Reason Magazine - Staff > Kerry Howley > Hit & Run Posts

White House Correspondence: The Great Forgetting

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 14:21:00 EDT

How hard is it to save your emails? The Bush administration seems to have underestimated the challenge. Tim Lee explains:

When the Bush administration took office, it decided to replace the Lotus Notes-based e-mail system used under the Clinton Administration with Microsoft Outlook and Exchange. The transition broke compatibility with the old archiving system, and the White House IT shop did not immediately have a new one to put in its place.
Instead, the White House has instituted a comically primitive system called "journaling," in which (to quote from a recent Congressional report) "a White House staffer or contractor would collect from a 'journal' e-mail folder in the Microsoft Exchange system copies of e-mails sent and received by White House employees." These would be manually named and saved as ".pst" files on White House servers.
Due to the lack of a reliable archiving scheme, thousands of e-mails appear to have been lost, perhaps irretrievably. A 2005 analysis performed by McDevitt (while he was still on the White House Staff) found over 700 days with e-mails apparently missing from the "journaling" archives, including 12 days in which all e-mails from the president's immediate office were missing, and 16 days when all e-mails from the Vice President's office were missing. The White House Office of Administration has estimated that between 2003 and 2005, at least five million e-mails have been lost. Some of those may be recoverable from backup tapes, but in the absence of adequate logging features, there is no way to be sure all of the e-mails have been recovered.

Federal law requires the preservation of White House emails concerning official business, but senior officials don't seem terribly concerned. Lots more here.

A Very Special Episode of Red Eye

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 15:50:00 EDT

Red Eye's 300th episode, God help us, airs tonight at 3am EST. Come to watch me, stay to watch Chuck Schumer's niece.

Kennedy Legacy Reduced to Sad Comic Strip

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 13:20:00 EDT

Remember Michael Skakel? Nephew of Ethel Kennedy, killer of Martha Moxley, exemplar of the stupid grandson theory? As the AP helpfully explains in between descriptions of Moxley's demise, he is working on an art project. Behold his moral vision:

Skakel, convicted in 2002 of killing Martha Moxley in 1975, participates in a program that lets inmates show another side to their lives. His drawing of his 9-year-old son George will be among those on public display starting Thursday at Capital Community College in Hartford.

The drawing shows the boy wearing a T-shirt that reads “love” and surrounded by colorful animals. A nearby skeleton with sunglasses symbolizes death, but two doves overhead depict triumph over death, said Jeffrey Greene, manager of Community Partners in Action, the nonprofit group that runs the program.

An eyeball in the sky symbolizes God watching over the boy, but a lamb is shown next to a lion.

Skakel, a nephew of Ethel Kennedy, is serving 20 years to life for bludgeoning Moxley to death with a golf club in wealthy Greenwich. He maintains that he is innocent.

In another piece, Skakel drew a comic strip about the loss of innocence. A young boy wants to play football, but his friends are not home. Then he runs into someone who gives him marijuana to smoke.

Blame Paris

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 10:50:00 EDT

In a recent review of A.K. Sandoval-Strausz' Hotels: A History, I discussed the moral panic hotels provoked in the 19th century, catering as they did to rootless transients and licentious women. I thought we were kind of over it, but the Falls Church New-Press informs me otherwise:

Parents and supporters of the St. James Catholic middle school packed the Falls Church City Council chambers at City Hall Monday night to plead to the F.C. Planning Commission that it not approve a proposed Hilton Garden Inn hotel adjacent the school in the block of W. Broad St.
Strident speakers Monday warned the Planning Commission of “the likelihood of inappropriate conduct between adults and children” due to the “transient nature” of hotel patrons. They also cited traffic congestion issues, noting that “car crashes are the number one killer of children under 14.” One said that N. Oak St. would become “a mini-mixing bowl.”
Concerns were expressed of “hotel rooms being used in crimes against children,” and laws cited in some jurisdictions across the U.S. prohibiting registered sex offenders from living near a school.
Judy Meehan, a victim’s rights advocate, said it was “disgraceful” that the City did not begin consideration of the project “with a concept of risk.” The City has been “negligent,” she said.
“The connection between crime and hotels is well known,” Meehan said, suggesting the heightened instances of prostitution and rape “in and around hotels.”

