Nick Gillespie: What Would a Sensible Drug Policy Look Like?

Posted on October 25, 2008, 1:55pm

In December 2006, reason's Nick Gillespie spoke on a plenary session at the annual conference of Students for a Sensible Drug Policy (SSDP). The panel's topic was "What Would a Sensible Drug Policy Look Like," and Gillespie focused not just on that topic but on how drug prohibition functions as what he calls a "structuring event" in American life, forcing all sorts of activity—from education and athletics, from law enforcement to foreign policy—to pay hypocritical and misdirected lip service to a Just Say No mentality.

"The drug war screws with everything that it touches, and it touches everything," says Gillespie. Snippets from his talk:

What I want to do is try to create a post-prohibitionist mind-set, where we are no longer merely reacting to prohibition and trying to get rid of it, because in a way we become twinned with it....

When we talk about the Tour de France, we talk about drugs. When we talk about Major League Baseball, we talk about who's using them. Plan Colombia and a good chunk of our foreign policy is all about drugs. Hundreds of thousands of people are in jail because of drug policy. All of you [students] probably went through some form of bogus drug education program, all for no good reason. The real dead-end of this is...[found] in men's rooms in America. When you go and take a piss, there is a pretty good chance that the urinal cake holder, the thing that deodorizes it...says 'Say No To Drugs' on it....

The quick version of my sensible drug policy, of a post-prohibitionist policy, is that it would be smarter to regulate all drugs, including prescription drugs, somewhat like we do with alcohol....

Like drug warriors...we will need to stop imbuing inanimate objects with supernatural powers.

The drug war is over, if we want it—to paraphrase a famous anti-Vietnam war slogan. The end of the war starts up here, in our heads, and then proceeds out to the actual America. The starting point for a sensible drug policy, a true post-prohibitionist mind-set that does not participate in any way with prohibitionist thinking, would be take seriously the credo of the Whole Earth Catalog..."We are as gods, and we might as well get good at it." Ironically, the first step to becoming gods may be to recognize that drugs are only one means among many for changing who we are, how we live, and what we will become.

Approximately 17 minutes; click on the image above.

To embed this video on your website, go here.

SSDP's 10th annual conference will take place in Washington, D.C., from November 21-23 and will feature, among many other speakers, reason's Radley Balko.

Go here for more information.

Intern at reason This Spring!

Posted on October 25, 2008, 10:30am

reason is now accepting applications for the spring 2009 Burton C. Gray Memorial Internship. The intern will work in our Washington, D.C. office for 10 weeks during the spring semester, and receives a $5,000 stipend.

The job includes reporting and writing for reason and reason online, helping with research, proofreading, and other tasks. Previous interns have gone on to work at such places as The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, ABC News, and reason itself.

To apply, send your résumé, up to five writing samples (preferably published clips), and a cover letter to:

Gray Internship
reason
1747 Connecticut Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20009

Electronic applications can be sent to intern@reason.com, with the subject line "Gray Internship Application." The deadline for applications is November 7, 2008.

The Next Time You Need a Cop, Call a Hippie...

Posted on October 25, 2008, 10:27am | Nick Gillespie

Bill O'Reilly had a lot of fun last night with this footage of a reporter bearding former Weather Underground superstar Bill Ayers outside his home.

The whole segment is fun, but things really get cooking around the one-minute mark:

"When a terrorist guy needs some help, who does he call?," asks O'Reilly, laughing. "The cops, just like everyone else."

More reason on Bill Ayers, who may not be a serious campaign issue, for sure, but is still a fool whose past and present is worth remembering.

O'Reilly threatens reason's Jacob Sullum:

O'Reilly calls Ron Paul "a pretty frightening guy" and I disagree, earlier this year:

British Pot Smokers Still Face the Dreaded Finger Wag

Posted on October 24, 2008, 7:11pm | Jacob Sullum

As expected, the British government has reclassified marijuana, a Class C "soft" drug since 2004, as a Class B drug. As NORML notes, "marijuana use by young people age 16 to 24 has fallen approximately 20 percent" since the drug's status was downgraded. Prime Minister Gordon Brown nevertheless ignored the advice of drug policy experts so he could "send a message" to Britain's youth about the "lethal" hazards of supposedly super-potent pot. Still, it looks like moving marijuana back to Class B will have few practical consequences. As before, people caught with small amounts of marijuana will receive warnings the first time around. A second offense can result in a citation and fine, while a third offense theoreticallly can lead to arrest and jail. But as NORML points out, "the Home Office will not document verbal warnings in a national database, making it difficult for police to know whether a defendant is facing their first, second, or third offense."

The Friday Political Thread: Write It Backwards on Your Face

Posted on October 24, 2008, 6:05pm | David Weigel

Unconvincing Quote of the Week
"She was upset with the media for blowing this into a political firestorm." - Pittsburgh police Assistant Chief Maurita Bryant on Ashley Todd, the McCain volunteer who admitted lying about a pro-Obama hate crime committed against her.

The Week in Brief
- Joe Biden declared pre-emptive war on Barack Obama.
- Obamacons tumbled out of the woodwork.
- Alan Greenspan was vewwy vewwy sorry.
- John McCain got on the Joe the Plumber bus.
- Ron Paul's ghost haunted the GOP.
- Bob Barr pronounced McCain's defeat.

Below the Fold
- Nate Silver explains why westerner John McCain is losing the western states. (Reagan swept them twice.)
- W. James Antle III throws a fit in Sam's Club.
- Will Wilkinson breaks a fly bottle over Jacob Weisberg's head. It leaves a mark shaped like an "L"!
- Greg Sargent has the ugliest scoop of the week. (If, as seems unlikely, McCain loses Pennsylvania in a squeaker because he underperforms in Pittsburgh, will Ashley Todd become the Steve Bartman of politics?)
- Gerard Baker predicts a wave of Palintology to come after the vote.

This week's Politics 'n' Prog is dedicated to Sarah Palin.

New at Reason: Brian Doherty on the "Escape from Berkeley" Alt-Fuel Road Rally

Posted on October 24, 2008, 5:30pm

Senior Editor Brian Doherty reports from the "Escape from Berkeley" road rally, where a motley crew of non-petroleum vehicles raced from Northern California to Las Vegas.

Read all about it here.

"If Obama hates Bush's policies, hopefully he will cut government."

Posted on October 24, 2008, 4:25pm | Nick Gillespie

Columnist Ron Hart:

Is there better irony than an imprudent Washington "investing" about a trillion dollars of debt funded tax money into the banking system and telling them how to run a business?

The same federal government confiscated the Mustang Ranch bordello in Nevada in the 90s and then promptly ran it into bankruptcy. If the feds cannot make a profit in a monopoly business of selling sex and booze, my guess is the complexities of banking will totally perplex them—especially when they have to follow the convoluted regulations they themselves impose.

If Congress imposes economic sanctions on Iran as harshly as they have on businesses in the USA, we should crush them with no military force required.

Hart notes wryly, "if Obama hates Bush's policies, hopefully he will cut government."

More here.

The Company You Keep

Posted on October 24, 2008, 3:21pm | Michael C. Moynihan

Over at The Corner, anti-immigration campaigner (both legal and illegal, according to the subtitle of his book) Mark Krikorian is horrified to learn that Sarah Palin isn't sufficiently hostile to the idea of "amnesty." Nothing surprising there. What's interesting, though, is that Krikorian apparently gleaned this information while reading the website of one Lawrence Auster, to whom he approvingly links and "hat tips." And who, exactly, is Lawrence Auster? Put it this way: this is a guy whose conservatism was too extreme for David Horowitz and Frontpagemag.com; the site cut ties with Auster after the Huffington Post published a piece detailing his history of, umm, racial insensitivity.

