On Sunday night, Northern Illinois University's Student Association Senate denied recognition to the school's chapter of Students for Sensible Drug Policy (SSDP), which means it may not post flyers or meet on campus. The Senate already had denied activity-fee funding to SSDP, declaring it a "political" group, as opposed to a "social justice" or "advocacy" group. Sunday's meeting was called to address constitutional objections to this decision raised by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), which last month wrote a letter to NIU President John G. Peters noting that NIU, as a state-run university, is bound by the First Amendment, which prohibits viewpoint-based discrimination in the allocation of funding and facilities to student groups. Why did the Student Association Senate nevertheless refuse to recognize SSDP when it had a second chance? If the majority had a justification aside from spite, it is not apparent in the account of the meeting provided by the Northern Star, NIU's student newspaper:
Senator Austin Quick, who voted for recognition, said he was surprised that NIU SSDP was not recognized Sunday.
"I think with all the fear and blatant disrespect towards the SA Senate, it upset enough senators to sway their votes," Quick said.
Senator Khiry Johnson said he voted against the motion to approve NIU SSDP because they did not make changes to their application after their initial recognition postponement.
"I felt like they didn't respect our decision the first time nor did they take our critiques seriously," Johnson said.
NIU SSDP President Jeremy Orbach suggested the Senate should be worried about the First Amendment instead of the Student Association's application forms. "Apparently, nobody is taking this seriously," he told the Northern Star. "Hopefully someone will start paying attention soon."
Under the current policy, both "political" and "religious" groups are ineligible for funding. As FIRE notes, that distinction in itself is constitutionally problematic, and in applying it the university has arbitrarily discriminated against groups based on puzzling criteria. While Advocates for Choice, the Campus Antiwar Network, the Consumer Education Society, PAVE (Promoting Awareness, Victim Empowerment), Students for Life (NIU), the Vegetarian Education Group, and the Women's Rights Alliance have been deemed eligible for funding as "social justice" or "advocacy" groups, the Committee for the Preservation of Wildlife and the Model United Nations, along with SSDP, have been deemed ineligible because they are too "political." Similarly, the Baha'i Club and NIU Atheists, Agnostics, and Freethinkers both can receive funding under the latest guidelines, while groups such as Hillel, Campus Crusade for Christ, the Latter Day Saint Student Association, the Muslim Students Association, the Newman Catholic Student Center, and the Pagan Student Association are ineligible because of their religious character.
Furthermore, FIRE notes, "The new definitions even prohibit a student group from receiving Activity Fee funding if any of its activities result in any individual, anywhere, 'petitioning Federal, State, or Local legislative or executive bodies for policies advocated by that group.'" FIRE's Adam Kissel sums up the constitutional violations embodied in NIU's policies regarding student groups:
NIU's Student Association Senate has violated all five of the rights codified in the First Amendment. The Senate violated the rights of freedom of speech and assembly by denying recognition to Students for Sensible Drug Policy and by discriminating against all groups it arbitrarily deems 'political' or 'religious.' The Senate violates the right to freedom of the press by stating that unrecognized groups are prohibited from posting flyers on campus and that publications will presumably threaten a group's funding. The Senate's policy violates the First Amendment religion clauses, since Baha'i, humanist, and atheist groups can receive funding to discuss religious topics, but other religious groups get nothing, in practice favoring some religious groups over others. Finally, perhaps the Senate's most stunning achievement of all was to violate the First Amendment right to petition government for the redress of grievances.
FIRE is urging President Peters to "immediately step in to preserve students' rights."
Amazon, you may recall, claims that the government isn't the reason it expelled WikiLeaks from its servers. PayPal, by contrast...
PayPal has said that its decision to stop users from using its service to make donations to Wikileaks was made after advice from the US government.
A senior official at the online payments firm said the State Department had told it that the activities of the website were illegal in the US....
PayPal's clarification came from the firm's vice-president Osama Bedier.
He said the company had carried out its actions after receiving a letter from the State Department, adding that it was a "straightforward" decision.
I'd love to see that letter, and to learn what law the State Department believes the site has violated.
In other WikiLeaks news, here's the conservative columnist Marc Thiessen trying to be helpful:
Some say attacking WikiLeaks would be fruitless. Really?...Imagine the impact on WikiLeaks's ability to distribute additional classified information if its systems were suddenly and mysteriously infected by a worm that would fry the computer of anyone who downloaded the documents. WikiLeaks would probably have very few future visitors to its Web site.
