Like shooting conservative fish in a barrel

Radley Balko posts a link to the most popular 50 pages on Conservapedia under the heading Compensate Much:

Meet the USLP candidates

David Weigel has a look at "wildest Libertarian Party nomination fight in decades". After the big names, he presents the usual list of names nobody should expect to see on the final ballot:

9. The others. There is absolutely zero chance that John Finan, Barry Hess, Dave Hollist, Daniel Imperato, Alden Link, or Robert Milnes will get the Libertarian Party’s nomination. They are occasionally entertaining, and they are harmless. Imperato, in particular, has run a campaign worthy of Max Headroom, bidding (with no success) for the Constitution and Green Party nominations, claiming to run a multi-billion-dollar international organization, to speak seven languages, and to be descended from Emperor Nero. (If that actually was true, why would anyone admit it?) "He is the most ridiculous candidate I have ever seen," says Starchild.

FLDS update

Jacob Sullum asks some pointed questions about the state's interest in removing several hundred children from their mothers:

I'm not quite as old-fashioned as the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS), which hews to the early-marriage customs of the 19th century and the polygamous practices of biblical times. But I'm old-fashioned enough to believe the government needs a good reason to pull a crying, clinging child away from her mother and hand her over to the care of strangers.

The possibility that the child might marry an older man 10 or 12 or 14 years from now does not cut it. Citing that long-term, speculative danger to justify the certain, immediate damage it has done by forcibly separating hundreds of children from their parents, the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services has violated its duty to take such extreme measures only when there's no other way to prevent imminent harm.

The department took custody of 463 minors who were living at the FLDS church's Yearning for Zion (YFZ) Ranch in Eldorado after an April 3 raid that was based on an abuse report police believe was a hoax. On Monday state officials said the children, who are now living in group homes or shelters, include 53 girls between the ages of 14 and 17, of whom 31 are pregnant or have children.

It's all very well to act on the basis of credible intelligence, which this case does not seem to have had, but it certainly appears as if the state is treating the FLDS children differently than they would if it had been a non-religious group (or [ahem] if it was another religion which also has a penchant for polygamy). Laws are created in order to apply equally . . . and that does not appear to be happening here.

QotD; [INSERT NAME OF MESSIANIC LEADER HERE]

Mrs Obama is most famous for declaring, a propos her husband's candidacy, that "for the first time in my adult lifetime I'm really proud of my country". Just a throwaway line reflecting no more than the narcissism and self-absorption required to mount a presidential campaign in the 21st century? Well, possibly — were it not for the fact that almost every time the candidate's wife speaks extemporaneously she seems to offer some bon mot consistent with that bleak assessment.

And when she stops looking back across the final grim despairing decades of the 20th century ("Life for regular folks has gotten worse over the course of my lifetime") and contemplates the sunlit uplands of the new utopia, it doesn't, tonally, get any cheerier. Pretend for a moment that the name of the candidate had been excised from the following remarks. Would it seem part of the natural discourse of a constitutional republic of citizen legislators? Or does it sound more appropriate to the leadership cult of Basketkhazia or some other one-man stan?

"[INSERT NAME OF MESSIANIC LEADER HERE] will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zones. That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed."

Barack, eh? Barack Jong-Il? Unlikely. Not too many "comfort zones" in Pyongyang. Barack Turkmenbashi, the late dictator of Turkmenistan? Possibly. But he would have exhorted his people to push themselves to grow more melons (a particular source of national pride). No, the above words were his wife's vision of life under the Administration of Barack Obama, the transformative Presidential candidate offering change you can believe in — or else. I hate to sound like I'm walled up in the Shed of Cynicism, but the constitutional right to be "uninvolved" and "uninformed" is one of the most precious, at least if the alternative is being "required" to work at coming out of your isolation and engaging with fellow members of the uninvolved, uninformed masses as we push ourselves to move out of our comfort zone.

Mark Steyn, "Mrs. Grievance", National Review, 2008-04-29

More on the FDLS case

A few links on the recent FDLS situation:

• Jesse Walker's "First They Came for the Toddlers..."
• "Grits for Breakfast" roundup of posts
• "The Polygamy Files" from the Salt Lake Tribune

For those coming in late . . . there's plenty of paranoia flowing, even this long after the notorious raid on the Branch Davidiansin Waco turned into a prolonged siege, eventually costing the lives of 82 people.

QotD: Paranoia in politics

On Tuesday the lesbian assassin of Vince Foster won Pennsylvania's presidential primary. In the larger contest for the Democratic nomination, though, she still lags behind a jihadist sleeper agent who is simultaneously a secret Muslim, a secret Communist, and a secret Republican. Whoever wins their race will go on to face a brainwashed puppet of the Viet Cong, and whoever wins that race will then get on with the modern president's central task: serving the interests of Mexico. It must be true, I read it in my email.

There's a persistant political myth that paranoia is only a feature of the fringe, something common among alienated radicals and reactionaries but rare in the great American center. In fact, paranoia has been ubiquitous across the political spectrum. You can find it in nearly every faction and movement at every point in American history, not least among those establishment figures who think they're immune to conspiracy theories. (The most lurid and destructive tales of Waco were not told by militiamen after the raid was over. They were told by the media and the government while the siege was underway.)

Jesse Walker, "The Paranoid Style Is American Politics: Fear and loathing on every campaign trail", Hit and Run, 2008-04-24

QotD: Banning "evil-looking" guns

When a rash of gun murders takes place, it makes sense for the police to do one of two things: renew tactics that have been effective in the past at curbing homicides, or embrace ideas that have not been tried before.

But those options don't appeal to Chicago Police Supt. Jody Weis. What he proposes is a crackdown on assault weapons.

I'm tempted to say this is the moral equivalent of a placebo—a sugar pill that is irrelevant to the malady at hand. But that would be unfair. Placebos, after all, sometimes have a positive effect. Assault weapons bans, not so much.

If there are too many guns in Chicago, it's not because of any statutory oversight. The city has long outlawed the sale and possession of handguns. It also forbids assault weapons. If prohibition were the answer, no one would be asking the question.

Steve Chapman, "The Cops That Couldn't Shoot Straight: Chicago police and their proposed, unworkable gun ban", Reason Online, 2008-04-24

There's regrets, and then there are "regrets"

Tom Tomorrow captures the nature of the regrets being offered after five years:

QotD: The Ron Paul Campaign

To be sure, by every conventional measure Paul’s presidential bid has been an abject failure — not a single primary win and only 14 delegates as of press time. Yet Paul managed to raise more than $20 million, virtually all of it online, and inspire an army of hyper-devoted and mostly youthful followers using a pitch — and a style — that will have much more to do with 21st century politics than whatever models of Buick and Oldsmobile the Democrats and Republicans eventually crank out this year. That’s how Paul pulled together over 67,000 people at the social networking site MeetUp (a total that was more than 20 times the number who signed up for the next most popular candidate, Barack Obama). That’s why he won raves from quarters as disparate as conservative commentator George Will (who called Paul "my man" on ABC's "This Week with George Stephanopoulos"), punk icon Johnny Rotten (who gave Congress' "Dr. No" a celebratory shout-out during a "Tonight Show with Jay Leno" episode), plus a self-explanatory group called "Strippers for Paul."

What explained the ability of this odd politician, with his inept campaign management team, to attract gobs of money, if not actual votes? Because it was only Ron Paul who said something truly distinct this campaign about the very nature of power. Namely, that government should have less of it on all levels and in every instance. "I don't want to run your life," Paul says. "I don't want to run the economy. ... I don't want to run the world." Such sentiment is simultaneously radical and fully in the Jeffersonian tradition of governing best while governing least. The right to be left alone, as Justice Louis Brandeis once put it, is at the very center of the American experiment because it allows individuals and the communities they form to pursue happiness in competing, peaceful ways. This is especially true in Long Tail America, where people are not only increasingly tolerant of alternative lifestyles but are constantly on the hunt for ways to individualize and personalize their own lives.

Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch, "Tuned Out (PDF download)", Politics, March 2008

There's a reason why Fark.com has a "Florida" tag

Katherine Mangu-Ward looks at Florida's unhappy relationship with that whole "elections" thing:

If Florida had a Homeric epithet (think Hector, tamer of horses) it would be "Florida, wrecker of elections." To Hades with "the Sunshine State."

This winter, the Florida Democratic party moved their primary up to a week before Super Tuesday, eager for the nation to watch its pilgrimage to the voting booth with bated breath once again. The national party warned that there would be consequences for states that jumped the line, and lo and behold: The Florida Democrats were stripped of their convention delegates.

And now, with Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) scratching each others' eyes out all the way to the finish line, Florida, wrecker of elections—along with Michigan, builder of iron horses—could well be the decider.

[. . .] Florida and Michigan are battlegrounds, not for principle, but for pride and victory. Politicians will be politicians, but Florida's voters have graciously bowed out, turning down the chance to indulge in the sacred rite of voting twice in the same contest. For that, one can almost forgive them the havoc they've caused.

