One week ago, May 28, 2011, RT correspondent and former U.S. Corporal Adam Kokesh and four other participants began a flash mob-silent dance at the Jefferson Memorial to commemorate the arrest of Brooke Oberwetter for quietly dancing in the memorial on Jefferson's birthday in 2008. The park police responded by punching, body slamming, and arresting Kokesh and the others.
Today, June 4, Kokesh and Code Pink has initiated another flash dance this time pulling almost 100 more people through press coverage, Facebook, and word of mouth. The memorial was soon shut down before the event ended with the police slowly forcing everyone to leave. No arrests were made. Reason.tv’s Joshua Swain was there to report.
Read Reason's coverage of Obwerwetter.
About 1.40 minutes
Shot and edited by Joshua Swain; help from David Bier.
Scroll down for downloadable versions, and subscribe to Reason.tv’s YouTube Channel to receive automatic notifications when new material goes live.
Reason Senior Editor will talk about municipal
bankruptcy and the delaying tactics of government employee unions
with the San Diego Union Tribune's Chris Reed tonight
on San Diego's KOGO 600 AM.
Topic: As more California towns look to bankruptcy as a way out of their crushing debts for public employee compensation, union flunkies in the state legislature are trying to find ways to force taxpayers to pay every penny of their million-dollar pension plans. The latest scheme is a roadblock for municipal banrkuptcy. The Sacramento Bee's Dan Walters explains:
Assembly Bill 506 by Assemblyman Bob Wieckowski, D-Fremont, is the latest incarnation of a political battle stemming from the bankruptcy of Vallejo and warnings by other local governments that they are flirting with insolvency.
Unions fear that contracts and even pension benefits could be abrogated by bankruptcy and have been seeking legislation for several years that that would make it more difficult. AB 506 would, if enacted, require local governments to have a "neutral evaluation process" completed before seeking bankruptcy and would assign the task to the state Debt and Advisory Commission. But critics say that agency is dominated by union-friendly Democrats.
Cavanaugh and Reed will liquidate all, for your listening pleasure.
Time: Tonight, 6:33pm Pacific, 9:33pm Eastern
Place: San Diegans (Diegers?) can tune their Marconi sets to 600 on the AM dial.
Others can listen live on the worldwide cybertubes.
The House of Representatives
has approved a non-binding resolution questioning President Obama's
unilateral attack on Libya.
The vote was made in accordance with Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution, which allows Congress to give the president a good talking-to when he starts an illegal war. The Washington Times' Stephen Dinan reports:
The resolutions were non-binding, and only one of them passed, but taken together, roughly three-quarters of the House voted to put Mr. Obama on notice that he must explain himself or else face future consequences, possibly including having funds for the war cut off.
“He has a chance to get this right. If he doesn’t, Congress will exercise its constitutional authority and make it right,” said House Speaker John A. Boehner, the Ohio Republican who wrote the resolution that passed, 268-145, and sets a two-week deadline for the president to deliver the information the House is seeking.
Minutes after approving Mr. Boehner’s measure, the House defeated an even more strongly-worded resolution offered by Rep. Dennis Kucinich, Ohio Democrat, that would have insisted the president begin a withdrawal of troops.
Most lawmakers said that was too rash at this point, and said they wanted to give Mr. Obama time to comply. Some also said immediate withdrawal would leave U.S. allies in the lurch.
Boehner's measure, which the White House calls "unnecessary and unhelpful," gives the president 14 days to provide a report explaining his failure to seek congressional approval. It also seeks some potentially interesting data on the status of Libya's civil war, the (non)performance of regional allies, and the role of international Islamists in the opposition.
Politico says the resolution has little chance of passing the Senate.
So, no
unauthorized debris-clearing in tornado-stricken Minneapolis,
and
no unpermitted homeless-feeding in Orlando:
Members of Orlando Food Not Bombs were arrested Wednesday when police said they violated a city ordinance by feeding the homeless in Lake Eola Park.
Jessica Cross, 24, Benjamin Markeson, 49, and Jonathan "Keith" McHenry, 54, were arrested at 6:10 p.m. on a charge of violating the ordinance restricting group feedings in public parks. [...]
The penalty for violating Orlando's ordinance is 60 days in jail, a $500 fine or both.
Thanks to reader Andrew Klein for the tip.