[Many thanks to reader Brian Nichols for the link.]

"We're Not Drug Dealing, We're Selling Curry"

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 10:43:00 EDT

Britain is phasing into a points-based immigration system that heavily favors educated workers, leaving unskilled workers from outside the European Union with no legal way in. Officials say unskilled jobs can be filled by Europeans, but Polish immigrants aren't doing much for the struggling curry business:

Thousands of curry restaurant workers gathered in London yesterday to demand that the government relaxes new immigration rules to avert a financial catastrophe caused by crippling staff shortages in the £3.5bn industry.
As demonstrators carrying placards demanding "Save Currynomics" surrounded the base of Nelson's Column, Muzammil Ali, who has run the Jewel in the Crown curry house in Swindon for 21 years, said he lacked skilled and unskilled workers. "This law will make staff shortages a very big problem for us," he said.
Shabul Muhth said his two restaurants in Kent had been raided at around 6.30pm on Friday and Saturday nights, the peak time for his business. Around 18 uniformed officers arrived on each occasion and closed the restaurant, he said.
"They didn't find anything but it spoilt business for those nights." No action was taken against the restaurant, he added. Muhth said he would not mind if raids were conducted on quiet nights, such as Sundays and Mondays, and officers came in plain clothes and "spoke nicely" to staff. "Come in like a gentleman," he said. "We're not drug dealing, we're selling curry."

The obvious government response would be to award more points to South Asians skilled in the culinary arts. But other industries will complain of shortages, and that leaves the government constantly monitoring every aspect of the economy in an attempt to predict the supply of labor. Australia updates its points system every six months; in April of 2007 it was trying to address a chronic shortage of hairdressers.

The currynomics update comes via Swati Pandey.

Art for the Nation State's Sake

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 11:50:00 EDT

Does it make any sense for the modern government of Peru to demand the return of Incan artifacts? The director of the Art Institute of Chicago doesn't think so:

Government serves the interest of those in power. Once in power, with control over territory, governments breed loyalty among their citizens, often by promoting a particular identity and history. National culture – language and religion, patterns of behavior, dress and artistic production – is at once the means and manifestation of such beliefs, identity and loyalty, and serves to reinforce governments in power.
Governments can use antiquities – artifacts of cultures no longer extant and in every way different from the culture of the modern nation – to serve the government’s purpose. They attach identity with an extinct culture that only happened to have shared more or less the same stretch of the earth’s geography. The reason behind such claims is power.
At the core of my argument against nationalist retentionist cultural property laws – those calling for the retention of cultural property within the jurisdiction of the nation state – is their basis in nationalist-identity politics and implications for inhibiting our regard for the rich diversity of the world’s culture as common legacy. They conspire against our appreciation of the nature of culture as an overlapping, dynamic force for uniting rather than dividing humankind. They reinforce the dangerous tendency to divide the world into irreconcilable sectarian or tribal entities.

The whole thing is well worth reading, as is Steven Vincent's 2005 reason story on cultural patrimony and the international antiquities trade.

Russell Pearce: American Hero

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 17:03:00 EDT

Rep. Russell Pearce, the excitable Arizona legislator who called McCain's immigration bill "treasonous," has a new idea:

Arizona public schools would be barred from any teachings considered counter to democracy or Western civilization under a proposal endorsed Wednesday by a legislative panel.
Additionally, the measure would prohibit students of the state's universities and community colleges from forming groups based in whole or part on the race of their members, such as the Black Business Students Association at Arizona State University or Native Americans United at Northern Arizona University. Those groups would be forbidden from operating on campus.
Pearce, a Mesa Republican, said his target isn't diversity instruction, but schools that use taxpayer dollars to indoctrinate students in what he characterized as anti-American or seditious thinking..
SB 1108 states, "A primary purpose of public education is to inculcate values of American citizenship. Public tax dollars used in public schools should not be used to denigrate American values and the teachings of Western civilization."

