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Can Drunk Driving Be Funny?

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 12:07:00 EDT

The Washington Post's Gene Weingarten wrote a very funny column a couple weeks ago, in which he gets schnockered in a driving simulator and documents the results.

Recently, he discussed the process by which a column making light of drunk driving might get approved, and offered an interesting insight into the kinds of topics that are still a bridge too far, even in an age where presidential candidates admit to doing "a little blow."

When I first proposed the idea to [my editor] Tom the Butcher, he was very concerned about one possible result: What if I continued to ace the test, well into staggering drunkitude?
"Well," I said, "I can make that funny."
"I'm sure you can," he said, "but I will not publish it."
A spirited and enlightening conversation ensued, the details of which I cannot go into here for reasons of propriety. In essence I was arguing for the transcendence of truth, and the Butcher was arguing for the transcendence of moral and civic responsibility. Both arguments had merit, but he had rank.

Fortunately, Weingarten's driving after a bottle and a half of wine on no sleep and an empty stomach was...well, I'll let the test administrator tell it: "You ran off the road after a curve. You crashed into a bus. You killed a pedestrian. You had a frontal collision with a car driving in the opposite direction in the other lane. You killed a bicyclist. As the test ended, you were beginning a dangerous maneuver that might have caused a rollover if it had continued."

All's well that ends in a fiery crash, I always say. But seriously, would it have been a public service to spike the column if Weingarten had slept well, eaten a big dinner, and been more or less OK after a few drinks?

More on the ever-falling acceptable blood alcohol level here.

Beyond Chandra Levy

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 17:08:00 EDT

Libertarian Democrat Terry Michael takes issue with the Wash Post's new maxi-series on the unsolved murder in 2001 of Chandra Levy:

"The Chandra Levy case captivated the world."
You can see those breathless words for yourself if you navigate to a washingtonpost.com web page posted Friday, July 11 touting a 12-part series about a dead intern (yes, you read that correctly: twelve!), the first installment of which was plastered across the front page of the Post's Sunday print edition two days later.
Stop whatever you're doing and think about that. Reporting staffs are being decimated all over the American daily newspaper landscape. Seasoned journalists are being forced into early retirement buy-outs. Hundred-year-old news values--objectivity, fairness, dispassion, fact-based arguments, proportionality--are being trashed in an infotainment media culture that dumbs down public discourse to verbal food fights, featuring talking-pointed-heads on cable "news" channels.
And the paper of record in the capital of the free world, a few miles up the road from where Jefferson and Madison understood the importance of the printed word to our experiment in liberty, has used its investigative and metro staff resources to publish a 12 part (twelve!!!) tabloid-style series pandering to the prurient interests of readers captivated by the unsolved murder of an intern.

More here.

reason's Matt Welch defended the Chandra Levy coverage back in August 2001. Read that here.

You Fly that Flag Right, or Else

mriggs@reason.com (Mike Riggs) — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 16:17:00 EDT

Matthew Rothschild at The Progressive reports on Dale Decker, a Wisconsin man who was harassed by police for hanging an American flag upside down:

On June 25, [Dale Decker] decided to fly the American flag upside down on the patio of his apartment....
Two days later, Manitowoc police officer Jason Delsman came to his door. But Decker was at Wal-Mart, so, Delsman left his business card with a handwritten note, "Call ASAP."....

"He told me I was committing a criminal act and could face fines or imprisonment," Decker said.

When Decker asked for the statute criminalizing this, he says Officer Delsman responded: "I'm sure that it is somewhere."

I wonder how many cops subscribe to a bastardized version of the "Better safe than sorry" mantra:"Better arrest/cite you in case there's a law that supports my prejudices"?

Stephen F. Hayes of The Weekly Standard wrote for reason about silly flag laws here.

The Fine Art of Burying the Lede (Creationism-vs.-Torture-in-the-Classroom Edition)

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 11:12:00 EDT

I just clicked through this story at Drudge headlined "Ohio town split over teacher accused of preaching...."

It takes you to a Columbus Dispatch tale of John Freshwater, who might be bounced from his job as a Mount Vernon eighth-grade science teacher for pushing creationism in the classroom:

An investigator for the district found that Freshwater's teachings undermined science education in the public school district and that his students had to be re-taught science principles when they got into higher grades.

Far more important, to my mind, is what got buried toward the end of the piece:

The family of one of Freshwater's former students who had a cross burned onto his arm by the teacher sued the school district and Freshwater last month. The suit says the boy's civil rights were violated.

I'm as pro-evolution as the next mammal or Pokemon desperately trying to rise above both nature and nurture, but I really think burning a cross onto a student's arm deserves to be in the first paragraph.

I did a quick Google search to get more background on the story and came across National Review's Kevin Williamson thinking the same thoughts (only more quickly and succinctly):

I might have written this Columbus Dispatch story a little differently. Seems a teacher in Ohio is going to be fired after accusations that he has improperly inserted his personal opinions into the curriculum....They're arguing about whether the guy went a little too Genesis during eighth-grade science when he burned a cross into a student's arm? Egad. Mightn't that have been a little higher in the story?

More here.

Update: National Review's Williamson pointed me to this additional story. Freshwater has been fired and seems likely to appeal his dismissal. Snippets from the story:

Freshwater's friend Dave Daubenmire defended him.

"With the exception of the cross-burning episode....I believe John Freshwater is teaching the values of the parents in the Mount Vernon school district," he told The Columbus Dispatch for a story published Friday.

Several students interviewed by investigators described Freshwater, who has been employed by the school district located 40 miles northeast of Columbus for 21 years, as a great guy and their favorite teacher....

Freshwater used a science tool known as a high-frequency generator to burn images of a cross on students' arms in December, the report said. Freshwater told investigators he simply was trying to demonstrate the device on several students and described the images as an "X," not a cross. But pictures show a cross, the report said.

Daubenmire sounds like a great friend, but that's a pretty big exception, don't you think?

The longer story and an image of the cross on a student's arm is here.

I am tempted to turn this into a pro-school-voucher story because, well, you know, nothing bad ever happens at private schools. But I think in the end it might just be an anti-school story. Or an anti-Ohio story. Or maybe just a summer vacation story.

What Price Justice?

info@reason.com (Jeff Taylor) — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 15:00:00 EDT

You want a happy ending. You want to say that everything eventually worked, that the system got it right in the end, that the latest twist in the seven-year long anthrax attack saga is a turn for the better. Except you can't.