Being a jerk is not a crime. That's a lucky break
for many of us, but it wasn't enough to keep a Virginia man named
Nate Cox out of legal trouble after he grabbed a bullhorn and
shouted at a police officer, “Stop harassing people, we pay your
paychecks.” Sure, Cox was acting like an idiot, writes A. Barton
Hinkle, but don’t forget that the First Amendment protects his
right to do so.
Under federal law, the “prevailing party” in certain civil rights cases may collect “a reasonable attorney’s fee” from the losing side. Yet Chicago and Oak Park, Illinois, which failed to persuade the Supreme Court last year that they did not need to respect the Second Amendment, have refused to pay the reasonable legal fees they owe to Alan Gura and the other attorneys responsible for the gun rights victory in McDonald v. Chicago. Thankfully, their stonewalling has now come to an end. In an opinion issued yesterday by the federal 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, Judge Frank Easterbrook described Chicago and Oak Park’s argument as “not realistic” and ordered them to pay up.
(Via How Appealing.)
Remember the bill that would have allowed California prosecutors to charge pot growers with a misdemeanor instead of a felony? Not gonna happen. Today the California Assembly rejected A.B. 1017, sponsored by Assemblyman Tom Ammiano (D-Calif.), by a vote of 36 to 24. California NORML's Dale Gieringer comments:
The state legislature has once again demonstrated its incompetence when it comes to dealing with prison crowding. With California under court order to reduce its prison population, it is irresponsible to maintain present penalties for non-violent drug offenses. It makes no sense to keep marijuana growing a felony, when assault, battery, and petty theft are all misdemeanors. Legislators have once again caved in to to the state's law enforcement establishment, which has a vested professional interest in maximizing drug crime.
Last week, after the U.S. Supreme Court ordered California to reduce its prison population as a remedy for Eighth Amendment violations, Gieringer noted that the state's prisoners include 25,000 drug offenders.
Read all about the outrage in the first
two-thirds of this Minneapolis
Star Tribune column by Jon Tevlin. Then prepare to let
the anger turn into despair, when Tevlin opines that the bad guys
in this story "actually make some good points." Here they are:
Sgt. Steve McCarty, spokesman for the MPD, said the area was dangerous that day, with downed powerlines and teetering structures. "He was not authorized to be in that zone," McCarty said, explaining that everybody who ignored barricades was cited, regardless of his or her intentions.
McCarty said police were working in a chaotic environment and their first job was to keep people safe. He's sorry [Mike] Haege got a ticket, however, and noted that he might have a good shot at an appeal.
Matt Laible, spokesman for the city, said Haege was doing work in a zone that he hadn't been assigned to, work that should only have been done by a contractor licensed in Minneapolis. Laible said 18 citations were issued to people for working without a permit.
Ben Post works for Urban Homeworks, and sympathizes with Haege. But he said volunteers were given explicit directions to stay out of banned zones, so if Haege was in one, he was on his own.
"People were super ramped up to help, and frankly there wasn't much to do," he said. "The hard part is, I'm sure people were asking volunteers for help in those areas. But if we just released 600 people into the neighborhood, it would have been a nightmare."
Statist vs. decentralized responses to disaster is one of Reason's greatest, if more idiosyncratic, subjects. Thanks to reader Vivek N. Iyer for the tip.
On Wednesday the U.S. Sentencing Commission held a hearing on the retroactive application of the shorter crack cocaine sentences that Congress approved at the end of last year. The legislation, a compromise between those who wanted to eliminate the sentencing disparity between the smoked and snorted forms of cocaine and those who wanted merely to shrink it, reduced the weight gap by 82 percent: A crack offender who qualifies for the five-year or 10-year mandatory minimum sentence now gets the same penalty as someone caught with 18 (rather than 100) times as much cocaine powder. Although Congress did not make the change retroactive, the sentencing commission can choose to do so for prisoners whose terms are not dictated by the statutory minimums. According to the commission's analysis (PDF), retroactivity could mean shorter sentences for more than 12,000 crack offenders who are currently serving time. But Attorney General Eric Holder asked the commission to exclude prisoners who have significant criminal histories or who possessed a gun at the time of their offense, which would reduce the number of eligible inmates to about 5,500. Julie Stewart, president of Families Against Mandatory Minimums, says that suggestion makes no sense, since those factors were already taken into account at sentencing.