QotD: Drug hysteria

On the opening page of High Society, which aims to explain "how substance abuse ravages America," Joseph Califano declares that "chemistry is chasing Christianity as the nation's largest religion." Although it is not always easy to decipher Califano's meaning in this overwrought, carelessly written, weakly documented, self-contradictory, and deeply misleading anti-drug screed, here he seems to be saying that opiates are the religion of the masses. Americans, he implies, are seeking from psychoactive substances the solace they used to obtain from faith in God, and better living through chemistry is nearly as popular as better living through Christ.

That claim, like many Califano makes, is unverifiable, and it does not seem very plausible. Americans may be less religious than they used to be, but large majorities still say they believe in God and identify with specific faiths, making the U.S. much more religious than other Western countries, which tend to have substantially lower drug use rates. Although Americans have a bewildering array of psychiatric medications to choose from nowadays (with permission from a doctor), they smoke a lot less than they did in the 1960s and drink less than they did a century ago, when they also could freely purchase patent medicines containing opium, cocaine, and cannabis. If the devout are less inclined than the doubters to use mood-altering drugs, how is it that mostly Mormon Utah leads the country in antidepressant prescriptions? And if chemistry and Christianity are locked in competition, what are we to make of Jesus' water-into-wine miracle, or of the Native American Church, Uniao do Vegetal, and other groups that combine Christianity with psychedelic sacraments?

Already I have put more thought into the alleged connection between faithlessness and drug use than Califano did. And so it is with the rest of the book. A proper debunking would require more than the 186 pages of text that Califano, a domestic policy adviser to Lyndon Johnson and secretary of health, education, and welfare in the Carter administration, squeezes out of conversations with politicians and old reports from the Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA), the prohibitionist propaganda mill he founded and heads.

Jacob Sullum, "No Bad Drugs: The arbitrary distinctions at the root of prohibition", Reason, 2008-03-20

Justifying the war on (some) drugs

Radley Balko has some thoughts on the current state of play in the war on (some) drugs:

As for Dunphy's strange appeal to a junkie's authority, there are several problems with the "if you legalize drugs, everyone will become an addict" argument. Among them:

1) It assumes that prohibition is actually preventing access to illegal drugs in any meaningful way today. It isn't. I could have a bag of marijuana in my hands in about five minutes. As fast or faster than I could get a sandwich. It would probably take me 20 minutes to a half hour hunt down a small bag of heroin, but it wouldn't be difficult. And I could get either without any real fear of arrest. And I'm not a drug user. If I had actual connections, it'd be even easier. Some survey data shows high school kids can get marijuana as easily or easier than they can get alcohol.

2) It wrongly assumes that the all of the problems we associate with drugs — the bloody turf wars, the presence of particularly potent drugs like meth, the lengths to which dealers will go to get their premium, etc. — are the product of the drugs themselves, and not the product of them being prohibited. This chart helps slay that argument.

3) It assumes that the laws against using and distributing drugs are the only thing preventing a huge portion of the population from trying them, and becoming addicted to them. Legalization may indeed increase the use of currently banned drugs. But I have my doubts about a massive increase in addicts. The social stigma would still be there, as it is with alcoholism. Perhaps more people would experiment. But it isn't clear that that's a bad thing. Use is not abuse, no matter what ONDCP says in its press releases. And the vast majority of drug users — even "hard" drug users — don't turn into addicts.

I've often argued for easing the restrictions on various drugs, not because I particularly want to use them myself, but because the costs of keeping them illegal far outweigh the benefits. It's not something Canada could do in isolation from the United States, as we are too vulnerable to trade sanctions which the current government would rush to put in place if we were seen to "weaken" in the war on drugs.

Drug prohibition is working just about as well as alcohol prohibition did in the 20th century. Believe it or not, that's seen as a positive comment in drug warrior circles.

A (fiscal) plague on both their houses!

Steve Chapman casts a jaundiced eye over the last three presidential candidates still standing:

For some time now, the three presidential candidates have been striving to outdo each other on what Hillary Clinton calls "the commander-in-chief" test. She says that she and John McCain have passed it. McCain's response has been on the order of, "What do you mean, 'we'?" Recently, Barack Obama assembled a passel of retired generals and admirals to publicly salute him.

It's good to know they are preparing themselves for that 3 a.m. phone call. But I'm not convinced any of them is ready for the 8 a.m. call from the budget director reporting that the deficit is raging out of control. When it comes to combating the fiscal menaces we face, these three are all absent without leave.

The budget situation is already dire. In the last six years, the federal government has spent some $1.8 trillion more than it has taken in. This year, the deficit will hit an estimated $410 billion. If the economy falls into a recession, the gap will grow.

Believe it or not, these are the good old days. In the next few years, the budget will begin to show the effects of a mammoth event that has long been dreaded: the retirement of the baby boomers. Social Security and Medicare already account for one-third of federal spending, and over the next 30 years, they are expected to nearly double in cost as a share of the total economy.

QotD: Revisiting Salem

American history is littered with examples of puritanism deranging the law, from the Salem witch trials onwards. Anthony Comstock, a 19th-century anti-porn campaigner, used his position as a postal inspector to seize 50 tons of books and 4m pictures. He boasted that he was responsible for 4,000 arrests during his career and 15 suicides. Under Prohibition people could be imprisoned for life for consuming alcohol.

Puritanism continues to stalk the country in new guises. The most dramatic example is America's new version of Prohibition — a "war on drugs" that helps explain why one in 100 American adults are in prison. But there are plenty of humbler examples. Schools impose zero-tolerance rules that result in expulsion for minor offences. The citizens of Texas may not buy dildos. Americans are banned from drinking until they are 21.

The combination of legalism and puritanism invariably produces the same dismal results. It creates expensive government bureaucracies that seize on any excuse — rules relating to inter-state commerce are a particular favourite — to extend their powers to boss people about or spy on them. It throws up swivel-eyed zealots who pursue their manias with little sense of proportion or decency (remember Kenneth Starr). And it ends by devouring its children. Mr Spitzer is only the latest in an endless line of self-righteous crusaders impaled on their own swords.

He certainly had no choice but to resign (as he did on March 12th) if, as it seems, he broke the law. But that still leaves the bigger question of whether the law is an ass. George Bernard Shaw once defined "Comstockery" as "the world's standing joke at the expense of the United States"; but it is hardly a joke for the people who are caught in its tentacles. There are enough real problems for America's law-enforcement officials to worry about.

"The hypocrites' club: Now with a new diamond-level member", The Economist, 2008-03-13

"I love the smell of schadenfreude in the morning"

Samizdata Illuminatus takes a good deep breath:

If I was a believer, I would be pouring a thankful libation right about now. Eliot Spitzer, one of the most nasty power crazed politicos in US politics today, perhaps second only to Oklahoma Attorney General Drew Edmondson in authoritarian thuggishness, has just shown that he who lives by the judicial sword, can oh so easily die by the judicial sword. To see a man who thought nothing of using the power of the state to intimidate those who dared cross him get caught in a Federal wiretap is . . . well . . . sweet. I love the smell of schadenfreude in the morning.

Reviews of Playmobil's latest toy

You may have heard that Playmobil, the toy company, recently introduced a toy to help train children to become jackbooted thugs TSA workers. The reviews on Amazon.com are very interesting reading:

You can also read the Fark thread for more frothing-at-the-mouth goodness.

QotD: British terrortourists

While Britain is fast catching up to America—and leading Europe—in illiteracy, obesity, and violent crime (despite ubiquitous surveillance cameras and an ineffective ban on handguns), the Wittgenstein references in Monty Python still shape our assumptions of British cultural supremacy. But as the English social critic Theodore Dalyrymple observed in 2004, to profess an interest in high culture in today’s Britain is to be met with accusations of homosexuality.

So before President Ron Paul restores the gold standard, it should be acknowledged that the sagging dollar is providing one useful service: a long-overdue corrective to our self-image as lesser Brits. Europeans, who ranked the English as the “world’s worst tourists” in a recent Expedia poll, have long ago disabused themselves of such stereotypes. Take a look around New York, Boston, or Los Angeles, and spot the omnipresent gaggle of chavs, waddling through the Adidas shop, shouting drunken insults in local Irish pubs, converting the currency on every product within reach. England is just America writ small.

Michael C. Moynihan, "Take Them Back to Dear Old Blighty: The ugliest byproduct of the sagging dollar", Reason Online, 2008-03-06

QotD: Jury Nullification

If asked to serve on a jury deliberating a violation of state or federal drug laws, we will vote to acquit, regardless of the evidence presented. Save for a prosecution in which acts of violence or intended violence are alleged, we will — to borrow Justice Harry Blackmun's manifesto against the death penalty — no longer tinker with the machinery of the drug war. No longer can we collaborate with a government that uses nonviolent drug offenses to fill prisons with its poorest, most damaged and most desperate citizens.