Which values count as American, you ask? Let's consult Rep. John Kavanaugh:

"This bill basically says, 'You're here. Adopt American values,' " said Kavanagh, a Fountain Hills Republican. "If you want a different culture, then fine, go back to that culture."

Well, that clears things up. Obviously, this proposal comes packaged as an amendment to a "homeland security" bill.

Hat Tip: Kip Esquire.

Maoist Village Embraces GMOs

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 15:20:00 EDT

The Chinese village of Nanjie is a half-socialist holdout where "villagers still lead a collective life as they did decades ago, sing revolutionary songs and chant Mao slogans every day." It appears to be much more prosperous than its market-oriented neighbors; this 1999 New York Times article notes the "spacious, well-equipped schools" and free vacations for model workers. Alas:

While the rest of the country abandoned the commune, pursued personal fortunes and dismantled state industries, the village of Nanjie in central China renationalised its land, set up factories and paid all residents £20 a month. Advertising was banned and instead, propaganda banners hung in streets which led to a 30ft statue of Mao built in 1993.

Unfortunately, few of the visitors were accountants. In the past two months, newspapers in Hong Kong and Guangzhou have unravelled a tale of Enron-style woe.

The village's triumphs were built on £120 million of secret loans from the Agricultural Bank of China, which is now calling in its loans as it prepares to list its shares on the Hong Kong stock exchange. According to one report, the bank had been instructed to support Nanjie at all costs by a conservative in the Communist Party leadership after the crackdown on the Tiananmen Square prοtests in 1989.

According to the Asia Times, the bureaucrat forcing the bank to make the loans has retired, and the new boss is less excited about funding a Maoist amusement park. The bank wants the loans repaid, and Nanjie seems, at least, to be trying:

To reduce its debts, companies run by the village have in recent years turned to marketing a soybean seed in the name of Spaceflight II. They claimed that after the seeds were sent out into space their genes underwent a mutation that would increase their harvest by 30%.

Reason on Red Eye

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 15:12:00 EDT

I'll be on tonight with "body language expert" Janine Driver and the hilarious Michelle Collins. The show starts at 3am EST on FNC.

Legends of the Fall

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 14:10:00 EDT

The New Yorker's Nick Paumgarten has a fun piece on the pleasures, perils, and social conventions of elevator travel:

Ask a vertical-transportation-industry professional to recall an episode of an elevator in free fall—the cab plummeting in the shaftway, frayed rope ends trailing in the dark—and he will say that he can think of only one. That would be the Empire State Building incident of 1945, in which a B-25 bomber pilot made a wrong turn in the fog and crashed into the seventy-ninth floor, snapping the hoist and safety cables of two elevators. Both of them plunged to the bottom of the shaft. One of them fell from the seventy-fifth floor with a woman aboard—an elevator operator...

Two things make tall buildings possible: the steel frame and the safety elevator. The elevator, underrated and overlooked, is to the city what paper is to reading and gunpowder is to war. Without the elevator, there would be no verticality, no density, and, without these, none of the urban advantages of energy efficiency, economic productivity, and cultural ferment. The population of the earth would ooze out over its surface, like an oil slick, and we would spend even more time stuck in traffic or on trains, traversing a vast carapace of concrete. And the elevator is energy-efficient—the counterweight does a great deal of the work, and the new systems these days regenerate electricity. The elevator is a hybrid, by design.

Sadly, fans of verticality are not welcome in DC.

Via Alex Massie.

