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Everyone Knows it's Cindy (Except Newsweek)

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 17:47:00 EDT

Newsweek has a 5,000-word cover story out on Cindy McCain. Here's how the magazine dispatches with the most interesting part of Cindy's life story: Her confessions (first to the feds, then to the public) about stealing painkillers from her own nonprofit:

The McCains knew the story would get out. They chose to tell what happened to a handpicked group of reporters they thought would be fair. The Arizona Republic wasn't included, and the day after the story broke, the paper ran an ugly editorial cartoon depicting Cindy as a junkie shaking down babies for pills. Cindy retreated further from public life and stayed away from reporters.

Er, that's one way of looking at it. Another, more contextual one is that the handpicked reporters

were offered an exclusive story in exchange for agreeing to certain terms. They would attend individual interview sessions Aug. 19 and sit on the story until Aug. 22.

Why the weird time lag? More on that below. What was the "exclusive story"? That Cindy had been addicted to Vicodin and Percocet for three years, going so far as stealing from her own international aid outfit. Why was she talking about it now, more than a year since she'd come clean?

"If what I say can help just one person to face the problem, it's worthwhile," she said. "They should know it's OK to be scared. It's OK to talk about it. And there's nothing wrong with staying home, carpooling and potty-training a 3-year-old."

Inspirational! But there were a couple of important details that Mrs. McCain was leaving out. Chiefly, that on Aug. 22, the day that all the Cindy-beats-drug-addiction hero stories were splashed across the wires and airwaves, Maricopa County was busy unsealing a 212-page extortion investigation into one of her ex-employees, Tom Gosinski, who had sued her for wrongful termination and tipped off the Drug Enforcement Agency that she had written bogus painkiller prescriptions in his name. The McCains knew that Aug. 22 was going to be the first day the public found out about Cindy's illegal drug problems; they just got out in front of it with a heart-rending story, scrubbed clean of seamy details and juicy context.

The extortion investigation into Gosinski − which, by the way, was initiated at the behest of legendary Washington fixer and McCain family friend John Dowd − quietly died nine months later.

Does any of this matter, in a world where Vicodin and Percocet should be easier for all of us to get without having to shake a baby upside-down? Not unless you care to know the darkest corner of McCainiac damage control/suppression, or if you're relying on Newsweek for warts-and-all political reporting. I'm actually a huge fan of Cindy; her magical realism about key moments in her life is all part of the fun.

OC Register Outsources Copy Editors

mriggs@reason.com (Mike Riggs) — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 12:30:00 EDT

Many a newsperson has bemoaned the shrinking size of the newsroom, but it seems that at least one paper is welcoming new hires:

An Indian company will take over copy editing duties for some stories published in The Orange County Register and will handle page layout for a community newspaper at the company that owns the Pulitzer Prize-winning daily, the newspaper confirmed Tuesday.

On the opposite side of the newspaper management-labor dispute is Gene Weingarten, who wrote a tongue-in-cheek column for last Sunday's Washington Post Magazine, criticizing the Post's decision to buy out some of its copy editors:

Truth to tell, I feel badly for all copy editors whom, I'm afraid, will suddenly find themselves out of a job. Time has past them by, however, efeated the Red Sox 6-5 in extra innings and it doesn't make sense for us to weep for copyeditors anymore than it makes sense for us to lament the replacement of bank tellers with automated ATM machines.
So to all my former copyediting colleagues, I wish them a soft landing. Finally, I'd like to give particular shoutouts to my friends Pat Meyers and Bill O'Brien, two longtime copyeditors for the Washington Post who took the early retirement: We'll miss ya, guys, even if we didn't need you all that muck.

What's happening at papers has been happening in other industries for a long time: As companies streamline processes and embrace new technology, their demand for labor fluctuates; out with the old, in with the tech savy; etc., etc. The recently retired can kick back, consult, or go back to school and get with the program.

As much as I love the idea of tucking a press card in my hat, smelling a newspaper that has just flown off the press, and naming my hemorrhoids, I really hope the Indian copy editors pan out. Hindus are better than no news.