Rob Beschizza reacts:
It all gives me this vision of Thiessen dreaming about single-handedly stopping Wikileaks by typing "OVERRIDE PASSWORD" into Julian Assange's laptop, then hitting the delete button after a stern British female voice declares "ACCESS GRANTED." Then there is a tense moment as a glowing neon blue progress bar slowly deletes Wikileaks, but will it finish before Julian returns from the virtual reality cyber conference with George Soros where they are laughing about having just gotten an oblivious Julian Sands thrown in jail?
If we lived in a just world, progressives would
still be singing (nondenominational) hosannas in honor of the
extraordinary political sacrifice our president has made to further
their cause. Instead, observes David Harsanyi, many whine and fume.
Quick question, Harsanyi writes: What do you liberals want from
this man?
The doc
fix is back (yet again). And whaddaya know, it’s gumming up the new
health care law.
During the health care debate, critics (including me) charged that the health care law’s cost estimates weren’t believable in part because they didn’t include any attempt to address the way that Medicare’s physician reimbursement formula called for large and growing payment cuts—now about 25 percent. Those planned cuts had been systematically overridden by Congress throughout most of the decade and replaced with a number of small reimbursement hikes funded through deficit spending. (This year alone Congress has passed five temporary delays in the rate cuts.) So the law’s cost estimates assumed that the lower payment rates would take effect and ignored the (potentially very high) cost of paying to keep the rates from dropping.
Democrats argued that the doc fix was a separate issue, unrelated to the new law and therefore unnecessary to include in the bill or the cost estimates. But that was pretty hard to believe: Reports indicated that Harry Reid had used the doc fix to buy support for the health care overhaul from the American Medical Association, and an early draft had included a fix. The cost proved to be too much.
And as of this week, it’s even harder to buy the line that the doc fix is somehow unrelated to the new health care law: Senate leadership has reportedly reached a deal to delay the called-for cuts and pay for a one year extension of Medicare’s payment rates. And they’re paying for it by taking money out of the health insurance subsidies included in the health care overhaul:
In 2014, some consumers will be able to buy health insurance through exchanges, web portals similar to Orbitz or Expedia. Low- and middle-income consumers will be eligible for tax subsidies to help pay for their coverage. The deal announced Tuesday would change how much money consumers would have to repay if they misreport their income or their income grows mid-year.Under the health care reform law, if a person gets more of a tax subsidy than they’re eligible for, they would have to repay no more than $250. Families would have to repay no more than $450. The deal on the table would raise those caps to between $600 and $3,500, depending on income.
The changes would free up about $19.2 billion to cover the one-year Medicare patch, according to Congressional aides familiar with the Congressional Budget Office estimates. It would impact about 200,000 people.
Another Politico report indicates there may be some pushback from liberals unhappy with the idea of cutting into ObamaCare's insurance subsidies. The problem at this point is that they need to find a way to pay for the $19 billion cost of the extension. But there just aren't that many plausible ways to raise revenue left at this point; most of the "pay-fors" with any heft went to pay for ObamaCare.
More on the doc fix and the health care overhaul here.
The Wall Street Journal’s Jess Bravin has a good overview of Chamber of Commerce v. Whiting, which the Supreme Court is hearing today. At issue is whether federal immigration law preempts Arizona’s harsh statute penalizing employers for hiring “unauthorized aliens.” As Bravin notes, some unusual alliances have been formed:
The [Chamber of Commerce] has teamed up against the Legal Arizona Workers Act with allies including the American Civil Liberties Union, the Service Employees International Union and a Latino group that Justice Sonia Sotomayor once helped lead. The Obama administration is sending the government's top litigator to assist the chamber's lawyer.
In the other corner is notorious anti-immigration leader Russell Pearce, the author of the state law:
Mr. Pearce, 63 years old, is a former sheriff's deputy first elected to the state legislature in 2000. "I was a tea partier before the tea party was cool," he said.
While Democrats are his principal adversary, Mr. Pearce also cited fellow Republicans he said carry water for a business community that puts "profits over patriotism." The day will come, he said, when "these folks are going to have to decide, when they take their money from big business, which side they really are on."
Read all about it here. For more on Pearce, don't miss Kerry Howley's 2008 feature "The One-Man Wall: How a single Arizona legislator's obsession has changed immigration policy for the worse."
