If you think that, like the Macarena, campus speech codes were mocked into obscurity during the 1990s, think again. Approximately 71 percent of American campuses still impose highly restrictive "red light speech codes" on college students, notes Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE).
Recently Reason.tv's Ted Balaker sat down with Lukianoff to discuss the sorry state of free expression in higher education, why you can't call Harvard men sissies, and how a student got expelled for criticizing a university president on Facebook.
Approximately 8.5 minutes.
Shot by Paul Detrick and Hawk Jensen. Edited by Austin Bragg.
Scroll down for HD, iPod, and audio versions of this and all our videos and subscribe to Reason.tv's YouTube channel to receive automatic notification when new content is posted.
Reason
Senior Editor Tim Cavanaugh appeared on Fox Business Channel's
Varney & Company this morning, discussing the Golden State's
bad budget math, the state Democratic leader's challenge to
spending cuts and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's recent
accusation that his fellow Republicans are soft on unions.
Take a gander:
Makeup artist Remy Couture
is being
prosecuted in Montreal for "corrupting morals" by making
"obscene" horror movies and posting them online. Under Canadian
law,
material is deemed obscene if "a dominant characteristic" of it is
"the undue exploitation of sex" or sex combined with "crime,
horror, cruelty and violence"—a definition so vague that it makes
you miss the relative clarity of America's Miller standard.
The two-prong definition means sex and horror scenes that would be
legal on their own can trigger prosecution when combined in the
same film; it arguably makes just about any R-rated American horror
movie obscene in Canada. Couture's short films chronicle the crimes
of a serial killer who likes to have sex with his victims after
they're dead. Couture (pictured in the middle of the photo, which
was taken at a protest outside the Montreal courthouse) emphasizes
that his work does not feature rape scenes and that all the gory
violence is simulated. Too well, apparently. The Montreal
Gazette
reports that the case against Couture originated with
complaints to Interpol from people who "thought the depicted events
were real."
The notion that simulated violence can justify legal restrictions that would otherwise be impermissible is central to the case involving California's ban on sales of violent video games to minors, which the Supreme Court is scheduled to hear in a couple of weeks. As a law professor, Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan promoted a similar idea, suggesting in a 1993 law review article that anti-porn activists could get around First Amendment obstacles by focusing on "works that are both sexually explicit and sexually violent."
If you’ve fired up an Xbox 360, a PS3, or a
Nintendo Wii for an evening of digital fun recently, you owe much
of the opportunity to the gaming machine that set the standard for
every console to come: the original Nintendo Entertainment System.
The very first NES consoles hit stores in the U.S. 25 years ago
today. And as any child of the 80s knows, within a couple of years,
they were ubiquitous. But
as Wired reports, the system was very nearly a
flop:
Twenty-five years ago today, the American videogame market was in shambles. Sales of game machines by Atari, Mattel and Coleco had risen to dizzying heights, then collapsed even more quickly.
Retailers didn’t want to listen to the little startup Nintendo of America talk about how its Japanese parent company had a huge hit with the Famicom (the 1983 Asian release of what became NES). In America, videogames were dead, dead, dead. Personal computers were the future, and anything that just played games but couldn’t do your taxes was hopelessly backwards.
But Nintendo President Hiroshi Yamauchi, whose grandfather had started Nintendo as a playing-card company almost a century earlier, believed strongly in the quality of the NES. So he told his American executives to launch it in the most difficult market: New York City. If they could make it there, Yamauchi thought, they could make it anywhere.
They couldn’t make it there. Retailers wouldn’t take the NES. So Nintendo of America head Minoru Arakawa, Yamauchi’s son-in-law, took a huge gamble that he didn’t share with the president. He told stores that Nintendo would provide them with product and set up all the displays, and they only had to pay for the ones that sold and could return everything else. For the stores, it was a no-risk proposition, and a few agreed to sell NES.
Even then, the initial roll out didn’t exactly
lead to a new high score. Nintendo only sold 50,000 consoles—about
half their units. But they pushed forward with the NES anyway,
quickly adding to the number of cities in which you could purchase
the device and then going national. Eventually, the console
sold more than 61
million units before giving way to newer, more powerful gaming
systems like the Super NES and the Sega Genesis—systems that, in
turn, paved the way for the ultra-powerful consoles we have
now.