Who Was He, and What Is He Doing Not Here?

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 17:01:00 EDT

Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen is feeling a tad defensive about his coverage of John McCain:

In some recent magazine articles, I and certain of my colleagues have been accused of being soft on McCain, forgiving him his flips, his flops and his mostly conservative ideology. I do not plead guilty to this charge, because, over the years, the man's imperfections have not escaped my keen eye.

The magazine article he alludes to is findable here. Cohen continues on, grudgingly:

But, for the record, let's recapitulate: McCain has either reversed himself or significantly amended his positions on immigration, tax cuts for the wealthy, campaign spending (as it applies to use of his wife's corporate airplane) and, most recently, offshore drilling. In the more distant past, he has denounced then embraced certain ministers of medieval views and changed his mind about the Confederate flag, which flies by state sanction in South Carolina only, I suspect, to provide Republican candidates with a chance to choose tradition over common decency. There, I've said it all.

Throat thus cleared, here comes the big "but":

But here is the difference between McCain and Obama -- and Obama had better pay attention. McCain is a known commodity. It's not just that he's been around a long time and staked out positions antithetical to those of his Republican base. It's also -- and more important -- that we know his bottom line. As his North Vietnamese captors found out, there is only so far he will go, and then his pride or his sense of honor takes over.

Question: If demonstrating an impressively brave breaking point in a Vietnamese prison gives you a qualitative advantage in becoming U.S. president, wouldn't that mean we should really be looking for the few tough S.O.B.s who didn't break at all? Like, you know, James Stockdale?

The Washington Post's Phony "Balance"

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 08:35:00 EDT

If ever you wanted to remind yourself of the deceptively simple logic that leads to open assaults on protections guaranteed by the Bill of Rights, let me direct you to today's Washington Post editorial on the probably unconstitutional security checkpoints being imposed on residents of violence-scarred neighborhoods in our nation's capitol. "Why," the faux-anguished subhed reads, "are there more protests about a police crackdown in Northeast than about the murders that caused it?" Some excerpts:

Critics of the District's decision to use police checkpoints have reason to question the practice's constitutionality and wonder about its long-term effectiveness. What's wrong is to play down the violence plaguing these troubled neighborhoods. Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D) and Police Chief Cathy L. Lanier are correct to see the crime problem in Northeast as a true public emergency that warrants new thinking and bold action. [...]
Any political judgment must balance the intrusiveness of the checkpoints against the seriousness of the problem they are designed to address. [...]
[T]here was more of an outcry over police efforts to stop the killings than over the killings themselves. And therein lies the real outrage.

The real outrage ... how played out, how elastic-to-the-point-of-meaninglessness, is that rhetorical formula, anyhow? "The real outrage is that Washington has no representation in Congress! The real outrage is that Marion Barry is still on the D.C. City Council! The real outrage is that Washington Post editorial writers care more about the political pieties of ACLU lawyers than the totally legitimate constitutional concerns said lawyers are raising about a crude policing tactic!"

Anyhow, the Post's authoritarian illogic is almost a classic of the form, down to the pulled-straight-from-the-arse "balance" between a measure's constitutionality and the "seriousness of the problem" that it's trying to address (a formula that, if applied to something as "serious" as war, would surely eviscerate the country's basic legal framework). Unfortunately for Fred Hiatt's posse, but fortunately for the rest of us, we "must" balance no such thing at all: Either a policy is constitutional, or it ain't, no matter how publicly you may weep for the victims of crime. That's one very good reason why we still have some semblance of constitutional protections left at all. No thanks to the last two presidents, and no thanks to the Washington Post.