On Tuesday, environment ministers from around the
world gathered at the U.N.'s Cancun climate change conference to
see if any "progress" could be made in the negotiations there. The
spokes-Polar Bear Frostpaw also dropped by. Reason Science
Correspondent Ronald Bailey assesses some of the diplomatic
platitudes and scientific predictions in his second dispatch from
the conference.
In Turkey, gay people aren't allowed to serve in the military. But it might take a lot of evidence for the authorities to believe you're gay:
many gay men have to endure pseudo-scientific tests designed to appraise both their homosexuality and the extent to which it might render them "unfit" for service. "Parts of the test I took included having to draw a picture of a tree, a house, and a person," says S. "You're given a lot of crayons, and then you have to answer why you drew things the way you did." Other gay conscripts report having been asked whether they liked playing with dolls as children or enjoyed wearing women's clothing. Military psychiatrists who know better have to pretend that there is a scientific value to such examinations, says L. [a psychiatrist with experience on military health panels], "because it's in the regulations."
Astoundingly, some gays also report that they were asked to produce photographs showing them as participants in anal intercourse. Even then, Turkish authorities are said to apply special criteria. According to the military, and Turkish society at large, penetrating another man does not necessarily qualify as a homosexual act; only being penetrated is undisputedly homosexual. Hence the unwritten rule when it comes to such photos: "The man should be in the passive position, receiving from behind," L. explains, "and looking at the camera. Preferably while smiling."
The article adds that the military "flatly denies" the photography story, so caveat lector.
Whole Foods is finally coming to gentrifying
Brooklyn. The reaction is as hilarious as you'd expect, as told in
this arch yet poignant
New York Observer article. Excerpt:
"I have concerns about the politics of the Whole Foods founder," said Mary Crowley on Saturday morning, walking through the Grand Army Plaza farmers' market with her husband. John Mackey, the company's co-founder and CEO, is a self-taught businessman who believes in small government, and he once compared working with unions to living with herpes—"It stops a lot of people from loving you." In August of last year, he wrote an editorial for The Wall Street Journal arguing that the government should not interfere in the health-care business. "He's very conservative," Ms. Crowley continued. "And we have good stores here already, so I don't know if we need another one."
Ms. Crowley's husband, John Denatale, walked over with their tall, long-haired dog. "I think people in the Slope get over things quickly," he said, their dog pushing his snout between his legs.
"I think they'll be upset. I disagree," said Ms. Crowley.
There was a strong wind blowing down Eastern Parkway. "People in Park Slope don't like change," explained Mark Germann, a young attorney standing over his son in a stroller while his wife, Beth Aala, a filmmaker, looked at yogurt drinks in the Ronnybrook Farm Dairy stall.
"Chains or change?" she asked, coming over to secure an extra blanket over their son.
"Change," he said.
"Maybe both," she added.
And I just love this dude:
No bricks [for the new Whole Foods], however, will come from the landmarked Coignet Stone Company, constructed in 1873, on the corner of the Whole Foods lot. The structure will sit just behind the new store.
"I don't know. I just don't want them to tear it down. Do you? Maybe they should. What do you think?" asked artist Dustin Yellin on Sunday afternoon, after a flight back from Art Basel, talking about the Stone Company building. "They should donate it to artists to have a small museum there! I want to build a museum." [...]
Mr. Yellin described Whole Foods as a "weird art installation, a postmodern clusterfuck of like 55 kinds of the same kind of granola and 55 kinds of the same kind of chocolate." He doesn't like grocery shopping very much.
"If it's not going to be a museum, and it's not going to be a park—'cause those are two things that I think enhance communities—then I say to myself, 'Well, a Whole Foods isn't terrible because a strip mall would suck. And Whole Foods isn't terrible, because don't they have good stuff?' I could definitely shop there to cook dinner for my friends. It's not Wal-Mart."
Reason's voluminous Mackey file here, including his participation in 2005 roundtable on "rethinking the social responsibility of business." Short version of our 2009 ReasonTV interview with Mackey below.
Despite its talk of "painful"
choices, says Senior Editor Jacob Sullum, last week's report from
the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform clearly
shows that eliminating the federal deficit and reining in the
national debt does not require radical change. That's too bad,
Sullum writes, because even if Congress implemented every cut
suggested by the report, the federal government would still be far
too big, rife with programs that are unnecessary, unconstitutional,
or both.