Today, according to the Entertainment Software Association, an estimated 42 percent of American households have game consoles. And for the last half decade or so, the gaming industry (as a whole) has done even better business than the big-screen box office, and top games setting entertainment-industry sales records. Meanwhile, Nintendo’s flagship games have become cultural touchstones for a whole generation. (If you didn’t grok why Scott Pilgrim collected power-ups and coins after defeating his enemies in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, it’s probably because you didn’t spend enough time playing the greatest NES game of all time, Super Mario Bros.)
It’s a great business success story. It’s also a great cultural success story. While it would be easy to over-interpret such things, I think the success of console gaming, which in some ways flips the traditional author-viewer relationship by putting the player in charge, reveals something about what the American public increasingly wants from its entertainment: individual choice, control, and digitally-enhanced free play—as well, maybe, as a shot at infinite lives (if you can get it).
Much more from Reason on video games here.
That is, how many deaths to coalition forces have been caused by the U.S. presence in Afghanistan vs. how many deaths of them, or anyone, caused by Wikileaks public release of secret U.S. documents related to that war? As Adam Serwer notes at American Prospect:
Despite widespread anticipation that the release of Wikileaks' Afghanistan logs would lead to the deaths of Afghan citizens who had helped the U.S. military, fueled by both official statements from the U.S. government and the Taliban itself, Defense SecretaryRobert Gates recently told Senator Carl Levin that the worst hasn't happened:
As far as broader intelligence gathering, Mr. Gates told Mr. Levin, “Our initial review indicates most of the information contained in these documents relates to tactical military operations.” He added: “The initial assessment in no way discounts the risk to national security; however, the review to date has not revealed any sensitive intelligence sources and methods compromised by this disclosure.”
Also note the nearly 7000 civilian casualties of the way in just the past four years. Earlier blogging from me on relative guilt and blood on hands when military men accused Wikileaks of criminal and fatal recknessness.
Forget the
craptacular poll numbers, the horrifying (thought meant to be
sympathetic) profile in the New York Times mag, the looming party
loss in November. President Barack Obama has crossed the line
dividing statesman and sad sack by constantly pushing a line that
makes George Costanza's infamous "jerk store"
comeback seem like the fabled "killer
joke" of Monty Python.
As USA Today reports, the prez has hauled out his har-har-funny line about Slurpees at least "20 times in recent weeks":
And every once in a while [after working like mad to get the U.S. economy/car out of a ditch], we'd look up at the Republicans. They were -- they had driven into the ditch, but they had gotten out and they were kind of taking a break, fanning themselves and sipping on a Slurpee, watching us do all the work.
Over the weekend, Barack and Michelle Obama came to campaign in Columbus, Ohio, where the president boldly stuck it to the Party of Lincoln Slurpees by suggesting that Republicans don't just guzzle crushed-ice beverages but...lattes!
"Even though we didn't drive it into the ditch, it is still our responsibility to get that car out of the ditch, and so we pushed and we pushed. And every once in a while we'd look up. And up on the road, you'd see a Republican standing there, fanning themselves, sippin' on a Slurpee, having a latte," he said.
A Slurpee and a latte? Those goddamn sons of bitches! More on that here.
If that bit about the lattes sounds familiar, you're probably thinking of an incredibly shitty ad from years back that painted Howard Dean (remember him?) and Dems as latte-drinkin', Volvo-drivin', body-piercin' freakazoids:
To put a positive spin on this, I guess it's worth postulating that it's a better America when Slurpees and lattes are available in one form or another at every convenience store in the country (though as Joe Biden will tell you, the 7-Eleven stores in his home state are staffed exclusively by people with "slight Indian accents").
And I guess it's a better America where martinis are no longer the drink of choice of miscreants and malefactors everywhere. To recall those simpler days, check out this cover of Bob Dylan's "Hurricane" (the martini line comes in around 2.50):
Because you might, according to documents recently secured by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Two documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request describe how the Department set up a Social Network Monitoring Center before Obama's inauguration in 2008, and how federal law enforcement uses social networking websites to track potential illegal immigrants or fraudsters. The EFF says the following about U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services:
[C.I.S. is] specifically instructing its agents to attempt to “friend” citizenship petitioners and their beneficiaries on social networks in the hope that these users will (perhaps inadvertently) allow agents to monitor their activities for evidence of suspected fraud, including evidence that their relationships might not live up to the USCIS’ standard of a legitimate marriage.