What McCain Thought Upon Re-Entry

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 12:34:00 EDT

In 1973, after returning from five and a half years of captivity in Vietnam, John McCain spent nine months at the National War College, engaging in what he has described as "a private tutorial on the war, choosing all the texts myself, in the hope that I might better understand how we came to be involved in the war and why, after paying such a terrible cost, we lost." Thinking that this could be a Rosetta Stone for McCain's foreign policy evolution, and for his potentially conflicting feelings about his own arduous service in Southeast Asia, I sought his thesis paper via Freedom of Information Act. The results (which came too late for my book, though I write about it in the forthcoming paperback) were different than advertised: It was basically a meditation not on How We Got Involved in Vietnam, but rather on the practical efficacy of the military's code of conduct governing prisoners of war. I wrote about the paper briefly for reason here, and more expansively for the L.A. Times here.

The New York Times asked me for a copy of the paper a while back, and I handed it over. You can read the Gray Lady's write-up here.

Another interesting artifact of his thinking at the time can be found in this 12,000-word U.S. News & World Report essay he wrote in May 1973.

New York Times Aghast that Wired Would Talk Honestly About Drug Use

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 09:58:00 EDT

10 Zen Monkeys has the details on a dust-up between the Gray Lady and Wired magazine in which the former got a case of the vapors over a short piece in the latter that honestly discussed the benefits and drawbacks of "brain power" drugs like nicotine, Adderall, caffeine, cocaine, and methamphetamine.

I hope Wired has learned a lesson, here. Apparently, anything short of parroting ONDCP talking points about illicit drugs and off-label use of prescription drugs is irresponsible journalism. There's no room for nuance, truth, or honesty here. Only scorn and absolutism.

Scott Stantis' First Cartoon

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Tue, 27 May 2008 09:38:00 EDT

Longtime reason cartoonist Scott Stantis, whose main gig is being the drawer-in-chief for The Birmingham News, recently celebrated his 30th year in the journalism biz. From his recent account of his first sale, to the San Pedro News-Pilot:

After saying goodbye, I ran out the door toward my dad who was parked across 7th Street. Blind with giddiness I danced across the street, not looking and darn near got run over. My father and I dancing in the middle of the street. He knew that I knew that this was a defining moment. It was wonderful to share that with him.
Years later, Lillian told me that she had called Jim out of his office. She asked what he had said to make me so happy. After explaining things, he looked out the glass doors at me and my father and said, "that has to be the happiest any one has ever been over 10 dollars".

Whole thing here.

Stantis' reason archive here.

Prickly City strips here.

Wikipedia bio here.

Reason Nominated for 16 L.A. Press Club Awards

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Fri, 23 May 2008 11:24:00 EDT

I am as pleased as Tom Harkin on an ethanol bender to announce that the 2007 staff of this here magazine and multimedia juggernaut hauled in a stunning 16 nominations from the Greater Southern California Press Club Awards (covering San Diego to Santa Barbara), with the winners to be announced June 21.

reason dominated the magazine category, earning 10 of the 20 finalist spots, including:

NEWS/INVESTIGATIVE
Who Owns Your Body Parts? Everyone's making money in the market for body tissue -- except the donors, by Kerry Howley.
CSI Mississippi: A case study in expert testimony gone horribly wrong, by Radley Balko.
The Trouble with Troubled Teen Programs: How the "boot camp" industry tortures and kills kids, by Maia Szalavitz.

FEATURE/COMMENTARY
Thank Deng Xiaoping for Little Girls: The tyrannical roots of China's international adoption program, by Jacob Sullum.
Bums: Why there are no "happy hobos," by Peter Bagge.
Be Afraid of President McCain: The frightening mind of an authoritarian maverick, by Matt Welch.

ENTERTAINMENT REVIEWS/CRITICISM/COLUMN
The Politics of Pants: It was consumers, not marketers, that made jeans a symbol of youthful revolt, by Charles Paul Freund.
Say You Love Santa: Pop culture's war on secularists, by Greg Beato.
Florida's Forgotten Rebels: Rediscovering the most successful slave revolt in American history, by Amy Sturgis.

ENTERTAINMENT NEWS OR FEATURE
Robert Heinlein at 100: How the science fiction master created the template for our looser, hipper, more pluralist world, by Brian Doherty.