Holder's proposal seems to be aimed at shielding the Obama administration, which supported the sentencing reform bill, from Republican flak. So far it is not working. On Wednesday, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas) accused the administration of "supporting the release of dangerous drug dealers." Smith said Holder's testimony "shows that they are more concerned with well-being of criminals than with the safety of our communities."
FAMM has more on retroactivity here.
When it comes to the federal government, massive cost overruns are the rule, not the exception. In 1967 long-run forecasts estimated that Medicare would cost about $12 billion by 1990. In reality, it cost more than $98 billion that year. Today it costs $500 billion. In her latest appearance on Bloomberg TV, Reason columnist and Mercatus Center economist Veronique de Rugy explains the facts about the government’s medicare cost projections by separating economic myths from economic truths.
Morris Davis used to be the
United States government's chief prosecutor for military
commissions at Guantanamo Bay. He resigned in late
2007 to protest the admission of evidence obtained via torture.
Over at
Crimes of War, Davis writes an account of his turn from
prosecutor to dissident that is worth reading regardless of where
you stand on any of the relevant issues. Excerpt:
In the fall of 2005, [...] I sat down for a lengthy discussion with a veteran member of the prosecution team, a Marine Corps officer with an extensive background in criminal prosecution. We discussed a case that caused him concern, one he said he was not comfortable prosecuting. After describing some of the specifics of the detainee's treatment at Guantanamo, which was documented in official records, the prosecutor said: "Sir, they fucked with him and they fucked with him until now he's as crazy as a shit-house rat." In an interview with Bob Woodward published in the Washington Post in January 2009, Susan Crawford, the Bush administration official who supervised the military commissions, explained why she refused to send the same case to trial when it reached her desk in the spring of 2008. "We tortured Qahtani," she said, "His treatment met the legal definition of torture." [...]
As chief prosecutor for the military commissions, I personally approved the charges against some of the detainees now convicted of war crimes and I participated in discussions on potential charges against others like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. A phrase used repeatedly in detainee charges is "in violation of the law of war." As a career military attorney, prosecuting those who violated the law of war was a duty I readily accepted. For nearly two years, I was a vocal supporter of the detention facility at Guantanamo and the military commissions. In June 2007, I published an op-ed entitled "The Guantanamo I Know," where I defended the detention facility and the military commission process.
I instructed the prosecutors that we would not use information derived by waterboarding or any other technique that went too far, and for two years that policy was unchallenged. Then, in October 2007, I received a written order from Deputy Secretary of Defense Gordon England placing me under the command of Brigadier General Tom Hartmann and Defense Department General Counsel Jim Haynes. Hartmann disputed the policy I established arguing that "President Bush said we don't torture, so what makes you think you have the authority to say we do?" He believed the information I had excluded should be introduced as evidence in detainee trials. Haynes was the architect of the memo former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld signed authorizing enhanced interrogation techniques, the memo on which Rumsfeld scribbled, "I stand 8-10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to four hours?" I was summoned to the Pentagon and given a copy of the order. I went back to my office and drafted my resignation. Information obtained by extreme coercion – what most call torture – has no place as evidence in what purports to be an American military court of justice. [...]
Torture violates both domestic and international law, and like the basis for the charges against the detainees, torture is "in violation of the law of war." The law requires that allegations of torture be investigated and those who engaged in it be held to account. To ignore that binding legal obligation is indefensible and inexcusable, whether it is the government of Syria, Pakistan or the United States who is derelict in performing its duties.
Whole thing here; link via the Twitter feed of Human Rights Watch's Laura Pitter. Reason on torture here.
Last month, the U.S. created just 54,000 jobs—well below the roughly 150,000 necessary simply to keep up with population growth—and unemployment crept upward to 9.1 percent. Those ugly jobs numbers have already provoked cries for action from Washington from a number of liberal bloggers.
We’ve heard this line before. In early 2009, as the economy reeled, the Obama administration passed a stimulus with an enormous price tag that’s since grown to roughly $800 billion. The stimulus package came attached to very specific promises about the unemployment trajectory that would follow its passage, and those promises were crucial to the administration's case for passing the spending.