On June 27th former federal bioweapons researcher Steven Hatfill essentially won his dispute with a federal government that had suspected him of unleashing anthrax letters on America in the fall of 2001. While admitting no wrongdoing, the feds agreed to pay Hatfill $5.8 million. In other words, the feds admitted they screwed up. Big time.

This sounds like a victory, and it surely is for Hatfill, who was hounded by the FBI and identified by hapless Attorney General John Ashcroft as a "person of interest" in the case. But the bigger picture remains bleak.

Most striking is the fact that the masterminds behind bold acts of terrorism—Osama bin Laden and the anthrax killer—remain at large despite untold of amounts of blood and treasure spent to catch them. Moreover, the anthrax attacks, unlike the use of airliners as guided missiles, remains an eminently repeatable mode of mass mayhem. Authorities still do not know exactly how the deadly compound was formed, where, or by whom.

The investigative missteps in the anthrax case were huge and there is no sign that procedures have changed in such a way as to avoid repeat. In fact, counter-terrorism measures have only become more hair-trigger and susceptible to political or panicked influence from outside the immediate investigation.

Former FBI agent Brad Garrett, who was part of the original anthrax investigation, recently reflected on how top brass in D.C. tried to micromanage every step of the investigation. FBI Director Robert Mueller demanded and received daily briefings on the case, which predictably tried to convey "progress" even if the facts suggested otherwise. This, of course, is not investigation, but ass-covering.

Any semi-complex problem requires getting smart people together and then leaving them alone to solve it. Trust, it turns out, is a key investigative tool. But the FBI didn't trust itself or others in 2002 and there is little reason to believe that anything has changed.

Instead, the FBI turned from trust to fear, now the defining element in America's counter-terrorism toolkit—from shock-and-awe to waterboarding. Clumsy and obvious surveillance was maintained on Hatfill with hopes of cracking him. Then a wholly implausible circus of "anthrax alerting" bloodhounds was staged to further ratchet up the pressure. In all likelihood, the "results" of these dog sweeps were fabricated by the feds, then leaked to gullible reporters to further pressure Hatfill.

This mind-set does not look for evidence or leads, let alone the truth. Such activity is not investigative, but prosecutorial. Guilt has been decided, the only question is how to make the case. It is no coincidence that a unitary executive branch that claims the power to imprison without the need for independent review or verifiable evidence produced and sanctioned this approach in the anthrax case.

There are now several distinct possibilities in the anthrax mystery, all with backers on the Internet and elsewhere. One is that the feds have no clue who might have been responsible. This is possible, beyond depressing to consider. Disputes over whether the anthrax spores themselves were "weaponzied" took up an inordinate amount of investigative energy, perhaps allowing the killer to cover all tracks leading back to him or her.

Then there is the case-making theory. This is the notion that the government has a suspect or suspects, but has yet to come up with enough evidence to merit an arrest. A close cousin of this view is the "Central New Jersey" theory; the idea that the anthrax used in the attacks was cooked up in the Garden State among a narrow range of possible circumstances.

Finally, we have most tin foil-plated view, one that on my blacker days I can readily see. Namely, the anthrax attacks were undertaken by a person or persons with ties close enough to the federal government that it is effectively impossible to prosecute them. Too many secrets would spill out.

All of these possibilities are dysfunctional enough for the next occupant of the Oval Office to undertake a top-to-bottom reform of America's counter-terrorism efforts. Otherwise, justice will remain elusive and arbitrary for citizens like Steven Hatfill.

Contributing Editor Jeff Taylor writes from North Carolina.

reason Hauls Down 11* L.A. Press Club Awards

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 08:42:00 EDT

Last night, reason won three first place awards, five seconds, and three honorable mentions at the 50th annual Southern California Journalism Awards. The winners were:

Kerry Howley, Best Magazine News/Investigative Article, for "Who Owns Your Body Parts?" Judges' comments: "This story's terrific lead drew you in with a revelation on how lucrative this business is. It fits the definition of a good expose."

Jacob Sullum, Best Magazine Feature/Commentary, for "Thank Deng Xiapoing for Little Girls." Judges' comments: "This engaging story mixes comprehensive, well-researched material with the author's personal experiences and perspective."

Nick Gillespie and staff, Best News Organization Website, for reason.com. Comments: "The true marks of a successful website are graphics and functions that pull you in, then content that doesn't easily let you go. Whenever we started to exit, something else would catch our eyes."

Second places: Radley Balko, Magazine News/Investigative, for "CSI: Mississippi." Brian Doherty, Magazine Entertainment Feature, for "Robert Heinlein at 100." Drew Carey, Multimedia Package, for "Medical Marijuana." Nick Gillespie, Online Design/Layout, for reason.com. Nick Gillespie and staff, Group Weblog, for Hit & Run.

Honorable mention (that's L.A. Press Clubese for "third place"): Amy Sturgis, Magazine Entertainment Review/Criticism/Column, for "Florida's Forgotten Rebels." Ronald Bailey, Online Column, for "The Secrets of Intangible Wealth." And Matt Welch, Magazine Feature/Commentary, for "Be Afraid of President McCain."

You can get all this terrific, award-winning journalism mailed to your doorstep 11 times a year for the ridiculously low price of $19.97. Or, if you subscribe already, you can send out a gift subscription to loved ones and antagonists alike, to blow their minds. What are you waiting for?

* Was originally "13." No wonder we did not place in "editor's math skills."

Eat, Drink, Krugman, Woman

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 16:00:00 EDT

Paul Krugman is freaking out again today about America's food supply. This time, of course, the problem is tainted tomatoes.

Opting for a Carrie Bradshaw-style lede question, he asks:

How did America find itself back in The Jungle?

Last time around, you'll recall, Krugman blamed Milton Friedman for our spinach woes.

Fortunately, Alex Tabarrok isn't afraid of raw CDC data (or raw spinach, for that matter). He crunches some numbers and comes up with this:

On an only slightly related topic, Krugman's headline "Bad Cow Disease" made me think, for one shining moment, that he might have written about the tempest-in-a-teapot scandal over Judge Kozinski's online pictures of "naked women on all fours painted to look like cows."