In the Online Column/Commentary/Criticism category, there were these two:
America's No. 1 Endangered Species: Is the middle class losing "its place at the table?", by Nick Gillespie.
The Secrets of Intangible Wealth: For once the World Bank says something smart about the real causes of prosperity, by Ronald Bailey.

In addition, the blog you are reading is up for Best Group Blog, and the website it's on is nominated for Best News Organization Website and Best Design and Layout. And last but not least, let's all smell the freedom of a man who probably didn't imagine himself being nominated for journalism awards a few years back: Drew Carey is up for Best Multimedia Package:

Let the betting commence! Vote for your favorite pieces in the comments! Even better yet, subscribe to this fantabulous magazine for less than $20 a year!

"Today's Republican Party -- divided, drifting, demoralized -- is epitomized by the farm bill"

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Mon, 19 May 2008 08:18:00 EDT

So says Robert Novak, in a nifty if depressing little sausage-making column. One wonders what kind of party will emerge from this November's rout.

Now Playing at Reason.tv: How The Week Is Redefining News Mags for the 21st Century

Thu, 15 May 2008 15:00:00 EDT

Bill Falk is editor in chief of The Week, the magazine that promises to "tell you all you need to know about everything that matters." Six years old and boasting a growing circulation of 500,000 subscribers, The Week has redefined the news magazine for the 21st century by offering wide-ranging and witty takes on the topics of the day. For each issue, Falk and his staff sift through thousands of newspapers, magazines, websites, and other sources to produce a concise and comprehensive gazette of news, opinion, and attitude.

Although The Week is a non-partisan publication, Falk has no shortage of opinions about the state of the media-and particularly the troubles facing old-style, mass-circulation print behemoths such as Time and Newsweek. Such mags are "clearly in a bad place," he says. "It's unclear what their role is in this new media landscape....They're fishing around for what their role is going to be."

In this 10-minute interview conducted and filmed by reason.tv's Nick Gillespie and Dan Hayes, Falk explains why he thinks The Washington Post is the best newspaper in America, why content will always be king across all media platforms, and why it may not be a bad thing that politics is starting to look more and more like a reality TV show in which contestants get voted off the island.

Click below to view. To add this video to your site and more reason.tv, go here.

Now Playing at Reason.tv: How the WSJ editorial page gets made—Q&A with Robert Pollock

Mon, 12 May 2008 15:00:00 EDT

Former reason intern Robert Pollock has been the editorial features page editor at The Wall Street Journal for more than a year. The Buffalo native sat down recently with reason.tv to talk about how he came to his libertarian beliefs; how the mainstream media is toeing the Journal's line on capital gains taxes; why The Washington Post is the Journal's toughest competition and why The New York Times' editorial pages have a "hectoring" tone; how the GOP turned its back on its small-government philosophy; why America needs more immigrants; and much more.

This 10-minute interview was conducted by reason.tv Editor Nick Gillespie and filmed by reason.tv's Dan Hayes.

Click below to view.

Hmmm. What Changed??

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Mon, 05 May 2008 20:31:00 EDT

W magazine writes about Arianna Huffington:

It wasn't that long ago that Huffington was variously dismissed as a social climber, "intellectual lap dancer" and political opportunist

Next up: W reveals how it wasn't that long ago that David Brock was dismissed as a partisan hack!

Bonus Arianna-ana: 1) Time's classic mid-'90s Margaret Carlson piece, "Should the Huffingtons Be Stopped?" 2) Watch ex-hubbie Michael call B.S. on her post-facto opposition to Proposition 187. 3) Jacob Sullum tells you what you really need to know about La Huffington's 2003 anti-SUV ads.

War Is the Health of the Economy

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 17:28:00 EDT

Hyper-influential foreign policy intellectual establishmenteer Frederick Kagan has a long new piece in the National Review attacking, um, "hyper-sophisticates of the American foreign-policy and intellectual establishment." Or at least, the ones who aren't named Kagan.