The post goes on to explain how the USCIS's use of social networking "suggests there’s nothing to prevent an exaggerated, harmless or even out-of-date off-hand comment in a status update from quickly becoming the subject of a full citizenship investigation." But it also concedes that "there are good reasons for government agencies and law enforcement officials to use all the tools at their disposal, including social networks, to ferret out fraud and other illegal conduct." So just like in the non-social networking "real world" that websites like Facebook try to emulate, there has to be some kind of equitable (and for that matter constitutional) balance between security and civil liberties.
Fair enough. But it's worth asking whether there are even any meaningful parallels between surveillance in the "real world" and surveillance in the online one.
Unless you're, I don't know, the president of North Korea or something, it's impossible to figure out what absoulely everyone in your society is doing at a given time. And even in North Korea there are some serious (or at least serious from the leadership's perspective) blind spots. Facebook has no blind spots. It's a wealth of freely-available social information that virtually anyone can access at a given time. The surveillance potential is enormous, and so is the possibility of Facebook or Twitter users getting caught up in criminal investigations of which they have absolutely no knowledge. People have even been charged with "crimes" based solely on their online social networking activities. That's why, at the very least, the government needs to be held to extremely high standards of transparency in terms of how it uses social network surveillance as a law enforcement tool. Unfortunately, there's no sign of such standards in the documents unearthed by EFF. EFF's efforts are a reminder of how social networks expand the government's potential to violate the privacy of individuals, and of how vital it is for the first digitally-socialized generation to remain constantly, permanently aware of this.
I could be the only (non-Russian) person alive who thinks Mikhail Gorbachev, accidental destroyer of the Soviet empire, is a one of the most overrated historical figures of the last half century. I outlined some of my objections here, quoting Robert Service’s observation that Gorbachev intended glasnost as “a renaissance of Leninist ideals” and that his books on glasnost and perestroika “still equivocated on Stalin.” But periodically, Gorbi gets it right. Having previously endorsed Vladimir Putin’s autocratic rule, the former Soviet dictator (a word rarely, if ever, used to describe a man who never allowed his leadership to be democratically challenged) has offered some guarded criticism of the Medvedev-Putin tag team.
“The current authorities haven’t become leaders for me yet,” said Gorbachev, who usually avoids criticizing President Dmitry Medvedev, 45, and his predecessor, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, 58. Gorbachev said the so-called tandem rule of the two politicians is “legitimate and legal,” though something “unexpected” may happen in the 2012 presidential election, when both men are eligible to run.
“Our government fears its own citizens,” Gorbachev said, warning the patience of Russians with “a swamp of stagnation, indifference and corruption” may eventually snap. “When people finally realize that their opinion is ignored and that nothing depends on them, they’ll go out on the street,” he said.
In the same interview, Gorbachev identifies the Russian leader to whom he “feels closest” as Yuri Andropov, the humorless thug who violently suppressed the 1956 Hungarian uprising.
In other Moscow-related news: According to a report from Russia’s Interfax news wire, the spies thrown out of the US earlier this year (including tabloid darling Anna Chapman) were presented with the Kremlin’s “highest honors" yesterday. Meanwhile, in Washington, officials are furiously hitting that “overcharge” button, shouting something about "no whammies."
Here's what you were reading last week at Hit & Run:
Just Admit it, Newspapers: You're Scared of Muslims, by Matt Welch (10/13)
Holder to California Potsmokers: We Will Still Lock You Up, by Matt Welch (10/15)
Is a Misdemeanor Sufficient Reason to Deny Second Amendment Rights? by Brian Doherty (10/15)
You Know Who Else Spelled "Crystal" With a K? The Nazis! by Tim Cavanaugh (10/13)
The White House Isn't Sure What's In the Health Care Bill, by Peter Suderman (10/12)
Jacob Sullum blogged about the strange belief on the part of many pundits, Democrats, and alas fans of liberalized pot laws that the Democratic Party is their friend. A group of New Hampshire Democrats, in a web site dedicated to attacking their statewide Republican opponents, slams a candidate for alderman in Manchester, Phil Greazzo, because "Greazzo uses Marijuana, or as he terms it "green gift of God" on a regular basis to "relax" and is a member of the Free State movement. (Nashua Telegraph, 3/2/2007) He is a candidate only Ron Paul could love."
Pot legalization would make a sweet way for the GOP in general to make a sternly fiscally responsible case for drug war sanity, and maybe maybe maybe just maybe (but probably not) shear off some young potential Democrat votes. Alas, that's a strategy only a Ron Paul might embrace, for the most part.