Jury nullification is American dissent, as old and as heralded as the 1735 trial of John Peter Zenger [link not in original article], who was acquitted of seditious libel against the royal governor of New York, and absent a government capable of repairing injustices, it is legitimate protest. If some few episodes of a television entertainment have caused others to reflect on the war zones we have created in our cities and the human beings stranded there, we ask that those people might also consider their conscience. And when the lawyers or the judge or your fellow jurors seek explanation, think for a moment on Bubbles or Bodie or Wallace. And remember that the lives being held in the balance aren't fictional.

Ed Burns, Dennis Lehane, George Pelecanos, Richard Price, and David Simon (writing team for The Wire), "The Wire's War on the Drug War", Time, 2008-03-05

The evolution of the hotel

Kerry Howley finds interesting things in A.K. Sandoval-Strausz's Hotel: An American History:

Hotels, he argues, were "a significant episode in the modern idea of a pluralistic, cosmopolitan society," and conservatives invested in the status quo were right to fear them. Transportation advances granted people a new mobility, and traveling Americans suddenly required social mores not predicated on years of shared community bonds.

[. . .]

Hotels were a new institutional form that upset expectations about the arrangement of daily life and alarmed defenders of domesticity. They were full of beds and liquor, associated with sex, theft, and violence. Guests interacted with no patriarch — only a relatively egalitarian ecosystem of managers, porters, and bellboys. As people began to take longer and longer hotel stays in the mid-18th century, sometimes even living in them, "an entire genre of screeds against hotel living" was born, mourning the decline of traditional gender roles in a world where cooks and maids left women hopelessly idle.

None of this did much to dampen Americans' collective zeal for travel and the institutions that would house them along the way. By the end of the 19th century, the American stranger had a new role in the social order: He was a guest.

Canadian rednecks

ChuckerCanuck performs a service in identifying the characteristics of Canadian Rednecks:

Often, as we travel the United States, we pass folks who stick their patriotism on their bumpers — the stars and stripes pasted on their cars to advertise their unthinking love of America. For many Canadians, this overt patriotism is decidely foreign. And yet, in my corner of the world, where Liberals win ridings by margins that would make Bashir Assad blush, there is a growing prevelance of people slapping Canadian flag license plates on the front of their vehicles. Canada has rednecks. And to help you identify a Canadian redneck, I have put together a short checklist for your benefit.

H/T to Mark C. at Daimnation for the link.

QotD: Americans, from the Canadian perspective

Like all Canadians, Americans are my #1 spectator sport. I find you all hugely entertaining to observe anthropologically, and I know you pretty well by now.

Bruce Rolston, "A quiet plea", Flit, 2008-02-01

Bill Buckley

William F. Buckley, Jr. died yesterday at the age of 82. Love him or hate him, he was unique in American politics. Reason's former editor Robert Poole has a farewell column posted:

I received the news of Bill Buckley's death with a great sense of loss. No, he was not a major intellectual influence on my becoming a libertarian. I have to credit Robert Heinlein and Barry Goldwater and Ayn Rand for that. But since for most of us libertarianism as an intellectual and political movement has been an offshoot of conservatism, Buckley in truth was a great enabler.

By creating National Review in 1955 as a serious, intellectually respectable conservative voice (challenging the New Deal consensus among thinking people), Buckley created space for the development of our movement. He kicked out the racists and conspiracy-mongers from conservatism and embraced Chicago and Austrian economists, introducing a new generation to Hayek, Mises, and Friedman. And thanks to the efforts of NR's Frank Meyer to promote a "fusion" between economic (free-market) conservatives and social conservatives, Buckley and National Review fostered the growth of a large enough conservative movement to nominate Goldwater for president and ultimately to elect Ronald Reagan.

There's also a PDF of Reason's 1983 interview with Buckely available for download here.

Update: Radley Balko has a few things to add:

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."

Obama-mania explained to Guardian readers

A brief introduction to the wave of Obama-worship currently engulfing Democratic primary voters by David Weigel:

Maybe it started with the fainting. After a while you couldn't ignore video and reports of Barack Obama supporters, sardine-tin-packed into his monster rallies, blacking out and dropping to the floor as the candidate hit his applause lines. Or maybe it started with the music video Yes We Can, a black-and-white, celebrity-studded mash-up of Obama's soaring South Carolina primary victory speech.

Somewhere on the Illinois senator's improbable march toward the Democratic nomination — and his remarkable steamrolling of the heretofore invincible Clinton family — the American commentariat tried to shake it off. Los Angeles Times columnist Joel Stein fretted about a "cult of Obama." New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, whose anti-Obama tirades have been reprinted in Hillary Clinton campaign mail, saw the campaign becoming "a cult of personality". Neoconservative Washington Post scold Charles Krauthammer, whose ideology has the most to lose from an Obama triumph, warned Americans that history was repeating: "As a teenager growing up in Canada, I witnessed a charismatic law professor go from obscurity to justice minister to prime minister, carried on a wave of what was called Trudeaumania." (Not as spine-chilling as Krauthammer's usual warning of this or that third-worlder becoming the next Hitler, but scary enough.)

The whole Trudeaumania thing would certainly be enough to scare the pants off me!

The best part of the article is this:

The problem for Clinton isn't just that 79% of her fellow Americans actually believe in celestial choirs. The problem for both of Obama's opponents is that being a "cult leader" is not a demerit in the quest for the presidency. Americans don't want a down-to-earth executive. They want Jesus Christ. They'll settle for Sun Myung Moon.

QotD: The primaries

This year's primary season has been so full of healthy developments that you could package it with oat bran and hawk it at Whole Foods. The country can thank its lucky stars that the process has pushed forward — in McCain and in Democratic Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama — the three most formidable figures in American politics. If Obama wins the Democratic nomination, the result will pit the two most widely admired political figures of their generations against each other in a presidential race. The last time the country saw anything remotely like that was when Dwight Eisenhower faced Adlai Stevenson in 1952 and 1956.

Democrats can be grateful they have two tough races on their hands, first for the nomination and then, as now seems virtually certain, against McCain in the general election. Remember LBJ and Jimmy Carter? When Democrats win against weak opponents or crippled parties, they overreach, underperform, and lose touch with the country.

Jonathan Rauch, "Saved by McCain: The presumptive nominee is a tonic for the party", Reason Online, 2008-02-21

Update: the state of play since 9/11

Although I've been finding his occasional (and becoming-less-occasional) 9/11 conspiracy asides to be disturbing, L. Neil Smith's summary of the state of civil and economic liberty in the United States to be pretty on-target:

In the wake of whatever happened on September 11, 2001 (whether anybody likes it or not, the facts of that event, including who was responsible, are far from settled), a fat, lazy, corrupt, rubberstamp Congress passed the so-called "U.S.A. Patriot Act" apparently without even reading it (some politicians claim there were no copies available to read — which should have caused them to reject it on the spot) destroying financial, communications, and medical privacy in this country, and with them, the tattered remains of the fundamental human right to trade with anybody for anything. Among many other new lows, for the first time, the law restricted constitutional and other rights during the period of an undeclared (and therefore totally illegal) war.

In addition to creating a new category of crime called "domestic terrorism", the act allowed the indefinite detention of a steadily widening variety of individuals, secret, warrantless searches of people's homes and businesses, and other violations of the Fourth and Fifth Amendments. (Freedom to travel without harrassment or intrusion had already been obliterated more than a generation earlier.) In short, with one stroke of a President's pen, America completed what had been, until then, a slow, steady, gradual descent into police statism.

The act (and supporting legislation that came later, such as the deceptively-named "Military Commissions Act" and H.R.1955/S.B.1959) mandated "studies" of biometric identification systems — I recently wrote an article about the way "studies" rapidly become law — the early origins of the notorious "No-Fly list" at airports, and fat "security" contracts for fascistic corporations like Halliburton and Blackwater, the latter of which has since become a worldwide military power with a greater armed presence in Iraq than the United States government.

Meanwhile, a brand new and overwhelmingly powerful secret police establishment with the Joseph Geobbelsian monicker "Department of Homeland Security", arose to prominence and has come to dominate all other American law enforcement organizations, Constitutional or otherwise.

But that was only the beginning. The Patriot Act, scheduled to sunset in 2005, was renewed with disgusting haste and followed by Patriot II, giving the government even more power at the expense of what had been unalienable individual, civil, Constitutional, and human rights.

All in all, it has been a time of bitter disillusionment. The nation's courts, for example, particularly the United States Supreme Court, have revealed themselves to be fully as corrupt and unreliable in their stewardship of the Constitution, especially of the Bill of Rights, as Congress, or even the mass media Thomas Jefferson believed — falsely, as it turned out — would preserve them. If somebody set out from the beginning, with the deliberate intention of destroying American civilization, he would be following exactly the same policies — running the Abraham Lincoln playbook — that George W. Bush is following.

Regardless of who ends up occupying the White House after the November election, you'd have to be wilfully blind not to be disturbed at how far the government has managed to extend its tendrils into so many more aspects of daily life than it had before 9/11. The restrictions on civil and economic liberties are not accompanied by jackboots and stylish uniforms, nor are they heralded by demagogues and mobs, but they're real — and growing — nonetheless.