The Comeback Id: Bill Clinton after the White House

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 12:02:00 EDT

Libertarian Democrat Terry Michael sent me this link to the much-discussed Vanity Fair story about Bill Clinton. Worth reading the the whole thing. A snippet:

It is also beyond dispute that Clinton has blended the altruistic efforts of his philanthropy with the private business interests of some of his biggest donors in ways that are surpassingly sloppy, if not unseemly, for any former president. A case in point is Clinton's relationship with Ukraine's Victor Pinchuk, a billionaire and philanthropist who has donated millions to the ex-president's foundation. According to Newsweek, in 2007, at a Pinchuk-sponsored international conference in Yalta, Clinton wowed the crowd with a presentation on Ukraine but also sparked controversy when he was embraced by Pinchuk's father-in-law, the country's former president Leonid Kuchma. Kuchma's repressive regime has been linked by a government investigation to the 2000 murder of a dissident Ukrainian journalist. The man was found decapitated-one of scores of journalists who have been killed or have disappeared in Ukraine since the country achieved independence, in 1991.

More here.

Update: Gina Gershon, I.D.ed in the Vanity Fair article as one of Clinton's consorts, says she did not have sexual relations with that ex-president.

P.J. O'Rourke on China

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Fri, 30 May 2008 13:02:00 EDT

Apres his National Lampoon days, P.J. O'Rourke made his bones as a serious journalist (horrible phrase) at Rolling Stone by doing some of the best and most-involved shoe-leather-times-10 travel reporting ever since Tocqueville decamped to America. Via Arts & Letters Daily comes this excellent recent piece based on a trip to China O'Rourke took in 2006. From the opening:

It took me almost two years to realize that what I have is a survey of "the tacit consent of the governed." Not that the Chinese I talked to were taciturn. They were forthcoming enough about their government, but they didn't care much about the political theory of it. Tom said, "Their attitude is, ‘Shhh, politics is sleeping, don't wake it up.'"

I talked to people who worked in private enterprise and people who worked in government and people who worked on furthering cooperation between the two. That is, I talked to the kind of people who are necessary to the advocating of freedom and democracy but who, so far, aren't advocating it. We need to listen to what they don't say. Here is a record of what Chinese think of politics when politics isn't what they're thinking of.

This is O'Rourke at his best. Informed by ideological suppositions but not enslaved to them; talking to a wide range of people; bringing his perspective to bear; and more.

Read the whole thing at the World Affairs Journal website.

How Hysterical Do You Have to Be for Newsweek to Suggest That You're Overreacting to a Drug Menace?

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Wed, 14 May 2008 17:20:00 EDT

This doesn't quite make up for Newsweek's anti-crack hysteria circa 1986 or its anti-meth hysteria circa 2005, but the magazine's latest issue includes a careful, balanced story about Salvia divinorum that could serve as a model for how the press should handle controversies involving psychoactive substances. Noting salvia's longstanding use as a Mazatec folk remedy, its modern use as an aid to introspection, and its medical potential, author Brian Braiker says media attention attracted by YouTube videos of teenagers smoking salvia "is spooking legislators and law enforcement" into banning the plant and arresting people for possession. A few excerpts:

Used in small amounts, salvia...contains no known toxicities. But when its extract is smoked in larger dosages, it can yield frightening results....
But is strict regulation the best way to deal with salvia? Obviously, any impairing agent could lead to accidents. But there have been no recorded injuries or deaths resulting from its use, as drug-reform activists like Ethan Nadelmann of the Drug Policy Alliance point out. "Most people who do it don't want to do it again," says Nadelmann. The salvia panic "is essentially an extension of the old drug-war debate in that there's this knee-jerk reflex on the part of legislators to criminalize first and ask questions later, if ever. There's no stopping to listen to scientific evidence, no cost-benefit analysis of the effect the law would have." California wants to ban the sale of salvia only to minors, a move that Nadelmann supports....
Condemning the drug to Schedule I status (the same class as heroin or cannabis), as some legislators have suggested, would make it virtually impossible for the medical community to obtain for research. It seems that sober thinking is needed on both sides of the debate.

My previous post on "the salvia panic" are here, here, and here.

[Thanks to the Drug Policy Alliance's Tony Newman for the tip.]

Breaking News In MY Backyard! Again!

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Mon, 12 May 2008 14:59:00 EDT

This is old--the data set ends in 1998--but the basic idea is forever true: News tends to miraculously happen in places where there are lots of people, and perhaps more importantly, lots of reporters. Go figure.

This map originally ran with a Science News article about cool new techniques for making maps that convey ideas[$].

Researchers extracted the dateline from about 72,000 wire-service news stories from 1994 to 1998 and modified a standard map of the Lower 48 US states (above) to show the size of the states in proportion to the frequency of their appearance in those datelines (below). Some notable results:
* Washington DC accounts for a huge proportion of the news stories - not surprising, since it is the nation’s capital, and the home of Congress, the Presidency and other political news generating institutions. But still: DC (pop. 600,000; metro area 5.8 million) generates more news than the most populous state, California (pop. 36.5 million)....
* News stories from Texas (pop. 20.8 million) seem overly scarce, especially when compared to, say, Georgia (pop. 8.2 million), which seems to get a bigger share. Could this be due to the fact that major news organization CNN is headquartered in Atlanta?
* The Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, Montana, Wyoming and Idaho, with a combined population of under 9 million, are all but invisible. No people, no news? Colorado alone, with a population of under 4.5 million, is responsible for a much larger chunk of news than those states combined. Could this be because the other states lack large cities, while Colorado has Denver (pop. 600,000; metro area 2.5 million)? No cities, no news?

Via Strange Maps

If You Don't Like Hank Williams

info@reason.com (Damon W. Root) — Fri, 09 May 2008 09:17:00 EDT

Yesterday's Wall Street Journal featured a long, favorable review of the new Hank Williams (and family) exhibit at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum. From Barry Mazor's article:

The lives of Hank and Audrey Williams; of their children, Hank Jr. and Lycretia; and of Hank's daughter Jett are all traced, as well as the growing careers of Hank Jr.'s performing progeny Hank III, the punk rocking honky-tonker, and Holly, the singer-songwriter. The exhibit features some 200 family artifacts, most never seen before in public, from Hank Sr.'s prized, inlaid Martin guitar and his violin, and the suitcase he had with him the night he died, to the family's early television set and bric-a-brac from their den. There are the spangled new Nudie suits provided Hank Jr. and then Hank III, in turn, when they were small boys, the white guitar Ms. Jett took to the stage as she began her own late-blooming career, and intimate family photos and home movies.