Well, we passed the stimulus. But as the chart below shows, the promised jobs didn’t materialize. With the stimulus in place, we were supposed to see less than seven percent unemployment by now. Via Cato’s Dan Mitchell, here's an updated comparison between the unemployment numbers the Obama administration predicted (the blue line) under the stimulus and the dismal unemployment figures we’ve actually seen (the dots):
Meanwhile, the jobs-created-or-saved numbers the White House constantly touts in order to justify the stimulus are essentially useless. They’re based on slightly updated versions of the same models that initially predicted the stimulus would create jobs rather than real-world measurements. As the director of the Congressional Budget Office, which produces the estimates, has made crystal clear, the topline numbers in the stimulus reports are disconnected enough from reality that if no jobs had been created at all, the official estimates would not reflect that fact.
So the official estimates tell us nothing of value. And the unemployment numbers in our post-stimulus world don’t even come close to matching the administration’s rosy original predictions. What’s the case for adding more expensive, debt-driving stimulus to the pile when there’s so little evidence that the last round worked in the way we were all promised it would?
The Wegmans supermarket chain
has had it with the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board's ridiculous
"wine kiosks," a vivid symbol of the state monopoly's inept attempt
to ward off privatization by operating more like a private
business. The Philadelphia Inquirer reports
that Wegmans has asked the PLCB to take back its machines, which
dispense a limited selection of wines at limited locations and
times to customers who present ID, look into a camera monitored by
a state employee, breathe into a blood-alcohol meter, and swipe a
credit card. As the Inquirer notes, the machines are
notorious for failing to deliver the promised vino, and last year
all 32 of them were taken offline for repairs "smack in the middle
of the Christmas holiday booze rush." Wegmans, which has 10 of the
kiosks (a third of the total) in its stores, explains its decision
this way:
We had hoped that our customers would find the kiosks to be a valuable addition to their shopping experience, but that proved not to be the case....The kiosks have not realized their potential, and in some ways have been detrimental to our stores.
A PLCB spokeswoman nevertheless insists (presumably with a straight face) that "our focus is the customer" and "we want to make sure we are doing things that people will embrace." As I argued in a column a few months ago, the focus of state-run liquor monopolies is decidedly not the customer, not only because they face no competition but because their whole reason for existing is to make buying alcoholic beverages more of a pain the ass than it needs to be. Hence these bizarre wine contraptions, which the PLCB presents as a consumer-friendly innovation but which are incomprehensible outside a system in which the government insists on getting between adults and their booze.
The wine kiosk fiasco can only strengthen support for privatization, which is backed by Gov. Tom Corbett and House Majority Leader Mike Turzai (R-Allegheny).
In January I noted Wegmans' end run around Pennsylvania's idiotic restrictions on beer sales.
[Thanks to Max Minkoff for the tip.]
The first New Hampshire debate of the 2012 presidential race will take place later this month, and former two-term New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson is not invited. CNN, WMUR, and the Union Leader are hosting the debate. Here's the latter's writeup:
Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann, businessman Herman Cain, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, Texas Rep. Ron Paul, former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum will debate on June 13 in Sullivan Arena at St. Anselm College.
Invitations were extended to 13 prominent Republicans. In addition to the seven who have agreed to debate, Mitch Daniels, Rudy Giuliani, Mike Huckabee, Jon Huntsman, Sarah Palin and Donald Trump were on the list.
Palin, who appeared in New Hampshire yesterday as part of a campaign-style bus tour, told WMUR, "I don't think I'll be able to be there. Thanks for asking, though." Giuliani and Huntsman turned down their invitations. Daniels, Huckabee and Trump decided not to run.
CNN, WMUR and the New Hampshire Union Leader sent invitations to every Republican who was taking substantive steps towards a presidential run
and met any of the following polling standards:> At least 2.00% support in at least three major national polls released in April.
> At least 2.00% support in at least three major national polls released in May.
> An average of at least 2.00% support in the two May polls of New Hampshire voters by the UNH Survey Center.
And here's the Johnson camp's press release responding to the news:
Republican presidential candidate and former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson released the following statement today in reaction to not being invited to participate in the June 13 New Hampshire Republican presidential primary debate:
“I respect the right of CNN and the other sponsors of the June 13 New Hampshire Republican presidential primary debate to apply their own criteria and invite who they choose. It is, however, unfortunate that a significant segment of the Republican Party, and more importantly, millions of independent voters who might be Republican voters, will not have a voice on the stage in Manchester.
What will be missing is the voice of those who hold an undiluted view of individual liberty – those who believe that individual rights extend to women who face choices about abortion, Americans who happen to be gay, and those who don’t place other asterisks on freedom.