Last we heard from failed Delaware Senate candidate Christine O'Donnell, pundits and bloggers were marveling that the truth-stretching Tea Party darling managed to finish her midterm race with almost $1 million dollars in the bank. And we aren't rid of her yet, according to a report in The Hill: O'Donnell is starting a PAC inventively called ChristinePAC. Why would we want to be rid of a politician so talented, so electrifying in front of a bank of cameras that she today compared the extension of unemployment benefits to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor (approximately 2,500 dead)?
"Today marks a lot of tragedy," O'Donnell, the Tea Party-backed GOP Senate candidate from Delaware, said Tuesday night during an appearance in Virginia.
"Tragedy comes in threes," O'Donnell said. "Pearl Harbor, Elizabeth Edwards's passing and Barack Obama's announcement of extending the tax cuts, which is good, but also extending the unemployment benefits."
I bet Delaware voters are kicking themselves today.
Don’t you just love it when Obama gets his compromise on? From today’s presser:
It’s a big, diverse country and people have a lot of complicated positions. It means that in order to get stuff done, we’re going to compromise. This is why FDR, when he started Social Security, it only affected widows and orphans. You did not qualify. And yet now it is something that really helps a lot of people. When Medicare was started, it was a small program. It grew.
I take it Obama intends this as a
defense of political compromise and starting small. He’s doing that
bipartisan thing he does, where he explains how the system works,
the limits it imposes, and how he plans to work for the good within
it anyway. If you like presidents who, as Obama said, “get stuff
done,” you are probably eating this like extra buttery
movie-theater popcorn, (which, like lots of presidential rhetoric,
is a form of cheap junk food doused in gooey, goopy flavoring that
always ends up costing way too much money – but somehow lots
of people love it anyway).
The growth of Medicare, though, is hardly something to brag about.
Sure, Obama is right on the facts: The program started far smaller than it is now, and it grew – and grew and grew and grew, like some mutant, money-sucking, fairy-tale beanstalk that no one in Congress had the strength to cut down. The rapid growth wasn’t just some manageable result of the program becoming a more mature, either. Instead, it was wracked by serious cost problems from year one. Those cost problems became a significant public policy issue – enough to attract Senate committee attention – within just three years of starting operation.
Cost estimates prepared by the House Ways and Means Committee assumed that if 95 percent of eligible seniors signed up in the first year, the maximum total cost would be about $1.3 billion. They were right about the high enrollment figure. But total cost? Not so much. The program’s first year cost was $4.6 billion –nearly four times as high as projected. That wasn’t a one-time spike either; from there on out, total spending continued to pull away from the estimates. In 1970, for example, the committee had projected that hospital spending alone would amount to just $3.1 billion. Instead, the tally came in at $7.1 billion. In 1975, hospital spending was expected to come in around $4.2 billion. The actual price? $15.6 billion.
Since then, bureaucrats have tried a slew of complex schemes to keep payments in check. But in the long run, none have really worked; Medicare continues to snarf down money while screaming “Feed me, Seymour!” at any Congress-person within earshot. Now even entitlement-hating Republicans are terribly, terribly afraid to touch it. Which is why ObamaCare includes an independent board tasked with capping Medicare spending at just above the growth of GDP. Maybe it will work this time! Right?!!?!?
Reason Foundation's Adam Summers writing in today's Orange County Register:
The nonpartisan state Legislative Analyst's Office recently confirmed that California's budget is built around billions of dollars in accounting gimmicks, overly optimistic assumptions and improbable handouts from the federal government. It projects a $25.4 billion deficit over the next 19 months and deficits of $20 billion for each of the next five years.
What's even scarier is that those figures do not include the state's enormous unfunded pension promises to state workers, recently pegged at up to roughly $500 billion – roughly $36,000 for every household in California. Throw in the $50 billion or so in unfunded retiree health care liabilities, a $10 billion unemployment insurance fund debt, and the state's $152 billion in general obligation bond debt, and you start to get a fuller sense of the state's true financial problems.
California's public pension and retiree health and dental care spending has quintupled since fiscal year 1998-99, increasing to $5 billion in 2009. And retirement spending is expected to triple again – to $15 billion – within a decade. The coming wave of baby boomer retirements and steadily increasing health care costs ensure that this burden will continue to grow rapidly. California will be spending more and more for state retirees' benefits, leaving less and less for other budget items such as public safety, education, and transportation.