Boom Times for Sellers of $600 Toilet Seats

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 16:05:00 EDT

As you're preparing the details of your financial life for inspection, consider the Pentagon's accounting skills:

The basic defense budget for 2007 was $439.3 billion, up 48 percent from 2001, excluding the vast additional sums appropriated for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. According to federal regulators and current and former Pentagon officials, the accounting process is so obsolete and error prone that it's virtually impossible to tell where much of this money ends up. While the department's brass has made a few patchwork improvements, billions are still unaccounted for. The problem is so deeply rooted that, 18 years after Congress required major federal agencies to be audited, the Pentagon still can't be...
Until the Pentagon can get its records in order, no comprehensive audit is required. Instead, the department writes each year to the inspector general certifying that "material amounts" in its financial reports can't be substantiated.

That it can't be audited "goes to the heart of the department's credibility," says Dov Zakheim, who was Defense Department chief financial officer and comptroller under Rumsfeld. "Nobody would trust even a half-million-dollar enterprise if its books weren't clean."

The Pentagon has repeatedly assured Congress that it is working toward an audit. Yet the projected date continues to slip further away. In 1995, Pentagon officials testified that it could be audited by 2000. In 2006, an audit wasn't envisioned until 2016.

That's from a Portfolio piece called "The Pentagon's $1 Trillion Problem." Veronique de Rugy's fantastic May cover story -- "The Trillion-Dollar War" -- will make you just as excited to pay your taxes.

Baby Gucci and the Death of Self-Governance

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 10:35:00 EDT

Because nothing sells like contempt for other people's consumption choices, Pamela Paul has written a book called PARENTING, INC. How We Are Sold on $800 Strollers, Fetal Education, Baby Sign Language, Sleeping Coaches, Toddler Couture, and Diaper Wipe Warmers — And What It Means for Our Children. From Kate Zernike's New York Times review:

As Pamela Paul chronicles in her occasionally frightening account, “Parenting, Inc.,” my generation of parents has fallen into the grips of Big Baby. Pushed by a host of factors — the guilt and exhaustion of working parents, the dispersion of family networks that once passed knowledge from generation to generation, the pressure of admissions from preschool to college, and a culture that worships all things celebrity (including its offspring) — we are intimidated or bamboozled into buying all sorts of goods and services that we not only don’t need, but that may harm our children...

“It may sound like a leap to go from baby toys to the death of democracy, but it’s a valid concern,” she approvingly quotes a child advocate saying. “A democratic populace relies on people who know how to think critically, who are willing and able to take action.”

The pictured diamond-studded, democracy-killing faux nipple can be had for a mere $17,000.

The Dangerous Extravagance of Servant Girls

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 11:20:00 EDT

The London Times reviews John Styles' Dress of the People: Everyday fashion in eighteenth-century England:

“The mill girl who wanted to dress like a duchess” has been identified by Neil McKendrick as one of the forces propelling the Industrial Revolution. Throughout the century, sartorial upward mobility got it in the neck, from Defoe at the beginning who said that female servants ought to wear livery to stop their extravagance (an argument still heard today but in relation to school uniform) to the London Magazine, which lamented in 1783 that “every servant girl has her cotton gowns, and her cotton stockings, while honest grograms, tammeys, linsey woolseys and many other articles of wool, which would be much more becoming their stations, lie to mildew in our mercer’s shops, are seldom enquired for but by paupers and parish officers”. Sociological inquiries, such as The State of the Poor by Sir Frederick Eden (1797), lamented that the poor in the South of England no longer spun their own clothes: “within these twenty years, a coat bought at a shop was considered as a mark of extravagance and pride”. As Styles mischievously puts it, “the modern morality tale of social bonds weakening as choice and individualisation intensify reproduces many of the anxieties expressed by eighteenth-century commentators about the perceived rise of plebeian participation in fashion”.
Reading Styles’s book, one is continually struck by the resemblances, on a much smaller scale of course, to today’s patterns and institutions of consumption, and also by the similarities in the way elite critics then and now purse their lips and sigh for a more homespun age.

