The Blanks Slate

An Anger-Fueled Ruse

2012-02-02T10:34:00.000-05:00

So, apparently Attorney General Eric Holder is back up on the Hill doing his usual CYA Dog and Pony show about Operation: Fast and Furious, the gun-walking (remember when it was gun running?) operation that led to U.S. DOJ officials losing track of the guns it sold to drug lords without apprehending anyone. I know I've discussed this before, but I get irritated every time I see Holder try to B.S. his way out of this by bringing up gun control.

The guns are a distraction: a massive, calculated, politically motivated distraction away from the actual problem--the Drug War. The Republicans are using F & F to embarrass Holder and, predictably, Holder is getting defensive and trying to turn the blame on the Republicans for creating the environment where guns may flow freely across the border. I've seen this show before.

Never mind that people don't tend to kill each other willy-nilly with a body count in the tens of thousands just because they have guns. Never mind that a lack of prohibition on guns is being scapegoated to cover up a failed prohibition that has gone on for a half century. Never mind that the drug prohibition has made drug trafficking so lucrative that kingpins can buy whatever they want: they have submarines now.

WE NEED BETTER SUBMARINE REGULATION!

So, as I write this, you have grown men and women engaging in heated, angry, blame-filled hearings, arguing over something completely tangential and plainly irrelevant to the actual cause of the violence and murder. This is your government on drugs.

Any questions?

bellum medicamenti delenda est

Shoot the Messenger

2012-02-01T15:49:00.000-05:00

Jim Moran is my congressman. I am not a big fan, and--if I were in a better frame of mind--I'd probably think he goes over the line of acceptable things old white guys can say here, but that's not why I'm writing. I'm writing not as his constituent, a black man, or a libertarian. I'm writing this as a copy editor. Indeed, my beef isn't with Moran--it's with whomever wrote this travesty of a transcription:

"He just seems clueless not that he has climbed abroad ship. He's climbed this latter of opportunity that was constructed by so many of his ancestors' sweat, sacrifice, blood, you know they did everything they could for his generation to be successful. But now that he's climbed abroad ship, instead of reaching down and steadying the latter, he wants to push it off. 'I'm up here. If you're not with me, too bad.' And President Obama, fortunately, is the kind of guy that says 'I was very fortunate to get where I am and I'm going to spend my life trying to steady that latter of opportunity by reducing college tuition and training our workers, trying to get a decent job for everybody. Making sure that while I'm African-American, it really doesn't matter. What matters is my commitment to public service, my love for this country and I'm going to leave a constructive legacy,'" he said. (italics mine)

TWO "abroad" ships? THREE "latters" of opportunity? This copy is so bad I can't even get mad at Moran. I need some aspirin. (click to embiggen)

HOUSEKEEPING: For those of you looking for something more substantive from me, I'm in the editing process of an essay I wrote about libertarians and the Confederacy. I hope to get it up at Libertarianism.org late this week or early next week. -jpb

bellum medicamenti delenda est

Me at Libertarianism.org

2012-01-23T17:26:00.003-05:00

Aaron Powell was kind enough to invite me to write for Libertarianism.org, and I've happily accepted. The main topic will be race and liberty--it's less policy focused, so most writing of that nature will probably remain here--when I actually get around to hitting the "publish" button when I write something.

Anyway, my first piece is up now. Please go read it there!

bellum medicamenti delenda est

Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011)

2011-12-16T14:34:00.001-05:00

I am lucky enough to have met Hitch on two separate occasions at parties, but I never dared entreat any of our mutual friends to arrange more intimate conversations. To be perfectly honest, it was because he was one of the few people on the planet with whom I could legitimately say I was awestruck and I couldn't bear the thought of boring a man I so greatly admired. My admiration remains so strong that I don't think I could properly convey my thoughts or feelings about him with the eloquence due him, so I'll just direct you to the two best reflections I've read about him: one by Christopher Buckley, and the other by Hitch's brother, Peter.

The video below was made as a get well tribute to him after his cancer diagnosis that I happened upon some time ago. It is an excerpt from a speech Hitch gave in defense of atheism against the assumptions of Christianity, and in support of finding truth and beauty in self-education in the absence of religion. I think its enduring message is particularly apt upon his death.