The state budget passed in October takes state pension benefits back to 1999 levels – for future/new state employees – and the Schwarzenegger administration estimates the tweak will save up to $100 billion over time. That's a minor fix at best.
The state has tried this before. In 1991, California created a second tier of lower benefits in an effort to stem rising public pension costs. Less than a decade later, the Legislature passed, with virtually no opposition, the infamous Senate Bill 400, which not only massively increased state employees' pension benefits but also made those increases retroactive. It would simply be too easy for legislators, with the support and pressure of government workers' unions, to do it again.
California needs to switch to a defined-contribution system for all new employees, as the private sector has been doing for decades.
Related Reason Cover Story - Class War: How public servants became our masters
In his Sunday column for The Washington Post, George Will highlighted a recent concurring opinion from Texas Supreme Court Judge Don Willett, arguing that Willett’s forceful case for judicial review is particularly relevant to the ongoing legal battle over ObamaCare:
Has the U.S. Supreme Court construed the commerce clause so permissively that Congress has seized, by increments, a sweeping police power that enables it to do virtually anything it wants? Willett's words, applied to the Obamacare mandate debate, highlight this question: When does judicial deference to legislative majorities become dereliction of the judicial duty to discern limits to what majorities are lawfully permitted to do?
Willett says: In our democracy, the legislature's policymaking power "though unrivaled, is not unlimited." The Constitution reigns supreme: "There must remain judicially enforceable constraints on legislative actions that are irreconcilable with constitutional commands."
Read the rest here. I discuss conservative and libertarian disagreements over judicial review here.
"The incompetence that Bernanke
has displayed over the past few years makes the Cincinnati Bengals
look like a model of excellence," the always
excitable
Michael Snyder
writes at DailyMarkets.com. "Bernanke kept insisting that the
housing market was stable even while it was falling apart, he had
absolutely no idea the financial crisis was coming, he declared
that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were in no danger of failing just
before they failed, his policies have created asset bubble after
asset bubble and the world financial system is now inherently
unstable. But even with such horrific job performance, Barack
Obama and leaders of both political parties continue to publicly
praise Bernanke at every opportunity. What in the world is going on
here?"
Snyder puts together a list of Ben's best. You've probably seen a few before, but lucky for America's enemies, Bernanke keeps talking, as he did Sunday with the appropriately credulous Scott Pelley of CBS's Sesenta Minutos.
Some choice bits:
#4 (January 10, 2008) “The Federal Reserve is not currently forecasting a recession.”
#7 “The money supply is not changing in any significant way. What we’re doing is lowering interest rates by buying Treasury securities.”
#11 “Although low inflation is generally good, inflation that is too low can pose risks to the economy – especially when the economy is struggling.”
My favorite from the 60 Minutes sitdown wasn't a particular gotcha, but a comment that reveals how captive the Federal Reserve Bank chairman is to the meritocratic fallacy:
“This fear of inflation, I think, is way overstated. We’ve looked at it very, very carefully. We’ve analyzed it every which way.”
More Fed fun: Ford Motor Company goes from hero to zero. The only one of the Big 1.9 U.S. auto makers that did not receive Treasury Department funding in the Obushma bailout turns out to have borrowed $15.9 billion from the Federal Reserve Bank, more than any other U.S. car company. From Jalopnik:
Ford spokeswoman Christin Baker said the two programs "addressed systemic failure in the credit markets, and that neither program was designed for a particular company, or even a particular industry." Ford Credit has disclosed through SEC filings and conference calls with media and investors that it was taking part in both programs.
BMW told Bloomberg that the Fed lending "supported our financial profile and offered us an additional funding source, especially at times when the money markets and capital markets did not function properly and efficiently."
According to the Fed, the commercial paper loans have been paid in full, while some $2 billion remains outstanding on loans for bond investors.
Related: Is the world's greatest central banker (it's like being the tallest munchkin at MGM) holed up in ... Lebanon? At RealClearMarkets, C.J. Maloney pays a more-spirited-than-documented tribute to Bank of Lebanon chief Riad Salameh:
Dr. Salameh has been Lebanon's central bank governor since 1993, steering her through multiple foreign invasions, civil war, political assassinations, and the greatest credit bubble the world has ever seen. Unique among all central bankers, he pulled his banking system from in front of the onrushing train of the Great Moderation so it went roaring by Lebanon's banking system and broadsided America's, sitting idle, dumb, and fat on the tracks just up ahead.