For my two cents, any celebration of America's honky tonk king is worth the trouble. And I can't help wondering what the folks at the Grand Ole Opry make of it. The Opry, of course, gave Hank the boot back in 1952, rescinding his membership as punishment for all the booze and pills he was downing. As Nick Tosches writes in Country: The Music and the Musicians, less than a month after scoring a crossover pop hit in the fall of 1952 with "Jambalaya (On the Bayou)," Hank was "in the worst shape of his life," shacking up at the boardinghouse run by his mother in Montgomery, Alabama. "He pined for his faithless wife, Miss Audrey, drank, took chloral hydrate, drank, fell down and cracked his skull, drank some more, and wrote ‘I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive.'" A few months later he was gone, found dead in the backseat of a chauffeured Cadillac.

Today, Opry visitors are greeted at the door by a Hank impersonator. And why not? He's arguably the greatest singer and songwriter in all of country music. But then why hasn't the Opry reinstated his membership after all these years? Here's what Reinstate Hank has to say about it:

Despite being one of the most powerfully iconic figures in American music, Hank Williams has yet to be reinstated to the Opry. Now, your help is needed to honor and preserve his legacy. Join the campaign and add your signature to the petition to Reinstate Hank Williams to the Grand Ole Opry.

Petition here. Hillbilly hellraiser Hank III carrying on his granddad's legacy here. My look at country's tangled roots in blackface minstrelsy (including Hank's "Lovesick Blues") here.

Now Playing at Reason.tv: The New York Sun's Alternative Take on the Big Apple

Wed, 07 May 2008 16:30:00 EDT

...

The Killer Elite

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 15:15:00 EDT

At this point in the news cycle, it is perhaps unnecessary to reprint Sen. Barack Obama's continuously reprinted comments about those bitter, clingy, armed, pious, and disaffected voters of Pennsylvania. But in case your interest in this never-ending race waned upon the exit of Mike Gravel, here is, once again, the Illinois Democrat explaining why the rural poor are supposedly swayed by conservative—rather than liberal—populism: "You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them...And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

Now, let's ignore that last bit of hypocrisy—if anyone has fanned the flames of anti-trade sentiment, it's Obama—and say that it's not too difficult to agree with The Economist's characterization of these comments as a bit "snooty." The claim that religious zeal (the Christian fundamentalism is implied) or gun ownership correlates to the number of shuttered Pennsylvania factories is pretty thin gruel. Recognizing this, both Obama's current opponents, Sens. Clinton (D-N.Y.) and McCain (R-Ariz.), pounced, calling the comments "elitist" and accusing their fellow senator of being hopelessly "out of touch" with the real America.

For its part, many in the media—excepting the conservative-leaning Fox News, of course—jumped into the breach to defend their beloved frontrunner. Consider the reaction of the pundits on CNN's The Situation Room, hosted by Wolf Blitzer, to the charge that Obama displayed a hidden contempt for the armed and religious. First, CNN's house windbag Jack Cafferty denied that Obama was trading in elitism. Rather, explained Cafferty, Obama was simply acknowledging that Pennsylvania is the Saudi Arabia of America. "What happens to [unemployed] folks like that in the Middle East, you ask? Well, take a look. They go to places like al Qaeda training camps." Regardless of whether gun ownership and economic desperation are causative, Cafferty (who has his own problems with inflammatory comments) denounced previous American leaders—cough, Bill Clinton, cough—that "shipped the jobs overseas and signed phony trade deals like NAFTA."

U.S. News & World Report Contributing Editor Gloria Borger weighed in with wrist-slap for Obama's "inartful" terminology. "But," she continued, "I think he's expressing a sentiment of mad as hell voters not going to take it anymore that we've seen throughout this election." The McCain and Clinton campaigns, Borger said, were after the same thing, which is to "portray Obama as this sort of effete elitist who doesn't understand the real working class people or Independent voters."

And, finally, CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin sputtered that the whole thing was taken out of context. It was, he proclaimed, a "fake issue. I think [Hillary Clinton] is completely distorting what Obama said. And I think it's just shocking, frankly... I think [Clinton's attack] ad is a disgrace." Toobin declared that by dint of his family background, Obama was incapable of elitism: "Well, I just think it's remarkable that Barack Obama, this guy who grew up in a single family household with no money, who lived in Indonesia, who, you know, was—came from very modest upbringings, somehow he's the elitist." (While certainly not rich, it's worth reminding that Obama, the son of two university-educated parents, attended an "exclusive and prestigious" private school in Hawaii, Columbia University, and Harvard Law School.)

So in The Situation Room, there was consensus. The story was silly season stuff; a prototypically Clintonian diversion from the substantive issues.

While CNN scoffed at the thought of Obama not understanding the rural, white working-class voter, a number of pro-Obama bloggers and pundits were turning on his accusers. At The Atlantic, Andrew Sullivan linked to a column by New Criterion editor Roger Kimball, and directed readers to "check out the photo" of Kimball wearing a bowtie and sporting turtle-shell glasses. What does this elitist buffon know from elitism?

Writing in The New Republic, Jonathan Chait railed at the "hypocrisy" of certain elite media figures, saving special ire for "George F. Will [who] decided to leap to the defense of the proletariat. Yes, that George F. Will."

In case you didn't immediately understand the source of Chait's sarcasm, he clarified that Will is "the fabulously wealthy, bowtie-wearing, pretentious reference-mongering, Anglophilic fop who grew up in a university town as a professor's son, earned two advanced degrees, has a designated table at a French restaurant in Georgetown, and, had he dwelt for any extended time among the working class, would be lucky to escape without his underwear being yanked up over his ears." Oh dear. Rumor has it that, in his Georgetown estate, Will has a shelf devoted to the novels of Evelyn Waugh, that poncy, ascot-wearing Brit (boo!) who wrote florid novels about fox hunting and buggery, which Will reportedly reads while consuming expensive French food!

So here we have a class-war version of the "chickenhawk" charge. Don't advocate for war unless you have served, don't speak for the peasants if you wear a bowtie and recommend Chesterton novels to your (probably foreign) friends. Members of the right-leaning bourgeoisie are incapable of spotting and deploring such condescension directed at those who typically vote for right-leaning candidates.

Chait writes that populist, fist-shaking pundits such as Chris Matthews and Bill O'Reilly, who bully guests and interviewers with references to their "real America," blue-collar credentials, "are multimillionaires who retain only the most remote connection to blue-collar life." This is true enough. But Obama's defenders use the very same line of argumentation in explaining away his "bitter" comments. So when critics such as Toobin tell Wolf Blitzer that Obama "grew up in a single family household with no money," it is perhaps worth mentioning that it should also be tough for Obama to retain his working-class connections—if he ever had any—when he earned $4.2 million in 2007.