A few bons mots from Auster, who has published in the racist magazines The Occidental Quarterly and American Renaissance: "What really convinced me of an inherent, dangerous weakness in black ways of thought, however, was their widespread belief in Afrocentrism and the notion that whites were committing ‘genocide' against blacks." Blacks "seem to have much less interest in knowledge or beauty for its own sake" and they "are in fact less endowed with the qualities that make civilization possible, particularly Western civilization." Or how about this fascinating explication of whether or not women should be allowed to vote (Auster says they shouldn't, because while "Women are the natural care-givers and are naturally focused on the home and the family and its protection. But those same priorities, when expressed through the political sphere as distinct from the private sphere, inevitably lead a society in the direction of socialism.")

So a tip to Krikorian: If you don't want people to think that you support immigration restrictions because of some sort of animus towards Mexicans, you should probably avoid linking to the websites of white nationalists like Auster. (And for the record, as far as I can tell, Krikorian has never written about phrenology, eugenics, and bell curves before, though it is troubling that he seems to be a reader of Auster's site. In fairness, I peruse quite a few crackpot websites too—for the purposes of seeing what the mad fringes are reading, I promise—though I wouldn't think of "hat tipping" such nonsense, especially without adding a strenuous caveat.) 

For those of you who suggest that immigrants simply "get in line," perhaps it's time to go over reason's helpful immigration flow chart. And don't miss Reason Foundation's Shikha Dalmia in combat with Krikorian on Bloggingheads.

UPDATE: I missed this post. After reading Krikorian's attempt to blame the collapse of WaMu on the company's affirmative action policies, Professor Bainbridge confessed that such nonsense makes him "embarrassed to be a conservative."

UPDATE II: Krikorian mails to say that I missed this post too.

Executive Power and the Election

Posted on October 24, 2008, 3:19pm | Damon W. Root

The New York Review of Books asked a number of its high profile contributors for their take on the upcoming election (Spoiler Alert: They're all in favor of Barack Obama). Gary Wills made a particularly strong case for why the Republicans should lose:

When Dick Cheney was vetting the last two candidates for the [Supreme] Court, he did not really care about their views on abortion. He concentrated on their attitude toward the many executive usurpations of the Bush administration, and he was satisfied on this account with John Roberts and with Sam Alito.

When Charles Gibson was questioning Governor Palin, he should not have asked about the Bush Doctrine (a wavering concept, and touching only one matter, war). He should have asked for her views on the unitary executive—the question Cheney asked the Court nominees. That is what matters most to the Bush people. It affects all the executive usurpations of the last seven years—not only the right of the president to wage undeclared wars, but his right to create military courts, to authorize extraordinary renditions, secret prisons, more severely coercive interrogation, trials with undisclosed evidence, domestic surveillance, and the overriding of congressional oversight in every aspect of government from energy policy to health services.

The use of presidential signing statements to undermine federal law has been another aspect of Bush's executive power grab. As The Boston Globe's Charlie Savage has extensively reported, Bush has issued more than a 1100 signing statements claiming the authority to reject or ignore portions of the very laws he has just signed.

In December 2005, for instance, Bush signed the Department of Defense, Emergency Supplemental Appropriations to Address Hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico, and Pandemic Influenza Act. This exhaustively titled bill was most notable for containing the so-called McCain Amendment, which prohibited "cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment of persons under custody or control of the United States government."

At the time, the bill's passage was seen as a victory against waterboarding and other torture tactics. But consider the passage from Bush's signing statement that specifically refers to the McCain Amendment:

The executive branch shall construe Title X in Division A of the Act, relating to detainees, in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the President to supervise the unitary executive branch and as Commander in Chief and consistent with the constitutional limitations on the judicial power.

President Bush, in other words, would be waging the War on Terror as he saw fit, regardless of what Congress or the courts had to say about it.

Obamanoia Roundup

Posted on October 24, 2008, 3:02pm | Jesse Walker

A treasure trove for students of partisan gullibility and political paranoia.

[Via Balloon Juice.]

Saving Social Security, Episode Four: Broken Trust

Posted on October 24, 2008, 3:00pm

Worried about the viability of Social Security? Unless you're already collecting it, you should be!

Follow the animated adventures of Sonny, exactly the sort of youth who is set to get screwed by a system designed during The Great Depression, when workers were plenty and retirees rare.

Episode Four of the series is titled "Broken Trust" and explains the rickety logic behind Social Security.

Go here for embed code and related articles and resources.

Created by Lineplot Productions.

Watch the previous episodes by clicking on the images below.

Episode One: Pimp My Walker

Episode Two: Boom Baby Boom!


Episode Three: Policy Warrior

Obamacons v.s. McClintonians

Posted on October 24, 2008, 2:51pm | David Weigel

Jesse Walker already blogged about Bill Weld's Obama epiphany, and I blogged Sunday's Colin Powellgasm, but the Wall Street Journal names the other prominent Republicans who are (figuratively speaking) carving the "B" into their faces.

On Thursday, former Minnesota Gov. Arne Carlson endorsed Obama at the state capitol. “I think we have in Barack Obama the clear possibility of a truly great president,” he said. “I would contend that it’s the most important election of my lifetime.”

Scott McClellan, a former spokesman for President George W. Bush, also endorsed Obama Thursday. USA Today reported that McClellan told CNN in a taping to be aired this weekend that Obama has “the best chance of changing the way Washington works.”

Ken Adelman, a prominent conservative on foreign policy matters announced his support for Obama on Tuesday, telling the New Yorker that his decision was based on temperament and judgment.

All that and Charles Fried, who broke with the McCain campaign over the choice of that Tina Fey impersonator as a running mate. And this comes after former Sen. Lincoln Chafee (RI), former Rep. Jim Leach (IA) and soon-to-be-former Rep. Wayne Gilchrist (MD) endorsed Obama.

I think this is a legitimately big story. When the Jeremiah Wright scandal broke, I thought Obama had lost the image that brought him this far: that of the post-racial moderate who saw beyond party. Story after story has broken since then about his ties to the left-wing New Party, his saintly status among ACORN members, his slumber parties with Bill Ayers, and so on, and so on.

And yet Republican moderates are convinced that Obama is the more sensible choice than Maverick John McCain. This is striking: Obama may be the most liberal Democratic candidate in 36 years, but no prominent Democrats have endorsed McCain. Joe Lieberman? You can write off his endorsement as Senate clubbyness and the bitterness of a guy who was literally purged from the Democratic Party two years ago. (Plus, the guy lost a popularity contest to Dick Cheney.) After that, the McCain endorsers are distinguished by their silliness.

- Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild, a multimillionaire friend of the Clintons who endorsed McCain on the grounds that Obama is a... wait for it... elitist.
- Debra Bartoshevich, a Wisconsin Hillary Clinton delegate who is bitter that Hillary did not win the nomination. She even starred in a TV ad.

- John Coale, the husband of Greta Van Susteren who resents the Democrats "being taken over by the moveon.org types."
- Harriet Christian, a big-haired Democrat who protested the DNC meeting that assigned Michigan and Florida delegates, telling reporters that Obama was "an inadequate black man."

All of these people have been invited to official McCain events, as if they mattered. It's really striking, considering that in 2004 Democrats were begging McCain to join the Democratic ticket.

Bailout Blackout

Posted on October 24, 2008, 1:06pm | Radley Balko

$700 billion in taxpayer-funded bailouts, and they're not even going to tell us how they're spending it.

