August 2009

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Man cannot aspire if he looked down; if he rise, he must look up.

-Samuel Smiles

August 17, 2009

Could have been worse--Bob Dylan in America

How many roads must a man walk down before he is considered suspicious? Well, I guess it depends on whether it is raining.

A few weeks ago, Bob Dylan--yes that Bob Dylan--was taking a walk in the rain while on tour in Long Beach, NJ. According to reports, he entered the yard of a house that had a For Sale sign out front. This very alarming behavior prompted the occupants of the house to call the police, apparently without interacting with ol' Bob one bit. I confess I don't understand that. But what I really don't understand is the behavior of the officer who responded to the phone call for help. It seems she (politely) asked Bob Dylan who he was and what he was doing, and made the determination that he was indeed suspicious lookin'.

Says the officer, "You know, it was pouring rain and everything."

Based on the suspicious act of walking in the rain, the officer put Bob Dylan in the back of her cruiser. The articles I've read make it sound very amicable and voluntary, but I have to wonder how this would have played out of Bob had tipped his hat, thanked her for her concern, and walked away. And maybe it wasn't so voluntary after all, given what else the officer had to say:

"He was really nice, though, and he said he understood why I had to verify his identity and why I couldn't let him go," Buble said. "He asked me if I could drive him back to the neighborhood when I verified who he was, which made me even more suspicious."

Officer Buble, I don't understand why you had to verify his identity. I don't understand why you couldn't let him go. I bet most Americans would be outraged if this had happened to them, but of course most Americans don't think it could happen to them, so the outrage does not take hold. What's the big deal? He looked like a homeless man, and it's not like they tased him or arrested him (this time).

For a variety of reasons, Americans have developed a relationship with their police departments that is best categorized as "It could be worse". It's not the Gestapo, or frontier justice, and yes this situation probably would have been worse for Jay-Z than for Bob Dylan. But I have the feeling that George Washington would have run you through with a sword if you tried to take him into custody for walking in the rain without identity papers. If that doesn't give you pause for thought, then I think you've missed the point of what this nation was supposed to be about.

To quote Bob Dylan, "A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night and in between does what he wants to do." May you someday find that kind of success, Bob.

Posted by Wulf | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

March 12, 2009

Chuck Norris And State Secession

Interesting: Chuck Norris is a secessionist

The last time that I agreed with a Democrat was in 1861, when the Republican North invaded sovereign Democratic Virginia and declared war on the fledgling secessionist nation. It’s amazing just how much Lincoln changed our nation. We give a hard time to FDR and Wilson, but no one has impacted this nation more than Abe, honestly. The famous expression goes that before Lincoln we referred to ourselves as “the United States are” as if that were a bad thing. It’s interesting when you think about it, and I’m finally starting to get clarity on this topic after my Civil War phase last year. Here’s the analogy I’ve drawn:

If a person immigrates to this country, that new citizen retains the right to visit other countries (mostly) and to renounce his or her citizenship at any time. One of the greatest aspects of this country is that – if you don’t like it – you have the ability to leave it…at any time. This, to me, pretty much sums up the definition of a free country. Similarly, a union of federated states should operate in very much the same way. The United States of America didn’t conquer Texas, or Alaska, or Hawaii. These states joined voluntarily because the United States represented a mode of federated government to which these states desired to belong. Likewise – a state should be free to leave the Union at any point that that state feels the government is not aligned to how…well, actually, a state shouldn’t even need to give a reason. If a state doesn’t want to be a member of the union anymore, then so be it.

If we hold a free, law-abiding citizen here against his or her will, then we are living in a non-free country. We would be living in an authoritarian government. Yes, fascism. So what does that make us when we hold a state here against its will? So when Texas or Alaska secedes because the U.S. government has been radically bastardized from the nation they voluntarily joined (even 50 years ago), what is our “freedom” loving country going to do? March in there with the 4th Infantry Division? (Whoops…that’s already based in Texas, let’s try the 3rd Infantry Division). And would we be able to look ourselves in the mirror and honestly call our nation “free”?

That’s the problem with Lincoln. This didn’t have to come to bloodshed and war. When you have a number of states arguing about peacefully seceding, it’s a pretty good indicator that somewhere along the line the federal government has gotten seriously out-of-whack. I know that there are some logistical issues that make difficult – say – a Kansas seceding from the nation. They’d be isolated from the rest of the world. But again, instead of marching into Kansas with an army and overthrowing its state government, why not work on revamping the federal government to cater to the state? After all, what purpose is a federal government but to serve its constituent states (Not its people)? This is why Lincoln failed so miserably, in my opinion, and why – as distasteful as this may be to me – I believe the Democrats were right. And now 150 years later, the political party names have swapped but the heart of the issue remains the same.

Well, one thing’s for certain, the Democratic South would have fared much better had Lee had Chuck Norris under his command.

Posted by Rammage | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

March 1, 2009

Halting the Tea Party

Via blogger Shaun Kenney, a story out of Cedar Rapids that sounds a bit Onionish:

An anti-tax group wanted to pitch in real tea like the Bostonian revolutionaries opposed to England’s tea taxes.

Tea, although natural and quite tasty, is considered a pollutant that can’t go into a body of water without a permit, said Mike Wade, a senior environmental specialist at the DNR’s [Department of Natural Resources] Manchester field office.

A few quick thoughts:

1) Tea is not naturally found in the river, and depending on the amount and the flow it could theoretically have an adverse effect. If you were to dump in tons of it, that is. I suspect they weren't planning to dump that much. DNR is not some kind of environmental hero on this case.

2) It's a fantastic credit to Cedar Rapids Tea Party founder Tim Pugh that he actually took the initiative to contact the DNR and ask about it ahead of time. Honestly. That's a responsible leader who is looking to keep his group's members out of legal troubles. Clearly this guy is an earnest political activist, and not a rabble rouser. I wonder if he realizes that the guys at the original Boston Tea Party were, in fact, rabble rousers?

3) The DesMoines Register article really does say that you can't dump tap water into the river because chlorine is a pollutant. Yes, it says that. Go back and read it again.

4) For some reason, I suspect I know who runs the DNR. This guy.

Posted by Wulf | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

February 16, 2009

Open Fields Doctrine

An interesting question from Norfolk political blogger Vivian Page:

A front page story in Sunday’s Virginian Pilot raised an interesting question.

Game wardens had put a hidden camera in a tree, pointed at VanKesteren’s soybean fields, after receiving a complaint about protected birds getting caught in predator traps.

The camera wasn’t just placed in any tree: it was placed in a tree on Steve VanHersteren’s property, without his knowledge or consent. The video was used to convict the Eastern Shore man for a violation of the federal Migratory Bird Act. His only alternative is an appeal to the US Supreme Court, an expensive proposition.

So, do you agree with the magistrate and the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals that, while troubling, such surveillance can done without a warrant?

Or is this an invasion of privacy and, as such, the conviction should be overturned?

Now I might be something of a rube when it comes to Constitutional Law, but it seems to me that if the officers can do this kind of thing without any kind of issuance from a judge, then there really is no such thing as private property outside of my house and car. And I'm not even talking about it from an anarchist point of view.

Among Vivian's commenters is one Timothy Watson who asserts that this is well covered by case law--some "open fields doctrine" that they never covered in my physics classes and about which I am therefore ignorant.

My question is, What constitutes an open field? How easy does this make it to violate the spirit of the law while following the letter? And why don't they teach this to us rubes in high school, before we go off and major in hard sciences?

Case law would make a great high school elective.

Posted by Wulf | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

December 27, 2008

Snowzilla

Alaska is the last American frontier. It is also the stage for a showdown between a 25 foot tall snowman and the city government of Anchorage.

City officials this year deemed Snowzilla a public nuisance and safety hazard. A cease-and-desist order was issued. The city tacked a public notice on Powers' door.

City officials said the structure increased traffic to the point of endangerment and that the snowman itself was unsafe.

You know darn well that I'm not the type to go on a pseudo-libertarian rant about Garrett Hardin's famous paper and public roads or something like that. I mean, I think we can all agree that I have a right to make a gigantic snowman in my yard. And I think we can all agree that this guy's neighbors think he is an asshat and we would all hate to have that kind of traffic on our own street. And sure, it's an interesting dilemma when those two are at odds.

But that's not what I want to talk about.

No, I'm just here to note that I wish I had some snow here in Virginia, and to note that there is always somebody who is able to make a buck off of any bizarre news story or cultural, um, phenomenon. And God bless that person, who in this case can be found here.

Posted by Wulf | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

November 22, 2008

Slow and Steady

According to several news outlets, a new Code of Conduct will outlaw Happy Hour at pubs and clubs across Britain.

Happy hours, drinking games and all-you-can-drink deals in pubs and bars are to be banned, the British government will announce next month.

It is being reported that the Department for Health will go so far as to curb offers of free drinks for women. [If this were a crass website, sexist jokes would go right here. Just sayin'.]

Teetotalers suggest that this move is necessary to balance out the fact that as of three years ago, pubs are actually permitted to operate 24 hours a day if they'd like to. As usual, the busybodies and the proposed government action completely fail to address the real problems (lack of individual responsibility) by taking away personal liberties (and individual responsibility) in a ridiculous, Orwellian move that could drive one to drink. So long as there are no games or promotions around.

Slow, steady, serious, round-the-clock drinking. Apparently, that's the way the British government wants it.

Cheers.

Posted by Wulf | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

August 30, 2008

What Right to Privacy?

Via Wil Wheaton’s blog, Bruce Schneier writes a thought-provoking essay on privacy at Wired.

The most common retort against privacy advocates -- by those in favor of ID checks, cameras, databases, data mining and other wholesale surveillance measures -- is this line: "If you aren't doing anything wrong, what do you have to hide?"

Some clever answers: "If I'm not doing anything wrong, then you have no cause to watch me." "Because the government gets to define what's wrong, and they keep changing the definition." "Because you might do something wrong with my information." My problem with quips like these -- as right as they are -- is that they accept the premise that privacy is about hiding a wrong. It's not. Privacy is an inherent human right, and a requirement for maintaining the human condition with dignity and respect.

No, those “clever” answers will get you absolutely nowhere with those in favor of ID checks, cameras, databases, data mining, etc. Right now, believe it or not, there are people around the nation doing things to endanger the lives of others. That’s not even debatable. And to the vast majority of people, it is reasonable to place some safeguards and restrictions on everybody in order to figure out who those bad guys are. The government would be negligent not to violate the absolute privacy of citizens in an effort to mitigate those dangers to the rest of us. If the government can violate your privacy without you even being aware of it, so much the better, some would say. Others would argue that no, it needs to be explicit and obvious or else it isn’t an effective deterrent. To anybody making either of those arguments, Mr. Schneier’s “clever” retorts are just silly. Privacy advocates need to step up the game well past that type of thing if they expect to make any headway.

Two proverbs say it best: Quis custodiet custodes ipsos? ("Who watches the watchers?") and "Absolute power corrupts absolutely."

Here Schneier is correct. The issue is all about who can be trusted to violate the privacy I construct for myself. The issue is about who would have the right to circumvent the privacy I take the time to build. It’s not a matter of an inherent right to privacy, because such a right does not actually exist.

Now let’s get this next part out on the table and out of the way: I am well aware of the fact that the Constitution does not specifically enshrine a right to privacy, but that’s definitely not what I am talking about. Please have the Ninth Amendment tattooed to your forearm.

Okay, what I do mean is that your right to privacy can only exist to the degree that you have bothered to create privacy. You do not have a right to have privacy out of thin air, if you haven’t taken the time and effort to create it. It’s like an intellectual property issue.

As Murray Rothbard said when discussing property rights in The Ethics of Liberty (emphasis original):

Is there really such a right to privacy? How can there be?

…as in the case of the “human right” to free speech, there is no such thing as a right to privacy except the right to protect one’s property from invasion. The only right “to privacy” is the right to protect one’s property from being invaded by someone else. In brief, no one has the right to burgle someone else’s home, or to wiretap someone’s phone lines. Wiretapping is properly a crime not because of some vague and woolly “invasion of a ‘right to privacy’,” but because it is an invasion of the property right of the person being wiretapped.

Wil Wheaton says, “We deserve privacy, and we don't have to give it up to have security.” We don’t indeed--in fact, we need each to make the other. If a man is stripped entirely of either of privacy or security, he can have none of the other. But it is important to keep straight the reasons why we ever have privacy. As one Wheaton commenter so wonderfully notes, “I find it comedically ironic that those that rail for nationalized healthcare, carbon credits/taxes, forced morality of affirmative action and other altruistic nightmares, et al., are often times the very same folks railing against ‘privacy’ violations.”

If you create privacy for yourself, then you can have it. But if you destroy it or give it away, you will have none.

Posted by Wulf | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

August 14, 2008

Fairness Doctrine and Blogs

Via Slashdot, Rasmussen reports that

31% [of Americans] believe the Internet sites should be forced to balance their commentary.

31%? Are you kidding me? How would that even work? By what mechanism could this possibly be enforced? [insert Gulag references here]

Democrats oppose government-mandated balance on the Internet by a 48% to 37% margin. Sixty-one percent (61%) of Republicans reject government involvement in Internet content along with 67% of unaffiliated voters.

Only 48% of Democrats and 61% of Republicans oppose the application of the Fairness Doctrine to blogs and other websites?

O'RLY?

Well, then in the interest of fairness, here is a detailed and articulate rebuttal from an opposing point of view, you bastards.

What should be the truly key point from the Rasmussen article: "Voters in all categories agree by sizable margins that it is possible for just about any political view to be heard in today’s media."

In other words, as much as the Fairness Doctrine is a heap of bullshit, it's especially so with regard to the internet. But just because something is blatantly unConstitutional, unworkable, and unnecessary, don't expect it to go away without a lot of "discussion".

Posted by Wulf | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

August 11, 2008

Does Hollywood support violent cartels of illegal immigrants defiling US national forests?

Yes, according to US Drug Czar John Walters:

“Illegal immigrants connected to Mexico's drug cartels are growing hundreds of millions of dollars worth of marijuana in the heart of one of America's national treasures, authorities say. It's a booming business that, federal officials say, feeds Mexico's most violent drug traffickers."

"People who farm now are not doing this for laughs, despite the fact Hollywood still thinks that.”

Hollywood still thinks that? Mr. Walters, the Corsican Brothers was a quarter century ago. Rumors of a Cheech and Chong reunion notwithstanding, I think the Drug Czar sounds very, very out of touch. Hollywood (like most of America) may not think it’s a big deal to grow a little bit of recreational marijuana and get high occasionally, but Hollywood is also known for being very environmentalist. While I haven’t heard any official Hollywood spokespersons discussing the issue, I suspect that the entertainers Mr. Walters is talking about are as a group fairly protective of national forests, and wouldn’t like international cartels using them for anything (including commercial cannabis farms). This is a bit different from this (NSFW language warning). Equating the two seems about as silly as, well, that second clip I just linked.

A quick aside on my comment that most of America doesn’t think that recreational use is a big deal: A CNN poll a few years back showed that 80% of Americans support decriminalizing medicinal marijuana. I couldn’t find a poll stating what percentage of Americans favor decriminalization for recreational use, but reports indicate that 25% of Americans admit to having used marijuana before, and that same CNN poll showed that only 19% of Americans support jailing recreational pot smokers. 72% favored fines over jail. And given that the difference between a fine and a tax is largely a matter of the participation rate, I find it hard to believe that most Americans would be upset to see recreational marijuana legalized, regulated, and taxed.

But all of this is beside my main point, which is that I think Mr. Walters was off base to invoke Hollywood as somehow feeding the problem. Am I wrong?

If Hollywood and Washington were ever to cooperate on these issues as Mr Walters implores them to do, I would hope that the goal might be decriminalization. To quote Robert Guest of the NORML legal committee,

Last time I checked Mexican drug cartels were not using illegal immigrants to growing tobacco, or run moonshine stills. If you are really want to end these drug cartel pot farms in national parks, legalize pot.

And I hope you know this old tune, and can join me in the chorus:

Replacing marijuana prohibition with a system of taxation and regulation similar to that used for alcoholic beverages would produce combined savings and tax revenues of between $10 billion and $14 billion per year, finds a June 2005 report by Dr. Jeffrey Miron, visiting professor of economics at Harvard University.

The report has been endorsed by more than 530 distinguished economists, who have signed an open letter to President Bush and other public officials calling for "an open and honest debate about marijuana prohibition," adding, "We believe such a debate will favor a regime in which marijuana is legal but taxed and regulated like other goods."

Chief among the endorsing economists are three Nobel Laureates in economics: Dr. Milton Friedman of the Hoover Institute, Dr. George Akerlof of the University of California at Berkeley, and Dr. Vernon Smith of George Mason University.

You don’t need to be a Nobel Laureate in economics to realize that the War on (some) Drugs is a failure. It is not only based on an immoral premise that what I inhale, inject, or ingest is the legitimate business of the government. It is also grossly impractical. It doesn’t work, and that’s not some piece of Hollywood fiction.

Costly and ineffective. That's a poor track record compared to Cheech and Chong's body of work. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Mr. Walters.

Posted by Wulf | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

August 4, 2008

Olympic reporters in China

Some things speak for themselves:

In 2001, when the International Olympic Committee (IOC) awarded the 2008 games to China, Wang Wei, the leader of China's bid told reporters: "We will give the media complete freedom to report when they come to China."

But for many reporters there now, it’s still unclear how free they will be able to report or not, as the restrictions and red tape seem almost endless, and they never know whether they've covered all their bases. "We already have to tell the Chinese everywhere we want to be in August, and what time," one TV broadcaster, who preferred to remain anonymous, recently told the Associated Press. "We have to provide a list of the guests who will be interviewed and the content of the interview."

That is, some things speak for themselves where permitted. Which is to say, if you are reading the article I linked, you are probably not doing so in China.

That the Chinese government will frustrate and limit the international press during the Beijing Olympics is a given. What remains to be seen is whether the international press will show itself to be a greater force than the Chinese government in the long run.

It is possible that the Chinese government will make the situation so untenable and intolerable that reporters will never forgive the transgressions, and will draw ever greater worldwide attention to the oppression that the Chinese people have undergone for years.

Or it is possible that the international press will complain a lot during the games and immediately afterward, but then fail to provide any sustained or cohesive effort to bring freedom to the Chinese people, who--unlike the international athletes and press--will still be living in China after the games.

A.J. Liebling once said "People everywhere confuse what they read in newspapers with news." That's still true today, though television news has dethroned the newspaper. Blogs are still reactionary, focusing mostly on the "news" that is published by papers or broadcast on TV... by reporters. While they do not decide what is news and what is not to the extent that they once did, the traditional media still has the power to shape narratives and focus the world's attention. I can't think of a cause that should be a greater motivation to them than worldwide freedom of the press.

Let the games begin...

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July 31, 2008

Hold my calls...

You make the call… is this actual news, or is it a piece of satire?

By a voice vote, the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee passed the Halting Airplane Noise to Give Us Peace--or HANG UP--Act, which was introduced earlier this year by Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.).

We only wish it were satire, friends. CNET’s blog notes that the FCC and FAA already coordinate a ban on in-flight cell phone use, but apparently the House doesn’t have anything more important to do than to move the prohibition from federal policy to federal law. Representative DeFazio justified the legislation by noting that without it, airlines might offer customers choices!!!!

"Polls show the public overwhelmingly doesn't want to be subjected to people talking on their cell phones on increasingly over-packed airplanes. However, with Internet access just around the corner on U.S. flights, it won't be long before the ban on voice communications on in-flight planes is lifted," DeFazio said in a statement. Cash-strapped airlines could end up charging some passengers to use their phones while charging others to sit in a phone-free section of the plane, he said.

And that’s un-American.

The cake is taken by a House member who the AP declines to name:

A third House member raised the specter of national security, saying she'd witnessed one man use his cell phone camera to take pictures of sensitive parts of the airplane.

So let’s look at this realistically. Will it still be legal for passengers to talk to one another? Will it still be legal for passengers to talk to themselves? Is it legitimate to make my speech illegal based solely on who I am talking to? I am trying to figure out any situation in which that makes sense.

Posted by Wulf | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

July 24, 2008

Anarchy

I find anarchists to be fascinating, compelling, and completely impenetrable. Jokes aside, the lack of dogma and structure makes them a little hard to learn about. And let's be honest, some of them are full-on crazy and full of crap. So that also makes it difficult.

But I really need to post a link to Anarchopedia, both as a bookmark and as a conversation piece.

I'm mostly interested in anarcho-capitalists, but I do get exposure to some of them in my regular rounds of the blogosphere. If you fancy yourself any level of anarchist, I'd love to hear your thoughts on Anarchopedia and other web resources. I'd especially love to hear from anticapitalism anarchists, because I have no idea where you are coming from.

Posted by Wulf | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)

May 8, 2008

Random Ruminations on Reforming the Right (and Other 'R' Words)

Excellent. I hope this works out: The Next Right.

This is somewhat related to an idea that's been on my mind a lot lately. There are certain Righty pundits, namely Mark Levin, who get extremely agitated by Republicans who talk about jumping ship. Levin sees it as a loyalty obligation to stick with the Republican Party and reform her from the inside, instead of casting Libertarian or other opposition votes. For my part, I've had somewhat of a realization over the last few days, spurred-on by a biography on Confederate Partisan Ranger John S. Mosby that I’m currently reading. It occurred to me that it is unhealthy and antithetical to historical precedent to perceive political parties as rigid, non-vacillating, and never-ending institutions. Quite the opposite, we've had not only a handful of varying political parties, but the political parties themselves have evolved over time to become wholly unrecognizable versions of their former selves.

For example, from the aforementioned James A. Ramage book on Mosby, the passage below seems almost surreal by today’s stereotypes (particularly in the modern context of Katrina and the Democrats’ desire for massive Federal reconstruction of New Orleans):

For the first four years after the [Civil] war [Mosby] refrained from politics and then in the summer of 1869, when military rule under Congressional Reconstruction was about to end in Virginia, he came out exactly in the center of the political stand of the majority of white Virginians. The state Conservative Party (later the Democratic Party) that opposed Radical Republican Reconstruction nominated Gilbert C. Walker for governor. When he came to speak in Warrenton, Mosby met him at the train station and hosted and introduced him at the local rally. In his remarks Mosby said that Walker stood for civilization while the Republican Party represented "barbarism." Mosby actively campaigned for Walker and for his friend James Keith, a fellow Warrenton attorney, running for the state legislature. Both won, and the Conservative state legislature ratified the 14th and 15th Amendments, bringing an end to Reconstruction in Virginia. [...] Mosby became an aggressive Conservative Party [meaning Democrat] member, personally taking the offensive against carpetbaggers, Northern men who came into the South and worked from Radical Republican governments.

