Reason Magazine - Staff > Jesse Walker > Hit & Run Posts

You'll Be Happy to Hear the Revolutionary State Has Seized Everything Except the Insurance Industry

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Wed, 14 May 2008 09:58:00 EDT

I became intrigued by an oddity that I came to think of as the end-of-the-world trade. The trade is the purchase of insurance against what would in effect be the failure of the modern capitalist system. It would take a cataclysm -- around a third of the leading investment-grade corporations in Europe or half those in North America going bankrupt and defaulting on their debt -- for the insurance to be paid out.

I asked one investment banker what might cause half of North America's top corporations to default. No ordinary economic recession or natural disaster short of an asteroid strike could do it: no hurricane, for example, and not even 'the big one', a catastrophic earthquake devastating California. All he could think of was 'a revolutionary Marxist government in Washington'. That's not a likely scenario, yet the cost of insuring against it had shot up ten-fold. Normally one can buy $10 million of end-of-the-world insurance for between two and three thousand dollars a year. By early last November, the prices quoted were between twenty and thirty thousand, and even then it was difficult to buy in quantity -- at least, said the banker, 'not from anyone you trusted'.

Via Ken MacLeod, who comments: "You can insure against the revolution? Who knew?"

Cities on a Hill

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Wed, 14 May 2008 09:17:00 EDT

Ron Paul won't be moving to Paulville, reports Politico:

The founders of Paulville recently announced the purchase of the first 50 acres in West Texas on which they plan to build one of their "gated communities containing 100 percent Ron Paul supporters and or people that live by the ideals of freedom and liberty."

One man who won't be moving there anytime soon: Ron Paul....

[D]ropping out and creating an isolated community isn't the answer, says Paul, a congressman from Texas. "You don't want the ideas to be centered in one place," he says. "But it shows how desperate people are for freedom."

Consistent with his beliefs in liberty, however, he doesn't outright oppose Paulville. "I don't see that as a solution, but it can't hurt anything either," he says.

My position on Paulville is the same as my position on every libertarian intentional community: I don't want to live in a town filled with ideologues, even (or especially) if they're ideologues I agree with. That said, better a thousand Paulvilles than a single McCain Nation.

It's not clear, incidentally, that Paulville will appear at all. From the same article:

On Monday, just days after the announcement of the land purchase, the Web site Paulville.org went out of existence. No contact information had been on the site when it was live; phone calls and e-mails to the site administrator over the last several days have gone unreturned.

Has the dream died already? Or, like Brigadoon flashing briefly in the mist, have they already gone off the grid?

Bonus exercise: Imagine life in Edwardsville, Bidentown, the Dodd District, Port Romney, Huckabee County, Tancredo Township, or any other community devoted to the principles espoused by a failed presidential candidate. (Except Giuliani City. We already know what that one looked like.)

[Hat tip: Dan Clore.]

Other Science Facts

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Tue, 13 May 2008 17:07:00 EDT

The BBC reports:

Ancient humans started down the path of evolving into two separate species before merging back into a single population, a genetic study suggests.

The genetic split in Africa resulted in distinct populations that lived in isolation for as much as 100,000 years, the scientists say.

That's one possibility, anyway; the reporter adds that "other scenarios could also account for the data." The paper, published in the American Journal of Human Genetics, is available here.

[Via The Art of the Possible.]

Vote for the Socialist Labor Party!

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Tue, 13 May 2008 08:00:00 EDT

No, not really. Besides the ideological problems, there's the small fact that it hasn't bothered to nominate a presidential candidate since 1976. But I must admit I admire one plank in its program:

The Socialist Labor platform called for abolishing the presidency, and party electors were instructed to vote "no president" in the comet-striking-earth chance that the SLP carried a state.

That's from Bill Kauffman's thoughtful review of Daniel J. Flynn's A Conservative History of the American Left. There's more to the article than entertaining asides about the presidential platforms of semi-syndicalist sects; read the whole thing here.

You Don't Have to Watch Dynasty to Cop an Attitude

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Mon, 12 May 2008 11:02:00 EDT

Last month I mentioned that the conspiracy theorist Carrington Steele, author of Don't Drink the Kool-Aid: Oprah, Obama, and the Occult, wasn't the first person to worry that a Church of Oprah was rising. But I didn't realize just how unoriginal Steele was. The Christian outfit Lighthouse Trails Research reports:

Upon reading Steele's work ourselves, our editors discovered that the 80-page book was filled with verbatim passages copied from other writers material, which was presented as Steele's own authorship....