Likewise, there will be no voice for the growing number of Americans who see the hypocrisy and failure of drug laws that condone alcohol at White House Dinners while incarcerating millions of Americans, including our kids, who choose to smoke pot.
I wish the participants in the debate well. And I sympathize with the millions of Americans whose beliefs will not be on display in Manchester on June 13.
I look forward to participating in the July 10 debate in Las Vegas, sponsored by Americans for Tax Reform and the Daily Caller."
Yesterday the self-appointed Global Commission on Drug Policy issued a report condemning the war on drugs. It is reminiscent of the 2009 report from the self-appointed Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy. The resemblance is not surprising, since the former presidents behind the earlier initiative—Fernando Henrique Cardoso of Brazil, César Gaviria of Colombia, and Ernesto Zedillo of Mexico—are also leading the new commission. But as Mike Riggs reported the other day, they've been joined by a bunch of notable international figures, including not just longtime critics of the war on drugs such as former Secretary of State George Shultz and Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa but prominent people who are less identified with the cause of drug policy reform, such as Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou, former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, Virgin Group founder Richard Branson, and Javier Solana, former secretary general of NATO and former E.U. foreign policy chief. The 19 commissioners all signed off on some pretty strong criticism of the status quo:
The global war on drugs has failed, with devastating consequences for individuals and societies around the world. Fifty years after the initiation of the UN Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, and 40 years after President Nixon launched the US government’s war on drugs, fundamental reforms in national and global drug control policies are urgently needed.
Vast expenditures on criminalization and repressive measures directed at producers, traffickers and consumers of illegal drugs have clearly failed to effectively curtail supply or consumption....
Political leaders and public figures should have the courage to articulate publicly what many of them acknowledge privately: that the evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates that repressive strategies will not solve the drug problem, and that the war on drugs has not, and cannot, be won.
So far, so good. But this comment from Cardoso, the commission's chairman, gives me pause:
We are making this effort to open a debate and to say: Stop the war on drugs, and let's be more constructive in trying to reduce the consumption. It's not peace instead of war. It's a more intelligent way to fight.
What's wrong with declaring peace? As the report makes clear, the commission, whether for ideological or tactical reasons, is not prepared to renounce the use of force to stop people from consuming politically incorrect intoxicants. It wants to lighten up on users and low-level suppliers while cracking down on "violent criminal organizations...in ways that undermine their power and reach while prioritizing the reduction of violence and intimidation." But it is prohibition that enriches and empowers such organizations while encouraging them to be violent. As the Mexican government has vividly demonstrated since 2006, fighting drug cartels escalates the violence associated with the black market, which will persist as long as supplying people with the drugs they want remains illegal. The commission knows this: It quotes a study concluding that "drug-related violence and high homicide rates are likely a natural consequence of drug prohibition" and that "increasingly sophisticated and well-resourced methods of disrupting drug distribution networks may unintentionally increase violence." Practical concerns aside, the policy of decriminalizing possession while maintaining the bans on production and sale is morally incoherent: If drug use itself is not worthy of punishment, why should people go to prison merely for helping others commit this noncrime?
Still, there is a great deal of good sense in the 24-page report. For example:
Law enforcement efforts should focus not on reducing drug markets per se but rather on reducing their harms to individuals, communities and national security....
Encourage experimentation by governments with models of legal regulation of drugs (with cannabis, for example) that are designed to undermine the power of organized crime and safeguard the health and security of their citizens....
The majority of people who use drugs do not fit the stereotype of the "amoral and pitiful addict."...
Most people involved in drug trafficking are petty dealers and not the stereotyped gangsters from the movies – the vast majority of people imprisoned for drug dealing or trafficking are "small fish" in the operation (often coerced into carrying or selling drugs), who can easily be replaced without disruption to the supply.
As I said regarding the 2009 report, talk of treating drug use as a "public health" issue, which is sprinkled through the new document, makes me nervous, not least because drug warriors have no problem adopting the same language, which can easily become a humane-sounding cover for repression. But on the whole, the reforms advocated in the report would be a huge improvement, and it is heartening to see so many big names endorsing them.
[Thanks to Mark Lambert for the A.P. story link.]