Today the Supreme Court agreed to hear a case involving the federal government's post-9/11 detention of terrorism suspects as "material witnesses." The case was brought by Abdullah al-Kidd, a former University of Idaho football star who was detained at Dulles International Airport in March 2003 on his way to Saudi Arabia, where he planned to pursue a doctorate in Islamic studies:
Magistrate Judge Mikel H. Williams of the Federal District Court in Boise, Idaho, authorized the arrest, based on an affidavit from Special Agent Scott Mace of the F.B.I. "Kidd is scheduled to take a one-way, first-class flight (costing approximately $5,000)," the affidavit said.
That statement was false: the ticket was for a round trip, in coach, costing $1,700.
Kidd was held for 16 days in three different states, ostensibly as a material witness. But he was never called to testify, and his treatment did not fit the legal pretext for holding him:
Mr. Kidd said he did not understand why someone held as a mere witness should be subjected to harsh treatment.
"I was made to sit in a small cell for hours and hours and hours, buck naked," he said. "I was treated worse than murderers."
Last year the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit ruled that Kidd could sue former Attorney General John Ashcroft for authorizing abuse of the material witness statute. In keeping with its policy of defending (and extending) war-on-terror excesses that the president criticized before he was the president, the Obama administration is asking the Supreme Court to overturn the 9th Circuit's decision (PDF).
Reason Senior Editor Radley
Balko looks at recent incidents in New York, Albuquerque, and
Kansas City which demonstrate a recurring pattern: When whistle
blower police officers report their fellow cops for misconduct or
excessive use of force, the whistle blowers themselves tend to
receive more severe punishment than the cops they report. For all
the fuss about "Stop Snitchin'" campaigns, in which witnesses to
criminal activity are threatened and intimidated for testifying,
the Blue Wall of Silence may be the most effective such campaign
around.
With Election Day just a couple of weeks away, The New York Times is intensifying its efforts to make "the torrents of money, much of it anonymous, gushing into House and Senate races across the country" into "the dominant story line of this year's midterm elections"—a story line in which Citizens United "remains the touchstone," despite a lack of evidence that the Supreme Court decision has had much to do with those gushing torrents. Sunday's "Week in Review" section included a piece by Jill Abramson in which she likens the current situation to the illegal corporate contributions collected by Richard Nixon's notoriously shady 1972 re-election campaign. "This election year," she notes, "is the first since the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision, which allows corporations for the first time to finance ads that directly support or oppose political candidates."
Not that Citizens United had anything to do with corporate campaign contributions, which remain illegal. "In this year's midterm elections," Abramson concedes, "there is no talk of satchels of cash from donors. Nor is there any hint of illegal actions reaching Watergate-like proportions. But the fund-raising practices that earned people convictions in Watergate—giving direct corporate money to a campaign and doing so secretly—are back in a different form in 2010."
In other words, businesses are supporting independent organizations such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Karl Rove's Crossroads GPS, which are running ads that criticize Democrats. Not technically illegal, but anathema to Democrats—just like Richard Nixon!
In today's Times, Michael Luo reports that some independent groups, including Crossroads GPS, are using the freedom granted by Citizens United to engage in "express advocacy," explicitly calling for a candidate's election or defeat (usually the latter). Others, including the Chamber of Commerce, are sticking to "issue ads," apparently worried about running afoul of tax rules that say 501(c)(4) "social welfare" organizations and 501(c)(6) trade associations are not supposed to focus mainly on partisan politics. But as Luo notes, the issue ads manage to communicate a pretty clear view about the virtues of particular politicians. Indeed, the whole premise of McCain-Feingold's ban on "electioneering communications," which applied to any message sponsored by a union or corporation that mentioned a federal candidate close to an election, was that issue ads had made a joke out of the ban on express advocacy. If so, we should be no worse off now that the Supreme Court has overturned both bans than we were before McCain-Feingold was enacted in 2002 (taking effect after that year's elections).
Yet Luo, whose story is ominously headlined "Groups Push Legal Limits in Advertising," calls express advocacy "an important new tool afforded to outside interest groups that is reshaping the contours of this year's midterm elections." That thesis seems inconsistent with Luo's claim that issue ads and express advocacy are indistinguishable to "casual observers" (i.e., voters). But if there is an important difference between issue ads and express advocacy—so important that it can reshape the contours of an election—the main argument for the ban on electioneering communications was specious. Is that something that campaign finance reformers (a category that seems to include most Times reporters) are now prepared to admit?