Lileks doubts Obama's magical healing powers

That known environmental and climate change heretic James Lileks apparently has some doubts about the all-healing powers of Barack Obama:

On the radio today Medved and Hewitt both asked Obama supporters to call and say why they were supporting their man. Specifics, please. The replies were rather indistinct. He would end the division and bring us together by encouraging us all to talk about common problems, after which we would compromise. He will give us hope by giving us hope: for many, the appeal has the magical perfect logic of a tautology. It's a nice dream. But compromise is impossible when you have a fundamental differences about the proper way to solve a problem. I believe we can achieve a fair society by taking away your house and giving it to someone else. I disagree. It is my house. Then let us agree to give away half of your house. Compromise! But that is not a compromise. You have taken half my house. We have compromised on your behalf with those who would have taken it all. Let us not return to the politics of division. There are strangers living in my spare bedroom. Then we have truly come together. Look, this isn't a matter on which we can compromise, because we have conflicting premises. You're pretending matter and anti-matter have the same relationship as Coke and Pepsi. They don't.

If he wins, I do look forward to dissenting; since it's been established as the highest form of patriotism, I expect my arguments will be met with grave respect. Shhhh! He's dissenting.

Among the arguments offered by the callers:

* He will help save the planet by encouraging everyone to recycle cans and bottles and paper (the caller discussed a local drought, and said she did not think that recycling would stop it, but if everyone recycled — something she thought Obama would bring about through a general new era of ecological concern — future droughts would not occur.)

* He will pay for college tuition (the caller thought tuition was too expensive, and did not want to be burdened with loans)

* He will meet with the Iranians, personally, and conduct a frank personal interrogation about their nuclear intentions

* He will inspire the Youth of America to get involved in politics again

* He will prevent American companies from moving manufacturing overseas (The caller was unsure how this could be done, only that it would be done, because it should be done)

* He will not raise taxes on anyone except maybe millionaires (The caller was surprised to be asked if Obama would raise taxes; it was a strange, peculiar, irrelevant issue)

* He will give everyone health care (This would make American industry competitive, since companies would be freed of the obligation of making it an employee benefit)

* He will talk to the Europeans

And so on. There is tremendous faith in his ability to just wave a love-wand and get things done. I remember the same zeitgeist afoot in the land in 1992; change was the mantra then, too. Odd how things turn out — I'd be happier with Hillary as President than Obama, simply because she seems a bit more seasoned and realistic. And I do find it interesting that people who have decried the shallow, theatrical, emotion-based nature of contemporary politics are now so effusive in their praise for someone's ability to move crowds. Perhaps they don't mind a fellow on a white horse if he promises to nationalize the stables.

Although it's (obviously, from these sample responses) easy to poke fun at the Obamaniacs, I still have to say that the idea of Hillary Clinton as President bothers me even more than the idea of President Obama. Clinton is as reflexive an authoritarian as you're likely to find in modern American politics. She is as strongly anti-market in her economic rhetoric as she is communitarian in her social rhetoric. About the only thing that would keep the US economy running smoothly during another Clinton presidency is that the President actually has fairly small ability to make changes over the economic side (certainly compared to the powers of congress).

On the other side of the fence, I think John McCain is likely to be the Republican candidate, and he's remarkably similar to Clinton in his views on the economy. For a Republican, he'd make a fine Democrat on economic issues. Both Clinton and McCain are likely to continue existing intervention in the affairs of foreign nations (not just in the Middle East, but more so there than elsewhere)

If you prefer your government to keep its nose out of the economy, and avoid creating or exacerbating foreign tensions, you're probably out of luck regardless of who wins the election in November.

Update: Jeff Taylor has some thoughts on the election:

Is Barack Obama more Michael Dukakis or Bill Clinton? Don't laugh. The answer is far more salient to who becomes the next President than feverish declarations that Obama in the heir to JFK or that McCain is really Winston Churchill.

Let's also stipulate that Hillary Clinton should not be forgot — not until the last spark of energy is wrung from her battle-chassis will she concede, and perhaps not then. Still in her playbook — the triple-whammy cry, where she and Bill and Chelsea all cut loose. Don't rule it out.

But the GOP's electoral offering is locked in stone, and one half of the November equation is set. McCain has an absolute ceiling as a candidate above which he cannot rise. He cannot out-debate or out-speechify his opponent, and he is prickly and prone to outbursts. In short, voters absolutely must prefer him on substance, not style, for McCain to win.

So, what about that substance? Here we find McCain in favor of perpetual war in Iraq, possibly a new war with Iran, an immigration reform process loathed by conservatives, and rewriting the First Amendment to protect incumbent federal office holders, plus hatred of earmark spending and support for tax cuts, then opposition to tax cuts, now morphed into a pledge against future tax hikes. Overlay this with a general suspicion of all motives not directly tied in to government "service" and you have a candidate with something to offend very many voting blocs.

Now recall that in 1988 Bush I was a similar polyglot — East Coast blue blood, Texas oilman, Nixon Republican suspicious of "voodoo economics," loyal Veep to Hollywood shaman — but he had the considerable advantage of running for Ronald Reagan's third term. And that was enough to beat a Dukakis.

Four years later a rudderless Poppy was helpless before Bill Clinton's mix of energy, outsider myth, and rope-a-hope symbolism. Whatever we can say today about Obama, surely one of the truest things is that stylistically he is no Dukakis. If so, McCain must find some substantial difference to hold up in front of voters or go the way of GHWB and the last aging senator/war hero the GOP coughed up for commander-in-chief, Bob Dole.

QotD: Castro and Cuba

Earlier this year, Castro had said that there would be no change in the Cuba-U.S. relationship until that man in the White House had vamoosed. And George W. Bush, along with most Dems and Reps, haven't shown much interest in changing the ongoing, and idiotic, U.S. embargo of Cuba. (Two pols who dare speak logic on this issue are Reps. Jeff Flake and Charles Rangel).

U.S. policy toward Cuba has been generally misguided for well over a century. Here's hoping the Congress and the president will do something right to accelerate a shift to freedom there. And here's hoping that Cuba becomes a better place as Castro puts one foot into the grave. I don't believe in hell, but I sort of hope there is a place like it for a guy like Castro.

Nick Gillespie, "Castro Resigns as President for Life of Cuba; Wants to Spend More Time with Families", Hit and Run, 2008-02-19

Unofficial tips on travelling to the United States

I don't need to travel much in my current job, but I used to be on a regular run to Boston several years ago. The hassle of going through US customs and immigration was trivial compared to what is now required of airline passengers in the TSA era. PC World offers some advice for those of you travelling with laptops, PDAs, and other modern electronic impedimenta:

1. No evidence needed to take your laptop

Border agents do not need any evidence or suspicion of illegal activity to examine a laptop or other electronic device.

Every time you cross the border, customs officials have the right to look at anything in your possession, including the content on your laptop, handheld device, cell phone, USB memory stick and digital cameras, Gurley said. They have the right to both view that information and to download or mirror it if they think it's necessary, she said.

2. Anything can be searched

Everything on an electronic device is open to search. This includes personal photographs, personal banking, any business documents and stored or unopened e-mail, Gurley said.

3. Your PC might not be returned right away

Seized devices may be kept for an indefinite period of time. Carry only a laptop or electronic device you can afford to lose or hand over for an unspecified period of time.

Sensitive data should be sent by e-mail before crossing the border in case the data becomes unavailable if the device is seized, she said.

4. Don't take anything you don't want to share

Don't carry anything on these devices that could potentially embarrass you or that you don't want others to see, Gurley said.

If it's information you don't want to share, don't carry it. That includes data such as personal banking information, photos, correspondence, health and password information. If the device is a company-owned computer, don't carry proprietary business information or personnel records on it, the ACTE advised.

5. Be cooperative

Cooperate with customs officials. Ask for a receipt and a badge number if your computer is seized. Try and get whatever information you can on the reason why it was seized.

The goal is not to hide data from border officials or the U.S government, Gurley said. Rather, it is about being aware that your laptop and other electronic devices in your possession could be searched and to prepare for that eventuality, Gurley said. ACTE's surveys in the past have shown that very few travelers are aware of the potential for such searches. "Our primary concern is to alert travelers that their laptops and other electronic devices can be seized at a border without explanation, provocation or even likely cause," she said.

You're more likely to encounter this sort of problem in some airports than in others (California is the most commonly mentioned area where this sort of thing has become more common recently).

"To err is human but to really screw up it takes the Berkeley City Council"

It's almost as shocking as cats and dogs living together, but the Berkeley City council has admitted it made an error about the USMC being "unwelcome intruders":

After a day of enraged confrontation outside Berkeley City Hall between anti-war and pro-military demonstrators, the City Council backed down early Wednesday from its controversial decision to tell the U.S. Marines they are "unwelcome intruders" for operating a downtown recruiting center.

Council members conceded that they had erred in passing a resolution Jan. 29 that condemned the Marines — rather than the war in Iraq — and some council members added that they felt they owed U.S. troops an apology as well the many Berkeley residents who were ashamed and offended by their position.