Does there come a point where enough opposition-party mud has been flung at a political party and subsequently stuck to render the party unsalvageable? The first example that comes to mind is the Whigs, who experienced mass defection because of their stance on slavery. Practically overnight the Whig Party of the mid-Nineteenth century utterly vanished in favor of the Democratic and Republican parties. A few months ago a commenter on the Atlantico remarked that the Republican Party was the party of racism, whereas the Democrats were the "Civil Rights" party. Can you imagine this being heard 140 years ago, when the North, New England, the Abolitionists, and Lincoln's Administration were overwhelmingly Republican and the Democratic Party was prevalent among Southerners, Secessionists, and anti-Abolitionists? We don't even have to go back as far as the Civil War. In 1964, the Democrats had three times the number of dissenters for the Civil Right's Act than the Republicans. And yet, enough mud has been thrown - and stuck - at the GOP that they are the party of racism. They are the party of greed. They are the party for rich, white men. The party of evangelical fanaticism and evolutionists. In general, the forest of concepts upon which the Republican Party was built has been lost for the mud-laden trees.

I think the Republican Party has served a nice, long run, and its time has come. I understand that the Next Right is looking to redefine the Republican Party, to get back to some of its grassroots. And that's great. But I also think that the time has come when we should not shy away from a complete make-over. And not just change for the change's sake, but understanding that the political party system is a fluid and evolving concept. As long as we remain grounded in our principles, then the name and history and baggage of a political party should be irrelevant. Why should I, someone who's trying to promote small-government, pro-capitalism, and traditional liberalism, be encumbered with a century and a half of GOP closeted skeletons? Likewise, I don't feel like today's socialists should be encumbered with the war-mongering likes of John F. Kennedy and FDR. Are we stuck in this rut because Fox News or CNN tells us so, or because of the deep pocketbooks and far-reaching influence of the D/RNC? Today's Democrats should form the New Socialist Party and we GOP train-hoppers should form the New Democratic-Republican Party and we should be going after each other in terms of our ideological differences instead of our historical mud-slinging and baggage pointing.

At the very least, making a serious effort towards a new Conservative Party would hopefully elicit wide-sweeping changes and reform within the current Republican Party: A "Next Right" upon which we can all agree.

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February 9, 2008

If only there was a word for this type of behavior…

If you had $75,000 of my money, what would you spend it on?

If you are the Virginia Senate, you would spend that taxpayer money on adjusting signs, letterhead, business cards and other literature to replace the phrase "mentally retarded" with "intellectually disabled."

At least there was an effort by the party of smaller government... oh wait, nevermind... that bill was passed unanimously

Posted by Wulf | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

July 31, 2007

Socialism: So Pretty!

The Daily Texan is the student newspaper of UT Austin. It’s one of the largest student newspapers in the country. And yesterday, it ran an opinion piece advocating that Westerners re-evaluate the wonders of socialism. Under normal circumstances, I don’t pay much attention to student newspapers and their opinion pieces, as they just aren’t that well written. But this piece is an exception, and it therefore deserves to be highlighted.

The author is history student Colin Pace, who writes:

Socialism is not a monolithic ideology and it is not a terrible, fear-driven beast that threatens the U.S. masses. In fact, it is quite the opposite. To understand this, one need not look further than Michael Moore's recent movie, "Sicko." Though gimmicky and biased, like his other movies, the film raises an important question about why universal health care systems rank so high above the United States' privatized system in a global comparison.

But Wulf! Michael Moore is a dirty propagandist and his movie is full of lies! We’ve debunked “Sicko”!

But Wulf! The US health care system isn’t actually private, it’s half government funded already!

Come on, Wulf! We have the best health care in the world! People come here from Canada for our health care! The metrics are not fair!

Oh, Wulf! It’s just an undergrad in social sciences, spouting off his dirty collectivist delusions!

Yes, yes, I know all of that. And I also know that every year there a few million kids turning 18 and getting the right to vote. And they don’t read your blog. And most of them don’t know what is inherently unjust about socialism. Rolling your eyes and dismissing them may make you feel better about yourself, but it doesn’t actually advance the cause of liberty. So let’s take a closer look.

Colin Pace represents an articulate voice pointing out that “[i]nstitutions ranging from news stations to school systems teach that socialist and nationalized programs are doomed to collapse under the weight of bureaucracy and corruption.” I would love for this to be the case, but I simply don’t agree that the prevailing theme taught to our youth is that nationalized programs are too big to succeed. Privatized education, health care, public transit, and other government services? No, that’s certainly not the predominant agenda being pushed to our youth by the sources I know of. But to an audience lacking an articulate source to the contrary, Mr. Pace can play the role of the guy who questions authority, and that gives his point the ironic advantage of being anti-authority. “Rebel against convention and think for yourself about the benefits of letting bureaucrats make more decisions for you!”

Pace then makes another appeal guaranteed to garner attention on any college campus: class warfare and rich white guilt. “Factory workers thousands of miles away are harshly exploited so consumer goods such as clothing and TVs can be sold at low prices to American consumers.” For Pace, it’s not a matter of comparing the standard of living for the workers today vs. 40 years ago. It’s a matter of comparing their standard of living to mine, or better yet to Dick Cheney’s. And again, rolling your eyes and dismissing him is not the same as refuting him - or socialism.

But the real reason I chose to highlight this article is not because it’s easy to cherry pick a couple of weak points and mock him. It’s because Mr. Pace really does make an excellent point that we should all consider:

People should not judge the word "socialism" solely by what they know of "socialist" leaders. Leaders like Joseph Stalin and Fidel Castro may have upheld socialist aspects of their administrations, but they were not actually "socialists"…

Spot on. The more distant Stalin and Castro become, the easier it will be to note that they did not actually uphold socialist ideals… and therefore they do not provide an honest example of what is wrong about socialism. Those who wish to refute socialism should beware not to let their argument stop with Stalin and Castro, because it (rightly) won’t sway a collectivist who recognizes that these men were not socialists. There is a difference between oppression by a tyrant and oppression by a democracy. One is appealing to the tyrant and his cult of personality, while the other is appealing to 51% of the population. If we only know how to refute the ills of the former, we will eventually suffer the latter.

In other words, Colin Pace’s final paragraph is one that should be considered by every thinking person the world over:

Even those who are staunchly opposed to the nationalization of industry, believing that the free market is the only means for progress, should question the objectivity of the Western view of socialism. The word is loaded with connotations, but that should not stop people from asking what the system is really about.

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July 26, 2007

The Basics

I love it when somebody lays things out in the most basic terms. So, here's three cheers for Kip, Esquire!

To review: The government has no business providing any goods other than public goods. A public good is one that is neither excludable (I can withhold a cheeseburger from you if you do not pay for it) nor rivalrous (a cheeseburger cannot be consumed simultaneously by more than one person).

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July 25, 2007

For Future Reference

WaPo:

President Bush this month is giving an obscure White House office new powers over regulations affecting health, worker safety and the environment. Calling it a power grab, Democrats running Congress are intent on stopping him.

This is great news. First, it’s an attempt to block the executive branch from acting without oversight, and instead gives the power to act without oversight to legislators and their aides, which is where that power ought to be, dammit. Secondly, and more seriously, I’ll be able to refer to this post the next time a Democrat is in the White House (cough-544 days-cough) and the shoe is on the other foot. That’s always fun.

As to the details, WaPo reports that the House voted to prohibit the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) from spending federal money on Executive Order 13422. Cutting federal spending, I suppose – so far, so good. But what is Executive Order 13422? It amends an executive order from 1993… let’s check the text:

Each agency shall identify in writing the specific market failure (such as externalities, market power, lack of information) or other specific problem that it intends to address (including, where applicable, the failures of public institutions) that warrant new agency action, as well as assess the significance of that problem, to enable assessment of whether any new regulation is warranted.

That gives me the creeps just reading it. But… I can imagine the argument that it is a damn good thing that each federal agency should have to identify in writing the specific problem it intends to address. So far, I don’t see what the Dems object to.

Unless specifically authorized by the head of the agency, no rulemaking shall commence nor be included on the Plan without the approval of the agency's Regulatory Policy Office…

The Post summarizes this as “No rulemaking can go forward without the approval of an agency's Regulatory Policy Office, to be headed by a presidential appointee.” Is it a big deal to drop the first clause? But the point about the presidential appointee is a good one. Please read “presidential appointee” as “partisan political hack”. The Right Wing would do well to imagine what their reaction to this would have been under Bill Clinton… or what it will be someday under Hillary. Why do we continually have to point this out? In fact, that’s really the bottom line regarding each and every action the Bush administration has taken to gather and centralize power. While it may be fun for some of you to cheer as Bush, Cheney, et alii thumb their noses at the Democrats, it’s going to come back to bite you in the ass.

PS - I am not sympathetic to the desire that some federally employed scientists have for everybody to shut up and let them do what they feel they need to do. When you fund your own research initiative, I’ll support your desire for the government to back off.

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June 26, 2007

What if Thomas Jefferson Were Alive Today?

A blog after my own heart:

What if Thomas Jefferson were alive today? What if the founding fathers were still around? What would they say about the way we live? Some of these questions are explored when writer of the Declaration of Independence and philosopher behind the American Revolution, Thomas Jefferson, is transported to the year 2003 through a freak time [traveling] accident, and starts up an [Internet] weblog to record his thoughts and adventures in today's time with Daniel, his all-too-American roommate.

Antics and zaniness ensue. But, a quick perusal through the pages of this site shows the author's done his homework on the third President, or "Teej" as they call him. Be sure to browse the entries chronologically starting here.

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May 9, 2007

One Day at a Time

Nancy Pelosi might be on to something with this idea of funding the war a couple of months at a time.

In fact, I propose we move to this kind of funding plan for other government policies whose “success” is in doubt or ill-defined. We can pony up a couple months of funding, attach some strings, and put it all under the microscope this summer with a budget axe at the ready. Not just the Iraq war. The War on Drugs, too. Health and Human Services. Campaign money, salaries and amenities for elected officials. Anything you consider pork.

Finally, a Democratic proposal I can really get behind. I’m even willing to suggest that federal education money comes up near the top of the list. It's friggin genius.

But why stop at two months? How about one month at a time, like most of my household expenses? Or even more frequently? We can go daily, like my junk food budget. Hey, I’ve studied Riemann sums. I’ve learned about compound interest. You let the time intervals shrink and the whole thing goes a lot smoother. And isn't that what we want in Iraq? Smoother! Again, it's friggin genius.

I’m on board, Ms. Speaker.

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May 8, 2007

What Limited Government?

Allow me to link BK Marcus on a point worth repeating... libertarians just might not be justified in their fond memories of that "small government conservative" Ronald Reagan. Was he better than the guys who have followed him? Sure. And is that really the point? I'm not sure. Markus links a Jeffrey Tucker article at Mises.Org that makes some points you really should remember when the 2008 GOP candidates embrace Reagan's legacy in their ads and debates.

Saul Friedman quotes Reagan himself, speaking at Oxford in 1992:

Let me tell you of another dream I have…a dream I have long had…Just as the world’s democracies banded together to advance the cause of freedom in the face of totalitarianism, might we not now unite to impose civilized standards of behavior on those who flout every measure of human decency? Are we not nearing a point in world history where civilized nations can in unison stand up to the most immoral and deadly excesses against humanity, such as those now defacing Somalia and Bosnia?

And later in that speech,

As long as military power remains a necessary fact of modern existence, then we should use it as a humanitarian tool…

What exactly did Reagan stand for, again?

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April 28, 2007

Hippocrates Shrugged

I don’t read the Volokh Conspiracy, mostly because I find his format unwieldy and distasteful. And that’s a shame, because my understanding is that Mr Volokh puts out some good content. But I sometimes run across his work by proxy, as was the case today. Inspired by one of Mr Volokh’s posts, Coyote Blog ponders, Does the Hippocratic Oath Make Doctors Our Slaves?

(The text of the Hippocratic Oath can be found here, if you’re the type to do research from the primary source.)

Coyote’s post is one that explains well the general libertarian philosophy as it applies to a specific situation. Libertarians (as he notes) are often written off in policy debates, because our positions come across to the average person as extreme and unworkable. And in our society, in the short term, maybe they are. But these aren’t knee-jerk, anti-social obstructionist positions. They are principled positions, stemming directly from classical liberalism. Most of our opponents are not willfully authoritarian, e.g. monarchists or the like. They are simply ignorant of how to draw political conclusions from philosophical values. They don’t recognize their own inconsistencies. And occasionally, when confronted with the issue in the simplest of terms and with the underlying philosophies and values, they recognize what’s going on.

So here it is: Just because a person has something that you want, or even something that you legitimately need, does not mean that you have a right to it. The only way to deny this fact is to reject egalitarianism* at its core – and who is willing to do that, explicitly? Most people – even those who support government medicine – will not. The failure of the collectivist philosophy that is so popular among intellectuals is not a failure to recognize that all men are created equal, but a failure to understand that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, and that your right to life is not to come at the expense of my right to liberty.

Often, I feel like I am preaching to the choir here at AtlasBlogged. Occasionally, I figure there is little value in doing so. But sometimes people are able to break down an issue so clearly that it is of great value to share it. Does the Hippocratic Oath make doctors our slaves? I know people who have taken that oath and believe in government health care – a “right” to medical treatment. They would never advocate their own slavery, if they recognized it for what it was. But they don’t see the issue in those terms, and they don’t fear for their own liberty. They just feel overwhelmed by hospital administrators and insurance companies. They feel badly for sick people. They know there is a better way than the current way, and they want to bulldoze everything that impedes their ability to give the absolute best treatment to everyone. What better bulldozer than the federal government?

My father would never count himself a libertarian. But he understands this issue very clearly. He took the Hippocratic Oath, and he took it seriously. And when the hospital administration asked too much of him, and he felt that the insurance companies limited him, he faced a serious clash of values. He is a man who gives of himself relentlessly. He has literally given the shirt off his back – to strangers. But he will not be enslaved, and he knew his slaver when he saw him. He quit medicine several years ago. He wasn’t eligible for retirement, but he stood by his principles and shrugged the expectations (and chains) right off. I’ve been proud of him my entire life, but never more than on this issue.

* I use the term “egalitarianism” to mean a belief in human equality especially with respect to social, political, and economic rights and privileges, definition 1 at Merriam Webster. The term is sometimes ignorantly hijacked to mean equality in results – redistribution of wealth or something even more reminiscent of the short story Harrison Bergeron. People who do so are jackasses.

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April 13, 2007

The Official PC Radio Hit List

Who is next, now that Don Imus has been fired?

Keith Olbermann has made a partial list:

Where's the other outrage? Rush Limbaugh calls Barack Obama 'Halfrican-American.' Michael Savage says the Voting Rights Act means 'a chad in every crack house.' Neal Boortz says Cynthia McKinney looks like a 'ghetto-slut.' Why have none from the racist right been protested, boycotted or fired?

Please note that I do not listen to any of these shows. But how disturbing is it that Olbermann would start calling for his ideological opponents to be taken off the air? How offensive is that mentality? (Offensive enough to call for Olbermann’s dismissal? I’m sure some on the right would miss the irony and do exactly that.) As Glenn Beck noted on air yesterday, Olbermann appears to be unaware that an atmosphere so charged would jeopardize Olbermann’s career, too. Remember: The Frankenstein monster sought to destroy its creator. This is no different, Keith.

As a side note, I do want to point out that the word “ho” clearly isn’t very offensive, as it has been casually repeated and batted around the airwaves, blogosphere, and print media nonstop for over a week. If it were truly offensive, it would be elevated to the level of those special words that go by their first initial – the “N” word, the “B” word, etc. If “ho” is so hurtful, maybe it should be called the “H” word from now on. The furor over this word is reminiscent of the Macaca flap, where commentators, bloggers, and jackasses around the world said over and over, “the use of the word ‘macaca’ is highly offensive! ‘Macaca’ compares ~~blacks~~ Indians to monkeys! The use of the word 'macaca' is enough to bar one from public office! Don’t ever say ‘Macaca’! Macaca, Macaca, Macaca!”

(Actually, this point was also made by the Jon Henke at QandO last December.)

For our amusement, let's imagine the following conversation:

Pundit: Look, I don't think it should be a sin, just for saying "ho".

Al Sharpton: You're only making it worse for yourself!

Pundit: Making it worse? How can it be worse? Ho! Ho! Nappy-headed hos!

Al Sharpton: I'm warning you! If you say "ho" one more time…

(Sharpton gets suspended from radio show)

Al Sharpton Hey! Who did that?

Media Gaggle: She did! She did! He! He did! He!

Al Sharpton: Was it you?

Media Exec: Yes. Well you did say "ho".

(Media Exec gets barraged with criticism and is fired)

Al Sharpton: STOP IT! STOP IT! STOP IT RIGHT NOW! All right, no one is to fire until Jesse Jackson or I blow this whistle. Even if... and I want to make this absolutely clear... even if they do say, "ho"

(Sharpton gets permanently fired from radio show)

So, is there an official “PC Radio Hit List”? Yes, I believe there is. Media Matters has published it. After our airwaves have been ~~purged~~ ~~cleansed~~ (sound too genocidal?) tidied up, we can next focus on the filthy internet.

I can only hope this site doesn’t attract too much attention with its snappy, threaded prose. Think we will be safe?

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April 11, 2007

Rabid, Rabid!

No surprise here… Elizabeth Edwards, the wife of Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, is upset with her neighbor – some guy by the name of Monty Johnson. She refers to him as a “rabid, rabid Republican”. She once saw him brandishing a gun. She says he keeps his property “slummy” just to spite her. She wouldn’t be nice to him if she ever met him, according to the Charlotte Observer and a host of other news agencies who are pouncing on her hurtful remarks. See also the Raleigh • Durham • Cary • Chapel Hill • Podunk News & Observer, which reports:

Monty Johnson was heading home Monday with a cooler full of catfish when he learned his new neighbor had turned him into a minor celebrity.

I love the imagery.

Nothing about this situation is especially surprising (except that it was carelessly spoken aloud and giving the Edwardses bad press). Nor is it unique to Podunk, NC where these people live. But since it’s been thrown out there into the news, I’d like to highlight the parts of the story that really frame my view of the situation:

Johnson said he has lived his entire life on the property, which he said his family purchased before the Great Depression.

Johnson, who has posted a "Go Rudy Giuliani 2008" sign on a fence just 100 feet from the entrance to the Edwards' driveway, has criticized Edwards for the scale of their nearby home. The property and home, which includes an indoor basketball court, an indoor handball court and an indoor pool, is valued at $5.3 million.

The Edwardses are still putting the final touches on the property, which they purchased in 2003.

It’s a pretty familiar story. It really highlights the difference between the haves and the have-nots. It’s almost like there are two Americas or something.

I don’t say that as somebody who hates Jon Edwards or his family. I don’t hate him for his wealth or his politics – in fact, I don’t hate him at all. I’m just somebody who can’t stand it when people expect their neighbors to “keep up” – especially since Mr. Johnson has lived there for more than half a century longer than the Edwards family. If they wanted to live in an exclusive Democratic haven with covenants against Guliani signs, they should have purchased land in that kind of community. If they wanted to live someplace where you could have your neighbor’s run-down childhood home destroyed, they should have picked New London, CT. If they wanted to live someplace where their neighbors would never be brandishing firearms, they should have purchased in Washington, DC (hahahahahahahaha! Come on, that was funny!)

As Rammage notes via email: “I'm instantly reminded of:

“Political tags—such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal conservative, and so forth—are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire. The former are idealists acting from highest motives for the greatest good of the greatest number. The latter are surly curmudgeons, suspicious and lacking in altruism. But they are more comfortable neighbors than the other sort.” ~ Heinlein

Which would you rather have as a neighbor?”

Indeed. Good call, Rammage.

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April 8, 2007

The Enemy of my Enemy is not my Friend

A Reminder to libertarians that the Democrats are not pro-liberty:

As unlibertarian as Republicans can be, the case for the libertarian Democrat is far from well-made, despite what Markos Moulitsas says.

You lovers of liberty who feel betrayed by the Republican Party and conservatives in general: How do you feel about those Democrats? Did you vote for this? The next time you find yourself thinking that the Democrats may be a libertarian option, remember these words by John Murtha, chairman of the House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee (and Pelosi’s choice for House Majority Leader): "I think everybody ought to be obligated to serve."

Let that ring in your ears.

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Personalized Pork

How can I not bring attention to an article titled, “Congress should terminate its Edifice Complex”?

…ego-driven pork-barrel projects protect incumbents, fuel their vanity and cost taxpayers real money. And they should stop.

This problem is bicameral and bipartisan.

The fact that it is bicameral and bipartisan should be disheartening to all citizens, but it also means that the practice is firmly entrenched and loved by politicians. It’s a great op-ed that Deroy Murdock has written on the topic. I would love to see this problem taken seriously by legislators.

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March 19, 2007

Truancy Equals Freedom

SCOTUS begins hearing Morse v. Frederick (a/k/a the "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" case), about which our friend and fellow libertarian Kip asks, “Why is this even a case?” Being both a libertarian and a public school teacher, I’ve paid some attention to this case. I am very concerned about the outcome – which I suspect will go poorly for young Mr. Frederick.

Okay, if you have no idea what case I am talking about, let me bring you up to speed – with some heavy quoting from SCOTUSblog, to which Kip also links.

The core facts that the two sides can agree upon are these: when the Olympic torch was being carried along Glacier Avenue in Juneau, Alaska, on January 24, 2002, 18-year-old Joseph Frederick held up a 14-foot banner with the message, “BONG HITS 4 JESUS.” (“Bong hits” is slang for smoking marijuana.) Glacier Avenue runs in front of Juneau-Douglas High School, where Frederick was enrolled as a senior. School Principal Morse crossed the Avenue, and demanded that the sign be taken down; Frederick refused, and the principal grabbed the sign and crumpled it. Later, Morse suspended Frederick for ten days, citing a variety of infractions of school rules. The Ninth Circuit found a violation of Frederick’s First Amendment rights, and found that the law was so clear on this issue in January 2002 that the principal was not entitled to legal immunity to money damages.

But the agreement on the facts largely ends there. The principal and the Juneau School Board insist that Frederick was taking part in a school-sponsored event – the students were let out of school to attend the torch-passing rally, and school cheerleaders and pep band took part; the students were closely supervised; school system money was spent to bus students in from other schools; the event occurred during school hours, and four students were torch-bearers. Frederick with equal fervor insists that this was a public event in a public forum (a sidewalk next to a public street), he was not on school property at the time, he was an 18-year-old adult, and he had not even gone to class that morning so was not among students released to go to the rally.

Now, I’d have to say it’s pretty clear that citizens have the right to unfurl banners with ambiguous religion/drug messages. It’s also pretty clear that the student would not have been allowed to do this in his school cafetorium – his suspension would have stood, and he never would have made it anywhere near the Supreme Court. But he wasn’t on school property, so he’s golden.

Except that the defense will argue convincingly that the torch rally was a school-sponsored event, much like a field trip. I am (annually) a field trip sponsor, and it has been made very clear to me (every damn year) that (to turn a phrase) school officials do not shed their in loco parentis responsibilities at the schoolhouse gate. I am not even allowed to change the rules of dress code or conduct just because I’ve taken the students to an amusement park to study the physics of the rides (not at taxpayer expense, settle down). And incidentally, this does not magically change when the student hits 18, so Joseph Frederick’s being that age at the time of this incident is probably completely irrelevant. The fact that Juneau-Douglas High School brought students to participate in this Olympic rally is enough to sink his case.