Christopher Hitchens, RIP.

bellum medicamenti delenda est

Longer Video From UC Davis Pepper Spray Incident

2011-12-06T10:48:00.001-05:00

I don't think this video exonerates the police officers, though I do think it lessens the sympathetic view of the protesters. Trapping police clearly is an invitation to police action, and the police warned them several times about the consequences of their actions.

Given this evidence, there is no question that the offenders should have been arrested. That does not mean that pepper spray should have been used, however. Pepper spray should be a defensive non-lethal alternative to violence--not a method to punish a non-violent crowd. It would have been cumbersome to arrest each of these students one by one, but pepper spray shouldn't be used just to make the job of the police easier. It has a proper use, yet dispersing obstinate but non-violent DFHs is not one of them.

My thoughts on #OWS remain virtually unchanged since I wrote this, and this video seems to support my assertion on Twitter about privileged kids inviting arrest. This incident should invite a broader conversation about police tactics and civil liberties, but #OWS has only shown interest in civil liberties insofar as it advances their right to annoy. Thus, we have just the latest example of a legitimate grievance of #OWS getting lost in their own misguided, nebulous agenda.

This is what petulance looks like.

bellum medicamenti delenda est

In Latinam Veritas

2011-11-30T13:42:00.001-05:00

Here's another great video from my former colleagues at Reason. The law enforcement guys are just too much.

One of the cops, professing an adolescent affinity for libertarianism, said 'As a younger man I used to say 'carpe diem'...Now, as a parent, I'm 'carpe kids.'

Indeed, cops are carpe'ing kids all over the place.

For those unfamiliar with the idiom or Latin, "carpe" means "seize."

bellum medicamenti delenda est (et carpe custodem fatuum )

EMP ICBMs and Other Bridges for Sale

2011-11-28T12:34:00.001-05:00

I rarely delve into foreign policy on this blog, usually because it's not in my professional bailiwick (outside of the international scope of the drug war, at any rate), but sometimes something is so egregiously silly I have to say something. (That, and this is something loosely tied to the Cold War and Russia, both of which I do, in fact, know a bit about.)

A conservative IU alumna I follow on twitter led me to this #headdesk-worthy item over at Heritage's blog:

One particularly visceral threat is nuclear fissile material falling into the hands of non-state belligerents. The American public, however, is acutely aware of such a threat. The notion of a “dirty bomb” attack has been pounded into the nation’s collective consciousness by pop-culture hits such as the Fox television drama 24. What is less known, but equally disconcerting, is the danger posed by an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack.

An electromagnetic pulse results from the sudden burst of electromagnetic radiation emanating from the detonation of a nuclear weapon. An EMP can also result from natural phenomena, such as a geomagnetic solar storm; however, our nation’s national security apparatus should be prepared to deal with the consequences of an enemy EMP attack.

If a nuclear weapon were to be detonated hundreds of miles into the atmosphere above the continental United States, the resulting electromagnetic pulse could destroy the nation’s electric grid and render impotent all elements of society that rely on electricity. In short order, many aspects of American society would be thrust into the early 19th century.

Now, I will grant, the science behind what EMP would do to U.S. infrastructure is legit, as far as I know. But the likelihood of manufacture and delivery is something entirely different. Most nations are just not capable of launching an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) that could detonate a nuclear bomb in the U.S. atmosphere. Of the two non-NATO countries I can think of, neither is openly hostile (or dumb) enough to risk retaliatory annihilation, ruin the global economy, and bring the planet to the brink of nuclear holocaust.

The rest of the post reads like an ad for whatever defense contractors are responsible for missile defense.

The fact of the matter is, even though the nuclear club has added new members in recent decades, most don't have a reliable delivery mechanism capable of striking anything, much less the United States on the other side of the planet. I'm not saying they never will have that capacity, but it's a hefty financial investment just to step up to a pissing contest they have no intention of seeing through.

Given that Al Qaeda has (thankfully) had trouble getting chemistry sets to detonate in people's Fruit of the Looms, I don't think it's terribly responsible to think they're going to attain and deploy a nuclear missile with a technology only a few nations have ever been able to assemble...at the cost of countless billions of dollars in design, technology, assembly, transportation, and maintenance. Barring that will-never-happen scenario, there's no extant state or organization on the planet with the motive and means to launch an atmospheric nuclear strike against the United States.

Just because a presidential candidate with a Ph.D. says something that sounds all sciency on the Tee Vee doesn't mean it isn't as ridiculous as it sounds. It really, really is.