With admirable foresight, Dr. Salameh paid attention to the Lebanese banks' off-balance sheet items, forbade (in 2004) sub-prime investments, and required a minimum 30% cash reserve at each institution. The result? (In Dr. Salameh's own words), "Lebanon will not feel the effects of the financial crisis, because we took the necessary measures preemptively" and as they say in Texas, it ain't braggin' if it's true.
In the time since the burst of our bubble, Lebanon's banking system has been doing super, thanks for asking! The first seven months of 2010 saw "unprecedented growth in lending activity" from a Lebanese system made up of "highly liquid deposit rich banks with low leverage".
Is Maloney full of baloney? No
and yes. Salameh gets props for maintaining the local currency's
dollar peg: It was 1,500-to-a-greenback when Salameh took over the
central bank in 1993 (coincidentally the same year I began making
occasional journeys to Lebanon), and it's 1,501.4
to the dollar now. And interest rates have
dropped substantially in recent years. However, inflation (of
real estate in particular) is rampant, unemployment is
estimated to be well above the officially claimed (and
historically very suspicious-looking)
rate of 9.2 percent, and economic opportunity is limited.
I'm also not sure how seriously to take those prohibitions against leverage. In a country where two-thirds of the population is theoretically not allowed to charge or collect interest, all agreements on interest and leverage are going to be to some degree self-declared.
Lebanon's federal budget is of course a total mess -- but a central banker's job is only to allow that kind of stupidity, not to execute it.
And a bonus just for staying to the end: Some interesting comments from a great Deirdre McCloskey interview at National Review. Here the Reason contributor and author of Bourgeois Dignity dismisses hairshirts like me who issue spartan condemnations of our debt-ridden culture:
Conservative romantic nonsense, similar to the cries in the 18th century that commerce would corrupt the Spartan virtues. Dr. Johnson, who was a conservative but no sort of romantic, said in 1778, “Depend upon it, sir, every state of society is as luxurious as it can be. Men always take the best they can get.” And the blessed David Hume had said in 1742, “Nor is a porter less greedy of money, which he spends on bacon and brandy, than a courtier, who purchases champagne and ortolans [little songbirds rated a delicacy]. Riches are valuable at all times, and to all men.” Of course.
There’s a progressive version of the nonsense, the complaining about “consumerism.”
A more up-to-date reply is that so long as various Oriental protectionists (in the 1970s it was the Japanese, not the Chinese) are so foolish as to send Americans TV sets and hammers and so forth in exchange for IOUs and green pieces of paper engraved with American heroes, wonderful. Would you personally turn down such a deal? If your personal checks circulated as currency, and the grocer was willing to give you tons of groceries in exchange for eventually depreciated Matt-dollars, wouldn’t you go for it? I would, and drink champagne.
New
research finds that insanely high incarceration rates in the
United States have contributed to declining marriage rates. Charles
Kerwin Kofi and Ming Ching Luoh write in The Review of
Economics and Statistics that "higher male imprisonment
appears to have lowered the likelihood that women marry, modestly
reduced the quality of their spouses when they do marry, and
shifted the gains from marriage away from women and toward
men."
In other words, the drug war is undermining traditional marriage. Hear that social conservatives?
The paper attributes about 13 percent of the decline in marriage rates overall since 1990 to the fact that an awful lot of dudes are in jail.
Incarceration rates vary by socioeconomic class and also by race; in 2004, one in eight black males age 25-29 was incarcerated compared to one in 28 Hispanic males and one in 59 white males. If women search for future husband in their own community—where community is defined over geographic, economic or racial qualities—then some women are more disadvantaged than others. The evidence suggests that this is true. For example, black women are the most disadvantaged—about 18% percent of the decline in marriage rates among black women can be explained by incarceration. Hispanic women are also relatively disadvantaged, with about 10% of the reduction in marriage rates in that group explained by incarceration.
This effect is biggest for women with little education; particularly women with less than a high school education, but also for women with high school and some college. The only group of women unaffected by the trend is women who have a university degree, but it isn’t that surprising that these women do not draw their partners from the same pool of men who have been affected by the increase in incarceration rates.
Social conservatives, please stop reading here, and take a little time to rethink your position on the war on drugs.
Everyone else, there are a couple of additional stats that seem to be related to high incarceration rates in certain groups: Employment for women is up dramatically, and divorce rates are down. These figures likely reflect the limited choices facing women in populations depleted of men.