Though it likely had little or no effect on yesterday's loss in Pennsylvania—potentially insulted voters were leaning largely toward Hillary Clinton anyway—it is not outrageous to think that Obama's extemporaneous bit of pop sociology was indicative of a generally condescending attitude towards the Other (that was the basic point of Will's column, which found precedent for such feelings in Adlai Stevenson's failed presidential runs in 1952 and 1956). That attitude will surely be revisited in the general election.

The inclusion of guns in Obama's complaint is, I think, especially revealing. A convincing argument can be made that xenophobia is more appealing to the dispossessed and downtrodden—They're taking our jobs! They're invading our country!—and a convincing case can be made that Obama has employed similar, though not explicitly xenophobic, language when railing against NAFTA stealing American jobs. But what does any of this have to do with guns, other than to signify that these are bitter country rubes that, to paraphrase What's the Matter with Kansas author Thomas Frank, foolishly vote against their own interests?

Nevertheless, Jeffrey Toobin told CNN viewers, what Obama said "was factually accurate." But is it? As Syracuse University professor Arthur Brooks wrote in the Wall Street Journal, "It turns out [gun owners] have the same level of formal education as nongun owners, on average. Furthermore, they earn 32% more per year than nonowners. Americans with guns are neither a small nor downtrodden group. Nor are they ‘bitter.' In 2006, 36% of gun owners said they were ‘very happy,' while 9% were ‘not too happy.' Meanwhile, only 30% of people without guns were very happy, and 16% were not too happy."

So Obama's gun analysis was not only incoherent (how does one "explain their frustrations" by shooting skeet, anyway?), but based on lazy presumption and stereotype that's not that backed up by any data. And George Will might well be a fop, but his distillation of Obama's argument strikes me as reasonable: "Americans, especially working-class conservatives, are unable, because of their false consciousness, to deconstruct their social context and embrace the liberal program." In other words, Barack Obama thinks that, whether they know it or not, the gun-toting plebes of America are in desperate need of "change."

Michael Moynihan is an associate editor of reason.

Dr. No Coverage

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 09:25:00 EDT

New Media grump Jon Friedman is busting campaign reporters for missing the story of Ron Paul.

[A]nyone who looked hard enough knew that there was more to Paul than an inability to amass delegates. Most of the media, turned off by his shrill libertarian leanings, missed the real news value of Paul's story -- namely, the Texas congressman's ability to connect intensely with voters. [...]
But the hard-core loyalty of his backers remains one of the most newsworthy, if unwritten, stories of this presidential campaign.

I will one-up Friedman, with whom I usually disagree: It was Paul's ability to connect intensely with voters despite not being a very charismatic politician, nor having a particularly effective campaign team, that suggested there's something going on here and ya don't know what it is, etc.

Brian Doherty's February cover story on the rEVOLution here. Nick Gillespie and I named the Paul campaign as the only one in this election cycle that even hints at 21^st century politics, in a Politics magazine story [pdf] from March. More reason Paul-ania here. (Friedman link via Romenesko.)

The McCain Mutiny

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 15:00:00 EDT

For those of us who have been writing critically about John McCain over the years, keeping tabs on the 2008 presidential campaign through the media is a bit like getting your war news via Saddam Hussein's old information minister: The street names may be right, but the big picture looks funny.

"No other modern politician has received as much favorable press as John McCain has in the past decade," write (plainly irritated) David Brock and Paul Waldman in "Free Ride: John McCain and the Media." "The rules are simply different for McCain."

Boy, are they. Though he flip-flops and prevaricates like any politician, McCain all but has the phrase "straight talker" tattooed on his skull-plate. A lifetime Beltway insider and third-generation naval officer with an heiress wife and an heiress mother is still referred to, without irony, as a "Man of the People." And though his heavily interventionist governing philosophy, both at home and abroad, is spelled out in his five easy-to-find books, he continues to receive mash notes from newspapers like the Des Moines Register for being a man who, because "he knows war," would be "reluctant to start one."

Such funhouse-mirror distortions are more than just giggle-worthy. Partly because of his reliably sympathetic portrayal in the media, McCain - who was advocating pre-emptive war against "rogue states" four years before it ever occurred to George W. Bush - nonetheless won by ratios of two to one among GOP primary voters who described themselves as "anti-war."

So if nothing else, "Free Ride" comes as a necessary corrective. Lefty partisan co-authors Brock and Waldman work for Media Matters for America, a "progressive" nonprofit "dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media." Therein lies the book's strength and weakness. There's nothing like a bit of the old political bile - especially when it pays! - to focus the mind and support staff on cataloguing the sins of the other team while bashing the media for failing to notice.

Thus the authors upbraid Beltway journalists for failing to recognize that "McCain has an act, and not having an act is his act." When the candidate bashed President Bush's Iraq policy in 2007, ageless Washington Post columnist David Broder pronounced that "candor, even belatedly, becomes him." When his campaign stumbled over immigration that spring, Newsweek was there to solemnly proclaim that "it may be because he is not, at heart, a politician. He is a warrior."

How did a Republican end up charming the liberal press? Brock and Waldman rightly point out three reasons: McCain's heroic war record, his "anti-politician" support for campaign finance reform and the copious amounts of access he has consciously given national reporters for the past two decades. "The McCain-Feingold bill in particular," they write, "became a vessel into which the press could pour all of its disgust with the practice of politics."

But media criticism works best when new interpretive light is shined on the subject being mis-covered. And it's here that the authors' partisan agenda and ideology get the worst of them.

They argue, improbably, that McCain has always been a "staunch" and "reliable conservative," in the tradition of Barry Goldwater. In fact, McCain's famous regulatory zeal on the Senate Commerce Committee - meddling into the affairs of amateur athletes, Hollywood marketers and tobacco companies - has been the opposite of Goldwater's principled libertarianism, and indeed the younger maverick never did understand why the man he replaced in the Senate failed to fully embrace him.

And what about McCain's furious tack to the left from 1999 to 2003, when he opposed Bush tax cuts on class warfare grounds, co-sponsored a patients' bill of rights, and voted to federalize airport security, all while trumpeting the career of trust-buster Teddy Roosevelt and flirting openly with defecting to the Democrats? "A few well-chosen breaks," they claim. Well OK then.