"To err is human but to really screw up it takes the Berkeley City Council," said council member Gordon Wozniak. "We failed our city. We embarrassed our city."

In the end, however, the council voted against issuing a public apology for its January action.

Is there a "moderate" version of 9/11 conspiracy theorizing?

Jennifer Abel, writing for the Hartford Advocate, tries to find out:

According to a 2006 Scripps-Howard poll, over a third of Americans believe high-ranking officials either helped commit the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, or at least allowed them to happen. Other polls report even greater levels of cynicism.

Where do you draw the line separating "fringe conspiracy theory" from "mainstream phenomenon"? We're not sure, but if one-third of the populace isn't the mainstream it's at least a significant tributary of it.

So last November, when we learned that the Connecticut Citizens for a New 9/11 Investigation were hosting a symposium at St. Joseph's College in West Hartford, we paid it more attention than the usual "UFOs killed JFK" conspiracy e-mails that flood our in-box: rather than delete the message, we called the contact number within.

Distrusting the government is like drinking wine: if you never do it, you're probably too uptight. If you do it in moderation, it's very good for your health. But if you do it too much you make yourself ridiculous. Where on this spectrum do the 9/11 deniers fall? Not in the "uptight" zone, that much we knew. The question was, did they have a healthy anti-government buzz or a sloppy-drunk one?

This is a tough area: I know there are lots of otherwise intelligent folks who are absolutely convinced that George Bush himself was at the controls of one of the planes, and Dick Cheney was at the controls of the other one. Except they weren't really planes . . . except that they were planes, but not the hijacked planes . . . except they fired missiles just before impact . . . and so on, and so on. The libertarian movement has more than their fair share of conspiracy theorists, including some well-known authors and public speakers.

Of course, there have always been conspiracy theorists, and there's always just enough plausibility to persuade some people that something is fishy about assassinations, terrorist attacks, and other major disruptions to everyday life. Here's Penn & Teller's take on conspiracy theories:

There, that should keep you busy for the next 30 minutes . . .

QotD: Mitt Romney

The problem with Mitt Romney is that he isn't Mormon enough. His unusual, unpopular religion is the one part of his public image that doesn’t feel like it came out of a focus group. Naturally, he does everything he can to minimize, marginalize, and neuter it. Most voters, he said at one point, "want a person of faith as their leader. But they don't care what brand of faith that is." He thus reduced his purportedly heartfelt beliefs to a brand name, just another toothpaste in the great big CVS in the sky. It might not be Colgate, but the important thing is that he brushes daily.

Jesse Walker, "Make Mine Mormon: If only Mitt Romney were as colorful as his faith", Reason Online, 2008-02-04

QotD: John McCain

As a direct result of his long media honeymoon, much of what we think we know about McCain is wrong. Exit-poll numbers out of the early states showed that McCain was doing especially well among primary voters who were antiwar. The numbers say something disturbing about our capacity to believe that independent antiwar voters are seriously considering a man who championed pre-emptive war three years before it ever occurred to George W. Bush, who personally told me that the U.S. share of defense spending — more than one-half of the world's total — was much too small, and who has demonstrated repeatedly these past weeks that he doesn't understand why any American would question the deployment of U.S. troops in Iraq 100 years from now. After more than seven years of increasingly unpopular war, Americans look poised to nominate the most explicitly pro-interventionist presidential candidate since Teddy Roosevelt. Don't say you weren't warned.

Matt Welch, "The Unlikely Comeback of John McCain, Maverick Warmonger", LA Weekly, 2008-01-30

It's the inevitable result of "no-knock" raids for non-violent offences

Radley Balko updates us on the most recent "no-knock raid goes horribly wrong" case:

Ryan Frederick was arraigned today. He was charged with first-degree murder, use of a firearm in the commission of a felony, and . . . simple possession of marijuana.

That's right. Though police still haven't told us how much marijuana they found, it wasn't enough to charge Frederick with anything more than a misdemeanor. For a misdemeanor, they broke down his door, a cop is dead, and a 28-year-old guy's life is ruined. Looks like the informant mistook Frederick's gardening hobby for an elaborate marijuana growing operation, and those Japanese maple trees for marijuana plants.

The parallels to Cory Maye are pretty striking. You've got a young guy minding his own business, with no criminal record, whose worst transgression is that he smokes a little pot from time to time. A bad informant and bad police procedures then converge, resulting in police breaking down his door while he's sleeping. He fires a gun to defend himself, unwittingly kills a cop, and now faces murder charges.

It's the inevitable result of the militarization of the civilian police forces: give them military gear, (some) military assault training, and they're going to look for ways to justify all the expense. "SWAT teams" have gone from being held in reserve for serious situations where their extra firepower might actually be needed, through being moved to standby for almost any situation, to (now) conducting commando raids on family dwellings (with children inside) for minor — and sometimes non-existent — offenses.

Does this make anyone safer? I think quite the opposite: it makes everyone less safe, including the police themselves.

If only he actually meant it

Republican front-runner John McCain:

We believe government should do only those things we cannot do individually, to tax us no more than necessary, and spend no more than necessary, and then get out of the way of the most industrious, ingenious and optimistic people in the history of the world so that they can build an even greater country than the one they inherited.

If that was a good summary of his views and intentions, I'd be much more favourable towards a McCain White House. The reality, however, doesn't quite measure up to the rhetoric:

It was a fine sentiment, similar to what he was saying after winning South Carolina . . . and it has absolutely nothing to do with McCain's voluminous track record as a congressman, senator and public figure.

The road begins to fork at the definition of what "we cannot do invidually." For instance, individually we — and by "we" I mean "John McCain," his Senate office, and even his own campaign website — can enjoy making or facilitating bets on, say, college basketball games. But it's only through the government can we — and by "we" I mean "John McCain" — make betting on college athletics illegal.

The same goes for the most sacred style of expression guaranteed by the First Amendment (or should I say, "quote First Amendment"): political speech. Sure, individuals such as John McCain can pay for advertisements attacking his political opponents within 90 days of an election. But thanks to John McCain, if two individuals join forces to pay for an ad attacking an elected official 90 days before an election, they are either forced to register as a political committee (and therefore comply with Byzantine federal laws regarding donation limits and disclosure), or do battle in the courts long after the election in question fades away.

Rambo, Rimbaud, what's the difference?

A lengthy discussion of the Rambo series at Reason Online, finds some interesting nuggets:

Twenty years after he last sprayed bullets across America's movie screens, John Rambo has returned in Rambo, a 93-minute feature in which Sylvester Stallone's bulky soldier wields a bow, a machine gun, and his muscle-bound, 215-pound body against another army of foreign villains. If you're rolling your eyes, you're not alone: According to Rotten Tomatoes, just 38 percent of the new film's reviews have been favorable, with its critics deploying such phrases as "torture porn," "jingoistic imperialism," and "the Schindler's List of B-list butchery."

For the most part I'll have to join in the jeers. This is basically a paint-by-numbers action picture that has almost as little to say as its laconic protagonist. But I can't dismiss the Rambo franchise entirely, and even this entry shows a brief glimmer of something thoughtful beneath the monosyllabic grunts and the CGI gore.

There are three things people forget about the Rambo series. One is the original book. Before there were any Rambo movies, there was a novel called First Blood, written by a young John Barth scholar named David Morrell and published in 1972. It's about a Green Beret called Rambo — the name was inspired partly by Rambo apples and partly by the French poet Arthur Rimbaud —who has come home from Vietnam and is tramping across America. It's also about a sheriff named Will Teasle, who doesn't want the long-haired, unshaven kid bringing trouble to his corner of Kentucky. Their conflict builds until it engulfs the entire town, with countless meaningless deaths. The book is told alternately from both characters' point of view, switching back and forth until their identities essentially merge. In the end they both die.

I don't think I've ever seen more than five minutes of any of the various Rambo films . . . and even after reading this article, I'd have to say that they're still of very minor interest to me.

QotD: Libertarianism, the scourge of the GOP

Without attempting to untangle the mess of that second graf — seriously, read it again — my question is this: Exactly where and how has libertarianism poisoned "public life"? Certainly not in the modern, Weekly Standard-approved national GOP, which has shot federal spending through the roof, created mammoth new entitlements, rammed through panicky regulatory nightmares, got the feds deep into local education, and lived out the doctrine of pre-emptive war. Of all the many, many things to complain about the party that has run most of the federal government for the past eight years, "dogmatic libertarianism" has to rank somewhere near the proliferation of Esperanto.

It's always flattering that libertarianism — almost uniquely among strains of modern political thought — is constantly challenged to defend itself against its most theoretical extremes.

Matt Welch, " 'The moral vacuity of dogmatic libertarianism is poisonous to public life'", Hit and Run, 2008-01-25

QotD: How bad could it get?

While sharing cocktails with some delightful Reasonoids at the Happy Hour at The Big Hunt earlier this month, I initiated a little game of ranking presidential candidates. I began by saying that I would have to vote for Hillary Clinton if Mike Huckabee were the Republican presidential candidate. On further reflection, I added that I would have to vote for Mike Huckabee if John Edwards were the Democratic candidate. So my short ranking is that Edwards is worse than Huckabee who is worse than Clinton. On further consideration (and some cocktails later), I began to wonder if reason needs a foreign correspondent for the next four years or so.