While we regret to issue this finding because we do believe that Oprah Winfrey's efforts to convert the public to her New Age beliefs must be exposed, we fear that Steele's book could negatively reflect upon and misrepresent long-standing and reputable ministries. In addition, because the author also plagiarized some secular sources (such as CNN, Fox News, and Rolling Stone magazine), we believe this book may, in addition to being a poor Christian testimony, be legally problematic.

There's a political angle:

Because the chapter on Obama did not contain any documentation that he was involved in the occult or the New Age, Lighthouse Trails asked Steele if there was political motivation involved. What's more, the chapter on Obama did not seem to fit in with the rest of the book. Steele said she was not politically motivated.

Fuel for future conspiracy theories:

When Lighthouse Trails spoke with Carrington Steele, she stated she had done both the writing and the research on the book without help or support from others. However, it was pointed out to her that she often said "we" and "us" in her interviews, and we wondered to whom she was referring. At this point, Steele said she could not answer that question, saying she was not at liberty to say. We found this response to be curious and disturbing.

Mike Gravel Crosses Over

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Fri, 09 May 2008 13:39:00 EDT

No comment:

For the Love of Godwin...

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Fri, 09 May 2008 10:28:00 EDT

This is mean-spirited, unfair, and profane. I loved it.

[Via Andrew Sullivan.]

I'm wondering where in the world Alan Keyes could be, I been looking for him even clear through Tennessee

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Thu, 08 May 2008 08:00:00 EDT

For heaven's sake, stop encouraging him:

The Constitution Party may not want Alan Keyes but some people do. Keyes scored his best Republican primary performance of the campaign last night, winning 3 percent of the vote in North Carolina (although he still trailed John McCain, Mike Huckabee, Ron Paul, and "no preference"). Keyes continues to run as an independent. And the state party chairman of the American Independent Party, Keyes's largest bloc of support at the CP national convention, told Ballot Access News that he would still like to nominate Keyes for president.

One Flew Over the Lone Star State

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Wed, 07 May 2008 12:19:00 EDT

The Dallas Morning News runs a blistering exposé of Texas' state psychiatric institutions:

Patients with severe mental illness are committed to Texas' state psychiatric hospitals to be protected from themselves. Instead, some are suffering vicious abuse from the very caregivers hired to look after them.

Last year, one state mental hospital employee tackled an adolescent patient who was sobbing for his mother, dragging him across the floor by his wrists and hair.

The year before, another brought a female patient into a hospital bathroom and sexually abused her....

State officials say there will always be some reports of abuse and neglect in an institutional setting. And they say they take any allegations of mistreatment seriously. But the records show that as in other state-run facilities, abuse and neglect are systemic.

Naturally, the system's supporters believe the problems can be solved with more money:

The state psychiatric hospitals, like other systems for vulnerable Texans, are chronically starved for cash, advocates of more state funding say, and services at the local level can't keep up.

"You get what you pay for," said Rep. Garnet Coleman, D-Houston, who has bipolar disorder. "When you financially dumb something down, you make services cheap, something's got to give. Unfortunately, it usually ends up being a mentally ill or disabled Texan."

Before we go any further, I'd like to pause to savor the phrase "Rep. Garnet Coleman, D-Houston, who has bipolar disorder." In a better world, the AP styleguide would require reporters to identify all elected officials with a party affiliation, a district or state, and a psychiatric diagnosis.

Now I'll turn the microphone over to Charles Johnson -- the Rad Geek guy, not the Little Green Footballs guy -- to argue that it might not be a good idea to give abusive institutions more resources:

no matter how bad and how widespread the abuse may get, the administrators can always count on the pro-establishment wing of their supposed critics to go to the public and to the legislature to beg for even more tax money and even more prison guards to be sent into the psychiatric prison system, so that the very people who created these maddening prison-ward hellholes can be rewarded for their institutionalized violence by being allowed to take even more money from taxpayers to go on doing the same old thing...

What is really needed is a power change, so that psychiatric wards are no longer artificially packed by court order, so that patients can leave and seek help through other means if conditions become unbearable, and so that supposed patients are no longer "treated" against their will and held down at the mercy of their helper-captors. If you make a hospital into a prison camp, then it should be no surprise when the hospital "caregivers" start acting like prison camp guards.

