Julie Amero's Denouement

Posted on November 23, 2008, 6:44pm | Radley Balko

Amero is the 40-year-old Connecticut substitute teacher convicted in January 2007 of four felony "corrupting a minor" charges when the computer she was using in front of her middle school class began opening a loop of pornographic pop-up windows.  She faced a possible 40-year sentence.  I wrote a short piece about her in our May 2007 issue:

As she tried to close the ads, the loops only intensified. She says some sort of adware or malicious software on her computer caused the pop-up ads to appear; such infections were indeed found on the computer later, including the Web address of a seemingly innocuous hairdressing site that spun off the loop of porn ads that Amero described in her defense. The school had filtering software on all of its computers but had let the software licenses expire, rendering the filters useless. The prosecution later conceded that Amero’s computer was never even tested for malware.

The state’s expert witness, a computer crimes investigator with the Norwich Police Department, testified that because the URLs for the offending sites were “highlighted,” Amero must have deliberately clicked on them. Yet none of the major Web browsers requires a mouse click to highlight a link; any address that has been loaded by the browser, which happens whenever a pop-up window opens, will show up as “visited.”

When Amero's case hit the Internet early last year, tech experts across the country quickly recognized what had happened, and dozens volunteered to aid in her defense.  A state judge granted her a new trial in June of last year after he was presented with evidence from actual experts (as opposed to the Norwich Police Department's badly misinformed computer crimes investigator) that the computer had been infected.  Yet the state's prosecutors stuck to their guns.

Finally last week, the state of Connecticut dropped the four felony counts against Amero.  But her vindication isn't quite complete.  As part of the plea, Amero still had to plead guilty to a misdemeanor, pay a $100 fine, and will have to forgo her teaching license in Connecticut.  She has also been hospitalized from stress and a heart condition brought on by the whole ordeal.  Incredibly, some public officials in Connecticut still insist she's guilty of knowingly corrupting minors with porn.  Here's Hartford Courant columnist Rick Green:

New London County State's Attorney Michael Regan told me late Friday the state remained convinced Amero was guilty and was prepared to again go to trial.

"I have no regrets. Things took a course that was unplanned. Unfortunately the computer wasn't examined properly by the Norwich police," Regan said.

"For some reason this case caught the media's attention,'' Regan said.

Another state's prosecutor, David Smith, apparently also said at the hearing that, "the State felt that they had enough of a case, but that due to Julie’s declining health, that he and William Dow had agreed to a lesser charge."  How generous of them.

Attn, DC Reasonoids: Brian Doherty Talking Gun Control on Trial, Monday Nov. 24

Posted on November 22, 2008, 9:03pm | Brian Doherty

My new book on the Heller case and the gun control debate will be out any day now (and read a nifty excerpt from it, from our December print issue). I'll be in D.C. on Monday talking about it at the headquarters of the book's publisher, the Cato Institute.

WHAT: I talk about my new book Gun Control on Trial, with comments on my remarks by lawyer Christopher Rhee of Arnold & Porter. Cato's Tim Lynch moderates.

WHERE: The Cato Institute, 1000 Massachusetts Ave. NW, Washington D.C. 20001

WHEN: Monday, November 24, 4 p.m.

It's free. Refreshments are served after the event. They do like you to register online. All D.C. area reason friends and enemies, please come by.

Poor Poverty Statistics

Posted on November 21, 2008, 8:41pm | Brian Doherty

An article at AEI's web site by Nicholas Eberstadt was a big nostalgia experience for me, as I recall that conservative and libertarian mags were full of this sort of debunking of poverty rate figures during the Reagan '80s/decade of greed when I first started reading them. Apparently, certain anomalies in how we measure official poverty that seem to make things sound worse than they are continue to abound, as Eberstadt explains.

Official U.S. government poverty measures show that the proportion of Americans living in poverty has actually increased some since the early 1970s:

To go by the OPR, then, America, through three decades of both Democratic and Republican administrations, has utterly failed to improve the material lot of the more vulnerable elements of society--to raise them above the income line where, according to the author of the federal poverty measure, "everyday living implied choosing between an adequate diet of the most economical sort and some other necessity, because there was not money enough to have both."

Eberstadt thinks there is much to doubt about this, though.

Since 1973, the behavior of the OPR looks increasingly aberrant when compared to other indices widely thought to bear on the risk of poverty in a modern urbanized society. In 1973, nearly 40 percent of adults over the age of twenty-five lacked a high school degree; by 2001, the figure was under 16 percent. Or consider trends in means-tested benefit programs--food stamps, housing subsidies, Medicaid, the Earned Income Tax Credit, and other programs that benefit the poor. Between the 1973 and 2001 fiscal years, spending on those programs more than tripled from $163 billion to $507 billion (in 2004 dollars) and increased by over 130 percent in real, per-capita terms.

Eberstadt goes on to show data indicating that expenditures by those under the poverty line are a more accurate measure of their actual deprivation than their reported income, and that "there is good evidence that, for the lowest fifth of Americans on the income ladder, reported expenditures are almost twice their incomes." When it comes to food, housing, transportation, health care, and home appliances, data indicates great improvements in overall American well-being that seem to belie stagnant or increasing poverty in the sense of absolute deprivation.

Eberstadt also notes that

the average net worth of households in the bottom fifth has actually grown in the last decade. Additionally, the gains in wealth have been broadly shared, with the portion of bottom fifth households reporting no assets whatever falling from 21 percent in 1989 to just 8 percent in 2004.

He ends with a call for better statistical well-being tracking based more on consumption than reported income, and some tentative praise for alternative poverty measures undertaken by New York's Mayor (for life?) Michael Bloomberg, though even that only offers a snapshot at a moment in time. Given what we know about the great churn in relative well-being among American families and households, and that Eberstadt thinks there is some reason to believe such volatility might be growing, it's mistaken to imagine that there's a large permanent underclass mired in misery being captured in official poverty stats.

What Happens When You Decline Pre-Reeducation

Posted on November 21, 2008, 6:21pm | Matt Welch

Alexander McPherson, professor of molecular biology and biochemistry at UC Irvine, is not the world's biggest fan of AB 1825, the 2004 California bill signed into law by, *cough*, Arnold Schwarzenegger forcing any state employer with more than 50 workers to subject its supervisors to sexual harassment training. So when McPherson continued to tell UCI that he "refused, on principle" to be trained, they were like, "That's cool, this is a university after all."

Ha ha, not really (and not really funny, either).

Last month, the university finally followed through, sending me a letter announcing that my laboratory and the students I oversaw were to be immediately turned over to other university officials and faculty. I continued to refuse to take sexual harassment training, and do so now.

Why so stubborn, professor?

First of all, I believe the training is a disgraceful sham. As far as I can tell from my colleagues, it is worthless, a childish piece of theater, an insult to anyone with a respectable IQ, primarily designed to relieve the university of liability in the case of lawsuits. I have not been shown any evidence that this training will discourage a harasser or aid in alerting the faculty to the presence of harassment.

What's more, the state, acting through the university, is trying to coerce and bully me into doing something I find repugnant and offensive. I find it offensive not only because of the insinuations it carries and the potential stigma it implies, but also because I am being required to do it for political reasons. The fact is that there is a vocal political/cultural interest group promoting this silliness as part of a politically correct agenda that I don't particularly agree with.

The imposition of training that has a political cast violates my academic freedom and my rights as a tenured professor. The university has already nullified my right to supervise my laboratory and the students I teach. It has threatened my livelihood and, ultimately, my position at the university. This for failing to submit to mock training in sexual harassment, a requirement that was never a condition of my employment at the University of California 30 years ago, nor when I came to UCI 11 years ago.

Read McPherson's whole cri du liberte here.

This kind of stuff drives me plum loco. Sexual harassment is already plenty illegal in California; the forced training is because lawmakers were chagrined to discover that criminalization hadn't eliminated every stray ass-grab and Kojak-style boss. More importantly (to me, anyway), is the pile-up of government-enforced behavioral oaths, whether it's to swear to uphold the state constitution (another University of California specialty) or to pretend that marijuana is a dangerous drug. I hope McPherson has an active legal defense fund.

Cathy Young wrote about campus sexual harassment politics for reason back in 1999.

New at Reason: John Berlau on Obama, Clinton, and Deregulation

Posted on November 21, 2008, 6:00pm

Now that he has won the presidency and must shift from campaigning to governing, Obama and his economic team will have to face up to a paradox that most of the media overlooked during the campaign, writes John Berlau. Namely, the Obama campaign's twin messages of bashing deregulation and embracing the Clinton years were inherently contradictory.

Read all about it here.

Now Playing at Reason.tv: Obama's Enron Problem

Posted on November 21, 2008, 4:30pm | Nick Gillespie

 

Capitalism at Work author and Enron insider Robert L. Bradley, Jr. on why Obama's energy plan is as phony as the defunct energy giant's accounting scheme; how Texas Gov. George W. Bush abetted Enron's rise; how Ayn Rand created her own movement meltdown; and much more.

Approximately 10 minutes; interview by Michael C. Moynihan; shot and edited by Dan Hayes.

Reason Writers Around Town: Cathy Young on Russia, the "New Cold War," and Barack Obama

Posted on November 21, 2008, 3:57pm

Writing in The New York Times, Contributing Editor Cathy Young looks at whether Russian President Dmitri Medvedev will keep the “new cold war” going during the Obama administration.

Secretary Clinton

Posted on November 21, 2008, 3:48pm | Michael C. Moynihan

Politico confirms what we all already knew: Sen. Clinton will be America's next secretary of state.

Breaking: President-elect Obama is expected to name New York Federal Reserve President Timothy Geithner as Treasury Secretary on Monday or earlier. Obama is also expected to announce other members of his economic team, sources say.

Meanwhile, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) plans to accept an offer of secretary of State and resign from the Senate, a top Clinton adviser said. An announcement is expected shortly after Thanksgiving, officials said. "She knew this was the right thing to do but just needed to sit with it for a bit to make sure," the adviser said.

Geithner was Under Secretary of the Treasury for International Affairs under Robert Rubin during Bill Clinton's second term. More change we can believe in.

Drug Addict, Patient, Whatever

Posted on November 21, 2008, 3:21pm | Jacob Sullum

Last April, Rose Johnson, a 53-year-old resident of Atwater, California, went to the local DMV office to renew her driver's license. A DMV agent noticed that Johnson was moving slowly, due to neck and back injuries caused by a 1990 car crash, and recommended that the department re-examine her license. During this process, the DMV learned that Johnson uses marijuana to relieve her neck and back pain, as she is permitted to do under state law. Although Johnson has a spotless driving record and never drives under the influence of marijuana, using the drug only at night, the DMV decided she was "incapable of safely operating a motor vehicle because of [an] addiction to, or habitual use of, [a] drug."

This week Americans for Safe Access (ASA) sued the DMV on Johnson's behalf, arguing that the department's decision to revoke her driver's license "based solely on her status as a qualified medical marijuana patient under California law" constitutes an abuse of discretion that violates the Compassionate Use Act (which recognizes marijuana as a medicine) and Johnson's constitutional right to direct the course of her medical treatment. Although a DMV spoksman told the San Francisco Chronicle the department does not have a blanket policy of taking away the licenses of medical marijuana users, instead treating cannabis as it would a prescription drug that could cause impairment, ASA says it knows of similar cases in several other counties. "The DMV cannot simply disregard California's medical marijuana law," says ASA Chief Counsel Joe Elford, who is representing Johnson in her claim against the DMV. "When the voters of California enacted the Compassionate Use Act, they never intended to authorize the DMV to strip medical marijuana patients of their driver's licenses."

The text of the suit is available here (PDF).

[via The Drug War Chronicle]

New at Reason: Jesse Walker on the GOP and the Bailout

Posted on November 21, 2008, 3:00pm

Reporting from Washington, DC, Managing Editor Jesse Walker looks at the Republican Party's efforts to stay afloat in these troubled economic times.

Read all about it here.

Palin and Pollan, Together at Last

Posted on November 21, 2008, 2:40pm | Katherine Mangu-Ward

Everywhere Sarah Palin goes, animals die.

At yesterday's turkey pardoning, Gov. Palin gave an interview in front of the killing cones, where Thanksgiving dinner meets its bloody, neck-snapping doom:

The folks at Huffington Post are upset about the callousness/obliviousness of it all, but here's what I say: If it's good enough for ethical-eating poster boy Michael Pollan, it's good enough for Sarah Palin, right? (To read about Pollan's stint at a plein-air abattoir, go here and search the book for the phrase "killing cones.") Pollan wants America to be in touch with where its food comes from. Well, thanks to Sarah Palin, cable news watchers will be a little more connected with the process that brings turkey to their plates this year. Good work, Sarah!

Palin flashback: Michael Pollan probably isn't on board with this one.

Read my review of Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma (with a killing cones reference!) here.

Press Release of the Day

Posted on November 21, 2008, 2:36pm | Radley Balko

Delivered to my inbox yesterday:

Al Qaeda Leader's Anti-Obama Racial Slur Denounced by Black Conservatives

Washington, D.C. - Members of the Project 21 black leadership network are denouncing the racial slur made against President-elect Barack Obama by al Qaeda deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri, and hope al-Zawahiri's crude action is a sobering reminder for the President-elect and his supporters about the harsh attitudes of our nation's enemies.

"While no fan of Barack Obama, I am a proud American.  I find this terrorist's remarks directed at our nation's incoming leader to be highly offensive," said Project 21 chairman Mychal Massie.

I hear a repentant al-Zawahiri has scheduled a sit-down with Al Sharpton and Don Imus early next week.

Frankbusters

Posted on November 21, 2008, 2:23pm | Jesse Walker

When I wrote my review of Tom Frank's The Wrecking Crew, there was a passage in the text that I didn't have space to address. It demonstrates the ways even the one genuinely worthwhile section of the book -- Frank's history of '80s conservatism -- can go awry:

When Conservative Digest asked Abramoff whom he supported in the 1984 presidential contest, the young roughneck exploded: "Are you kidding? Wally Mondale is a boring wimp." Others on the right taunted "Fritz" Mondale as a "quiche eater," after the squishy food for which "real men" were said to have no appetite, and a squad of CRs [College Republicans] mocked the "wimp" to the catchy theme from Ghostbusters, dancing and singing "It's Ronnie's time; Fritz is a slime." The group reportedly sold almost fifty thousand T-shirts emblazoned with their "Fritzbusters" logo and along the way gave me my first taste of the tradition of gleeful malice that is observed so carefully in conservative circles.

A footnote points out that "'Fritzbusters' images can be found wherever one digs in the right-wing student literature of those days, and the shirts and stickers can still be found in thrift stores and on eBay."

I don't have any interest in sticking up for the mid-'80s College Republicans, but as evidence of a particularly conservative form of "gleeful malice" this is pretty thin gruel. Not just because it wasn't especially malicious by campaign standards, but because it wasn't limited to the Republicans. As a teenager in North Carolina at the same time, I owned a "Helmsbusters" button with essentially the same design. And there was plenty of "Ronbusters" and "Reaganbusters" merchandise out there as well.

The striking thing here isn't that Frank is apparently unaware of the equivalent material on the left. At the time he was a conservative teenager in a conservative state, and I'm not surprised if he didn't see the buttons, posters, and T-shirts available on the other side of the spectrum -- especially in a year when liberals weren't exactly omnipresent. What's striking is that he would use that CR kitsch as evidence of something peculiar to the right without checking whether Democrats also adopted what was, after all, a pretty obvious pop culture reference. If Frank was already running "Fritzbusters" searches on eBay, how much work would it have been to type in "Reaganbusters" as well and see what comes up?

Eric Holder's Second Thoughts on Mandatory Minimums

Posted on November 21, 2008, 1:01pm | Jacob Sullum

The Drug War Chronicle notes that Eric Holder made some semi-encouraging remarks about sentencing reform at a press conference in March 1999, when he was deputy attorney general:

I do not think that we should ever foreclose the possibility that we take a look at how the laws that we have passed are working. I tend to think that mandatory minimum sentences that deal with people who commit violent crimes are almost always good things. I think the concerns are generally raised about mandatory minimum sentences for non-violent drug offenders. And I think there are some questions that we ought to ask.

I do not go into it with a presumption that they're necessarily bad, but we ought to look at the statistics and see, are we putting in prison, are we using our limited prison space for the kind of people that we want to have there? Are the sentences commensurate with the kind of conduct that puts people in jail for these mandatory minimum sentences?

Those are the kinds of questions I think that we ought to ask. And as thinking legislators on both sides, Republicans and Democrats, liberal and conservative, I would hope that we would ask those questions and then go into it with an open mind.

This is pretty weak stuff, especially 13 years after Congress approved draconian new mandatory minimum sentences, by which time their injustice and inefficiency were abundantly clear, even to lock-'em-up-and-throw-away-the-key criminologists such as John DiIulio. And these days, even Joe Biden, creator of the "drug czar" position and one of the most gung-ho drug warriors in the Democratic Party, concedes the need to trim sentences. As the Chronicle notes, our vice president–elect has signed on to legislation that would eliminate the absurd disparity between crack and cocaine powder sentences, a cause President-elect Obama also supports. That would be a significant reform, albeit two decades late. Holder, despite his support for mandatory minimums in D.C. when he was a U.S. attorney, seems to be on a nearby page when it comes to reducing the sentences for people who don't belong in prison at all. Yay, I guess.

Radley Balko Around Town

Posted on November 21, 2008, 12:07pm | Radley Balko

Just a reminder, tomorrow at 11:30am ET I'l be speaking on a panel about police militarization and the drug war at the Students for Sensible Drug Policy's annual conference at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Doherty Talking Gun Control on Trial on the Radio Today--Twice

Posted on November 21, 2008, 12:07pm | Brian Doherty

Obama has appointed a very anti-gun attorney general. But I am not daunted: I'll continue to talk about my new book Gun Control on Trial, the story of the Supreme Court's Heller case (which overturned D.C.'s gun ban and established that the Second Amendment protects an individual right) and America's gun control debate.

