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Friday Mini Book Review: Head Case

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 21:40:00 EST

Head Case: How I Almost Lost My Mind Trying to Understand My Brain, by Dennis Cass (HarperCollins, 2007). More in the "sensitive but not too earnest, hapless but not too pathetic" guy non-fiction mode, on a topic that could certainly use some humane and skeptical voices: the graspings of modern neuroscience.

The book is a perfectly entertaining failure; it reads quickly and smoothly as any given Esquire feature (which it resembles in voice and weight) and switches skillfully and entertainingly from the poignant memoir part (the author's troubles coping with the memory of his mentally troubled stepfather) to the wacky participatory journalism parts (he gets his brain scanned, takes Adderall, leads his own psychological research team to a mall).

Cass plays the naif too much to get to any deep conclusions about what we actually understand, and/or can control, about the human brain; this humble voice is appropriate to such a confused and confusing topic. One comes away intrigued with the knowledge that Adderall makes Arby's sandwiches taste even crappier; thinking that his nutty stepdad might have been hell to live with but is pretty interesting to read about; and that perhaps the wisest sentence in the book is "When Bill [the stepdad] talked to me this way he wasn't a brain; he was a shitty dad."

Cass is a good writer who took on an important topic--perhaps a more important topic than he even fully grasped. Sometimes contemplating neuroscience and its curious and troubling connection to the humane life--its advances, its imperialism, its reductionism, its tautologies--I think it must demand either slavish obedience or rebellious resistance. Doubtless, that's a limbic reaction. A middle way is surely more sensible, more responsible, more defensible. Cass takes that middle way, and proves that, at least when it comes to popular journalism, that middle path is alas far less fascinating.

Shouting "Screw You" At Prozac

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 20:35:00 EST

Found via Kevin Drum at the Washington Monthly, an interesting new metastudy written up in the UK Guardian that casts doubt on the effectiveness of such SSRIs and SSNIs commonly prescribed for depression as Prozac and Effexor.

An excerpt from the Guardian account:

The study examined all available data on the drugs, including results from clinical trials that the manufacturers chose not to publish at the time. The trials compared the effect on patients taking the drugs with those given a placebo or sugar pill.
When all the data was pulled together, it appeared that patients had improved - but those on placebo improved just as much as those on the drugs.
The only exception is in the most severely depressed patients, according to the authors - Prof Irving Kirsch from the department of psychology at Hull University and colleagues in the US and Canada. But that is probably because the placebo stopped working so well, they say, rather than the drugs having worked better.
"Given these results, there seems little reason to prescribe antidepressant medication to any but the most severely depressed patients, unless alternative treatments have failed," says Kirsch.
The paper, published today in the journal PLoS (Public Library of Science) Medicine, is likely to have a significant impact on the prescribing of the drugs.
.........
The pattern they saw from the trial results of fluoxetine (Prozac), paroxetine (Seroxat), venlafaxine (Effexor) and nefazodone (Serzone) was consistent. "Using complete data sets (including unpublished data) and a substantially larger data set of this type than has been previously reported, we find the overall effect of new-generation antidepressant medication is below recommended criteria for clinical significance," they write.

From my own perspective on the rolling juggernaut of psychatric medicine, I somehow doubt the optimistic "likely to have a significant impact" bit. Especially given Kevin Drum's observation on how little play this has gotten in American media, which still seems to be the case.

Drum's comment thread is very interesting and worth at least skimming for those who care about this topic. Lots of people jousting with the results, some of them of the level of intellectual sophistication of those who note that, damn, that horoscope that day really described exactly what I was going through; others raise the notion that the study might be misleading for either conflating some drugs that work with others and dragging down the working drugs average, or for mixing subjects who really are depressed with a bevy of people to whom the drugs were misprescribed and thus don't work.

The full study, from the open-access Public Library of Science.

Ronald Bailey wrote back in July 2007 for reason on the fascinating world of public access open source scientific journals such as Public Library of Science.

This July 2007 reason feature by me touches on some of the things that psychiatric medical science can't quite tell us.

And see this July 2000 reason interview with psychiatric critic Thomas Szasz, conducted by Jacob Sullum.

Second Thoughts on WFB

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 20:02:00 EST

Reading through a recent issue of the magazine he founded, National Review, on the day of his death, I was reminded that, though there are certainly things to admire from a libertarian perspective about William F. Buckley, many of which you've read here on this site this week, it takes a fair amount of "defining bad conservatism down" to praise the late Mr. Buckley unreservedly as one of the good 'uns.