Is it me or has anti-couture pro-homespun snobbery been on the decline? Most of the pursed lips I see are directed at the extravagance lavished upon young girls, not the adult women buying $700 it-bags, and much of the longing for a simpler, purer age plays out in the politics of organic food.

The Kidney Opt-Out Revolution

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 12:20:00 EDT

Economist Richard H. Thaler and law professor Cass R. Sunstein have a book out called Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness in which they promote their theory of "libertarian paternalism." At the book's new blog, they mention Drew Carey's reason.tv bit about organ sales, and they seem to have come to some strange conclusions:

Reason, the libertarian magazine, has put together a video (hosted by comedian and libertarian advocate Drew Carey) on the virtues of organ donation.
The organ shortage in the U.S. is primarily due to default rules that require organ donors to formally register their wish to be a donor, known as explicit consent. In surveys, most Americans express a strong willingness to donate their organs upon death, but very few take the costly step of formally registering to become a donor. We tend to take people at their word that they do want to be an organ donor, and advocate switching the default rule from explicit to implicit consent, in which the minority of Americans (15-25 percent depending on polls) who do not want to be donors would fill out a form expressing those wishes.

As Virginia Postrel explains here, even if every one of us signs on as a potential donor, Americans will continue to die waiting. The circumstances under which deceased donor organs are usable remain quite limited, so abolishing the list entails incentivizing live donation. Only Iran has managed to find kidneys for everyone in need, and Iran has an imperfect, highly regulated system of organ sales.

Pointing out that presumed consent will not solve the problem is not exactly an argument against it, but the consent policy Thaler and Sunstein advocate is more complex than they seem to understand. It's an extremely delicate issue among minorities who are (with good reason) wary of the medical establishment, and it may be politically impossible in a society as heterogeneous as ours.

Rogue Traders of the World, Unite!

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 11:20:00 EDT

Will no one protect French workers from their rapacious capitalist overlords? Consider the now notorious case of banker Jerome Kerviel, thrown into the cold for losing a mere $7 billion.

Jérôme Kerviel is challenging Société Générale for failing to respect French labour law when the bank fired him over an alleged €4.9bn ($7bn) rogue trading scandal.
However, a spokesman for Mr Kerviel on Thursday dismissed reports that he was suing the French bank for unfair dismissal. He said the former equity derivatives trader was “only standing up for his rights”.
Mr Kerviel received a letter confirming his formal dismissal from SocGen while he was in jail earlier this year. His lawyer wrote back in early February challenging the bank for not respecting labour laws.
One aspect of his challenge is the claim that SocGen failed to comply with the French legal requirement for employers to hold face-to-face meetings with any staff they fire to explain the reasons for the move.

Kerviel's spokesperson says the former trader doesn't actually want his job back. He just wants to know the reason for his dismissal.

Via Free Exchange.

Human Bondage: Now With Benefits!

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 12:26:00 EDT

In retrospect, this was inevitable:

Sadly, egg donation has less to do with altruism and more to do with the exploitation of women–particularly young women and often poor women who are usually facing large debts or just trying to make ends meet.

In fact, we contend that human egg harvesting is the newest form of human trafficking.

That's from a piece in First Things coauthored by an adjunct professor at George Washington University and the founding director of Hands Off Our Ovaries. They're calling for Congress to adopt a definition of trafficking that encompasses not only Emperor's Club employees, but anyone who buys a kidney on the black market or eggs on the gray one. Given the breadth of their definition, it seems to me that it would also include sperm donors and surrogate mothers. Actually, given the breadth of their definition, it seems to me that it would include any employment contract of which these activists do not approve.