N.B.: This is not to say that neighbors of hostile nuclear club members have nothing to worry about via shorter range missiles--though I think those worries are often overstated--but not even the most hawkish arguments for protecting South Korea or Israel could feasibly include a 'missile shield' for the United States as any way germane.

bellum medicamenti delenda est

Quote of the Day

2011-11-09T12:42:00.001-05:00

This made me snort:

Hanson glibly mentions former segregationist Republican Strom Thurmond's "wandering hands," which is a euphemism for "former white supremacist who fathered a black child out of wedlock and managed to keep it a secret until after his death."

That's Adam Serwer over at Mother Jones dismantling Victor Davis Hanson's screed about, inter way-too-much alia, how much it sucks to be Herman Cain. I think Adam may be a bit hard on Hanson for this quote, cuz I mean, "wandering hands" really is so much more economical for word count...

...and for glossing over what wretched human beings Thurmond and his ilk really were.

bellum medicamenti delenda est

"Made in the U.S.A." Is Not the Problem

2011-11-08T16:37:00.002-05:00

I was watching the Senate Judiciary Committee's hearing today on the oversight of the Department of Justice. The sole witness was Attorney General Eric Holder, who would be called upon to answer for "Operation Fast and Furious," a failed DOJ/ Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco Firearms and Explosives (BATFE) program that was meant to snare cartels in gun trafficking. I tweeted the first part of the hearing, but I wanted to discuss an op-ed by two state attorneys general that Chairman Pat Leahy (D-VT) had put in the Congressional Record (courtesy of Emptywheel's @bmaz):

Congress and the media have understandably focused on the missteps of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in the “Fast and Furious” sting operation that allowed suspected “straw buyers” to purchase weapons and transport them to Mexico in order to build cases against drug cartels.

However, the covert operation was terminated abruptly after its possible connection to the tragic death of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was revealed. Unfortunately, most of the recent criticism about the operation seems to be serving as a means to attack Attorney General Eric Holder and destroy the ATF, rather than to hold those behind Fast and Furious accountable.

The focus should be on the real public safety problem underlying this controversy: keeping arms from the Mexican drug cartels and protecting the security of the United States. However, many of the roadblocks faced by ATF and the Department of Justice are not being built by international criminals, but by Congress. (Emphasis mine)

The piece goes on to explain the prolific violence in Mexico and that 95% of the guns recovered from Mexican drug violence 'can be traced to the United States.' This sounds troubling, but it's really smoke and mirrors.

As I've detailed in the past, drug violence in Mexico is indeed rampant and unspeakably brutal. People are kidnapped, murdered, often tortured, strung up from overpasses, disemboweled, and/or beheaded. Does it really matter whether the murderers bought their ropes and machetes from stores in Tuscon or Tijuana?

It's the murderers, stupid.

If we could magically keep American guns out of the hands of the cartels, people would start being gunned down with a greater percentage of AK-47s sold in other countries than AR-10s made and sold in America, but they would still be gunned down. The cartels have planes, boats, and more than enough money to get whatever they want through their expansive networks. Making it marginally more difficult to acquire weapons may be good policy insofar as we want better, more sensible gun laws in this country, but it's hardly the "real public safety problem" facing our law enforcement agencies and the public at large.

The cartels make astronomical profits from selling the drugs banned by the United States' global prohibition policy. That money gets them access to the entire planet and all its terrible weapons that make their line of work so bloody. Ramped up interdiction efforts just make drug dealing more dangerous, but also more lucrative, and thus more enticing. So, when you think about it, the real public safety problem is the one that enables and incentivizes the cartels to commit heinous crimes in the first place: the Drug War itself.

Arguing about where the cartels bought their guns is like arguing the make of the bus that just hit you: it's trivial, at best, and probably a sign you have brain damage.

bellum medicamenti delenda est

UPDATE: This isn't meant to be a dismissal of the ineptitude that plagued Operation Fast and Furious. This was a post about the underlying problems, not the highly questionable tactics employed in that operation.

Smokin' Joe Frazier, RIP

2011-11-07T23:55:00.002-05:00

Because of other projects and responsibilities tomorrow, I'm not going to have the time to write up everything I wanted to say about Joe Frazier, who died tonight of liver cancer. However, I wanted to implore the people who may otherwise not pay attention to the coverage about his life to pay attention to his relationship with Muhammad Ali.