The article that got me thinking this was a review by NR Senior Editor Ramesh Ponnuru of the new book by fellow National Review contributor David Frum, Comeback: Conservatism That Can Win Again. The book's prescriptions (I have not read the book--I am going from Ponnuru's review, and my understanding of Frum from his short-form journalism) sound simply dreadful--and in many ways perfectly Buckleyan.

One of the characteristic aspects of Buckleyan conservatism was that it must stay moored within the bounds of widely acceptable and achievable political goals, an approach that he and his colleagues felt made them more serious, more engaged, more realistic, than their libertarian semi-comrades. This approach was drilled into him by early mentors like James Burnham and Whittaker Chambers. You see this attitude in Ponnuru on Frum:

Had [Bush] governed more conservatively, he would be even more unpopular than he is now. Conservative journalists and policy experts complain that Bush added an expensive prescription-drug benefit to the already-unaffordable Medicare program. “But,” writes Frum, “public support for the benefit ranged between 80 percent and 90 percent through the first Bush term. .

Blithely going along with a program that will cost staggeringly unimaginable amounts of money in a nation already buried in debt is the sober, serious stance, then; while those who might object to indebting ourselves to the nth generation to satisfy short-term political and business constituencies are head-in-the-clouds losers.

There's more to Frum's realistic advice:

it is conservative themes, not just conservative policies, that need to be updated [thinks Frum]. “[H]ow many Americans in these opening years of the 21st century feel too little liberty to do what they want to do?” We have more liberty, and less order, than we used to have, and popular anxieties have shifted in response.

That's exactly the problem most Americans face: too much liberty. What does this man who sells himself as political advisor to an adrift political tendency offer to save conservatism (and America) from too much liberty?

He wants stiff carbon taxes, to combat both global warming and our geopolitically harmful dependence on oil. He thinks conservatives should regard obesity as an issue of public concern. Some conservatives have championed the reform of prisons, for example to reduce the horrifying incidence of rape within their walls; Frum believes such reform should be a much higher priority.......he asserts that conservatives need to stand for “universal health insurance.” ......He has no strategy on education, just the hope that the No Child Left Behind Act, by requiring schools to report their test scores, will open people’s eyes to the public system’s failure and thus make them more receptive to conservative ideas such as vouchers.

Now, that particular philosophically confused set of policies might not match those WFB would endorse exactly. Here at Hit and Run we've praised Buckley for being right on two important issues where most of his fellow conservatives are wrong--pot legalization and the Iraq War.

But I fear that his being right was more a matter of his magisterial whim than of a firmly developed and trustworthy set of beliefs, either strategic or philosophical. This same "conservatism is what I think government needs to do to satisfy either the people or my particular concerns" principle animates Frum.

It has been often quoted, especially by libertarians, but so often because it is a succinct and representative explanation of the distinction between conservatives and libertarians in the day when Buckley and the early National Review was helping create and enforce a gap between libertarians and conservatives. See again this disturbing thought from Buckley in Commonweal magazine in 1952: "We have to accept Big Government for the duration – for neither an offensive nor a defensive war can be waged...except through the instrument of a totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores." He thus championed "the extensive and productive tax laws that are needed to support a vigorous anti-Communist foreign policy," and of course the "large armies and air forces, atomic energy, central intelligence, war production boards and the attendant centralization of power in Washington – even with Truman at the reins of it all."

From those early Cold War thoughts to segregation through his more recent missteps on matters like national service and smoking, Buckley seemed to believe steadfastly in this timeless political principle: that government should be restricted quite firmly to...those things that Buckley thought it important for government to do. (See, for example, in his 1983 reason interview the distinction he makes between pot legalization, which he's for, and heroin legalization, which he is not.)

Thus both Buckley and Frum represent the weaknesses of conservatism: slavishly dedicated to the politically possible to some degree, whimsically unmoored from settled principles about what government ought to be doing to a large degree, unreliable bulwarks of peace and liberty to a dangerous degree.

Buckley was a witty man, a learned man, in most ways clearly a good man--dedicated, productive, humane. He was certainly vital to importing a general sense in American culture in the past half-century that government was not necessarily the solution to every problem. Was he a great writer? I've enjoyed some of his longer form work. As a newspaper columnist, especially in the later decades when I was reading him most regularly, I have to largely concur with Jesse Walker's wickedly entertaining take on his deficiencies.