The Supreme Court ruling in Plata v. Brown ordering California to relieve prison overcrowding has outraged the Court’s conservatives. But as Reason Foundation Senior Analyst Shikha Dalmia notes in her latest column in The Daily, their reaction is just as overblown as the liberal reaction to welfare reform was 15 years ago. Just as liberal predictions that welfare reform would lead to destitution for the poor didn’t come to pass, likewise conservative predictions that prison reform will jeopardize public safety are baseless now. That’s because much of the Golden State’s overcrowding is the result of its insanely draconian three-strikes law that keeps non-violent, non-serious offenders behind bars much longer than necessary.
“Many of their [second- and third-strikers] sentences could be commuted without endangering public safety given that these laws have had little impact on crime rates,” notes Dalmia.
One hestitates again to dive
into the noxious pool of science politics that surrounds the issue
of climate change, but here goes. At the center of the latest
contretemps is a fight
over Freedom on Information Act requests involving research done by
climate scientists. Specifically, Virginia's Attorney General Ken
Cuccinelli (R) and lawyers for the American Tradition Institute
have made FOIA requests for information on the grants, emails and
other information about the research done by climatologist Michael
Mann when he was at the University of Virginia. For the record, I
came out a while back against misusing FOIA requests as a tool for
prosecuting scientific "witch
hunts."
More recently, the Washington Post editors high-mindedly opined,
FREEDOM OF information laws are critical tools that allow Americans to see what their leaders do on their behalf. But some global warming skeptics in Virginia are showing that even the best tools can be misused.
Lawyers from the Environmental Law Center at the American Tradition Institute (ATI) have asked the University of Virginia to turn over thousands of e-mails and other documents written by Michael E. Mann, a former U-Va. professor and a prominent climate scientist. Another warming skeptic, Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli II (R), recently demanded many of the same documents to determine whether Mr. Mann somehow defrauded taxpayers when he obtained research grants to study global temperatures. ...
Going after Mr. Mann only discourages the sort of scientific inquiry that, over time, sorts out fact from speculation, good science from bad. Academics must feel comfortable sharing research, disagreeing with colleagues and proposing conclusions — not all of which will be correct — without fear that those who dislike their findings will conduct invasive fishing expeditions in search of a pretext to discredit them. That give-and-take should be unhindered by how popular a professor’s ideas are or whose ideological convictions might be hurt.
Teresa A. Sullivan, U-Va.’s president, said that the university will use “all available exemptions” from the state’s public records law to shield Mr. Mann. And a university spokesperson said that U-Va. anticipates that most of the documents at issue will be exempt under a statute that “excludes from disclosure unpublished proprietary information produced or collected by faculty in the conduct of, or as a result of, study or research on scientific or scholarly issues.” The university is right to make full use of such exemptions.
So there. In today's Post, the lawyer for ATI Christopher Horner responded, calling the Post's editorial "hypocritical." You be the judge:
...we take issue with the editorial’s failure to acknowledge a critical point: It is customary among commonwealth universities to provide such records of academics, even the specific class of records we are seeking. For example, U-Va. began providing to Greenpeace records of former research professor Patrick Michaels, before Greenpeace suspended its request. And just this year George Mason University released correspondence of professor Edward Wegman regarding an already published paper, just as we seek former U-Va. assistant professor Michael Mann’s correspondence relating to his publications.
For the uninitiated, Mr. Michaels is a “skeptic.” Mr. Wegman was involved in exposing Mr. Mann’s statistical methods and problems with climate science’s version of peer-review. So their records are somehow different. For The Post to acknowledge this disparate treatment would be to acknowledge that the law is on our side, that the exception sought here is unique to a favored individual, and that this expression of outrage in response to our request is therefore selective and hypocritical.
Looking into the matter, one finds that U.Va. was indeed responsive to Greenpeace's FOIA requests for access to Michaels' correspondence. In a letter dated January 27, 2010, the academic bureaucrat in charge of FOIA requests did inform Greenpeace that U.Va. could not give "unfiltered" records, but for a fee the University would be willing to check through Michaels'
"'letters, ... faxes, reports, meeting and teleconference agendas, minutes, notes, transcripts, tape recordings and phone logs' relating to global climate change...."
Greenpeace apparently dropped the request when it discovered how much it would cost (more than $4,000). However, the University did send "a list of grants in support research, which we can provide free of charge," along with Michaels' CV. The University appears to be much less willing to shield a climate change "denier" from FOIA requests than it is to protect a climate change "alarmist" from similar requests. (The terms are what each side calls the other.)