Also, No One Likes the Popup Ads

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Tue, 06 May 2008 11:10:00 EDT

Al Qaeda's Internet problems:

One Bin Laden tape in four months has a tremendous impact, a dozen Zawahiri tapes in two months has considerably less. In Zawahiri's Q+A, he repeatedly answered questions with an irritated "I already answered that in last month's speech" or "bin Laden already answered that in his speech." That suggests that too many messages dilutes the impact. It also reduces the likelihood of massive media coverage, since the messages become routine. The same applies for the Iraqi insurgency videos: the first exploding hummer might be thrilling, but the 76th not so much.

That's the always-interesting Marc Lynch writing about the limits of the jihadists' online efforts. They bear a striking resemblance to the limits of everyone else's online efforts. Here's some more:

I come across quite a bit of posturing and bravado in these forums, hating on 'enemies' and back-patting of 'allies'. The recent initiation of an 'al-Jazeera watch' feature on one of the forums tracking perceived slights and misrepresentation by the now maligned station reminds me of nothing so much as the partisan media criticism found on so many political blogs. There's a lot of posting of articles or news reports clipped from the media, with long comment threads of cheering or jeering. I remember seeing a bitter post on one of the main forums a few weeks ago (al-Boraq? I forget) complaining that the "internet jihad" had failed since the forum had degenerated into personal attacks and what we would call flame-wars.

Whole thing here.

Obsolete Communism

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Mon, 05 May 2008 11:30:00 EDT

City Journal has published a collection of reflections on the revolutionary month of May 1968. The views on display are more varied than you might expect, given the magazine's neoconservative slant. I particularly enjoyed Guy Sorman's memories of the uprising in France:

Slogans painted on walls and an onslaught of posters with surrealist messages captured widespread attention. The most memorable posters were those asserting that it was FORBIDDEN TO FORBID. Others offered more cryptic slogans like SOUS LES PAVÉS, LA PLAGE ("Under the paving stones, the beach") and COURS CAMARADE, LE VIEUX MONDE EST DERRIÈRE TOI! ("Run, comrade, the old world is behind you!"), an ironic paraphrase of Marxist ideology. Slogans were the only program, and they called for individual freedom, anarchy, nonviolence, and enjoyment of the here and now.

The longterm effect of '68, Sorman argues, was that "an individualistic society replaced the hierarchical one." The results could be seen everywhere from sexuality ("May '68 was the moment when sexual liberation coincided with the availability of the birth-control pill") to business ("Many '68 leaders became entrepreneurs and contributed to the new managerial style") to the left:

In the ideological world, Marxism was the most obvious victim. The May '68 leaders were anti-Communist. Those who claimed to be Maoist, as some did (without any understanding of Maoism's true nature), were, above all, anti-Stalinist. The revolts in Eastern Europe rendered Marxism comatose, both as an ideology and as a mode of governance. While another 20 years would pass before the Communist Party gave up power in Eastern Europe, the seeds of its demise were sown in '68. True, there were a few deviations: the Red Brigade in Italy, the Baader-Meinhof Gang in Germany, and the guerrillas in Latin America. But these were ideological last gasps.

That isn't, of course, the only political legacy of '68. Sol Stern's contribution to the forum describes Tom Hayden's naive support for the Viet Cong, and Christopher Hitchens' essay reveals the many ideological paths a soixante-huitard could take. But Sorman is right: A revolt against Communism was brewing, sometimes even among people who considered themselves Marxists. What looked like a month of triumph for the left wound up advancing something that is beyond left and right.

Footnote: How did free-market libertarians react to the rebellion in France? Many wrote it off as another spasm of collectivism, but not everyone. Here is Murray Rothbard's brief review of Daniel and Gabriel Cohn-Bendit's book about the uprising:

The story of the almost-victorious French revolution of May, 1968 by its heroic young anarchist leader. The case for an anarchist rather than a Bolshevik revolution.

By the way: This is also the anniversary of May 1958, another month of turmoil in France. Where are the cinquante-huitards?

London Calling to the Zombies of Death

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Sat, 03 May 2008 13:59:00 EDT

The most interesting thing about Boris Johnson's victory in the London mayoral race might be what hasn't changed. The office has moved from the hard left to the hard right, but there's one issue where it is staying put:

London voters just voted out Ken Livingstone, the iconoclast left-wing antiwar mayor, and replaced him with the iconoclast right-wing antiwar Boris Johnson....