Since he was himself an often rough-and-tumble public controversialist, I trust neither he nor anyone else would consider it untoward to deal with him critically, even on the week of his death. Buckley was, through his virtues, a representative--the representative--conservative of his time, with all the troublesome (for the libertarian) beliefs and strategies that implied.

Many of his successors in the business of defining and running the modern American right-wing are worse, to be sure; more partisan, more brutal, less rooted in any understanding of the necessary limits of state power. But even on his passing, it's worth remembering many of the problems with modern conservatism, problems that live on beyond Buckley, that can fairly be considered his children.

"It is Well That War is So Terrible...."

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 20:16:00 EST

Via Wired.com, and from the collection of psychologist Philip Zimbardo who was a defense expert witness for one of the guards, some more gruesome photos from Abu Ghraib. Some are pretty similar to the classic hooded figure one, some of them defensible on some level as weird black humor, but for the most part showing some very dark behavior seemingly motivated from some of the very dark feelings generated by life during wartime.

[Tip via reader John-David Filing.]

Libertarianism and Civil Disobedience

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 15:23:00 EST

Arnold Kling at TechCentralStation thinks libertarians should give civil disobedience a chance:

I am thinking more like open, nonviolent defiance of laws that require licenses, paying onerous taxes, and so on....like Gandhi in the sense that we would be counting on a civilized society not to engage in severe repression. We would have the same idea. Millions of ordinary, decent Americans engaging in peaceful disobedience, making it awkward for the government to engage in repression.....Run a small school without a license. Do some health care services without a license. Run a small part-time business without complying with the payroll tax.

Kenneth Silber thinks that's nuts. Kling begs to differ, natch. Kling's blogging partner Bryan Caplan weighs in.

reason contributions from Silber and Caplan.

AT&T Works In More Places....

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 13:39:00 EST

For some real-world commentary on the recent telecommunications company/FISA brouhaha, see the work of the Billboard Liberation Front on a San Francisco AT & T billboard yesterday.

For more sober and detailed commentary on this matter see, to begin with, Julian Sanchez's "Time for Democrats to Lead on FISA" from December.

Of Gold and Empire

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 10:46:00 EST

For those confused by the linkage between two of Ron Paul's major issues--antiwar and pro-gold--economist Steve Horwitz explains the connection in the January/February issue of The Freeman with a historical review of the links between federal intervention in the currency system and war.

Some excerpts that tell the tale:

Governments that can either create money directly or use regulation to force banks to provide the resources will be able to conduct war more often and with less political resistance than those that cannot.
.......
In 1863 the federal (Union) government for the first time offered charters for individual banks. With charters came regulations, one of which was the requirement that bank-issued currency be backed with U.S. government bonds. Whenever a federally chartered bank wanted to give its customers paper currency, it had to purchase such bonds, whose face value slightly exceeded the value of the currency and then present them to the Comptroller of the Currency in Washington, who then printed the bank’s notes......Interestingly, when the federal government first offered the charters, almost no banks signed up; they kept their state charters because the federal charters offered no advantages and some minor disadvantages. Not content to lose that way of financing the war, Congress quickly passed a 10 percent tax on the banknotes of state-chartered banks..... Between the original bond-collateral requirements and punitive tax on the state-chartered banks, the federal government used its power over the monetary system to ensure a market for bonds to pay for the Civil War.
............
The Johnson administration made a conscious decision to finance the Vietnam War
through inflation rather than higher taxes....At the time Federal Reserve Notes held by foreign central banks were still redeemable in gold at the Fed. As a result of the inflation (depreciating dollar) of the late 1960s, the Fed saw a massive flow back of Federal Reserve Notes from foreign governments, which began to reduce U.S. gold holdings. This drain of gold reserves led President Nixon to close the “gold window” in 1971, breaking the last remaining link between the dollar and gold. With excess supplies of money no longer generating any direct negative economic consequences for the Fed, the even-greater inflation and macroeconomic disorder that characterized the rest of the 1970s and ’80s were no surprise.
Thus the need to finance the Vietnam War led to increased government control over money, which led to macroeconomic disorder (much as we saw in the late nineteenth-century banking panics), which in turn led to calls for more government intervention.

A reason roundtable on the Federal Reserve in the Bernanke era, featuring Milton Friedman and Ron Paul, among others.

Horwitz reviewed Theodore Burczak's Socialism After Hayek in reason's July 2007 issue.

Some Thoughts on WFB

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 16:01:00 EST

This will not be a fully thought out discussion of William F. Buckley's influence and achievements. For a bit more in that direction, see this review of a Buckley bio and this review of a book on National Review's history.