I'll be talking about it today on two programs. One, Barry Lynn's "Culture Shocks", which airs nationally on WMET 1160 AM in D.C. (4-5 p.m.), KCAA 1050 AM in Los Angeles (1-2 p.m.), KRXA 540 AM in Monterey, CA (1-2 p.m.), and KTAA 1330 AM in Cameron, TX (3-4 p.m.) All times are local. Check the show's web site for more details and listen-live options.

Also, today at 10:15 a.m. pacific/1:15 p.m. eastern, I'll be on Antiwar Radio with host Scott Horton, also talking Gun Control on Trial.

See an excerpt from the book in the December issue of reason.

New at Reason: Ben Malisow Interviews Game Designer Jeff Vogel

Posted on November 21, 2008, 12:00pm

From our December issue, Ben Malisow talks about individualism, niche markets, and the politics of fantasy with acclaimed independent game designer Jeff Vogel.

Read all about it here.

New Report: CIA Lied About Missionary Plane Shot Down Over Peru

Posted on November 21, 2008, 11:15am | Radley Balko

In 2001, the Peruvian Air Force shot down a plane flying over the Amazon after receiving information from the CIA that the plane was trafficking in narcotics.  It wasn't.  It was filled with Christian missionaries.  The attack resulted in the death of 35-year-old Veronica Bowers and her infant daughter Charity.  The CIA was working with the government of Peru as part of a program to intercept drug planes en route—another part of our disastrous drug interdiction efforts in Latin America.

Seven years later, CIA Inspector General John Helgerson has issued a blistering report finding that the CIA repeatedly lied and covered up details about the intercept program, about the downing of Bowers' plane, and about other incidents that never made the news.

Unfortunately much of Helgerson's report is classified, so the conclusions, while damning, are frustratingly lacking in detail.  Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.), whose district Bowers was from, is trying to get the entire report declassified.  Here are a few excerpts from what's been released to the public [pdf]:

The plane, following the Amazon River in its westward journey in daylight, was tracked by a CIA aircraft as a suspected narcotrafficker and was fired on by the Peruvian Air Force.  The mother and infant were killed; the American pilot was seriously wounded.  Within hours, CIA officers began to characterize the shootdown as a one-time mistake in an otherwise well-run program.  In fact, this was not the case.

[...]

The routine disregard of the required intercept procedures in the ABDP led to the rapid shooting down of target aircraft without adequate safeguards to protect against the loss of innocent life.  Key Peruvian and American participants in the program told OIG that, in many cases, performing the required procedures would have taken time and might have resulted in the escape of the target aircraft.  In addition, because the required procedures to establish contact with a target aircraft were difficult to conduct, it was easier to shoot the aircraft down than to force it down.  The result was that, in many cases, suspect aircraft were shot down within two to three minutes of being sighted by the Peruvian fighter – without being properly identified, without being given the required warnings to land, and without being given time to respond to such warnings as were given to land. 

[Emphasis in original.]

In other words, the risk of the loss of innocent life was acceptable if it meant more efficient ways of inhibiting the delivery of narcotics.  Lying to Congress and the exeuctive?  All worth it.  Because it's all about stopping people from getting high.

Collateral damage—and let's face it, that's how the CIA and federal drug warriors view Veronica and Charity Bowers—has always been an accepted part of drug prohibition, but this callous disregard for the loss of life and human rights seems particularly egregious in our foreign interdiction efforts.  See the House of Death case, where federal agents looked the other way while one of their Mexican informants participated in a series of brutal and entirely preventable murders.  See our pre-September 11 anti-narcotics alliance with the Taliban, or our continued drug interdiction aid to Thailand after the government mass executed thousands of suspected drug offenders, sans trial.

My favorite most recent example is an op-ed in the Arizona Daily Star by a former DHS counter-narcotics official insisting that the increasingly bloody and brutal drug-related killing in Mexico is a sign that the U.S. and Mexico are "winning" the drug war.  Because what's a few thousand dead Mexicans if we can point to a 19 percent drop in the use of cocaine here in the U.S.?

Yes, He Can. Maybe. When He Gets Around To It: An Ongoing Series

Posted on November 21, 2008, 11:13am | Brian Doherty

Some of his supporters may not be disappointed at all. He did warn that he might not be able to achieve all his goals in one term. (And for most of his goals, that's a very good thing.) Still, this from today's Washington Times. Obama

will not move for months, and perhaps not until 2010, to ask Congress to end the military's decades-old ban on open homosexuals in the ranks, two people who have advised the Obama transition team on this issue say.

Repealing the ban was an Obama campaign promise. However, Mr. Obama first wants to confer with the Joint Chiefs of Staff and his new political appointees at the Pentagon to reach a consensus and then present legislation to Congress, the advisers said.

"I think 2009 is about foundation building and reaching consensus," said Aubrey Sarvis, executive director of the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network. The group supports military personnel targeted under the ban.

Mr. Sarvis told The Washington Times that he has held "informal discussions" with the Obama transition team on how the new president should proceed on the potentially explosive issue.

Lawrence Korb, an analyst at the Center for American Progress and an adviser to the Obama campaign, said the new administration should set up a Pentagon committee to make recommendations to Congress on a host of manpower issues, including the gay ban.

Apparently Obama remembers how Clinton got sandbagged on this one. But a lot has changed since then. It has been an extraordinary decade of progress in public acceptance of gays, with gay marriage, for example, going from a Falwellian horror fantasy to gin up donations for halting American moral decay to something courts are willing to grant as a right, and the voting public can get close to supporting when asked. And as the article mentions, "Today, gay activists cite national polls that show public sentiment, unlike in 1993, support removing the ban." See one such poll here, from early 2007, with 55 percent support for open gay service in the military.

I imagine if Obama makes this change cleanly at any time in his term, he'll be fondly remembered. Still, his apparent unwillingness to be bold on something he considers a matter of both justice and wise policy--and that he has clear political support on--should be disconcerting to his fans.

Mike Riggs on the disaster of "don't ask, don't tell" back in July.

[Hat tip: John Kluge]

Eric Holder and the Second Amendment

Posted on November 21, 2008, 11:08am | Damon W. Root

Gun rights scholar and reason contributor David Kopel has an excellent post at the Volokh Conspiracy detailing future Attorney General Eric Holder's lousy and troubling record on the Second Amendment:

As Deputy Attorney General, Holder was a strong supporter of restrictive gun control. He advocated federal licensing of handgun owners, a three day waiting period on handgun sales, rationing handgun sales to no more than one per month, banning possession of handguns and so-called "assault weapons" (cosmetically incorrect guns) by anyone under age of 21, a gun show restriction bill that would have given the federal government the power to shut down all gun shows, national gun registration, and mandatory prison sentences for trivial offenses (e.g., giving your son an heirloom handgun for Christmas, if he were two weeks shy of his 21st birthday). He also promoted the factoid that "Every day that goes by, about 12, 13 more children in this country die from gun violence"--a statistic is true only if one counts 18-year-old gangsters who shoot each other as "children."(Sources: Holder testimony before House Judiciary Committee, Subcommitee on Crime, May 27,1999; Holder Weekly Briefing, May 20, 2000. One of the bills that Holder endorsed is detailed in my 1999 Issue Paper "Unfair and Unconstitutional.")

After 9/11, he penned a Washington Post op-ed, "Keeping Guns Away From Terrorists" arguing that a new law should give "the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms a record of every firearm sale." He also stated that prospective gun buyers should be checked against the secret "watch lists" compiled by various government entities. (In an Issue Paper on the watch list proposal, I quote a FBI spokesman stating that there is no cause to deny gun ownership to someone simply because she is on the FBI list.)

After the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the D.C. handgun ban and self-defense ban were unconstitutional in 2007, Holder complained that the decision "opens the door to more people having more access to guns and putting guns on the streets."

Whole thing here. Kopel's reason archives here.

As We Look Past the Next Four Years of Virtually Certain Unmitigated Crapitude, Here's a Couple of Thoughts on Election 2012

Posted on November 21, 2008, 8:50am | Nick Gillespie

As Brian Doherty noted not so many days—oy, it feels like years!—when it comes to electoral politics, small "l" and big "l" libertarians know disappointment like Charlie Brown knows kite-eating trees.

Yet as those of us who belong to that dwindling tribe of Mohicans who believe in choice not coercion, free minds and free markets, open borders, drug legalization, buyouts not bailouts, and more look to 2012, let's keep in mind two great hopes for a fun, invigorating, and informational presidential race.

I humbly submit that Duke University political science professor Michael Munger, who ran a strong bid as an Libertarian Party candidate for governor in North Carolina, set his eyes toward an even bigger and remote target in 2012, that stationary Death Star known as the White House. Here's a clip of Munger in action:

reason's Dave Weigel talked with Munger here.

And here's another ticket well worth considering, that of LP activist Angela Keaton and blogger Michelle Shingal:

Full disclosure: Keaton is married to Brian Doherty. Shinghal promises "a chicken in every pot" to everyone who follows this simple plan.

Munger and Keaton/Shinghal would doubtlessly run fun, media-savvy campaigns that would delight and edify the masses.

And as long as we're talking about revolution at the ballot box, let's not forget Matt Welch and Dan Haye's mad mood poem for the Ron Paul Revolution (long time passing):

Plus-Sized Hosers Take Off in Two Seats in Great White North, Eh

Posted on November 21, 2008, 7:05am | Nick Gillespie

"One passenger, one fare" is not quite as catchy as "one man, one vote," but Canada's new court ruling on the matter may finally convince ursine musical felon David Crosby to finally move to the Great White North.

Obese people have the right to two seats for the price of one on flights within Canada, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled on Thursday.

The high court declined to hear an appeal by Canadian airlines of a decision by the Canadian Transportation Agency that people who are "functionally disabled by obesity" deserve to have two seats for one fare.

The airlines had lost an appeal at the Federal Court of Appeal in May and had sought to launch a fresh appeal at the Supreme Court. The court's decision not to hear a new appeal means the one-person-one-fare policy stands.

More here.

reason on obesity here.

New at Reason: Friday Funnies

Posted on November 21, 2008, 7:00am

In the latest edition of Friday Funnies, Chip Bok examines Bill Clinton's post-presidential career.

I Love the Smell of Murderous Thuggery in the Evening

Posted on November 20, 2008, 10:10pm | Radley Balko

Legendary high-end Paris candle-maker Cire Trudon introduces "Ernesto," for those of you who want to fill your home with the scent of a sweaty, murdering Latin revolutionary:

In a hotel of Havana, sizzling under the stubborn sun of the Revolution, fierce overtones of leather and tobacco meddle with waxy silence of wood. Breaking out of the cool dimness, sly grimaces emerge, framed by the smoke of cigars and the barrels of guns.

Please note, this scent isn't for the proletariat.  This particular block of paraffin infused with the scent of glorious Marxist uprising will set you back a cool $75 for 9.5 ounces.  ¡Hasta la Victoria Siempre!

Thanks to Jim McCarthy for the link.

Judge Orders Release of Five Gitmo Detainees

Posted on November 20, 2008, 10:00pm | Radley Balko

From the Washington Post:

For the first time, a federal judge today ordered the release of enemy combatants from the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, ruling that the government had provided insufficient evidence to continue their detentions.

The decision came in the case of six Algerians who were detained in Bosnia after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks and have been held at the military prison in Cuba for nearly seven years. U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon, a Bush appointee, ruled that five of the men must be released “forthwith” and ordered the government to engage in diplomatic efforts to find them new homes.

In an unusual move, Leon also urged the government not to appeal his ruling, saying “seven years of waiting for our legal system to give them an answer” was long enough.

The judge did find sufficient evidence for the government to continue to hold a sixth detainee, which suggests his decision was the result of a careful look at the evidence.

I browsed the reactions of a few conservative blogs, and found the predictable outrage that the court system would dare challenge the authority of the executive branch to snatch up people and detain people in overseas prisons without ever giving them a trial, possibly ever.  What you won't find is much concern that the Bush administration has been wrong in a disturbing number of these cases about just how dangerous most of the Gitmo detainees really are—which you would think might raise worries that a not insignificant number of them may actually be innocent.

National Review's Andy McCarthy nearly gets there:

It seems pretty clear that the Bush administration did not help matters here.  Nearly seven years ago, the President publicly claimed the Algerians were planning a bomb attack on the U.S. embassy in Sarajevo.  Last month, however, the Justice Department suddenly informed the Court that it was no longer relying on that information.  We've seen this sort of thing happen too many times over the last seven years...

...and?  And the frequency of these mistakes should give us pause before placing all of our trust in the executive to detain people indefinitely on the basis of secret, unreviewable evidence?  And the Bush administration should be ashamed of itself for exaggerating the actual evidence against some of these detainees in its efforts to drum up support for unlimited executive power?  And it raises the shameful possibility that we may actually have kidnapped and arrested more than a few innocent people, and detained them for years?

No, no.  None of that.  McCarthy concludes....

...and the effect can only be to reduce the confidence of the court and the public that the government is in command of the relevant facts and can be trusted to make thoughtful decisions.

Ah yes.  A Republican-appointed judge has reviewed his first six Gitmo cases, and found that in five of the six, the government not only didn't have sufficient evidence to continue to hold the detainees, he ordered their release forthwith, and urged the government not to appeal his ruling.  That's a pretty resounding repudiation.  And McCarthy's reaction is, "Gee, I hope this doesn't undermine the public's faith in executive power!"

It damned-well ought to.  Remember that last month,  U.S. District Judge Ricardo M. Urbina ordered the release of 17 Chinese Uighurs, also after determining the government had no proof not only that they were enemy combatants, but that they were even a security risk (the government won on appeal, so the Uighurs are still at Gitmo).  And as I wrote in a short piece for reason last year, an astonishingly high number of Gitmo detainees fall far short of the classification "the worst of the worst," to use a favorite phrase of the Bush administration and its allies.

In May 2003, Guantanamo held 680 prisoners, the highest number to date. About half have since been released. The Bush administration has claimed the prisoners at the camp represent the “worst of the worst” terrorist threats to the U.S. But when the Seton Hall law professor Mark Denbeaux and the defense attorney Joshua Denbeaux analyzed information supplied by the Defense Department, they found that less than half the inmates were determined to have committed a hostile act against the United States or its allies. Only 8 percent are suspected to be Al Qaeda fighters.

Of the 385 still held at Guantanamo, the Pentagon plans to formally charge 60 to 80. To date, just two have been tried by a military tribunal, and only one, Australian David Hicks, has been convicted. He was sentenced to nine months in prison, which he was allowed to serve in Australia.

You can add to that Salim Hamdan, who was convicted in a military tribunal on minor counts of supporting terrorism.  The government wanted 30 years to life.  The tribunal judge gave him just five-and-a-half years, clearly a comment on the seriousness of crimes.  He will soon be eligible for release, unless the government decides to continue to detain him, anyway.

Me, I look at all of this and I worry that we've given the executive way too much power, that they're abusing that power, and that our government is arresting, detaining, and possibly torturing people who are either innocent, or clearly not a threat to the United States.  McCarthy looks at all of this and worries that it might undermine the cause of continuing to give the executive unchecked power to keep people in prison indefinitely, no questions asked.

To which my response would be . . . one can only hope.

Liquidate the Libertarian Party?

Posted on November 20, 2008, 8:34pm | Brian Doherty

Over at the Volokh Conspiracy, reason contributor Ilya Somin repeats a pretty consistent call from the more intellectual end of the libertarian movement oh these past 25 years or so: give up on the Libertarian Party as a meaningful vehicle for political/ideological change. An excerpt:

....third party politics simply is not an effective way of promoting libertarianism in the "first past the post" American political system. That system makes it almost impossible for a third party to win any important elected offices. And such a party also can't be an effective tool for public education because the media isn't likely to devote much attention to a campaign with no chance of success.

Libertarians have had some genuine successes over the last 35 years. These include abolition of the draft (heavily influenced by Milton Friedman's ideas), deregulation of large portions of the economy (of which libertarians were the leading intellectual advocates), major reductions in tax rates (facilitated by libertarian economists, libertarian activists, and the legislative efforts of libertarian-leaning Republicans), the increasing popularity of school choice programs, increases in judicial protection for property rights, gun rights, and economic liberties (thanks in large part to advocacy by libertarian legal activists), and heightened respect for privacy and freedom of speech (promoted by libertarians in cooperation with other groups). Libertarian academics and intellectuals have also done much to make libertarian ideas more respectable and less marginal than they were in the 1960s and early 70s.

What all these successes have in common is that they were achieved either by working within the two major parties or by efforts outside the context of party politics altogether. The Libertarian Party didn't play a significant role in any of them.

Libertarians often emphasize that failed enterprises should be liquidated rather than kept going on artificial life support. That enables their resources to be reinvested in other, more successful firms. The point is well taken, and it applies to the Libertarian Party itself. For 35 years, the Party has consumed valuable resources, both financial and human. The money spent on the LP and the time donated by its committed activists could do a lot more to promote libertarianism if used in other ways.

Of course, for some people third party activism is exactly and only how they would care to participate in the game of public ideological change. And for some (including yours truly) getting hooked on the team-sports aspect of an ideological movement through what seems, especially to the young, its only significant action element, political parties running for office, leads them on to other parts of the ol' war for liberty (for better or for worse, I grant).

I wrote on how and why third party politics might be more a consumer good (for its own sake) than a capital good (meant to lead to something else, like political or ideological change, that is meaningful for its own sake) back in 2004.