Johnson is not a neocon. In fact, he comes from the same sort of paleo-conservative roots as Pat Buchanan. He is opposed to British imperial dreams, and is in direct conflict with much of the UK Conservative Party.

In the last few years, he has been a strong opponent of the Iraq War, the rush to war with Iran, and Blair's crackdown on civil liberties.

Something else that hasn't changed: The mayor of Greater London does not, alas, have much influence on his country's foreign policy.

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Sat, 03 May 2008 13:30:00 EDT

I don't know how this story slipped by me last week:

Llewellyn Werner admits he is facing obstacles most amusement park developers never have to deal with -- insurgent attacks and looting.

When you are building an amusement park in downtown Baghdad, those risks come with the territory.

Mr Werner, chairman of C3, a Los Angeles-based holding company for private equity firms, is pouring millions of dollars into developing the Baghdad Zoo and Entertainment Experience, a massive American-style amusement park that will feature a skateboard park, rides, a concert theatre and a museum. It is being designed by the firm that developed Disneyland....

A $1 million skateboard park, the first phase of the development, will open in July. Parts for 200,000 skateboards and materials to build ramps will be shipped from America to Iraq for assembly at state-owned factories and distributed free to Iraqi children along with helmets and knee pads.

If the attraction does open as planned, I'd be curious to learn how many of its costs are being borne by private investors who actually expect it to be a profitable park, and how many are being subsidized -- via government factories, government security, or any other means -- by leaders eager to establish a Potemkin Disneyland.

The Last Communist We Hang Shall Be the One Who Sold Us the Rope

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 10:40:00 EDT

Globalization and nationalism, chapter CCXXXV:

Police in southern China have discovered a factory manufacturing Free Tibet flags, media reports say. The factory in Guangdong had been completing overseas orders for the flag of the Tibetan government-in-exile.

Workers said they thought they were just making colourful flags and did not realise their meaning. But then some of them saw TV images of protesters holding the emblem and they alerted the authorities, according to Hong Kong’s Ming Pao newspaper.

The factory owner reportedly told police the emblems had been ordered from outside China, and he did not know that they stood for an independent Tibet.

[Via Chris Hayes.]

I Am Curious (Wiki)

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 14:53:00 EDT

I'm pro-Wikipedia. I think it's an inspiring example of bottom-up collaborative creation. Knock it for its inaccuracies, and I'll reel off the usual defenses: Sure, it isn't completely reliable, but there are thousands of eyes monitoring it. When someone makes an obviously inaccurate edit, someone else will usually pounce to fix it. In the meantime, the uncertainty encourages a different, more skeptical sort of reading.

That said: Boy, but some weird crap manages to slip through the cracks there. From the entry on Curious George:

As stated in an interview, the book Curious George Takes a Job was inspired by a true story. A boy, whose name is not known today, was born in Hamburg in 1909 with Down's Syndrome. He was institutionalized by his parents, condemned to a life at the facility.

When the boy was 15, he escaped from the institution and fled into the city streets. Hungry and in search of food, he found the briefly unattended kitchen of a restaurant, where a cook found him playing with the food and eating it. The cook, intrigued, put him to work to clean dishes, and took him home that evening. Within the following days, the cook arranged with a friend to have the boy wash windows at an office building.

The boy's work went well at first. But in one office, he found colored paints. He used them to paint a mural on the wall of the office. The tenant returned to his office after a lunch break to find the boy busy painting, and he started to chase after him. The boy jumped out a third-story window, breaking some bones.

The story made local headlines. After several weeks of hospitalization, the boy was formally adopted by the cook, and he later became the star of an amateur movie. He was recognized in the coming years as a talented artist. Some of his artwork was sold by the renowned bookseller, A.S.W. Rosenbach.

Tragically, his identity, art, and other details of his life were lost in the ravages of World War II, and he is believed to have been put to death by the government of Nazi Germany.

That passage has been part of the article for over a year. During that time, the page has not suffered from an absence of attention. There has been a long-running battle about whether George is an ape or a monkey. There have been arguments over the political subtexts of the stories. There have been efforts to add obviously phony info to the entry, prompting editors to leave comments like this one:

I seriously doubt "Curious George Gets AIDS" was one of the books. I don't want to change it myself since last time I made a minor edit I was banned from making any further ones by Wikipedia.