Except that Joseph Frederick had not gone to school that day. (dum-dum-dum!)

That was the one fact of the case that I picked up from SCOTUSblog that I had not known this morning, when I emailed the Atlantico list about this case. This morning, I said:

The case is interesting to me because I have seen groups from the right and the left supporting this kid. The ACLU and gay rights groups in particular seem concerned about potential abridging of free speech, no surprise, but several religious groups recognize how a ruling in support of the school could be used against religious expressions at school. But he's so going to lose.

Ah, not so after all. In light of the fact that Joseph Frederick was absent from school, he can’t reasonably be considered to have been participating in the torch rally as a student subject to the school rules. Suddenly, it’s much more like the time that I ran into students at the amusement park who were not on the physics field trip, and in fact weren’t enrolled in a physics class. They were not my problem, from a legal point of view.

Well played, Mr. Frederick. Well played. Bong hits 4 Jesus, indeed.

ps - I personally think the defense is further hurt by the arguments that are being made about schools needing to enforce anti-drug policies. I just can’t see the justices nodding along with that argument. At least, I hope not.

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March 13, 2007

Ron Paul

Ron Paul is formally seeking the Republican presidential nomination – something that we’ve known, but that was just made formal this week. I didn’t think the official announcement would cause me any confusion, but then I read this in the NYT:

A statement released by campaign chairman Kent Snyder described Paul as “a real conservative in the race for president” who Republican primary voters can support.

A real… conservative? Wait… Ron Paul is known for being libertarian – in fact, he played the part of the Libertarian Party’s presidential nominee in 1988. So which is it? Libertarian, or conservative?

Or are libertarians and conservatives really very similar after all?

Oh, sorry. Ron Paul is running for the Republican presidential nomination, which means he needs to get GOP voters to identify him as a reasonable option. Thus the word “conservative” being so attractive. I get it. Just for a second, I thought we were going to have to identify the issue that separates libertarians from conservatives. (hint)

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February 27, 2007

Playing Politics with the Iraq Troop Surge

I really like it when the media frames a debate the way I would do. NPR’s Ron Elving was apparently willing to accommodate me for this piece on the Iraq troop surge.

I, unlike most self-described libertarians, recognize that it would be foolish for the Bush administration or military commanders to announce a pull-out date. But that doesn’t mean I am not looking forward to seeing the troops exit Baghdad. And that’s exactly what the troop surge would lead to if all goes well. As Elving notes:

The question now is not whether more U.S. troops will be committed but whether they will accomplish what most Americans want: an expedited disengagement.

While Democrats jockey to get the credit for the eventual troop withdrawal - Senate Democrats are considering legislation that would revoke the 2002 authorization of force that allowed the Iraq invasion, which would probably be followed by legislation revoking the laws of supply and demand so they can ram through some kind of socialist healthcare and attempt to nationalize Big Oil – the fact is that this has been the culmination of US efforts to get Iraq’s government on its feet all along, as I have noted before. The Bush administration has not been able to effectively convince Americans of the progress, partly because it brings up the obvious questions of when our troops will be done and get to leave Iraq – a question that the administration can answer in terms of benchmarks but not in terms of timetables, as Ron Elving and I have already mentioned to you.

In Elvings’ piece from this week (the one I quoted above), he implies that there are some who wish the American troop presence in Iraq could just go on and on – an indefinite pseudo-occupation that would presumably continue to take the lives of good American soldiers. Except that I don’t know anybody who wishes for that. But that’s my only complaint with Elvings’ view of the troop surge. As he ends;

So the surge will go forward. Those who want U.S. involvement to end as soon as possible must now wish for events in Iraq to render a clear verdict, pro or con. If the surge works well, the phased withdrawal so many Democrats demand (and for which so many Republicans wish) can still begin this year. If the surge fails utterly, withdrawal becomes inevitable.

The next task for Democrats and the media, really, is to write the story so that it looks like the troops only came home because the Democrats had the mandate of the people to shut off Bush/Cheney’s blood spigot. Just tell yourselves that otherwise, it never would have ended.

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February 20, 2007

Virginia General Assembly (Updated)

Try to follow this logic. The Virginia General Assembly is poised to pass legislation allowing youths as young as 14 to make decisions regarding alternative medicine. Though the wording of the current bill reportedly gives judges discretion on the matter, 14 is being referred to as the “age of consent” on the issue. Of course, that same kid is still 2 years too immature to drive, and 4 years too immature to make his own decisions about smoking, dropping out of school, or joining the military. He is also 7 years too young and immature to drink wine with dinner or have a beer at the game. Perhaps if he were to claim any of these were medicinal, it would suddenly be okay - pending judicial review. (Story at Virginian-Pilot on line.)

In other news, the House Finance Committee voted down legislation that would have allowed a 40 percent tax credit on contributions of at least $1,000 toward private schools serving children with disabilities. Which horrific special interest group would discourage donations to schools for disabled kids? The Virginia Education Association, for one. Again, try to follow this logic:

They said money that would pay for the credits would reduce general funds available to public schools.

The lesson? When push comes to shove, those disabled kids had better back off of the ~~taxpayers’~~ VEA’s money.

And lastly, legislators have shot down a bill that would protect homeowners who use legally owned weapons to defend their lives, their families, and their property. The bill would have protected homeowners from wrongful death suits, but not from criminal suits (obviously). One last time, try to follow the logic of those opposing the bill:

But Henry County prosecutor Bob Bushnell, speaking for the Virginia Commonwealth's Attorneys Association, said the legislation would shield someone who opens fire on a mentally ill person who wanders into his home.

It also would provide immunity to a drug dealer who shoots a police officer who enters a home unlawfully because he didn't notice that a magistrate forgot to sign a search warrant, Bushnell said.

(emphasis mine)
So according to Mr. Bushnell, if an officer enters my home unlawfully, and I take him to be a non-police officer who has entered my home unlawfully (the only difference here being his occupation), then I should not be able to defend myself? Keep in mind that during the average unlawful home entry, there isn't a lot of time for asking whether the masked man in fatigues is a police officer or a criminal. Besides which, a criminal might lie.

I guess I’ll just take comfort in the fact that I’m not a drug dealer, and therefore the police would never enter my home unlawfully.

Update: MichaelW of ASecondHandConjecture comments at QandO that Virginia follows the Castle Doctrine; Thus the legislation in question concerned civil liability, but Virginians are already protected from criminal liability if they shoot a violent intruder. It is true that the legislation was about civil liability – the sponsor was concerned with a homeowner facing a wrongful death suit filed by the family of an intruder that had been killed – but my understanding of Virginia Law is that the Castle Doctrine is not spelled out in Virginia. It may be implied or understood, but my understanding is that is as far as it goes.

Of course, I am no lawyer, and the scenario in the QandO story is a bit off of my original point anyway. My point is that the reason given for killing the legislation was that homeowners might take advantage of the freedom to kill trespassers wantonly, or at least inappropriately. And I understand the concern, I guess. But the appeal that one of those trespassers might be a police officer instead of just a citizen is one I find lacking. If the intruder is there illegally, then the homeowner should be explicitly protected under the law. If the intruder is there legally, then the Castle Doctrine does not apply, and the now-dead legislation would not have, either. Whether the intruder is a cop or not shouldn’t matter at all to this discussion. Their lives are not to be held above those of citizens.

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February 7, 2007

On Trial for Publishing the Danish Cartoons

Philippe Val, publisher of the French weekly magazine Charlie Hebdo went on trial this week for publishing the infamous Danish Cartoons.

The charge is “publicly slandering a group of people because of their religion” (I have seen several variants of this, so I guess the translation is a bit open to interpretation.) The charge carries a possible six-month prison sentence and a fine of up to €26,800. Val was quoted as saying, "In a democracy, we're all shocked by what people say and do. We just have to learn to talk about it.”

The shame is that he even needed to say that. As Rammage so eloquently noted last year, this situation puts the American Left in quite a quandary. Which value is more important – freedom of the press, or respect for the cultural and religious beliefs of those in third world countries? Is it okay to print cartoons that criticize Islamists, or is it not?

But even if Americans answer that question correctly, it may not help Mr. Val in his trial over in Europe. After all, Europeans have criminal bans on swastikas, headscarves, and “hate speech” (potentially on line, as well). I have no faith that justice will prevail.

Of course, maybe I will be surprised. After all, Germany recently announced that it will not push for a EU-wide ban on swastikas and Holocaust denial. There may be some pockets of Europe where dialogue is preferred to prison when dealing with those with whom one disagrees. I sincerely hope Mr. Val is in one of those pockets.

While I am on the subject of Holocaust denial, let me share with you an amusing point by the Brussels Journal:

If Turkey joins the EU then we will have the comedy situation that denial of the Armenian Holocaust is a criminal offence in France, whilst mentioning it is a criminal offence in Turkey. The happy result of this could be that the entire population of France could be lifted and placed, Midnight Express like in Turkish prisons. Of course the entire population of Turkey could then find itself extradited to France and imprisoned there.

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February 4, 2007

Bad, Virginia Legislators, Bad!

Thus always to Payday Lenders.

As I pointed out a couple of weeks ago, the Virginia General Assembly is tackling the "problem" of payday lenders. I use the quotation marks not to imply that there is no problem, but rather to note that my legislators are not limiting themselves to their proper role in this matter. They first considering a repeal of the Payday Loan Act of 2002, but have since moved toward simply capping the fees lenders can charge for these small short-term loans.

Detractors (and the media) continue to insist on comparing the fee levels to compounded interest, which is not accurate or appropriate. For example,

the House of Delegates [today] advanced legislation that would cap the interest lenders could charge on short-term loans of $500 or less... The rate cap would reduce the interest on a two-week loan from $15 per $100 to $2.77...

As the article notes, the bill is not sure to pass as is. But something will be done, because legislators have decreed that something must be done. They don't even mind that payday lenders may go out of business. In fact, bill supporters are downright flip about it:

"If they can't make money off of 72 percent interest, I think they need to reconsider their business plan," said Helen O'Beirne, a spokeswoman for Virginia Partnership to Encourage Responsible Lending.

At least the General Assembly killed the proposal to outlaw anonymous sperm donation, which I think is a euphamism for one-night stands. I don't know how they planned to enforce that, but I'm sure there are some who would be willing to give it a try.

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A Conservative Professor's Discrimination Suit

Virginia State University is a historically black university located just outside of Petersburg. It was the United States' first fully state-supported four-year institution of higher learning for black Americans (an oft-repeated point of pride which I first heard when visiting VSU, back when I worked for the SMV). My problem with that, of course, has nothing to do with the students being black, and has everything to do with asking why the state is using my tax dollars to support higher learning for anybody at all. But that's not even the issue I wanted to discuss today.

It has been alleged more than once over the years that VSU discriminates against conservatives on its own faculty. The latest case is Jean R. Cobbs, an outspoken conservative black woman who was a professor at Virginia State University with more than 27 years of tenure when, in January 2005, she was fired for reasons that look to me pretty unfounded. She sued the school, its president, and its provost, claiming that her termination was simply retaliation for her testimony in another suit, years earlier, in which the school and its president were accused of racial discrimination.

VSU has offered Cobb $600,000 to settle the suit out of court. A Goy and his Blog notes that this benefits the university, its president, and its provost in that they do not have to admit any wrongdoing or shell out any of their own money in order to make both Professor Cobb and her lawsuit go away:

the settlement guarantees an end to the public controversy. Much better to rob VSU’s students of a half million dollars in funding than to let the internet, mainstream media and public-at-large get hold of the details of this case. Think what a can of worms that might open!

Well, yeah, I live less than half an hour from VSU, and I've heard this case mentioned exactly zero times on the local TV and radio news. The Richmond Times-Dispatch carried one story, and it hasn't been mentioned much elsewhere.

I don't think, however, that discrimination against conservatives in academia is so systemic as to warrant some sort of Academic Fairness Doctrine or Equal Time provision. Nor do I support Rammage in his grudge against Atlas Blogged reader feminist mom. But I wish that Professor Cobb was able to wring a public acknowledgement of wrongdoing out of VSU - and getting paid in a manner that punishes the wrongdoers personally, instead of with tax dollars. As it is, she stands as yet another example of how an academic career can be broken by politics. If we must be saddled with state universities, then this behavior shouldn't be tolerated in them.

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January 22, 2007

Second-hand Smoke and You

This AB article is dedicated to Jib Halyard.

Fellow AB author Rick asked me: "Who would have to present evidence that second hand smoke is harmful, for you to believe it?

My response:

Bear in mind that I'm not saying that second-hand smoke can't be harmful. Clearly and ad absurdum, if you and I sat in a closed 10x10x10 cube for thirty years with me blowing cigarette smoke in your face then you're going to be just as likely to get lung cancer as I. What I am saying is that the science is being blown out of proportion - and often times outright fraudulent - in order to justify and form policy that is eroding personal freedoms. It's going to be the trend of the 21st century, I'm starting to think.

I tell you what. I'll let a Harvard Medical School graduate talk for me first, and I'll throw in a few comments at the end:

In 1993, the EPA announced that second-hand smoke was "responsible for approximately 3,000 lung cancer deaths each year in nonsmoking adults," and that it "impairs the respiratory health of hundreds of thousands of people." In a 1994 pamphlet the EPA said that the eleven studies it based its decision on were not by themselves conclusive, and that they collectively assigned second-hand smoke a risk factor of 1.19. (For reference, a risk factor below 3.0 is too small for action by the EPA. or for publication in the New England Journal of Medicine, for example.) Furthermore, since there was no statistical association at the 95% confidence limits, the EPA lowered the limit to 90%. They then classified second hand smoke as a Group A Carcinogen.

This was openly fraudulent science, but it formed the basis for bans on smoking in restaurants, offices, and airports. California banned public smoking in 1995. Soon, no claim was too extreme. By 1998, the Christian Science Monitor was saying that "Second-hand smoke is the nation's third-leading preventable cause of death." The American Cancer Society announced that 53,000 people died each year of second-hand smoke. The evidence for this claim is nonexistent.

In 1998, a Federal judge held that the EPA had acted improperly, had "committed to a conclusion before research had begun", and had "disregarded information and made findings on selective information." The reaction of Carol Browner, head of the EPA was: "We stand by our science..there's wide agreement. The American people certainly recognize that exposure to second hand smoke brings.a whole host of health problems." Again, note how the claim of consensus trumps science. In this case, it isn't even a consensus of scientists that Browner evokes! It's the consensus of the American people.

Meanwhile, ever-larger studies failed to confirm any association. A large, seven-country WHO study in 1998 found no association. Nor have well-controlled subsequent studies, to my knowledge. Yet we now read, for example, that second hand smoke is a cause of breast cancer. At this point you can say pretty much anything you want about second-hand smoke.

As with nuclear winter, bad science is used to promote what most people would consider good policy. I certainly think it is. I don't want people smoking around me. So who will speak out against banning second-hand smoke? Nobody, and if you do, you'll be branded a shill of RJ Reynolds. A big tobacco flunky. But the truth is that we now have a social policy supported by the grossest of superstitions. And we've given the EPA a bad lesson in how to behave in the future. We've told them that cheating is the way to succeed.

Okay. Let's take a step back from the studies and the degrees and the arguing from authority and so forth, and let's take a Sanity Check. For shoots and grins, Google the term "Second-Hand Smoke."

Here are some of the words used on the first Google'd page:

Secondhand smoke causes about 3000 deaths each year from lung cancer...
Secondhand smoke kills...
Secondhand smoke affects everyone, but children are especially vulnerable...
Secondhand smoke can trigger asthma episodes...
Second-hand smoke is actually more dangerous than directly inhaled smoke...
It is not easy to avoid secondhand smoke...

Let me ask you, does this sound like science or politics to you?

Incidentally, here is the EPA's report refuting their critics' critique of their report. Bottom line: There may be a slightly increased chance of lung cancer for second-hand smoke, for a person living with a chain smoker for twenty-years. But even then, it's rare.

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January 21, 2007

Regulating Payday Loans

Doug Mataconis tackles an issue at the Liberty Papers that I've been meaning to write about all week. The Virginia General Assembly is considering a repeal of the Payday Loan Act of 2002, which legalized the short-term, high-interest loans commonly known as Payday Loans.

Last November, the University of Virginia School of Law hosted a panel on the topic (sponsored by Family Resource Clinic, the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy, and the Federalist Society). An article in the newspaper UVA Today explains the loans as well as any other source:

Payday loans are generally governed by the states, explained moderator Prof. Daniel Nagin, director of the Law School’s Family Resource Clinic. But the federal government recently got involved when Congress passed legislation placing a 36-percent cap on the annual interest rate of loans taken out by active-duty military personnel.

Obtaining a payday loan in Virginia is as simple as writing a check, Nagin said. Anyone who has a checking account is qualified to take out a loan. The payday lender will charge the borrower $15 for every $100 that is loaned. At the end of the loan period, which can be as short as seven or up to 30 days, the borrower must return to the store to repay the loan, or the company can cash the check that was written at the beginning of the transaction. The maximum a borrower can take out under Virginia law is $500...

The payday loan industry in Virginia has grown from a $165 million business in 2002 to more than $1 billion worth of transactions in 2005, Nagin explained. There are approximately 750 authorized payday loan outlets throughout the state.

750? That sounds like there is quite a demand for these places. But Delegate Jennifer L. McClellan, D-Richmond, has a different take on that number:

There are over two payday lending stores for every McDonalds in Virginia and three for every Starbucks. This is ridiculous.

I am horrified to learn that this is the standard my lawmakers will use to judge the situation. [shudder] And that's clearly become a talking point. I have no idea where it started, but it's constantly repeated on the Richmond radio and in most news articles. My question: why have we allowed this disparity between the number of McDonalds and the number of Starbucks in the first place? What ever happened to equality in this country? And what is the ratio of payday lenders to Taco Bells? I demand an answer!

As Mataconis points out in the post at The Liberty Papers, we can question the wisdom of borrowers to enter into a payday loan, but what right does the state have to prevent it? Not that legislators give a damn about what they have the right to do, of course.

Since we're here, let's take a look at what proposals are on the table. Again from UVA Today,

The Virginia General Assembly is currently reviewing two bills that would affect the Payday Loan Act of 2002, which authorized payday lending companies to set up shop in Virginia and exempted the industry from the prior 36-percent interest rate cap. The first bill repeals the Act; the second bill introduces an amendment calling for a real-time database that would force payday lenders to report the identity of the borrower and the terms of the loan to the state. Lenders would be able to search the database when a prospective borrower wants to take out a loan. The lender would be prohibited from lending money to patrons who had three or more outstanding loans. Finally, lenders could not loan money to anyone who had terminated a loan contract within the previous 48 hours.

(emphasis mine)

I love the comments by Michele Satterlund, an attorney who represented the payday lending industry at the UVA panel:

There are no viable alternatives being presented and there is a market need. We are a product that serves that market.

When I hear [panel member Jay Speer, executive director of the Virginia Poverty Law Center] talk, it’s as if he’s saying people who find themselves in financial hardship are not very smart, that’s the message I get. They’re not very smart, they can’t control their money, let’s control their money for them.

Opponents of Payday lenders point to a lot of alternative sources, but when it comes down to it, they are trying to legislate away one of my options because they think they know what's best for me, and I don't. Doesn't that sound familiar?

For those who think the high interest rates warrant government action, consider a point illustrated in Wikipedia:

Payday loan makers also argue that the interest on a payday loan is less than the costs associated with bounced checks or late credit card payments. For example, bouncing a $100 check may inccur an NSF fee from the bank of $28 and a returned check fee of $25 from the merchant.

In comparison, when expressed as APRs for two-week terms:

$100 pawn loan with 20% service fee= 240% APR;
$100 payday advance with $15 fee= 391% APR;
$100 bounced check with $48 NSF/merchant fees = 1,251% APR;
$100 credit card balance with $26 late fee = 678% APR;
$100 utility bill with $50 late/reconnect fees = 1,304% APR.

I await the logical conclusion - a bipartisan proposal to outlaw usury. For the children.

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January 12, 2007

Gender Equality

My wife took my last name when we married. I didn't ask her to. I didn't expect her to. But she tacked it on at the end as a fourth name with the expectation that it would make things easier. (That is correct, she did not drop her original last name. She just added mine on the end like a caboose, with no hyphens or other decorations.)

And all things considered, it was pretty easy. I've sometimes wondered how easy it would have been for me to take her last name. Not that I wanted to, but I know a few people who have changed their name not through marriage or divorce, and it was more of a hassle than my wife experienced. I was wondering how easy it is for a guy to take his wife's name, or whether the ease of changing names will be enjoyed by gay couples when they eventually have the right to marry.

But I never looked into it until I stumbled across this story about a guy who is suing California on the premise that "the difficulty faced by a husband seeking to change his name violates the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment".

Only six states — Georgia, Hawaii, Iowa, Massachusetts, New York and North Dakota — have statutes establishing equal name-change processes for men and women when they marry. In California and other states, men cannot choose a different last name while filing a marriage license.

It suddenly raises my libertarian hackles. I definitely support Mr. Buday in his suit.

I did get a little chuckle over this guy in the article, though. He says

"Diana and I feel strongly about gender equality for both men and women,"

Yes - because gender equality for one or the other, but not both, would be unacceptable.

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January 5, 2007

Can Preferences Trump Rights?

The New Jersey Supreme Court is hearing a case on what limits a homeowners association can place on the free speech of residents. It ought to be a great topic of conversation, since it pits two cherished values against one another. Should one civil liberty trump another?

The plaintiffs bring several issues to the court, but the main one is regarding restrictions on the display of political signs in the community. An NPR story reports that this issue sprang up from one of the plaintiffs trying to put up a political sign on her property, in support of her run for a seat on the Twin Rivers homeowners association. She lost the initial suit, due to the prevailing wisdom that this is a private contractual matter, and she knew about the covenants of the community when she chose to live there. But the case has continued, because

the plaintiffs contend the association should be treated like any other government entity, because it can issue fines and place liens against homes.

In other words, plaintiffs argue that a municipal government would not be allowed to violate the rights of citizens as outlined in the state constitution, and a homeowners association ought not to either. The appeals court was unanimous on this point. Personally, I disagree – I side with the conventional wisdom, and the sanctity of the private contract these homeowners have entered into. This is something homebuyers need to consider ahead of time. I am disappointed – but not surprised – to see the ACLU siding with the plaintiffs.

The Court’s opinion is not expected for several months, but it may be very important to the future of these associations. For one thing, over 50 million Americans live in these types of communities – 1 in 6 Americans, as NPR points out. I was astounded by that number, until I realized the number of urban homes – specifically, condominiums – and retirement communities this must include. If the plaintiffs prevail, the freedom of individuals to contractually promote a particular sense of aesthetics will be denied, in favor of the notion that a citizen’s preferred avenue of expressing themselves does in fact trump other liberties. That would be a terrible shame.