Mike Huckabee: "The Best Government Is Self-Government..."

Posted on November 20, 2008, 4:27pm | Nick Gillespie

huckb...by which I mean you have the right to agree with me.

Over at Pajamas TV, Helen and Glenn Reynolds interview former GOP presidential candidate and Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee about the future of the Republican Party. The Huck continues his jihad against libertarians, those strange and horrible creatures who dislike government intrusion into private matters but support low, low taxes. This is an interesting performance, as Huckabee can't find a single good thing to say about libertarians but worries over their lack of Big Tentedness. Go figure.

The fun begins about five or 10 minutes in, after a discussion by others about the future of conservatism. And just why won't Huckabee mention Mitt Romney? His phony folksiness is summed up by his discussion of whether he would vote for a Mormon. Huck is shocked that anyone could ask such a question and then goes on to note that many of the finest people he knows are Mormons and dodges why he asked The New York Times whether Latter Day Saints think that Jesus and the Devil are brothers.

reason on Huck here.

Cotton and Cretaceous Geography Favor Obama for President

Posted on November 20, 2008, 4:25pm | Katherine Mangu-Ward

The black dots represent cotton production in the 1860s—each dot is 2,000 bushels bales. The blue counties went for Obama in 2008.

One of the commenters on the excellent Strange Maps site, whence this map came, notes that the history of this slice of land goes back even further:

These areas are still used predominantly for agriculture, and they actually have a name: the “black belt,” which refers both to the region’s rich, loamy soils and to its demographics.

So, in addition to seeing this swoosh-shaped pattern in political maps and in maps of 1860 cotton production, you’ll also note it in soil maps and in geological maps of shorelines in the Cretaceous Period.

eHarmony Forced to Create a Dating Service for Gay Singles

Posted on November 20, 2008, 3:57pm | Jacob Sullum

In a settlement with the New Jersey Attorney General's Office, the online dating service eHarmony, until now limited to heterosexuals, has agreed to start matching men with men and women with women. The deal resolves a complaint by a gay man who claimed that eHarmony's failure to accommodate homosexuals violated New Jersey's Law Against Discrimination. eHarmony's lawyer said it believed the complaint "resulted from an unfair characterization of our business" but settled because "litigation outcomes can be unpredictable." (Isn't that the main reason anyone settles a lawsuit?) The company's new service for gay singles, Compatiblepartners.net, may also resolve similar litigation in California.

I've never bought the argument that gay marriage—i.e., the government's evenhanded recognition of relationships between couples, without regard to sexual orientation—is a way of forcing "the gay agenda" onto people who object to it. But this coerced agreement, compelling a private business to provide a service it did not want to provide, certainly is. As Michelle Malkin notes, "this case is akin to a meat-eater suing a vegetarian restaurant for not offering him a ribeye or a female patient suing a vasectomy doctor for not providing her hysterectomy services."

eHarmony founder Neil Clark Warren says the company has declined to serve the gay market because the compatibility research on which it relies to match people was done with heterosexuals and may not be applicable to same-sex couples. But even if he decided to focus on heterosexuals because he disapproves of homosexuality, that should be his right in a free society. Potential customers excluded or offended by that choice then would have a right to go elsewhere, instead of forcibly imposing their preferences. Likewise, competitors would be free to take advantage of eHarmony's perceived shortcomings, as they've been trying to do. Speaking of competitors, wouldn't the principle that justifies forcing eHarmony to match gay singles also require gay dating services to match heterosexuals and Jewish dating services to match Christians?

Katherine Mangu-Ward covered the controversy over eHarmony's "straights only" policy in the November 2007 issue of reason.

[Thanks to John Kluge for the tip.]

New at Reason: Michael Moynihan on IFC's New Media Bias Show

Posted on November 20, 2008, 3:56pm

Michael C. Moynihan watches episode one of The IFC Media Project, a six-part documentary series on the Independent Film Channel exploring media bias and malfeasance, and discovers that its host just wants more government regulation of the news.

Read all about it here.

A Bit More on Eric Holder

Posted on November 20, 2008, 2:10pm | Radley Balko

Drug Policy Reform Organizations Weigh in on Holder

Posted on November 20, 2008, 1:34pm | Radley Balko

I asked several drug policy reform groups for a statement on Obama's nomination of Eric Holder to head up the Justice Department.  The consensus seemed to be mild disappointment tempered with cautious optimism that despite his recent staff selections, Obama will keep his campaign promises to end the federal raids on medical marijuana dispensaries and work to ameliorate the discrepancy in crack/powder cocaine sentencing.

I think this is about right.  In Rahm Emanuel, Joe Biden, and now Holder, Obama has already picked some pretty aggressive drug warriors for top positions.  That's troubling only to the extent that their positions on federal drug policy factored into his decision to choose them.  I doubt that it played a role with any of the three. 

All three will of course be advising Obama.  And I'd rather have less draconian aides whispering in his ear.  But if Obama has designs on changing federal drug policy, he'll do so.  Neither Biden, nor Holder, nor Emanuel can stop him.  Who Obama ends up choosing to head up the DEA and ONDCP will be a far better indicator of whether he intends to continue the Bush administration's aggressive prosecution of the drug war, or if he's looking at a more tempered approach.

My prediction?  He'll call off the medical marijuana raids.  Anything more would be a pleasant surprise.  And even that will be offset by his insistence on resurrecting harmful criminal justice block grant programs.

The ACLU's Drug Law Reform Project declined to comment.  But here's what other drug policy reform advocates had to say:

Aaron Houston, director of government relations, Marijuana Policy Project

Holder's record from a dozen years ago is concerning, but we expect President-elect Obama to keep his pledge to end federal raids in medical marijuana states, and that the Obama administration will not rerun the Clinton administration's terrible medical marijuana policies. One in four Americans now lives in a medical marijuana state, and medical marijuana outpolled Obama in Michigan by six points. Medical marijuana states, including Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada, were essential to Obama's victory, and continuing a federal war against a quarter of the country would make no sense.

Bill Piper, director of of national affairs, Drug Policy Alliance

Holder seems really knowledgeable about the ways the war on terror infringes on civil liberties and how that undermines law enforcement, but seems to have a blindspot when it comes to the war on drugs, which also infringes on civil liberties and undermines law enforcement (probably more so than the war on terror). President-elect Obama doesn't have this blindspot so there's room for hope. America needs an Attorney General who will stand behind Obama's promises to end the DEA's medical marijuana raids in California, eliminate the crack/powder disparity, repeal the federal syringe ban and begin treating drug use as a health issue instead of a criminal justice issue. 

 Julie Stewart, president, Families Against Mandatory Minimums

FAMM’s experience with Eric Holder has been limited primarily to executive clemencies granted during the Clinton administration and that experience was generally a good one.  Holder was Deputy Attorney General when nearly two dozen nonviolent drug offenders serving harsh and excessive sentences were granted much-deserved commutations at the end of President Clinton’s term.  Although Holder is most well-known for his opinion regarding the Marc Rich pardon, he presumably reviewed and recommended in favor of commuting the sentences of the drug offenders, too, who have gone on to lead productive and law-abiding lives.  Hopefully, his experience as Deputy Attorney General will motivate him to take an active role as Attorney

General in ensuring that clemency requests are processed in an efficient manner and that real and meaningful review is given to all cases, which is currently not happening.

Holder’s past positions on mandatory minimum sentences give pause.  As the U.S. Attorney in Washington, DC in 1996 he advocated for mandatory sentences of 18 months to six years for selling drugs – including marijuana.  (Thankfully, the DC City Council did not adopt his proposal.)  FAMM will give him the benefit of the doubt and hope that in the ensuing dozen years he has developed a more comprehensive view of sentencing policy that gives the courts the reasoned discretion they need to sentence individuals according to their culpability. Confirmation hearings should flesh out his current position on sentencing policy.

Allen St. Pierre, executive director, NORML

NORML has serious concerns about the choice of Eric Holder as the next Attorney General because he has a long history of opposing drug policy reforms, perceiving cannabis smoking by adults as a public nuisance worthy of constant harassment, promoting violent governmental intervention into the private lives of citizens who consume cannabis, supporting mandatory minimum sentencing and so-called civil forfeiture laws.

His attraction to the myth of ‘fixing broken windows’ and using law enforcement to crack down on petty crimes will swell an already overburdened, bloated, expensive and failed government prohibition against otherwise law-abiding citizens who choose to consume cannabis.

Breaking (From Yesterday)!: Reason Foundation's Proactive No Vote on Tom Daschle as HHS Secretary

Posted on November 20, 2008, 1:14pm | Nick Gillespie

Yesterday I directed Hit & Runners' attention to Reason Foundation policy analyst Shikha Dalmia's proactive case against picking the awful Eric Holder as President-elect Barack Obama's attorney general.

Now that we know that the awful former Sen. Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) is going to be Obama's Health and Human Services jefe, it's time to look again what Dalmia wrote earlier this week in her exhaustive survey of good, bad, and ugly picks for the next administration's cabinet:

For libertarians, three poor picks [for HHS secretary] would be chairman of the Democratic Party and former Vermont Governor Howard Dean, New York Sen. Hillary Clinton, rumored to be the frontrunner for Secretary of State, and former Democratic Senator from South Dakota Tom Daschle.

Dean, a doctor himself, tried to control soaring health care costs by expanding government control over insurance prices and hospital budgets. He also created a statewide insurance pool and formed a new bureaucracy to manage it. None of this worked and premiums—and the number of uninsured—increased under him.

Clinton, of course, tried to nationalize the health care industry in one fell swoop when her husband was in office. Even though she seems to have abandoned that plan, during her presidential campaign, she advocated forcing the uninsured to buy coverage—through penalties and fines if necessary—to achieve universal coverage.

Meanwhile, since leaving the Senate, Daschle has written a book titled, Critical: What We Can Do About America's Health-Care Crisis, in which he recommends creating the equivalent of the Federal Reserve Board for health care to set treatment standards, performance requirements and impose other mandates on the industry. In short, create another layer of bureaucracy on top of the one that he would oversee and hand it even more powers.

[Any] of them will signal a return of Big Government, big time.

More here.

To which I can only say: The return of Big Government? It feels like it's never left.

Obama Is Still Pushing Green Snake Oil

Posted on November 20, 2008, 12:53pm | Jacob Sullum

In a taped speech shown to attendees at a climate change conference in California this week, Barack Obama continued trying to distract Americans from the enormous cost of making substantial reductions in carbon dioxide emissions by promising "five million new green jobs that pay well and can't be outsourced." Not only is this number pulled out of thin air; it's nothing to be happy about. As I've noted, the manpower required to transform the economy so that greenhouse gas emission targets can be reached is a measure of the cost involved. Obama makes it seem as if we should try to maximize this cost, promising that green jobs will "steer our country out of this economic crisis."

That is pretty much the opposite of the truth. As The New York Times notes, "some industry leaders and members of Congress have suggested that Mr. Obama's climate proposal would impose too great a cost on an already-stressed economy—having the same effects as a tax on coal, oil and natural gas—and should await the end of the current downturn." Obama's response is to portray the economic burden as a boon.

In the speech, he does implicitly make the case that the cost he refuses to acknowledge will be justified in the long run:

Few challenges facing America—and the world—are more urgent than combating climate change. The science is beyond dispute and the facts are clear. Sea levels are rising. Coastlines are shrinking. We've seen record drought, spreading famine, and storms that are growing stronger with each passing hurricane season.

Is it really "beyond dispute" that global warming already has produced drought, famine, and stronger storms? New York Times environmental reporter Andrew Revkin notes that "the statement about 'storms that are growing stronger with each passing hurricane season' is hard to square with the science on hurricanes in a warming world, which has gotten more nuanced of late."

Even if Obama were right about current conditions, and right that things will only get worse, what evidence is there that his cap-and-trade plan will ameilorate the trend enough to justify the cost? Assuming we meet his goal of an 80 percent reduction in carbon dioxide emissions by 2050 (a conveniently distant deadline), how much will it cost, what impact will it have on global warming, and how much damage will thereby be avoided?

Bjorn Lomborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist and Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming, argues that adapting to climate change is much more cost-effective that trying to prevent it, an effort he says is unlikely to have any measurable impact. Presumably Obama thinks Norberg Lomborg is wrong. I'd like to hear why. But that would require Obama to be more candid about the sacrifices demanded by his plan to create the Clean-Energy Economy of Tomorrow. It is difficult to perform a cost-benefit analysis if you refuse to admit there's a cost.

Ron Bailey's interview with Lomborg appeared in the October issue of reason.

Brits Propose Possible Life Sentence for Johns

Posted on November 20, 2008, 12:05pm | Radley Balko

New at Reason: Jesse Walker on Thomas Frank's The Wrecking Crew

Posted on November 20, 2008, 12:00pm

From our December issue, Managing Editor Jesse Walker explains what's wrong with Thomas Frank's new book The Wrecking Crew, which blames libertarians for Jack Abramoff and George W. Bush.

Read all about it here.

I For One Welcome Our New Mustachioed Overlords

Posted on November 20, 2008, 11:14am | David Weigel

The environmental movement has claimed a big, 82-year old scalp: Michigan Rep. John Dingell, who's been in Congress since Eisenhower's first term, has lost the chairmanship of the House Energy and Commerce Committee to California Rep. Henry Waxman.

Waxman’s takeover of the Energy and Commerce caps a quarter-century rivalry between him and Dingell. While they agree on many issues — most notably health care — the two men have clashed since the 1980s over environmental regulations. Waxman, who leans to the left of his party, is an advocate of strong clean air protections and stringent fuel-efficiency and energy conservation measures.

Dingell has been a fierce protector of the auto industry, which is crucial to the economy of his home state of Michigan.

Waxman’s victory gives him control of one of the most powerful committees in Congress, with jurisdiction that touches almost every corner of domestic policy, from energy to health care to telecommunications.

You can't overstate how much liberals had come to resent Dingell. Glenn Hurowitz's 2007 rundown of the saga is a good place to start.

In a nod to Dingell, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi excluded an increase in vehicle fuel efficiency -- despite the fact that the Senate included such an increase in its energy bill and more than 200 House co-sponsors have publicly backed the measure. It was a notable gap in a bill that otherwise included aggressive measures to tackle the climate crisis and secure energy independence, like diverting $16 billion in subsidies from oil and gas companies towards clean energy...

Earlier this summer, Dingell floated an energy proposal that could almost have come out of Dick Cheney's energy task force. Not only did it propose massive subsidies for dirt fossil fuels like coal and prohibit increases in automobile fuel efficiency, it took a somewhat gratuitous swipe at Pelosi's home state by revoking California's more than 30-year-old authority to set its own cleaner air standards.

Reason contributing editor Julian Sanchez has more on Waxman's views of intellectual property, part of his new fiefdom.

Reason Writers Around the Ether

Posted on November 20, 2008, 11:00am

Managing Editor Jesse Walker's weekly freeform radio show, Titicut Follies, will be broadcast on WCBN-FM this afternoon from 12 to 3, eastern time. If you live in the Ann Arbor/Ypsilanti area, you can tune in at 88.3 FM; if you live elsewhere, you can listen online.

For more information about the show, go here. For selected podcasts of previous programs, go here and here.

When Does an Infant Industry Stop Needing Its Taxpayer Allowance?

Posted on November 20, 2008, 10:48am | Ronald Bailey

Federal bioethanol subsidies are 30 years old this month. As reason has documented time after time after time after time, those subsidies to corn ethanol have had deleterious effects on the environment and the price of food around world.

It's way past time for the industry to stand or fall on its own economic merits. Food Before Fuel, a broad coalition of environmental, farming, taxpayer, consumer and other groups, is calling on the feds to drop counterproductive bioethanol subsidies:

“On many issues, these groups gathered here today do not see eye to eye.  But we have come together because we all can agree that the government’s subsidization of the corn ethanol industry is a flawed policy that pits rural industries against one another, raises food prices for everyone and has failed to yield promised environmental benefits,” Brandenberger said.

Duane Parde, president of the National Taxpayers Union, was critical of the ethanol industry as a “demonstrative waste of taxpayer money in a time of economic hardship.”

"President-elect Obama and the 111th Congress have an opportunity to protect taxpayers and end business as usual,” Parde said. “We have spent 30 years and billions of taxpayer dollars subsidizing the production of ethanol with little to show for it. Despite the subsidies, ethanol is not competitive in the marketplace and the industry only survives because politicians shovel our money into their pockets. We must end the bailouts and subsidies for industries that are unable or unwilling to stand on their own."

Craig Cox, Midwest vice president of the Environmental Working Group, said that, "After 30 years of subsidies, ethanol is displacing only 3 percent of the gasoline we use each year, is likely increasing rather than decreasing greenhouse gas emissions, and is threatening our soil,  water and wildlife. Yet ethanol gets $3 out of every $4 of tax credits the federal government gives to all renewable alternatives including wind, solar and geothermal. It is time we direct our tax dollars to renewable alternatives, including biofuels, based on how well they protect our climate, our environment and our energy security."

Jason Clay, senior vice president for market transformation at the World Wildlife Fund, noted, “In its work with local communities and habitats across the globe, the World Wildlife Fund has seen the negative impacts of the biofuel policy not only on the environment, but on vulnerable populations throughout the world.”

As Competitive Enterprise Institute senior fellow Marlo Lewis notes:

"After 30 years of government coddling, it's time for this infant industry to grow up and succeed or fail on its own merits. If ethanol is commercially viable then no government support is needed; if it is not commercially viable, no amount of government support can make it so."

Whole anti-subsidy coalition press release here. 

Disclosure: I am an adjunct fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. 