One of his rebuttals to critics of the Kagans' War is sure to win over you FDR fanboys out there:

Modern economics has long understood that the notion of a one-for-one guns-versus-butter trade-off is simply wrong. A high proportion of money spent on defense goes back into the U.S. economy in the form of salaries paid to the more than 5 million Americans employed directly or indirectly by the Defense Department, and payments to the defense industry and the long and complex supply chains from which they draw their raw materials. Military spending has traditionally been a form of economic stimulus, and wars more commonly end recessions or depressions than start them.

Whole Kagger here; thanks to commenter Don for the link. And for something completely different, a reminder to check out Veronique de Rugy's cover story from reason's May issue. Excerpt:

How much money is $1 trillion? Enough to pay for the entire 1976 federal budget, adjusted for inflation. Enough to write a check for $37,500 to every Iraqi man, woman, and child. Enough to buy 169,492 Black Hawk helicopters, or 455 stealth bombers. Enough, in nominal terms, to pay for the entire federal government from 1789 to 1957. And it's 10 times more than what specialists predict it would take to eradicate malaria once and for all.

To distract people from the real price tag of a two-front war, the president and Congress have used an unprecedented and fiscally irresponsible budgetary trick: a series of "emergency" supplemental spending bills totaling hundreds of billions of dollars. This scheme has allowed them not only to hide the costs of the conflicts but also to avoid painful budget choices while funneling billions of dollars in unvetted goodies to favored interest groups.

Capitalism No Longer in "Favor" After 15 Largely Uninterrupted Years of Growth and Job Creation

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 09:12:00 EDT

Expect to see a whole lot more like this, from the news pages of your morning paper:

Former senator Phil Gramm, with his aw-shucks Texas drawl, may at first blush have little in common with Carly Fiorina, the telegenic former chief executive of Hewlett-Packard. But they share a bond: Both are leading economic advisers of Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), the presumptive Republican nominee for president, and both have reputations as the kind of aggressive capitalists that may be sliding from favor as the nation's economy edges toward recession.
Democratic opponents are already plotting attacks on two advocates of what Robert Reich, a former Clinton labor secretary, described as "dog eat dog capitalism," an economic philosophy that works well when the economy is on the upswing but may not play so well in a trough.

I shudder to imagine what will happen to capitalism's wobbly reputation when unemployment creeps above 5.0%.

For an actually literate take on McCain's economic team, I'll again recommend the Weekly Standard's Andrew Ferguson.

What Kind of American Will They Ask Next?

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 10:00:00 EDT

The OC Weekly's Gustavo Arellano, one of my favorite writers, is hanging up his nationally syndicated alt-weekly column "Ask a Mexican" after years of explaining to baffled and/or angry gringos why brown folk wear pants to the beach, sell oranges on freeway off-ramps, and hate on the Guatemalans. From his assimilationist adios:

[L]ike Mr. Dooley, Olle I Skratthult and The Katzenjammer Kids before me, this column's time has come: It's no longer necessary to explain Mexicans to Americans because Mexicans are Americans. Gracias for all the fights, the propositions of sexytime explosion, and the slugged-back tequila shots after book signings, but there's a little ranchito in Zacatecas waiting for me and a barefoot muchacha ready to cook me dinner. Vaya con Dios, America, and always remember: Order the enchilada-and-taco combo TO GO.

The punchline, though, goes to my vigilant anti-Reconquista pals at the California Coalition for Immigration Reform, whose subject header on its e-mail alarm was: "Gus Arellano Claims Mexicans ARE Americans and Then Retires!"

There Is Nothing Left to Lose

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 14:15:00 EDT

Dave Grohl has launched a presidential campaign in the pages of Harp magazine. If elected, the Foo Fighter promises to legalize pot, pardon Foxy Brown, "make war against the law," and give the country "a good, smoky barbecue -- family style, at least once a week, winter months included. Every Sunday....It could be Tuesday, I don't want to say."

Overpowered by his oratory, Harp then folded.