Via tipstress extraordinaire Courtney Knapp.
Glenn Greenwald (get yer boos and hisses started!) with some reasons why loony koo-koo moonbats who you don't need to give a second thought to might sometimes think the U.S. government is actually a danger to liberty:
Just look at what the U.S. Government and its friends are willing to do and capable of doing to someone who challenges or defies them -- all without any charges being filed or a shred of legal authority. They've blocked access to their assets, tried to remove them from the Internet, bullied most everyone out of doing any business with them, froze the funds marked for Assange's legal defense at exactly the time that they prepare a strange international arrest warrant to be executed, repeatedly threatened him with murder, had their Australian vassals openly threaten to revoke his passport, and declared them "Terrorists" even though -- unlike the authorities who are doing all of these things -- neither Assange nor WikiLeaks ever engaged in violence, advocated violence, or caused the slaughter of civilians.
This is all grounded in the toxic mindset expressed yesterday on Meet the Press (without challenge, naturally) by GOP Sen. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who said of Assange: "I think the man is a high-tech terrorist. He’s done an enormous damage to our country, and I think he needs to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. And if that becomes a problem, we need to change the law." As usual, when wielded by American authorities, the term "terrorist" means nothing more than: "those who impede or defy the will of the U.S. Government with any degree of efficacy."...
But that sort of legal scheming isn't even necessary. The U.S. and its "friends" in the Western and business worlds are more than able and happy to severely punish anyone they want without the slightest basis in "law." That's what the lawless, Wild Western World is: political leaders punishing whomever they want without any limits, certainly without regard to bothersome concepts of "law." Anyone who doubts that should just look at what has been done to Wikileaks and Assange over the last week....
People often have a hard time believing that the terms "authoritarian" and "tyranny" apply to their own government, but that's because those who meekly stay in line and remain unthreatening are never targeted by such forces. The face of authoritarianism and tyranny reveals itself with how it responds to those who meaningfully dissent from and effectively challenge its authority: do they act within the law or solely through the use of unconstrained force?
He hasn't just been murdered, yes. And if that's your standard, you are welcome to it, and imagine yourself or a loved one the target of what's been aimed at Assange.
Tonight, apparently, the franchise-launching holiday classic and Vince Guaraldi vehicle A Charlie Brown Christmas will air on network television, whatever that is. If you don't happen to have a two-year-old girl whose entire incentive structure is anchored on behaving well enough in school to merit watching Peanuts DVDs at night, it's possible that you've forgotten the special's major if soft-pedaled subtheme: That commercialization is distorting and obscuring "what Christmas is all about."
Cue the kids at 10 Zen Monkeys, who exclusively reveal that Charlie Brown's first foray into animation "followed a six-year period where the whole gang was recording commercials for Ford Motor Vehicles." You know you want to watch:
Not only that, the commercialism-dinging Charlie Brown Christmas was heavily sponsored by Old Coke:
[O]riginally the special ended with the Christmas carol — "Hark, the Herald Angels Sing" — being interrupted by the following voice-over: "Brought to you by the people in your town who bottle Coca Cola."
You know what's coming next: classic footage from the 1965 Libertarian Party convention. As Internet hero recon007jf teaches us, "Pay special attention to the girl in the pink dress she seems so free and happy. I'd like to feel that way."
Reason on Charlie Brown here. Thanks to El Destiny for the tip.
It now seems that the smears in the Julian
Assange rape case are bidirectional, writes Senior Editor Michael
C. Moynihan, from the exceptionally flimsy charges accusing the
WikiLeaks boss of being a sexual predator to the increasingly loud
and incoherent conspiracy theories suggesting that his two accusers
are working on behalf of The Agency. How do Keith Olbermann, a
Swedish Holocaust denier, and Bianca Jagger join forces to promote
the idea that a Swedish feminist is working for Langley?
The British government's Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) no longer needs to have any scientists among its members. The same legislation eliminating the requirement for scientist presence on the council also gives the Home Secretary power to unilaterally ban any drug for a year with no consultation with the ACMD at all. Tom Chivers at the UK Telegraph explains why they want it that way--and why they shouldn't get away with it:
Scientific advisers have always said that cannabis should not be lumped in with amphetamines as a class B drug, and that ecstacy’s position as a class A – like heroin and crack – makes a nonsense of the classification. And last year, after two deaths were linked with mephedrone (nicknamed “meow meow” in the press), a ban on the drug was rushed through to appease the hysteria in the press, against the advice of the ACMD and prompting the resignation of two council members.