Dammit, Janet, I Love You

Posted on November 20, 2008, 10:28am | David Weigel

If Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano actually becomes Secretary of Homeland Security, as President-elect Obama seems to desire... well, we could do worse. The first DHS secretary, Tom Ridge, struck me (I only met him twice) as a smart guy who really didn't understand his portfolio and was being driven slowly mad by the blame accrued for the agency's sloppy organization and stupid proposals. Second-and-current Secretary Michael Chertoff as been nowhere near as bad as we had reason to expect. Yes, he presided over Hurricane Katrina. But that seems to have been another victim of the inherent bureaucratic nightmare of DHS.

I think history has already forgotten Battlin' Bernie Kerik, the laughably corrupt and mobbed-up cop whom Rudy Giuliani commended to George W. Bush as a great replacement for Ridge. Kerik's nomination caught fire like styrofoam in a microwave, and we as a nation got the first clue that Giuliani had been replaced at some point in 2001-2004 by a strange, bald cyborg that needed to recharge batteries by making inopportune phone calls to its "wife."

Anyway, the worst idea proferred by Chertoff has been the national ID card, the slow decline and sputter-out of which I wrote about earlier this year. One of the governors who helped nail down the coffin lid on REAL ID was... Janet Napolitano.

On Tuesday, Gov. Janet Napolitano signed a measure, House Bill 2677, barring Arizona's compliance with the Real ID program. In so doing, she called it an unfunded federal mandate that would stick states such as Arizona with a multibillion-dollar bill for the cost to develop and implement the series of new fraud-proof identification cards.
...
In a letter explaining her support for HB 2677, Napolitano cited a White House estimate that Real ID would cost at least $4 billion to implement. But thus far, she said, the federal government has only appropriated $90 million to help Arizona and other states offset those costs.

"My support of the Real ID Act is, and has always been, contingent upon adequate federal funding," Napolitano wrote Tuesday. "Absent that, the Real ID Act becomes just another unfunded federal mandate."

The implication is that Napolitano would favor a national ID if it could be funded. What's the likelihood of it being funded soon? Not very high. So Napolitano seems, first and foremost, like an effective manager who understands immigration policy and has been a bulwark against the crab barrel of restrictionist crazies in her state. Not the worst pick Obama could make.

The Great American Smokeout is Today...

Posted on November 20, 2008, 9:06am | Nick Gillespie

...celebrate by noting

a) the voluntary nature of the event (and the immediate health benefits of not smoking):

Every year, the American Cancer Society dedicates the third Thursday of November to those ready to give up cigarettes for just a day in their lives in the hope that this might help them stop permanently. The organization wants smokers to ask themselves what it would take them to quit, and to try it out for a day to see how kicking the habit feels like.

Medically, there are great benefits a smoker would have even from the very first day of quitting. More exactly, doctors believe that a smoker's blood pressure and pulse rate drop to normal within 20 minutes of his last cigarette. Breathing becomes easier within 3 days. Circulation improves, walking becomes easier, and lung function increases up to 30 percent within 2-3 months. Also, risk of coronary disease will be cut in half within a year.

b) the ham-fisted, involuntary nature of outright and total smoking bans that have proliferated over this sweet land of liberty over the past decade. I'm no fan of smoking, but I'm less of a fan of smoking bans that run roughshod over individual choice, property rights, and much more.

c) Watching this new (released just last week) reason.tv extravaganza, Just Can't Quit: How far will smoking bans go? (go here for embed code, related articles, and a great 2002 documentary produced by reason's Paul Feine and Jesse Walker called Talking Butts).

New at Reason: Steve Chapman's Rx for the Republicans

Posted on November 20, 2008, 7:00am

In two years, the Republicans have lost both Congress and the presidency. This year's presidential defeat was the worst the party has suffered since 1964. In his latest column, Steve Chapman offers the GOP some advice for getting back on track.

Read all about it here. 

More Advice Obama Won't Take: Ron Paul for Treasury!

Posted on November 19, 2008, 8:33pm | Brian Doherty

A blogger at a community site run by pop-investment team "Motley Fool" calls for it. Excerpt:

--He's a Republican. Not only that, but he's a Republican primary candidate who the rest of the contenders basically hated, mostly for his repeated statements about where the economy was headed (which pretty much were dead on). You've got a win-win for the Obama camp: "Across the aisle" with a guy who's been beaten up by the rest of the Republican establishment. Talking about having your cake and eating it too: Obama would be able to use the terms "Uniter" without becoming a caricature while lobbing a grenade into the middle of the RNC.

--He's a policy guy, not a banker. This is important because Paul wouldn't have any "former associates" in the banking industry to cover for, sympathize with, or protect. Paulson, on the other hand, can't escape the whiff of insider-ism in everything he's doing. Questions like "Why isn't the bailout being used as originally planned?" and "Why can't we get a clear picture of who's getting the money and who's being turned down?" may have a reasonable answer, but the overall tone of Cover-Your-Buddy's-Ass can't be ignored.

...........

--Convergent ideas. Iraq War: Obama against; Paul against. Economic disaster looming: Obama warned; Paul warned. Fix Bush/Cheney damage to foreign relations: Obama for, Paul for.

Could this happen in the universe we live in? Nope. Good idea? I think so. Not for Obama politically, or Paul's reputation or future, but the greater good of this here nation.

Holder and Obscenity Prosecutions

Posted on November 19, 2008, 7:00pm | Jacob Sullum

Some civil libertarians worry that Eric Holder will be inclined to continue the Bush administration's crusade against pornography. They cite a June 1998 memo in which he told U.S. attorneys that obscenity prosecutions should focus on "cases involving large-scale distributors who realize substantial income from multistate operations and cases in which there is evidence of organized crime involvement" but added that "cases involving relatively small distributors can have a deterrent effect." The Clinton administration's actual track record in this area, however, consisted almost entirely of cases involving child pornography. "We continue to make these [child porn] cases a priority," Holder says in the memo. Social conservatives often complained that the Clinton administration was not interested in taking on pornography made by and for consenting adults. We probably can look forward to hearing such complaints again under the Obama administration.

Here is a 2000 account from J. Robert Flores, vice president and senior counsel at the National Law Center for Children and Families, of the May 1998 meeting that apparently generated Holder's memo: 

Mr. Holder seemed genuinely concerned with our requests. But he had little understanding of the obscenity industry. Afterwards, he contacted all 93 U.S. attorneys in the states to remind them that the prosecution of obscenity producers and distributors was still a priority, and they were responsible to act.

Still, nothing happened. The porn industry's trade publications reported the Justice Department had sent this letter, but pornographers obviously didn't fear prosecution and continued "business as usual."

In the May 2004 issue of reason, Greg Beato reported on U.S. Attorney Mary Beth Buchanan's prosecution of Extreme Associates, an obscenity case that's scheduled for trial in March. This year Nick Gillespie interviewed John Stagliano, another target of the Bush administration anti-porn campaign.

Holder on Executive Power

Posted on November 19, 2008, 6:42pm | Jacob Sullum

One issue where Eric Holder sounds pretty good compared to his predecessors in the Bush administration is executive power as it relates to fighting terrorism. In a June speech to the American Constitution Society, notes The Boston Globe's Jason Tuohey, Holder forthrightly condemned President Bush for breaking the law:

I never thought I would see the day when a Justice Department would claim that only the most extreme infliction of pain and physical abuse constitutes torture and that acts that are merely cruel, inhuman and degrading are consistent with United States law and policy, that the Supreme Court would have to order the president of the United States to treat detainees in accordance with the Geneva Convention, never thought that I would see that a president would act in direct defiance of federal law by authorizing warrantless NSA surveillance of American citizens. This disrespect for the rule of law is not only wrong, it is destructive in our struggle against terrorism.

Here, unlike in the area of drug policy, Holder is in sync with the opinions expressed by Barack Obama. Of course, it is always easier to worry about illegal extensions of executive power when the other party controls the executive branch. And you have to weigh Holder's speech against the less-rehearsed post-9/11 comments noted by Damon Root.

You can watch Holder's speech here.

Pleistocene Park Just Got Closer

Posted on November 19, 2008, 6:05pm | Ronald Bailey

Researchers at Pennsylvania State University have sequenced most of the genome of wooly mammoths.

Serve the Servants

Posted on November 19, 2008, 5:52pm | Matt Welch

If ever you wanted to see the inner workings of an unfocused mind, particularly one plugged into the zeitgeist of the country's momentarily dominant political ethos, you could do worse than reading the output of California's most overrated columnist, the L.A. Times' Steve Lopez. Here Lopez makes the following assertions about National Service, apparently without irony:

* FDR's Civilian Conservation Corps "kept service strong and unemployment low during the Great Depression." (The Corps was created in 1933; unemployment averaged 18 percent for the ensuing six years, and was higher in 1938-40 than it was in 1937.)
 
* The California Conservation Corps, with significant goosing from an Obamatastic federal government, might just help the Golden State "become the capital of the clean energy industry, using service agencies to recruit and train kids beginning in middle school and high school," which will help them "be linked along the way with clean energy employers who might later hire them."

* Even though "it's a huge cost," and the federal government is "throwing money around like there's no tomorrow" (as Lopez approvingly quotes once-and-future California governor Jerry Brown), that just makes the case for AmeriCorps that much stronger in a world of Wall Street bailouts. "If there's money for them," Lopez concludes, "then why not for our youth, now that they're lined up and ready to march?"

To paraphrase reason Contributing Editor Julian Sanchez from five years back, if the kids are indeed "lined up and ready to march," I'm pretty sure it ain't my tax dollars that's preventing their little legs from stomping in unison. And as Paul Thornton pointed out in our pages this spring, candidate Obama spoke of "a goal of having middle and high schoolers contribute at least 50 hours a year to community service." Also, 18-year-old women under an Obama administration can look forward to the patriotic pleasures of mandatory "selective" service.

There's a l-o-n-g list of Obama National Service ideas up over at The New American. His chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, called for "universal civilian service" in his book of two years ago. Meanwhile, some are floating the idea that Obama appoint ex-rival John McCain as Service Czar (a prospect I'd put money on), and Arianna Huffington, for one, is keeping the president-elect's feet to the fire on this, one of his most oft-repeated campaign promises. "Obama must turn his words into action and follow through on his promise to emulate FDR's Civilian Conservation Corps, JFK's Peace Corps, and LBJ's Vista," Huffington wrote today, adding: "A crisis is a terrible thing to waste."

Reductio ad Hitlerum: It Never Goes Out of Style

Posted on November 19, 2008, 5:50pm | Michael C. Moynihan

Now that Naomi Wolf's breathless tale of America's collapse into fascism has been further repudiated (unless, that is, Hitlerian countries routinely elect people like Barack Obama), perhaps it's time for the hysterics on the right to tremble in fear at the forthcoming machtergreifung. First, the psychopathic radio host and "world famous herbal expert" Michael Savage hosts former Hitler Youth member Hilmar von Campe "to discuss similarities between President-elect Obama and the rise of totalitarianism under Hitler." Not much you can say to that, except to point out that beyond the big, excited crowds, there are absolutely no similarities. And then we have 1990s relic Newt Gingrich bemoaning what he views as the thuggish behavior of those opposed to California's Prop. 8: "Look, I think there is a gay and secular fascism in this country that wants to impose its will on the rest of us, is prepared to use violence, to use harassment." Gay fascism in America? Perhaps he's thinking of Austria.

After eight years of Bush, remember, it was deeply serious people like the New Yorker's  Steve Coll and New York Times columnist Frank Rich that, in the final months of the 2008 election, eluded to a Weimar-like atmosphere at John McCain rallies. But their guy won. And fascism is over, if you want it. No liberal Von Hindenburg will cede power to the forces of darkness! It is early yet, though, and expect much more of this nonsense of the fringes of the right this time around.

Still Waiting for that Hope and Change

Posted on November 19, 2008, 5:15pm | Damon W. Root

As reason's Jacob Sullum, David Weigel, and Shikha Dalmia have all noted, President-elect Barack Obama's selection of Eric Holder as the next attorney general doesn't bode well for civil liberties or drug policy reform. Over at The Nation, John Nichols adds his voice to the chorus of disapproval:

Quick! Name the veteran Department of Justice insider who, shortly after the USA Patriot Act was signed into law and at a point when the Bush administration was proposing to further erode barriers to governmental abuses, argued that dissenters should not be tolerated?

Who invoked September 11, explicitly referencing "the World Trade Center aflame," in calling for the firing of any "petty bureaucrat" who might suggest that proper procedures be followed and that the separation of powers be respected?

John Ashcroft? No.

Alberto Gonzales? No.

It was Eric Holder, the man who has reportedly been selected by President-elect Barack Obama to serve as the next Attorney General of the United States.

Whole thing here.

Thomas Szasz To Run Department of Health and Human Services

Posted on November 19, 2008, 4:10pm | Jesse Walker

Ha! No, it's gonna be Tom Daschle. Or so say "two Democratic sources close to Daschle and with intimate knowledge of the decision." So you see, Obama isn't just drawing on Clinton retreads; he's reaching out to retreads from the legislative branch, too.

New at Reason: Radley Balko Offers Barack Obama Some Unsolicited Advice

Posted on November 19, 2008, 3:00pm

Senior Editor Radley Balko offers seven pieces of advice to President-elect Barack Obama, including the necessity of increasing government transparency and swearing off executive privilege.

Read all about it here. 

Border Search Nabs Medical Marijuana User

Posted on November 19, 2008, 2:51pm | Radley Balko

Last month, I posted on concerns from the ACLU that the Department of Homeland Security was coupling the terrorism threat with an old Supreme Court case to essentially nullify the Fourth Amendment for anyone driving on a public road within 100 miles of a U.S. border.

The Supreme Court's decision in U.S. v. Martinez-Fuerte allows for suspicionless but minimally invasive roadblock searches of motorists for the purpose of checking for illegal aliens.  The ACLU maintains that DHS is conducting far more thorough searches, stretching the ruling in that case well beyond what the Court intended.

Seattle's Post-Intelligencer ran a story this week that seems to confirm the ACLU's fears.  Earlier this year, border patrol agents cited 55-year-old Stephen Dixon for marijuana possession after searching his car at a checkpoint near the U.S.-Canadian border.  Dixon wasn't crossing the border, he just happens to live in the area where the feds set up one of their checkpoints (the article describes the checkpoint as "dozens" of miles from the border).

Dixon has a doctor's prescription to take medical marijuana for chronic pain associated with an amputated leg and an injured spine.  A drug dog tipped off the border agents to Dixon's couple of grams of marijuana.  That a drug dog was on the scene would at least seem to suggest that the border agents had more in mind than merely looking for illegal immigrants sneaking down from Canada.

The good news is that U.S. Attorney Jeff Sullivan has refused to pursue charges against Dixon and four others caught with small amounts of marijuana at the same checkpoint.  The bad news is, the border patrol seems intent on continuing to rely on the Supreme Court decision in Martinez-Fuerte to conduct illegal searches far away from the border.  DHS agents could also refer over to local prosecutors the minor drug cases the U.S. attorney doesn't want.

Radley Balko Around Town

Posted on November 19, 2008, 2:10pm | Radley Balko

This Saturday, I'll be speaking on the issue of police militarization and the drug war at the annual Students for Sensible Drug Policy conference.

And on Friday, December 5, I'll be speaking on the alcohol neoprohibition movement at a Cato Institute event celebrating the 75th anniversary of Repeal Day.

Splice Today's Russ Smith on Marijuana: Legalize It Already!

Posted on November 19, 2008, 1:46pm | Nick Gillespie

Russ Smith's long-running Mugger column in the old New York Press was one of the great joys of the past 20 or so years of American alternative journalism (or journalism, period).

He's now heading up the always interesting website Splice Today, which covers politics, media, pop culture, sports, sex, campus life, you name it with verve and panache. Or possibly vanache and perve. Either way, it's worth bookmarking.

The right-wing, conservative, and libertarianoid Smith has a great piece up dedicated to the modest proposal that if Obama really wants to the change agent that he posed as during the campaign, he should legalize marijuana. The story is seething with outrage and memory and is a great place to point folks who still need convincing that pot is not evil:

Any American, given about a minute, can tick off a list naming examples of disgrace in our 21st century society. You pick your hobbyhorse, I'll pick mine, and let the free-for-all begin. It's mind-boggling, at least in this corner, that there's still actually a debate among politicians and citizens over the issue of medicinal marijuana use. In 1982, as a young man not yet 30, my mother was slowly dying of brain cancer, and one day she asked if I could purchase a small quantity of pot to relieve the pain of chemotherapy.

I hadn't used the illegal substance for several years, but it wasn't hard to find, and so on a visit to our house she was given a small bag of Mexican grass, and for the first time in her life she toked up. It wasn't to her liking and so that experiment ended, but, after years of worrying about this sort of drug use among her five sons-my parents swallowed all the scare tactics from the government and media in the 1960s-she'd come to realize that in the scheme of things, smoking marijuana wasn't, in the vast majority of cases, likely to derail a person's life. As for her fellow cancer patients, Mom said, "Look, we're dying, it's not as if puffing on a joint [I'd never heard her say that word and was slightly taken aback] will be the ‘gateway' to heroin." None of my friends and acquaintances who are physicians disagree with that simple statement....

As Barack Obama prepares to occupy the Oval Office in January, this modest (in my opinion) proposal is worthy of his consideration, especially if he does intend to follow FDR's example and set forth a very ambitious agenda for the first year of his presidency, before he begins his 2012 campaign. I'm not naïve and don't expect Obama will even give a moment's thought to the subject-hell, if he lifts the embargo on Cuba next year, that'll be amazing, and long overdue, enough.

More here.

Smith notes that there's huge potential for state and federal governments to gain revenue from taxing legal sales of weed. That was a contributing factor in the end of alcohol prohibition (though far from the only one or even the driving force) and who knows: If enough moral outrage at the excesses of the drug war gets topped off by the lure of excise taxes, maybe pot will be legalized sooner rather later.