I'm not sure I've ever written here about my deep affinity for The Greatest, but suffice it to say that there was not an athlete I admired more than Muhammad Ali--even though all of his meaningful fights happened before I was born. But Joe Frazier's legacy will always be told in tandem with his professional and, more to the point here, personal fights with Ali. And despite my profound admiration for Ali as a fighter and as a man, Ali's treatment of Frazier was utterly disgraceful.

Ali was a young, brash, anti-authoritarian man of great pride and braggadocio. Ultimately, I think his overabundance of confidence was one of his greatest strengths--of which there were many. But he went too far with Frazier--humiliating him and calling him a Tom and Gorilla, among many other awful things. I understand that Ali was trying to get into Frazier's head, but whatever line there is between trash talk and humiliation, Ali crossed it repeatedly with the exuberance and glee of a bully.

Frazier took it--and took it to Ali.

Their relationship was important to note because, much more than it was with Sonny Liston, the Ali-Frazier feud was used as a metaphor to describe the social turmoil among blacks emerging from the Civil Rights Era: was our identity to be one of patriotism and patience (Frazier)? Or was it to be of proud, unyielding defiance of authority (Ali)? Of course, we all forge our own identities as individuals, and fittingly, these two men surpassed the narrative arcs assigned to them to become the more complicated sports icons and historical figures we acknowledge today.

In time, Ali apologized for what he said and did over the course of their intertwined careers. I read recently that Joe had publicly forgiven him--which is a testament to the kind of man Joe Frazier was. No man should take the verbal abuse and humiliation he took from Ali--and Joe Frazier was so much the better man for that forgiveness.

Smokin' Joe Frazier, RIP.

UPDATE: A few people flagged an article on Twitter. Following the Thrilla in Manila, this was filed on deadline at Sports Illustrated. This is what sports journalism should look like.

bellum medicamenti delenda est

The Government's Addiction

2011-11-07T07:43:00.004-05:00

Charlie Savage reports that the DEA is ramping up its militarization efforts around Latin America:

The D.E.A. now has five commando-style squads it has been quietly deploying for the past several years to Western Hemisphere nations — including Haiti, Honduras, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala and Belize — that are battling drug cartels, according to documents and interviews with law enforcement officials.

The program — called FAST, for Foreign-deployed Advisory Support Team — was created during the George W. Bush administration to investigate Taliban-linked drug traffickers in Afghanistan. Beginning in 2008 and continuing under President Obama, it has expanded far beyond the war zone.

“You have got to have special skills and equipment to be able to operate effectively and safely in environments like this,” said Michael A. Braun, a former head of operations for the drug agency who helped design the program. “The D.E.A. is working shoulder-to-shoulder in harm’s way with host-nation counterparts.”

The DEA has hit-teams now. What could possibly go wrong?

“It could lead to a nationalist backlash in the countries involved,” [University of Miami professor Bruce Bagley] said. “If an American is killed, the administration and the D.E.A. could get mired in Congressional oversight hearings. Taking out kingpins could fragment the organization and lead to more violence. And it won’t permanently stop trafficking unless a country also has capable institutions, which often don’t exist in Central America.”(emphasis mine)

In short, the Obama administration's answer to the Drug War is to get more violent and put more agents in harm's way, the benefit of which will be...more violence. It's not like this hasn't been tried before:

The FAST program is similar to a D.E.A. operation in the late 1980s and early 1990s in which drug enforcement agents received military training and entered into partnerships with local forces in places like Peru and Bolivia, targeting smuggling airstrips and jungle labs.

The Reagan-era initiative, though, drew criticism from agency supervisors who disliked the disruption of supplying agents for temporary rotations, and questioned whether its benefits outweighed the risks and cost. The Clinton administration was moving to shut down the operation when five agents died in a plane crash in Peru in 1994, sealing its fate.

Best case scenario: country A sees a wave of US-backed military raids and violence. This country restores its "capable institutions" and after countless firefights with law enforcement and one another, leaving scores of innocents dead, the resident drug operation finds more fertile ground to operate in country B, which lacks similar capable institutions. America still gets its drugs and the bloody fight continues in a new country. This predictable and oft-repeated result is called the "balloon effect."