These were the most popular columns at Reason.com last week:
Abolish Drunk Driving Laws: If lawmakers are serious about saving lives, they should focus on impairment, not alcohol, by Radley Balko (10/11)
Fluidity and Mobility: It's time to redefine what it means to be middle class, by Sam Staley (10/12)
Logical Farce: Obama's wild attacks on "foreign money" reek of desparation, by Jacob Sullum (10/13)
It Can Happen Here: Government really can be cut: case studies from Canada, New Zealand, and the United States, by Arnold Kling, David Henderson, & Maurice McTigue (10/12)
Freer Is Better: Measuring economic liberty around the world, by John Stossel (10/14)
One thing both parties can agree on? When all else fails, pander to seniors.
Republicans did it with Medicare during the health care debate. Now, as the election approaches, Democrats are pushing for a one-time boost in Social Security payments. Free money! Sort of.
Last week, the Social Security Administration
announced that the program’s beneficiaries wouldn’t see a
cost-of-living increase in their benefit payments this year. So
President Obama and Democratic leadership in Congress have proposed
to give Social Security recipients a $250 bonus. White House
spokesdork Ribert Gibbs
is “urging” legislators “on both sides of the aisle to support our
seniors” and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has said she’ll
schedule a vote on the bonus payments for November.
Now, as political proposals go, “Here is some free money for you, people-who-vote-in-high-numbers-during-midterms” makes an obvious sort of sense. And certainly the senior-friendly lobbyists at AARP think this is deserved. Seniors are being squeezed. Drug costs are up. What will grandma do when she wants to take the grandkids to Wally World? Etc. etc.
The $250 bonus proposal is being called an “Economic Recovery Payment.” But the only thing seniors are recovering from is an extra-large increase in benefits.
In fact, this year’s payments are still scheduled to be higher than the consumer price index they typically track. How’s that? In 2009 Social Security benefits rose significantly when energy prices briefly spiked. But since then, overall consumer prices have come down. Social Security payments haven’t been increased, but they haven’t been reduced either.
At U.S. News, John Farrell explains:
Soaring energy prices in 2008 produced a whopping 5.8 percent COLA hike in 2009—the largest in 27 years. Then energy prices and other costs plummeted in the recession. Inflation was kept in check by the tough economic times. The government didn't ask Social Security recipients to pay the money back, or to take a cut last year. It simply didn't add another COLA.
The result,
as the folks at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget
helpfully show, is that Social Security payments are, in fact,
currently higher than if they had followed the Consumer Price
Index.
CRFB suggests we call it a Cost Of Reelection Adjustment, and offers a reminder that neither Social Security nor the overall federal budget are exactly in tip-top shape:
A one-time payment to seniors or ad-hoc COLA would be economically unjustifiable since doing so would actually be relative benefit payment increase. With our fiscal outlook so poor and with Social Security's projections just as bad, increasing relative benefits, while politically a good move (I mean, who wouldn’t want free money!), is a terrible fiscal idea. Such a proposal (whether offset or not) would truly reflect poor policymaking and blatant pandering.
“Poor policymaking.” “Blatant pandering.” Terrible, yes. But have some sympathy. How else are our nation’s politicians supposed to get themselves elected?
The Washington State Ferries -- the aquatic arm of the State Department of Transportation -- is refusing to stock the current edition of the Seattle Weekly, whose cover depicts Muhammed Sen. Patty Murray covered in pork:
A spokesperson for the ferry system tells the Weekly the issue was pulled because "it was distasteful. We pulled one I think three years ago when it was a caricature of Sweeney Todd slashing Santa's throat during the holidays. We decided to pull it because we thought it was denigrating to women. It was not in keeping with what we want our customers to have to view. I thought it forwarded a disrespectful attitude toward a public figure." The spokeswoman also says that the ferries hadn't received any customer complaints about the issue, but "I don't want to have to receive a complaint about it."
Bonus links: Read the Weekly's actual article here. See the image the paper was spoofing here.
How
much does the president not understand why his party is about to
get shellacked? This
much:
WEST NEWTON, Mass. - President Barack Obama said Americans' "fear and frustration" is to blame for an intense midterm election cycle that threatens to derail the Democratic agenda.
"Part of the reason that our politics seems so tough right now and facts and science and argument does not seem to be winning the day all the time is because we're hardwired not to always think clearly when we're scared," Obama said Saturday evening in remarks at a small Democratic fundraiser Saturday evening. "And the country's scared." [...]
He faulted the economic downturn for Americans' inability to "think clearly" and said the burden is on Democrats "to break through the fear and the frustration people are feeling."