Confessions of an Economist

Posted on October 24, 2008, 1:05pm | Brian Doherty

A fascinating call for papers from Econ Journal Watch:

In a rich body of highly regarded work, the Duke University economist Timur Kuran has developed a theory of preference falsification: the individual may publicly express views or attitudes that are false to his or her true private views or attitudes.......

The impetus of the symposium is to provide an outlet for exploring preference falsification and other forms of moral or intellectual compromise within the economics profession. Authors are encouraged to be introspective and personal, and yet impartial......

In his or her essay, the author should clarify the kind of preference falsification in which he or she has engaged. For example:

• Building models one does not really believe to be useful or relevant.
• Making simplifications that obscure or omit important things.
• Using data one does not really believe in.
• Focusing on the statistical significance of one’s findings while quietly doubting economic significance.
• Engaging in data mining.
• Drawing “policy implications” that one knows are inappropriate or misleading.
• Keeping the discourse “between the 40 yard lines” so as to avoid being outspoken; knowingly eliding fundamental issues.
• Tilting the flavor of policy judgments to make a paper more acceptable to referees, editors, publishers, or funders.
• Disguising one’s methodological or ideological views, such as by omitting revealing activities or publications from one’s vitae.
• For government, institute, or corporate economists: Having to significantly play along with things one does not believe in.

I'm not usually one to eagerly await academic journal symposiums, but they've got me hooked with this one.

"Truly free markets are also free of privilege"

Posted on October 24, 2008, 12:41pm | Damon W. Root

Sheldon Richman, the editor of The Freeman, adds another nail into Jacob "end of libertarianism" Weisberg's coffin:

According to Weisberg, editor in chief of Slate, the financial turmoil taking place worldwide is the fault of . . . libertarians. That must mean libertarians have been in a position to repeal generations of deep-seated government intervention in the financial and related industries, including the Federal Reserve system. That would have taken a long time, yet I don't recall reading that a libertarian revolution occurred in the United States. Surely it would have been in the newspapers. Hence, I must conclude that I, like old Rip [van Winkle], was slumbering all those years. I missed the revolution! It's the only possible explanation.

Unless Weisberg is wrong.

[...]

Weisberg obviously hasn't been paying attention. For him the Community Reinvestment Act, Fannie and Freddie, and past bailouts make up three separate libertarian explanations, when in fact they are all parts of a single integrated explanation of how government intervention created the problem. That he doesn't know this suggests that he doesn't understand the libertarian case. One ought to understand something before dismissing it.

Whole thing here. reason on Weisberg's lousy article here and here.

Bozos On & Off the Bus

Posted on October 24, 2008, 12:05pm | Jesse Walker

The neocon columnist Charles Krauthammer's endorsement of John McCain today is neither remotely surprising nor remotely persuasive. But I have to admit I got a chuckle out of his lede:

Contrarian that I am, I'm voting for John McCain. I'm not talking about bucking the polls or the media consensus that it's over before it's over. I'm talking about bucking the rush of wet-fingered conservatives leaping to Barack Obama before they're left out in the cold without a single state dinner for the next four years.

I stand athwart the rush of conservative ship-jumpers of every stripe -- neo (Ken Adelman), moderate (Colin Powell), genetic/ironic (Christopher Buckley) and socialist/atheist (Christopher Hitchens) -- yelling "Stop!" I shall have no part of this motley crew. I will go down with the McCain ship.

On a related note, former Massachusetts governor William Weld has just endorsed Obama. Because of his tolerant stances on abortion, gay rights, and medical marijuana, Weld was hyped in the early '90s as a libertarian Republican. As he swelled the state budget and passed new regulations, he started to look more like an old-fashioned liberal Republican instead. Nonetheless, a couple years ago he nearly served as the New York Libertarian Party's gubernatorial candidate. Maybe Obama will give him an ambassadorship.

New at Reason: Cathy Young on the Left's Strange Sympathy for Putin's Russia

Posted on October 24, 2008, 12:00pm

Salon.com's Glenn Greenwald recently blasted both major party presidential candidates for perpetuating the "blatant falsehood" that Russia launched an "unprovoked attack" on Georgia last August. But as Cathy Young writes, it just so happens that Greenwald's charge is blatantly false—and reveals much more about the mindset of the left than about the state of American democracy.

Read all about it here. 

The "B" is for "Tawana Brawley"

Posted on October 24, 2008, 11:44am | David Weigel

Yesterday was a banner day for distributed webby journalism. Conservatives, inspired by stories of fake donors like "Doodad Pro" and "Fhhdhh" giving money online to Obama, created their own fake names and tried to lay down some hope. They succeeded.

Erika Franzi, who described herself as conservative and preferring Senator John McCain over Mr. Obama, used the name “Della Ware” and entered an address of 12345 No Way in Far Far Away, DE 78954. Under employer, she listed: Americans Against Obama; for occupation, she typed in: Founder.

To her surprise, she said, her contribution went through in “fewer than three seconds.” Then, in order to be fair, she repeated the experiment on Mr. McCain’s Web site, entering the exact same information. Three times, she said, she received the message: “We have found errors in the information that you submitted. Please review the information below and try again.”

The day's other development was, if anything, weirder. Pittsburgh McCain volunteer Ashley Todd, a 20-year old College Republican, reported that she'd been mugged at knifepoint by a "6'4'' 200 pound" black man who then used his knife to carve the letter "B" in her face. The story led Drudge even before it was confirmed by local news. But the story stunk. Michelle Malkin, author of Unhinged—a book all about how Democrats engage in violent, angry behavior—suspected a hoax.

She refused medical treatment after reporting the incident to police. Why on earth would she do that?

Look at her face. What’s wrong with the “B?”  Maaaaybe the alleged robber straddled her upside-down while carving it into her face. Maybe. But I’ve got my doubts.

Like Malkin, I've watched fake hate crimes unfold. I covered the unravelling of one hoaxter on my old college campus. (Apparently, the culprit is now an actor.) But Todd was working in the age of Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter, which gave hundreds of people across the web the tools to pull apart the story. Wonkette found her curiously chipper Twitter feed, and commenters found photos of a poster she'd made that bore handwriting that looked a lot like the scarlet (and not even skin-breaking) "B." Also:

Salon was able to find some of Todd's personal Web pages, which we're not linking to in order to protect her privacy. What appears to be her MySpace page, which gives her age as 23 rather than 20, is private. But the quote at the top of it is visible -- it reads, "Lying is the most fun a girl can have without taking her cloths [sic] off, but its [sic] better if you do."

This circumstancial evidence is mostly discouraging conservative bloggers who started off the evening accusing (however tongue-in-cheek) Obama of egging on the mysterious mugger. The real work is being done by local cops, who have heard multiple versions of the story from Todd (one where the mugger was outraged by her campaign button, one where he didn't get angry until he saw her bumper sticker) and are giving her a polygraph. Still, it was the speed of bloggers that cast doubt on the story before it could even lead cable news.

UPDATE: Todd admitted to a hoax.

Investigators did say that they received photos from the ATM machine and "the photographs were verified as not being the victim making the transaction."

This afternoon, a Pittsburgh police commander told KDKA Investigator Marty Griffin that Todd confessed to making up the story.

The charge of "race-baiting" is thrown around in a lot of situations where it really doesn't fit. But telling cops a black person attacked and mutilated you when, in fact, you are trying to concoct a story to defeat Barack Obama... well, there's a word for that, and it's not "enlightened." Even conspiracy theorist Andy McCarthy is eating crow on this.