There is a lot I could disagree with about the way Buckley treated what he clearly thought of as his conservative movement throughout the years, particularly his linking it with an endless war against communists both domestic and foreign. But I should also remember that if the conservative movement of today were more truly his, it would be a conservative movement I could cheer far more than I can the one we are actually faced with here in the phenomenal world Buckley has just left us behind in.

On the passing of this man of world-historical importance, I prefer to just note some details of his charm and humanity. He is known as a ruthless enforcer of orthodoxy within conservatism (for his own extended take on why he felt he had to be, see his 2003 novel Getting It Right in which fictionalized Objectivists and Birchers are drubbed). He's cheered for it and booed for it by different camps for different reasons.

But in his personal life, for the most part, he showed a winning ability (again, much of the time, not all) to be friendly and supportive beyond obvious ideological differences. I prefer to remember the Buckley who is understood to have provided support above and beyond the call to such friends and mentors as Whittaker Chambers and aging anarchist Frank Chodorov in his waning years; who could write, in response to many intemperate attack letters from his old buddy Murray Rothbard that "not that I love you any the less, you perverse old anarchist. But don't worry, when the Communists come, I'll run interference"; who would publish articles by the then utterly disreputable Timothy Leary in National Review in 1976 based on what Leary told me was the intertangled old acquaintanceships between his New England Irish aunts and Buckley's family, and "out of friendship--libertarian friendship"; and the man who could be long and intimate pals with ideologues who he considered as dangerous and wrong as John Kenneth Galbraith.

He was often a sterling example of letting humane considerations trump political ones (though he was usually less charitable toward ones, like Rothbard, Garry Wills, or Joseph Sobran, who he had thought of as "on his side" but who then shifted in whatever direction).

Yes, this kind forbearance was not universal, and some of his own obituaries for prominent libertarians he was at odds with such as Rand and Rothbard were intemperate. A complicated man, to be sure, and a complicated public influence. But on this day of his passing, I'll remember the wit who wrote an amused but delicate letter trying to placate F.A. Hayek (who was appalled at the indecorum of running a gag item hinting that deceased UN chief Dag Hammarskjold had cheated at cards); and who wrote in his influential column in 1971--the year that radical libertarians like Louis Rossetto were on the front page of the New York Times Sunday Magazine--that "the radical libertarians have a great deal to contribute."

Surge: Not Protecting

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 11:44:00 EST

The new Rolling Stone (Jack Johnson cover) has a long and ruthless anti-surge feature from Nir Rosen (author of The Triumph of the Martyrs: A Reporter's Journey into Occupied Iraq, a book that was hobbled in hardback with the un-resonant and uninformative title In The Belly of the Green Bird).

Rosen's story contains some anti-conventional wisdom assertions that are sure to make many spit their juice, for example:

"In Saddam's time, nobody knew what is Sunni and what is Shiite," [Iraqi National Police Capt. Arkan Hashim Ali] says. The Bush administration based its strategy in Iraq on the mistaken notion that, under Saddam, the Sunni minority ruled the Shiite majority. In fact, Iraq had no history of serious sectarian violence or civil war between the two groups until the Americans invaded. Most Iraqis viewed themselves as Iraqis first, with their religious sects having only personal importance. Intermarriage was widespread, and many Iraqi tribes included both Sunnis and Shiites....

The story is also belly-up vulnerable to accusations that it's only focusing on the scary side of the complicated reality of Iraq. Still, it's well worth a long look for those trying to collect as much data as possible about what America is facing and might soon be facing in Iraq.

The general arc of Rosen's piece: as Rosen follows various Iraqi and U.S. security forces around on raids, he insists that the Sunni militias known as either "Iraqi Security Volunteers" or Sahwa ("The Awakening") are another civil war waiting to happen, loyal only as long as the Yankee dollars keep flowing; Iraqis smile to our troops' faces but behind our backs they hiss: what are troops like you doing in a nation like this? And contempt for the U.S. occupying force is only matched by contempt for the official Iraq government.