As Nick Gillespie mentioned earlier this morning, the thing you'll notice absent from this formulation is any hint whatsoever that this frustration may have been caused in part by federal policies that failed to deliver on their promises of private-sector job growth, contained unemployment, and summers/Summers of recovery. Instead, as detailed in this weekend's big New York Times Magazine profile of Obama, you have a braintrust (and arguably a broad swath of the Democratic Party) utterly convinced of its own moral, scientific, and historical certainty, plagued only by doubts about its salesmanship. Excerpts from that:
"Given how much stuff was coming at us," Obama told me, "we probably spent much more time trying to get the policy right than trying to get the politics right. There is probably a perverse pride in my administration — and I take responsibility for this; this was blowing from the top — that we were going to do the right thing, even if short-term it was unpopular. And I think anybody who's occupied this office has to remember that success is determined by an intersection in policy and politics and that you can't be neglecting of marketing and P.R. and public opinion." [...]
The view from inside the administration starts with a basic mantra: Obama inherited the worst problems of any president in years. Or in generations. Or in American history. He prevented another Great Depression while putting in place the foundation for a more stable future. But it required him to do unpopular things that would inevitably cost him. [...]
Gov. Ed Rendell of Pennsylvania, though, is among the Democrats who grade Obama harshly for not being more nimble in the face of opposition. "B-plus, A-minus on substantive accomplishments," he told me, "and a D-plus or C-minus on communication." The health care legislation is "an incredible achievement" and the stimulus program was "absolutely, unqualifiedly, enormously successful," in Rendell's judgment, yet Obama allowed them to be tarnished by critics. "They lost the communications battle
on both major initiatives, and they lost it early," said Rendell[.] [...]
[F]or all the second-guessing, what you do not hear in the White House is much questioning of the basic elements of the program — Obama aides, liberal and moderate alike, reject complaints from the right that the stimulus did not help the economy or that health care expands government too much, as well as complaints from the left that he should have pushed for a bigger stimulus package or held out for a public health care option. [...]
Instead, what you hear Obama aides talking about is that the system is "not on the level." That's a phrase commonly used around the West Wing — "it's not on the level." By that, they mean the Republicans, the news media, the lobbyists, the whole Washington culture is not serious about solving problems. The challenge, as they see it, is how to rise above a town that can obsess for a week on whether an obscure Agriculture Department official in Georgia should have been fired. At the same time, as Emanuel told me, "We have to play the game."
As Brands, the historian, put it, "It'll be really interesting to see if a president who is thinking long term can have an impact on a political system that is almost irredeemably short term in its perspective."
The reaction from these folks on Nov. 3 sure is going to be interesting.
To hear the Obama administration tell it, there are few things worse than anonymous political activity. Just recently, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius told the Christian Science Monitor:
The untold story of 2010 is not the "tea party" or not the health-care bill, or a number of these issues. It is the amount of money that is flowing in districts around the country and particularly the amount of anonymous money....
I haven’t been any place where there aren’t dozens of ads now being run and nobody knows who is behind them...I am used to a political system where people engage in battles and you know who brought them to the dance.
But in a new Reason.tv video, Nick Gillespie and Meredith Bragg ask, Is anonymous political speech really that new - or that bad?
Because my blood pressure was
dangerously low, I tuned into Morning Joe to get frustrated. Among
the spectacles was recidivist
plagiarist Mike Barnicle denouncing the lack of historical
knowledge in America and then immediately confusing Tennessee's and
Kentucky's legendary old senators and Mayor Mike Bloomberg with
dead guitar hero Mike Bloomfield. Who is writing Barnicle's
material these days? He should be fired!
Sen. Claire McCaskill went on to complain about how voters aren't paying attention to all the Dems have done in the past 18 months to save the "middle class" because of all the negative and secret (?) ads that Republicans have been spewing at her party's candidates. Bizarrely, that conversation got started by a discussion of Democratic candidate Jack Conway's pathetic attack on Rand Paul as a true believer in "Aqua Buddha" rather than the carpenter who came and died a criminal's death. (McCaskill wrapped up her appearance by bragging on how St. Louis Cardinals' skipper Tony LaRussa will soon be advertising against "puppy mills.")