For those interested, the New Jersey Law Blog includes a link to the webcast of the arguments.

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Why Privatize?

Yet another example of government incompetence this week in Buffalo, NY:

The fiscally strapped Buffalo School District paid more than $544,000 for health insurance coverage for dead retirees and their spouses, recouping the money only after a state audit red-flagged the problem.

Over half a million dollars. Tax dollars. And the district safeguards are defended in the article.

The state comptroller scrutinized safeguards used by 20 municipalities for making sure that they are not paying insurance premiums for people who have died. The audit found that 19 municipalities needed to improve their systems, including the Buffalo Public Schools and Niagara County, the only two local government entities that were cited in the audit...

The Buffalo Public Schools' payments represented nearly 70 percent of the $786,481 that the nine governmental entities paid for health insurance for beneficiaries who had died.

Isn't it wonderful to see the government turned loose - to solve the problems of our nation, our states, our cities?

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December 27, 2006

What Privacy Concerns?

But hey, if you haven't done anything wrong, then what do you have to be afraid of?

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December 15, 2006

First Amendment Primer

Sigh. Stop the ACLU is a sometimes interesting site, with sometimes interesting commentary. But other times they represent everything that is wrong about the right wing. Today's example:

CAIR has been successful in silencing the free speech of a fellow blogger and friend of ours.

A free speech issue? Really? Well, there ought to be a law or something to protect free speech, in my opinion. It could say something like

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

Need I highlight the first word in some way for the slower part of the population?

(The blogger in question is Vilmar of Right Wing Howler. I am unfamiliar with his writing, but if I were to judge a blog by its title, I'd say he's about as useless as Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler. It's not that fine a line between satire and vile hateful stupidity, boys.)

As commenter Jeff Molby noted on the Stop the ACLU article (on December 15th, 2006 @ 4:12 pm):

This isn’t a free speech issue. When he began transacting business with his service providers, he agreed to give them an editorial veto. After receiving a complaint, they are exercising it.

He’s still free to spread his message. I’m sure he can find a more lenient service provider if he feels that his message needs to remain intact.

Exactly. In their knee-jerk response to what they view as an injustice, the right wing blogs I've seen weighing in on the issue seem to have forgotten that first word of the First Amendment. Isn't it supposed to be the left who disagrees with libertarians on issues of private property and the sanctity of legal contracts? I always find these turnabouts entertaining - until I recall how hypocritical and therefore ugly they are.

Beth at My Vast Right Wing Conspiracy says she can’t believe this BULLSHIT! She may have a legitimate complaint about how little CAIR Tampa Executive Director Ahmed Bedier has done to fight violence and terrorism by Muslims - I don't know, so for argument's sake I'll grant it to her. But that doesn't change the fact that Bedier was able to point to Vilmar violating Hostgator's terms of service. Getting angry with Bedier and CAIR over Vilmar's reckless comments just doesn't hold water with me. Whose web hosting company is it? Were the terms of service violated? If you're trying to get me riled up about free speech, these are the only two questions that matter to me.

Now, when John Stephenson emailed a list of bloggers (myself included), he wrote:

CAIR has successfully shut down a friend's blog, Vilmar of Rightwing Howler. I'd provide a link, but it would only go to a suspended account. They claimed he was a hate site and quote he advocates the murder of Muslim children. Where did they get this idea? Well, he quoted some Satire from the well known satire site IMAO. I've gathered up quite some angry reactions to this. Most agree that CAIR should put their focus in shutting down all of the jihadi hate sites if they really want to make a difference. People are outraged and urging others to contact his server and ask them why they are afraid of CAIR. Please share with your readers.

Here I have no argument. If Vilmar wants to argue that satire doesn't violate the terms of service, he need only contact Hostgator and explain this to them. Go ahead, get a lawyer, Vilmar. But there is nothing wrong with CAIR asking Hostgator to review the site and consider the terms of service. Not a thing. It's simply not a free speech issue.

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December 5, 2006

"We're trying to protect those people."

The Bethie Bee notes that the new Fairfax County, VA ban on feeding homeless people from one's own kitchen is "Further proof that government is way out of control". I share it with you for three reasons.

1) You should be aware of this story.
2) I dig the Bethie Bee.
3) To note that while most people are aware that the government is way out of control, they seem to focus on our leviathan of a federal government. But the state, county, and local governments can be real bastards, too. That must always be on the minds of libertarians.

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December 3, 2006

Libertarian or Evangelical direction for GOP?

The two major political parties in the United States are, of course, coalitions of voting blocs who work together to advance common goals, but who are at odds on other issues. We are stuck with this reality so long as third parties are kept out of contention.

In light of this, what pundits often refer to as “infighting” is probably better viewed as just “fighting”, since the various factions in these two parties are of such divergent interests, and not really of the same family. In fact, it can be hard to tell whether changes in party identity are due to calculated steering of the party or strategic moves by interests who jump parties en masse. The recent discussion by libertarian voters about voting Democrat in order to put the brakes on the Republican government is an excellent example. Will the GOP turn more libertarian in order to woo these voters back? Or will it turn less libertarian now that we have left the table? Note that the Libertarian Party is completely insignificant to this discussion, sadly.

Bart Mongoven wrote a piece this past week at Stratfor (subscription required) that asserts that

the overlap between the libertarian Republican point of view and that of religious conservatives has dissolved during the past decade of Republican control of government. For secular libertarians, a small government was the central objective; for the religious conservatives, small government was an element of a strategy to reduce the power -- or at least slow the growth -- of institutions purveying secular values. The growth of government over the past 10 years has suggested to evangelicals that the strategy does not work. The Faith-Based Initiative, for instance, is seen as a small move in a positive direction, but one that also has done nothing to displace secular federal government activity.

Is there any chance that libertarians and evangelicals are both jumping ship in order to express dissatisfaction with each other? Does that leave the ship a bit empty and rudderless? What would that mean for the GOP? Mongoven believes that the party will follow the evangelicals, as they provide more of a geographic base of support – but that evangelicals will have to come more to the middle for that to work. But I don’t know how easy it will be to pull that off before the ’08 elections.

The sense among the evangelical grassroots is that the Republican Party has used them, but only paid lip service to their goals, aspirations and values.

Amen, brother.

Regarding the importance of geography to the evangelical-Republican bond, consider this news article:

”If you look at several states in the Southeast where the evangelical base came out in undiminished numbers, it held for Republicans. When you move to the heartland, there was some peel away. ... The question is why?”

[Author Mark Pinsky] noted that Republican candidates in Florida "who ran to the center" did better than those who ran "hard right." He cited Gov.-elect Charlie Christ, who is pro-life and anti-gay marriage, but who supports civil unions. As attorney general, Christ opposed intervention in the Terri Schiavo case.

"He didn't back away during the primary," Pinsky said. "He must have sensed there was fissure among white evangelicals."

"I think evangelicals are feeling pretty homeless right now," said Janice Shaw Krouse, director and senior fellow of the Beverly LaHaye Institute, a think tank affiliated with Concerned Women for America. "They're increasingly uncomfortable with a party that didn't really make their issues top priority. In 2004, 74 percent of evangelicals voted Republican. In 2006, it was 69 percent. That's a huge difference, politically."

The biggest problem with libertarians may very well be that we are too disorganized to be highlighted in a news article. I have no idea what percentage of libertarians voted Republican in 2004 or 2006. I consider this yet more evidence that the GOP will have a better chance of winning back evangelicals than libertarians. And frankly, that is probably good news for Democrats - and bad news for libertarians of all persuasions.

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November 8, 2006

Shameful

(Updated 7:21 pm 8 Nov.)

Virginia voters yesterday easily passed an amendment to the state constitution that defines marriage as between one man and one woman.

The proposal, which will be added to the Bill of Rights of the Virginia Constitution, outlaws same-sex marriage and civil unions, as well as domestic partnerships and any relationship between unmarried couples that approximates marriage.

(Richmond Times-Dispatch)

That's correct - it's in our Bill of Rights. Sick, ironic... shameful.

Update: There were a lot of commentaries against this amendment. Last week, David Boaz of the Cato Institute wrote:

There's never been a same-sex marriage in Virginia, and they've been outlawed by statute for more than 30 years. So why are Virginia voters being asked to vote on a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage?...

The irony in Virginia is that conservatives fearful of an out-of-control judiciary are in fact inviting the judiciary to get involved in micro-managing family law...

This amendment goes too far. But even its first sentence — the ban on gay marriage — is unworthy of a state that was the birthplace of American freedom. It is a cruel irony that this amendment to restrict contract rights and exclude loving couples from the institution of marriage is to be added to Virginia's Bill of Rights, a document originally written by the great Founder George Mason.

And Virginians voted for it.

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November 3, 2006

Stern Language

I like Sir Nicholas Stern. He’s got a name that lends itself quite nicely to the type of cheap wordplay that is so popular with newspapers and blogs. It really doesn’t go beyond that – I was not at all familiar with the man until last week. The head of Britain's government economic service and the former World Bank chief economist, Stern recently published a report on the economics of climate change (some highlights here and some reactions here). It’s causing quite a stir.

The Economist:

Gordon Brown, the chancellor of the exchequer, asked Sir Nicholas to look into the economics of climate change because he wanted some solid material to counter the argument of those who accept that global warming is happening but believe mitigating it is too expensive to be worthwhile. That view is rare these days in Europe, but common in America, where it is often infused with the belief that attempts to control greenhouse-gas emissions are part of a European socialist conspiracy to undermine the American way of life.

Sir Nicholas has tried to assess the future costs of climate change—drought in Africa, floods in Europe, hurricanes in America, rising sea levels around the world—and has set them against the costs of cutting fossil-fuel usage enough to stabilise carbon-dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere. His answer to the second part of this calculation is fairly uncontroversial. The costs of switching away from carbon should not be huge because of the rise in fossil-fuel prices and the fall in alternative energy prices. Sir Nicholas reckons that the world could stabilise concentrations at a reasonable level at a cost of 1% of GDP by 2050. Many other economists have looked at the matter, and most agree with Sir Nicholas.

But Sir Nicholas dissents from the general view on the costs of climate change itself. Most economists who have looked at the matter up to now reckon that, if greenhouse-gas emissions continue on their current path, the costs of climate change would be between zero (where the benefits of warming to cold countries balances out the costs) and 3% of global output over the next 100 years. Sir Nicholas thinks they would be a massive 5-20% over the next century or two: in other words, world output could be up to a fifth lower, as a result of climate change, than it otherwise would have been.

…Sir Nicholas has received plenty of support from economists (four Nobel prize-winners have endorsed the report) and a certain amount of criticism…One complaint is that he has selected the most pessimistic research and ignored more conservative work… Another criticism is that figures on the economic costs of climate change are bound to be nonsense because they are based on a cascade of uncertainties.

But neither point invalidates Sir Nicholas's central perception—that governments should act not on the basis of the likeliest outcome from climate change but on the risk of something really catastrophic (such as the melting of Greenland's ice sheet, which would raise sea levels by six to seven metres). Just as people spend a small slice of their incomes on buying insurance on the off-chance that their house might burn down, and nations use a slice of taxpayers' money to pay for standing armies just in case a rival power might try to invade them, so the world should invest a small proportion of its resources in trying to avert the risk of boiling the planet

Is this a fair point?

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October 30, 2006

Copyright Issues

Perhaps the technology industry will tire of the constant whinging that comes from the music and movie and publishing industries and decide instead to build fully functional systems that do not accept the arbitrary limitations put on them by a content industry that fears for its own future.

Commentator Bill Thompson on the inevitable changes in store for the music, movie and publishing industries.

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October 28, 2006

The Silent, Ignored, Divided Twenty Percent

Earlier this year, the Burlington Free Press printed a letter to the editor that stated, in part,

The Gallup Poll's annual survey on government found that 20 percent of the population is libertarian. Many libertarians can be found in the Democratic and Republican parties trying unsuccessfully to change these behemoths. Trying to hold the Republicans to their small-government rhetoric, and the Democrats to their promises of social tolerance and opposition to the war.

Libertarians make up the sensible center. We are socially tolerant and fiscally frugal. Libertarians are building a third party to put freedom of choice and responsibility back into your hands.

The letter was written by Hardy Machia, the chairman of the Vermont Libertarian Party.

It may not be immediately obvious, but Mr. Machia is in the minority of politically active libertarians in that he eschews the two major parties. Most people who seek policies of greater freedom do so from within the two big parties. And they generally lose that fight to those who seek to regulate, regulate, regulate. This is true with the Democrats (regulate business, regulate firearms, regulate hate-speech, etc) and Republicans (regulate relationships, regulate substances, and secretly monitor that which cannot be regulated). Libertarians who fight from within either of these two parties are on a fool’s errand.

Our plight was recently highlighted by an article in The Economist:

America may be the land of the free, but Americans who favour both economic and social freedom have no political home. The Republican Party espouses economic freedom—ie, low taxes and minimal regulation—but is less keen on sexual liberation. The Democratic Party champions the right of homosexuals to do their thing without government interference, but not businesspeople. Libertarian voters have an unhappy choice. Assuming they opt for one of the two main parties, they can vote to kick the state out of the bedroom, or the boardroom, but not both.

But the situation is even worse than this, as the two main parties repeatedly fail to deliver what they are advertising.

Democrats actually oppose gay marriage and even civil unions. Remember the way Bill Clinton burned the gay community with “Don’t ask, Don’t tell”? Why do Democrats have the support of the gay community?

Democrats are the self-styled party of inclusiveness and diversity, but they have no problem violating those principles for partisan mud-slinging based on race, creed, etc. And it’s not hard to make the argument that they have long taken the black vote for granted.

Meanwhile, Republicans are not giving us smaller government. They are fat on pork, and are so different from the 1994 GOP that even Dick Armey says they have compromised their agenda and will lose their majority in the House.

Again, why would any lover of freedom vote for either of these two parties? The only answer is pragmatism, though we know that is a formula for failure in the long run.

The Economist article concluded with an ironic, painful note that the situation is, of all things, market-driven:

Libertarians are ignored partly because they are hard to find, not least because they just want to be left alone. (There is a Libertarian Party, but it gets hardly any votes.) Politicians can reach social conservatives through churches or union members through their unions, but where do libertarians gather? Parties will always court the votes that are cheapest to court because, for once, they are spending their own money.

Libertarians have been hoping that the internet will be the place to find and organize like-minded, anti-government Americans. According to polls, there is a large, silent minority of us in this country - enough to control the outcome of any election, if we could only be organized toward a common goal. But we instead concentrate on our differences - some fight primarily for social freedom, while others concentrate on economic liberties. So long as that is the case, we will only get lip service from the two parties of power and big government.

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October 26, 2006

George Allen and Porkbusters

We all know that Senator George Allen is in a tight race for re-election. The race has been receiving a lot of press - though not for substantive reasons, of course. And there is a place for that kind of thing - people do want to know the dirt on the candidates, after all. But as I have said before, the issues matter most to me.

That's why I am so glad to see Senator Allen's article at RedState: "Spending Is The Problem, Not Revenue". Allen credits the blogosphere - specifically Porkbusters - for forcing greater transparency in government spending. Says Allen:

Porkbusters represents citizens demanding accountability from their government. That is grassroots activism at its very best, and I share their goal. Congress doesn’t have a revenue problem. It has a spending problem. Toward that end, I have supported a “Taxpayers’ Bill of Rights”...

I am also a sponsor of the “Commission on the Accountability and Review of Federal Agencies Act”...

I also support passage of the “Stop Over Spending Act of 2006,” which I have sponsored...

Whether you agree or disagree with such efforts, it is nice to see them laid out like that. It would be helpful if more politicians would put together some articles like this, documenting their positions and the legislation they have/will sponsor. We could start with Jim Webb, frankly.

And after the election, I'll judge Allen's performance by this article. Considering that he is widely assumed to have presidential aspirations, it should be a great opportunity to demonstrate that he says what he means and he means what he says. Or that he doesn't.

Again, would that more politicians in both parties would author some articles with some specifics. At least, I would personally appreciate it.

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October 23, 2006

He’ll use his weapon more effectively than you anyway.

Brussels Journal quotes the frontrunner for the 2007 French presidential race, Conservative Nicolas Sarkozy on RTL radio, 22 September 2006:

I would like to say one thing, in what is my conception of the Republic, security is the responsibility of the State, I am against militias, I am against the private ownership of firearms, and I’m trying to make you think about that. If you are assaulted by an armed burglar, he’ll use his weapon more effectively than you anyway so you’re risking your life. If the criminal is not armed and you are and you shoot, your life will be ruined, because killing someone over a theft is not in line with the republican values that are mine. The private ownership of firearms is dangerous. I understand your exasperation for having been burglarized two times, I understand the fear that your wife and daughter may have but the answer is in the efficiency of the police and the efficiency of the judiciary process, the answer is not in having guns at home.

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October 19, 2006

What Ails the GOP?

Former majority leader Dick Armey spoke with NPR a few days ago about why the GOP may be about to lose control of the House of Representatives here in a few weeks. The ideas should come as no surprise. The only surprise is that it's so clear, and they're doing it anyway.

Listen to the interview here, and below his photograph on that site there is another link to "hear Armey's advice for Republicans in November".

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October 8, 2006

Smokin’ in any Jacket

We at AtlasBlogged have discussed smoking bans before (see here, here, here, here, here, and here - cripes, it’s almost like we are smokers or something. For the record, I enjoy a nice cigar on occasion but have never had a cigarette).

Well, put another log on the fire. France is going to ban public smoking.

France is to ban smoking in all public places from next February, the prime minister has announced.

Cafes, nightclubs and restaurants are to be given until January 2008 to adapt, said Dominique de Villepin.

Smoking has always been popular in France. Putting aside all jokes about cheese and military misfortune, the French used to believe in personal liberties like smoking unfiltered fags anywhere, any time. Bans are getting more and more popular – I get 13 pages of BBC audio and video archives when doing a search for “smoking ban” (don’t take my word for it, look for yourself… Welsh, Germans, Scotland, Italy, etc, etc…). The videos offer conflicting reports on whether pub business is “booming” or taking a hit. But there is no denying that the times and the European image are changing.

Since I am not directly affected, I have the luxury of noting the special irony that it is the “Man” on the Left who is keeping smokers down. Let the college kids downtown with the bumper stickers equating Bush to Hitler stick that in their pipe and not be allowed to smoke it.

Of course, I understand why some non-smokers would support these bans. They think that they have the right to enter any place of employment, entertainment, commerce, etc, and not breathe secondhand smoke. The problem is that more and more people labor under this delusion, and individual rights have no real legal meaning in a truly democratic society.

I haven’t heard much lately from the entrepreneur who was making plans to launch the world’s first airline for smokers. But he was taking things in a direction I like:

Alexander Schoppmann, a former stockbroker, is seeking the start-up cash for Smintair - Smoker's International Airways…

The plan is to fly two leased Boeing 747s on the Duesseldorf-Tokyo route…

"Allergics against tobacco smoke or militant anti-smokers are asked to not apply," Smintair says on its jobs page.

(See the BBC News article on Smintair here, and some conversation about Smintair at The Age, here.)

Wouldn’t it be grand if we could someday open a bar (Jib: a “pub”) called “Atlas Drank”? And, you know, decide for ourselves whether or not to allow smoking on our property? Man, that’d be great. Allergics against tobacco smoke or militant anti-smokers are asked to not apply. If you have any complaints, contact our management - John Galt.

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October 4, 2006

Intelligent Market Design

Allow me to draw your attention to a great point made at Coyote Blog:

...economics and evolution are very similar. Both are sciences that are trying to describe the operation of very complex, bottom-up, self-organizing systems. And, in both cases, there exist many people who refuse to believe such complex and beautiful systems can really operate without top-down control.

I love reading Coyote Blog. The only reason it is not on our blogroll is that I am incompetent and disorganized. (hint, Rammage) In the meantime, you should read the rest of that excellent article. Warren Meyer's comparison between Intelligent Design and the Market Manipulation conspiracies is classic. Brad Warbiany at Unrepentant Individual has shared some good comments on this as well.

The analogy really is a wonderful follow-up to my oft-verbalized but rarely written view that conspiracy theories must provide a remarkable amount of emotional comfort to believers. Even if you hate Karl Rove, people must find it comforting to think that some person has the ability to control every GOP politician, their staffers, plus businessmen and foreign dictators. It can be very frightening to think that this (I'm waving my hands at evolution) and this (waving at politics) are just a confused mess with repeated mistakes and failures and dead-ends.

But I don't suppose I will ever known that comfort, nor disabuse the believers of their theories of magic and wizardry.

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September 27, 2006

Don't Download This Song

Long before AtlasBlogged, I shared my thoughts on internet piracy via email. My friends on the Atlantico email list were subjected to a little tirade about how the anti-piracy artists like Metallica and Eminem were coming across as pretty ridiculous. Oh, I’m not saying that an artist doesn’t have rights to their intellectual property (at least, I’m not saying that right now)… I’m just saying that if you become a millionaire in the metal or rap industries in particular, I have trouble respecting you when you play The Man and have your lawyers email me for ripping and burning. There is no street cred in these actions, imho.

Well, I’m not alone in this belief. In this video, a very popular artist addresses this very serious issue.

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September 24, 2006

Libertarians and Taxes

In a recent email exchange on taxes, Rammage made the following comment:

Any talk of going to a national, flat-rate sales tax is libertarians throwing their hands up in defeat. It's a *compromise*. And as such, I just can't stand behind it.

I have no idea what kind of defeat this would represent. Most libertarians would like a national sales tax - it isn’t a compromise at all. Libertarians recognize that there are legitimate functions of government, and that these must be funded in some way. User fees are a fairly extreme concept for most people to swallow, and can’t be seen as a realistic option. But a national sales tax is closer to being a user fee than is any kind of income tax. What Rammage sees as a moral compromise I would call a step in the right direction.

Other comments from the same thread:

Jib Halyard:

I lean towards a sales tax vs income tax because its a lot harder to hide purchases than it is income. Not to mention... I HATE filing taxes every year.

(An excellent point. Of course, there is always the black market, but I can’t see that being more of a hassle to deal with than is the current nest of income loopholes. And there are groups like the National Retail Sales Tax Alliance whose refund scheme seems like it would be as much trouble as the current system. But something more straightforward would be possible. And I still don’t see how the basic notion of a national sales tax would be a defeat for libertarians.)

Jon Henke:

Don't worry. You'll never get the opportunity to make this compromise. It will never happen. Among other things, it's simply not possible to fund our government at anything like current revenue levels with a flat rate national sales tax.

This is probably true. But this does highlight exactly why libertarians would like to see a national sales tax. They believe that it would awaken more people to the cost of our government and stoke the fires of libertarianism in the average American. I’ve got a stack of IRS forms and booklets that would feed those fires very nicely.

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September 16, 2006

Roxanne, You Can’t Cross That Red Line…

I heard this story on the way to work last week. It really blew me away. Then I got cut off by some ignoramus who righted-on-red about 10 seconds before they would have had a green light anyway, and I lost my train of thought. Thank you to Kip for reminding me of the issue.