Two big fat data points not to count on Obama are, of course, his picks of Joe "I created the office of drug czar while riding Amtrak and drinking Scranton-brewed beer" Biden as VP and Eric "Zero Tolerance" Holder for AG.

Eric Holder Nips Marijuana in the Bud and Invents a Time Cover Story

Posted on November 19, 2008, 1:42pm | Jacob Sullum

Barack Obama's selection of Eric Holder as his attorney general is a very discouraging sign for anyone who hoped the new administration would de-escalate the war on drugs. As Dave Weigel noted earlier today, Holder pushed for stiffer marijuana penalties when he was the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, and the details are strikingly at odds not only with Obama's signals regarding marijuana but with his opposition to long sentences for nonviolent drug offenders. According to a December 1996 report in The Washington Times excerpted at TalkLeft, Holder wanted "minimum sentences of 18 months for first-time convicted drug dealers, 36 months for the second time and 72 months for every conviction thereafter." He also wanted to "make the penalty for distribution and possession with intent to distribute marijuana a felony, punishable with up to a five-year sentence." The D.C. Council made the latter Holder-endorsed change in 2000. Holder thought New York City's irrational, unjust crackdown on pot smokers was a fine idea and worth emulating, saying "we have too long taken the view that what we would term to be minor crimes are not important." His rhetoric on the seriousness of marijuana offenses was indistinguishable from that of the most zealous Republican drug warrior:

The truth of the matter is that marijuana is a significant problem for the city....Crack cocaine still drives most of the violence in this city, but marijuana violence is increasing. We need to nip it in the bud.

Four years later, when he was the deputy attorney general, Holder talked up the Clinton administration's alleged drug war victories during a weekly briefing (also quoted by TalkLeft):

We've made some major inroads in the drug problem but we don't have—I mean, if you think back there was a Time magazine article I remember on—a cover story on cocaine and—this was sometime back in the late '80s—and at that point, I remember reading the article and the article seemed to indicate that, you know, it was [a] drug being used by the middle class and that there were not many consequences for that use. We obviously know that that is not true now....

Certainly, I think, as opposed to the late '80s and the early '90s, I think consumption is down.

Holder's memory was a little fuzzy. According to the Monitoring the Future Study (which I'm using because it provides comparable data throughout the period), illegal drug use among teenagers was substantially higher in 2000 than in the early 1990s. In 2000 nearly 25 percent of high school seniors reported past-month use of an illegal drug, compared to 16.4 percent in 1991. It's hard to believe Holder was not aware of this trend, since it was the focus of Republican claims that the Clinton administration was soft on drugs.

And what Time cover story did Holder have in mind? Presumably it was this one, which appeared in July 1981, not "the late 1980s":

Contrary to Holder's gloss, the story is replete with warnings about cocaine's hazards. The subhead reads: "The 'all-American drug' has hit like a blizzard, with casualties rising." Here is the last sentence of the nut graph: "Largely unchecked by law enforcement, a veritable blizzard of the white powder is blowing through the American middle class, and it is causing significant social and economic shifts no less than a disturbing drug problem."

Holder's confusion about the date when this allegedly cocaine-friendly story appeared is significant because it erroneously places the article in the middle of the first Bush administration, with the implication that Clinton has been more serious about fighting the war on drugs (a laughable notion to anyone who remembers George H.W. Bush's apocalytpic baggie-of-crack speech or the zealousness of his drug czar, William Bennett). But the article actually appeared less than six months into the Reagan administration, when the pharmacological naivité Holder claims it displayed could be seen as residue from the Carter era, soon to be washed away by Reagan's enthusiastic prosecution of the drug war. In short, Holder's false anecdote about the Time cover story, along with his bogus claim about drug use trends, suggests he epitomizes the Clinton administration's desperation to prove that a Democrat who used to smoke pot can too be tough on drugs—precisely the motivation that could make Obama just as bad on drug policy as the current administration, if not worse.

Breaking (From Yesterday!): Reason Foundation's Proactive No Vote on Eric Holder as Attorney General

Posted on November 19, 2008, 1:14pm | Nick Gillespie

Over at Reason.org, the website of the nonprofit Reason Foundation that publishes reason online, policy analyst Shikha Dalmia has been laying the cases for good, bad, and ugly picks of the President Obama cabinet.

In a piece written earlier this week, here's what she had to say about Eric Holder, who unfortunately has been nominated to be attorney general:

Among the bottom-of-the-barrel would be Eric Holder and Jamie Gorelick, both of whom were deputy attorney generals under Janet Reno.... Though Holder has a good resume, his positions and record suggest that he does not understand the constitutional limitations within which this office is supposed to operate. He is a drug warrior and even proposed to stiffen penalties for the possession of marijuana. He was also involved in the federal government's decision to seize Elian Gonzalez from his aunt's home and return him to Cuba without obtaining a court order, a terrible lapse of judgment. Nor is he a pillar of rectitude: There have been questions about whether he was completely upfront about the Justice Department's conduct in the Branch Davidians-Waco fiasco. And some suspect that he might have with-held information about billionaire fugitive and tax evader, Marc Rich, to facilitate Rich's pardon by President Clinton.

Equally bad would be Gorelick, who pushed, unsuccessfully, for the execution of Randy Weaver for killing federal agents in the botched raid in the Ruby Ridge case—rather than holding FBI agents accountable for killing Weaver's unarmed wife.

Appointing either of them will substitute one set of excesses with another and would not offer any fundamental rethinking of Justice's conduct or its powers.

Read who Dalmia wanted to become attorney general (and much more) by going here and here and here.

Sale of Single Cigars to Poor Blacks Banned

Posted on November 19, 2008, 1:05pm | Katherine Mangu-Ward

The sale of loose, cheap cigars has been banned in Maryland's Prince George's county—you must now buy them in packs of five. Loose, cheap women are still available as singles.

The argument goes like this: Single blunts are (a) gateway drugs to cigarette smoking, especially the flavored ones, and (b) drug paraphernalia, since they can be hollowed out and used to smoke pot. 

It almost seems as if the rule was written as a satire on class and race relations in the U.S.:

Tobacco stores that specialize in cigar sales, and often sell high-end cigars for as much as $5 apiece or more, are excluded from the legislation's restrictions, as are other locations that are sometimes age-restricted, including golf courses, fraternal lodges, bars and restaurants.

In short, the only thing that has been banned are cheap cigars in places where poor black people buy them. Carry on with your commerce, white men, in your cigar stores, Elks Clubs, and golf courses. 

Bruce C. Bereano, a lobbyist for the distributors, said the intent of the law was "laudable." But, he said, the law will only create a cottage industry of people who buy cigars in packs of five and then sell them individually on the streets. 

The result: The poorest people will pay a little more for a bottom-of-the-line product and have to buy it on the street. Otherwise, everything will carry on as before.

Via Rawley Vaughan

Forensic Experts Aren't Team Players. Nor Should They Be.

Posted on November 19, 2008, 12:46pm | Radley Balko

reason contributor Roger Koppl relays the story of a district attorney in the Midwest who threatened one of Koppl's acquaintances, who happens to be a county medical examiner. The prosecutor's complaint?  The doctor had testified for the defense in a nearby jurisdiction. Koppl writes:

The email says, “I do not find this acceptable” and “I view this practice as a conflict of interest and inappropriate.” I think the DA sincerely believes that his ME acted wrongly.   “I would never accept a request to review the matter in the first place. Nor do you have to accept these requests. If you continue to do so, I am giving you the courtesy of letting you know that neither the Sheriff or I will be in a position to continue to support your appointment as the [local] County Coroner.” That’s quite a threat: If you persist in testifying for the defense in other counties you’ll lose your job as ME in this county.

I think Koppl's friend needs to publicly name this district attorney. It is the DA's behavior that is unprofessional, irresponsible, and wholly inappropriate, here. A medical examiner is not part of the prosecution's "team."  From the National Association of Medical Examiners' Forensic Autopsy Performance Standards:

Medicolegal death investigation officers, be they appointed or elected, are charged by statute to investigate deaths deemed to be in the public interest--serving both the criminal justice and public health systems. These officials must investigate cooperatively with, but independent from, law enforcement and prosecutors. The parallel investigation promotes neutral and objective medical assessment of the cause and manner of death.

To promote competent and objective death investigations . . . [m]edicolegal death investigation officers should operate without any undue influence from law enforcement agencies and prosecutors.

Many prosecutors don't see it this way (pdf). They believe a medical examiner's job is not to get at the truth, but  to help the state win convictions. If his conclusions differ from the prosecutor's theories about the crime, then the medical examiner's job is to keep his mouth shut. This case is even more egregious, in that this particular prosecutor is objecting to his own county's medical examiner testifying in another jurisdiction. As Koppl explains, this may be an effort by prosecutors in the area to gain a monopoly on "truth" by depriving defendants of qualified available experts.

Koppl and I wrote a piece for Slate earlier this year outlining steps to a more fair, accurate, and honest forensics system.

House Negro, Please

Posted on November 19, 2008, 12:32pm | Matt Welch

Al-Qaeda is trying to taunt the president-elect, drive a wedge between post-racial transcendence and Malcom X, or both:

Ayman al-Zawahri said in the message, which appeared on militant Web sites, that Obama is "the direct opposite of honorable black Americans" like Malcolm X, the 1960s African-American rights leader.

In al-Qaida's first response to Obama's victory, al-Zawahri also called the president-elect—along with secretaries of state Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice—"house negroes."

Speaking in Arabic, al-Zawahri uses the term "abeed al-beit," which literally translates as "house slaves." But al-Qaida supplied English subtitles of his speech that included the translation as "house negroes."

The message also includes old footage of speeches by Malcolm X in which he explains the term, saying black slaves who worked in their white masters' house were more servile than those who worked in the fields. Malcolm X used the term to criticize black leaders he accused of not standing up to whites.

It will be interesting indeed to watch how the outside world–and not just the Islamo-nutsandwiches–react to a half-black American president. Judging by Silvio Berlusconi's early example, we could be in for some comedy.

I Had a Dream, I Had an Awesome Dream

Posted on November 19, 2008, 12:00pm | Matt Welch

So I pick up the Sunday edition of the Los Angeles Times, and what do I see but a 16-page special section with a heroic, back-lit photograph of the president-elect under the banner headline:

It is an incredible thing to behold. The first words of defenestrated Washington bureau chief Doyle McManus' portentiously laid-out cover text were "WE ARE A DIFFERENT COUNTRY NOW." Page two featured a steely Norman Rockwell-style half-page illustration of the man; page four was topped by the following quote:

'He might be the best president we ever had. But even if he's the biggest jerk in the world, he's done an awesome thing for this country already.'

-- Anna Kormos, who struggled with doubts before voting for Obama

Page seven was a photo essay entitled "A CITY CELEBRATES." The page 8-9 double truck was dominated by this photograph:

The page 10 Michelle Obama story was adorned with the Onion-caliber headline "SPEAKING HER MIND, HEART," and on page 14, in case you didn't see it the first time around, my ex-colleagues over on the editorial board reprinted their "Obama for president" endorsement.

What the hell is going on here? In part, you have a major metropolitan newspaper taking the rare (for it) step of reacting to audience demand. The LAT was stunned and delighted to discover in the first several days after the election huge lines of readers actually demanding product, in the form of a reprint from the first post-election paper. Coupled with Obama's recent audience-spiking appearances on 60 Minutes and The Daily Show, we are beginning to see a strange new trend: The liberal media temporarily reversing its long decline by hyping the liberal president.

The second interpretation is somewhat less generous. Namely, the media is in full-on, unembarrassed (OK, maybe slightly embarrassed) gush mode. Connoisseurs of media bias will certainly have their hands full for at least the next six months.

New at Reason: Dave Weigel on Fiscally Conservative Republicans Who Supported the Bailout

Posted on November 19, 2008, 12:00pm

From our December issue, Associate Editor David Weigel explains why fiscal conservatives failed to come out swinging against the bailout.

Read all about it here.

Obama's Attorney General on Drugs

Posted on November 19, 2008, 10:21am | David Weigel

President-elect Obama has tapped Eric Holder, Jr for attorney general, and most of the opposition thus far has centered around Holder's role in the eleventh hour Clinton pardons. I get bored just typing about that. I'm much more worried about what Holder wanted to do 12 years ago, when he was U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia.

U.S. Attorney Eric H. Holder Jr. said in an interview that he is considering not only prosecuting more marijuana cases but also asking the D.C. Council to enact stiffer penalties for the sale and use of marijuana.

"We have too long taken the view that what we would term to be minor crimes are not important," Holder said, referring to current attitudes toward marijuana use and other offenses such as panhandling.

Now, people arrested in the District and charged with distributing marijuana, even large quantities, face only misdemeanor charges, a standard that has sparked repeated complaints by police officers.

He also told the Washington Post that "the District could learn from New York's 'zero-tolerance' policy." I wonder what people in the drug policy reform movement, who have so far been (relatively) optimistic about Obama, think of this.

(Hat tip: Ben Masel.)

Auto Bailout: "redistributing wealth from the successful to the failed, an implausible formula for prosperity."

Posted on November 19, 2008, 9:41am | Ronald Bailey

Washington Post columnist George Will nails the proposed Federal bailout of the Big 2.5 today: 

"Nothing," said a General Motors spokesman last week, "has changed relative to the GM board's support for the GM management team during this historically difficult economic period for the U.S. auto industry." Nothing? Not even the evaporation of almost all shareholder value?

GM's statement comes as the mendicant company is threatening to collapse and make a mess unless Washington, which has already voted $25 billion for GM, Ford and Chrysler, provides up to $50 billion more -- the last subsidy until the next one. The statement uses the 11 words after "team" to suggest that the company's parlous condition has been caused by events since mid-September. That is as ludicrous as the mantra that GM is "too big to fail." It has failed; the question is what to do about that.

The answer? Do nothing that will delay bankrupt companies from filing for bankruptcy protection, so that improvident labor contracts can be unraveled, allowing the companies to try to devise plausible business models. Instead, advocates of a "rescue" propose extending to Detroit the government's business model for the nation -- redistributing wealth from the successful to the failed, an implausible formula for prosperity. (emphasis added)

And it only gets better. Read the whole column here. 

Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), Your Iceberg Is Waiting...

Posted on November 19, 2008, 7:20am | Nick Gillespie

It's official: Felonious Sen. Ted "Wounded Bull" Stevens (pictured at right) has lost his seat in the U.S. Senate, the world's greatest (and possibly fattest) deliberative body. From the AP:

Stevens' pursuit of a seventh term was damaged by his conviction in federal court—just days before the election—for lying on Senate disclosure forms to conceal more than $250,000 in gifts and home renovations from an oil field services company.

He was trying to become the first convicted felon to win election to the Senate. A survey of people leaving polling places conducted for The Associated Press and television networks found that two of three voters considered Stevens' trial a factor in their decision. Begich voters cited it as an issue more often.

More here.

It would be the nice thing to say of Stevens that it's been nice knowing him (he was reportedly a homeless man living on the land upon which the Senate was built back in 1483; of course that's not true, I just read it on that series of tubes Stevens was so concerned about). 

But really, it hasn't been nice knowing him. He represents with almost focus-group intensity virtually everything that is wrong with American politics. He's a whining crybaby, a special-interest towel boy who was, like his equally repellent former colleague Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W. Va.), slowly mailing the entire federal budget back to his home state in a never-ending series of priority packages large and small. Stevens' loss is the nation's gain.

As reason's Jacob Sullum has written:

From 2004 to 2008, Taxpayers for Common Sense reports, Stevens had a hand in 891 Alaska-benefiting earmarks worth $3.2 billion. That works out to about $4,800 per Alaskan, 18 times the national average. And earmarks represent just a fraction of federal spending in Alaska, which totaled $9 billion in 2006 alone....

Although Alaskans are the biggest beneficiaries of congressional largess [in 2005, they pulled in a whopping $1.84 for every buck they sent to the feds], Stevens, who lobbied for statehood in the 1950s, still sees them as victims of a high-handed federal government. During his 2005 tantrum over Tom Coburn's proposal to move transportation money from Alaska to hurricane-stricken Louisiana (a proposal the Senate overwhelmingly rejected), Stevens repeatedly invoked his state's "sovereign" and "equal" status, seemingly worried that his colleagues were disrespecting Alaska behind his back. His attitude was reminiscent of a beggar who not only demands a handout but insists that everyone pretend the money was his all along.

More on that here.

New at Reason: Jacob Sullum on the Government's Confusing and Contradictory Economic Pronouncements

Posted on November 19, 2008, 7:00am

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson warned us that the economy was about to collapse unless Congress immediately authorized him to spend $700 billion on "troubled assets" held by banks. But it's been a month and a half and the Treasury has yet to buy any troubled assets. In fact, last week Paulson said it had no plans to do so. And as Senior Editor Jacob Sullum writes, that's just one of the many bewildering reversals in economic wisdom we've seen in recent months.

Read all about it here. 

The One Presidential Power Bush Doesn't Care For

Posted on November 18, 2008, 7:27pm | Radley Balko

That would be the pardon power.

Former U.S. pardon attorney Margaret Colgate Love writes in the Washington Post:

Bush's 157 pardons say little about his criminal justice philosophy. Most have gone to people convicted long ago of minor offenses, who spent little or no time in prison, and who are unknown outside of their communities. Five of his six sentence commutations went to small-time drug offenders who had spent years in prison and were close to their release dates.

Meanwhile, Bush has denied almost 8,000 clemency requests, many of which were indistinguishable from the ones he granted.

[...]