Yet that shaggy-dog story about Curious George Takes a Job is still there. No one has even suggested that it be sourced with a citation stronger than the vague "As stated in an interview."

It is my power as a Wikipedia reader to make the necessary changes myself. But a bizarre and funny passage like that one deserves to be immortalized, so I'm blogging it instead.

Bonus links: A communiqué from the Curious George Brigade.

Fr. Archimedes Aloysius Anarchy's Curious George fan fiction, including such unforgettable tales as Curious George Goes to Jail and Curious George Does LSD.

A Curious George true crime story.

Curious George meets rave culture:

They Keep Killing Mr. Hooper

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 15:47:00 EDT

The Baltimore Sun's Rona Kobell (full disclosure: she's my wife) describes the impact that unexpected new crabbing regulations will have on Hoopers Island and other Chesapeake communities:

Last week, the Maryland Department of Natural Resources announced it will end the season for female crabs Oct. 23, about seven weeks early. That will slash income for crabbers here at the most lucrative time - when the female crabs are migrating along the coast of the Lower Eastern Shore to Virginia, where they spawn. The state also is imposing limits on how many bushels of females watermen can take in September and October, further cutting their income.

"The main stream of our income is this crab, and without it, we are just destroyed," said Thomas "Bubby" Powley, a crabber who also owns a crab-picking house. "There is just no way we can live with the regulations that they are suggesting."

Whole thing here.

Eminent Domain As a Civil Rights Issue

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 10:30:00 EDT

An event in Alabama tomorrow that looks like it'll be worth watching:

Few policies have done more to destroy community and opportunity for minorities than eminent domain. Some 3 to 4 million Americans, most of them ethnic minorities, have been forcibly displaced from their homes as a result of urban renewal takings since World War II....

On Tuesday, the Alabama Advisory Committee of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights will hold a public forum at Birmingham's historic Sixteenth Street Baptist church to address ongoing property seizures in the state. The church was not only a center of early civil rights action, but also, tragically, where four schoolgirls lost their lives in a bombing in 1963.

Whole article here. Event details here.

Alan Keyes Loses Again

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 13:40:00 EDT

The Permanent Candidate has failed to win the nomination of the paleoconservative Constitution Party. Eric Garris reports:

Last night, CP founder Howard Phillips strongly denounced [Alan] Keyes as a warmonger, neocon, and egomaniac. Phillips was subsequently attacked by Jim Clymer, the CP national chairman.

In spite of Keyes bringing in a lot of delegates, the CP remained true to their anti-interventionist views and rejected Keyes.

The nomination instead went to the antiwar conservative Chuck Baldwin, by a vote of 383.8 to 125.7. It's a small but satisfying victory for two noble though possibly lost causes: the movement to end the occupation of Iraq and the transideological coalition to get Alan Keyes to shut up.

I pointed out a while back that the California affiliate of the Constitution Party is the old American Independent Party, a group formed as a political vehicle for the segregationist George Wallace. Jim Antle of The American Spectator, who has done the best reporting I've seen on the CP race, tells me that the California delegation backed Keyes, a black man -- while the party's two black state chairs were Keyes' leading opponents. It's a complicated world, innit?

Anti-Libertarian Humor

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 09:27:00 EDT

I have to admit it: This video is pretty damn hilarious.

Update: The creator speaks:

I'm the writer, director, editor, and producer of the video in question, and while I admit it's somewhat tongue-in-cheek, it's not intended to be anti-libertarian by any means. I wrote the poem 10 years ago when a Koch Associate applied to work for my organization and listed "libertarianism, poetry" as her interests....The idea of "libertarian poetry" seemed incongruous.

He adds that "if anything the poem and video are poking fun at a stereotype of libertarianism" and concludes, "If any libertarians or anarcho-capitalists take offense to the video, please note that it was not intended to offend you."

No offense taken. Like I said, it's hilarious.

Al Qaeda vs. the Truthers

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 15:59:00 EDT

My brain hurts:

Al-Qaeda's deputy leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, has blamed Iran for spreading the theory that Israel was behind the 11 September 2001 attacks.

In an audio tape posted on the internet, Zawahiri insisted al-Qaeda had carried out the attacks on the US.

He accused Iran, and its Hezbollah allies, of trying to discredit Osama Bin Laden's network.

Via Thoreau, who notes that this is another case of satire as prophecy.