Richmond [Virginia] is clamping down on prostitutes and customers in their favorite spots.

City Council voted unanimously last night to approve the creation of Target Enforcement Zones that would make it a crime for a previously arrested prostitute or "john" to be seen in three neighborhoods.

That’s right. It is illegal for you to be in that neighborhood if you were once arrested for prostituting your own body or soliciting somebody to do so. That's what's new in America. That's what's going down in the Capital of the Confederacy – give a rebel yell and don’t let ‘em tell you how to live, right fellas?

At the request of city prosecutors, judges will be able to prohibit someone with a previous arrest from entering the zones unless they live, work or worship in the area. Enforcement begins Oct. 1.

Worship what? I smell a loophole...

Some council members expressed concern that the zones might push the streetwalkers to other parts of the city.

If I thought that this might lead to zoning ordinances that defined prostitution to be permissible in certain locations, I would be very impressed with the almost comprehension of personal freedoms. It would be a very small step in the libertarian direction.

I assume this means that last year’s solution didn’t work.

the RPD also launched "Johns TV" on the city’s public-access station, a controversial program that airs the faces of all those who have been convicted recently of soliciting a prostitute in Richmond.

This redlining is a big problem that's building up. How many different “problems” will Progressives (on both the Left and the Right) attempt to “solve” in this manner? It doesn’t matter whether you own your body or your land, they’re going to do this anyway. Keep thinking about this practice. You haven’t heard the last of it. It simply will not stop with this particular vice. Yours is somewhere on the list, pal.

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August 27, 2006

Bob Smither, Netroots, and Name Recognition

Netroots activism has had a few impressive showings, including the recent victory by Ned Lamont over incumbent Senator Joe Lieberman in Connecticut’s primary elections. The Nation magazine summed it up thusly :

Ned Lamont's victory was driven by two triggers: First, the war elicited a primary opponent; then Internet activists convinced voters that he was a viable alternative.

In other words, there was a demand for change. There was somebody willing to supply that change. Internet activism simply got the message out.

Now, I don’t want to overstate the effect of the blogosphere on a campaign, but clearly blogs are able to get the message out and generate a lot of attention. If a politician has a message that resonates with voters, then a netroots campaign is exactly what he or she needs in this day and age. Name recognition, media coverage, and the buzz of the old-fashioned grassroots movements can help to bring down unpopular incumbents, or draw attention to a candidate who might not otherwise be seen as viable.

Can you see where I am going with this?

In an excellent post at WatchBlog, Richard Rhodes wrote:

The fact is whether many people want to admit it or not is that name recognition does matter. And this is the one thing that third parties lack.

Richard is correct that this problem will certainly burn “third party” candidates in the next presidential election. Congressional elections, however, are a different matter. Name recognition is easier to achieve in a single congressional district. But even in a congressional race, third party candidates generally lack name recognition because most people just don’t care. The real race is between the Democrat and the Republican… if there is both a Democrat and a Republican. I would like to suggest that in any race where there is not already both a Democrat and a Republican, there is a potential for a third party candidate to make a very strong showing and possibly even win a seat. Of course, trying this against a popular incumbent, this would present quite a challenge for even the most savvy and enthusiastic netroots activists. But what if the incumbent is unpopular… or what if there is no incumbent?

A netroots movement may be trying to build up around Libertarian Party candidate Bob Smither for Tom DeLay’s old congressional seat (District 22 in Texas). With Republicans unable to field a candidate, voters face a choice between the Democrat Nick Lampson and Libertarian Bob Smither. Will Republicans vote for a Libertarian just to spite the Democrats? Well, considering Smither’s promise to caucus with House Republicans if elected, and considering that Republican voters tend toward fiscal conservativism similar to that of Libertarians, they might be persuaded.

Jon Henke at QandO calls it the the Ron Paul option.

Other bloggers picking up the cause include Stephen VanDyke at Hammer of Truth, James at Swing State Project, and they’re arguing about it at Daily Kos.

A full read of the article by Lance at Inactivist.Org may spell out the best argument for pushing a netroots campaign. He asks for help in getting Bob Smither elected:

First, we have one more vote against big spending…
Second, we have the opportunity to send a message; most importantly Republicans have the chance to send a message that we as a citizenry are unhappy with the course our representatives have taken.

Hey, Lance, I'm on board. I can't vote for Bob Smither, but I can support his candidacy. I will direct people to his website. I will encourage netroots activism, not only among Libertarians but among all "third party" supporters, and independents. If you are reading this, please look into Bob Smither and see if you can support him and/or his candidacy.

Let's get the word out. Bob Smither for Congress.

(This article was originally posted at WatchBlog)

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Notes on the NSA Wiretap situation:

This article is cross-posted at Inactivist, with slightly altered formatting.

So how about that NSA anti-terrorism program of eavesdropping and data mining? It’s a pretty contentious issue, isn’t it? Heck, I may have managed to upset both sides with just the first sentence of this post. One wrong word and the Right might identify me as a terrorist sympathizer who doesn’t understand the dangers of al Qaeda. One wrong word and the Left might identify me as a fascist thug who is completely unaware of the Bill of Rights. Despite the danger, I plan to lay out a position on the issue that can engender reasonable discussion on the issue.

Allow me to start with a January ’06 statement from the White House:

The NSA's terrorist surveillance program is targeted at al Qaeda communications coming into or going out of the United States. It is a limited, hot pursuit effort by our intelligence community to detect and prevent attacks.

Now, who could be upset by such a program? (Besides al Qaeda, of course.) Surely every reasonable American wants the government to surveil terrorist organizations. Surely every reasonable American supports hot pursuit of terrorists, and the prevention of terror attacks. In fact, I have never seen it argued otherwise. So why is this issue contentious?

Well, there are some who feel that the Fourth Amendment requires a court to issue a warrant for such a program. And that is where reasonable people separate into opposing camps. There are some who are certain that this is the first step down a slippery slope. These people generally recognize that not every warrantless search is unwarranted. Nor are they necessarily a violation of the Fourth Amendment. But trying to equate, for example, most of the examples given in this oft-cited Andrew McCarthy article to the program in question is not helpful – it simply does not address the substantive concerns that exist, even if it makes for good soundbite material.

Along the same lines, it must be recognized that those who support the NSA program is necessary as-is are not actually seeking to raise the presidency to a dictatorial level. They simply recognize that valuable information is passed between terrorists through channels that we have the power to monitor, and they want the NSA and other government agencies to have the freedom to act for the safety of Americans. To accuse these people of disregarding the rights of the individual is to neglect the depth of thought that goes into weighing personal freedoms against national security.

I think the most overlooked point on this issue is that no reasonable person is arguing that the government should not be able to conduct this program with warrants. At the risk of oversimplifying the situation, it seems to me that whether the warrants are technically necessary or not, obtaining them would be very easy, and would allay the concerns of opponents.

Allow me to highlight a few of my favorite arguments regarding the issuance of a warrant:

Kip, Esquire responds to several media outlets:

OpinionJournal, a/k/a Wall Street Journal:In this environment, monitoring the communications of our enemies is neither a luxury nor some sinister plot to chill domestic dissent.

--But how do we know they're our enemies? Do we have, um, probable cause to think so? Or even just the less onerous standard of "reasonable suspicion"? Or, um, anything specific enough to get a FISA warrant?

New York Sun:Yesterday's ruling follows the disclosure in December of an NSA program to listen in on calls between suspected terrorists abroad and those on American soil who might be communicating with them.

--But why do we suspect that they're terrorists? Because we have, um, probable cause or reasonable grounds to suspect it? Enough to get a FISA warrant?

NRO:The lone judge in American history to order a president to halt in wartime a foreign-intelligence-collection program that has undoubtedly saved lives probably sympathizes with the journalists, and others, who are suing to stop the Terrorist Surveillance Program in which NSA intercepts foreign-U.S. terrorist communications.

--But how do we know that they're terrorists? Because we have, um, probable cause to know it? Enough to get a FISA warrant?

USA Today:The NSA program applies only to international calls, and only those intercepted while tracking known or suspected al-Qaeda operatives.

--But how do we know or suspect that they are al-Qaeda operatives? Because we have, um, probable cause? Enough to get a FISA warrant?

It's not the wiretapping. It's the warrantless, stupid!

Similar thoughts from defcon:blog.

Jib Halyard (my good friend and co-blogger at Atlas Blogged) expressed the civil libertarian viewpoint when he asked:

Where does this presidential power end? Warrantless wiretapping is the legal equivalent of unlawful search and seizure, which is clearly prohibited by the 4th Amendment. If the administration’s argument affirms that, because we’re at war, it can contravene the 4th Amendment, then why doesn’t that same argument have the capacity to circumvent the entire Bill of Rights?

Obviously, some see this as very unreasonable in the face of the threat to national security that is posed by ~~IslamoFascistsany terroristsany criminals~~ our enemies. But it doesn’t have to be a slippery slope – a point Jib argues to Xrlq in the comments section of that post:

I want our law enforcement to be able to practice surveillance using the best technology available. The objection I have is to warrantless wiretaps, not to the practice of wiretapping altogether. All I desire is for our system of checks and balances between the branches of government to remain intact while doing so.

As I'm sure you know, FISA was enacted to address this very circumstance. Instead, the executive chose to ignore this law, claiming that (i) it is too cumbersome for their needs, and (ii) they have the authority to, based on its Article II powers.

I'm challenging these two claims:

First, if FISA is out date for whatever reason (it's insufficient, anachronistic, too cumbersome in a modern environment, simply can't apply to our newest prevention technologies, whatever), then the executive should go to the legislative and say so, and ask for what they do need. Congress was united in supporting what was needed to protect our country - at least when this program started - and would have done what was necessary to update the FISA system; but, it's beyond the executive's purview to simply ignore the existing law.

Second, as I asked in my article, if the administration's interpretation of the executive's war powers is correct, then what does stop the executive from expanding their powers further, infringing on our other civil rights as outlined in the Constitution? From my perspective, this is the true scary part of the equation.

Thomas Eddlam at Lew Rockwell:

I’ve got no problem with tapping the calls of people who are al Qaeda, and Congress authorized the President to do this under the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). All that Bush has to do is follow the same Constitution he swore an oath to "preserve, protect and defend" by seeking a warrant. There’s even an emergency provision in FISA that lets the President tap a phone call before getting a warrant, which is similar to the common law doctrine of "hot pursuit" with regard to warrants. If all the President has to do is get a warrant within 72 hours after conducting the phone tap, it doesn’t slow down the NSA one bit to get the warrant.

So, other than the argument that it is not necessary (which may or may not be true), why shouldn’t the NSA go ahead and get the warrants for these searches? Are we worried about a slippery slope that would greatly restrict the federal government? If so, is that a concern held by conservatives, or by liberals?

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August 17, 2006

That Cushy Government Job

WSJ recently ran a Chris Edwards editorial titled “Welcome to Club Fed”.

The closest thing to a lifetime sinecure in America is a federal government job, and now it turns out that it's also a very lucrative way to make a living.

New data from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis confirm that the average federal civilian worker earns $106,579 a year in total compensation, or twice the $53,289 in wages and benefits for the typical private worker. This federal pay premium costs taxpayers big bucks because Uncle Sam's annual payroll is now $200 billion a year. No wonder that, with a per capita income of $46,782 a year, Washington, D.C. is the fourth richest among the nation's 360 metropolitan areas.

(also available here)

Edwards also discussed the issue back on August 2 at Cato at Liberty, when he noted:

The data for 2005 shows that compensation for the average federal civilian worker ($106,579) is now exactly double the average compensation in the U.S. private sector ($53,289).

The federal pay advantage has been soaring in recent years. The ratio of average federal to average private compensation increased from 1.51 in 1990, to 1.68 in 2000, to 2.00 today.

Holy cripes that’s alarming. This nation needs a political party dedicated to smaller government. Don’t you dare say the Republicans, you fool.

The Cato at Liberty piece was linked by Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of… As Kip and I noted in the comments section, the numbers being presented by Cato at Liberty are only telling a very small part of the story. What exactly are these federal jobs? How do they compare with the compensation for state or local government jobs? I’m not playing Devil’s Advocate here; It’s just that I would really like to know. It might better paint the picture for me.

These are federal civilian positions. What low-paying federal civilian positions are there that might pull down the average? Could it be that the federal government contracts out all of the menial stuff, both raising its own average salary and lowering that of the private sector? Perhaps playing Devil’s Advocate isn’t such a bad idea…

Well, Edwards does address that:

The structure of that workforce has also changed over time. There are fewer low-pay typists and more high-pay computer experts in the government today than there were a generation ago. But that doesn't explain why, as the BEA data show, federal wages have risen 38 percent in just the past five years, compared with 14 percent in the private sector…

Federal workers receive generous health benefits during work and retirement, a pension plan with inflation protection, a retirement savings plan with generous matching contributions, large disability benefits, and union protections. They often have generous holiday and vacation schedules, flexible hours, training options, incentive awards, flexible spending accounts, and a more relaxed pace of work than private-sector workers.

Perhaps the most important benefit of federal employment is extreme job security. According to Bureau of Labor Statistics data, the rate of layoffs and firings in the federal workforce is just one-quarter the rate in the private sector. All these advantages in worker benefits suggest that, in comparable jobs, federal wages ought to be lower than private-sector wages.

One sign that federal workers have a sweeter deal than they acknowledge is the rate of voluntary resignation from government positions: just one-quarter the rate in the private sector, the BLS data show. Long job tenure has its pros and cons, but the fact that many federal workers burrow in and never leave suggests that they are doing pretty well for themselves.

The numbers just don’t lie. Edwards also linked to the Bureau of Economic Analysis website for those who would like to parse the numbers.

Says Radley Balko at The Agitator:

I'm sure there'll be a flury of letters to the editor from federal bureaucrats defending their existence. But the vast majority of them are parasites. Not only do they add nothing to the economy, they actually slow it down, both by sapping tax dollars for their salaries, offices, and benefits, and by the very nature of their jobs, most of which raise the cost of doing business in America. Not to mention the amount of money American individuals spend on lawyers and tax accountants, either to lobby to make sure the sea of regulations are more to their liking, or merely to help them understand the law so that they can comply with it.

And that's not even touching the damage the ever-expanding army of federal law enforcement officials is doing.

Okay! I’ll quit the Devil’s Advocate thing. This is the antithesis of what America is supposed to be about. This isn’t how we think of ourselves, and I can’t imagine who would defend this, except for those sucking at the government teat. And I don’t foresee it being undone. Sharing the information far and wide would be a good start. Again, the numbers just don’t lie.

Edwards was further quoted by Cato’s own Greg Garner:

In the May 2006 edition of Cato's Tax & Budget Bulletin, Edwards urges Congress to "restrain federal compensation by freezing federal wages for a period of years and examining fringe benefit programs for possible savings." He writes, "In the longer term, the coming surge in federal worker retirement as baby boomers enter their sixties offers an opportunity to downsize federal agencies without problematic layoffs or buyouts. As government air traffic controllers, space scientists, and others retire in coming years, these activities should be handed over to the private sector so that they can be better managed and have more efficient compensation policies."

Hear, hear!

More on the subject of federal unions at PowerBlog:

Labor union membership in the private sector has declined steadily and stands at about 8%. By contrast, in the government sector labor union membership stands at around 37%.

This is itself a huge disparity, and one that I would think has large effects on issues of pay, benefits, and job security. Thus, I think there has to be a link between the rates of union membership and compensation between the public and private sectors.

As Dr. Charles Baird notes in a radio interview, “In the government sector there is no declining unionism, none at all.”

Bingo.

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Wasted Votes

I have never missed an election, and I have never voted for a Democrat or Republican presidential candidate. That means my vote is wasted. I am told this every time. To vote for an Independent, Libertarian, or other "third party" candidate is to throw one's vote away, especially in the "big" elections.

Right?

I would assume that anybody writing in the center column on WatchBlog would feel otherwise. But allow me to lay out the argument that my vote is indeed meaningless - and yours is, too.

Take yourself back to the controversial US presidential election of 2000. I live in Virginia. I walk in to the voting booth and see the following tickets:

Bush / Cheney - Republican
Gore / Lieberman - Democrat
Nader / La Duke - Green
Browne / Olivier - Libertarian
Buchanan / Foster - Reform
Phillips / Frazier - Constitution

I don't remember the order in which they were presented to me, but these were my options. Bush / Cheney are projected to win the state by more than 7% over Gore / Lieberman. So, how do I cast a meaningful vote? Whether I vote for Bush or not, he's taking the 13 electoral votes from the Commonwealth of Virginia. It's just not close enough to dispute. Think about that. No matter which chad I punch, Bush wins Virginia – nothing I could do would change the outcome of the election. This is the definition of my vote being meaningless.

Right?

I have several friends who are libertarian Republicans. They talk the libertarian talk, and then - frustratingly - they vote GOP, every time. In 2000, they tried to persuade me to vote for Bush just to ensure that idiot Gore doesn’t get elected. The LP was polling under 2% and had no chance of winning (they argued) so you have to cast your vote for the candidate who is closest to your ideology among those candidates who are legitimate contenders. Even if the closest isn't very close. Otherwise the vote is wasted. The same argument was made in '04 to keep Kerry out of office. I expect it again in the next cycle.

I also have several friends who are libertarian Democrats. They have very libertarian philosophies, but always vote Democrat, for reasons similar to those I gave above. Their hatred and fear of the Republican Party (usually the Christian Right in particular) brings them to vote for candidates like Gore or Kerry, who don’t actually represent them at all. Because otherwise, the vote is wasted.

Right?

Except that my one vote could not affect the outcome of the election anyway. If I had voted for Bush, he wouldn’t have won harder or something. If I had voted for the Democrat, it wouldn’t have swung Virginia – the gap was nearly a quarter of a million people. In a closely contested state, I can at least understand why Greens, Libertarians, and Reform Party types would feel that they had to engage in tactical voting. But in most states, no individual vote is any more meaningful than my vote for the LP. I can accuse the libertarian Republicans or the libertarian Democrats of casting "wasted votes" as assuredly as they can accuse me.

Also, consider that third-party voters are often given credit / blame for splitting the vote. In particular, Perot in 1992 and Nader in 2000 are sometimes considered effective spoiler candidates, responsible for the election of Clinton and Bush, respectively. So voting Republican isn’t the only way to keep a Democrat out of office, and vice versa. I would argue that the 1992 election demonstrates exactly why voting “third party” is better than the tactical voting method. In that election, Independent candidate H. Ross Perot carried 18.9% of the popular vote, leaving Bill Clinton to win the presidency with the support of only 43.0% of voters. As a result, the Republican Party reevaluated what voters dislike about Democrats, and played to that in 1994. They did this well enough to get Perot’s support for their 1994 Contract with America, which held specific promises of fiscal conservativism. We all know the result – the Republican Party controls Congress.

The way in which this is an argument for voting third-party is that the Perot voters of 1992 were able to explain clearly what it was that they found lacking in the Republican Party, and they have had concessions in future elections. People who did not support Bill Clinton, but voted for him as the lesser evil, explained nothing to the Republican Party, and were not courted as effectively. What concessions have libertarian voters won from either major party by voting for them over the last decade or so? None, because so many vote Democrat or Republican. The Libertarian Party does not represent me perfectly, but it is closer to me than the two major parties, and I want them to know that. I want the Democrats to know exactly why I am not voting for them. I want the Republicans to know exactly why I am not voting for them. If any “third party” can significantly muster more than 5% of the vote, or if alternative parties are able to approach 15% collectively, their positions will be taken more seriously than they are now.

(This article was originally posted at WatchBlog)

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August 16, 2006

(H.R.) 42 is Not the Answer

Here’s a little story that didn’t receive too much press:

Americans Now Free to Display American Flags at Their Homes

Congressman Roscoe Bartlett Present When President Bush Signed H.R. 42 into Law - First American Values Agenda of House Republicans to Become Law

On all things political there sits atop my shoulders a little angel and a little devil, one representing libertarian ideals, the other Republican (I’ll leave it to the reader to decide for himself which is the angel and which the devil). While the two agree on many issues (such as their mutual contempt for all things Democrat), every once in a while they run across a topic to which they are diametrically opposed. This American flag issue is one of them.

Now, far be it from me to criticize my Maryland Congressman Roscoe Bartlett. Indeed, if I were ever to enter the political arena, I’d like to think that I’d model myself after him. That is, his sole purpose in life seems to be voting down anything and everything put before him. That’s a politician who I can get behind.

Furthermore, I include myself among those who feel that homeowner’s associations are beginning to outgrow their usefulness, both in scope and expense. Short of a neighbor opening a salvage dump next door, I can’t imagine too many infractions that would drive me to lodge a complaint with an HOA. The thought of any HOA in the United States implementing covenants against flying the American flag is repulsive to me. I agree with Congressman Bartlett when he said “I was alarmed when I learned that some homeowners associations and condos all over the country prevent Americans from flying the American flag. It's hard to see how flying an American flag could depreciate the value of a condo.”

At first glance, this is reminiscent of the flag burning debate. But flag burning was an issue of government versus the citizen. Bartlett’s bill, on the other hand, is business versus citizen with the government acting as a third-party intervenor. And this is where the libertarian angel/devil begins to whisper in my ear. Is this the best solution?

U.S. House Majority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) stated:

"Every American should be able to display the American flag on their own residential property. Simply put, homeowners associations and condominiums should not be able to restrict the rights of those wanting to display the flag at their homes. Displaying the American flag should be the right of each and every citizen and I'd like to thank Rep. Bartlett for his work on this important legislation and the values it represents for our country."

The diminutive Republican tutelary on my shoulder strenuously agrees. Every American should be able to display an American flag on his or her own property. The libertarian counterpart reminds me that citizens who enter into an agreement to live under the conditions of a homeowner’s association do so under their own free will. If a group of citizens want to move into a development together and maintain covenants, no matter how ridiculous, then they should be able to do so free of government intervention.

Is there a free-market solution to Americans overcoming these petty HOA covenants that does not involve government involvement? Actually, there are two. First, the homeowners can petition the HOA to get the restriction(s) reversed. Second, homeowners can choose not to move to developments with flag restrictions. If enough people opted for the latter, then eventually restrictive HOAs would be weeded out.

I like Joe Kelley’s take:

Some people claim that [HOAs are] un-American by banning American flags. In reality, HOAs are perfectly American because they define self-rule. HOAs are not governed by some foreign body of iron-fisted tyrants. They are controlled by the people who make up your community - your next door neighbors.

A homeowner’s association is made up of like-minded individuals who all seek to maintain (and increase) the value of their most-prized investment.

Everyone who moves into a community governed by a HOA agrees to live under the guidelines established by the community. Those guidelines are routinely fluid and can change with public sentiment.

Much like the restaurant smoking bans, if enough faith and time is allotted, then the market will provide solutions without government interference and without restricting anyone’s rights, whether it is a citizen’s right to hang the Stars and Stripes or an HOA’s right to operate without Uncle Sam on its back.

And that would make my angel and devil happy.