Dept. of Failed Assassinations

Posted on October 24, 2008, 10:08am | Jesse Walker

Cracked lists "The 6 Most Utterly Insane Attempts to Kill a US President."

Bonus video: Here's how to do it right:

New at Reason: Tom Campbell on Ending Marriage Discrimination in California

Posted on October 24, 2008, 10:00am

Government has no business making distinctions between people based on their personal lives.  That's why former Republican congressman Tom Campbell will be voting No on Proposition 8.

Read all about it here.

Survey Says...Two Cheers for Divided Government!

Posted on October 24, 2008, 9:07am | Nick Gillespie

From a new NPR poll showing that Barack Obama can take the rest of the election off (a.k.a. an 11-point lead in swing states):

There is one question in the poll where Republicans did better than Democrats, who probably will still control Congress after the election. Voters were asked whether it would be better to have a Democratic president working with the Democratic-controlled Congress to get things done, or to have a Republican president keeping Congress in check. Forty percent of those surveyed said a Republican president would be better; 32 percent chose a Democratic president.

But every silver lining carries a dark cloud for the Republicans this time (and rightly so):

But the results were different when the question about divided government was posed another way. When voters were asked whether they preferred for Obama to be president and work with a Democratic Congress or for McCain to be a check on the Democratic Congress, Obama narrowly won, 49 percent to 44 percent.

More, including gratuitous and annoying overuse of the term "game changer," here.

Back in 2007, just as the Dems took control of the Congress (hey, how's that going?...never mind), reason looked at the virtues of and hopes for divided government here.

Alan Shrugged

Posted on October 24, 2008, 7:26am | Nick Gillespie

In testimony before Congress yesterday, former Federal Reserve chairman and Ayn Rand devotee did his best Claude Rains impersonation when it came to the financial meltdown that is running the show these days:

Despite concerns he had in 2005 that risks were being underestimated by investors, "this crisis, however, has turned out to be much broader than anything I could have imagined," Greenspan said in remarks prepared for delivery to the House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

"Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholder's equity—myself especially—are in a state of shocked disbelief," said Greenspan, who stepped down from the Fed in 2006....

While Greenspan was once hailed as one of the most accomplished central bankers in U.S. history, the low interest rates during his final years at the Fed have been blamed for fueling the housing bubble and eventual crash that touched off the current financial crisis.

His strong advocacy for limited regulation of financial markets has also been called into question as a result of the crisis.

The former Fed chair said that a securitization system that stimulated appetite for loans made to borrowers with spotty credit histories, was at the heart of the breakdown of credit markets.

"Without the excess demand from securitizers, subprime mortgage originations— undeniably the original source of crisis—would have been far smaller and defaults, accordingly, far fewer," he said.

More here.

There's a lot to be said about this particular panel, which also featured Securities and Exchange head Chris Cox and former Treasury Secretary John Snow, so keep your eyesballs tuned to reason online.

But for right now, consider a couple of things:

First, as Jeffrey Miron pointed out at reason online earlier this week, it's far from clear that financial markets were deregulated in any serious manner. Or, more precisely, it seems the worst of all possible worlds was created, in which money folks could do what they wanted with implicit if not explicit guarantees that various elements in government would back them up in worst-case or even less-dire scenarios.

Second, as economist Arnold Kling has suggested, it's far from clear just what the hell is going on in credit markets, whose distress is the ill we gots to cure right now or else it'll be the second coming of the Great Depression:

For example, many economists breathlessly cited high short-term interest rates in interbank lending markets as an indicator of credit markets "freezing up." However, as some Minneapolis Fed economists point out, the volume of lending does not indicate such a freeze. In fact, very short-term interest rates are a ridiculously melodramatic indicator to use, because even a small increase in default probability can cause the annualized interest rates to soar.

More on that here. 

Even before the situation is fully understood, there seems to be a huge interest in symbolic bloodletting, to pay for the sins of a boom market once the economy tanks (this always happens—just ask Martha Stewart).

reason on the bailout, etc. here.

New at Reason: Friday Funnies

Posted on October 24, 2008, 7:00am

In the latest edition of Friday Funnies, Henry Payne looks at Freddie, Fannie, and the scary truth about the financial crisis.

The TSA Will Run the Show, With the Emphasis on Show

Posted on October 23, 2008, 6:08pm | Jacob Sullum

Yesterday the Transportation Security Administration said it will begin taking over the responsibility of checking airline passengers against government-generated watch lists in January. It expects to be fully in charge of that function, which the airlines currently handle, by the end of next year. The TSA, which has been working on a revamped system for vetting passengers since 2001, says exciting new developments in data analysis, including the use of full names, gender, and birth dates, will help avoid the sort of confusion that has grounded or delayed tens of thousands of innocent travelers mistaken for Al Qaeda hangers-on:

Details about why certain passengers are stopped are normally not shared with travelers, who often endure long delays and pointed questions. [The Department of Homeland Security] has received more than 43,500 requests for redress since February 2007 and has completed 24,000 of them, with the rest under review or awaiting more documentation.

Even if the TSA delivers on its promise to stop confusing members of Congress with terrorists, the watch lists seem like more trouble than they're worth:

The number of people who actually match the names on the watch lists is minuscule, officials acknowledged. On average, DHS screeners discover a person who is actually on the no-fly list about once a month, usually overseas, and actual selectees daily, [TSA Administrator Kip] Hawley said.

To bolster their case for the new program, U.S. officials for their first time disclosed that the no-fly list includes fewer than 2,500 individuals and the selectee list fewer than 16,000.

I noted the slow movement of watch list reform last year. In a 2004 reason cover story, James Bovard took a broader view of TSA folly. The latest issue of The Atlantic includes an article by Jeffrey Goldberg that reaches similar conclusions, relying heavily on the insights of TSA critic Bruce Schneier. Goldberg, who snuck various banned items past TSA screeners as part of his research, dismisses airport anti-terrorism measures as "'security theater' designed to make travelers feel better and catch stupid terrorists."

And Who Will Check the Apples for Razors?

Posted on October 23, 2008, 5:12pm | Jacob Sullum

In Texas and several other states across the country, law enforcement officials are engaging in the annual pre-Halloween ritual of corraling and branding "sex offenders" to prevent them from molesting kids while handing out candy. The efforts include arrests (typically for violating registration requirements or residence restrictions), confinement to police stations during trick-or-treat hours, and mandatory posting of signs declaring the homes of sex offenders candy-free zones. In South Carolina, A.P. reports, registered sex offenders "cannot give out candy or have their outdoor lights on." New York goes further, decreeing that sex offenders "can't answer the door to trick-or-treaters, have Halloween candy in their possession or dress in costume" (italics added). When do sweets legally qualify as Halloween candy? Minis presumably are contraband, but what about fun size?

There is little rhyme or reason to this crackdown, which does not distinguish between registrants who have a history of sexually assaulting children and those who have never shown any inclination to do so. Furthermore, as Scott Henson notes at Grits for Breakfast, the sex offender roundup diverts police resources from more pressing concerns to address a hazard that is vanishingly unlikely to materialize:

Such programs are all about playing to the media, not public safety. Kids trick or treating are more likely to be hit by lightning while going door to door than they are to be abducted by a registered sex offender.

There's only one [documented] case in the history of the planet where a child was abducted by a stranger while trick or treating (in Wisconsin in 1973). In that instance, the killer had no prior record and wouldn't have been on any sex offender registry even if it had existed....

By comparison, how many drunk drivers are out on Halloween? How much vandalism and other youth crime occurs that night while police attention is focused on tracking sex offenders?

They can say this is all about protecting children, but if authorities really wanted to protect kids they'd protect them from actual, demonstrable risks that occur in the real world.