Like a gambler at a casino who just doesn't know when to quit, the United States continues to double-down on its hopeless efforts to use violence to solve its 'drug problem.' Any objective observer of the situation can clearly see its futility and the consequences of pursuing this course of action. Yet the gambler continues, thinking this time it's gonna work. Any short term gains are completely illusory, but they are used to justify even more of the same.

It's time we start thinking about an intervention.

bellum medicamenti delenda est

The Other 1%

2011-11-03T16:11:00.004-04:00

I have been, at best, ambivalent about Occupy Wall Street and its various iterations around the country and Western world. I certainly understand that they are having a hard time in life right now and have legitimate grievances against a system that is clearly unfair. That said,

Life is pain, highness. Anyone who tells you different is selling something.

I'm very much on board with Matt Welch's piece at H&R the other day. (I'm not sure Alex Pareene's take is any more accurate in describing what #OWS is about than the litany of other "concrete ideas," but it's as good as any.):

Who are these wise men, and what are these rules, these promises, this ticket to class mobility, or at least a secure career, this singular notion of the one "right" way to do things? At the risk of going all "Generation X is sick of your bullshit" here, count me as one Gen Xer who does not recognize the world that Alex Pareene and the Salon staff (many of whom are even older than me!) have sketched out here.

Cradle-to-grave employment (at least outside the public sector) has been dead since at least the end of the Cold War. Undergraduate degrees in English and Film and Sociology and Philosophy (and a thousand other subjects) have had debatable workplace utility for as long as I've been alive. There have even been previous housing bubbles and busts in Alex Pareene's lifetime.

I don't recall anything like the promises so cruelly unkept in Salon's list. I do remember my father warning me that an engineering degree would be much more useful in the workplace than English, to which I uttered a phrase available to 18-year-olds everywhere: Thanks, Dad; not your call. Ditto for the legions of well-meaning adults urging me to finish my undergraduate degree, to sign up for the Selective Service, and even (when I finally attained a decent living in the second half of my 30s) to pay a mortgage instead of paying rent. One of the best perks about being a grown-up is that you get to make your own choices, and to own the results, good and ill.

Matt's rant, at the bottom of it, is about the "poor me" complex that infects #OWS at the core. I've heard varying defenses of them and their plight, but let's be real: ~~nearly~~ more than 90% of the protesters have been to college. A majority are under 34, white, and presumably able-bodied. (How many sick people do you know can sit out in the elements for days on end?) That they, of all people, have it bad is notable, but hardly compelling enough for me to break out my not-exactly-full wallet and call the telethon phone bank. Indeed, these are nearly the last demographic ON THE PLANET that most people would feel sorry for. (The last group would be the so-called 1% at which this youthful bedraggled horde is aiming their incoherent angst.) It's not that they have it easy--but some perspective would be nice.

There is a 1% that is getting ignored in all of this please-pay-off-my-art-school-loans self-pity: the 1 in 100 Americans currently incarcerated in our own country. Indeed, they're only getting attention now because apparently the NYPD is allegedly directing the recently released down to Zuccotti Park because of the free grub and/or to stir up trouble. And if it's true, I don't condone such action, but the resentment of the #OWS is telling: "We are the 99%" is a catchy little slogan, but it's not true.

When I think of the people in our society who need the most help, I think of the mentally ill, the homeless, the illiterate and uneducated, the multi-generationally impoverished, and the victims of our criminal justice system--not coincidentally, a system that overwhelmingly picks on these very same groups. (In fairness, it has been noted that #OWS has begun to incorporate some of the needs of the homeless whom they've taken among their ranks into their nebulous demands, but given their proximity to one another, one would hope so.) If it's hard for a college grad or drop-out to get a job, how hard do you suppose it is for an uneducated ex-con? One in 31 Americans is at some point within the correctional system--incarcerated, on probation, or paroled--and a conviction is an easy way for Human Resources manager to automatically thin the application pile in a time of high unemployment. They don't have the time or inclination to inquire the circumstances about the crime--let alone whether the "crime" was itself just. If these issues have been brought up by #OWS, they haven't been brought to the fore either by their detractors or supporters.

In fact, like the Tea Party and its relationship to/co-opting by the conservative base before it, most of the "concrete ideas" are Progressive talking points or Democratic politicking. And, given that an election year is coming up and that guy down on 1600 Pennsylvania is relying on young, relatively affluent, educated Progs to help him win reelection, it should have been no surprise whatever that he threw a bone to one of the consistent "demands" of #OWS: college loan debt assistance.