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August 10, 2006

Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act

Updated 15:30
I got this email today thanking me for my support in helping to pass the Child Safety Act. I don’t believe that I actually provided any such support, and I don’t know why I got this email, but it immediately made me think of Kip’s comments on “sex-offender mania”. He has written on red-lining, recidivism rates, and the obvious direction for registries after the sex-offender precedent. This is all worth some deep pondering in the face of the “for the children” march.

His most recent post on the topic is here and contains links at the bottom to some of his previous articles.

The body of the mysterious email in its entirety is below the fold:

Thank you for support in helping pass The Child Safety Act.

A message from John Walsh - July 27, 2006

This is an incredible week for myself, my family and other parents of murdered or missing children, and I want to thank all of you who have supported us to make sure The Child Safety Act got through to the President.

I'm incredibly thankful to the members of the House and Senate for passing the "Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act" - and to President Bush for signing it.

My wife Reve and I are honored that it has been named for our son on the 25th anniversary of his abduction and murder.

There are so many people who have worked so hard to get this bill passed -- their work will impact and save lives.

-John Walsh

Some information about the Adam Walsh Act that you - our Safe Side friends - helped to pass:

Of the 550,000 registered sex offenders nationally, the whereabouts of at least 100,000 are currently unknown.

The Adam Walsh Act creates stricter requirements for sex offenders registration -- to prevent offenders from slipping through the cracks and hurting our children.

One of the most important features of the bill is the creation of a national sex offender registry that will be available on the Internet. The legislation also calls for stricter prison sentences for offenders who fail to register and keep their information current. The offender will be assigned to one of three tiers; the worst offenders will have to check-in more frequently, and all offenders will have to register in person.

Some highlights of the bill:

* Establishes a comprehensive national system for the registration of sex offenders

* Establishes three tiers of sex offenders

* Requires all jurisdictions to enact criminal penalties for sex offenders who fail to comply with registration requirements

* Requires sex offenders to appear in person to verify their registration

* Imposes a fine and/or term of imprisonment for up to 20 years on sex offenders who knowingly fail to register

* Makes registration as a sex offender a mandatory condition of probation and supervised release

* Eliminates the statue of limitations for prosecutions of child abduction and felony sex sex offenses against children

Thank you so much for all of your support along the way! Our Safe Side friends helped generate over 16,000 letters to Senator Specter.

The Safe Side Team

www.thesafeside.com
====================
The Safe Side Company is a proud financial supporter of The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.

www.missingkids.com

As The Safe Side creates more safety products for children and adds new safety information to our site, we will be sending out important news and information via E-mail.
If you would like to be removed from our E-mail list, please read the unsubscribe information below.
As always, we will not share, sell or give your E-mail address to any other organization. Ever.

If you would like to unsubscribe from our list, visit:
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I’d like to know more about the "three tiers" part. I am not as familiar with this legislation as I ought to be. Time to go a-researchin’… please drop me a line if you know anything much about it.

Update: I haven't found much on the three tiers, but I did find an article that notes that the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children recognizes some problems with red-lining.

South of Houston, so many municipalities have passed similar ordinances that surrounding communities worry that if they don't follow suit, they will become dumping grounds for sex offenders.

"The key is to know where they are and what they're doing, not to limit where they can live. Because, by doing so, you may be inadvertently pushing them into a situation where we no longer know where they are," says [NCMEC President Ernie] Allen.

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August 4, 2006

For Everything Else, There's Ned Lamont's MasterCard

Universal preschool.....................expensive.

Universal health care...................very expensive.

All-day schools...........................New Haven real estate-expensive.

"A transportation strategy which interconnects cities and suburbs, inner cities and jobs and affordable housing, and ports and airports" ......................really quite ungodly expensive.

"A serious, long-range infrastructure plan to upgrade our schools, public transportation, highways, our sewage treatment and our levees in below sea-level areas" .................expensive beyond the realm of absurdity.

The Washington Post suggesting that Connecticut's Ned Lamont is a "fiscal conservative"..................Priceless.

Cato's David Boaz pokes fun here.

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August 2, 2006

Commerce Not Good for Children

Updated 17:25
Which should concern me more: Sponge Bob on a box of macaroni and cheese, or the possibility that my child will be abducted? Well, seeing that I don’t really give a rat’s ass whether Sponge Bob is on the box, it should be an easy question. But the message of this NPR story is that I am a fool for failing to recognize the insidious dangers of letting my children watch television in a society where there is no government regulation of Sponge Bob on food boxes. You see, if my children watch TV and see Sponge Bob Squarepants, Cinderella, Dora the Explorer, or any of the other so called “children’s programming”, then they will desire bedspreads and cereal and clothing and bicycles and whatever else some evil bastard slaps a cartoon character on and sticks on a store shelf.

It is disturbing, the NPR story says, that a 4-year-old recognizes the logo for Coca-Cola. Stop and think about this: We sing and use flashcards and read books to our children in an attempt to get them to recognize and use symbols to communicate with other people, including across barriers of language and space and time. And the Coke symbol is one of the most widely recognized symbols in the world. But this NPR story presents it as lamentable when a child joins the rest of us in knowing what that symbol means. This knowledge is bad. To desire Coke is also bad. That is the message NPR is pushing.

Some of you [stare at Rammage] will say that this is typical of NPR. Fine, but I have a point beyond complaining that NPR is a bunch of anti-market liberal weenies (especially since I don’t believe that is generally the case).

Mayo Clinic pediatrician Dan Broughton is interviewed in the story. Speaking for the American Academy of Pediatrics, Dr. Broughton is the one who says that I worry too much about child abduction (after all, it’s statistically improbable), and not enough about having my children see Sponge Bob on a box macaroni and cheese in the store (statistically certain). I guess it doesn’t occur to him why, exactly, I worry about child abduction. First of all, the two concerns are not mutually exclusive. What if an abductor exposes my child to the Sponge Bob m&c? Now the kid has been stolen and corrupted by advertising! It is clear, after all, that there is no escaping from advertisers. Better to keep the kid safe from abduction, in my mind, just on the off chance that it would be better for the child to be with me than with an abductor.

But I do get Mr. Broughton’s point. Even while my children are with me physically, they can be mentally abducted right before my eyes by what they are watching on television. Don’t dismiss this as hyperbole – hours upon hours of children’s programming have a serious impact on what your kids believe. They can be pushed a socialist agenda, or a message of rugged individualism… many shows indicate that might makes right, and as a parent I sometimes have to address that. Parents do need to be aware of what their children are exposed to at school, on line, on television… everywhere. This is a legitimate concern. In fact, I have addressed the possibility that the messages in these kids' shows are a means of positive social engineering (see here).

Having said that, I don’t really care if my children are watching commercials. I am one of those parents who are capable of saying "no" to my children. And my kids don’t have money, and they don’t have cars, so they won’t be making any purchases for themselves for quite some time. In the meantime, they learn by example. I do not feed them crap, and I do not buy them whatever they ask for. My shopping habits are shockingly similar to those of my parents when I was a child, and shockingly dissimilar to what I was asking for when I was five years old. Despite all of the Smurf-watching I did as a kid, I turned out okay. And that wasn't nearly as educational as Dora, or my personal favorite, Little Einsteins.

But we all know that there are people out there who don’t think that parents can handle raising their kids without regulatory help from the government. Some of those people are parents like the ones the NPR story talks about. So the question for any level-headed lover of liberty is, How can I get these people to leave me alone? How can I keep them from pushing more regulations onto the industry – how can I stop that slippery slope? The Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood is a group that wants to end marketing of junk foods to children under eight. [Insert libertarian joke about black-market junk food ads]

But in all seriousness, how exactly would such a ban be enforced? The answer is, sweepingly.

If you listen to the NPR story, you will hear the president of Nickelodeon trying to explain the basic concept of supply and demand, but it’s a futile effort. The story even notes that there is a demand for healthy food to be associated with these cartoon characters, so we see the creation of things like Dora Carrots. But still, in the minds of the media and child psychologists, there is a failure to let parents raise their own children.

Update: The NPR piece I discussed was the first in a series of three. The others are here (on 'tweens) and here (teens).

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July 26, 2006

Republicans Would Never Do That

Amy Ridenour chalks up one more dig on the self-styled party of small government...

Don't worry, Ms. Schuett. One day we'll have a Republican Congress, and left-wing pork like this will end.

It would be really funny, if so many small government advocates weren't locked into supporting the GOP regardless of the return. The difference between a reliable voter and a stooge is... what, exactly?

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July 18, 2006

Exceeding Infinity

As a scientist and technophile, I am all about the research into and application of alternative energy sources. Those who know me will not be surprised that I am on record here, here, and especially here saying what shouldn’t need to be said – that finding alternative energy sources is beyond the proper purview of our government, and should be dealt with by the market, even if that means that some investors get rich (horrors!).

As a scientist and proponent of alternative energy sources, it really drives me nuts to see some of the things people have to say about the topic. For example, Michael Kanellos, Editor at large for CNET News, covered the comments of Rice University chemistry professor and Nobel laureate Richard Smalley in 2004. Dr. Smalley of course calls for more government money to be spent on energy sources. I wish Kanellos had quoted Smalley more extensively, so I would know exactly where to lay blame over some of the comments in the article, such as:

If the government doesn't start funding energy research, future generations might end up living in dark, nanotech scientist says.

…and…

Wind, wave and hydrothermal power have mostly been tapped.

tapped? TAPPED?

I can’t believe that such a statement would have to be refuted, but if it must be, then consider what the U.S. Department of Energy has to say on the subject (emphasis mine):

Sources of renewable energy are either continuously resupplied by the sun or tap inexhaustible resources. They include solar, geothermal, biomass, wind, and hydropower resources.

Specifically if you click on the link for geothermal, you get the following (again, emphasis mine):

In the United States, most geothermal resources are concentrated in the West, but geothermal heat pumps can be used nearly anywhere.

The use of wave power and oceanic thermal gradients is so undeveloped that it doesn’t even get mentioned in the DoE page above.

Not only are these resources far from “tapped” in the way the word is used in the CNET article, the technologies for harnessing these resources are constantly becoming more efficient and affordable.

What was Mr. Kanellos thinking? Did he simply report accurately what Dr. Smalley actually said? If so, he is still guilty of not looking into the facts of the situation. I would like to give him the benefit of the doubt in some way, but I don’t see how I can. The nature and potential of renewable resources is covered in elementary, middle, and high school. It’s easy to look up. It’s even common sense – how could solar power or wind power be “tapped”?

And I haven't even touched the ridiculous scare-mongering suggestion that our children will not know electricity if we don't do something.

Suggestions? I might have to file this one under “inexplicable” until I hear from Mr. Kanellos on the matter. Perhaps he has already clarified these remarks somewhere, but I haven't seen it.

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July 17, 2006

You Say You Want a Revolution?

Jon Henke at QandO has fleshed out an email conversation into an open question for the blogosphere:

is there a clear, bright line between when civil obedience/disobedience is proper and when Revolution/violence directed against the State is proper?

It is interesting to see that the response has focused primarily on the question of a modern popular revolution in this country, as opposed to struggle and violence on an individual level. Commenters on Jon’s post took the tack of discussing a popular rebellion, as did Dale and McQ in this week's QandO podcast.

But that's not what interests me most.

Incidentally, Dale was absolutely correct in what he said about Dave Schuler of “The Glittering Eye”. Democracy is one of the worst protections of individual liberties. As we have all heard, democracy is two wolves and a sheep making dinner plans.

I don’t know Dave Schuler, but I suspect that he would say that his use of the phrase liberal democracy somehow keeps Dale’s and McQ’s criticisms from being germane. But the principles and laws that are supposed to keep our rights inalienable (even in a democratic society) are violated by our own government. So, now what? As far as I am concerned, Schuler has basically re-stated the original question without answering it - and carried it to his own blog for a similar discussion.

Tyler Cowen and Radley Balko have also discussed the issue in recent weeks, but there too it is a discussion that has more to do with raising an army than with an individual who is facing oppression.

Billy Beck eventually weighed in at QandO, and I was looking forward to his two cents - mostly because I was originally considering the question from a personal standpoint, and I suspected he would as well. (If you don't know Billy Beck, you should check out his blog. I like him, but I can't promise you will. I think I can promise that you will find him very interesting.)

When I emailed Henke on the subject, I was thinking about the broader principles involved in violence toward agents of the state when an individual’s rights and freedoms are encroached upon unjustly – something that would apply to people around the world, under any type of government, at a personal level. No matter how oppressive a regime, there are situations where citizens are face-to-face with agents of the state, and are in a position to submit or fight. How far will they be pushed? It of course depends on how much freedom they are accustomed to.

I hadn’t meant to test the waters of armed rebellion – I am well aware of the non-violent channels available to me if I don’t like the seat belt law or the income tax, and I have no desire to try to raise an army anyway. Odds are about zero that there will be any armed insurrection of Americans civilians against the police and military, or of any kind of armed civil war… especially in my lifetime.

And while I hope it never comes about, I am sure there is a much greater chance that someday I will have to decide how to respond to an agent of the state who is directly and personally depriving me of some of my rights and freedoms. That’s closer to the question I have been pondering. I don't know what Thomas Jefferson would do. But I think it is good to give it thought.

p.s. - (The podcast also includes a great story about Mike Wallace and a USMC Colonel that relates very well to the furor over photographer Joao Silva.)

p.p.s. - I was surprised that in the whole extended conversation, there was no mention of the boiling frog or Pastor Martin Niemöller.

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July 3, 2006

Teachers-vs-Unions

What a sign. It is displayed on the side of a truck that is parked out front of the NEA convention in Orlando this weekend. The Evergreen Freedom Foundation had the truck done up with three different billboards that cycle over time (see the other two images here - No Means No and here - a beautiful pie chart).

The National Education Association is a pretty powerful lobbying group. That's actually how they explained to me that I should be a member. I've spoken with them every spring since I started teaching. I was very impressed this year with the ability of the NEA rep to look me in the eye and keep a straight face when answering questions like "Why is the average salary of an NEA employee roughly twice that of the average teacher salary?" (It's because they work so hard, by the way.)

The website Teachers-vs-Union appears to be advocating simply that teachers be given the choice of whether to join the NEA. Since I work in a Right-to-Work state, they aren't talking about me. People sometimes forget (or never knew) that membership in the NEA is not forced on teachers in every state – though they are in most cases. According to the National Institute for Labor Relations Research (here);

Roughly two-thirds of K-12 public school teachers nationwide, including union members and nonmembers alike, are forced to accept an "exclusive" teacher union agent as their spokesman in contract negotiations.

And in many union-stronghold school districts, either the mammoth, 2.6 million-member National Education Association (NEA) union or the equally power-crazed, 1.2 million-member, AFL-CIO-backed American Federation of Teachers (AFT) union wields monopoly control not just over teachers, but also over other school employees, including teaching aides, nurses, guidance counselors, librarians, bus drivers, and even principals.

I love the language - nothing says objective and non-partisan like the use of the phrase "power-crazed". But when they're opposing the NEA, they're still going to be the good guys. Consider:

Union officers attending the NEA's summer 2000 convention passed a resolution acknowledging that union policy "opposes providing additional compensation" for hard-to-fill teaching positions in critical subject areas like math and science. The NEA brass also snubbed talented, hard-working teachers in all subject areas by declaring their categorical opposition to "any . . . system of compensation based on an evaluation of the education employee's performance."

Of course we should pay more to fill positions that are hard to fill. Supply and demand! Why do brain surgeons make more than grocery baggers? The same reason that hard-to-fill teaching positions should be paid more than those positions that are easy to fill.

(Oh, Wulf, you’re just saying that because you teach in a hard-to-fill position! Um, no… if my goal here was to make more money, I’d be leaving teaching for private industry. I mean, I’d love a raise – who wouldn’t? I am just saying that my argument here is not based on having a dog in the fight. If I were that type, I wouldn’t be a teacher to begin with.)

Personally, I don’t like national unions of any kind. When the NEA advocates federal policy, it is highly unlikely to represent most of its members accurately. Despite the lefty stereotype, teachers are pretty evenly split along party lines, as much as the rest of America (see that beautiful pie chart again). The NEA buys itself trouble by advocating positions that are not directly related to education and teacher contracts. How representative of NEA members was it really, when the union took a stand to support gay marriage? I mean, I’m all for it, but there is no reason to believe that most teachers are, or that they want their union dues to go toward any advocacy either way on the issue.

The farther afield the NEA strays, the more they look to be partisan hacks whose time is spent making excuses for their own existence and expansion – wasting money and clout that could be benefiting children instead of the NEA staff. I highly doubt I am the only teacher to make the connection – especially with that billboard truck parked right outside the national convention.

Thanks to Cato@Liberty for sharing the initial story.

For more on Right to Work laws, see here.

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Is NASA An Industrial Subsidy In Disguise?

With regard to the NASA budget, Kip Esquire of A Stitch in Haste yesterday brought up a post from the archives, noting that "one of the stickier wickets for some libertarians is the issue of government-funded space exploration."

This is an issue which Rammage and I have discussed many times (in person and in email - don't bother searching). I would like to point readers to an excellent point/counterpoint discussion, here. Enjoy!

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July 1, 2006

Smoke 'em if you got 'em

Sean Lynch at Catallarchy says Smoking Bans Aren’t *that* Un-Libertarian...

I'd love to know where our readers come down on this. Personally, I think this comment is a great point, and I have long said that this represents the reason libertarianism is doomed to eventual permanent defeat. Sigh.

Also weighing in on the children angle is Hammer of Truth. Both blogs were responding to Bill Ferguson's article Smoking around children is criminal.

One more: Radley Balko at The Agitator says Seems to me that smoking bans are a pretty fundamental, litmus-test libertarian issue.

Yes! We've finally got a litmus test!

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June 29, 2006

Revisiting Redistricting

SCOTUS ruled today that it's okay to redistrict more often than once a decade, so long as the usual BS redistricting rules are followed. My gut-response to this was that it would lead to even worse Gerrymandering. I am not sure that I believe that now. After all, the court did not uphold the entire Texas redistricting as constitutional. The district that stretches from Laredo to San Antonio (and out in a couple of odd spurs along the way) was deemed unacceptably discriminatory against Hispanics. So again, the old rules still apply.

But as I asked back in March, Where are the questions of how we can be rid of Gerrymandering altogether?

Other than the fact that the power to do this lies in the hands of exactly the people who would be destroyed by it - incumbent Republicans and Democrats - is there a downside to proportional representation? Is it a downside that is anywhere near what we have to go through with this redistricting nonsense?

For those interested in looking up the decision, the S.F. Chronicle notes that the court's decision was in four consolidated cases: League of United Latin American Citizens vs. Perry, No. 05-204; Travis County vs. Perry, No. 05-254; Jackson vs. Perry, No. 05-276; and GI Forum of Texas vs. Perry, No. 05-439.

Oh, and by the way, Jon... Ginsburg did not recuse herself.

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June 25, 2006

Opposing the Sex Offender Registry

Proposals to take away the privacy of ordinary citizens don't usually go over very well. But it's a different matter if we are talking about convicted sex offenders, in which case many people feel it's a no-brainer that their punishment doesn't end when their prison time has been served. After all, if the guy moving in across the street has spent the last decade or two locked up for raping preschoolers, you want to know.

To hell with common sense. Kip, Esquire makes the argument that such a registry is a bad idea. And it's not just one of those wispy libertarian arguments about how government is evil - this post has some meat to it. I direct readers to it, here, and I hope to get some feedback. Oh, sure, you could post your comments on Kip's blog, since he's the one making the argument here. Go ahead. I'll see it there.

Of course, I am infuriated (but not surprised) to see people being caught up in this registry who ought not to be. But the part I found most interesting was this::

The dual canards: that "sex offenders have greater recidivism rates" (the Department of Justice says the opposite is true), and that "child molesters prey on the community" (they overwhelmingly tend, in fact, to prey on children they have proximate access to, such as stepchildren), have both been discredited.

Somehow, I don't expect these facts to dominate the evolution of these registries.

Now, I am no legal expert, but I find it intriguing that Kip has argued in the past that there is no legal basis for what he calls redlining (and I call banishment) - see here and here. I confess that I don't see how banishing a criminal is significantly different (from the POV of the community) from locking him up. The purpose of each is to remove the threat from the community. Either action infringes upon the freedoms of the criminal. Is one really so much more defensible than the other? I suppose it opens up some interesting questions - for example, as Kip once asked, is there, or should there be, a fundamental right to live where one chooses, even for convicted child molesters?

Clearly there are already limitations on an individual's right to live where one chooses: cost, zoning regulations, Kelo, ~~citizenship~~ (sorry)... why not a conviction for a serious crime?

You know... like raping preschoolers?

Update: June 26 at high noon
I'd like to direct readers to an article called Zoning Cartman from almost a year ago on PrawfsBlog.

Consider this question from the comment section:

Why should the right to live where you choose be subject to less regulation (i.e., protected with closer judicial scrutiny) than the right to work where and how you want? In this case, for example, would any court bat an eye if a government entity refused to hire someone because of a prior sex offense conviction?

There are several other comments that are very interesting, including:
bw | Aug 4, 2005 3:23:17 PM
Will Baude | Aug 4, 2005 10:41:09 PM
Anthony | Aug 23, 2005 2:04:47 AM

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June 6, 2006

Nordic Tracking

Last year I wrote about tracking "good" socialism in the Baltic region (Bunch of B.S. (Baltic States)):

This article made me realize something. Something very obvious now that I look back on it. PJ O'Rourke had written an article on some of the more annoying Baltic States [sic] who seem to be prospering in their socialism. It seemingly contradicted everything that I believe, that no socialist state could survive long-term. So I've been a little perplexed by this.

I went on to suggest some reasons for their teetering success, and was quickly rebuked by a few Swedish commenters. So I feel somewhat vindicated reading that things aren't quite as rosy over there these days then when O'Rourke had last visited.

Per Bylund writes:

While in the early 20th century the Social Democrats, a hegemonic power in Swedish politics throughout that century (and beyond), had demanded tax cuts to liberate workers from unnecessary burden, it now swiftly changed into a tax-raising, welfare-embracing party calling for more "liberating" social reform. The voting masses, children of the welfare state dependent on its system of logic, supported the tax hikes, which quickly climbed to 50% and higher. And they demanded social benefits at taxpayers' expense to cover for and exceed these higher taxes.

Gee, why does that sound so familiar?

Read the whole thing: How the Welfare State Corrupted Sweden

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May 30, 2006

New London Crunch Time

In case you don't normally visit his site, let me say that Tom Blumer of BizzyBlog has had excellent coverage in the aftermath of the Kelo v New London eminent domain ruling last June. It continues. Just because SCOTUS ruled on the case, doesn't mean that it has played all the way out.

Tomorrow, May 31, is the deadline for the homeowners who lost the court case - either take the bad deal the city offers at the point of a gun, or face eviction and nearly a $1 million in fines, taxes, and fees. BizzyBlog's latest is here, along with a couple dozen previous postings linked at the bottom.

For her part, Ms. Kelo has called on Gov. M. Jodi Rell to intercede before the New London City Council can make good on its threat to evict the homeowners. Rell has expressed sympathy, but does not appear likely to actually do anything (see here).

