p.m.-or any other time. That law kicked off a wave of happy hour restrictions around the country. From Ohio, where bars were compelled to end two-for-the-price-of-one premiums at 9 p.m., to West Virginia, where bars must have food available during happy hours, to Mississippi and Oregon, where happy hours are still allowed but cannot be advertised, happiness is being snatched from law-abiding Americans across the land.

Such laws often have unintended consequences. When a 1990 Illinois law banning "happy hours" took effect, bars came up with a creative solution, changing "happy hours" to the even better "happy days." A "happy day" means reduced prices on drinks for the entire day, since the price of drinks cannot be legally changed during any one business day.

On its website, MADD condemns "Practices Which Encourage Excessive Alcohol Consumption," including happy hours, ladies' nights, and any fluctuations in prices that bring in consumers during what are usually slow hours. The group calls upon the "hospitality industry to voluntarily end all practices associated with excessive alcohol consumption." As a backup, MADD also supports the legal prohibition of such practices in all 50 states.

Sometimes bars want the state to help stop practices consumers love. Bar crawling is common in cities like New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Friends, typically in their 20s and 30s, get together and go from bar to bar. To attract such groups, some bars offer unlimited drinks for a fixed price. In 1999 New York Gov. George Pataki signed into law a ban of the practice, asserting that it encourages "irresponsible binge-drinking."

Even if that's true, adult binge drinking is none of Pataki's business, since adults have the right to get smashed as long as they don't hurt anyone else. But bar and nightclub owners didn't mind when Albany prevented them from engaging in this sort of expensive price war. The pubs' chief trade group lobbied strenuously to get the state to stop the practice.

Alcohol nannies also have targeted sporting arenas, blaming alcohol for every brawl or other instance of misconduct by fans. George Hacker, director of alcohol studies at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, suggests several solutions, including a ban on selling beer in the stands, a reduction in the size of a beer serving from 16 to 10 ounces, a 3.2 percent limit on beer alcohol content, the elimination of beer signs, and aggressive police identification of "people who are obviously intoxicated." Although brawls occur at a tiny percentage of sporting events, alcohol nannies latch onto them as an excuse to interfere with the enjoyment of millions of fans.

Drinking may not be a prerequisite for a happy life, but it's a ritual most Americans have enjoyed as long as the nation has existed, and harmlessly so in the overwhelming majority of cases. Although I'm not an exceptionally heavy drinker, I can't, and don't want to, imagine a life without alcohol. As long as I'm not endangering anyone else, I shouldn't have to.

David Harsanyi, a columnist at the Denver Post, is the author of Nanny State: How Food Fascists, Teetotaling Do-Gooders, Priggish Moralists, and Other Boneheaded Bureaucrats Are Turning America Into a Nation of Children, from which this article is adapted. Published by Broadway Books, a division of Random House, Inc. © Copyright 2007 by David Harsanyi.