Ronald Bailey, "The Presidential Candidate Ranking Game — Who is Worse?", Hit and Run, 2008-01-23

QotD: Economic Interventionism

It can even be argued that in one respect President Reagan was extremely fortunate: the problems he faced, though they had baffled liberals, were problems which gave conservatives no great intellectual difficulty. Liberals were then wont to say, indeed, that conservatives were offering simple answers to complex problems. But the problems were complex to liberals only because they insisted on misunderstanding them at a very simple level. Just as the Ptolemaic theory that the sun goes around the earth can be made to yield accurate predictions only by qualifying it with a multitude of exceptions and special cases, so the liberal belief that inflation was caused by unions and corporations seeking higher prices led to a multitude of difficulties as each intervention to hold down prices created more problems which required more interventions which in turn created more problems and so ad infinitum. And what was true for inflation also held for most areas of policy. It was the complex solutions advocated by liberals that caused the complex problems — at least as much as the other way around. No wonder liberals suffered from malaise.

John O’Sullivan, "Flashback: After Reaganism", National Review

The economics of the sex trade

An article in this week's Economist has some recent findings about the sex trade in Chicago and in Ecuador:

These studies contribute to our understanding of the suppliers of paid sex, but tell us little about their customers. The session's organiser, Taggert Brooks of the University of Wisconsin, attempted to fill this gap in knowledge. He shed light on the sex industry's demand side in his analysis† of men who attend strip clubs. He argued that habitués of strip clubs featuring nude or semi-nude dancers are in search of "near-sex" — an experience of intimacy rather than sexual release. They are aware that paid sex is on offer elsewhere, should they desire it.

Strip-club patrons are more likely to be college-educated (cue some uneasy seat shifting from conference delegates), to have had an STI, and to have altered their sexual behaviour because of AIDS, than non-patrons are. They are typically unmarried, relatively young (against the stereotype of old married men) and are characterised as "high-sensation seekers".

One of the more surprising findings was that condom use is significantly higher among prostitutes in Ecuador than in Chicago:

As in Chicago, the paid-sex market in Ecuador is tiered, with licensed brothel workers earning more per hour than unlicensed street prostitutes. These gradations might reflect different tastes: brothel workers tend to be younger, more attractive and better educated. They are also slightly less likely to have an STI. Condom use is the norm: 61% of street prostitutes surveyed used a condom in the previous three transactions. In Chicago, condoms were used in only a quarter of tricks.

It's not Bullshit, but it is more Penn

If you're a fan of Penn & Teller's Bullshit, you may want to direct your browser here, for a selection of uninhibited, unedited, unshaven Penn Jillette.

H/T to Katherine Mangu-Ward for the link.

Having solved all other crime problems . . .

. . . police in San Mateo County turn to stamping out the scourge of small stakes poker games:

Police in San Mateo County, California apparently first spent months investigating the small-stakes poker game. From this firsthand account, it looks like a couple of the officers were playing regularly for several weeks before sending in the SWAT team, guns drawn, last week. If California is like most states (and I believe it is), a poker game is only illegal if the house is taking a rake off the top. In this case, it looks like that "rake" was the $5 the extra the hosts asked from each buy-in to pay for pizza and beer.

Police also took a 13-year-old girl out of the home, away from her parents, and turned her over to child protective services. In addition to the charge of running an illegal gambling operation, the hosts are also charged with contributing to the delinquency of a minor. Good thing the poor girl was saved before slouching toward an inevitable life of crime.

Update, 16 January: Radley Balko provides some corrections and additions to the original report:

A reason reader shared with me a correspondence he had with Sam Mateo, California Sheriff Greg Munks. Munks says the raid on the San Mateo poker game was not done by the SWAT team. I assumed it had been due to firsthand accounts that described police in "full riot gear" with their "guns drawn." Also via email I learned that the child seized in the raid was a boy, not a girl.

I apologize for the errors. The other points about the appropriateness of the raid, seizing the kid from his parents, etc. still stand. One more thing: Several regular players at this game have emailed to assure me that the hosts were not cheating or defrauding participants, which police seemed to hint was the real reason behind the raid. If the players are right, the only real justification for the raid would then be the $5 charge on top of the buy-in for refreshments.

If you didn't have to live through the 1970's

For those of you lucky enough to have skipped the 1970's (the first time around, any way), James Lileks encapsulates (perhaps that should be encrapsulates) the decade that never should have been:

[. . .] a dreadful 70s generic look that screams END OF AMERICAN INFLUENCE AND CONFIDENCE, plus Kojak-style urban decay. If you weren't around during the rise of the generics you might not recall how depressing these products were; yellow cans that said BEER, yellow boxes of gummint cheese, yellow generic cigarettes. You saw a world where retail would consist entirely of a 7-11 store with buzzing fluorescent lights and the stink of incinerated coffee, a fat greasy unshaven clerk looking at you between glances at a yellow-covered magazine whose cover simply said SMUT, shelves and shelves of generic food, CHUDs in the parking lot siphoning gas from your '77 Pacer — she was twenty years on, and parts were hard to find — while you put a few items in the filthy plastic basket. This was our future in 1975. Little did we know that things would turn around, and in a few years we'd all be spending money on gourmet jelly beans. Morning in America!

Calfornia temperature controls

Perry de Havilland finds that California is hoping to become even more intrusive into the lives of private individuals:

According to American Thinker, there is a move afoot to nationalise the ability of people to control the temperatures of their own homes (yes, really!) in, where else, the People's Republic of California:

What should be controversial in the proposed revisions to Title 24 is the requirement for what is called a "programmable communicating thermostat" or PCT. Every new home and every change to existing homes' central heating and air conditioning systems will required to be fitted with a PCT beginning next year following the issuance of the revision. Each PCT will be fitted with a "non-removable " FM receiver that will allow the power authorities to increase your air conditioning temperature setpoint or decrease your heater temperature setpoint to any value they chose. During "price events" those changes are limited to +/- four degrees F and you would be able to manually override the changes. During "emergency events" the new setpoints can be whatever the power authority desires and you would not be able to alter them.

In other words, the temperature of your home will no longer be yours to control. Your desires and needs can and will be overridden by the state of California through its public and private utility organizations. All this is for the common good, of course.

Just remember . . . once you've accepted that government has a role in setting energy prices, they've got a foothold into controlling energy usage, too. And in this proposal, they're creating an even greater incentive for folks to go "off the grid". Wait and see how they choose to address that leak, should enough people attempt to take advantage of it.

QotD: Bipartisanship

Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) said bipartisanship tends to produce the worst that Washington has to offer — transactional politics where lawmakers scratch one other's backs without regard to the bigger picture. Pork-barrel spending goes unchallenged because members of both political parties know that by objecting to one project, they jeopardize their own, Flake said.

"Partisanship is underrated. There is a time and place for it, and more time and place than we realize," he said.

Jonathan Weisman, "GOP Doubts, Fears 'Post-Partisan' Obama", Washington Post, 2008-01-07

Everyone weighs in with comments on the "Ron Paul" newsletters

Matt Welch rounds up the first batch of responses to the "Ron Paul" newsletter revelations:

David Harsanyi:

The end of Ron Paul? For me, it is. Not the principles, but the man. Sure, Paul has experienced tremendous grassroots support and I've been very sympathetic to a lot of his strong Constitution-based rhetoric. But if even a slither of the quotes in this New Republic article by James Kirchick are accurate, I'm not sure how mainstream libertarians can absolve him.

David Bernstein:

I give Paul the benefit of the doubt on this one, and assume that some right-wing cranks paid him to use him name on their newsletters, and he didn't actually read the newsletters carefully if at all, much less write them. That shows very poor judgment, but is a lot less damning than if he did read, write, or edit these newsletters.

[. . .]

Ryan Sager:

I truly don't understand the Paulites defense that Ron Paul bears no responsibility for any of this . . . just because. (Read the comments to the article — as usual for the Paul brigades, they're unhinged.)

At least Andrew Sullivan may be waking up to the fact that the Ron Paul "revolution" is a front for something much uglier than opposition to the Iraq war and defense of the Constitution.

[. . .]

Ann Althouse:

Look, I said it on Bloggingheads: The things Ron Paul has been saying made me suspect that his libertarianism was a cover for racism.

Much, much more in the original article, with links a-plenty. No matter how it turns out, this is an ugly development for the Paul campaign, and even more so for libertarians and classic liberals.

QotD: The Ron Paul newsletter

I'm disappointed in Paul and in his campaign.