Even if the authors restrict themselves to adult women selling ova, it's worth reflecting on the vulgarity of this conflation. Johan Hari here describes a 14-year-old Bangladeshi girl sold into prostitution in Calcutta, forced to service 10 men a day. The average American egg vendor is probably a healthy middle class college student looking for help with tuition. If you're actually concerned about child slavery, the idea of comparing the experiences of the former and the latter might well strike you as grotesque.

The authors go on to claim that justification for including egg vending is right there in the UN protocol on trafficking (Pdf). As they explain it, article three includes (emphasis mine):

• acts of trafficking, which include recruitment of persons. Young women are heavily recruited for their eggs. One Google search would confirm this.
• means of trafficking, such as forms of coercion, fraud, deception, the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability, or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits.
• purposes of trafficking: exploitation, which is at the heart of trafficking, for the purpose of forced labor or services, slavery or practices similar to slavery, servitude, or the removal of organs.

Reading the agreement, I'm not convinced that this is an accurate summary. But it's telling that the authors' definition of human bondage involves the "giving or receiving of payments of benefits," which, to my knowledge, has not been a particularly common feature of slavery in the past.

My experiences as a victim of trafficking are chronicled here.

Less Research Is Needed!

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 10:10:00 EDT

Arguments against genetically modified foods almost always begin with the contention that research is preliminary and inconclusive. Well, this doesn't help:

About 300 protesters invaded Monsanto's seed research unit in southeastern Brazil to protest Brazil's approval last month for genetically modified corn from Monsanto and Bayer AG for sale and planting, destroying a greenhouse and a testing field.

Much more on GMOs and Africa here.

Reason on Red Eye

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 15:49:00 EDT

I'll be on Red Eye tonight with one of those people who comments on Ashlee Simpson's outfits in US Weekly and Greg Plitt. I encourage you to google the latter. The show starts at 3am on Fox News.

Texans Refuse Generous Border Patrol Offer

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 13:00:00 EDT

If you've got property in the Rio Grande Valley, the U.S. Border Patrol will pay $100 to survey the land and decide whether to erect a hideous, vista-destroying gray wall on top of it. You can refuse, of course. And then they'll sue you.

Last December, a U.S. Border Patrol agent asked [Hilaria] Muniz to sign a paper allowing the government to survey his land for the border fence. Muniz, who doesn't read or write, refused. The government sued. The family sought help from rural legal aid lawyers.
Their attorney, Celestino Gallegos, said the government has also sued some 50 other landowners in the Rio Grande Valley. In each case, he said, the government demands unlimited access for six months and was willing to pay only $100 for the inconvenience.
"That was across the board for every single landowner," Gallegos said. "No matter if you had 100 acres or if you had — in the case of the Muniz family — a third of an acre, the access to it and any kind of damage that could be caused is only worth $100."

Whole NPR report here.

Ashley Dupre: Slave?

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 10:17:00 EDT

Over at the L.A. Times, E. Benjamin Skinner tries to explain the difference between being a high priced American hooker and a slave. It's not very difficult.

One hot june day in 2006, I saw what slavery really meant. In a rundown mansion in a slum of Bucharest, Romania, a pimp offered to sell me a young woman he described as "a blond." She had bleached hair, hastily applied makeup, and she apparently suffered from Down syndrome. On her right arm were at least 10 angry, fresh slashes where, I can only assume, she had attempted suicide. The pimp claimed that he made 200 euros per night renting her out to local clients. He offered to sell her outright to me in exchange for a used car..
"It is a vicious myth that women and children who work as prostitutes have voluntarily chosen such a life for themselves," asserted a 2005 State Department fact sheet. Thus the victimization of Ashley Alexandra Dupre, the high-priced call girl frequented by Eliot Spitzer, who until Monday was New York's governor, is equated to the slavery of the young woman in the Bucharest brothel.
Over the objections of a few anti-slavery stalwarts in the Justice Department, the House of Representatives passed a bill in December that expands the current anti-trafficking legislation to cover most forms of prostitution, coerced or not. If approved in its current form by the Senate and signed by the president, the law will no longer address slavery exclusively and will instead become a federal mandate to fight prostitution on a broad scale.