Henson's advice to parents:

Let the kids go get some candy and have some fun, for heavens sake, and if you're worried what will happen, tag along. It's called "parenting."  

Jesse Walker noted Halloween hype about sex offenders back in 2006.

The Dear Leader Gives the Children Candy!

Posted on October 23, 2008, 4:15pm | Michael C. Moynihan

Via Tina Brown's Daily Beast, an apparently irony-free video featuring a variety of pro-Obama pumpkins, courtesy of the website Yes We Carve. For some reason, I find this video even creepier than the one with those singing robot kids.

The Return of the Curse of Ron Paul's Ghost

Posted on October 23, 2008, 3:17pm | David Weigel

One month ago I covered the campaign to put Ron Paul on the Montana ballot and learned that it might boost Barack Obama's chances in the state.

"It makes McCain's job here a hell of a lot harder," says James Lopach, the head of the University of Montana's political science department. "There is inviting soil for both Paul and Bob here. Some of those disgruntled conservative voters will be overjoyed to see them on the ballot."

Today comes this poll from Montana State University-Billings:

If this year's presidential election were being held today, for whom do you think you would vote?

Barack Obama  44.4%

John McCain  40.2%

Ron Paul  4.2%

Ralph Nader  .7%

Bob Barr  1%

Undecided  9.5%

The gap between Obama and McCain is exactly the same as Paul's support in the state. In the interals, Paul is drawing independents, "other parties," and Republicans, but no Democrats whatsoever.

This shouldn't surprise anyone. McCain only carried eight counties in the Montana caucuses, coming in third in the popular vote, behind... Ron Paul. Paul won 20,606 votes in the nonbinding June primary, and this is a state where only 450,000 ballots were cast in the Bush-Kerry race. (The all-time record for a Libertarian candidate was the 9,825 votes Ed Clark collected in 1980.) If around 25,000 people vote for Paul, Nader, and Barr, then the winner in Montana only needs to hit 48 percent. Obama's closer to that than McCain.

Headline explanation:

New at Reason: Is 'Socialist' a Racist Slur?

Posted on October 23, 2008, 3:00pm

Our presumptive president will govern more in the style of L.B.J. than Eugene Debs, writes Michael Moynihan. But is accusing Barack Obama of being a "socialist" actually a racial code word?

Read all about it here.

Connecticut Teacher Fired Over Myspace Page

Posted on October 23, 2008, 2:27pm | Mike Riggs

Another contentious Myspace profile, another legal debacle. The rundown, courtesy of Mediashift:

Jeffrey Spanierman, a teacher at Emmett O'Brien High School in Ansonia, Connecticut, created a MySpace page, ostensibly "to communicate with students about homework, to learn more about the students so he could relate to them better, and to conduct casual, non-school related discussions." One of Spanierman's school colleagues became concerned about the page, which she said contained, among other things, pictures of naked men with "inappropriate comments" underneath them. She was also concerned about the nature of the personal conversations that the teacher was having with the students, and she convinced Spanierman to remove the page, which she considered "disruptive to students." Spanierman subsequently created a new MySpace page, however, that included similar content and similar personal communications with students. When the colleague learned of the new page, she reported it to the school administration, which placed Spanierman on administrative leave and ultimately declined to renew his teaching contract for the following year. After hearings that he attended with his union representative and later with his attorneys, he received a letter stating that he had "exercised poor judgment as a teacher."

Spanierman contested the grounds for his dismissal, alleging that the school violated rights guaranteed him by the First and 14th Amendments, but the U.S. District Court of Connecticut rejected both claims. The legalese protecting tenured and non-tenured Connecticut public school teachers is beyond my expertise, so I'll avoid weighing in on whether or not Spanierman's contract was violated. And due to the appalling precedent established by the "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" case, it's tough to argue that Spanierman's First Amendment rights were violated.

But there's a better way to go about contesting his firing—by arguing that Myspace and other social networking technologies are an integral component of education reform. After all, a million Mark Bauerlein books (excellent reason.tv interview here) aren't going to keep students away from the Internet, so why not turn Myspace, Facebook, and other online applications into teaching tools?

At Inside Higher Ed, Andy Guess reported on a Facebook application that communicates information from Blackboard (an online interactive syllabus), in effect, reaching "students even when they’re trying to avoid studying." And in an op-ed that came out a few months prior to Guess' piece, professor Shari Dinkins, a self-professed ole' fogie, conceded that "when used appropriately and in moderation, technology can help us teach. And it can help our “wired” students learn."

And while most of the reported successes of social networking mingling with curricula are from the post-secondary level, I know a number of high school teachers who have used instant messaging to help their students. In one of these cases, a math teacher signs onto his AOL account right after dinner and answers questions pertaining to the evening's homework until around 9 p.m., which allows more time the next day for teaching new material and addressing lingering concerns from the previous night's assignment.

Granted, Myspace—with its naked bum pics, renegade spammers, and risque ads—is probably not the best means for reaching students outside the classroom, but instead of firing Spanielman, his bosses should have done more to measure the effects of his online interaction with students, and, had they found them effective, established age-appropriate guidelines for how to use those tools.

Katherine Mangu-Ward on the University of Phoenix here. Excellent reason.tv video on universal preschool here. Daniel H. Pink on individualized education here. And of course, the other big Myspace case.

[Hat tip to Simon Owens.]

Buy My Cornpile

Posted on October 23, 2008, 1:44pm | David Weigel

Finally, a bailout for ethanol producers. Why not? Iowa's presidential caucus is earlier than the Michigan primary, anyway.

"Some plants are under pressure because they've been speculating on corn," [Agriculture Secretary Ed] Schafer told reporters after speaking at the World Food Prize symposium breakfast.

The secretary said the department wouldn't buy or sell grain or cover trading losses. Rather, he said, money could come from the USDA's Rural Development office, which can provide up to $25 million to keep rural businesses operating.

The idea isn't getting a lot of attention in the final weeks of a presidential race, although Rep. Jeff Flake has spoken out.

“The federal government’s ethanol policies have driven up the price of corn,” said Flake. “But rather than reforming the policies that have caused a spike in corn prices, the federal government wants to bail out ethanol producers who speculated on the price of corn. Only the U.S. Department of Agriculture could dream up a policy like this.”

Flake said tax breaks and credits for ethanol producers should be repealed. “The high price of corn has had a ripple effect over our entire economy. Instead of trying to bail out every industry hurt by it, the federal government needs to take a serious look at reforming our ethanol policies,” said the East Valley Republican.

I realize this is an executive branch program, and this is unrelated, but: I'm not looking forward to this lame duck Congress. I don't think there'll be a lot of agreement with Flake.

Obesity vs. Political Apathy: Obesity Wins!

Posted on October 23, 2008, 12:43pm | Katherine Mangu-Ward

Americans may be too lazy (or too rational) to vote. But as a great man once said, "You gotta eat!" So, while half of America may not be voting in the booth, they're happy to vote with their stomachs. 

At Baskin Robbins, the results are in, and Whirl of Change ("Peanut-nougat ice cream whirled with chunks of chocolate-covered peanut brittle and a caramel ribbon") beat Straight Talk Crunch ("Caramel ribbon, chocolate pieces, candy red states and crunchy mixed nuts swirled into White Chocolate ice cream") with 51 percent of the vote. Half a million votes were cast.

At 7-11, coffee drinkers can choose between an Obama cup and a McCain cup. Obama is crushing McCain with 60 percent of the popular vote in the great cup buy-up. He is also winning in every state where 7-11 exists, except New Hampshire.