Obama Speech -- the View From Elaine's

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 11:03:00 EDT

I happened to catch Barack Obama's big race speech yesterday morn in the odd environs of the Columbia University Journalism School, where I watched it with some of my fellow judges at the National Magazine Awards. The collective verdict of the nation's glossiest editors? Somewhere in the loamy middle between fan-fucking-tabulous and history-changing, once-every-half-century OMG. People were excusing themselves to call their wives ... did you watch that? Though the award judging is legendarily secretive, I can exclusively confirm to Hit & Run readers that one person told me that the room was so quiet where he was watching it that even Jacob Weisberg stopped using his Blackberry.

Hopping into an elevator together, a bunch of us agreed that it was a pretty terrific speech*. "But," said one, "we're not exactly the Real America."

This brings up an intriguing point -- Obama essentially punted the ball back into America's court yesterday, which is interesting on its own, but all the more so because his Republican opponent will probably not use any kind of code-word race-baiting in this campaign, and in fact will likely condemn his own allies if they do so. That could leave both the dirty political work and the cleansing national conversations to happen outside the realm of high-level presidential campaigning. (It will also probably lead to two candidates bashing the free speech of 527 groups, and competing with one another to see who would ban them quickest.) All else being equal (which it never is), I prefer my vicious and/or clarifying racial arguments taking place from the ground up, not stoked cynically from the top down.

* I thought The Speech was captivating and -- yes! -- audacious, up until the point he started committing the stump-fallacy of "once we solve X, then we can unleash Y." Especially when moving beyond Culture War race tensions would unite us ... uh, against corporations? And in favor of a throw-more-money-at-it approach to the lousy public school system? There's a time and place to empty your gumbo pot of campaign promises; a world-historical race speech doesn't seem to me to be one of them. Though maybe that's just because I disagree with many of his ideas.

"Two-Timing John McCain's Sizzling Secret Sex Life"!

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 17:20:00 EST

From the Department of I-paid-the-$3.29-so-you-don't-have-to, I just shelled out precious fiat currency to see what new dirt The Globe has on Sen. McFrontrunner's sexy-time activities. Answer? Bugger-all.

McCain dated strippers and heiresses! Ditched his first wife after she'd been disfigured in a car wreck, and replaced her with a young hottie with a fat bank account! Admitted "the blame was entirely mine"! All these and more you can find ... in McCain's own books. Plus countless interviews he's given.

The best The Globe can do to advance the ball is this quote from "a political insider":

As a young pilot in the early '60s, the house he rented was notorious as a place for raucous sex parties.

OH NOEZ! And then there's this:

Still, one Internet poster rips the presidential candidate, saying, "McCain cheated on his first wife, why wouldn't he cheat on his second?"

That all you got, tabs? I remember back when the supermarket gossip rags at least delivered some goddamned gossip.

Life Meets Art

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 17:10:00 EST

For you fans of The Wire:

The Philadelphia Inquirer is running a multipart series about Philadelphia's homeless, inspired by the gruesome death of a homeless man. This is delicious because the Inquirer's editor is none other than Bill Marimow, former Sun managing editor, nemesis of David Simon, and Simon's supposed model for managing editor Thomas Klebanow on The Wire. Klebanow, of course, is supervising the Sun's special homeless investigation, inspired by the gruesome deaths of homeless men.

The joke on the show, of course, is that the homeless series is nothing more than cheap Pulitzer bait, one habit of contemporary journalism that caused Simon to leave the field.

Why Smoking Is Worse Than Terrorism

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 14:27:00 EST

This ad was produced for the New Zealand chapter of Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) by Doyle Dane Bernbach. As Copyranter notes, the idea is not even original: An anti-smoking ad published in a Dubai newspaper on the 2007 anniversary of 9/11 used the same tasteless concept. The copy in the ASH ad reads:

Terrorism-related deaths since 2001: 11,337 • Tobacco-related deaths since 2001: 30,000,000

This juxtaposition should not be dismissed as mere provocation. For "public health" true believers, the fact that smokers who get lung cancer or emphysema are not murdered but instead die as a result of voluntarily assumed risks does not mean the government has less of a duty to prevent their deaths. As public health theorist Dan Beauchamp puts it, "The historic dream of public health that preventable death and disability ought to be minimized is a dream of social justice," and realizing it means rejecting "the ultimately arbitrary distinction between voluntary and involuntary hazards" as well as "the radical individualism inherent in the market model."