First, a few caveats. I think Paul's prone to nutty conspiracy theories, but I don't think he's a racist, at least not today. Perhaps there was a time when he held views that I and many people reading this site would find repugnant. But I certainly don't think that's the case now. Paul's temperament and demeanor in public does not suggest he's the kind of person capable of writing the bile Kirchick quotes in his article. Paul's position on the drug war alone — which he has acknowledged disproportionately affects minorities — would do more for blacks in America than any proposal any of the other candidates currently has on the table. Paul has also recently rescinded his support for the federal death penalty, also due to its disproportionate impact on blacks. Those two positions alone certainly don't indicate a candidate who fears "animal" blacks from the urban jungle are coming to kill all the white people.

I also think the Paul phenomenon ought to be separated from any personal baggage Paul may have. Yes, there are some losers who support Paul's candidacy. Any time you're a fringe candidate cobbling together support from those who feel disaffected and left behind by the two-party system, you're going to end up bumping elbows with a few weirdos. But there's nothing bigoted about the thousands of college kids, mainstream libertarians, war opponents, drug war opponents, and hundreds-long threads on sites like Digg and Reddit where enthusiasm for Paul's candidacy is strong. This movement is about ideas. There's a vocal, enthusiastic minority of people out there, skewing young, that is excited about "the Constitution," limited government, and personal freedom. That's significant and heartening, and shouldn't be tainted by the fallout from Kirchick's article (though I fear it will [. . .]

Radley Balko, "Ron Paul", Hit and Run, 2008-01-08

The SWAT team "dynamic entry": it's not just for drug busts anymore

Radley Balko posted this little tidbit over at Hit and Run:

Sheriff: SWAT Team Necessary Because Man Is a "Self-Proclaimed Constitutionalist"

World Net Daily reports:

Nearly a dozen members of a police SWAT team in western Colorado punched a hole in the front door and invaded a family's home with guns drawn, demanding that an 11-year-old boy who had had an accidental fall accompany them to the hospital, on the order of Garfield County Magistrate Lain Leoniak.

The boy's parents and siblings were thrown to the floor at gunpoint and the parents were handcuffed in the weekend assault, and the boy's father told WND it was all because a paramedic was upset the family preferred to care for their son themselves.

The boy had apparently fallen and bumped his head. His father, who says he was a medic in Vietnam, says he examined the boy, determined he was fine, and saw no need to take him to the hospital. A paramedic called by neighbors forced his way into the home, then called police when the father refused to let the son go to thie hospital.

The police then sent social workers, who according to the Associated Press reported "a huge hematoma and a sluggish pupil." That night, they sent in the SWAT team.

As it turns out, the kid was fine. After the raid, a doctor examined him, and told him to drink some fluids and take a Tylenol.

No drugs involved in this little contretemps, however:

The sheriff said the decision to use SWAT team force was justified because the father was a "self-proclaimed constitutionalist" and had made threats and "comments" over the years.

However, the sheriff declined to provide a single instance of the father's illegal behavior. "I can't tell you specifically," he said.

"He was refusing to provide medical care," the sheriff said.

QotD: Fascists will heart Huckabee

After a year of wringing their hands over their choices in the presidential race — a pro-choice mayor with an authoritarian streak, a serial flip-flopper, and a senator who is a dedicated opponent of free speech — the Republicans finally have a new front-runner.

Mike Huckabee won the Iowa caucuses Thursday night with 34 percent (with 95 percent of precincts reporting) of the vote, handily defeating Mitt Romney, who came in second with 25 percent in spite of heavy stumping in the key Midwestern state.

Just what Republicans longing for a new Ronald Reagan needed: a religious-right candidate who is also a big-spending nanny statist.

Reporters have been quick to jump on Huckabee's comments in a 1992 Associated Press questionnaire that seemed to confirm their suspicions about a Baptist minister for Arkansas. Huckabee told the AP that "homosexuality is an aberrant, unnatural and sinful lifestyle," and called for isolating people with AIDS. That was a position, by the way, that the venerable Reagan had firmly rejected five years earlier. In 1997, then-Arkansas Gov. Huckabee pushed for a reaffirmation of the state's sodomy law, and in 1998 he compared homosexuality to necrophilia.

Huckabee says his rise in the polls can only be attributed to God's will. He endorsed the Southern Baptist Convention's declaration that "A wife is to submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband." He says he entered politics to "take this nation back for Christ."

David Boaz, "Shakeup in Iowa changes the outlook for both parties:What fresh Hell is this?", San Francisco Chronicle, 2008-01-07

QotD: Economics, government style

This is terrific logic. Americans should be bothered with useless, unsolicited junk mail so that the USPS can continue to pay otherwise unneeded postal workers to deliver it. Makes sense to me.

I thus propose a federal "Agency for Digging Holes in Americans' Front Yards." Then, because of the holes-in-people's-front-yards problem that will inevitably result, I propose a second "Agency for Filling In Yard Holes."

These two agencies will create thousands of new federal jobs. And as we all know, new jobs are good for the economy.

Radley Balko, "Public Choice in Action", Hit and Run, 2008-01-06

QotD: The tone of the campaign

It strikes me as a little-remarked phenomenon in this election that, for the first time since maybe 1988, the Democrats are running a serious candidate with an essentially Naderite worldview on the evils of Corporate Greed. I haven't paid much attention to the Blue Team so far — the Red crack-up being so much more entertaining — but whenever I do I hear some Democrat espousing economic-policy ideas (hatin' on corporations, hi-fivin' Lou Dobbs on trade) much further to the left of Howard Dean in 2004, Bill Bradley in 2000, and Bill Clinton in the 1990s.

With the one-day Hucka-BOO-yah on the GOP side, the big winner in Iowa tonight seems to be illiberal economic populism.

Matt Welch, "Million-Dollar Haircut; Ten-Cent Head", Hit and Run, 2008-01-03

Don't read this if you're already depressed . . .

Radley Balko's predictions of which civil liberties will disappear in 2008:

As the end of the year approaches, it's time for another column of government overreach predictions for the New Year. What outrageous, beyond-parody grabs at power and erosions of civil liberties will transpire in 2008? My predictions:

— The Bush administration will claim it has the power to kidnap citizens of foreign countries for violating U.S. law, and extradite them to the U.S. for trial and imprisonment — even for white collar crimes unrelated to terrorism, and even for acts that aren't illegal in the countries where the target is a citizen.

— Police will take enforcement of prostitution laws to a new level, by arresting and seizing the cars of anyone who merely talks to an undercover cop posing as a sex worker. Good samaritans, beware.

— The war on prescription painkillers will also reach new absurdities, as people will begin to be arrested and convicted of possessing painkillers for which they have a prescription. Prosecutors will weirdly argue that there is no "prescription defense" to possessing prescribed medication.

— How about sex crimes laws? I predict that here too, prosecutors will overreach. Watch, as some overzealous district attorney will charge middle school kids with sex crimes for such childhood shenanigans as slapping fellow classmates on the buttocks.

It gets worse. Much, much worse.

Mother Jones on the Ron Paul campaign

Another view of the insurgent Ron Paul presidential campaign:

Their candidate, a 72-year-old obstetrician from Lake Jackson, Texas — land of duck hunters, ranchers, and oilmen — has improbably become an Internet sensation. He counts more Facebook and MySpace supporters than any Republican; more Google searches, YouTube subscribers, and website hits than any presidential candidate; and more Meetup members than the front-runners of both parties combined. In recent months he was sought out on the blog search engine Technorati more often than anyone except a Puerto Rican singer with a sex tape on the loose; his November 5 Internet "Money Bomb" event pulled in $4 million from more than 35,000 individual donors, a single-day online-fundraising record in a primary. (The previous best was $3 million, by John Kerry.) "The campaign calls itself the Ron Paul Revolution," notes Republican Internet consultant David All. "And I don't think that's a far stretch."

Indeed, Paul's literature is dominated by the word "revolution," though with the middle letters inverted to make "love" — a hippie touch that would be countenanced by few Republicans other than the congressman, who has been elected 10 times on the GOP ticket (and who also ran as a Libertarian in the 1988 presidential election). The truth is, Paul's revolution is a conservative one, by his own account — and thus all the more noteworthy for Democrats, who until now comfortably assumed that progressive bloggers, YouTubers, and ex-Deaniacs would give them, and only them, an edge online. As it turns out, nobody has more Internet buzz than a pro-gun, pro-life, antitax, and antiwar Republican.

QotD: Presidential Propaganda

Here's a history test no one should fail: Name a president whose "only reading materials were government documents and Bible scriptures" and whose tenure was linked to an increasingly unpopular war started under morally murky — if not clearly phony — circumstances.

That would be James K. Polk, who pushed for war with Mexico in 1846 after the Mexican army killed American soldiers in disputed territory along the Rio Grande River. As recounted in You Said What? (Harper Paperbacks), Polk "began to prepare his declaration of war, at no time recognizing that . . . the attack had occurred in disputed land. By not addressing the point, he was able to make the strongest case possible to a skeptical Congress."

Polk lied through omission, a disturbingly common characteristic of many of the "lies and propaganda" campaigns gathered in this volume. One hundred and 20 years later, another president, Lyndon Johnson, took advantage of the fog surrounding the Gulf of Tonkin incident to ratchet up the American military presence in Vietnam. What's more, Johnson systematically pursued a "policy of minimum candor" when discussing U.S. aims and troop commitments: "He left office branded a liar because he could not tell the whole truth about the war."