Tragicomically, the two deaths were later shown not to have had anything to do with the drug at all – the teenagers had been taking methadone, a completely different drug available on prescription to heroin addicts, mixed with alcohol. Dozens of other deaths’ links to the drug turned out to be equally spurious. Strangely, the media firestorm had passed on by that point.
And there is the problem with removing scientific advice from drug policy. It would have been politically very difficult to ignore press calls to ban mephedrone, despite there being no evidence-based reason for such a ban. If the ACMD could have been rendered toothless enough to give Home Office-friendly advice to ban it, that would probably have made the Home Secretary’s life considerably easier. But it would have been giving bad advice. As it was, the good advice they did give was not taken, hence the resignations. But at least the Government could not pretend that they were doing it because they had been scientifically advised to do so.
[Hat tip: the Drug Policy Alliance's Meghan Ralston]
Reason Senior Editor Katherine Mangu-Ward appeared on Freedom Watch with Judge Napolitano to discuss the federal government's attempts to ban bake sales in public schools. Airdate: December 6, 2010.
Approximately 3:30.
Today the U.S. Court of Appeals
for the D.C. Circuit
ruled that the FDA may not ban electronic cigarettes as an
unapproved "drug/device combination." The appeals court agreed with
U.S. District Judge Richard Leon that the battery-powered
e-cigarettes, which generate a smoke-free vapor containing nicotine
derived from tobacco, are properly regulated as tobacco products.
That means the FDA may regulate the marketing of e-cigarettes under
the authority granted by the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco
Control Act but may not treat them like a pharmaceutical product
subject to strict clinical testing requirements (a trick it once
tried with conventional cigarettes, only to be slapped down by the
Supreme Court). The ruling is a victory not just for the companies
that brought it, NJOY and
Smoking Everywhere,
but for smokers who use their products as replacements for ordinary
cigarettes, which are far more hazardous.
The D.C. Circuit's decision is here (PDF). Michael Siegel comments here. More on e-cigarettes here.
[Thanks to Bill Godshall for the tip.]
Hey Amtrak rider! Wake up, I'm talking to you! You can now transport 'em if you got 'em, "'em" being your Second Amendment-protected weapons. Via TravelMole:
The US Congress has ordered the reversal of a gun ban that had been in place on the government-owned railroad for nearly a decade.
Starting Dec.15, gun owners will need to let Amtrak know 24 hours in advance of their intention to bring firearms onboard. Unloaded guns will need to be packed in hard-sided containers. These will be placed in special storage lockers -- guns will not be allowed on trains that don't have checked baggage service.
The story of how we got that Second Amendment right recognized by the Supreme Court is told in my Christmas present ready book Gun Control on Trial.
Whether they're intelligent design advocates, psychics, or 9/11 truthers, Skeptic Magazine's Founding Publisher Michael Shermer says the world is full of people who believe weird things.
Shermer sat down with Reason.tv's Tim Cavanaugh at Libertopia 2010 in Hollywood to discuss why self-help gurus aren't the key to happiness, what the New Atheist movement hopes to accomplish, why liberals accept evolution but not free markets, and why he switched from global warming skepticism to acceptance.
Approximately 9 minutes. Camera by Adam Hawk Jensen and Zach Weissmueller. Edited by Weissmueller. Music by Bjorn Fogelberg (Magnatune Records).
Visit Reason.tv for downloadable versions. Subscribe to Reason.tv's YouTube channel to receive automatic notification when new material goes live.
The Guardian is reporting that the Indian environment minister rebuked rich countries here at the U.N. climate change conference for failing to keep their promises to deliver $30 billion in climate aid to poor country by 2012. As the Guardian reports:
[Minister Jairam Ramesh] said: "The grand bargain at Copenhagen was President Obama telling the four heads of state: do you agree on transparency in return for money which can start flowing to vulnerable countries? The question is: has the money started flowing? and the answer is clearly no."
The minister diplomatically fails to mention that the poor countries are rejecting proposed systems to account for how they spend the aid. So, Mr. Minister; The question is: has the transparency been adopted? The answer is clearly no.
Then he has the nerve to threaten that no deals will be reached in Cancun unless the money is handed over. No deal in Cancun? A lot of citizens in rich countries will think that that's a great deal.
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