This measure actually has a pretty decent record. The Gore cup lost to the Bush cup by a single percentage point, and the 2004 results were identical to national polls: 51 percent Bush, 49 percent Kerry. I guess the sample size is pretty decent at 1 million cups of coffee sold each day at 7-11 stores.

Looks like indicators from the gluttonous public predict a win for Obama. Ah, America. How I love you.

See the 7-11 cups in action at the reason offices earlier this month.

New at Reason: Steve Chapman on John McCain's Radical Friend G. Gordon Liddy

Posted on October 23, 2008, 12:00pm

John McCain has attacked Barack Obama for his connection to former Weather Underground member William Ayers. But as Steve Chapman notes, McCain has been associating with a dangerous militant of his own.

Read all about it here. 

In Defense of Plumberpalooza

Posted on October 23, 2008, 11:46am | David Weigel

Steve Benen is shocked, shocked, that John McCain is hitting Florida with a "Joe the Plumber bus tour."

McCain is exploiting Wurzelbacher for no reason. Under Obama's tax policy, Wurzelbacher would get a tax cut, not a tax increase. Indeed, I don't know the details of Wurzelbacher's finances, but there's reason to believe he'd end up far better off under Obama's tax plan than McCain's.

But Wurzelbacher wasn't asking Obama about what his tax plans would do right now. It was a hypothetical.

I'm getting ready to buy a company that makes about $270-280,000 a year. Your new tax plan's going to tax me more, isn't it?... If I buy another truck and build the company, I'm getting taxed more.

Obama explained to Wurzelbacher, correctly, that now he'd get a tax cut, and if he'd pushed his plan through when Wurzelbacher was making less money than Wurzelbacher would have taken home even more. Obama tried to talk about what Wurzelbacher makes now; Wurzelbacher said Obama would punish him if he "fulfilled the American dream." It's completely fair for McCain to attack Obama's taxes on small businesses (although you can make the case that Obama will save them on health care costs).

The problem with the bus tour is that somewhere along the line McCain lost his grip on the economic argument and turned Joe's story into "honest man versus mainstream media."

Now, Joe didn't ask for Senator Obama to come to his house, and he didn't ask to be famous. And he certainly didn't ask for the political attacks on him from the Obama campaign.

Who cares? No one's lost a dime over Wurzlebacher's bruised feelings. They will lose money if they try to start a small business under Obama. That's the attack! And, typically, McCain is whiffing it because it's easier for him to fight about "honor" than about economics. The whole campaign is running on the Drudge Report—whatever leads there is the attack of the day. It's made it tougher for them to find a winning message.

Reason Writers Around Town

Posted on October 23, 2008, 10:48am

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

For more information about the show, go here. To see the playlists for previous programs, go here, here, here, here, here, and here. To hear a podcast of one of those earlier broadcasts, go here.

Georgia On and Off Our Minds

Posted on October 23, 2008, 10:44am | Brian Doherty

Mark Ames at the Nation thinks that the New York Times took an unwarrantedly kind view of the sterling qualities of Georgia's government and behavior in the recent Russia v. Georgia contretemps, and is now quietly backpedaling. Some excerpts:

....a couple of weeks ago, the New York Times slipped in a story that completely contradicted a narrative that it had been building up for two straight months, one that was leading America into another war--a so-called "New Cold War." The article exposed the awful authoritarian reality of Georgia's so-called democracy, painting a dark picture of President Mikhail Saakashvili's rule that repudiated the fairy tale that the Times and everyone else in the major media had been pushing ever since war broke out in South Ossetia in early August. That fairy tale went like this: Russia (evil) invaded Georgia (good) for no reason whatsoever except that Georgia was free. Putin hates freedom, and Saakashvili is the "democratically elected leader" of a "small, democratic country."

........

The real question, then, is why the Times waited until this late to question its own position--why wait until the war was long off the front pages, to publish an article about what everyone with an ounce of journalistic curiousity already knew--that Saakashvili was about as much a democrat as he was a military genius?

The push in the West by outlets like the New York Times and the Washington Post to get a new cold war on hinged on two major fallacies: (1) that Russia invaded Georgia first, totally unprovoked, because Georgia is a "democracy"; and (2), that Georgia is a "democracy."

It's as if the Times deliberately forgot what it already reported about Saakashvili last year, after he sent in his goon squads to crush opposition protests:

"I think that Misha tends toward the authoritarian," said Scott Horton, a human rights lawyer in the United States who taught Saakashvili when he was a student at Columbia Law School in the mid-1990s, later hired him at a law firm in New York and has remained friendly with him. "I would put it this way: there is a remarkable similarity between Misha and Putin, in terms of their attitudes about presidential prerogatives and authority," Horton said. Like Putin, he added, Saakashvili has marginalized Parliament and taken to belittling the opposition.

...........

Ever since I went down to South Ossetia to see the war for myself, I'd developed a kind of sick curiosity to see just how the Times and all the others were going to extricate themselves from the credibility-hole they'd dug. I had a feeling it was going to come, because Saakashvili was not only a blatant liar but an incredibly bad liar. I was in South Ossetia at the close of the war--I saw the destruction that the "freedom-loving" Georgians wreaked, and the bloated, rotting corpses on the streets of the province's capital city, Tskhinvali--so I was particularly interested in how long the sleazy tale of good vs. evil would last, and how the major media would squirm their way out of their biggest journalistic fiasco since the Iraqi-WMD blooper.

It's a long piece, but well-detailed, and worth studying for historians of how U.S. public opinion is shaped toward feeling bellicose about far-away conflicts with little to no effect on genuine American interests.

Matt Welch on John McCain's overreaction to the Georgia crisis. 

[Link via Rational Review.] 

Central Planners Are Paper Tigers

Posted on October 23, 2008, 10:28am | Jesse Walker

More freedom comes to China:

Anxious at the spreading unrest among farmers left behind in the rush to get rich, China's Communist Party leaders...unveiled sweeping reforms to give its 730 million or more rural residents more say in what they do with their land....

Approved at a twice-a-year plenum of the party's Central Committee earlier this month, the scheme will allow farmers to transfer their land-use rights and to join share-holding entities with their farmland. The policies, still lacking in crucial details, effectively give farmers -- rather than village leaders -- the authority to decide how to use their land.

Tens of thousands of peasant protests erupt each year and nearly half are linked to land grabs by local officials who see a chance to make money by turning over land on the outskirts of towns and villages to developers.

This isn't the first time disobedience from below has forced China's leaders to allow more economic liberty. As Gordon Chang pointed out two years ago,

We now know Deng as a reformer, and we credit him and the Communist party for debating, then planning, and finally executing the startling transformation of Chinese society. Yet the truth is that reform progressed more by disobedience than by design. Deng began his tenure in adherence to orthodox Communist economics, by trying to implement a ten-year plan. But his early failure to meet the plan's goals forced him to back away and permit individual initiative, at first under strict rules. Peasants on large collective farms, for example, were allowed to form "work groups" to tend designated plots, but it was specifically prohibited for just one family to make up a "work group." The prohibition did not last: in clear violation of central rules, families started to till their own plots, and local officials looked the other way.

Subterfuge on the farm was followed by subterfuge in towns and cities. Although private industry was strictly forbidden, entrepreneurs flourished by running their businesses as "red hat" collectives: private companies operating under the guise of state ownership. Such defiance would once have been unthinkable. By Deng's time, frustrated bureaucrats and countless individuals, including some of the poorest and most desperate citizens in China, were ready to take the next step -- ignoring central-government decrees and building large private businesses that now account for at least 40 percent of the Chinese economy. This became China's "economic miracle," brought to fruition even as government officials remained holed up in their offices in Beijing, preparing meticulously detailed five-year plans.