What about the case of Wegman and George Mason University? Statistician Edward Wegman did an analysis that was highly critical of Michael Mann's statistical methods for the House Committee on Energy and Commerce back in 2006. That report's findings were highly contested. Enter a FOIA request from USA Today journalist Dan Vergano to GMU for information relating to Wegman's research. This how GMU responded:
In accordance with the Virginia Freedom of lnformation Act (§2.2-3700, et seq.) and per your request on October 21, 2010, for “information and documentary materials, including electronic mail and other communication, made by Dr. Edward J. Wegman and his associates, Yasmin J. Said and Walid Sharabati, in connection with I or related to the following grants”:
1. National Institutes on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism grant 1 F32 AA015876-01Al
2. Army Research Office contract W911NF-04-1-0447
3. Army Research Laboratory under contract W911NF-07-1-0059As well as in connection with I or related to the following reports created by some or all of these authors at George Mason University:
1. Computational Statistics & Data Analysis 52 (2008) 2177 – 2184, Said, Y. et al
2. COMPST AT 2008 -Proceedings in Computational Statistics: 18th Symposium Held in Porto, Portugal,
2008 Wegman, E. et al, pp. 173-189Please find the requested information as electronically copied on the enclosed CD.
At Virginia universities, there does seem to be some difference in how researchers are treated when it comes to FOIA requests depending on which side they stand in the climate change controversy.
But now the Wegman case gets really interesting. Because of the FOIA request in part, Vergano was able to uncover and report plagiarism in the Wegman report and subsequent peer-reviewed articles based on that report. In this case, a FOIA request may have contributed to revealing some research hanky-panky, which was severe enough that the journal that published the article has now retracted it.
So, it can be argued that the Wegman case cuts in favor of releasing Mann's records through FOIA since the folks going after those records believe that they, too, might well uncover research abuse.
Instead of engaging in FOIA battles which fuel conspiracy theories, the real solution is for publicly funded researchers to embrace research transparency, putting all their data and methods online for everyone to see.
Disclosure: I was graduated from the University of Virginia in 1975.
Joshua Kurlantzick, a fellow at the
Council on Foreign Relations, just claimed in The New
Republic that "global freedom" has "plummeted" and that
"it is democratic meltdowns, not democratic revolutions, that are
now the norm." Managing Editor Jesse Walker disagrees. The
long-term trend, he argues, is still toward greater freedom. The
know-how for building freedom is still spreading. And half of
Kurlantzick's argument has less to do with the spread of liberty
than with the freer countries' willingness to go on global
crusades.
1. Watch out for fake cops.
2. But if there's any chance the folks trying to get into your house are police, you'd better let them in.
At a Wednesday hearing in Ohio on the
constitutionality of ObamaCare’s individual mandate to purchase
health insurance, a judge asked an Obama administration to define
the limit of Congressional power under the Constitution’s Commerce
Clause. From
The New York Times:
One judge, James L. Graham, pressed that question on Wednesday with Neal K. Katyal, the acting United States solicitor general, who is defending the law for the Obama administration.
“Where, ultimately, is the limit on Congress’s power?” the judge asked.
Mr. Katyal responded that the government had never suggested that there were no limits.
“Where are they?” Judge Graham continued. “I want to find them.”
I wish Judge Graham good luck with his quest, but I don't expect he'll have much success. He may want to find and define the limits of congressional power, but apparently the Obama administration doesn’t. Rather than answer Graham's question directly, the lawyer arguing the case for the mandate instead made the odd claim that the law’s individual mandate to purchase health insurance coverage is not, in fact, a requirement to buy health insurance coverage. The NYT continues:
Mr. Katyal then argued that the law’s insurance mandate, which takes effect in 2014, does not so much require individuals to buy coverage as it does regulate the way they pay for health care they will inevitably consume. Without the mandate, Mr. Katyal said, the law’s requirement that insurers provide coverage to all applicants, regardless of their health status, would simply encourage people to buy insurance after they got sick.
“Congress is not regulating the failure to buy something, but the failure to secure financing,” Mr. Katyal said.
This isn’t the first time the administration has attempted to characterize the mandate as something other than a requirement to buy insurance. In May, a lawyer for the White House told a different judge that the mandate is “not asking people to buy something they otherwise might not buy.” This latest attempt to redefine the mandate as something other than a mandate seems rather tortured, but given the Obama's long history of flip-flops on the mandate, it is perhaps not surprising that the administration is now trying to pursuade judges that a provision requiring the purchase of health insurance is not really a requirement to purchase insurance at all.