Properly speaking, the collectivist calculus of public health should take into account years of life lost, and the people who died in the the 9/11 attacks were, on average, younger than people who die from smoking-related diseases. But since the latter group is so much larger, it accounts for many more total years of life lost. By this logic, smoking is a much bigger outrage than terrorism, and governments should spend much more money and effort to prevent it than they do to prevent terrorism. Although I am sympathetic to the argument that our government devotes too many resources to stopping low-probability terrorist attacks, I tend to think any amount of taxpayer money spent on saving people from themselves is too much. But that's because I am still subject to what Beauchamp disapprovingly describes as "the powerful sway market-justice holds over our imagination, granting fundamental freedom to all individuals to be left alone."

[via Wonkette]

A Few Thoughts on Buckley

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 17:42:00 EST

The guy got some things wrong, but he got a lot right (in both senses of the word).

Buckley leaves an enormous legacy, but to the detriment everyone, the right left Buckley years ago. Where Buckley stood athwart the tide of history and beat it back with wit, sophistication, and argument, we today get best-selling Regnery screeds from lowest-common-denominator clowns like Ann Coulter, Dinesh D'Souza, and Glenn Beck. Where Buckley mistrusted government and aimed to slow the world down, he's been usurped on the right by the likes of William Kristol and David Brooks, men who want to use government to remake the world in their own image. Where Buckley flourished in cosmopolitan Manhattan and took delight in life's finer things, modern conservatism has grown disdainful of the marketplace of culture, commerce, and ideas abundant in urban areas (witness the last election, where many on the right weirdly smeared John Kerry as a "latte-sipper"—real Americans apparently drink Maxwell House). In fact, today's Bush/neocon-right is often contemptuous of commerce itself, sometimes calling the voluntary, unchecked exchange of goods, labor, and services—a pure free market—"ugly" and "crude."

The 15-year GOP ascent to power from 1980 to 1994 gave rise to rightist thinkers more inclined toward activist government, just one that was active promoting conservatism. With Republicans at the helm of the federal government, limiting government's scope and reach no longer seemed like such a good idea. So old right thinkers like Buckley lost influence in favor of big government neocons like Kristol, who gave quarter to grand dreams like an imperial presidency, using the federal government to promote conservative values through intervention in areas like health care and the public schools, remapping the Middle East, and other ideas that require too great a belief in the competence and benevolence of bureaucrats and politicians for sensible rightists like Buckley.

I didn't agree with Buckley on everything, of course. But he represents a time when conservatives and libertarians shared quite a bit of common ground—indeed when both philosophies largely sprang from the same well of ideas and influences. I don't think that's the case anymore.

Rest in peace.

No Depression, RIP

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 15:49:00 EST

One of my favorite publications, the music mag No Depression, is about to close its doors. Initially devoted to "alternative country (whatever that is)," the magazine soon covered a whole spectrum of American roots music, defined as broadly as the editors' very catholic tastes allowed. Now it is a victim of industry turmoil. "In this evolving downloadable world," the editors write, "what a record label is and does is all up to question. What is irrefutable is that their advertising budgets are drastically reduced, for reasons we well understand. It seems clear at this point that whatever businesses evolve to replace (or transform) record labels will have much less need to advertise in print....What makes this especially painful and particularly frustrating is that our readership has not significantly declined, our newsstand sell-through remains among the best in our portion of the industry, and our passion for and pleasure in the music has in no way diminished. We still have shelves full of first-rate music we'd love to tell you about."

It's a shame. There's a lot of wonderful music writing online, but there is a particular pleasure in perusing a magazine that covers a wide breadth of topics that somehow, in the editors' hands, all feel like they're part of a whole. Every issue I read both taught me new things and deepened my appreciation for the things I already knew. The No Depression website will continue -- appropriately, since the magazine itself emerged from a discussion group on AOL -- but it looks like the site won't include nearly as much content as the journal that birthed it.