The Sentencing Reform Act of 1984 made the pardon power virtually the only mechanism by which lengthy mandatory prison sentences can be reconsidered once they have become final. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, the author of opinions upholding harsh sentencing laws, urged in a 2003 speech to the American Bar Association that the pardon process be "reinvigorated" in response to "unwise and unjust" federal sentencing laws; "a people confident in its laws and institutions should not be ashamed of mercy," he said. 

[...]

A series of final pardons could highlight flaws in the justice system that would be instructive to the next administration. The Framers considered the pardon power an integral part of our system of checks and balances, not a perk of office. Judicious grants of clemency can signal to Congress where rigid laws should be amended and give policy guidance to executive officials. The president's intervention in a case through his pardon power benefits an individual but also signals how he wants laws enforced and reassures the public that the legal system is capable of just and moral application.

It is ironic that a president who has stretched his other constitutional powers to the breaking point has been so reticent and unimaginative in using the one power that is indisputably his alone.

The one time Bush used the pardon power to make a statement about injustice was when he commuted what he determined was an unfairly long sentence for former Cheney chief of staff Scooter Libby.  There's also some talk now that Bush may pardon all federal counter-terrorism interrogators to clear them of possible torture charges in an Obama administration (Obama has signalled that he won't pursue such charges).  There's also talk (though it seems more far-fetched) that Bush will issue a blanket preemptive pardon for himself and his top advisers before leaving office.

Here are just a few people more deserving.

"California Bent on Rebuilding Despite Wildfire Risk"

Posted on November 18, 2008, 6:02pm | Katherine Mangu-Ward

Oh California. You burn and burn—1,000 homes have gone up in flames since Thursday—and yet...

Visiting a mobile home park in the chaparral-covered foothills where 500 dwellings were leveled in the latest firestorm, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said on Sunday: "Every single time there is a fire like that we learn new things."...

Then:

"We want to let the people know that the state is with you, we're going to help to get your homes back and your structures back, to get your lives back," Schwarzenegger said.

Looks like the opposite is more likely true: Every time there's a fire, California does pretty much exactly the same thing.

More on the eternal recurrence of the California wildfires here, here, and here.

Obama FCC Watch

Posted on November 18, 2008, 5:23pm | Jesse Walker

If you're interested in what policies to expect from Barack Obama's Federal Communications Commission, you've got more to go on than, say, unsourced reports that Hillary Clinton will take over the agency. The president-elect has named an FCC transition team to be led by the legal scholars Kevin Werbach of the Wharton School and Susan Crawford of the University of Michigan.

Both Werbach and Crawford are vocal advocates of the idea that network neutrality should be enforced by law, and Crawford has said she regards Net access as a "utility," always a disturbing choice of words when regulations are at stake. But they're interesting picks for other reasons as well. Crawford is a strong supporter of opening up the "white spaces" between TV signals for unlicensed broadband access, while Werbach has gone even further, advocating some radical ideas for spectrum reform (representing the open-commons wing of the reform community, not the spectrum-as-property wing). I haven't read a lot of Crawford's work, but I know Werbach is a sharp thinker with an appreciation for markets; I have my disagreements with him, but I'd much rather have the next FCC shaped by someone like Werbach than someone like, say, Democratic commissioner Michael Copps, the agency's strongest supporter of censorship and heavy-handed regulation. (Lest we get too sanguine, Obama's agency review team also includes former FCC chief Reed Hundt, who isn't exactly a First Amendment absolutist.)

Speaking of net neutrality: The always-interesting Tim Lee has written a smart paper for the Cato Institute on the subject. Breaking with both traditional camps in the debate, he offers an essentially Hayekian defense of the end-to-end principle as an architectural doctrine and a critique of the idea that the principle should be mandated by statute.

Wayne's World, Party Time, Excellent

Posted on November 18, 2008, 5:12pm | David Weigel

A little while ago I chatted with erstwhile Libertarian vice presidential candidate Wayne Allyn Root, to get a grapple on where the LP is going after 2008. Root didn't figure much into Brian Doherty's excellent rundown of the LP campaign, so I wanted to get his perspective.

"I just wrapped up another little political discussion," said Root. "I was talking to a guy who’s run nine campaigns in Las Vegas, and won eight of them. He thinks I'm an absolute favorite for mayor of Las Vegas in 2011. And keep in mind, it's a non-partisan race, and the incumbent is term-limited, even though he's been inspired by Michael Bloomberg to try and change that."

Root was "obviously disappointed" with how the Barr/Root presidential campaign ended, but the only specific criticism he made was the decision to "stiff Ron Paul" at his September 10 press conference and offer him the LP vice presidential slot. "If you want him to get behind you, offer him the top spot on the ticket. If you want to snub him, offer him the number two spot. I mean, why would he ever take that, this candidate who'd won a million votes?"

That's as negative as he wanted to get. "I'm a team player," he said. He concentrated on his game plan for the next four years.

- "Pick up the Ron Paul torch." Root is reaching out to RP's old base of supporters, like moneybomb originator Trevor Lyman, and appearing on Lyman's Break the Matrix site whenever he can.

- "Become Rush Limbaugh." Root's book The Conscience of a Libertarian will hit shelves in May, and he's proud of the subtitle: "Empowering the citizen revolution, with God, guns, gambling, school choice and tax cuts."

- "Find the next David Koch." Root's convinced, and he's not alone, that the secret of the LP's success in the 1980 campaign was the vice presidential candidacy of deep-pocketed libertarian philanthropist David Koch. "I will spent the next four years with one goal in mind: Finding a billionaire running mate. Believe me when I tell you I will find him, or her. All of a sudden I’ll be on TV day and night, just like Ross Perot, and suddenly we’ll get 19 million votes, just like Ross Perot."

"We don't say it all that often, but President Bush is right"

Posted on November 18, 2008, 4:55pm | Damon W. Root

That's the lede from today's New York Times' editorial calling for Congress to pass the Colombia free trade agreement:

Mr. Bush signed the deal two years ago. The Democratic majority in Congress has refused to approve it out of a legitimate concern over the state of human rights in Colombia and less legitimate desires to pander to organized labor or deny Mr. Bush a foreign policy win.

We believe that the trade pact would be good for America's economy and workers. Rejecting it would send a dismal message to allies the world over that the United States is an unreliable partner and, despite all that it preaches, does not really believe in opening markets to trade. There is no more time to waste.

Good stuff! Speaking of those "less legitimate desires to pander to organized labor," here's reason contributor Will Wilkinson on why Detroit's Big Three automakers are just the right size to fail:

Lots of companies fail. Lots of cities, built around those companies, decline. If employees of the Big Three deserve to have taxpayers pay part of their relatively lavish salaries, then employees at thousands of failing businesses deserved the same. They had no chance of getting it, though, simply because they don’t have the right history with Washington. There is no other reason.

There is nothing that helps people more than high rates of economic growth, compounding, compounding. But everyone is not helped equally. Economic growth requires dynamism, requires “creative destruction,” and some people get trapped in the wreckage, become wreckage. Not everyone is hurt equally.... But the impulse to freeze the system, to try to tape all the cracks and staple all the cleavages, to ensure that nobody has to explain to their kid why Christmas this year is going to be a lousy Christmas, that is one of our greatest dangers. Our sympathy, untutored by a grasp of the larger scheme, can perversely make itself ever more necessary. When we feel compelled to act on our uncoached fellow-feeling, next year’s Christmas is likely to turn a bit worse for everybody. And then somebody has to explain to the kids that they can’t find a job at all.

Holy Joe Lieberman Was Resurrected After Three Days

Posted on November 18, 2008, 3:14pm | David Weigel

I don't get it. Why is it so hard for the Democrats to kick Holy Joe Lieberman to the curb that he has so dearly earned? There are some reasons at the link (they're not afraid of him using his committee chairmanship to attack Obama, the president-elect wanetd them to forgive and forget), but are they the last people on earth who realize that Lieberman is one of the true scrubs of American politics, an unliked and unlikeable scold who can only elicit applause at John Hagee's church and the occasional PMRC reunion tours?

Let's turn the clock back a little. When Lieberman endorsed John McCain, it was supposed to help McCain court a few sought-after groups of voters. First, Jewish voters who might have a problem with a candidate who wanted to meet with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and, oh yeah, was named "Barack Hussein Obama." Second, independents. Third, voters in Lieberman's own state of Connecticut, a swing state as recently as 1992, and New Hampshire, a swing state every year since then.

How'd it go?

Jewish voters: John Kerry won them, 74-25 percent. Obama won them by more, 78-21.

Independents: Kerry won them, 49-48 percent. Obama won them by more, 52-44.

Connecticut and New Hampshire: Kerry won them, 55-44 and 50-49. Obama won them by more, 61-38 and 54-45. Obama's victories in both states were the biggest for any Democrat since LBJ, and I believe he's the first Democrat to every sweep every county in New Hampshire.

Senators protecting their own, nothing new. Senators protecting such an obvious loser... that's more unusual, isn't it?

UPDATE: There's some murmuring in the comments about why any reasonoid should care about this. Well, two years ago, when it looked like the video game-banner and drug warrior from Connecticut had lost his Senate seat, we fired off 21 guns. A Lieberman-free Senate would be a better Senate, insofar as such a thing might exist. It's been amusing/irritating to see Lieberman heralded, in his post-Democratic career, as a force for bipartisanship and independence. He's not: He's a full-scale nanny stater who gets squeamish when people behave in ways he doesn't like. Watching his McCain endorsement backfire or fall flat should have killed Lieberman's image once and for all, but apparently that image has George Romero and Lucio Fulci qualities.

Recently at Reason.tv: Elegy for Indoor Smoking; Calculating The Price of Everything; The Truth About Universal Preschool; Everything You Need to Know About the Bailout

Posted on November 18, 2008, 3:00pm

 

Just Can't Quit: How far will smoking bans go?

Economist Russell Roberts on his new novel, The Price of Everything.

 

Universal Preschool: A silver bullet for education reform or a waste of money?

Reason on the Bailout: What you need to know. And fear.

For more video and information on how to embed any of the above, go to reason.tv now.

And subscribe to reason.tv's YouTube channel here.

New at Reason: Ron Bailey on Why Oil Prices are Falling

Posted on November 18, 2008, 12:00pm

Oil prices have dropped by 60 percent since July, writes Science Correspondent Ronald Bailey. And they fell without the benefit of a gasoline tax holiday, new anti-speculator regulations, or a windfall profits tax on oil companies. So what happened?

Read all about it here. 

Shocking News! State Mandates Increase the Cost of Health Insurance!

Posted on November 18, 2008, 11:36am | Ronald Bailey

Researchers at Brigham Young University, the National Bureau of Economic Research and the Brookings Institution have found that health insurance mandates raise the price for everybody. As the press release describing the study explains:

New research shows that the cost of health insurance for a typical family increases about $100 per month when state governments limit price adjustments based on factors like age, health or risky behaviors such as smoking.

The finding by Brigham Young University economist Mark Showalter is one of several examples of how one state's set of rules can result in widely different prices than what's found in the state next door. Perhaps the most eye-opening contrast exists in Trenton, New Jersey, where premiums cost about twice as much as those sold across the Delaware River in Pennsylvania...

Seven states prevent insurers from adjusting prices based on one or more factors like age, health status or risky behavior. The researchers found such rules - known as community ratings - increased family premiums between 21 and 33 percent.

The rule is intended to promote equity but may consequently make insurance too expensive for healthy people. The study found New Jersey's strict form of community ratings responsible for premiums set two to three times higher than if the requirement were not in place.

Who knew that 1,800 nearly 2,000 federal and state mandates would boost the price of health insurance? Well, actually, lots of analysts do. For example, Harvard business school professor Regina Herzlinger told reason: 

"It's like I'm shopping for a car and my state mandates that all cars have heated seats," says Herzlinger. Car buyers would not long stand for a heated car seat mandate that raises the price of a car by $1,000, and similarly individual health insurance shoppers would object to unnecessarily expensive insurance mandates.

It is very likely that legislators rarely consider the costs of such mandates to consumers, so the good news is that the study now quantifies them so that these trade-offs can be made explicitly. Whole press release for the study is available here.

Weigel vs. Lilly: Endgame

Posted on November 18, 2008, 10:49am | David Weigel

My two final arguments with the Center for American Progress's Scott Lilly are here and here. Subjects include big labor's influence over the Democratic party, whether Obama can (and should) buck their influence, and whether the sky-high hopes for the Age of O will backfire on him.

Religious Beliefs of Health Care Workers to Trump Those of Patients

Posted on November 18, 2008, 10:42am | Ronald Bailey

That is, if new "religious discrimination" regulations being rushed through by the Bush administration stand. President Bush and his minions evidently don't believe that they've done enough damage yet, so they are trying (as prior administrations have done) to impose new regulations before they return to a well-deserved exile in the private sector. In this case, as the New York Times reports:

A last-minute Bush administration plan to grant sweeping new protections to health care providers who oppose abortion and other procedures on religious or moral grounds has provoked a torrent of objections, including a strenuous protest from the government agency that enforces job discrimination laws.

The proposed rule would prohibit recipients of federal money from discriminating against doctors, nurses and other health care workers who refuse to perform or to assist in the performance of abortions or sterilization procedures because of their “religious beliefs or moral convictions.”

It would also prevent hospitals, clinics, doctors’ offices and drugstores from requiring employees with religious or moral objections to “assist in the performance of any part of a health service program or research activity” financed by the Department of Health and Human Services.

reason warned that this was coming: 

Can pharmacies, stem cell labs, or abortion clinics refuse to hire people who believe their activities are evil? The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services doesn’t think so. The agency is circulating draft regulations that would outlaw employment discrimination on the grounds of religious and moral beliefs by any entity that receives the department’s money.

Since Washington’s subsidies are so ubiquitous, the rule would apply even to local pharmacies, because the feds pay for some prescriptions. In effect, the government’s money is serving as a Trojan horse for the administration’s moral agenda.

The tension between the moral choices of health professionals and the interests of their patients has never been resolved. After Roe v. Wade affirmed a woman’s right to obtain an abortion in 1973, Congress quickly passed the Church Amendments, permitting health care providers that receive federal funding to refuse to perform or assist abortions or sterilizations on moral or religious grounds. This means, for example, that Roman Catholic hospitals don’t have to offer these services but can still receive government money. The Church Amendments also prohibit employment discrimination against health care providers who object to abortion.

Fortunately, there is a way out for people who find that certain medical treatments offend their consciences:

“Religious freedom is an important part of the history of this country,” Richard S. Myers, a professor at Ave Maria School of Law, told The Washington Post. “People who have a religious or moral belief should not be forced to participate in an act they find abhorrent.” Myers is correct. But why should the religious beliefs of others trump those of patients and employers? People who don’t want to participate in medical procedures they find abhorrent have a simple solution: They can choose to work elsewhere.

Whole New York Times article here. 

Play it Again, Chico

Posted on November 18, 2008, 10:10am | Jesse Walker

While preparing their 1946 film A Night in Casablanca, the Marx Brothers received a legalgram from Warner Bros. noting that the forthcoming picture's title resembled Casablanca, which had been released approximately four years before. The lawyers demanded that the name be changed. Groucho Marx replied with a letter of his own:

Apparently there is more than one way of conquering a city and holding it as your own. For example, up to the time that we contemplated making this picture, I had no idea that the city of Casablanca belonged exclusively to Warner Brothers. However, it was only a few days after our announcement appeared that we received your long, ominous legal document warning us not to use the name Casablanca.

It seems that in 1471, Ferdinand Balboa Warner, your great-great-grandfather, while looking for a shortcut to the city of Burbank, had stumbled on the shores of Africa and, raising his alpenstock (which he later turned in for a hundred shares of common), named it Casablanca.

I just don't understand your attitude. Even if you plan on releasing your picture, I am sure that the average movie fan could learn in time to distinguish between Ingrid Bergman and Harpo. I don't know whether I could, but I certainly would like to try.

The entire letter is here, along with a description of the followup correspondence, in which Warner Bros. requested an outline of the film's story and Groucho replied that he would be playing "Bordello, the sweetheart of Humphrey Bogart."

[Hat tip: Bryan Alexander.]

Update: Snopes says that while Warners did contact the comedians with concerns about the movie, it didn't actually threaten to sue them, and that the Marxes spread the story as a publicity stunt. Meanwhile, Wes Ghering's The Marx Brothers: A Bio-Bibliography claims that Warners eventually did file a complaint, though "it was ironed out quickly in arbitration."

Where Your Tax TARP Dollars Are Going

Posted on November 18, 2008, 10:00am | Nick Gillespie

The Treasury Department has updated its list of financial institutions that are participating in the bailout's "capital purchase program," through which the feds buy preferred stock in a given bank.

In the $25 billion club are Citigroup (tough luck to those pink-slipped yesterday!), JPMorgan Chase, and Wells Fargo. Bank of America is in for $15 billion, and Goldman Sachs (thanks Hank!), Morgan Stanley, and Merrill Lynch are pulling $10 billion.

Read the rest of the list, two dozen-plus strong, here.

Update: The excellent website ProPublica, dedicated to "journalism in the public interest,"[*] is keeping a graphically rich, continuously updated tally of who's getting what, why, and how. According to their math, we're at $177 billion of commitments so far. Geez, that $700 billion toe tag on the economy just seems to be getting smaller every day, dunnit?

[*]: I should add that I don't believe in the "public interest," for the same reasons I believe that Szaszians, public-choice economics, and Marxists give a deep critique of "helping" institutions.

But the ProPublica website, which covers all sorts of topics ranging from government to media to national security, is really worth checking out.