Note to McCaskill and other Democrats
complaining about not getting enough "credit" for "going to the
mat" for the middle class: Voters know what you and the president
passed since January 2009 (and nobody is buying the suggestion that
your dominance in both houses of Congress is an instance of
"partisan gridlock"). That's precisely why you're about to get your
asses kicked to the curb. TARP and the auto bailout, initiated
under Bush and supported by Obama and most Democrats, are
unpopular. Health care reform is unpopular. Increasing massively
troop strength in Afghanistan: unpopular. Congress and federal
workers getting raises? Also unpopular. Fin-reg reform? To the
extent that anyone knows about it, unpopular. The idea of
constantly bailing out homeowners regardless of inability to pay?
Not popular. An inability to finalize tax rates that will kick in
on January 1, 2011? Really unpopular.
The president and Congress have
historic or near-historic lows in approval ratings. All Democratic
claims about how the stimulus would keep unemployment low and
kickstart the economy are belied by everything that runs in the
daily newspaper. You're not victims of bad press, but of press (you
best hope that no independent or swing voters read the new New
York Times Magazine profile of Barack Obama, which is a
tremendous portrait of
the narcissist in winter).
And a note to Republicans: You got your own asses kicked to the curb back in 2006 not because of what you didn't do but because of what you did: Blow out all stops on spending and war without doing anything to show that you knew bupkus about keeping government lean and efficient.
It's not a complicated lesson, but it seems one that either party is capable of reciting from memory. All pols oughta read this:
A majority in a new USA TODAY/Gallup Poll disapprove of the jobs President Obama and Congress are doing and have unfavorable views of both major political parties. Only half express even a fair amount of trust and confidence in the people who hold or are running for public office. Just one in four are satisfied with the way the nation is being governed.
Meanwhile, six in 10 Americans say the government has too much power, and nearly half agree with this alarming statement: "The federal government poses an immediate threat to the rights and freedom of ordinary citizens."...
58% of those surveyed say the government is doing too many things that should be left to individuals and businesses. That's the highest percentage who say the government is doing too much in more than a decade.
In war as in life, what doesn't happen is often
as significant as what does. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, with
their setbacks, victories, and casualties, have many things in
common with past American wars. But as Steve Chapman notes, there
is one big thing missing this time: the draft.
If you've been following the foreclosuregate story, you've probably encountered some explosive forecasts of how the mess will play out, from Wall Street bears preparing for the collapse of the country's biggest banks to populists predicting a sort of a Homeowners' Jubilee, with the residents of disputed properties acquiring their houses mortgage-free. John Carney expects a more familiar phenomenon: another bailout.
Bank of America's recent decline—down almost 10% this week—is driven by fears that the bank could be hit with huge liabilities for faulty mortgage pools. And I'm pretty sure that is not going to happen.
Why not?
Because the politicians will not let the financial stability of the largest bank in the nation be threatened by contractual rights. Not when there's an easy fix available that won't cost taxpayers a dime.
Here's what is going to happen: Congress will pass a law called something like "The Financial Modernization and Stability Act of 2010" that will retroactively grant mortgage pools the rights in the underlying mortgages that people are worried about. All the screwed up paperwork, lost notes, unassigned security interests will be forgiven by a legislative act.
There's a big difference between the financial crisis of 2008 and the new crisis. In 2008, banks were destabilized by the growing realization that they were over-exposed to the real estate market. Huge portions of their balance sheets were committed to mortgage-linked investments that were no longer generating the expected revenues or producing losses. That was a problem of economics that could only be solved by recapitalizing banks or letting some of the biggest banks in the U.S. fail.
The put-back crisis is not driven by economics. It is driven by legal rights. And there's simply zero probability that the politicians in Washington are going to let Bank of America or Citigroup or JP Morgan Chase fail because of a legal issue.
So here's what I expect will happen. The lame duck session of Congress will pass a bill that essentially papers over the misdeeds of the banks that originated mortgage securities. Every member of Congress and every Senator who has been voted out of office will cast a vote for the bill. And the President will sign it.
Will the public be outraged? Probably. Financial bloggers will scream from the high heavens against another bailout of the banksters. Congress may try to create some cost for banks in exchange for the forgiveness, perhaps requiring more mortgage modifications.
But the much feared put-back apocalypse will be laid to rest.
[Hat tip: Bryan Alexander.]
When it comes to its stated mission—keeping school-age children from trying illicit drugs—the D.A.R.E. program has been a failure. But D.A.R.E. does have a fun history of teaching kids to turn their pot-smoking parents in to the police.
The 11-year-old student is in 5th grade at a an elementary school in Matthews. Police say he brought his parents' marijuana cigarettes to school when he reported them.