Nick Gillespie, "You Said What? A happy history of lies and propaganda", New York Post, 2007-12-09

Chicago . . . home of "justice"

Radley Balko highlights how the Chicago police department continues to set standards for police everywhere:

Want to Get Away With Murder in Chicago?

Join the Chicago Police Department.

An eight-month Chicago Tribune investigation of 200+ police shootings going back 10 years found that within hours of a police shooting, the police department convenes hastily-assembled, wagon-circling "roundtables" of law enforcement officials where police and witnesses are questioned but not sworn or recorded, where the officers involved are allowed to confer to get their stories straight before being questioned, and where the inevitable conclusion is always that the shooting was justified. From there, broader, show-investigations begin. Key witnesses go uninterviewed. Forensic evidence is ignored. And the shooting officer is inevitably exonerated.

Clinton vs Giuliani? Yikes!

David Boaz explains why it may not matter (as far as civil liberties are concerned) who wins next November. If Hillary Clinton wins the Democratic nomination, we can expect further expansion in the role of government in everyday life:

Clinton, always eager to wield power on behalf of her vision of the public good, has just endorsed new government mandates on health care and energy along with a $50 billion spending program for global AIDS. Meanwhile, revelations about Giuliani's secretive use of New York City police and his refusal to allow the city comptroller to audit his security spending reflect his lifelong affinity for using and abusing power.

Clinton calls herself a "government junkie." She says, "There is no such thing as other people's children" and promises to work on "redefining who we are as human beings in the post-modern age."

Running for President, she's full of ideas about how to use the power of the federal government. Indeed, she says, "I have a million ideas. The country can't afford them all." That's good to hear. But the ones she apparently thinks we can afford still include a national health care plan, a $50 billion program of energy subsidies, more money for local schools and local roads and bridges, a bailout fund for mortgage borrowers, $25 billion for "American Retirement Accounts," and more. She still has the government junkie's love for a nurturing and nannying government.

On the other hand, if Rudy Giuliani wins the Republican nomination, we can expect even more authoritarian measures, more government secrecy, and more intrusions into the lives of ordinary people:

Giuliani seems much less committed to any particular vision of government's role. Rather, throughout his career Giuliani has displayed an authoritarian streak that is deeply troubling in a potential President who would assume executive powers vastly expanded by President Bush. As U.S. attorney, he pioneered the use of the midday, televised "perp walk" for white-collar defendants who posed no threat to the community. It was a brutal way to treat people who were, after all, innocent until proven guilty.

As mayor he was so keen to "clean up the city" and crack down on dissent that he lost 35 First Amendment lawsuits. He fought against any oversight of his activities; he resisted investigations and audits by the Independent Budget Office and the New York State Comptroller. As Rachel Morris reported in the Washington Monthly, "Over the past 40 years, only two commissions had been held to revise New York's governing document. During his time in office, Giuliani convened three." And he stacked the commissions with close allies and pressed them to eliminate the IBO and the city ombudsman.

He released details from the sealed criminal records of police critics, in clear defiance of state law. But he did manage to seal the records of his own administration by transferring them to a private foundation, even though mayoral records are legally city property.

Not much to be said for either candidate as far as limiting the scope of government, or rolling back some of the powers that Bush has claimed during his administration. Both candidates are clearly inclined to be even more likely to attempt to centralize power in their own hands.

The proper sphere of government?

To borrow a phrase from Fark.com . . . having solved all the nation's problems, Congress turns its attention to the pressing issue of investigating professional baseball:

[. . .] we now know beyond a shadow of a doubt that if you give a former Senate Majority Leader $2 million a month for more than a year and half, force clubhouse lackeys to testify under threat of $100,000 fine, and have federal prosecutors grant vastly reduced sentences to drug convicts in exchange for cooperating with Mitchell's private investigation, you can indeed produce circumstantial evidence that Nook Logan (career home runs: 2) and nearly four score others may have taken legal supplements without a prescription to help them recover more quickly after working out, many during a time when such supplements were perfectly acceptable according to Major League Baseball's own rules. And as a direct result, your teenage daughter might eventually face drug testing if she plays sports, once Congress goes through another thrilling round of reforming government.

In so many ways, this is a lovely example of why governments should be limited in the scope of what they can do . . .

QotD: Military Kangaroo Justice

No American would accept the proposition that one of our citizens, having been cleared of wrongdoing by American courts, could be abducted by a foreign power and imprisoned for years, only to have his fate determined by a kangaroo court that flouted the most elementary procedural rights. The Supreme Court should not accept it from our government either. If a legitimate hearing finds that Boumediene and his fellow detainees are guilty of aiding America's enemies, so be it. But we should not be satisfied to leave them to languish until the military decides whether the witches will float.

Julian Sanchez, "Restoring Habeas: Why old 'enemy combatmant' rules can't apply to a global battlefield.", Reason Online, 2007-12-12

QotD: The evolution of gender equality

That tells me that you are younger than I. Consider the time/culture that Elena was raised in. "Exploring the possibilties of boyfriends" was not an option. Any more than it was when I was 18.

I went from being the property of my father to being the property of my husband. Literally.

If I had been injured and compensation was awarded in a Personal Injury case, the Plaintiff would have been my father/husband. And the judgement (money) would have been payable to him, not me. And, if he had chosen to spend the money not "for my benefit", I would have had no recourse.

I had absolutely no legal rights separate from my father/husband.

"Moving out" and living on your own was no remedy. A woman was legally incapable of signing a contract. Want to lease an apartment? Buy a car? Open a bank account? Your "responsible male", i.e., father or husband, needed to sign for you.

Fortunately, times and laws changed.

Sharon Kutzschbach, posting to the Bujold Mailing List, 2007-12-12

QotD: The 1960s

The 1960s remain a volatile mixture of sacred birthplace and hallowed battleground, both Jerusalem and Gettysburg for our national politics and culture. The decade's reach is long, its grasp immense, alternately a continuing mystery needing unraveling or an ongoing problem requiring a solution.

As music, art, racial and sexual relations, and citizens' relation to the state all percolated and mutated in that decade, the resulting cultural and political heat weakened certain bridges across cultural divides. Whether the decade's tumult created those divisions or just illuminated them, they are still often read as defining America in our red/blue era. For one example, the '60s legacy led Andrew Sullivan to the mad expediency of declaring that only a Barack Obama presidency can reconcile the dueling meanings of that decade, the era when Baby Boomers' passions and concerns began their long march through all American’s institutions.

Brian Doherty, "Always on Trial for Just Being Born: Revisiting 1960s tumult in art and politics — and seeing what lasts", Reason Online, 2007-12-11

How not to fix a banking crisis

Jeff Taylor introduces some cold water reality to a fantasy castle-in-the-sky "fix" to the sub-prime mortgage crisis:

"It is probably in their best interest to walk away. They have no equity," Whalen says of the hapless borrowers.

The possibility of their underwater borrowers actually taking a walk terrifies the banks, however. Banks would have no choice but to write down and make real phantom losses lurking just off their books. What to do? How about pretending that the loans aren't actually bad. How do you do that? Pretend that the borrowers can pay them back. How do you do that? Pretend the teaser rate is the real rate. Presto, problem solved.

At this point, some adult would ideally step in and say, "no, that's fraud." But clearly Treasury is not that mature. And it appears the Fed has resigned itself to some form of greater idiocy coming out of Congress on the subprime front that maybe, just maybe, the teaser freezer can head off.

However, the stubborn fact remains that banks will lose money on teaser rates. Regulators and investors both know this. Who exactly are we trying to fool? Besides inattentive voters.

Of course, nobody in the highly educated, fast-paced, exciting world of banking ever noticed that lending large sums of money to people with little or no real ability to repay the principal might be a risk. Bailing them out with public funds is exactly the wrong thing to do . . . which makes it the odds-on favourite of both stricken bankers and politicians needing to be seen to be "doing something".

QotD: College Football

In other college football news, 13 of the 121 Division I-A football coaches have been fired, forced out or resigned under pressure since turkeys were carved. This only seems like a purge because departures of Division I-A coaches are so rare. Eleven percent of Division I-A head football coaches have been shown the door in 2007; last year, 19 percent of NFL head coaching jobs turned over. The average of the past two decades has been roughly 20 percent annual head coach turnover in the NFL, versus about 5 percent in Division I-A.

As TMQ often reminds everyone, the football-factory schools in Division I-A hold such incredible advantages in recruiting, in cupcake-opponent scheduling and in playing more games at home than on the road that an orangutan could coach a Division I-A school to bowl eligibility. Almost every football-factory season ends in a bowl bid, and thus the typical football season outcome at a big school is officially characterized as a success. Two-thirds of NFL teams do not qualify for the postseason, and thus the typical season outcome in the pros is failure. That's why there are far more long-term coaching dynasties in college than in the NFL. It is simply easier to win games at a football-factory college than in the pros, me