Lacking any ability or willingness to analyze McCain's peculiar strain of National Greatness Conservatism, Brock and Waldman fill the pages by exaggerating the extent to which McCain is handled with kid gloves (The New York Times in particular has been disproving that notion almost every day); complaining about journalists referencing his Vietnam imprisonment, and relying on such crude measuring sticks as the voting scorecards of activist groups.

The results correct some myths, but erect new ones in their place.

Matt Welch, editor-in-chief of reason, is the author of "McCain: The Myth of a Maverick." This story originally appeared in The New York Post.

The Dipping Point

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 13:02:00 EDT

Slate's Jack Shafer has a very interesting and pretty disturbing story about the willingness of bestselling author (The Tipping Point, Blink) and superstar journalist Malcolm Gladwell to fudge the truth. The setup is that Gladwell appeared at the "storyteller's forum The Moth," where he told about early journalistic experiences (Gladwell skipped over his connection to The American Spectator and the Wash Times' publication Insight).

That talk, which Shafer calls "mostly bunk," was later broadcast on NPR's This American Life. Writes Shafer:

A storyteller can't have it both ways, instructing listeners to "look it up" while stretching the yarn beyond the breaking point or claiming that smuggling the "baffling" phrase into Post copy became "literally" an "obsession." Gladwell's method, and his decision to let This American Life air his tale, raises ... well, new and troubling questions about his attitude toward his audience.
Gladwell isn't having any of it.
"My story was true in spirit," he e-mails. "The details were happily and gleefully and deliberately exaggerated and embellished and made up by me-and I am quite sure that not a single person in the audience the night I told it thought otherwise. Anyone who would fact check a tall tale like that either has no sense of humor or is on crack."
On March 13, after I interviewed him, Gladwell had second thoughts about his Moth talk, qualifying it on his blog with these words:
There is a disclaimer at the end of the This American Life broadcast, to the effect that the Moth is a place where "people come to tell both true stories and occasional tall tales." As I think should be obvious if you listen to it, my story definitely belongs to the "tall tale" category. I hope you enjoy it. But please do so with a rather large grain of salt.

Whole Shafer bit, which fact checks various Gladwellian assertions, here. Highly recommended reading for anyone interested in how journalism gets done. And undone.

It shouldn't be surprising if Gladwell stretches the truth. What is arguably his great breakthrough story, The New Yorker piece "Six Degrees of Lois Weisberg," is built around the work of legendary psychologist Stanley Milgram, who conceptualized the idea of "the small world" experience later popularized as the movie-buff game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. Milgram's work is, alas, mostly bunk itself. As Judith Kleinfeld wrote in 2002 in Psychology Today (the magazine that published Milgram's original writeup):

I had always regarded Milgram's work as one of the great counterintuitive studies in the social sciences and wanted to replicate it. To do so, I tracked down the details of the small-world study in Milgram's papers at the Yale archives.
What I found was disconcerting. Very few of his folders reached their targets. In his first, unpublished study, only three of 60 letters-5 percent-made it. Even in Milgram's published studies, less than 30 percent of the folders got through. Since then, only a few replications that actually spanned cities have been done. Of these trials, few folders made it through, especially across class and race boundaries.

More here.

The Wire vs. The Sun

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 16:30:00 EDT

The fifth and final season of The Wire concluded Sunday night. Until this year critics were nearly unanimous in their praise for the Baltimore-based HBO series, but the last 10 episodes provoked furious debates between the program's defenders and detractors. The chief cause of the ferment was the show's critique of the newspaper where Wire creator David Simon began his career: the Baltimore Sun.

I'm not going to join the argument about the season's artistic merit—not here, anyway. I do have a few thoughts about the substance of Simon's criticisms. I might not have a front-row seat at the paper, but I'm not squinting from the back row either: I subscribe to The Sun, my wife is a reporter there, and our circle of friends includes several current and former Sun staffers, some of whom had cameos on The Wire this year. (Disclaimer: What follows are my own opinions. They are not necessarily shared by anyone who happens to be married to me.)

Here is Simon's critique, conveniently summarized in an essay for the March Esquire:

[W]hen the Chicago Tribune Company buys Times Mirror and more buyouts follow, the tipping point will be reached. Instead of a news report so essential to the high-end readers that they might—even amid the turmoil of the Internet—still charge for their product online and off, American newspapers will soon be offering a shell of themselves in a market unwilling to pay for such and then, in desperation, giving the product away for free. The window will close; newspapers will not be getting better, stronger, more comprehensive. Not ever again.

In Baltimore, the response will be to drop beats, to abandon the pretense of actually covering the city in detail, to regard institutional memory and the need to look at the city’s problems systemically as, well, quaint. The newsroom culture will instead emphasize impact.

No longer would the journalism be rooted in the organic work of reporters sent into the streets to learn new things and then pull smart, balanced stories through the keyhole. Impact means prizes. Now you pick a target and, to the exclusion of all complexity, you hammer on that target, story after story. Most especially, you write additional accounts highlighting the "impact" that The Sun's coverage has achieved—covering your own coverage—the better to show that the newspaper has effected change.

Note that this is not the familiar liberal narrative of newspaper decline. In the standard story, like Simon's story, short-sighted media companies cut the meat out of powerful papers. But in the usual account, those "impact" stories are the missing meat and the editors who assign them—in The Sun's case, John Carroll and Bill Marimow—are the heroes standing up for journalistic "excellence."

For Simon, by contrast, Carroll and Marimow are a central part of the problem. Their stand-ins on his show are sanctimonious blowhards; their prize-hungry journalism is a substitute for the real thing. Their quest for "impact" brings to mind Ivan Illich's opening to Deschooling Society, with its disdain for the confusion of "process" with "substance," its ire at a world where "Health, learning, dignity, independence, and creative endeavor are defined as little more than the performance of the institutions which claim to serve those ends." It's the same problem The Wire decries in policework and schooling, where decaying bureaucracies defend their performance by jacking up meaningless statistics.

I don't agree with all of Simon's take. It's hard to believe, for example, that many papers could have kept themselves relevant while hiding their best online material behind a pay wall. And the focus on cutbacks qua cutbacks seems off. The problem with The Sun isn't that it's cutting back; it's that it's so thoughtless about where it cuts. The Wire made a big deal about The Sun's disappearing international bureaus. (Eight years ago, it had outposts in five foreign countries. Now it has none.) But I would be happy to see the paper bring its overseas correspondents home if it would reinvest those resources in covering the city.