Stepping out of the libertarian shell for a moment here, it doesn't matter what I think about the program in a vacuum: in times like this, the people who need help the most are being overshadowed because they either don't or can't vote--thanks felony disfranchisement!--or they can't give money to that end. The purported voice of the 99% is the voice of the disaffected middle class, which may be a lot, but certainly not 99%. For all their talk about unity and The People and other fairy tale claptrap, it's just more people with their hands out: young, privileged, educated people who have it a lot better than people who need it more.

At this point, they're just like any other special interest or lobby: they're just not as well dressed. But the Dems, the unions and the Left are paying attention and they thank #OWS for their support.

bellum medicamenti delenda est

Another Bad Apple

2011-10-19T16:22:00.001-04:00

So this guy doesn't seem too bright:

A deportation officer with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement led Arizona state police and federal agents on a high-speed chase in his government vehicle, throwing bundles of marijuana out of the window as he fled, the Department of Public Safety said Wednesday.

The deportation officer, whose name has not been released, had been under surveillance for more than month after a known smuggler who had been arrested gave authorities a tip about the officer in an effort to get lenient treatment, DPS Officer Carrick Cook told The Associated Press.

When DPS and federal agents tried to pull the officer over Tuesday after he picked up a load of marijuana in the desert with his unmarked ICE pickup truck, the officer fled, leading agents on a 45-minute chase at speeds of up to 110 mph as he threw 10 of the 14 bundles of pot that he had in the truck out of the window, Cook said.

"He got pretty desperate," Cook said.

The chase ended when the officer's vehicle rolled over and he gave himself up. He was booked into Pima County jail on charges of smuggling and felony flight.

No wonder ICE has been working overtime to deport so many people this year. ( I kid...sort of.)

Via the incomparable @InjusticeNews feed

bellum medicamenti delenda est

Housekeeping: Another Bad Apple

2011-10-19T16:21:00.000-04:00

It is no secret that a lot of what I do and what I'm interested in is closely related to work that Radley Balko has done for years. Indeed, it's almost creepy in a Single Bi-racial Male sort of way how much we have in common:

Roughly same age
Hoosiers by birth and alma mater
Ex-Conservatives
Wrote conservative/libertarian columns for our college paper (STOP GOOGLING!)
Worked at Cato and Reason
Big fans of bourbon
Concentrate on Criminal Justice/Civil liberties issues

I'm writing a paper about police corruption and the drug war and it is roughly based on the style of his Overkill paper--which if you haven't read, you should. If he'll allow, I'm taking one more idea: the "Another Isolated Incident" post of police wrongdoing. I'll call it "Another Bad Apple" as I'll try to keep up with the rather numerous incidents of police malfeasance as they relate to the drug war.

All this kinda makes me feel like Mr. McDowell in 'Coming to America' when he's trying to explain he's not ripping off McDonald's trademark: "They have the 'golden arches,' we have the 'golden arcs'!" Riiiight.

Anyway, while most of the stuff above is entirely coincidental, he set a pretty great example so I don't feel too bad for doing a lot of what he did in my professional life. I will never be the incredible journalist he is--nor do I have even the slightest inkling to move to Memphis. (Nothing personal, Memphis) Oh, and I'm a cat person. (Nothing personal, dogs.)

If you don't already, make sure you follow Radley at the Huffington Post.

bellum medicamenti delenda est

Police Officers Respond to Incentives Too

2011-10-18T18:05:00.000-04:00

Last week, former undercover police officer Stephen Anderson told the New York State Supreme Court that planting drugs on innocent people was so common that it didn't even register emotionally to him. The story is starting to get traction in the media as an egregious example of police corruption, but it's notable only because of the admission to the practice in open court. Each year, there are hundreds of cases in which police officers are caught stealing, using, selling, or planting drugs or pocketing the proceeds from drug busts. Despite the obligatory PR protestations that any given instance of corruption is an isolated case, the systemic, legal, social, and economic incentives in every law enforcement agency in America combine to make police corruption virtually inevitable. And with no other category of crimes are these incentives stronger than with drug crimes.