Is it also a "vicious myth" that women offered $1 million for spreads in Hustler might accept voluntarily? Discuss.

In the current issue of reason, Joanne McNeil traces the "white slavery" panic back a century.

They Paved Paradise, They Put Up a (Natalist) Parking Lot

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 13:47:00 EDT

Sacramento legislators are bored again:

California lawmakers are considering granting special parking privileges to women in the final three months of pregnancy and the first two months after birth.
Assemblyman Chuck DeVore's bill would qualify pregnant women for "temporarily disabled" parking placards from the Department of Motor Vehicles.

As it turns out, pregnant people don't actually like being called "disabled."

Helen Grieco, executive director of the California chapter of the National Organization for Women, said AB 1940 inadvertently could send the wrong societal message.
"It's very much a normal part of a woman's life – we have children," Grieco said. "So we've always been troubled by framing pregnancy as a disability."
Sacramentan Sarah Nolan, 30, said she was granted disabled parking privileges years ago because of complications that required "modified bed rest." She does not support awarding placards to all pregnant women, however.
"It's what our bodies were made to do," Nolan said of pregnancy. "You become as big as a house, and you get to moan and complain about it, but that kind of goes with the territory. It's not disability."

DeVore's best defense is probably this classic Onion article.

Baseball and Sentencing Reform: Not the Same!

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 10:45:00 EDT

Over at Slate, Ray Fisman breaks down an NBER study on three-strikes laws:

[R]ut yourself in the shoes of a two-strike criminal. The prospect of 25 years behind bars for a third offense is likely to give even a hardened criminal pause before he or she crosses the street against the lights. So we'd expect two-strike felons to commit fewer crimes. But suppose you've already decided to break the law—maybe you need to make a quick buck. Are you going to lift a few golf clubs from the local pro shop? Or are you going to hold up a bank? The potential haul from a bank robbery is obviously much greater, and the penalty is the same: Bank robbery will get you decades in the slammer, but if it's your third offense, so will shoplifting.
Three-strike-eligible criminals who actually do get arrested for a third offense commit more serious crimes. Burglars, for example, become robbers—these are both offenses that involve stealing, but robbery has the added element of force. Similarly, while thefts decline overall, assaults during thefts go up under three strikes, suggesting that an increasing number of thieves may, in desperation, be trying to muscle their way out of a third arrest. In general, arrests of three-strike-eligible felons are 20 percent more likely to be violent crimes (relative to no-strike criminals).
It's tempting to invoke the law of unintended consequences in thinking about what was perhaps a well-intentioned but flawed piece of legislation. But these consequences could have been entirely anticipated if legislators recognized that criminals, like all of us, often make decisions by rationally weighing the costs and benefits of their actions.

Not sure about that last bit--the law of unintended consequences, to the extent that it counts as a "law" at all, is not suspended just because legislators are too slow and invested in tough-on-crime talking points to consider said consequences. It's also worth remembering that prisons are full of people who wasted that last strike on pathetic little victimless crimes and were still slapped with draconian sentences. Matt Welch checked in with California's three-strikes law a few years back:

Pam Martinez...was only recently given clemency from a 25-year sentence for stealing a $30 toolbox. About 4,300 of the 7,000 third-strikers in state prisons were sent there for nonviolent felonies. Of those, The Orange County Register reports, there are "357 people convicted of petty theft, 235 of vehicle theft, 69 of forgery and 678 of drug possession."