In Cincinnati, It's Like a Who Concert for Magnet Schools

Posted on November 18, 2008, 9:48am | Nick Gillespie

For any of us who are perplexed and apalled by the unimaginable incompetency of many (if not all) large public school districts (we'll leave smaller districts for another time), take a gander at an annual ritual of idiocy in Cincinnati, Ohio, whose schools are even worse than its professional football team. That is, of course, despite spending tons of cash on a per-pupil basis—around $13,000 for the 2005-2006 school year, or about 50 percent more than the state average.

Like most big districts, years ago Cincinnati created a series of "magnet" schools, ostensibly as a means of offering specialized curricula equally to all students but in reality a way of keeping a dwindling handful of white parents from fleeing the district. Magnets, of course, require an application process, which already biases the programs to folks with more time, resources, and social capital. But unlike other districts that have somehow managed to come up with an application process that might be even semi-rational, the Cincinnati public school district (CPS) resorts to a bizarre first-come, first-serve setup that typically results in parents camping out overnight in front of their preferred venues, like teenagers in front of concert halls in the bad old pre-Ticketmaster days.

CPS officials are hoping to convince parents it simply isn't necessary to wait in line for days, despite the hype that builds up around the [magnet] schools with outsized demand.

It's impossible to measure this year's demand in advance, said district spokeswoman Janet Walsh, but last year, parents who stood in line for an entire weekend weren't substantially more likely to secure a spot than those who arrived just a few hours early....

CPS is not publicizing the number of available seats in advance as it did last year—something Walsh said may have created an artificially high demand.

"People saw (how few spots were open) and figured they better get there early," said Walsh. "When in fact, almost everybody who got there within a few hours of the actual start of the open-enrollment time got in."

Principals will not allow campsites to interfere with a school day either today or Tuesday, Walsh said. That could include simply banning camping altogether, Walsh said.

It's understandable why parents want to get their kids into magnet schools: Their kids get a much better education by virtually any measure. And if their kids don't get into a magnet school, they're likely to be sent to what the Cincinnati Enquirer suggests is a "struggling school that has repeatedly failed to meet federal and state achievement standards."

CPS, writes the Enquirer with hilarious understatement, "has struggled for years in finding an application method that doesn't give an unfair advantage to families with paid vacation time, traditional work hours and cars."

In fact, that gets it almost exactly wrong. If the district wanted to change the policy to help people without cars, traditional work hours, and personal transportation (i.e., the relatively poor and disadvantaged), they wouldn't require parents to show up early at schools during the work week. They would canvas neighborhoods, community centers, churches, you name it, on the weekends or the evenings.

More to the point, they would take a page from Rock 'n' Roll High School and blow the whole system up by, at the very least, turning every public school into a charter school that would need to compete for students (better yet, they would just give everyone a voucher they could use in any school, public or private). Such moves simply could not make the schools worse and they would certainly increase the opportunities that poor kids trapped in the current system have.

When I read stories such as this one about the CPS, I'm reminded of the basic Szaszian, public choice, and Marxist readings of "helping" institutions: Despite their rhetoric about uplift and opportunity, institutions such as public schools aren't there to shake up the social pyramid but to set it in frigging concrete. How better to punish the poor by creating a system that trains them in failure from the very beginning, all the while pretending to offer slim reeds of hope such as a handful of slots in "magnet schools"? Anything but actual choice because that could, you know, lead to actual choice.

As the father of modern school reform, Milton Friedman, told reason in 2005:

As to the benefits of universal vouchers, empowering parents would generate a competitive education market, which would lead to a burst of innovation and improvement, as competition has done in so many other areas. There's nothing that would do so much to avoid the danger of a two-tiered society, of a class-based society. And there's nothing that would do so much to ensure a skilled and educated work force.

Will Nevada Gamblers Colleges Be Next for a Bailout?

Posted on November 18, 2008, 7:32am | Nick Gillespie

From the indispensable Inside Higher Ed, a strong indication of where bailout-mania is heading (which is everywhere):

Which may be why [Jim] Rogers [chancellor of Nevada higher ed], in a speech at a news conference Monday, turned his attention to another potential source of funds: the U.S. treasury.

His message is simple: Nevadans pay $4 billion a year more in taxes than the state receives in federal payments of various sorts (it ranks 47th among the states in the latter, according to Rogers). At a time when the government is pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into efforts to help troubled institutions, notably Wall Street financial institutions and other banks, "It seems to me that the survival of Nevada's citizens' fundamental way of life is just as essential as the survival of big business pocketbooks."

More here.

In 2005, according to the Tax Foundation, Nevadans received 65 cents for every dollar they paid to the feds. That's no justification for a bailout, but it is nice to see educators in the ballpark when using any sort of figure.

New at Reason: Brian Doherty on How the Second Amendment was Restored

Posted on November 18, 2008, 7:00am

From our December issue, Senior Editor Brian Doherty reveals the inside story of District of Columbia v. Heller, where a gang of libertarian lawyers made constitutional history.

Read all about it here.

Lori Drew is Doomed

Posted on November 17, 2008, 6:21pm | Mike Riggs

As of last week, it looked like Judge George Wu would forbid any mention of Megan Meier's suicide in Lori Drew's trial. Today Wu changed his mind:

Evidence from the suicide of a Missouri girl can be used by prosecutors against a woman charged with helping to create a false Internet identity that was used to harass the teenager, a federal judge has ruled....

U.S. District Judge George Wu previously indicated he might bar any mention of suicide because it could be prejudicial, but he changed his mind Friday after hearing lawyers' arguments.

Wu said he was now convinced that many prospective jurors would be aware of the suicide from reading news reports or seeing a recent episode of the TV show "Law and Order" that involved a similar scenario. [emphasis added]

Law and Order? Seriously? Drew's attorney, Dean Steward, on the news:

"The jury is going to end up thinking that Lori Drew is being tried for the death of Megan Meier," he said.

Rather than making a reasoned decision, he said, "this jury is just going to decide this by sympathy."

I hate to call this one in the state's favor, but things don't look good for the cyber bully from Missouri. For more on Myspace's most notable sob story, check out reason's miniature Lori Drew Archive.

The Favor Factory

Posted on November 17, 2008, 5:59pm | Radley Balko

Last month, the Seattle Times assembled a handy database breaking down the earmarks attached to the 2008 defense appropriations bill.  The paper looked at how many of the bill's earmarks went to each congressional district and, in turn, how much money in campaign contributions the recipients of those earmarks have given to the congressmen who requested them.

For example, my congressman, Rep. Jim Moran (D-Va.) larded the 2008 defense bill with $40.6 million in earmarks.  Over the last five years, the recipients of those earmarks have given Moran more than $890,000 in campaign contributions.  Moran was second only to Rep John Murtha (D-Pa.) in raking in contributions from recipients of his sponsored earmarks—Murtha reaped $1.6 million in contributions from the whopping $126 million he put in the bill.

Only about 10 percent of Congress requested no earmarks at all.

"I'm probably the only district judge with this many tattoos"

Posted on November 17, 2008, 5:52pm | Damon W. Root

The Houston Chronicle has an interesting profile of Kevin Fine, a criminal defense attorney and self-described former drug addict who was elected this month as a Texas district court judge. From the story:

The devil tattooed on Kevin Fine's upper arm holds a razor blade, a mirror and an eight ball symbolizing cocaine. His forearm sports a tattoo of Jesus holding up a man who has collapsed amid the waves of a massive storm.

[...]

The crumpled man in Jesus' arms is a metaphor for the way he later faced his own skeletons and weathered the problems of addiction, said Fine, a criminal defense lawyer who will take the bench in January.

Fine believes he is qualified to help those who truly want to battle their own demons and says he'll be able to spot the phonies.

As the story notes, Fine will be replacing incumbent Judge Devon Anderson, whose responsibilities currently include volunteering one day per week at Harris County's "drug court," where judges determine whether or not to mandate certain drug offenders into treatment facilities rather than locking them up behind bars. "Fine said he plans to volunteer for the drug court after a year of learning the ropes as a new judge," the Chronicle reports.

This certainly raises some interesting questions: Will having a self-described former addict who is able to spot the "phonies" be good news for Harris County's drug offenders? More importantly, are drug courts that deal out treatment rather than incarceration really mitigating the Drug War's negative impact? It's obviously hard to argue that getting sent to drug treatment is worse than going to jail or prison, but does that mean that this sort of mandatory treatment is something that Drug War opponents should support? Here's what Thomas Szasz had to say on the subject in an interview with Jacob Sullum in February 2000:

Reason: In the area of drug policy, you've criticized the idea of shifting from a criminal justice approach to a "medical" or "public health" model, which you say would only reinforce the therapeutic state. But if a drug offender who might otherwise go to jail can instead undergo "treatment"—which is now the case in Arizona, for example—isn't he better off, even if the treatment is bogus?

Szasz: He may be better off in the sense in which a Jew in 15th-century Spain may have been better off converting to Christianity than being tortured. But I reject the dilemma. One of these so-called treatment options may be less punitive for the subject. But the side effect is that it reinforces the legitimacy of this kind of medical autocracy.

Full Houston Chronicle story on Fine here. reason's interview with Szasz here.

(Chronicle story via How Appealing)

Better and Better: Order Pizza Via TiVo

Posted on November 17, 2008, 5:22pm | Katherine Mangu-Ward

I squealed with joy when I read this (I really did. Ask the guys here at reason's DC HQ if you don't believe me): You can now order pizza from your TiVo.

From the press release:

TiVo Inc. (NASDAQ: TIVO), the creator of and a leader in television services for digital video recorders (DVRs), and Domino's Pizza, Inc. (NYSE: DPZ), the recognized world leader in pizza delivery, have teamed up to give broadband connected TiVo subscribers the ability to order pizza for delivery or pick-up, and track delivery timing, right from their TV sets using the TiVo® service.

Tell me that this quote from Rob Weisberg, vice president of precision and print marketing at Domino’s Pizza, Inc., doesn't make your heart overflow with joy at the wonders of the modern world:

"This is the first time in history that the ‘on-demand’ generation will be able to fully experience couch commerce by ordering pizza directly through their television set. You’ll see a television ad for Domino’s and you’ll click ‘I want it’ through your remote. In about 30 minutes, your pizza will show up at your door.”

Just in case you missed it, you can track your pizza from your couch.

Via Lifehacker

Just How Strapped Are the Big 2.5 Automakers?

Posted on November 17, 2008, 4:29pm | Nick Gillespie

Earlier today, reason's Michael C. Moynihan pointed to arguably the GM, Ford, and Chrysler's biggest problem in being competitive in today's auto industry: Labor costs that are on average about 50 percent higher than competitors such as Toyota.

Here's some interesting news on that front. Last year, the Big 2.5 negotiated a contract with the United Auto Workers that radically changes its cost structure. Basically, the companies are no longer paying for health care and pension benefits for new workers (additionally, the companies will pay vastly reduced health care costs for existing workers going forward). They've done this by switching from defined-benefit pensions to 401(k)s, offloading health care costs to the UAW, and cutting wages into something more in line with their competitors.

Here's how CNNMoney.com calculates the difference for bleeding behemoth GM, which is offering buyouts of older workers (more on that in a second):

The current veteran UAW member at GM today has an average base wage of $28.12 an hour, but the cost of benefits, including pension and future retiree health care costs, nearly triples the cost to GM to $78.21, according to the Center for Automotive Research.

By comparison, new hires will be paid between $14 and $16.23 an hour. And even as they start to accumulate raises tied to seniority, the far less lucrative benefit package will limit GM's cost for those employees to $25.65 an hour.

More on those GM buyouts, which the company has used in the past:

To try to stem automotive losses that have dogged the company since 2005, the company is making a range of offers, up to cash payments of $140,000 to the remaining 74,000 GM workers represented by the United Auto Workers union.

The goal is not to reduce headcount but rather to bring in new workers at a lower cost.

About 46,000 of the GM employees are eligible to retire today and they can take pension incentives worth between $45,000 to $62,500 to retire.

Whole story here.

None of this is to suggest that GM, or Ford or Chrysler, is out of the woods. Beyond everything related to labor costs, they've got a real product problem that needs a-fixin' fast.

The sort of move above though, however, has made some auto industry watchers optimistic about the longer run. Here's Autoblog's John McElroy:

Another benefit of that new labor contract is that the Big Three are no longer pressured to keep building cars and trucks in the face of weak demand. Under the old labor contract it was cheaper to build cars and slap big incentives on them than it was to not build them in the first place. Now, they can build to actual demand, and they're running on much tighter inventory.

That means they'll be able to slash their incentives. Every $1,000 that General Motors cuts from incentives will drop roughly $4 billion to the bottom line. And GM has an average of $3,500 in incentives!

More from him here.

Unconvincingly, McElroy is in favor of an automaker bailout, likening it to the Chrysler deal back in 1979, after which its "stock shot from $3 a share to over $30, a 1,000% return in just a few years time." He figures if the taxpayers back GM, Ford, and Chrysler this time around, the same thing will happen. Whether the world, especially Chrysler customers, are better off than if the company had actually gone out of business, is not clear at all. (I say this as someone who has owned two Plymouths.)

So will a mere $25 billion now turn into bazillions of dollars later? Eh, mebbe, mebbe not. In any case, it's hardly the taxpayers' job to be guaranteeing companies that, assuming they are really worth a damn, will be bought up by investors with an eye toward undervalued and underperforming outfits. Indeed, to the extent that the Big 2.5 are reforming themselves, they will become attractive to investors.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Estonian Spy

Posted on November 17, 2008, 4:20pm | Michael C. Moynihan

According to the Times of London, the Russian government received classified data on American missile defense from an Estonian defense ministry official in "what is being seen as the most serious case of espionage against Nato since the end of the Cold War." The case has rocked the former Soviet colony, which has long had (and here is the understatement of the year) a strained relationship with its neighbor to the East. It's not a particularly surprising development—Moscow's intelligence services barely skipped a beat after 1991, and are almost as aggressive now as they were in the days of Felix Dzerzhinsky—but this sentence particularly caught my eye, underlining the contiguous relationship between the KGB and its predecessor, the FSB:  "[Accused spy Herman Simm] was recruited by the Russians in the late 1980s and has been charged in Estonia with supplying information to a foreign power." Further details from the Times:

"The longer they work on the case, the more obvious it becomes how big the impact of the suspected treachery really is," according to Der Spiegel magazine. A German official described the Russian penetration of Nato as a "catastrophe".

Comparisons are being drawn with the case of Aldrich Ames, the former head of the CIA counter-intelligence department who was in effect Russia's top agent in the US.

"Simm became a proper agent for the Russian government in the mid-1990s," says the Estonian deputy Jaanus Rahumaegi who heads the country's parliamentary control commission for the security services.

On the face of it, the Simm case resembles the old-fashioned Cold War spy story. He used a converted radio transmitter to set up meetings with his contact, apparently someone posing as a Spanish businessman

Full story.

New at Reason: Brian Doherty on Where the Libertarian Party Went Wrong

Posted on November 17, 2008, 3:15pm

With the nomination of former Republican Congressman Bob Barr, many in the Libertarian Party anticipated the LP's most successful presidential campaign to date. In his definitive postmortem, Senior Editor Brian Doherty explains where the Barr campaign went wrong.

Read all about it here.

Regulators 'Simply Gave Up' on Blocking Online Gambling

Posted on November 17, 2008, 3:07pm | Jacob Sullum

Gambling law expert Nelson Rose says federal regulators "simply gave up" when confronted with the impossibility of implementing the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA). After receiving a flood of objections from financial institutions, the Treasury Department will not require them to figure out the difference between legal and illegal online gambling, a distinction Congress deliberately left vague and regulators refuse to clarify. The Bush administration's final regulations under the UIGEA, issued last week, require American credit card companies to invent new codes for certain transactions and require financial institutions to ask their clients to avoid illegal gambling. Otherwise, Rose says, "everyone else can basically continue to do what they are now doing," including American gamblers who use overseas intermediaries to place bets and collect their winnings. Money sent to individual gamblers does not even qualify as a "restricted transaction," Rose notes, and the regulations "now make it clear that payment processors should not waste their time checking on where money is sent by individuals." The government concedes "there are no reasonably practical steps that a U.S. participant [financial institution] could take to prevent their consumer customers from sending restricted transactions cross-border."  

I interviewed Rose for my June reason article about the online gambling crackdown. Last week Radley Balko noted that the Bush administration rushed to finish the UIGEA rules before its rule making authority expired, under the guidance of a former lobbyist for the NFL, one of the UIGEA's major backers.

A Bush Postmortem

Posted on November 17, 2008, 2:33pm | Nick Gillespie

Columnist Ron Hart runs through some reasons why George W. Bush failed so spectacularly as president.

Bush operated in an obstinate, faith-based manner which he felt guided him on all decisions. And is there a better way to combat irrational Islamic extremism than for Bush to look to his God for all answers?  It is like a poker game of "I see your Mohammed and raise you a Jesus."  Faith-based governing is much like faith-based cliff diving: for long-term survival, it really matters that your facts and calculations are correct.

"W" made government bigger to reflect his personal religious views. Silly side shows like the Terry Shiavo intervention, stem-cell research opposition, the gay marriage ban, a non-competitive Medicare prescription drug entitlement, the No Child Left Behind debacle and wiretaps sent many of us who value freedom and a non-intrusive government packing.

And the war of choice in Iraq is nothing short of a religious war. Any rudimentary understanding of history would have told his hawkish, neocon advisors that religious wars or wars of choice never turn out well.

Whole thing here.

SC Gov. Mark Sanford to Feds: Drop Dead!

Posted on November 17, 2008, 2:01pm | Nick Gillespie

Gov. Mark Sanford (R-S.C.) has a message to D.C. lawmakers, his fellow governors, and the American people that's worth listening to. The short version: The feds shouldn't bail out his state or anybody else's.