For a case that was the focus of so much national and even international attention at the time of the ruling, it hasn't caught much ink lately. Lawmakers around the country suggested last June that state laws would be tightened to ensure that the actions of the New London City Council would not be replicated around the nation, but little useful legislation seems to have been passed anywhere. Says Timothy Sandefur, a staff attorney at the Pacific Legal Foundation:

Of the 16 states that have acted since Kelo was decided, only six -- South Dakota, Georgia, Indiana, Pennsylvania, Minnesota and Florida -- have imposed meaningful restraints on government power. Other states have either done nothing or have enacted laws so riddled with loopholes that they allow government to seize whatever property they consider "blighted."

To quote dissenting justice Clarence Thomas, "something has gone seriously awry with this Court's interpretation of the Constitution." Further, something has gone seriously awry with the desire of the American people to reverse course on this erosion of personal rights. I for one will continue checking back in with Mr. Blumer for the latest - and continuing to write my elected representatives on this egregiously flawed trend of collectivism in our government.

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May 25, 2006

Free Market Solutions

NPR's Allison Aubrey had a story on "Morning Edition" today that began,

The Food and Drug Administration doesn't test supplements for safety or purity.

Doesn't that sound like the perfect way to begin a story about how evil businesses are, and how more government regulation is needed? I braced myself. But that's not at all the direction the story takes:

Supplement researcher Steve Bent, MD is an Assistant Professor at the University of California, San Francisco... [he] says that because there isn't any FDA or government agency that's testing these products, it's important to have independent companies doing the testing.

Listen here to the story of ConsumerLab.com - a free market solution to a problem that many would probably assume the government would address.

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May 1, 2006

The Price Cost of a Gallon

NPR has laid out a pretty good article on gas prices and the oil company profits. I was very surprised - not by the information in the article, but by the fact that it was sitting there at NPR. Don't get me wrong, I love NPR, but it's always a refreshing surprise to me when they come to the defense of corporate giants who are making billions of dollars.

Plus there's this really cool pie chart.

Hopefully, they will soon provide a chart demonstrating how stupid a $100 rebate check would be.

The article answers the following questions:

What factors are causing gas prices to rise so quickly?
Who sets these prices?
How does [OPEC] affect prices?
Iraq's oil production hasn't recovered to its prewar levels. Has this had a major impact on global oil supply and prices?
What kind of impact might ANWR oil have on prices?

Go on, even if you already understand the issue. Check it out.

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April 29, 2006

Does Free Speech Equate to Corruption?

Sometimes it seems like you can't swing a dead cat without hitting some supposed right or another that has been reserved for quote We the People. All of these Amendments cluttering up the place... if only there were an honest politician handy to clean things up.

As if on cue, RedState has a video clip of Senator John McCain telling radio personality Don Imus that he prefers McCain-Feingold to the dirty old First Amendment.

"He [Michael Graham] also mentioned my abridgement of First Amendment rights, i.e. talking about campaign finance reform... I know that money corrupts... I would rather have a clean government than one where quote First Amendment rights are being respected, that has become corrupt. If I had my choice, I'd rather have the clean government."

Ah... it's about time for the issue of campaign finance to jump back to the front burner, what with the 2006 elections coming up this fall. Now, I am sure that John McCain has honest intentions... of keeping his Senate seat forever, that is. He is a power broker - one of about a hundred in the Senate. Are there really Republicans who are hoping he makes a run for the presidency in 2008? Why?

As one of the commenters at RedState says, "He is a terrific AMERICAN citizen and a war hero; however, he should not hold any political office." And yet, the people of Arizona keep sending him back.

Any chance Senator McCain would like to look into some of the other anti-corruption techniques... like term limits?

Let's agree that campaign finance is a Major Issue again, shall we? I need to be pointed toward a member of Congress, or even a candidate, who will take a solid libertarian stance on the Major Issue. You know - that the Constitution means what it says, and says what it means. That it enshrines and protects our rights, which are not to be skirted with attempts to "clean up". Anyone?

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April 24, 2006

Light Blogging

With two major projects wrapping up soon, it is likely that I will be posting even less prodigiously than usual. Considering that Rammage is too busy turning the gears of the US military-industrial complex, and G-Dawg has been AWOL for nearly a month, it is likely that AtlasBlogged readers will be relatively deprived, and may become distracted by bright, shiny objects. If that happens, please enjoy the bright, shiny object carefully, as such items often have sharp edges.

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April 22, 2006

Earth Day 2006

Tom Blumer at BizzyBlog asks On This “Earth Day,” Who Will Defend the Facts?

He then shares some of those facts as relayed in today's (subscription only) WSJ editorial. It's worth a read. Tom comes across as neither a Love Canal apologist, nor the well-intentioned but completely uninformed environmental activists who represent themselves as the only ones who really care about nature. You know the type.

BizzyBlog:

The worst polluters of the world over the history of the industrialized world have been the communist and totalitarian regimes that so bankrupted their economies that no resources were available for any kind of environmental protection, let alone cleanup. Even where the totalitarians have some wealth, as in China, the environment festers and decays in ways enviros would correctly deem unacceptable here.

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April 17, 2006

How is Your Job?

Rammage emailed:

Guess what is The Best Job in this country :-)

Be sure to note how Money picked the best jobs, explained here.

Teaching didn't exactly make the rankings, despite how cushy the general public knows it to be*. But I could always jump back to physical science as a career, or (as Rammage noted) college professor came in #2. The rigors of academia!

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April 7, 2006

More Immigration Thoughts

An interesting note that I caught this afternoon on NPR's All Things Considered:

The nation's unemployment rate fell to 4.7 percent in March, the lowest level since 2000, and employers added 211,000 jobs to their payrolls. Economists say growth in service and construction may explain why the unemployment rate for immigrants is lower than that of native-born Americans.

The emphasis is mine. Never before has the unemployment rate for immigrants been lower than that of native-born Americans. I suppose there are a lot of thoughts that might arise when noting the low unemployment rate. For example, it buries the canard that people come here for our socialist programs - they are indisputably here to work. I think the real point to take from this news is one that should be obvious anyway; Immigration will continue, so long as jobs are available. Legalities have never stopped the flow of workers, and the people who come know that they can find employment. No walls, fences, amnesty, American flags, or Congressional deal will stop the flow.

Why is there any opposition to making legal immigration to the United States easier? It obviously isn't about security - I am reminded of Cato's Daniel Griswold testimony last year before the Senate Subcommittee on Immigration, Border Security, and Citizenship:

Our focus, one might say our obsession, with keeping Mexicans from crossing our Southwester border illegally has not served our national security interests. It has diverted resources and attention away from efforts to identify and keep out people who truly intend to do us harm.

(transcript here)

But instead of demanding real and useful reform of the immigration laws, many bloggers are wailing about the sensationalist "Reconquista" protests. Where is the serious political counter-movement? Or a campaign to remind the Latino youth that Caesar Chavez actually protested illegal immigrants? I don't see it. I just see predictions that our children will all be speaking Spanish.

I'll be honest, I don't give a damn what language my descendants are speaking in a century or two. I care more about whether they will be protectionist, socialist, unionized, fearful, and still have useless policies regarding immigration, but serve no security purpose.

Call me loco.

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April 5, 2006

Big Box Urban Expansion

Wal-Mart Stores Inc., often accused by critics of harming local businesses, announced Tuesday it plans to build more than 50 stores in struggling urban neighborhoods over the next two years to create jobs and help small establishments...

What a great move. It will not sway the rabidly anti-Wal-Mart pseudo-socialist anti-corporatist faction who is incapable of recognizing the ways in which Wal-Mart benefits communities. But who cares? Let them talk, and let Wal-Mart act, and then we'll take a look at which is more helpful.

Ten of those stores will anchor "Wal-Mart Jobs and Opportunity Zones" that will help local businesses, especially minority and women-run enterprises, with free advertising, grants to local chambers of commerce and seminars and advice on doing business near Wal-Mart and with Wal-Mart...

Scott said the new stores in blighted neighborhoods will all go into big metro areas, where Wal-Mart is starting to expand after building its base in mainly rural areas.

The stores could generate more than $100 million in state and local tax revenue, he said.

(story here)

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April 3, 2006

Supply and Demand

It is often said that people in some countries (mostly Mexico) fill a demand for low-wage jobs. Not blue collar jobs, but dirty blue collar jobs. Agriculture, housekeeping, food service, construction... how true is it that Americans won't take those jobs?

Our system of ~~free~~ compulsory public education has brought us to a point where children are told that anybody can go to college, and more importantly, everybody who is anybody does go to college. High school students who are not planning to go to college are usually embarassed to say so. Frankly, it is becoming that way with regard to graduate degrees as well. And what person goes to college for four (or more) years in order to pick fruit?

Ours is an overschooled (though undereducated) society. We all have expectations for ourselves and our children. And to paraphrase Michael in Office Space, nobody would clean sewage if they had a Master's degree.

Daniel Griswold of the Cato Institute writes:

The U.S. economy continues to produce opportunities for low-skilled workers in important sectors such as retail, services, construction, and tourism. Meanwhile, the pool of Americans happy to fill those jobs continues to shrink as we grow older and better educated. Yet our immigration system has no legal channel for peaceful, hard-working people to come to the United States even temporarily to fill those jobs. The result is widespread illegal immigration.

I keep hearing that legal immigration and guest worker programs are easy and unlimited. But that appears to be in dispute - I am no expert myself. The best answer is greater legal immigration - not just because it is good for the economy, but because it is a value that a free society would hold dear.

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April 2, 2006

Breaking the Law, Breaking the Law

I am opposed in principle to immigration limits. I recognize why it could be pragmatic to have them in a democratic society, but in reality they are mostly about xenophobia and protectionism. American workers panic over immigration for the same reasons they panic over a lack of tariffs - they fear losing everything. They fear losing jobs, homes, power, everything, and they especially fear losing it to people who are different.

Immigration is a big topic right now. I will ease into the conversation slowly, perhaps building up points over several days. Let's start with the article Are 'Illegal' Immigrants Illegal? at Cafe Hayek, where Professor Boudreaux says, "not everything declared illegal by statute is, in fact, illegal."

Although not as universally accepted today throughout America as is consensual sex among unmarried adults, immigration without permission of government is widely enough accepted that we can conclude that it is lawful, despite what is written in the statute books.

I am picturing lawyers, police officers, and legislators around the nation shaking their heads. Or maybe not, I don't know. But most Americans want to see it made easier for immigrants to enter this country legally, and harder to come in illegally. They don't like the status quo. Does this make it analogous to civil disobedience? Or violating the speed limit? Or having sex without being married?

Well, yeah. For millions of Americans, it does. I think the only issue is that of pragmatism with regard to national security. As millions of peaceful, hard-working people slip undocumented across our border, how many thieves, murderers, would-be terrorists, and other criminals are slipping in with them?

Professor Boudreaux obviously takes the point of view of a libertarian economist, but issues of security must be addressed. With that pragmatic caveat, I agree with him.

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March 11, 2006

Don Surber: Porkbusting Is Futile

From Don Surber:

What's that, Porkbusters found $23 billion in questionable spending? That is less than 1% of a $2.7 trillion budget.

Cato Institute's Tax & Budget bulletin for February arrived via snail mail. It revealed where the $831.6 billion in new spending went under this President Bush -- a 50 percent spending hike in his first five years.

That, not the tax cuts, spurred the deficit spending.

In fact, if Bush actually budgetted the people's money instead of going on a spending spree, the budget would be balanced. Instead of a 50% increase in five years, a 25% increase (still well above inflation) would have meant $415.8 billion in new spending and a modest federal surplus of $44.8 billion instead of a projected deficit of $371 billion.

So play with the pork all you want. Until we begin holding the line on agency spending, people are just stroking their bacon.

I feel the same way. That is so easy to say, I know, but it is true. We at AtlasBlogged have carried a few articles about pork, and some of them were even referring to pork-barrel spending instead of the other white meat. But as easy as it is to get really worked about that $200 million "Bridge to Nowhere", it is hard to stay worked up about it once some overall budgetary perspective is gained. If they killed that bridge project, the real spending problem would still remain.

We are now over $20 billion per year on the War on Drugs (check this out). Government spending exceeds $20,000 per household. The Heritage Foundation lists billions and billions (and billions) on government waste. The amounts dwarf the pork that is being listed at PorkBusters.

The growth of government - especially by the self-styled party of smaller government - happens in large part because lawmakers can do it, and they think they will suffer at the polls if they do not do it. They think you want more government. If you have not told your representative otherwise, then you are the reason government is growing.

Write your representative.

Write your senators.

Don't just tell them you are angry. Tell them what made you angry on the Heritage Foundation and PorkBusters websites you see linked above. Target your own state pork - they "bring home the bacon" because they think you want it. They expand agencies because they perceive a demand for more government.

I never wanted to be dismissive of PorkBusters. I think what they are doing is great. And it is an issue where you can find common ground with people who do not share your ideological views. But when I saw the tiny, tiny dollar amounts they are flagging, I realized it was a project destined for trivia. Of course it adds up to a lot, and of course it is inappropriate, and of course it should be stopped. But as Surber's article notes, we have bigger fish to fry if we ever expect to see the government spending reined in.

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March 5, 2006

Randall "Duke" Cunningham

At some point when I was stationed on the USS Enterprise ('95-'99), I noticed a plaque that commemorates the first U.S. flying ace of the Vietnam War. I remember the pilot's name only because it is a name shared by a sports star - Randall Cunningham. I remember being very amused the name sharing, and the fact that Lt. Cunningham's missions had been flow as a part of Operation Linebacker. I guess it wasn't that funny, in retrospect - Cunningham was a quarterback, not a linebacker - but my point is I remember the name of the first Ace of Vietnam.

It wasn't until I read an article at Cafe Hayek today that I realized this flying ace is Randy "Duke" Cunningham, (former R-Calif.) A lot of news articles today are mentioning that he was a Navy fighter pilot, but either that hasn't been in the reports before, or I never noticed it.

The Cafe Hayek entry references a Washington Post article that reported the Cunningham defense team requesting a lesser sentence for the ace-turned-convicted corrupt politician, citing suicidal depression stemming from his Vietnam heroics.

Being "praised and rewarded for his conduct" gave Cunningham "a sense of omnipotence which was an adaptive psychological defense mechanism,"... Thus Cunningham "came to the job of Congressman with the outsized sense of ego and a mantel of invulnerability. . . . The process of rationalizing his behavior blinded him to the corruption it entailed, and led him to behave in ways totally antithetical to his life history," the psychiatrist concluded.

Hey, we give them that power. It is no surprise that our politicians are corrupt - the surprise is how brazen they are, and how many get caught. It has been this way for a very long time - but what's to be done? Term limits? Limits on ~~donations~~ the First Amendment right to advocate for the candidate you support?

Cunningham's defense sounds pretty reasonable (from the AP);

A psychiatric report submitted by the defense said that Cunningham also suffered from depression.
And it referred to his military career in which honor came from "ignoring danger signs and performing perilous and death-defying acts."
There was a different expectation for behavior in Congress, but "the psyche cannot make such a U-turn easily," wrote the psychiatrist, Dr. Saul Faerstein.

Reasonable, but not forgivable. What is to prevent the next Representative Cunningham from the same behavior? You know it is going on right now with others. If they are caught and brought to justice (or at least to the attention of the media), we will again wonder how they thought they could get away with it. Perhaps we should have a better way?

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March 2, 2006

Redistricting-gate

During the commute this week, I was able to catch a daily dose of radio news stories about the Texas ~~redistricting~~ Gerrymandering case. NPR is as usual one of my first options in the car, and I particularly enjoyed this story - one of several that actually read from the transcripts. Almost all of the commentary (on NPR and elsewhere) has focused on the question of whether the DeLay redistricting is unconstitutional. But where are the questions of how we can be rid of Gerrymandering altogether?

Gerrymandering has been a part of American politics for at least two centuries. It is accepted by voters and politicians. It is not seen as an evil, and the courts have agreed that at least at some level, partisan gerrymandering is okay. But would it not serve our purposes and our principles better to put redistricting behind us altogether, and give ourselves a system of proportional representation?

This would allow the courts to be satisfied that minorities are able to find representation, and it would allow new parties into the mix, which would likely improve voter turnout, which has been at embarassingly low levels for as long as I can rembmer. We could stop burdening our poor, overworked legislators with the trouble of redrawing the whole state every ten years, and SCOTUS could spend its time on items that are more interesting - maybe something Justice Ginsburg will stay awake through (Jon Henke at QandO asks, "I'm not terribly familiar with judicial ethics, but I suspect that consciousness is a necessary pre-condition for ruling on a case. Will Ginsburg have to recuse herself?")

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February 25, 2006

Virginia Keeps Smoking

From the Virginia Pilot:

A proposal to ban smoking in Virginia's restaurants and other public places has been snuffed out.

Frankly, I found it troubling that the ban was considered at all. The fact that it made it as far as it did is evidence that even in the Old Dominion, there are some who are trying to trample the rights of the individual to determine whether to allow the use of a legal substance on their privately owned commercial property. Like our commenter Goose in a previous post, some here in Virginia feel that if you offer your services to the public, it is suddenly acceptable - nay, a moral imperative - for the government to interfere with the parameters of the transaction.

Individuals cannot be trusted to engage in personal or financial intercourse without having a collectivist hold their hands.

"Why do you need a law to protect people when people can protect themselves by not going in" restaurants that allow smoking, said Del. David Albo, R-Fairfax.

Exactly. This is no different from my feelings on private schools, by the way - expressed in the comments section at Right on the Left Coast. This is not a matter of equal opportunities, it is a matter of equal outcomes. And we all know that line of thinking, don't we?

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February 23, 2006

Hillary Clinton Opposes Jihad

The video and some transcripts of it are making the rounds on the blogosphere. I was directed to find it at Michelle Malkin, no surprise. You can see it here.

CLINTON: Suppose that you were meeting today to decide who got the vouchers. First parent comes and says 'I want to send my daughter to St. Peter's Roman Catholic School' and you say 'Great, wonderful school, here's your voucher. Next parent who comes says, 'I want to send, you know, my child to the Jewish Day School. Great here's your voucher! Next parent who comes says, "I want to send my child to the private school that I've already dreamed of sending my child to.' Fine. Here's your voucher. Next parent who comes says, 'I want to send my child to the school of the Church of the White Supremacist.' You say, 'Wait a minute. You can't send...we're not giving a voucher for that.' And the parent says, 'Well, the way that I read Genesis, Cain was marked, therefore I believe in white supremacy. And therefore, you gave it to a Catholic parent, you gave it to a Jewish parent, gave it to a secular private parent. Under the Constitution, you can't discriminate against me.'
Suppose the next parent comes and says 'I want to send my child to the School of...the Jihad.' Wait a minute! We're not going to send a child with taxpayers dollars to the School of Jihad. 'Well, you gave it to the Catholics, gave it to the Jews, gave it to the private secular people. You're gonna tell me I can't? I'm a taxpayer. Under the Constitution.'

Now, tell me how we're going to make those choices.

The fact of the matter is that this argument - as compelling as some would like to think it is - boils down to a matter of elitism. Wealthy people can choose to send their children to St. Peter's Roman Catholic School, or the Jewish Day School, or the school of the Church of the White Supremacist, or the School of the Jihad (nice ring to that one). But poor parents cannot. How could a Democrat with presidental aspirations ever be making this statement?

The answer is the NEA, of course. The NEA hates vouchers, because they threaten the monopoly we public school teachers currently have and are desperately trying to hold. There's a union, dammit. A union that votes and whose financial support any Democrat with presidential aspirations would clearly need. That is all there is to it.

Incidentally, one of the regular commenters at QandO sets up a nice strawman about how Senator Clinton is just trying to enforce a law that prohibits schools from advocating violence against our nation, and it gets knocked down repeatedly. As I read the comments, it occurred to me that there probably are a lot of people who hear her comments, figure it sounds reasonable (I'm against Jihad, too!), and don't understand why a libertarian minded person would have a problem with it. Thankfully, McQ is patient and tries to explain it again... and again...

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February 15, 2006

Has Bush Derangement Syndrome Infected the LP?

Take a look at the following headlines:

"Bush Evades Constitutional, Legal Constraints to Violate Americans’ Privacy"

"President Bush is Taking America in the Wrong Direction"

"White House Stonewalling Hurricane Katrina Investigation"

"Vice President Cheney Not a Straight Shooter"

Are these the latest ravings of moonbats on Eschaton? The front page of the Daily Kos? No, they're not even headlines in the NY Times. Rather, they are all headlines on the main website of the Libertarian Party.

Every time I get gung-ho about finally taking the plunge and joining the Libertarian Party, a few minutes of perusing their website reminds me that their members still largely consist of disgruntled Democrats whose party wasn't moving fast enough on the drug legalization issue. As a white, male, software engineer falling smack dab in the middle of the libertarian demographic, I appreciate the fact that the LP takes for granted that they have my vote. But by devoting their website to Bush-bashing, the LP convinces me to stay registered as a Republican until the grown-ups can take over running their offices.

That's not to say that I don't appreciate the scrutiny of an administration as spend-happy as this one. And, indeed, this blog has been plenty critical of the Bush Administration (see here). But it was the Katrina article on the LP website that inspired this post.

If I'm on a libertarian website, about the only thing that I would expect to see written on Katrina is how poorly the local government responded to the disaster, and even more importantly, how the federal government had no jurisdiction in usurping the state National Guard. (More here) Instead, the LP article chooses to engage in the same old he said/she said hissyfitting that can be found anywhere left of the Blogosphere's prime meridian. Is the news of the White House stonewalling the Hurricane Katrina investigation helping to promote and educate libertarian ideals, or helping to recruit would-be Libertarian Party voters?

Well, at least not in my case. Not until the Libertarian Party can show me they're cured of Bush Derangement Syndrome.

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A Challenge for Conservative Bloggers

What is this map? Would you believe it is a color-coded display of the international reaction to the Danish Cartoons? Take a look... the red shows countries who have officially denounced the publisher of the cartoons, the yellow shows where riots have occurred. The light blue is where it has been seen as bad form, and the cartoons have not been published. The royal blue is where the cartoons have been published in the name of freedom in the face of religious oppression. And the dark blue is Canada.

Okay, that's not what this map really is. So what is it?

In actuality, this map is how the world responds to homosexuality. Click on it if you cannot read the legend. It says that the dark blue is where same-sex marriage is legal. The royal blue allows same-sex unions. In the light blue, it is not illegal to be gay, but you can't get married or anything like that. Large penalties in the yellow nations, and the death penalty in the red zones.

So, where do you stand? Do you believe in the freedom to stand up to religious strictures and ~~publish cartoons~~ be treated equally before the law, regardless of what lies between your lovers legs? Or are you maybe more the yellow-nation type? Or do you just wish it would all go away? Many people say they don't care if their neighbor is gay, just so long as it is kept ~~in the closet~~ private. But this is hardly a compelling argument for the continued insistence that marriage should be restricted to one man and one woman. In fact, I have never heard a compelling argument for that continued insistence. Be careful, conservatives! Your only reasoning here is based on 1) religious law, or 2) "for the children".