Today, Chang notes, "virtually every segment" of Chinese society ("except, of course, senior Communist leaders and wealthy entrepreneurs") regularly joins in much more public protests. "Almost anything, whether or not it is a genuine grievance, can trigger a sit-in, demonstration, or riot against party officials, village bosses, tax collectors, factory owners, or township cadres." The new extension of rural property rights is among the results.

Elsewhere in Reason: More comments on Chang's article.

Puppycide in Oklahoma

Posted on October 23, 2008, 10:16am | Radley Balko

Note:  Video includes actual footage of the dog getting shot.

What Happens When Super Smart Artificial Intelligence Arrives?

Posted on October 23, 2008, 10:00am | Ronald Bailey

The major venue for discussing this question is the 3rd Singularity Summit this Saturday in San Jose, Calif. The folks at the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence (SIAS) are offering a $75 dollar discount off summit's registration fee for interested readers of Hit & Run (and other blogs) here.

So what is "the Singularity"? According to the SIAS:

The Singularity is the technological creation of smarter-than-human intelligence...

A future that contains smarter-than-human minds is genuinely different in a way that goes beyond the usual visions of a future filled with bigger and better gadgets. Vernor Vinge originally coined the term "Singularity" in observing that, just as our model of physics breaks down when it tries to model the singularity at the center of a black hole, our model of the world breaks down when it tries to model a future that contains entities smarter than human.

Human intelligence is the foundation of human technology; all technology is ultimately the product of intelligence. If technology can turn around and enhance intelligence, this closes the loop, creating a positive feedback effect. Smarter minds will be more effective at building still smarter minds. This loop appears most clearly in the example of an Artificial Intelligence improving its own source code, but it would also arise, albeit initially on a slower timescale, from humans with direct brain-computer interfaces creating the next generation of brain-computer interfaces, or biologically augmented humans working on an Artificial Intelligence project.

The Singularity Summits gather tech luminaries to consider the implications of this view--if it's true and what might be done about it. Participants in this summit include:

    * MIT's Cynthia Breazeal on the implications of robots with social intelligence.

    * Peter Diamandis on materializing audacious goals with Mega X PRIZEs.

    * Esther Dyson on the end of genetic ignorance – or was it bliss?

    * Ray Kurzweil presenting his latest research, a more rigorous standard for the Turing Test, and discussing IEEE Spectrum's Singularity Report.

    * Intel's CTO Justin Rattner on why the Singularity is a realistic possibility.

    * Acclaimed author Vernor Vinge in conversation with CNBC's Bob Pisani.

Ray Kurzweil, inventor and author of The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology explains:

What, then, is the Singularity? It's a future period during which the pace of technological change will be so rapid, its impact so deep, that human life will be irreversibly transformed. Although neither utopian or dystopian, this epoch will transform the concepts that we rely on to give meaning to our lives, from our business models to the cycle of human life, including death itself. Understanding the Singularity will alter our perspective on the significance of our past and the ramifications for our future. To truly understand it inherently changes one's view of life in general and one's own particular life.

My coverage of the 2007 Singularity Summit can be found here and my interview with Paypal co-founder and singularitarian Peter Thiel is here.

Priceless!

Posted on October 23, 2008, 9:33am | Radley Balko

From Wired:

Cost to install a camera in the town park in Liberty, Kansas (funded by a federal grant : $5,000)

Population of Liberty, Kansas: 95

Irony of spending $50 per resident to install a federally-funded surveillance camera in a tiny town called “Liberty”: Well, you know how the commercial goes

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

Posted on October 23, 2008, 7:00am

With support from major foundations and political heavy hitters like Barack Obama, universal preschool is the next big thing in education reform. Indeed, it's second only to universal health care on the liberal wish list. The goal is to offer publicly funded preschool—complete with credentialed teachers and a standardized curriculum—to all four-year-olds during the school year.

Advocates argue that public investments in early education will pay dividends over the long term. Critics point out that the evidence from states that have universal preschool programs shows that whatever benefits kids receive from those programs fade out by the fourth grade.

Since preschool attendance rates in states that have universal preschool are no higher than the national average, universal preschool wouldn't even increase preschool attendance. It would, however, cost a lot of money, put lots of privately owned preschools out of business, and dramatically decrease early education options for parents.

So what do you think? Is expanding our failing K-12 system the best way to fix it?

This 10-minute documentary is hosted by reason's Nick Gillespie. It is written by Paul Feine and shot by Roger M. Richards. Go here for related materials and embed code.

Classic Hit & Run

Posted on October 23, 2008, 6:59am | Jesse Walker

From the vaults.

The 190-Million Person Exception to the Fourth Amendment

Posted on October 22, 2008, 8:03pm | Radley Balko

In the 1976 case U.S. v. Martinez-Fuerte, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that contra the Fourth Amendment, the government can set up roadblock checkpoints within 100 miles of the nation's borders in order to check for illegal immigrants and smuggling.  The Court ruled that if the stops are brief, limited to that purpose, and not fishing expeditions, the minimal invasion to personal privacy is outweighed by the government's interest in protecting the border.

The ACLU says that since September 11, 2001, the government has been steadily stretching the limits of Martinez, to the point where the Department of Homeland Security is using that case and the terrorism threat to conduct more thorough, more invasive searches at dozens of checkpoints across the country.  With 33 checkpoints now in operation, we're not exactly to the point of "Ihre Papiere, bitte" Berlin yet, but the ACLU does warn that the area of the country 100 miles from every border and coastline would include about 190 million people, or nearly two-thirds of the U.S. population (see map below).

Moreover, post-9/11, the courts have been pretty deferential to increasingly invasive searches the government says are necessary for national security purposes.  For example, federal courts have given the okay to airport seizures and thorough searches of laptops and other electronic devices belonging to people returning from abroad.  Such searches can be conducted with no individualized suspicion at all.  Some of those subjected to them have said it took weeks for the government to return their computers.

Should the courts uphold these increasingly invasive "border searches" under some vague national security exception, I don't think it's too much of an exaggeration to say that the Fourth Amendment would be close to non-existent for a large portion of the country.

Free Beer in an Unfree World

Posted on October 22, 2008, 7:17pm | Katherine Mangu-Ward

For those who are feeling bleak about the economy and downright suicidal about how dumb the election has become, cheer up. Science—and better still, science with commercial applications—continues apace, making the world a better place. Popular Science reports that a bunch of college students and professors at Rice are working on genetically modified beer that lowers the risk of heart disease.

To create their BioBeer, the students are attempting to genetically alter a strain of yeast so that it produces resveratrol [a chemical present in wine that lowers the risk of heart disease and cancer] while also fermenting beer.

They plan to enter their brew, based on Houston's Saint Arnold wheat beer,  in the world’s largest synthetic biology competition: International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM), taking place November 8th and 9th in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

We should count ourselves lucky that these guys haven't taken their suds and gone gulching, since they're certainly laboring in an unfree world. To wit: 1) Most of the team is under 21, and therefore can't legally consume their scientific breakthrough, and 2) "Don’t start dreaming of BioBeer-filled games of beer pong or flip cup anytime soon. Until this team of young researchers eliminates all the additive 'marker' chemicals in their brew and the FDA approves, no one will be drinking a drop."

Via Instapundit

New at Reason: Cathy Young on the Negative Campaigns of Obama and McCain

Posted on October 22, 2008, 4:30pm

At a moment when America faces hard choices and perhaps hard times, writes Contributing Editor Cathy Young, the presidential campaign has largely degenerated into a vicious squabble whose poisonous effects are likely to be felt for years to come.