Instead, The Sun—which managed to find the money for an expensive redesign hated by virtually every reader in the metro area—no longer maintains a beat for each of the city's major regions. Now it has just one reporter covering urban neighborhoods. It has been closing its suburban offices, eliminating its Carroll County bureau last year and losing its Baltimore County base last month. (The former county is growing rapidly, and half or more of the paper's readers live in the latter.) When the Baltimore County staff moved to the paper's downtown headquarters, a company spokesperson told the local alt-weekly that the reporters are "not in their office most of the time anyway. They can go out to Glen Burnie or Reisterstown from here just as quick as they could from Towson."

For those of you who don't live around here: It is extremely unlikely that a Baltimore County reporter will have to cover anything in Glen Burnie, since Glen Burnie is in Anne Arundel County. To get from the old Baltimore County office in Towson to Glen Burnie, you must first move around or across an obscure little burg called the City of Baltimore. The fact that it is possible to be a spokeswoman for The Sun without knowing this speaks volumes.

This rupture between the paper and the region it covers is at the heart of Simon's critique, and it's here that I agree with him the most. It's striking how much of The Sun's coverage of Baltimore—especially, but not exclusively, the blacker, poorer parts of Baltimore—are written as though the subject is an alien landscape. But it shouldn't be surprising.

There are basically two ways to get hired at The Sun. The standard method is to learn your craft at a series of smaller papers around the country. The other approach is to come directly to the paper from an elite university. The Sun has found a lot of fine journalists through these routes (especially the first one). But there used to be a third road to the paper: from the city itself, getting started as a copy boy or some other low-level position and gradually working your way up the ladder.

It's valuable to have a number of Baltimore-bred correspondents who developed their skills and discovered their city at the same time. They have accumulated a wealth of local knowledge that can't easily be replaced. Not only is this now essentially closed as a path to the paper, but the reporters who entered the building this way, along with other experienced hands, have been leaving as the newspaper hires cheaper but greener outsiders to replace them. There are solid reasons not to staff a newspaper only with native talent, but there are solid reasons as well to make sure they're part of the mix—perhaps even for a special local outreach effort to find the next generation of copy boys made good. But that isn't part of the professional culture of old-media journalism, at The Sun or anywhere else.

This isn't intended as a nostalgic argument for bygone days. In some ways American journalism is better than it has ever been: There are more outlets to choose from, more ways to start an outlet of your own, more eyes monitoring the outlets' output for errors, omissions, and lies. The larger mediasphere has grown more open to outside voices, even if specific channels like The Sun have grown more insular and removed. For many topics, though not nearly enough, this means not just more commentary but more actual reporting.

But that makes it all the more important that a paper respond to that competition by doing the things an urban newspaper is best suited to do. And that means intimate, collaborative coverage of a city by people who know it well. The major problem with The Sun is that it doesn't seem to know what to do with the knowledge it has stored within its walls, and that it doesn't seem to have noticed how much of that knowledge has already slipped out its doors.

Jesse Walker is reason's managing editor.

William F. Buckley, RIP

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 13:11:00 EST

William F. Buckley Jr., who founded National Review and did more than any other intellectual to create a conservative alliance between traditionalists and libertarians (an achievement that seems more impressive with each passing day), died this morning at the age of 82. I think my first introduction to Buckley was through David Frye's impersonation of him on I Am the President, so for me he was part of a pantheon of important political figures with distinctive voices from early on. I vividly remember watching a 60 Minutes interview with Buckley in the 1970s and being struck by how much he seemed to relish intellectual combat while remaining calm, polite, and self-assured, traits that also came through in his long-running PBS talk show Firing Line. For left-liberals, I realized, he was a house-broken conservative, witty, learned, and cordial even while espousing horrifying opinions. Although many of today's most conspicuous conservatives eschew that role, Buckley's dignified, thoughtful approach earned the conservative movement mainstream credibility and may even have persuaded a few people, instead of simply stirring up the mob.

In the early 1990s I worked for Buckley at National Review, although by that time he was not much involved in the day-to-day running of the magazine. He would see us at the editorial meetings every two weeks and treat us to lunch at a neighborhood Italian restaurant he favored. In conversation he was always sharp but gentlemanly. At one of those post-meeting meals I remarked that there was something to be said for the Articles of Confederation. "Yes," Buckley replied with a sly smile, taking a slug of red wine, "but not much." This formulation, which allowed for continued argument but also let me drop the subject without embarrassment, was of a piece with his confident but laid-back intellectual style.

As for substance, Buckley often called himself a libertarian; the subtitle of Happy Days Were Here Again, his 1993 collection of columns and articles, was "Reflections of a Libertarian Journalist." Buckley represented the classical liberal strain of modern American conservatism often enough that his endorsement of statist schemes such as "national service" (or, more recently, tobacco prohibition) caused real dismay. He especially endeared himself to libertarians with his courageous and persistent criticism of the war on drugs, a stance that continues to distinguish National Review from other conservative organs. Although Buckley's support for repealing drug prohibition grew more out of pragmatic concerns than a principled commitment to individual freedom, his prolific writings usually reflected skepticism of government intervention. In recent years this skepticism drove him to question another war popular with conservatives, one that could prove to be as long-lived as the war on drugs, if John McCain has anything to say about it. Buckley, in short, admirably combined an ability to fuse the disparate elements of the conservative coalition with a willingness to break them apart when he thought the stakes were high enough.

Don't Let the Bedbug Story Bite

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 11:33:00 EST

Interesting analysis of a tiny--very tiny--media panic over the looming, but likely nonexistent, "return of the bedbug" from the Washington Post. Excerpt:

Even if no one is padding the totals, relying on reports from freaked-out callers is ill-advised. For one thing, there are so many people out there who think they're being devoured by bugs -- and aren't -- that psychologists have a name for it: delusional parasitosis.
"We had a lady come in here with a garbage bag she said was filled with bugs that were biting her," says Matt Nixon of American Pest Management in Takoma Park. "She handed it to my dad and she said, 'If you open that and you get bit, it's your problem.' And there was nothing in there except lint, hair and dry skin. We deal with people like that every week."
But there are so many bedbug false alarms that there's reason to assume many perfectly sane people are ringing them. In New York, the city housing authority has fielded and checked out more than 2,500 bedbug complaints in the past three years; fewer than 500 turned out to be actual infestations. Even allowing for some overlap -- two calls about the same bugs, for instance -- that's as many as two or three callers who don't have bedbugs for each caller who does.