A few key excerpts:

After meeting recently in Baghdad, U.S. officials concluded in an internal report, "Most young Concerned Local Citizens would probably not agree to transition from armed defenders of their communities to the local garbage men or rubble cleanup crew working under the gaze of U.S. soldiers and their own families."
..........
As the soldiers storm into nearby homes, the two men who had tipped off the Americans come up to me, thinking I am a military translator. They look bemused. The Americans, they tell me in Arabic, have got the wrong men. The eleven squatting in the courtyard are all Sunnis, not Shiites; some are even members of the Awakening and had helped identify the Mahdi Army suspects.
I try to tell the soldiers they've made a mistake — it looks like the Iraqis had been trying to connect a house to a generator — but the Americans don't listen. All they see are the wires on the ground: To them, that means the Iraqis must have been trying to lay an improvised explosive device. "If an IED is on the ground," one tells me, "we arrest everybody in a 100-meter radius." As the soldiers blindfold and handcuff the eleven Iraqis, the two tipsters look on, puzzled to see U.S. troops arresting their own allies.
.............
The [Iraqi National Police] were also reporting fake engagements and then transferring to Shiite militias the ammunition they had supposedly fired. "It was funny how they always expended 400 rounds of ammunition," [Maj. Jeffrey] Gottlieb [who trains Iraqi police] says.
...........
The Americans know that the entire raid may have been simply another witch hunt, a way for the Shiite police to intimidate Sunni civilians. The INP, U.S. officers concede, use Al Qaeda as a "scare word" to describe all Sunni suspects.
"Yeah, the moral ambiguity of what we do is not lost on me," Maj. Gottlieb tells me. "We have no way of knowing if those guys did what they say they did."

For more surge-skeptic blogging, see Radley Balko from earlier this week.

UPDATE: Forgot to mention, Rosen did some reporting from Iraq for reason back in 2004. See here and here.

Really Full Disclosure

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 12:21:00 EST

New way to bedevil those working in and for Congress, from the website LegiStorm's press release:

LegiStorm, the Web site that first caused controversy in Washington by publishing congressional staffer salaries, has now launched the first database of personal financial disclosures for thousands of the most powerful aides.
By law, members of Congress and their highest paid staff - who tend to be the most powerful on Capitol Hill - are required annually to disclose information about their personal finances, including details about their debts, stock portfolio, outside earned income, spousal employment, major gifts received and even their gambling winnings.
..........

Rules from the House of Representatives state, "The objectives of financial disclosure are to inform the public about the financial interests of government officials in order to increase public confidence in the integrity of government and to deter potential conflicts of interest."
[LegiStorm founder Jock] Friedly expects controversy with the new free database. "I understand that congressional aides want to jealously guard their privacy and I sympathize," he said. "However, these are the behind-the-scenes power players who control a $3.1 trillion federal budget and write all the laws of the land. It's hard to argue that they are not important public figures worthy of a little scrutiny."

Start your private investigation at LegiStorm today!

Don't Let the Bedbug Story Bite

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

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

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

Stagflation, Or Just a Good Ol' Recession?

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 09:51:00 EST

Might there be a little something to worry about in the Federal Reserve's recent let-er-rip attitude toward cutting interest rates? See the latest inflation news from the Wall Street Journal:

U.S. wholesale prices surged in January and core inflation also climbed above expectations, according to more data revealing price pressures amid the economic slowdown.
The producer price index for finished goods rose 1.0% on a seasonally adjusted basis after a 0.3% decrease in December, the Labor Department said Tuesday. Originally, prices in December were estimated down 0.1%.
The core index, which excludes food and energy items, rose 0.4% last month, seasonally adjusted. It rose 0.2% in December.
Wall Street expected smaller price increases.....
In the 12 months ending in January, prices climbed 7.4% on an unadjusted basis. In the 12 months ending in December, prices were up 6.3%. The 7.4% climb is the largest since 7.5% in October 1981.

Analyst Paul Kasriel says it ain't stagflation (although a bunch of people quoted in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal might disagree)--just a natural and predictable start-of-recession phenomenon, with inflation lagging the slowing of GDP growth.

A reason roundtable on the Federal Reserve, from November 2006, featuring, among others, Milton Friedman and Ron Paul.

In possibly not unrelated commentary, see some recent goldblogging from me and Matt Welch.

Everything Still Turns to Gold

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 10:45:00 EST

Ron Paul associate, old libertarian movement hand, and retired coin dealer Burt Blumert is profiled at the San Francisco Chronicle's website. An excerpt:

Precious-metal prices tend to increase in times of economic uncertainty and a weakened U.S. dollar. And this inverse relationship is key to understanding Blumert's reference to gold dealers' dismal view of the future. To a philosophical goldbug, when the price of their commodity increases, it's a sign that the global economy is tanking. Inflation is proof that the fiat money system is an illusion — and an affirmation that, in the portentous, Arthurian terms of a recent book by Nathan Lewis, gold is The Once and Future Money.
But — and here's the paradox — for the goldbug's worldview to be finally vindicated, the fiat money system has to collapse. "Many of my clients would like to be standing in the rubble of our society saying, 'I told you so,'" Blumert says. "And there was a time when I did want collapse — when I was young and excited about my view. But the older I get, personally I can't deal with rubble anymore. I don't want to see a collapse, to be vindicated and say, 'See, I was right.'"