Besides the fact that it is not true that children need a heterosexual pair of parents in order to turn out okay, it is in general an argument that conservatives mock when used by liberals on other issues (like smoking bans, gun bans, seat belt laws, etc.).

Some conservatives may try to sidestep and make this an issue of states rights. A majority of U.S. states have adopted Defense of Marriage Acts, which define marriage as a union between a man and a woman. But fearing that these laws will not be upheld as constitutional in the state courts, religious activists have opted to push amendments to their state constitutions.

Here in Virginia, there is an amendment due for this November's ballot. I caught a piece by NPR's Barbara Bradley Hagerty this morning regarding the situation (available here). She quotes State Sen. Steve Newman, a Republican;

We're speaking directly to the federal courts, and saying, 'States have a right to define what marriage is for each individual state'

If you would like to know what is going on in your state, click on this interactive map:

Of course, it may be that none of this will be enough to stomp out equality before the law. Whenever something is fought out at the state level, it quickly makes its way to the federal level. I totally agree with Kip, Esquire, who writes:

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist has announced his intention to hold a vote on the Marriage Protection Amendment, a/k/a the Federal Marriage Amendment, in June (i.e., just in time to make it an election issue). I think that's wonderful. I want senators to go on the record, forever, on the issue of same-sex marriage. I want to see Republicans forced to stand up and declare, openly and unequivocally, that yes, they do think constitutionalizing bigotry is a good idea. I want to see Democrats forced to stand up and stop selling gays out and, for once, vote they way they keep promising to vote.

The problem is, this won't likely benefit the gay community. From Barbara Bradley Hagerty's piece;

Kareem Crayton, who teaches law and political science at the University of Southern California, says the marriage amendments stoked up the culture wars, impassioned the Christian conservative base... and may have played a major role in re-electing President Bush, especially in battleground states like Ohio.
"I think it had an effect on the intensity that voters had for showing up," he says. "So in Ohio, for example, where polling lines were extremely long, you were more likely to stay out in the rain and wait for your time to vote, if you thought this was a major issue and you couldn't just let it pass."

Seth Kilbourn of the Human Rights Campaign talks the personal liberty line for this issue;

"We need to make the case for why marriage for same-sex couples is good, why it is the true measure of equal treatment under the law. That will improve the vote."
If the message is equality, he says, the medium is personal stories.

But even Mr. Kilbourn doesn't have much optimism for this fall. This is a long-term issue, and it will only be longer still if conservatives and libertarians continue to stand against personal liberty. Do you believe that our government serves us best by basing its treatment of a man on the sex of his lover? Do you believe it is desirable that we in this nation continue to enshrine religious sensibilities over freedom?

I challenge the conservatives who stand in favor of personal freedoms to reevaluate the way they view the issue of gay marriage.

Posted by Wulf | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)

January 28, 2006

Tiananmen Squared != Google

According to these images found on Google China, Tiananmen Square seems like such a nice place to visit, or stage a protest. Contrast this with the uncensored version here.

Contrast some other image search key words like liberty, freedom, capitalism, democracy, and so forth. It's like trying to find a conservative audiobook on iTunes.

Communism. God love it. Let's give it another try here in America. [Slaps Noam Chomsky]

Looks like it's time to dust off Yahoo as my engine of choice, once again.

Hat tip to Junkyard Blog, Michelle Malkin, and Wanderlust (for the image).

Previous: Google's Subpoena

Posted by Rammage | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)

November 30, 2005

MoveOn.org's Love-Hate Relationship with Wal-Mart

After learning about the MoveOn.org fiasco where they faked American troops in a Bush-bashing video, I decided to check out their website to see if the video was still available [At this writing, it is] H/T Michelle Malkin.

While on their main page I noticed an article blasting Wal-Mart [yawn]:

MoveOn members held viewing parties as part of a coalition effort to bring attention to Robert Greenwald's compelling new documentary: Walmart, The High Cost of Low Price.

And a link takes you to this page, where the Moveon.org folks want you to host a DVD party of this movie that "dives into the deeply personal stories and everyday lives of families and communities struggling to fight a goliath." [See here]

Ho-hum, right? Another pro-Socialism organization, who thinks even WJ Clinton was right of Attila the Hun, is fighting to bring down McDonalds, Starbucks, Coca-Cola, Halliburton, etc., etc. It is no surprise whatsoever that they're fighting the likes of Wal-Mart and Exxon, too.

But! While doing a little more snooping I came across another Moveon.org link peddling one of their books, MoveOn's 50 Ways to Love Your Country. Well how about this for the epitome of hypocrisy: Moveon.org is selling this book through Wal-Mart. [Buy it here!]

Message read loud and clear, MoveOn.org. Boycott Wal-Mart for all items except for the ones that make us money. Gotcha.

Posted by Rammage | Comments (2) | TrackBack (1)

November 28, 2005

Voting GOP

"Democrats are the only reason to vote Republican."

I'm hoping that I got this Thomas Sowell quote verbatim. I heard this the other day and couldn't believe that someone could so accurately summarize in so few words my reason for voting straight-ticket GOP. But Sowell hits the nail on the head.

Posted by Rammage | Comments (16) | TrackBack (0)

November 8, 2005

How To Tell If Your Friends Are Socialists

Atlas Blogged Special Feature

Have you ever wondered how many of your friends are closet Socialists? Do you have one friend in particular who gives plenty of lip-service to civil liberty and capitalism, but you are suspicious of regardless? Here is a simple, albeit lengthy, test you can perform to find out. Although results will vary, one can expect tell-tale signs of socialist-leanings – if any – within three (3) years.

Organize a fantasy football league with eight (8) to twelve (12) of your friends. The geographic location of your friends is irrelevant, since there are many websites today that offer the means to host your fantasy football league, as well as a method of communication. Although there are many good sites out there, some of the readers of Atlas Blogged use My Fantasy League.

For the most part, you can use whatever fantasy football rules that you desire. But the critical part of this experiment is to have a “Keeper” league that allows the fantasy owners to keep three players of his choosing each year. For example, in your inaugural draft, each owner/coach gets to “draft” players to his team, for a total of 16 NFL players per roster. Each year, after the season ends, all but three players are released back into the draft bucket for next year. The three remaining, the Keepers, are presumably the players with the highest scoring potential. The Indianapolis Colts’ Peyton Manning is an example of a typical Keeper.

To reiterate, personal results may vary, but by using this system, you should be able to separate your friends into the capitalists and the socialists within three years, and possibly as early as two. And the results may surprise you.

How does this work? For whatever the reason, be it a better initial drafting, a greater knowledge of sports or football, previous experience with fantasy leagues, luck, or whatever, it will become immediately obvious that some people are better than others at fantasy football. More times than not, however, the measure of how one performs in fantasy football is largely dependent on how much effort and energy is put forth towards the game. Those who do their homework and study the draft, perform mock drafts, study the waiver wire, and keep abreast of NFL news will invariably perform better in fantasy football. Thus, the equation is the same in the game as it is in life: harder work = greater reward.

This, of course, is a socialist’s bane, who feels that equality and outcome should be guaranteed, regardless of any other factors. So the hidden socialists of your fantasy league may tolerate a team performing badly for one year, but will not stand for it two years in a row. The socialists of your league will begin, by the second year, petitioning the league commissioner (who is equivalent to the government, in our scenario) for hindrances (taxes) on the teams that are performing well, and benefits (subsidies) to the teams that are performing poorly. For, to the socialist, forced parity trumps free-market competition. A laissez-faire fantasy football league is unfair to those who put less effort into it, according to your newly-outed socialist friends.

The true libertarians of your league will be the ones who – regardless of how their team is performing – prefer going winless over having a heavy-handed league commissioner (aka government).

In the league to which I belong, the socialists and the capitalists are almost divided evenly, regardless of a coach’s winning percentage over the last three years. In fact, it’s almost uncanny how those who favor wealth redistribution (i.e. contriving new rules to mandate outcome) are registered Democrats, whereas those who favor the laissez-faire, free-market fantasy football league are registered with anti-collectivist political parties.

Try it for yourself. It’s fun, and revealing. Just don’t let the socialists of your league wrest Edgerrin James from your roster unless you’re well compensated.

Posted by Rammage | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

August 30, 2005

Chief Sitting Cindy

Michelle Malkin challenges us to write our own caption:

How about "Chief Sitting Bull Comforted by Some Guy in Feathered Headdress?"

Anyone else?

Posted by Rammage | Comments (6) | TrackBack (0)

August 27, 2005

Protest Warriors

No matter where one lies on the political spectrum, most can agree that extremists can be quite a spectacle. For my dollar, I find few things on the Internet more amusing than the videos by Protest Warrior. Their latest mission, Operation Enemy Enlightenment II, was a counter- protest held at the Foothill Technology High School, Ventura, California.

[Correction: This was the Foothill Technology High School chapter of Protest Warrior that was staging the counter-protest.]

According to Protest Warrior, they

[...] showed up on the street to initiate dialog with some protesters, and provoked the usual litany of angry cliches and torn signs.

Portions of this confrontation are found here, which include someone referring to the U.S. Secretary of State as "Condoleezza 'Oil Tanker' Rice." This is the second video of theirs that I have seen where a protester uses Cuba as an example of how a government should be run. The Protest Warriors try to engage them in conversation between their stifled laughs. Hilarious...and a little scary at the same time.

Keep up the good work, Protest Warrior, and be careful out there.

Although Atlas Blogged does not necessarily subscribe to this theory, the two arguing women on this video certainly give us pause for thought regarding The Babe Theory of Political Movements, first postulated by P.J. O'Rourke in his Parliament of Whores book.

We are hoping that the Protest Warrior's Operation Enemy Enlightenment III takes place at Walter Reed. Give us a call.

Posted by Rammage | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

August 15, 2005

Collectivists Take Heed, and Go To Helsinki.

Why spend the time, money, and effort in tranforming the U.S. into a socialist state, when Finland already offers you life, liberty, happiness, and a free college education that includes a monthly stipend to live on for 55 months?

"If we Americans are so rich and so smart, why can't we treat our citizens as well as the Finns do," asks Robert G. Kaiser in his In Finland's Footsteps article in The People's Washington Post.

Kaiser gushes:

Finns have one of the world's most generous systems of state-funded educational, medical and welfare services, from pregnancy to the end of life. They pay nothing for education at any level, including medical school or law school. Their medical care, which contributes to an infant mortality rate that is half of ours and a life expectancy greater than ours, costs relatively little. (Finns devote 7 percent of gross domestic product to health care; we spend 15 percent.) Finnish senior citizens are well cared for. Unemployment benefits are good and last, in one form or another, indefinitely.

This sounds too good to be true. Has utopia been found in the city by the sea?

Unfortunately, the brief euphoria is lost when Kaiser coughs through this sentence: "They spend relatively little on national defense." So maybe the U.S. can enjoy the same degree of welfare when Finland decides to pick up arms and defend the Western world?

Kaiser almost redeems himself with this insight:

Nor do they tune in to American individualism. Groupthink seems to be fine with most Finns; conformity is the norm, risk-taking is avoided -- a problem now, when entrepreneurs are so needed.

And then he wraps up with:

The complicated Finnish language includes the word talkoot, which means, roughly, "doing work together." It's a powerful Finnish tradition, and reflects a national sense that "we're all in the same boat," as numerous Finns said to me. This idea has always appealed to Americans, but in this country it has nearly always been an abstraction.

In exactly which Bizarro world has this idea ever appealed to Americans? And speaking of Bizarro world, when has a state-sponsored tourism website ever had the need to include this factoid:

Long-term personal problems; illness, mental disorder, alcoholism, drug abuse, social exclusion and difficult living conditions may dampen a person's enthusiasm for life. Most suicides in Finland are carried out by people who have used mental health services but without success. Alcohol abusers commit more than half of the annual suicides. In addition, low serotonin levels due to the shortage of natural light during the dark season and other neurotransmitter disorders in the brain have been suggested as key factors underlying Finland's suicide rate, the second highest in Europe.

No thank you, Mr. Kaiser. I will keep the entrepreneurialism and individualism. You can take your collectivism and groupthink and go to Helsinki. But don't forget your serotonin shots.

Previous: Bunch of B.S. (Baltic States)

Posted by Rammage | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

July 22, 2005

Janice Rogers Brown for President

The Sundance Channel has finally surrendered the last remnants of impersonating a medium that promotes film art to dedicate itself full-time to forwarding a political agenda. The majority of the "art" on Sundance used to consist of movies like "My Two Daddies" or "Bush's Appendix" or whatever, but with the airing of Air America's The Al Franken Show, they have given up trying to attract non-left viewers. Hopefully some entrepreneurial Rupert Murdoch type will recognize this void in the market and provide an artsy movie channel that is not aggressively pursuing Socialism (of which I will fully embrace when Robert Redford dedicates every last penny of his to the social security welfare program and vows to never work in Hollywood - or Park City - again.)

Nonetheless, I'm enthralled with Franken's show. I usually flip back and forth between Franken on Sundance and Fox and Friends for my daily dose of humor (the former unintentional). The Al Franken Show, seemingly dedicated to mocking patriotism, offers that same sort of pre-Fahrenheit 9/11 Michael Moore humor. The only greater possibility for humor is if Michael Moore were to do a documentary of the Al Franken show…in Flint, Michigan. But I digress.

[I wonder if anyone has thought yet to have a conservative/liberal show in the spirit of Hannity and Colmes that features Al Franken on the left? The right's representative? Ben Stein of course. Working name: "Franken Stein". It'd be a monster show. That's copyright, 2005, by the way. Contact me, Sundance Channel, if you're interested in buying the rights. I want to produce.]

Al Franken and his co-host, the very forgettable Katherine Lanpher, called Janice Rogers Brown a "psychopath" this week. Now, I know that this can be dismissed as humor, but even other political humorists such as Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter have a granule of truth behind their parodies and caricaturing. I could understand Franken using humorous epithets for Brown like 'scary' or 'dangerous,' because, indeed, these are two words that are accurate from their perspective. Janice Rogers Brown is scary and dangerous for all those who seek to rewrite the Constitution for a more progressive age.

Maybe I just fail to see the intrinsic humor value behind the word 'psychopath.' Here is one definition of psychopath:

A person with an antisocial personality disorder, manifested in aggressive, perverted, criminal, or amoral behavior without empathy or remorse.

Certainly an argument can be made, especially when focusing on 'amoral behavior without remorse,' that the word could be used to define Bill Clinton in his waning presidential years. And yet, I'd be hard-pressed to think of a time that a conservative called Bill Clinton a psychopath, although I wouldn't put it past Ann Coulter to have done so.

Nonetheless, Al Franken and what's-her-face have called Janice Rogers Brown a psychopath. Anyone who has read Brown's "A Whiter Shade of Pale" speech given in 2000 will certainly understand why the left fears her, and considers her dangerous. But I'm curious as to what has exalted her to this psychopathic status usually only reserved for the most heinous, like former Halliburton CEOs for instance.

I decided to do a little research on what makes her so reviled. So I went straight to the deepest cavern of the moonbat cave - the Alliance For Justice - and read their official press release for their strong opposition to the nomination of Janice Rogers Brown to the DC Circuit. The equally forgettable but somehow ubiquitous president of Alliance for Justice, Nan Aron said,

"After a thorough review of Justice Brown's record, we have profound concerns about her ability and willingness to put aside her extreme, anachronistic views of the law and decide cases as statute and precedent require."

Note that their concerns are not simply concerns, but profound concerns. Concerns with deep meanings attached. Sticking with the comedic theme, however, their use of the word "anachronistic" as it relates to Constitutional interpretation is laughable. As if, somehow, the meaning of our twenty-two decade-old Constitution changes in nuance with every passing year. Somehow, the Constitution has slightly different meaning today than it did, in, say, 2004.

Most of the Alliance for Justice's articles are simply attacking statements made by Brown in the infamous speech noted above. But this line is a keeper: "[Brown] repeatedly misconstrues precedent and brazenly criticizes U.S. Supreme Court rulings." [GASP!] You mean to tell me that someone has the audacity to criticize the rulings of the holiest of holy institutions? Are not they beyond reproach? And to do so in such a brazen manner! Perhaps it is this brazen quality - her outright disrespect for Supreme Court legislating - that has caused her, a black woman, to be shunned by the NAACP and NOW.

In fact, according to People for the American Way (founded by Superman, apparently), Janice Rogers Brown has been denounced by a virtual who's who list of leftist/socialist organizations from the AFL-CIO, Alliance for Retired Americans, Americans for Democratic Action, Feminist Majority, NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, Inc., NARAL Pro-Choice America, National Bar Association, National Council of Jewish Women, National Organization for Women, National Senior Citizens Law Center, National Women's Law Center, Natural Resources Defense Council, Planned Parenthood, Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, Sierra Club, and perhaps most tellingly, the NY Times and the Washington Post.

In the Washington Post condemnation of her, they say "[...] Brown's activism comes from the right, not the left; the rights she would write into the Constitution are economic, not social. Suddenly, all but a few conservatives seem to have lost their qualms about judicial activism." Well, this is predictable, if nothing else. Any attempts to halt the slippery slope of leftist judicial activism is labeled as "conservative activism," instead of what it is, originalism or constructionism. Janice Rogers Brown is a judicial activist, according to the Post, by sheer virtue of the fact that she's not a Socialist judicial activist.

I doubt Al Franken and the Sundance Channel would find humor in one aspect of Janice Rogers Brown that has already been pointed out by several conservative talk show hosts. It's that all of Brown's opponents list her rulings, speeches, and views as negative qualities. When what is really happening is that conservatives and originalists alike are resoundingly agreeing with her. For instance, back to the People for the American Way, they lament:

Economic Regulation and Environmental Protection: One key case [of Brown's] concerned an ordinance requiring hotel owners seeking to convert residential units to tourist hotels to help replace the lost rental units in the city, which suffered from a severe shortage of affordable rental housing. The majority easily upheld the ordinance, but Brown dissented, arguing that such regulations are not allowed unless property owners agree they would benefit them economically. Such a radical philosophy would preclude almost any economic or environmental regulation. The majority severely criticized her for attempting to use her own political and economic views to redo the democratic decision in the case.

You mean to tell me that she found it unconstitutional for the government to force private businesses into a line of work that was not profitable to them? [Gasp!] What a "radical" philosophy! Doesn’t she know that this goes against California's socialistic agenda? And what, exactly, would cause businesses to convert residential units to tourist hotels anyway? Certainly not San Francisco's heavy residential regulation and rent control. No wonder Janice Rogers Brown has made so many enemies with these radical and extremist views she peddles.

Anyone this despised by so many leftist organizations has no business being appointed to the Supreme Court. Rather, this psychopath should run for President.

Posted by Rammage

July 13, 2005

National Education Association and National Endowment for the Arts Merge; Form New Acronym

Michelle Malkin points out the National Education Association has conducted their annual meeting (Shut Up and Teach).

According to their charter, "the National Education Association (NEA) is the nation's largest professional employee organization and is committed to advancing the cause of public education." [Emphasis mine]

But clearly indicated by their business items, they have more on their agenda than simply education:

New Business Item 47
The NEA will inform members about reasons for the boycott of Gallo wines called by the United Farm Workers, AFL-CIO. The NEA will ensure that Gallo wines are not served at any function of the Association.

and

New Business Item 78
NEA will urge its members that they "do not shop" at Wal-Mart and Sam's Club due to Wal-Mart's anti-union, low-wage, low-benefit policies that have left its employees in need of hundreds of million of dollars in public aid for various health care and social safety net programs.

Uh-huh. And what, again, do these pro-union agenda items have to do with education? Let's face it, the NEA might as well change their name to the People's Education Association (PEA). Then the intellectual elite among them can be referred to as "PEA-brains."

No mention of the nefarious "V" word.

Posted by Rammage | Comments (1)

July 12, 2005

Bunch of B.S. (Baltic States)

On April 28th, Wulf forwarded me this: A Few Good Lessons for Europe

This article made me realize something. Something very obvious now that I look back on it. PJ O'Rourke had written an article on some of the more annoying Baltic States who seem to be prospering in their socialism. It seemingly contradicted everything that I believe, that no socialist state can survive long-term. So I've been a little perplexed by this.

But, [Eureka!], they don't have to defend themselves. Oh sure, they have some navies, and some soldiers, and so forth. But realistically, how much of their free health care money would have to be diverted to national defense if, say, we were living in an America-less world circa 1939?France is understandable - they're destined to be slapped around till the end of time. But I'd imagine that Sweden, Norway, Finland, and even Belgium, and all those other whiny western Euro countries wouldn't take kindly to a Soviet, Italian, or German invasion. They'd have to invest monies into their military. And where would their wonderful socialist society be then? I tell you where: the same state as the USSR in 1988.

Just like Jonah Goldberg, as an American taxpayer, I don't mind funding this blanket of freedom over Europe, since it undoubtedly serves us a good purpose too. Namely, the prevention of the next European Conqueror and Emperor from recruiting Franco-Drones into their army. But sheesh, the apparent complete lack of gratitude or diplomacy from anyone on the western side of the continent is obnoxious.

Heh. Cracks me up. "No, no, capitalism will never work. It's evil!" Not only is it working, but it is subsidizing entire countries to insouciantly bask in their socialism.

Posted by Rammage | Comments (3)

July 6, 2005

Scrapple, Onions, and Ham

Someone in the blogosphere stated, and I wish that I remembered who to properly give him credit, that all institutions eventually turn leftist (i.e. Amnesty Intl., U.N., etc.). It's just a law of nature. Even venerable The Onion has fallen decidedly left of center, as evidenced by one of their writers recently peacocking on Air America Radio's The Al Franken Show.

Fortunately, there's always Washington's-own Scott Ott keeping political humor fresh at Scrappleface. Yesterday's news release - Bush: Africa's Poverty Reduces Greenhouse Gases

Posted by Rammage

July 1, 2005

SCOTUS Interruptus

This is a wonderful comment made by Emile Zola on Polipundit

By the way, W. can always make a recess appointment of Judge Brown to SCOTUS. (Eisenhower made recess appointments of Justices Earl Warren, Potter Stewart and William Brennan, before they were later confirmed by the Senate). The eventual confirmation battle after that would be something to see, because it would be a spectacle of Democratic Senators trying to remove the first African-American woman from SCOTUS.

Go Janice Rogers Brown!

Posted by Rammage

The Vote is In

And I ask you, how can any reasonable person with a modicum of common sense rationalize that the Democrats are "for the common man?"

This House vote was for a piece of legislation that

would cut off federal funding to any governmental entity that use[d] the expanded eminent domain power to take land for economic development projects.

Here's how the voting fell: http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2005/roll350.xml

Posted by Rammage

June 21, 2005

Second Posting

still learning.....

People's Republic of Montgomery County, Maryland

Posted by Rammage

June 18, 2005

First Post

This is a test.

This is also a test.

Posted by Rammage | Comments (1)