Media Critic Robert McChesney Panned in Small-Circ. Mag; Must Be Really Pissed Off That It Wasn't in Time Mag

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 12:08:00 EST

Univ. of Illinois Prof. Robert McChesney is one of the leading fretters about the concentration of media ownership. Surveying the contemporary mediascape, he generally sees nothing but darkness peering out of a total blackout of alternative views and freedom of expression that existed, well, some time in the fabled Golden Age of something or other.

Writing in the Columbia Journalism Review, Carlin Romano finds McChesney's most recent book-length whine worth thumbing through but unconvincing:

If American citizen "Jose Garcia" can get all the information McChesney or John Dewey might think he needs to be a fully effective citizen by regularly reading The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal-and In These Times, Mother Jones, and The Nation-how does dominance by corporate media frustrate the democratic abilities of citizens? McChesney endlessly cites Madison and Jefferson, but neither they nor any logic implicit in democratic political theory requires people to get their best information from mainstream media. It may not be pleasant for one's favored media to be small fry, but McChesney provides no argument for why mini truth-tellers among the maxi-deceivers don't meet the constitutional aims of the Framers, who were concerned with availability of ideas, not market control.

The whole essay is worth reading.

In 2004, reason talked about McChesney's and other folks' media "Domination Fantasies" in a great--and grotesquely illustrated--cover story by Ben Compaine.

More reason on media here.

Hat Tip: Arts & Letters Daily.

Science Writer's Motto: We Don't Ask Questions. That Is Not Our Role.

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 15:12:00 EST

Over at AlterNet, Bruce Mirken of the Marijuana Policy Project suggests questions reporters should have asked about a recent trio of cannabis studies that generated alarming headlines. In addition to the lung cancer study I discussed the other day, he covers a study of marijuana withdrawal and a study of the association between pot smoking and gum disease that prompted an Australian news site to announce that marijuana "makes teeth fall out." The saddest part of Mirken's article is this response from an American editor to his suggestion that reporters should have asked about the possible influence of confounding variables, such as dental hygiene and use of other drugs, on the link between marijuana and bad gums:

We are dealing with a peer-reviewed journal study, and I don't feel at all comfortable going beyond what they are publishing. That is not our role.

Any journalist who doesn't feel comfortable going beyond what appears in a medical journal to put a study's findings in context and offer caveats where appropriate has no business writing about science. Reporters can't be experts on everything, but they can ask smart questions and seek informed comments regarding a study's potential weaknesses. If news organizations refuse to do so on the grounds that the study was peer reviewed and therefore must be faultless, they might as well just reprint researchers' press releases. Which is pretty much what they do, all too often.

From Hillary to Whole Foods

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 18:49:00 EST

Jonah Goldberg's bestseller Liberal Fascism, had many potential subtitles during its editing cycle. At one point, the subtitle was "From Hegel to Whole Foods." At another it was "From Mussolini to Hillary Clinton." In his Times column today, David Brooks further complicates the Hillary/Whole Foods metaphor business. Hillary, he says, is the Safeway of the race. Obama is Whole Foods.

Hillary Clinton is a classic commodity provider. She caters to the less-educated, less-pretentious consumer. As Ron Brownstein of The National Journal pointed out on Wednesday, she won the non-college-educated voters by 22 points in California, 32 points in Massachusetts and 54 points in Arkansas. She offers voters no frills, just commodities: tax credits, federal subsidies and scholarships. She’s got good programs at good prices.
Barack Obama is an experience provider. He attracts the educated consumer. In the last Pew Research national survey, he led among people with college degrees by 22 points. Educated people get all emotional when they shop and vote. They want an uplifting experience so they can persuade themselves that they’re not engaging in a grubby self-interested transaction. They fall for all that zero-carbon footprint, locally grown, community-enhancing Third Place hype. They want cultural signifiers that enrich their lives with meaning.

This seems exactly right to me: I just got a call from my mom, a youngish Baby Boomer living in Virginia. She has a seat reserved for an Obama pre-primary speech next week at my old high school. And, despite the fact that she's leaning Hillary, she is pumped. She's psyched for the speech the way I'm psyched for the MacBook Air. (Obviously, Hillary is PC and Obama is Mac.) She's excited for the patented Obama experience. And she's not the only one...

On Super Tuesday, Silence Is Golden

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 16:11:00 EST

Comic genius and surprisingly savvy political observer Harry Shearer is the voice of Principal Skinner on The Simpsons, and the face of Derek Smalls in This Is Spinal Tap. He was also the impresario behind a video art exhibit consisting of dead time on cable satellite news feeds called Raw Feeds--the most famous clip of which was the infamous "John Edwards fixes his hair with a compact mirror" sequence. Now, he brings us the first in a series of Silent Debates between major presidential contenders. Shearer asks incisive questions and the candidates sit and fidget. Brilliant. Below, Hillary and Romney face off in a flurry of dead air and distracted looks:

Cross posted on reason.tv

Victory in Iraq is What You Want it To Be

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 15:19:00 EST

From the Columbia Journalism Review, another of what I think is an interesting example of the "normalization" of Iraq, that I suggested back in October might mean that the war and any discontent over it will be a much smaller issue come this November than most suspected back in those halcyon days of yesteryear when it was to be a Hillary-Rudy sure-thing.

Excerpt, from their embedded reporter Paul McLeary:

Being out here, the one thing that is most striking is how cut off you feel from the political fight over Iraq back home. While pundits, politicians, blogs, and op-ed pages argue endlessly about the relative success of the “surge” and whether to pull the troops out, to the soldiers out here, the situation is vastly more complex.
There is no clear definition of victory in a fight like this. This isn’t to say that we’re winning—or losing—just that we’re at a crucial juncture where things could quickly swing back toward chaos, or ahead toward increased security and stability. The choice at this point really does lie with the Iraqi people, and their government, or whatever branches of their government are actually functioning. Meanwhile, there is a great story to be told—at Camp Courage and throughout Iraq—of the efforts of American soldiers at a crossroads, who are serving simultaneously as fighters, diplomats, civil servants, and tribal consiglieri, while trying to build trust between Sunni and Shia sheiks, the Iraqi Army, the Iraqi police, local Nahia and Qada councils (think city councils) and the Concerned Local Citizens movement, any of whom might be working at cross-purposes with each other at any given time. It’s a down-and-dirty study in the application of counterinsurgency doctrine.

With no "clear definition of victory," the easier it will be to make anything look like victory, as long as it isn't clearly as bad as it was one or two years before.