My reason interview with Nathan Lewis, mentioned in the above excerpt, on gold. Recent goldblogging from Matt Welch.

Obama: The More Things Change...

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 09:06:00 EST

D.C. Examiner columnist Melanie Scarborough goes to the man's website to figure out his plans for America. Some high-spendin' samples:

» “Obama will make college affordable for all Americans.”
» “Obama will quadruple Early Head Start and increase Head Start funding. Obama will also provide affordable and high-quality child care to ease the burden on working families.
» “Obama will double funding for after-school programs.
» “Obama will provide job training, substance abuse and mental health counseling to ex-offenders, so that they are successfully re-integrated into society.
» “Obama will create a fund to help people refinance their mortgages and provide comprehensive supports to innocent homeowners.
» “Obama will create an Affordable Housing Trust Fund to develop affordable housing in mixed-income neighborhoods.
» “Obama will create 20 Promise Neighborhoods in areas that have high levels of poverty and crime and low levels of student academic achievement … which provide a full network of services, including early childhood education, youth violence prevention efforts and after-school activities, to an entire neighborhood from birth to college.
» “He will provide at least $2 billion to expand services to Iraqi refugees in neighboring countries, and ensure that Iraqis inside their own country can find a safe haven.
» “Obama will double our foreign assistance to $50 billion.”

......Obama plans to meddle in minutiae, such as radio programming in Topeka (“An Obama presidency will promote greater coverage of local issues and better responsiveness by broadcasters to the communities they serve”)...

The New Iraq War

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 19:41:00 EST

Managing the empire can get so complicated: Turkey invades Iraq. From Reuters:

Thousands of Turkish troops have crossed into northern Iraq to hunt Kurdish rebels, television and a military source said on Friday, escalating a conflict that could undermine stability in the region.
Turkey's military said the cross-border offensive, possibly the largest in a decade, would continue until they had stopped the threat from PKK rebels, who have been using northern Iraq as a base to stage attacks in Turkey.
It said in a statement 24 PKK rebels and five soldiers were killed in clashes in Iraq. It also said at least 20 rebels were killed in separate aerial attacks.
The United States urged Turkey, a key regional ally, to limit its offensive to precise PKK targets and to bring the operation to a swift conclusion.

Link via the very useful Rational Review. Doug Bandow in reason in 2003 on the U.S.'s complicated relationship with Turkey.

Some Businesses Are Inherently Public, Says Washington State Supreme Court

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 13:11:00 EST

Some bad news from the Institute for Justice, in a press release ~~that does not yet seem to be on their website~~ that you can read here in its entirety:

The Washington Supreme Court today dealt a blow to civil liberties. In Ventenbergs v. City of Seattle, a divided Court decided that the city of Seattle could violate local entrepreneur Joe Ventenbergs' constitutional right to earn an honest living by creating construction waste-hauling monopolies for two multi-national corporations, making it illegal for Joe to practice his profession.

“The Court got the law wrong today and Washingtonians will suffer as a result,” said William Maurer, executive director for the Institute for Justice Washington Chapter (IJ-WA), which represents Joe Ventenbergs. “The Court ruled that our constitutional rights are less important than protecting two enormous, out-of-state corporations from competition. The sole good news from this decision, however, is that it is so narrow that it affects only hard-working entrepreneurs in the waste-hauling business and not other entrepreneurs throughout the state, who will be able to continue to rely on the protections of our state constitution to combat the creation of government monopolies.”

In a decision released this morning, the Court stated that hauling construction waste is not a private enterprise and “is in the realm belonging to the State and delegated to local governments.” The court found specifically that the provision of waste hauling service is a “government service” and constitutional protections do not apply to government-provided services.

Justice Richard Sanders, joined by Chief Justice Gerry Alexander and Justice Jim Johnson, dissented, arguing that today’s decision “presents a textbook example of governmental corporate favoritism to advance the profits of the privileged few at the expense, and the extinction, of any potential competitors. It flies in the face of the state’s privileges and immunities clause which was adopted to combat this exact sort of unholy alliance between government and big business, which ultimately not only disserves the excluded businesses but also the public in general.”