I wrote around a half-dozen articles for ND over the last 10 years, mostly record reviews. It didn't pay very well, but that wasn't the point -- I wrote for it because I liked to see my writing there. (Well, that and the free subscription.) Any magazine whose definition of country music was eclectic enough to let me expound on the Kinks, the Pogues, and the 1970s Florida funk scene is fine by me. I miss it already.

NYT Asks: "Could Greed Be Good?"

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 10:45:00 EST

ABC's John Stossel is probably the most widely-recognized, most be-mustached libertarian out there. He sneaks all kinds of Econ 101 and pro-freedom lessons into his 20/20 segments and special. The Ur-episode is the one in which he asks, with faux shock, after examining the benefits of capitalism: "Could greed be good?"

John Stossel - Greed (Part 3of3)
by InTheClassroom

It seems that The New York Times is asking itself the same question.

In light a dismal fiscal future, the Times has brought in new board members, "two exceptional individuals," in the words of Times chairman Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., one from Wal-Mart and one from Chevron. The New York Sun takes a look at the few choice words from the editorial board on Wal-Mart in the past:

One, Dawn Lepore, served as a director of Wal-Mart from 2001 to 2004. While Ms. Lepore was serving as a Wal-Mart director, the Times was denouncing Wal-Mart for a series of supposed sins. A November 15, 2003, editorial thundered, "This Wal-Martization of the work force, to which other low-cost, low-pay stores also contribute, threatens to push many Americans into poverty. The first step in countering it is to enforce the law. The government must act more vigorously, and more quickly, when Wal-Mart uses illegal tactics to block union organizing. And Wal-Mart must be made to pay if it exploits undocumented workers." It went on, "Wal-Mart likes to wrap itself in American values. It should be reminded that one of those is paying workers enough to give their families a decent life."

An April 11, 2004, editorial, also written while Ms. Lepore was serving on the Wal-Mart board, warned, "the entry of such an especially tight-fisted employer in a community compels competitors to whittle at their own labor costs. That translates into lost jobs and smaller paychecks for everyone."

Say it with me (and John Stossel) now: Could greed be good?

Via American Thinker

Cross-posted at reason.tv

Fear of a Gray Planet

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 11:46:00 EST

Megan McArdle has a perspicacious piece in the new Atlantic on the likely economic and cultural effects of the aging of America's population. You ought to read it in full, but for a potted summary: likely slowdown in macro economic growth statistics as more Americans' needs shift from goods (where productivity growth is strong) to services (where it isn't).

She gently debunks the somewhat common fear of a huge stock market crash as the aging Boomers start selling off the stocks they've socked their savings in for decades. But she does think that double digit yearly stock market index growth is very unlikely down the line.

The implicit advice to the young? Go into geriatric medicine. Implicit advice to America? We'll need more immigrant service workers. (Paging Kerry Howley.) Implicit rebuke to aging Americans? You maybe shoulda thought about having more kids. (Paging Bryan Caplan.) And expect to see more graying heads in service occupations, as many Boomers didn't save enough to sustain them through their increasing golden years, and they'll have to keep working past standard "retirement" age, and Social Security won't sustain them. Nor will it bankrupt the Republic, in her reading--though Medicare just might.

Read the whole thing. It ends with a pleasing "life will go on, and still be sweet" tone, despite the possibly scary-sounding economic and cultural shifts she discusses.

Failing Upward

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 21:48:00 EST

It's a D.C. tradition.

Huffington Post is reporting that your next regular columnist for the New York Times will be…William Kristol.

A pretty uninspiring choice. It means the Times op-ed page will be well-represented by big government liberals (Krugman, Herbert), big government moderates (Friedman, Kristof), and big government conservatives (Brooks, Kristol). I do believe that just about covers the full range of acceptable political opinion, doesn't it?

Also makes you wonder just how many times one man can be wrong before people will not merely stop taking him seriously, but stop giving him bigger and broader platforms from which to trumpet his perpetual wrongness.