Anderson testified that drugs would be seized from suspects at a given bust, divided, and then used again as evidence against other people on site (or at a time later) who had nothing to do with the initial arrest. This was, in part, due to established drug arrest quotas the officers needed to meet. As public servants, police departments face the same budgetary pressures as any other government entity and thus their officers are required to meet certain benchmarks set by the powers that be. Added to the normal budgetary justification, however, many police officers are in the position to confiscate cash and property that can be sold at auction thanks to civil asset forfeiture laws. Many departments across the country keep a percentage or the entirety of forfeiture proceeds, so pressure to maintain a certain level of drug arrests is something straight out of Public Choice: 101.

So far, about 400 cases have been dismissed because of these most recent revelations from the NYPD. It's too early to say how many and to what extent the victims were “innocent,” but the city seems to think 400 people were victimized by lying police officers. The police were able to lie with impunity because they enjoy the advantage of assumption of innocence. Despite the “innocent until proven guilty” mantra that all defendants are pretended to enjoy, an arrestee's word against the testimony of a police officer (and perhaps his partner) is, absent independent damning evidence of police malfeasance, next to worthless. This reputation imbalance is amplified by the unintended consequence of plea bargains: if the potential penalty is large enough, accepting a plea bargain in the face of nearly certain conviction becomes a rational decision for an innocent person. It doesn’t help that the label of “drug dealer” carries a social stigma just below “murderer” and “rapist”—and the potential sentences for drug crimes reflect that.

While the present NYPD case primarily deals with officers trying to advance their own careers, police corruption takes many different forms and affects every type of jurisdiction.

Authorities in Tulsa, Oklahoma are digging out of the mess members of their police department put them in. Nearly a dozen present and former officers of Tulsa’s police department—as well as one BATFE agent and one former officer turned-Secret Service Agent—have been implicated, terminated, indicted and/or convicted of police corruption charges ranging from, inter alia, staging illegal drug busts to embezzlement to perjury to distribution charges. At last count, 41 different people have had their federal convictions thrown out or state charges dropped as a result of the investigation into the department. Attorneys are now poring over the cases of countless other convicts and defendants who may have been railroaded by the Tulsa PD. (It should be noted that the people getting the strongest consideration are those who were naïve enough to refuse plea bargains at some point in the judicial process.)

Despite federal stings catching officers red-handed, confessions of wrong-doing that resulted in termination from the police or federal agencies, only four officers have pleaded or been found guilty. Five remain on the police force. The investigations into the TPD are considered closed and so the only hope for measures of justice are the investigations into case files and those related to the numerous civil suits the city faces.

The point is, these are but two recent and galling cases of police corruption. For every Tulsa and New York City there are innumerable cases of unreported shakedowns, coercive threats, and brazen theft by individual officers all over the country. This isn't the work of a few "bad apples," it's a systemic failure of police departments that are asked to solve an intractable policy problem all the while maintaining the utmost integrity on individual and organizational levels. Officers are highly incentivized to break the rules—and the law—either to satisfy the demands placed on them or to pad their own pockets. There are layers of protection built into the system to keep officers safe from public scrutiny and prosecution, and it's nearly impossible for an ordinary American—let alone an accused drug dealer—to protect herself. Meanwhile, the consequences of the legal and extra-legal drug war continue to chip away at the freedom of criminals and law-abiding Americans alike...and we are all less safe because of it.

bellum medicamenti delenda est

50% of Americans Support Marijuana Legalization...And?

2011-10-18T11:12:00.000-04:00

My facebook feed is exploding with glee and celebration that marijuana legalization finally enjoys the support of half of Americans. While I grant that the shift in popular opinion is encouraging, it's hardly reason for celebration.

I'm sorry to piss in everyone's corn flakes, but since when does popular opinion write policy or federal law? (Hell, when do the feds even respect it?) Sure, office holders have to run for reelection, but half of registered voters don't show up at the polls--I think it's safe to assume that the half that show up is not the exact same half that supports legalization--and drug policy isn't one of the issues that enjoys a significant bloc of single-issue voters like abortion or taxes.

Asking a question in abstract in a poll is one thing: getting people to actually understand an issue and be willing to fight against entrenched interests to see it through is entirely another. Take war for example: if you asked Americans if they prefer peace or war, I would bet my bank account peace wins.

How's that working out for you?

Again, this is a welcomed development in public opinion, but forgive me if I don't bust out the "special" brownie recipe just yet.

bellum medicamenti delenda est

Alabama Crops Rot: Why?