Human Contraband, Pot Residue, Whatever

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 10:40:00 EDT

Resourceful, equal-opportunity border patrol agents prove that they're not just after Mexicans who commit victimless crimes:

These days, the checkpoints on eastbound Interstate 8 and northbound Arizona 95 near Yuma (a passageway to the I-10 and I-40 corridors linking Arizona and California) are open 24 hours a day. And with the addition of seven times more K9 dogs, they have become the biggest weed traps in the country.
Drug-sniffing dogs at some of the checkpoints, especially the ones south of Tucson and through Texas, find literally tons of marijuana being smuggled from Mexico.
But the vast majority of people getting busted at checkpoints in Arizona near Yuma aren't smugglers or illegal immigrants. They aren't even big-shot partiers like Lil Wayne. They're just average people who happen to be carrying a smidgen of marijuana in their vehicles.

In other news, Yuma is considering a moat.

Patriotism: Get Used to It

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 16:36:00 EDT

George Kateb, author of the wonderful Patriotism and Other Mistakes leads off a Cato Unbound forum on whether "patriotism is good for anyone other than flag manufacturers." I found Kateb's contribution a little disappointing (though I enjoyed his liberal use of the word blood-tax), but Chandran Kukathas' charmingly world-weary little essay makes up for it:

Patriotism comes not to undermine citizenship but to fulfill it. To rid the world of patriotism it would be necessary to rid the world of states. Even this would not relieve us of the burden of petty loyalties to clumps of soil or to far-fetched abstractions, but it would mean the end of one kind of nonsense. Yet I don’t see states disappearing anytime soon, and am not wholly convinced we can give them up, whether or not we would perish without them. So I conclude we should just get used to patriotism, patriots, and their discontents.

That said, we can at least start calling certain legislation passed at the behest of the Bush administration "The Petty Loyalties to Clumps of Soil Act."

Thoughts on Thoughts on Spitzer

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 23:27:00 EDT

I’m fascinated by the Spitzer-inspired discussion of prostitution on blogs that identify as feminist, most of which seem to be conflicted but marginally pro-decriminalization. It’s a surprisingly utilitarian back-and-forth; few posters or commenters are arguing from self-autonomy (OK, none), and most are weighing the obvious harm of denying sex workers access to law enforcement (in the case of criminalization) against the desire not to reinforce patriarchy and/or heteronormativity (in the case of legalization). Everyone seems to assume that legalizing sex work will reinforce all sorts of ugly cultural phenomena women struggle against all the time. Writes one commenter at Feministing, “I’m politically liberal, openly feminist, and opposed to sex work precisely” because of “patriarchy” and “heterosexuality issues.”

I find this incoherent precisely because I share all the poster’s intuitions about problematic cultural norms. Of course sexism restricts autonomy in all sorts of ways that deserve consideration when discussing the prevalence of prostitution or the choice to enter sex work. Of course it’s deplorable that sexually adventurous young women are constantly told they are “degrading themselves” by seeking out various experiences, that every bit of enjoyment eats away at some secret store of purity. This whole tradition–the idea that women need be preserved in glass so as not to “ruin” themselves, lest they diminish their sexual value by “giving it away”–restricts the lived autonomy of women in ways I can’t even begin to articulate. None of the slut-shaming makes sense unless you assume women live to give themselves to men in their purest possible form.

If you find all of these cultural pathologies unfortunate, what is the public policy you should prefer? It seems to me that it is not the policy that deems it a crime against the American people to open your legs. Anti-prostitution laws add a layer of legal sanction to all of our worst intuitions about the treatment of sexually independent women; they strengthen and validate the idea that women who bed men with any frequency are sick, marginal, pariahs. Even decriminalization, which treats Johns as outlaws and sex workers as victims, assumes that all sex workers are damaged, that no woman would ever love sex enough to make a career out of it. And why not? Well, because every woman knows that she is her sexual purity rating. No sane woman would ever choose to mess that up.

In sum: If we are ever going to introduce a conceptual distinction between the moral character of individual women and the integrity of their hymens, it seems extremely important not to criminalize aberrant sexual behaviors.

For a more direct view of sexual autonomy (plus explanatory geometry!), please consult Rev. Moon.