Read all about it here. 

Barr, the LP, and the New Yorker: Checking the Numbers

Posted on October 22, 2008, 3:25pm | Brian Doherty

I was less impressed with the New Yorker piece on LP candidate Bob Barr than was David Weigel the other day. Sure, the very fact that a serious profile of an LP candidate is in such an augustly mainstream publication is a good sign for serious attention for the LP, I suppose.

The profile itself, though, managed to be so dull, and so unilluminating about libertarianism or the LP per se though barely successful in giving a pointillist picture-dabbed-through-small-details about Barr himself (it has one of those flat feature-writery finishes that the writer apparently wants the reader to find portentous in some manner but to me just screams "I don't really know what the point of this article is either, just let me sneak quietly out the back") that I don't think it will help even those who manage to finish it understand much they will care about about libertarianism or the LP.

For a more specific critique, the piece makes a huge leap, though, when it implicitly attributes a rise in paid membership to a change in the LP platform, the sort of thing that isn't really fact-checkable per se and something that almost no New Yorker reader will have any independent base of knowledge on which to judge. (It is also written in such a way that the author could deny even having meant to make that implication, though it's hard for me to imagine that most readers wouldn't read it that way):

In 2006, [LP founder David] Nolan told me, the Party had a “civil war” over its platform, most of which was subsequently dropped. The following year, the Party’s dues-paying membership grew by twenty-eight per cent.

My equally un-fact-checkable opinion is that the platform and what it says or doesn't say is only of importance to a very small number of party activists whose self-identity is tied up with it, and for the occasional candidate whose opponents try to call him out on some outre element of it, though I don't think there's even a lot of evidence that happens often, mostly because major party candidates can generally completely ignore their LP opponents.

Still, to be sure, a post-platform reform, post-Barr LP has been on the grow in terms of dues-paying national members, according to the LP's official figures. From December 2007 to now, the party membership has grown by 1,656 members; that's nearly 11 percent.

But how impressive is this? In 2004, the year of unknown Michael Badnarik as their candidate, with a Party burdened with that crazy-radical old platform, the party grew from December 2003 to December 2004 by 2,814 in whole numbers, and by 14 percent, from a much higher base.

For whatever reason, the Party's biggest membership plunge of the past few years happened over the course of 2006, the year which, in July, the Party's platform was shaved in the manner that the New Yorker implicitly credits with the 2007 membership rise. The LP gained 3,313 members in 2007--again, in judging how well the "nominating the successful politician" strategy has done for the LP's prominence so far, note that that is more than twice the number of new members that nominating Barr has earned the LP so far. Yes, the year isn't over yet, and the election hasn't happened yet. But, non-disdainful mainstream media attention or not, I'm not impressed with what Barr has done for the LP so far.

UPDATE: In private correspondence, Shane Cory from the Barr campaign says I'm being misleading about Barr's effect on membership growth by using net numbers rather than gross. With a month-by-month breakdown more specific than the ones the LP national HQ provided me with, he shows that since May (when Barr got the nomination) that new members joining the LP have amounted to at least 3,403.

True. But for every month since May, lapsed members have outnumbered both new members and renewed members--but not the two put together, of course, or there would have been no total growth at all.

I noted in the original post that from December 07 to now, LP membership grew 1,656. With more specific growth figures from May on supplied by Cory, I see that membership since Barr got the nomination in fact grew by a little more than that--1,884. (There was a dip between December 07 and May 08.) While reasonable people can argue about this, I suppose, it seems to me net growth in membership is a far more important measure of Barr's effect on growing the party than merely new members joining. If Barr drew in 10,000 new and lost 13,000 old members, that would not be a positive sign for the LP's future.

"Will we ever stop electing Andrew Jackson?"

Posted on October 22, 2008, 3:17pm | Damon W. Root

The New Yorker's Jill Lepore has a great article tracing the unsavory history of one of publishing's lowest arts: the campaign biography. Not surprisingly, it's all Old Hickory's fault:

In 1824, [John] Eaton published a revised "Life of Jackson," founding a genre, the campaign biography. At its heart lies a single, telling anecdote. In 1781, when Jackson was fourteen and fighting in the American Revolution, he was captured. A British officer, whose boots had got muddy, ordered the boy to clean them: Jackson refused, and the officer beat him, badly, with a sword. All his life, he bore the scars. Andrew Jackson would not kneel before a tyrant.

[...]

The United States has had some very fine Presidents, and some not so fine. But their campaign biographies are much of a muchness. The worst of them read like an Election Edition Mad Libs, and even the best of them tell, with rare exception, the same Jacksonian story: scrappy maverick who splits rails and farms peanuts and shoots moose battles from the log cabin to the White House by dint of grit, smarts, stubbornness, and love of country.... Nixon learned how to be a good Vice-President by warming the bench during college football games. Palin forged bipartisan political alliances in step-aerobics class. Parties rise and fall. Wars begin and end. The world turns. But American campaign biographies still follow a script written nearly two centuries ago. East of piffle and west of hokum, the Boy from Hope always grows up to be the Man of the People. Will we ever stop electing Andrew Jackson?

Whole thing here. reason on the odious Andrew Jackson here and here.

New at Reason: The Reason Roundtable on Nuclear Power and Energy Independence

Posted on October 22, 2008, 3:00pm

In this Reason Foundation roundtable, Senior Analyst Shikha Dalmia, Terrestrial Energy author William Tucker, and Cato Institute Senior Fellow Jerry Taylor discuss the future of nuclear power, energy independence, and whether nuclear energy can sustain itself in the market without government involvement.

Read all about it here.

Whaddya Know, Economists?

Posted on October 22, 2008, 2:23pm | Brian Doherty

Sadly, not much, says economist Arnold Kling:

Kling talks to reason.tv about the bailout.

New at Reason: Radley Balko on Why the GOP Must Lose

Posted on October 22, 2008, 12:00pm

The Republican Party has exiled its Goldwater-Reagan wing and given up all pretense of any allegiance to limited government, writes Senior Editor Radley Balko. That's why they deserve to get their clocks cleaned in two weeks.

Read all about it here.

al-Qaetch-22

Posted on October 22, 2008, 11:48am | David Weigel

I just got off a McCain campaign conference call in which senior foreign policy advisor Randy Scheunemann and former CIA Director Jim Woolsey addressed this Washington Post story.

"Al-Qaeda will have to support McCain in the coming election," said a commentary posted Monday on the extremist Web site al-Hesbah, which is closely linked to the terrorist group. It said the Arizona Republican would continue the "failing march of his predecessor," President Bush.

Schneuemann and Woolsey attacked the paper for selectiveness and unfairness, listing supportive things said by American enemies like Ghadaffi about Obama that the Post never covered. Plus, according to Woolsey, there's no way a serious Al-Qaeda blogger could support McCain.

This individual knows that an endorsement by him is a kiss of death, figuratively. He is not trying to help John McCain.

The first question: If this was a bad faith comment meant to hurt McCain, how do we know comments from Ahmedinijad about Obama aren't meant to hurt the Democrat? Woolsey:

Any major organization, itself, will not take the risk to depart from the party line.

Woolsey explained that if someone like Zawahiri said something like what that blogger did, you could assume if was part of a new sarcasm initiative. "But if you take an individual blogger... if you take this literally it's hard to conclude he supports John McCain." He chuckled into the receiver. It was just too self-evident that terrorists want the man who opposed the surge to beat the man who pushed for it.