IJ's page dedicated to the Ventenbergs case. with a timeline and many links.

Montana: Wrong Heller Decision Would Violate Its Compact with the United States

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 10:13:00 EST

An interesting wrinkle in the gun-rights controversy: Various Montana politicians have signed a resolution arguing that anything other than an individual-right interpretation of the Second Amendment (at issue in the forthcoming Supreme Court case Heller v. D.C.) would violate the compact between Montana and the U.S.

Excerpts from the resolution:

WHEREAS, when the Court determines in Heller whether or not the Second Amendment secures an individual right, the Court will establish precedent that will affect the State of Montana and the political rights of the citizens of Montana;

WHEREAS, when Montana entered into statehood in 1889, that entrance was accomplished by a contract between Montana and the several states, a contract known as The Compact With The United States (Compact), found today as Article I of the Montana Constitution;

WHEREAS, with authority from Congress acting as agent for the several states, President Benjamin Harrison approved the Montana Constitution in 1889, which secured the right of "any person" to bear arms, clearly intended as an individual right and an individual right deemed consistent then with the Second Amendment by the parties to the contract;

............
THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED by the undersigned members of the 60th Montana Legislature as follows:

1. That any form of "collective rights" holding by the Court in Heller will offend the Compact; and.........4. Montana reserves all usual rights and remedies under historic contract law if its Compact should be violated by any "collective rights" holding in Heller.

A longer explanation of their "contract argument."

Heirs of a Terror War, That's What We've Become...

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 20:50:00 EST

Bush is once again trying to cut its budget to a mere $900 million (and will likely fail, like he did last year, when asking for that sum got him $1.3 billion appropriated by Congress), and while continuing its (sadly eternal) dying gasps, Amtrak makes the experience of riding the rails even more annoying:

Amtrak will start randomly screening passengers' carry-on bags this week in a new security push that includes officers with automatic weapons and bomb-sniffing dogs patrolling platforms and trains.
The initiative, to be announced by the railroad on Tuesday, is a significant shift for Amtrak. Unlike the airlines, it has had relatively little visible increase in security since the 2001 terrorist attacks, a distinction that has enabled it to attract passengers eager to avoid airport hassles.
Amtrak officials insist their new procedures won't hold up the flow of passengers.
"On-time performance is a key element of Amtrak service. We are fully mindful of that. This is not about train delays," Bill Rooney, the railroad's vice president for security strategy and special operations, told The Associated Press.

Peter Bagge cartoons wickedly on the Amtrak experience, from our Dec. 2005 issue.

Are We Ready for 2007 Nostalgia Yet?

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 14:06:00 EST

Eleanor Clift at Newsweek wonders: could it still be Gore for the Democratic presidential nomination? There's more than one path to a Clinton restoration, after all.

Ron Paul: Don't Let Them Gilchrest Me

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 13:57:00 EST

Fearing defeat in his March 4 primary contest for his congressional seat in Texas, Ron Paul calls on those who gave so surprisingly and generously to his presidential run to give now to his congressional race.

My February reason cover feature on Ron Paul and his fans.

UPDATE: For details on why Paul thinks he needs his supporters' help and pronto, see this from Pajamas Media saying internal polls from both Paul and his opponent Chris Peden have Paul behind 11 points.

Bank Nationalisation (sic) in Britain

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 13:35:00 EST

Cue up talks of pipers and calling tunes: what started as a bailout in September turns into a takeover as Britain's Northern Rock bank is nationalized.

The Financial Times on some of the reaction, from analysts, stockholders, and the private interests who wanted to buy the bank. As the Telegraph reports, the government says it hopes to be able to sell it back to the private sector at a propitious time in the future, "When the market conditions improve and when the housing market comes back."

Cthulhu Is Just All Right With Me

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 14:10:00 EST

I'll warn you that the execution of this isn't quite as rich and hilarious as the concept might allow, but I'm a bit of a sucker for Cthulhu comedy. Herewith, an example of a Great Old One worshipper running for president and, Romney-style, trying to convince the American people that despite his eccentric beliefs, he's OK.

Link via Todd Seavey, author of our current print issue's cover story on nanotech (already in the hands of subscribers).

Cthulhu, mentioned a suspiciously large number of times here at Hit and Run.