In 2008 bailouts became the first resort [in a strapped economy]. Over the past year the federal government has committed itself to $2.3 trillion (including the tax rebate "stimulus" checks of last February) to "improve" the economy. I don't see how another $150 billion now will make a difference in a global slowdown. We've already unloaded truckloads of sugar in a vain attempt to sweeten a lake. Tossing in a Twinkie will not make the difference.

However, there is something Congress can do: free states from federal mandates. South Carolina will spend about $425 million next year meeting federal unfunded mandates. The increase in the minimum wage alone will cost the state $2.6 million and meeting Homeland Security's REAL ID requirements will cost $8.9 million.

Read the whole thing in the Wall Street Journal (for free).

Watch the July 2008 CNN interview that might has cost the governor a VP slot on a McCain ticket (Sanford does such a piss-poor job articulating McCain's positives it is almost unbelievable):

When you make all the mandatory exemptions for real-life, actually elected politicians, Sanford is one of the most attractive pols around—a fiscal tightwad who is not unwilling to actually address and cut mega-spending issues.

Here's excerpts from a 2000 reason interview with then-Rep. Sanford, who was among those rare few who actually kept their self-imposed term-limit pledges.

Republican Mark Sanford ran for Congress in 1994 because he wanted to do something about the deficit, the debt, and Social Security. The GOP establishment wasn't happy—he was a developer, not a longtime pol who'd attended all the right dinners and functions—and they did their best to defeat him in the primary. They sent the likes of Tom DeLay, Dick Cheney, and Jack Kemp to South Carolina's 1st District to campaign against him. "I was like, ‘Why are you people here? I don't know who you are,'" recalls Sanford.

Once in office, Sanford was among the early advocates of privatizing at least part of Social Security. He also wants to free Americans to trade with Cuba. And he's famously cheap -a valuable and rare character trait in a politician. Domestically, this led him to oppose pork barrel spending, even in his own district. Internationally, it led him to pay a Cuban family $35 a night to put him up during a 1999 visit rather than stay at a hotel. On a personal level, it leads him to sleep on a futon on his D.C. office floor, rather than rent an apartment. At least he won't have to break a lease when he leaves town....

Reason: You once said that being a congressman wasn't that hard, that it should take six months to grasp the basics. Do you still believe this?

Sanford: In the 9 a.m. Republican conference meeting today, a certain unnamed Californian stands up and says, "This is real simple. It's shirts versus skins. We're shirts, they're skins." It's all the very elementary stuff on trading marbles. Any kid who has a set of marbles in the back yard or Pokémon cards or baseball cards and learns how to trade them knows everything you need to know about Congress.

Reason: Why does the trading always seem to go one way then? People seem to trade more for more, which leads to the growth of government every year. Why don't you ever make a new program contingent on killing an old one?

Sanford: That is the structural problem of democracy: diffuse costs and concentrated benefits. I'll have 100 visits in a week in the office. Ninety-nine of those visits people will say, "Mark, we really appreciate what you are doing on the deficit and debt and trying to reduce government spending. Keep it up. But we are here to talk to you about this one program and why it is very important." Who's going to take a trip to Washington to save 2 cents on the price of sugar because of the sugar subsidy?...

Reason: What's the biggest surprise you've had in Congress?

Sanford: The local will always trump national. Tip O'Neill said that all politics are local. He was exactly right. Whatever is in the best interest of one's chances of getting reelected is what drives the institution. It's selfishness in that "I-have-got-to-stay-up-here-to-do-good, fight-other-fights" way.

These people become your friends and you don't want to disappoint them. Even though I've only been here six years, some of my best friends in life are other members of Congress and I am going to miss them when I go. And if I had been here on the 20-year program, I would be that much more hesitant about disappointing them. Because nobody likes to disappoint anybody.

More with Sanford and other "congressional quitters," bless their souls, here.

Making Dearborn Independent

Posted on November 17, 2008, 1:11pm | Michael C. Moynihan

Writing in the New York Times, Daniel Sperling and Deborah Gordon, authors of the forthcoming book Two Billion Cars: Driving Toward Sustainability, advocate saving the Detroit auto industry by further taxing those who buy their (already overpriced) products:

One way to [fund the bailout] would be to establish a price floor of $3.50 per gallon on gasoline. If the price drops below that, as it recently has, the federal government would impose a variable tax to bring the price up to $3.50. If the price goes above $3.50, then the tax disappears. The money raised by the variable tax would be used, at least in the short term, to provide loan guarantees to the auto companies. (To ease the burden of higher gasoline prices on low-income taxpayers, some of the revenue would be provided to them as tax credits or vouchers.)

Of course higher gasoline prices would burden low-income Americans in other ways too, by increasing the cost of most consumer goods. And good luck convincing those who have recently purchased a Ford or a Chrysler (there must  be someone buying American cars) that an artificial price for gasoline is required, in order to give even more of your money to the selfless members of the United Auto Workers union.

Via Cato, Mark Perry, professor of economics at the Flint campus of the University of Michigan, argues that "Maybe the country would be better off in the long run if we let the Big Three fail, and in the process break the UAW labor monopoly, and then let Toyota, Honda and Volkswagen take over the U.S. auto industry, and restore realistic, competitive, market wages to the industry." He provides this helpful chart (which is further explained here; headline reference explained here):

Heart Attacks and the Massachusetts Smoking Ban

Posted on November 17, 2008, 12:11pm | Jacob Sullum

Last week the Massachusetts Department of Public Health claimed a new study shows the state's smoking ban has resulted in 577 fewer heart attack deaths per year since it took effect in July 2004. The department, perhaps hoping its spin will be accepted before critics have a chance to examine the basis for it in detail, does not plan to release the study until next year. All we have to go on is a press release, a "fact sheet" (PDF), and a story in The Boston Globe. But several things are clear:

1) Heart attack deaths were already declining before the statewide ban; the researchers claim the trend accelerated after the law took effect.

2) Judging from the graph on the fact sheet, heart attack deaths (as a percentage of all deaths) fell sharply after the ban even in municipalities that were already subject to local smoking bans, including those that had "strong" laws. That's not what you'd expect if restrictions on smoking caused the decline.

3) The reduction in heart attack deaths reported by the Globe—30 percent over three years—is much smaller than  the effects attributed to smoking bans in other studies. The report on Helena, Montana, for example, initially claimed a 60 percent reduction in heart attacks within six months, which was later downgraded to 40 percent.

4) Although Massachusetts Public Health Commissioner John Auerbach says "we believe the single most compelling reason [for the decline in heart attacks after the ban] was reduced exposure to secondhand smoke in workplaces," it's not clear what biological mechanism would account for such a quick effect. It can't be that fewer people are developing heart disease, since that takes years. Presumably what Auerbach has in mind is that less secondhand smoke means heart attacks are less likely to be triggered in people with pre-existing heart disease. Is there any evidence that, prior to the ban, nonsmokers with heart disease were keeling over dead as a result of heart attacks triggered by exposure to secondhand smoke?

Michael Siegel, who seems to have had a look at the raw data, has more (emphasis added):

In the first year after the smoking ban was implemented, there was no significant decline in heart attack deaths in the state. Moreover, there was no decline in heart attack deaths even among just those residents living in towns that did not previously have smoking bans. Thus, this study refutes the conclusions from Helena, Pueblo, Bowling Green, etc. that smoking bans immediately reduce heart attacks by decreasing secondhand smoke exposure.

The study did find a decline in heart attack rates from the first to second year after the statewide smoke-free law was implemented, but it turns out that the magnitude of this decline was not significantly different in towns with or without smoking bans prior to the state law. Thus, the study provides no evidence that the statewide smoking ban was associated with any significant decline in heart attacks, even up to two years after its implementation.

Siegel adds that cities with smoking bans did see significant reductions in heart attack deaths compared to cities without such laws in the seven-year period from 1999 through 2006. They also had lower smoking rates, which suggests they may be seeing the results of improving health in former smokers who quit as a result of the ordinances. Case-control studies indicate that the heart disease rate among former smokers falls by about 50 percent within four years of quitting.

In short, even if secondhand smoke has no measurable impact on death rates, over the long term smoking bans can be expected to reduce the incidence of heart disease (and other smoking-related illnesses) by pressuring smokers to quit. From a "public health" perspective, in fact, that is the main benefit of smoking bans. But whether we're talking about smokers or nonsmokers, immediate, sharp reductions (within the first six months to a year) are not biologically plausible, and they're not what the Massachusetts study found.

New at Reason: An Oral History of Reason Magazine

Posted on November 17, 2008, 12:00pm

From its beginnings as a mimeographed, small-circulation student magazine pushing the obscure political and philosophical vision known as libertarianism, to the website you are currently reading, Brian Doherty traces the history of reason magazine through interviews with its founders, staffers, and contributors.

Read all about it here.

The Important Thing Is that the Big 2.5 Automakers Should Get $25 Billion from Somewhere...

Posted on November 17, 2008, 11:37am | Nick Gillespie

This is what leadership in DC has been reduced to in the early years of the 21st century (the post-American century?): Congress demanding a bailout for the Ford, Chryler, and GM from the magical pool of $700 billion created just a few short weeks ago and the White House demanding that the bailout come instead from a Department of Energy boondoggle specifically designed to pad the carmakers' bottom lines.

Perino's early morning statement also made clear, however, that the administration steadfastly opposes drawing funds from the bailout plan to help Detroit. She said the $25 billion that Democrats favor taking from the rescue plan should come, instead, from a Department of Energy program previously approved and funded to develop fuel-efficient vehicles. The White House opposes the idea of automakers getting an additional $25 billion.

Democrats want to use part of the $700 billion Wall Street bailout for emergency loans to help prop up the Big Three carmakers. General Motors Corp., Ford Motor Co. and Chrysler LLC are seeking an infusion of $25 billion, a figure that several Senate Democrats embraced Sunday.

More here, via the Cincinnati Enquirer.

Purely rhetorical question: Have you driven a Ford lately?

Mike Huckabee vs. the Libertarians. Sorry, "Faux-Cons."

Posted on November 17, 2008, 11:27am | David Weigel

Once (and future?) presidential candidate Mike Huckabee is out with his third book in as many years, Do the Right Thing, a searing picture of a day on a Brooklyn city block a memoir of his unlikely, underfunded, and proudly socially conservative bid. A big chunk of the book is dedicated to settling some scores between Huck and the economic conservatives and libertarians who considered (and still consider) him unacceptable.

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

Huckabee trains a lot of fire on the Club for Growth, who had another tough election cycle, with 2006 victors Rep. Tim Walberg (MI) and Rep. Bill Sali (ID) going down in the Obama wave, joined by prize recruit Andy Harris in Maryland's first district. (Harris beat incumbent Rep. Wayne Gilchrest, a fellow Republican, in the primary, and watched Gilchrest push past him to elect Democrat Frank Kratovil.) Perhaps the Club's biggest success was its pre-emptive demolition job on Huckabee. The governor responds by accusing them and other libertarians of believing in "purity of politics first; people are on their own." In a chapter titled "Let Them Buy Stocks!" he accuses "libertarian faux-cons" of driving "the party even further away from its base of the hard-working middle class." He names names.

You can see the growing influence of faux-cons in the 2008 election cycle from the so-called Ron Paul Revolution to the economics-only conservatism reflected by some of the supporters of Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani.

But he backs off on Paul.

Before I get singed by hot and angry mail from Ron Paul disciples, I want to be emphatic in stating my sincere respect for Congressman Paul. I was convinced that he at least had genuine convictions and was willing to stand by them and on them no matter what the audience--a lot more than I could say for some of the candidates who could change positions as easily as Cher can change costumes in one of her many farewell tours.

Subtext: "Go to hell, Mitt Romney. No, not the one you believe in. The one I believe in."

One reason Huckabee might be softer on Paul is the role that rEVOLutionaries played in Huckabee's West Virginia primary victory. West Virginia Republicans select their winner at a party member-only convention. As I reported on Feb. 5, Paul backers, who loathed the bullying and arrogant Romney faction, cut a deal with Huckabee backers to combine their votes and edge out Romney. All the news networks reported that John McCain supporters had made the deal, but Huckabee sets the record straight and credits the "horse-trading" of the Paul people for his win.

The Anti-Socialist Wealth Redistributors

Posted on November 17, 2008, 10:50am | Matt Welch

George Will on Sunday furthered his valuable recent service to the nation by giving Republicans the kind of intellectual shock therapy they'll need if they are to learn anything both useful and objectively pro-freedom from their electoral drubbing earlier this month:

Conservatism's current intellectual chaos reverberated in the Republican ticket's end-of-campaign crescendo of surreal warnings that big government -- verily, "socialism" -- would impend were Democrats elected. John McCain and Sarah Palin experienced this epiphany when Barack Obama told a Toledo plumber that he would "spread the wealth around."

America can't have that, exclaimed the Republican ticket while Republicans -- whose prescription drug entitlement is the largest expansion of the welfare state since President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society gave birth to Medicare in 1965; and a majority of whom in Congress supported a lavish farm bill at a time of record profits for the less than 2 percent of the American people-cum-corporations who farm -- and their administration were partially nationalizing the banking system, putting Detroit on the dole and looking around to see if some bit of what is smilingly called "the private sector" has been inadvertently left off the ever-expanding list of entities eligible for a bailout from the $1 trillion or so that is to be "spread around." […]

Hyperbole is not harmless; careless language bewitches the speaker's intelligence. And falsely shouting "socialism!" in a crowded theater such as Washington causes an epidemic of yawning.

Whole thing, well worth a Monday morning read, here.

Like a Doctorow/MacLeod Mashup

Posted on November 17, 2008, 10:23am | Jesse Walker

An abandoned Soviet bunker in the Lithuanian countryside becomes a theme park:

Išgyvenimo drama opened in early 2008 to some controversy. Tourists pay 120 LTL ($US 220) each to step back into 1984 as a temporary USSR citizen for 2.5 hours. On entry, all belongings, including money, cameras and phones, are handed over and under the watchful eye of guards and alsatians, tourists change into threadbare Soviet coats and are herded through the bunker.

Experiences include watching TV programs from 1984, wearing gas masks, learning the Soviet anthem under duress, eating typical Soviet food (with genuine Soviet tableware) and even undergoing a concentration-camp-style interrogation and medical check.

The Soviet Bunker is not a theme park for the faint-hearted; all of the actors involved in the project were originally in the Soviet army and some were authentic interrogators...

Someone should write a travel book covering all these communist-themed tourist attractions in the former Soviet bloc, with ratings measuring each venue's levels of irony, horror, nostalgia, and educational value. Plus an appendix on visiting North Korea.

So Let It Be Written In, So Let It Be Done

Posted on November 17, 2008, 9:49am | David Weigel

Last week, I counted up the vote totals for the third parties in this presidential election. Nothing much has changed in a week, although extra ballots have edged Ralph Nader past his 1996 performance and pushed Chuck Baldwin to the best Constitution Party showing ever. The biggest change, historically speaking, is the total of write-in votes. As of today we know that, in the states that allow write-in votes to be counted, 78,346 people wrote in names at the top of their ballots, the biggest official number in American history.

Does that mean there was a nationwide groundswell of support for Ron Paul? Sort of. We know what happened in New Hampshire, the state that's crunched the write-in numbers the fastest.

Hillary Clinton, the Democrat who finished first in New Hampshire's presidential primary last year, also took first among all the write-in candidates in last week's general election. She garnered 1,124 write-in votes. Clinton's husband, former president Bill Clinton, also had his supporters, claiming 13 write-in votes from around the state.

Libertarians also made a strong showing in write-in ballots. Libertarian icon and Texas Republican Rep. Paul snagged 1,092 write-in votes. Chuck Baldwin, the Constitution Party nominee, snagged 226 votes.

All year I argued that the Ron Paul rEVOLution had more dead-enders than the Hillary Clinton electorate. But it turns out that, in the one state where we have data, their numbers were pretty comparable.

UPDATE: A caveat about Ralph Nader: His better vote totals are largely a function of his making it on more state ballots than he did in 2004 and 1996. In swing states where he's always been on the ballot (and where he focused his attention), his numbers are cratering. Nader won 28,087 votes in Florida this year, down from 32,971 in 2004 and (famously) 97,488 in 2000. In Colorado, Nader won 12,542 votes, down marginally from 12,718 in 2004, way down from 91,434 in 2000, and down even from the 25,070 votes he won in his 1996 non-campaign (when he allowed his name to be placed on ballots but refused to stump on the trail). California is Nader's burial ground: he won 237,016 votes there in 1996, 418,707 votes in 2000, and missed the ballot in 2004. But this year he got back on and won only 95,609 votes, even though liberal voters had no doubts about Obama winning the state.

It's hard to escape the conclusion that Nader would have been better off skipping this race, as far as it concerns his reputation. (Beyond the paltry vote totals, all that'll make his obituary is him accusing Obama of "acting white" and being an "Uncle Tom.") That's also true for McKinney, but probably not true for Barr, Baldwin, and Paul.

New at Reason: Steve Chapman on Term Limits Advocates Who Refuse to Leave Office

Posted on November 17, 2008, 7:00am

In a column that originally appeared in April 2006, Steve Chapman looks at how politics trumps principle to keep self-described term limits advocates from leaving office.

Read all about it here.

Libertarianism: About Property, Or Something More?

Posted on November 17, 2008, 2:18am | Brian Doherty

reason contributors spar about the definition and proper focus of libertarianism. A dividing line: is libertarianism (or should it be?) about property rights, or about the exercise of freedom more widely conceived?

This blog entry from Todd Seavey, along with its accompanying links and the comment thread, is a good start to dive into this ongoing round in a debate that had run through the self-conscious libertarian movement for a long time. Seavey is sure that his property rights-based version is both the customary and proper one--while the likes of Will Wilkinson, Kerry Howley, and Roderick Long all think that freedom is bigger than property rights.