The Atlantic Wire's Media Diet series is fast becoming a forum where important old people say stupid things about the Internet. Last month, Aaron Sorkin complained about "BobsThoughts.com." This week, Rep. Barney Frank bemoans the fact that "anyone can publish anything."
[Frank]: The trouble with new media is the fact that there's no screen. Anyone can publish anything. We still have the notion that if it's printed it has some validity. Previously, you had to convince at least one other person that it was worth printing. Now, anyone can print anything in this medium. In general, there's a lot more gossip and fragmentation. People are starting to just get reinforcement in the media. On the left, it's MSNBC, Fire Dog Lake and The Huffington Post. On the right, it's Fox News and the talk radio hosts. People interpret facts differently through these parallel universes. It's what makes compromise so hard because your partisans just think your selling them out because that's what everyone they know says. It deepens and sharpens a partisan and ideological divide.
Yesterday I debated the federal government's new guidelines for school lunches with Margo Wootan of the Center for Science in the Public Interest on Air Talk With Larry Mantle, which is carried by KPCC, an NPR affiliate in Pasadena. The most striking thing to me was Wootan's conviction, which seemed to be shared by Mantle and all of the callers, that if a federal program is popular (or "effective"), it does not matter whether it's authorized by the Constitution.
You can listen to the conversation here.
The tornados of April 2011 cut a destructive
swath through Tuscaloosa, Alabama and surrounding areas. Whole
neighborhoods now resemble bombed out post-war Tokyo or Berlin. Yet
Tuscaloosa also became the scene of an inspiring, highly
decentralized outpouring of volunteers and donations. As University
of Alabama historian David Beito reports, right-wing talk radio,
local churches, and concerned citizens spontaneously organized to
help tornado victims.
New at Reason.tv: "Universidad Francisco Marroquin (aka University of Free Marketeers)"
Matt Welch and
I are happy to announce that we'll be appearing at FreedomFest 2011, which
will be held July 14-16 in Las Vegas. FreedomFest is an annual
gathering of 2,000 or more fans of liberty and among the featured
speakers are Fox Business' Judge Andrew Napolitano, Whole Foods
founder John Mackey, the Cato Institute's David Boaz, Freedom
Works' Matt Kibbe, visionary Peter Thiel, and many
more.
On Saturday, July 16, Matt and I will be talking about the themes and ideas in our book The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What's Wrong with America, which will be published on June 28 (pre-order now from your favorite online seller!). Later in the day, we'll be hosting a book signing as well.
And we'll be
heading up "Reason Day," a great lineup of speakers from the
Reason Foundation including Lisa Snell (education), Anthony
Randazzo (fiscal policy), Harris Kenny (government reform), and
Adam Summers (California's budgetpocalypse).
The organizers promise (emphasis theirs!):
Eleven Great Debates in 2011: FreedomFest is famous for challenging your mind with a series of highlighted debates. This year they will include . .
- “Selfishness: Virtue or Vice?”
- “ObamaCare: Beginning or End of Good Living in America?”
- “Free Trade vs. Fair Trade”
- “To Vote or Not To Vote: You Decide”
- “Can Science Determine Human Values?”Featured Panel Discussions: Among the many speakers, debates and breakout sessions, we will have a special panel discussions on
- “The Growing Chinese Threat: Crisis and Opportunity”
- “From Good to Great: The Keys of Successful Leadership”
- "Vaccines: Good or Bad?"
- "The Future of the Middle East: DIctatorship? Democracy? Islamic Republics?"
- "Education in America: Are We Making Progress?"
- "Beating the Market with Hedge Funds"
FreedomFest's registration fee of $495 per person ($795 per couple) covers three full days of general sessions & breakout sessions, special pre-conference session on Wednesday, all conference materials, unlimited entrance to our exhibit hall, and an early registration cocktail reception. Go here for more details.
Reason on Facebook
Reason on Twitter
Reason on YouTube
Reason RSS
Site comments/questions:
Media Inquiries and Reprint Permissions:
(310) 367-6109
Editorial & Production Offices:
3415 S. Sepulveda Blvd.
Suite 400
Los Angeles, CA 90034
(310) 391-2245