First They Came for the Toddlers...

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 11:25:00 EDT

The FLDS raid in Texas looks more ludicrous every day. Writing in the Dallas Morning News, Scott Henson takes aim at Judge Barbara Walther:

Excuse me, Judge? You issued a sweeping, house-to-house search warrant based on a highly questionable anonymous call that turned out to be phony. You refused to allow individual hearings for children, grouping them together like cattle. You accepted the testimony of an expert on "cults" who only learned about FLDS from media accounts, rather than an academic who'd studied them professionally for 18 years.

You've ruled the existence of five girls between 16 and 19 who were pregnant or had children was evidence of systematic abuse, even though in Texas 16-year-olds can marry with parental consent. You've ruled young toddlers are in "immediate" danger because of their parents' beliefs or what might happen 15 years from now, not because anyone abuses them.

From the evidence presented publicly, I do not believe that the children have been sexually abused or physically harmed. Allegations of forcible rape turned out to be bogus, and only five girls 16 to 19 years old were found pregnant or with children -- probably about the same ratio you'd find if you rounded up all the kids in my neighborhood....

In Eldorado, no one alleges YFZ parents are themselves abusing children. Instead the allegation (in court, at least) is that they're teaching their kids that a woman's highest calling is giving birth and raising children and that it's acceptable to get married at an early age. Even if it were true, and the allegation was disputed, can this really be enough to seize children from their homes?

Hanson has been covering the case heavily on his excellent blog. Also invaluable: The Polygamy Files, a blog by Brooke Adams of The Salt Lake Tribune, who has been on the fundamentalist Mormon beat for years. One piece of good news: Judge Walther has reversed her decision to separate FLDS mothers from children less than 12 months old.

And yes, it may turn out that there was some genuine sexual abuse in that community. If so, it should be punished. But even then, the approach the government has taken would be deeply harmful overkill, for reasons expressed pithily by Les Jones:

Imagine that some parents in a school district were accused of child abuse. Now imagine that the authorities took every child from the elementary, junior high, and high school away from their parents and put them in foster care. That's a rough analogy of what's happening in Texas.

The difference, I guess, is that the FLDS parents belong to a "cult." And once you've applied that label, it's just a quick step to assuming they do everything en masse.

D.I.Y. Eminent Domain

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 10:12:00 EDT

RIA Novosti reports:

A villager in south Russia's Astrakhan Region has been detained on suspicion of stealing his neighbor's house, which is common practice in remote areas, a local police spokesman said Monday.

The spokesman said the hapless house owner, who had been away for four months, reported the theft to police after he returned home to find his house gone and just the foundations remaining.

"A local resident decided that if no one was living in the house, it could be taken away piece by piece, and he dismantled it for construction materials and put them inside his yard," the police spokesman said, adding the suspect faced a maximum of three years in prison, if found guilty.

Warning: This Post Is About Alan Keyes

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 16:16:00 EDT

Alan Keyes wants the presidential nomination of the conservative Constitution Party -- but does the Constitution Party want him? Jim Antle reports that Keyes' pro-war positions haven't endeared him to the party's isolationist rank and file:

Ricardo Davis, the state party chairman for Georgia, says any attempt to abandon the antiwar stance will go over about as well as the New Coke. "What if I was the new CEO of a midsized company and decided embark on a strategy to sell a 'me too' product that negates the company's unique sales proposition?" he asks. "What if that sales proposition is held dear by most of the sales and marketing management in the company? What do you think will happen to that company as I try to change the company's direction? A train wreck would look prettier!"...

Last Thursday, Keyes took part in a conference call with state Constitution Party leaders. Instead of smoothing over their differences on the Iraq war and other issues, at least one participant remembers Keyes being more interested in talking than listening. "I appreciate that Alan speaks his mind," says Davis. "But he is seeking our nomination, not the other way around."

Keyes has supporters, too: Some CPers seem to believe, in the face of massive evidence to the contrary, that his fame will make him a vote magnet. The Constitutional convention is coming up this weekend, so we'll soon see if Keyes' semi-celebrity status is enough to outweigh his support for Bush's foreign policy.

[Via Freddy Gray, a young Englishman who "was only recently made aware of the extraordinary Mr Keyes. I am now obsessed. Is he not the most entertaining politician in the world?" I remember that feeling, Freddy. Time will pass, and soon you'll be sick of him too.]