The Trouble with the DOJ's Stance on DC Gun Rights

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 12:45:00 EST

Robert Levy, one of the major players in the 2nd Amendment case Heller v. D.C., is annoyed at the Bush administration's Department of Justice for its brief in the case. He explains why in the Washington Times. The problem with the DOJ's position?

According to the DOJ, the courts should consider the nature and functional adequacy of available alternatives. That may sound sensible at first blush, but it could be fatal to the Heller litigation.
Here's the rub: The Justice Department says the Court of Appeals ruling that overturned the D.C. ban might cast doubt on the constitutionality of existing federal legislation, including machine-gun regulations. So the administration urged that Heller be returned to the lower courts for appropriate fact-finding to determine whether rifles and shotguns in the home, as permitted by the D.C. Code, are an adequate substitute for handguns.
That came as quite a shock to those of us who believed the administration's professed fealty to gunowners' rights. What we got instead was a recommendation that could be the death knell for the only Second Amendment case to reach the Supreme Court in nearly 70 years.
Rather than a foursquare pronouncement that the D.C. handgun ban is unreasonable by any standard, the Justice Department has essentially endorsed years of depositions and expert testimony, and a rerun before a less hospitable Supreme Court.
In effect, a conservative administration has thrown a lifeline to gun controllers. Following the DOJ blueprint, they can pay lip service to an individual right while simultaneously stripping it of any real meaning. After all, if the D.C. ban can survive judicial scrutiny, it is difficult to imagine a regulation that would not.

Those eager for one-stop shopping on news, background, and briefs on the Heller case, see the DC Gun Case site.

Russian Bombers Buzz the Nimitz

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 12:11:00 EST

Cold War nostalgics and Putin paranoia mongers rejoice! From CNN:

American fighter jets intercepted two Russian bombers, one of which buzzed a U.S. aircraft carrier in the western Pacific on Saturday......
Russia's Defense Ministry said Tuesday that there was no violation of flight regulations during the incident. A ministry official said the flights are standard operating procedure for air force training.
One of them twice flew about 2,000 feet over the deck of the USS Nimitz Saturday......
The Russians and the U.S. carrier did not exchange verbal communications.
Four turboprop Tupolev-95 Bear bombers took off from Ukrainka Air Base, in Russia's Far East, in the middle of the night, Japanese officials told The Associated Press, adding that one of the planes violated Japanese airspace.
Russian bombers have been making flights over the western Pacific for several months
There have been eight incidents off Alaska since July. Among the latest, on September 5, six F-15s from Elmendorf Air Force Base, adjacent to Anchorage, Alaska, intercepted six Russian bombers about 50 miles from the northwest coast of Alaska.

Cathy Young on the complicated Vladimir Putin, back in January 2005 and subscribers should look for her latest feature reporting on Putin in a soon-forthcoming issue of reason.

Steve Gerber, R.I.P.

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 14:21:00 EST

In the 1970s, Steve Gerber was Marvel Comics' most consistently interesting writer. He is dead at age 60. Tom Spurgeon at his Comics Reporter site has an excellent obituary, both telling the story of Gerber's career in detail and explaining his achivements. The summation:

Steve Gerber's role as one of the best and emblematic writers of his generation can't be overstated. He was a crucial figure in comics history. Like some of the all-time great cartoonists of years past, Gerber carved a place for self-expression and meaning out of a type of comic that had no right to hold within itself so many things and moments that were that quirky and offbeat and delicately realized -- except that Gerber made it so. His Howard the Duck comics remain amusing when read today, perhaps more poignant now, laying into their broad targets in a way that communicated a kind of critical consciousness into the minds of many devoted superhero comics readers, fans that simply wouldn't have been exposed to those kinds of ideas any other way, the concept that media might lie to you, the notion of absolute self-worth in the face of a world that seems dead-set against it. Steve Gerber's superhero books were a tonic to the over-seriousness of most of their cousins, and his horror-adventure books were frequently classy and reserved in a genre that tends to reward the blunt and ugly. No creator save Jack Kirby has as a cautionary tale and a living example saved so many creators the grief of turning over their creations without reward or without realizing what they had done. Few creators in the American mainstream were as consistently fascinating as Steve Gerber. Even fewer have been as outspoken and forthright, or in that way, as admirable.

Much of Gerber's best work is still in print in wonderfully affordable black and white reprints. Start with Essential Defenders Vol 2, Essential Howard the Duck, and Essential Man-Thing, and the color reprint volume of Omega the Unknown (currently being "covered" by novelist Jonathan Lethem in a new Marvel series).