Matthews Police say he reported his parents after a lesson about marijuana was delivered by a police officer who is part of the D.A.R.E. program, which teaches kids about the dangers of drugs, alcohol, and tobacco.
"Even if it's happening in their own home with their own parents, they understand that's a dangerous situation because of what we're teaching them," said Matthews Officer Stason Tyrrell. That's what they're told to do, to make us aware."..
Police arrested the child's 40-year-old father and 38-year-old mother on Thursday.
Both were charged with two misdemeanor counts each of marijuana possession and possession of drug paraphernalia.
They were not jailed and were released on a written promise to appear in court...
Police say both the 11-year old and a sibling have been removed from the parents' house by social services.
Proving once again that pot ruins lives. Not because of the drug itself, but because of what the government will do to you if they catch you with it.
Last year I wrote a column about Nick Cheolas, a young guy from the Detroit suburbs who became interested in the criminal justice system after witnessing some appalling behavior from police and other local officials in a case involving his family. Cheolas went on to law school at the University of Michigan, where his experience at home spurred him to get involved with the school's innocence clinic. There, he worked on a team that won the release of Dwayne Provience, a man who had spent nearly a decade in prison for a murder it's pretty clear he didn't commit. (After much hemming and hawing, prosecutors finally announced in March that they wouldn't attempt to try Provience again.)
I'm sorry to say that Nick's story has taken a bummer of a turn. Last July he was diagnosed with an aggressive form of non-Hodgkins lymphoma. He has started a blog (Arrested Development fans: take note of the title) where he writes about his treatment, opines on legal issues, and discusses the various other topics about which we bloggers tend to bloviate. If you'd like to click over, I'm sure he'd appreciate knowing he has support out in libertarian land.
Also, if the idea of following an online diary of cancer treatment sounds morose—and it did to me when I was first sent the link—Nick's sense of humor considerably lightens the experience. His blog's tagline:
I don't fight cancer because I fear death. I fight cancer because I fear Mitch Albom writing about me after death.
Get better, Nick. No one else wants to see that happen, either.
A Jacob Weisberg article is like a poverty-row B movie with hammy acting and a tired storyline: You can't take it seriously on its own terms, but it's a wonderful document of the time, place, and mentality that produced it. Consider the columnist's sneer at the libertarian entrepreneur and philanthropist Peter Thiel:
Thiel's latest crusade is his worst yet....The Thiel Fellowship will pay would-be entrepreneurs under 20 $100,000 in cash to drop out of school. In announcing the program, Thiel made clear his contempt for American universities which, like governments, he believes, cost more than they're worth and hinder what really matters in life, namely starting tech companies. His scholarships are meant as an escape hatch from these insufficiently capitalist institutions of higher learning.
Where to start with this nasty idea? A basic feature of the venture capitalist's worldview is its narcissism, and with that comes the desire to clone oneself -- perhaps literally in Thiel's case. Thus Thiel fellows will have the opportunity to emulate their sponsor by halting their intellectual development around the onset of adulthood, maintaining a narrow-minded focus on getting rich as young as possible, and thereby avoid the siren lure of helping others or contributing to the advances in basic science that have made the great tech fortunes possible....This threatens to turn the risk-taking startup model into a white boy's version of the NBA, diverting a generation of young people from the love of knowledge for its own sake and respect for middle-class values.
Click through Weisberg's own links, and you'll find Thiel's actual argument for the program: "From Facebook to SpaceX to Halcyon Molecular, some of the world's most transformational technologies were created by people who stopped out of school because they had ideas that couldn't wait until graduation." In other words, Thiel says he's trying to better the world by helping good ideas get off the ground. If Weisberg wants to convince the rest of us that this is a dumb argument, he should start by engaging the argument itself, not some strawman in which the fellowships exist only for "getting rich as young as possible" and the motive is merely Thiel's narcissistic need to breed mini-mes. (Thiel, incidentally, has a graduate degree, so the dropouts who receive these grants will not "emulate their sponsor." Not unless they decide to return to school later -- which of course they'll always be free to do.)
So as a critique, this is shoddy stuff. But as a window into the Weisberg worldview, it's very valuable indeed. Count the assumptions:
1. Intellectual development halts when you leave school.
2. Entrepreneurs do not "help others" or "contribute to advances in basic sciences."
3. Launching a startup is a "white boy" thing.
4. Respect for middle-class values and the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake are inconceivable if you avoid the higher-education path that Jacob Weisberg followed. But Thiel's the guy who wants to clone himself.
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