Ten Years of Running and They Put You on the Woods Fund Board

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 09:59:00 EDT

Had enough of the Bill Ayers pseudo-scandal? Me too, but it just sparked an exchange between Cass Sunstein and David Frum that is too jaw-droppingly silly not to mention.

First -- this isn't the silly part -- Sunstein wrote in The New Republic:

Ayers is one of numerous people, in the Chicago area, whom Barack Obama has run across. Obama has much closer relationships with numerous conservatives on the University of Chicago faculty, many of whom have given money to Obama's campaign, and many of whom have talked to him at length and been at social occasions with him.

I know for a fact that Obama has actually played basketball with Richard Epstein, a libertarian on the law school faculty who has written some pretty controversial things on property rights and government regulation. I also know that Obama has had a number of conversations with former law school dean Daniel Fischel, a Reagan Republican who has written some pretty controversial things on corporations and government regulation.

Sounds like a reasonable point to make. But not to Frum:

Obama himself has equated Ayers' record of treason and violence to the intemperate talk of Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn. Now Cass Sunstein goes further still - and compares unrepentant domestic terrorism to libertarian theorizing!

The point of Sunstein's comments, obviously, is not to "equate" Epstein with Ayers, just as the point of Obama's earlier comments, obviously, was not to "equate" Ayers with Coburn. The point is that Obama associates with a lot of very different people and that it's foolish to assume his loose connections to one of them define his politics. Serving on the same board as Bill Ayers doesn't make Obama sympathetic to Marxist terrorism any more than shooting hoops with Epstein makes him a libertarian.

If there's a legitimate story here, it isn't that Obama is one of the many Chicago politicians (even the mayor!) who have interacted with Ayers. It's that Ayers, after playing revolutionary for a spell, has managed to find a place in the Chicago establishment. The Weather Underground was made up of the children of the elite, and after all the shouting of the '60s and '70s died down those Weathermen who managed to avoid prison or self-immolation have often been able to return to high-status professional positions. I'd love to see a Marxist analysis of that class dynamic.

I, Rigoberta Russert

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 13:00:00 EDT

Jonathan Chait takes up one of my favorite themes: the rise of right-wing P.C.

Barack Obama's comments about the white working class have thrown the political campaign into a particularly comic spasm of pretense and hypocrisy, but I was planning to let it go, I really was, until George F. Will decided to leap to the defense of the proletariat. Yes, that George F. Will. The fabulously wealthy, bow tie-wearing, pretentious reference-mongering, Anglophilic fop who grew up in a university town as a professor's son, earned two advanced degrees, has a designated table at a French restaurant in Georgetown, and, had he dwelt for any extended time among the working class, would be lucky to escape without his underwear being yanked up over his ears. Will devoted his column to expressing his displeasure at Obama's "condescension" toward the working class....

Blue-collar whites now occupy the same position in American politics that people of color hold in the smaller political subculture of academia: a victim-hero class whose positions (usually as interpreted by outsiders) enjoy the presumption of moral superiority.

The victim-hero class is the object of competitive flattery and the subject of mutual accusations of disrespect. You can't read a Peggy Noonan paean to real America--"a healthy and vibrant place full of religious feeling and cultural energy and Bible study and garage bands and sports-love and mom-love and sophistication and normality"--without thinking of a junior faculty member extolling the dignity of Guatemalan peasant women. Bill O'Reilly's or Tim Russert's endless invocations of their working-class backgrounds are the equivalent of the campus activist who introduces every opinion by saying "As a woman of color...."

Whole thing here. Over the next seven months, you should expect many more opportunities to think of those noble Guatemalan daughters of the soil.

Update: A few readers have spoken up for George Will, noting that his column in question managed to avoid O'Reilly-style phony-populist bluster. That's a fair point, though I think Chait was simply showing how easy it is to turn those rhetorical guns on the Republicans. But for the record: Will has a right to write about liberal condescension toward the working class whether or not he has a proletarian bone in his body. The problem is those conservatives (and Clintonites) whose hymns to Middle America are at least as condescending as Obama's remark about people who cling to their Bibles and guns.

(That's one of the reasons, I think, why Obama's comment doesn't seem to have hurt him in the Pennsylvania primary, though it may yet do some damage in the general election. Nothing he said has been as patronizing as Hillary Clinton's Dukakis-in-a-tank attempts to paint herself as a gun-toting, shot-drinking tribune of the laboring classes.)