2011-10-06T12:10:00.004-04:00

Via Doug Mataconis:

A sponsor of Alabama’s tough new immigration law told desperate tomato farmers Monday that he won’t change the law, even though they told him that their crops are rotting in the field and they are at risk of losing their farms.

Republican state Sen. Scott Beason of Gardendale met with about 50 growers, workers, brokers and business people Monday at a tomato packing shed on Chandler Mountain in northeast Alabama. They complained that the new law, which went into effect Thursday, scared off many of their migrant workers at harvest time.

“The tomatoes are rotting on the vine, and there is very little we can do,” said Chad Smith, who farms tomatoes with his uncle, father and brother.

“My position is to stay with the law as it is,” Beason told the farmers.

Beason helped write and sponsor a law the Legislature enacted in June to crack down on illegal immigration. It copied portions of laws enacted in Arizona, Georgia and other states, including allowing police to detain people indefinitely if they don’t have legal status. Beason and other proponents said the law would help free up jobs for Alabamians in a state suffering through 9.9 percent unemployment.

The farmers said the some of their workers may have been in the country illegally, but they were the only ones willing to do the work.

“This law will be in effect this entire growing season,” Beason told the farmers. He said he would talk to his congressman about the need for a federal temporary worker program that would help the farmers next season.

“There won’t be no next growing season,” farmer Wayne Smith said.

“Does America know how much this is going to affect them? They’ll find out when they go to the grocery store. Prices on produce will double,” he said.

So, let me get this right: crops rotting. Hard working American farmers at risk of losing everything they own. No one coming to work the fields.

It can't be about jobs, as this is threatening to put more people out of work. But if the anti-immigrant folks are to be believed, it's NOT about racism either.

Kick out all the brown people, make a lot of people lose their farms and homes--in many cases, old farms that have been owned by the same family for generations--make food more expensive for the average citizen who is struggling to get by, and generally inflict more damage on an already depressed economy. Historically speaking, racist otherism is about the only thing that makes Americans dumb enough to continue with such programs in the face of all available evidence.

If you don't want to call it racism, fine: call it criminally ignorant economic insanity. But the Alabama electorate should decide whether it will continue to support the politicians that did this to them, and if they do, I'd like to know why.

bellum medicamenti delenda est

Turley on Obama and Civil Liberties

2011-09-29T11:16:00.000-04:00

In today's LA Times, GW law prof Jon Turley says what everyone who follows civil liberties already knows: President Obama has been dreadful on civil liberties:

However, President Obama not only retained the controversial Bush policies, he expanded on them. The earliest, and most startling, move came quickly. Soon after his election, various military and political figures reported that Obama reportedly promised Bush officials in private that no one would be investigated or prosecuted for torture. In his first year, Obama made good on that promise, announcing that no CIA employee would be prosecuted for torture. Later, his administration refused to prosecute any of the Bush officials responsible for ordering or justifying the program and embraced the "just following orders" defense for other officials, the very defense rejected by the United States at the Nuremberg trials after World War II.

Obama failed to close Guantanamo Bay as promised. He continued warrantless surveillance and military tribunals that denied defendants basic rights. He asserted the right to kill U.S. citizens he views as terrorists. His administration has fought to block dozens of public-interest lawsuits challenging privacy violations and presidential abuses.

What I find compelling about the op-ed, however, is something most of the establishment Left can't bring themselves to say publicly:

It's almost a classic case of the Stockholm syndrome, in which a hostage bonds with his captor despite the obvious threat to his existence. Even though many Democrats admit in private that they are shocked by Obama's position on civil liberties, they are incapable of opposing him. Some insist that they are simply motivated by realism: A Republican would be worse. However, realism alone cannot explain the utter absence of a push for an alternative Democratic candidate or organized opposition to Obama's policies on civil liberties in Congress during his term. It looks more like a cult of personality. Obama's policies have become secondary to his persona.

This paragraph explains perfectly why Obama should face a primary challenge--and why the Democrats would never allow one.

No one wants to recognize that their guy/party is a sham. Political people are invested in the party system and while they are first to accuse their opponents of callow opportunism and careerism, when it happens within their own ranks, that behavior is met with the same "pragmatic" political argument and the silence is, and must be taken as, tacit consent.

This country needs a Democrat to stand on principle and challenge Obama on his civil liberties record. The professional Left, who so often pride themselves on their principles, should be leading the call for a primary challenger to keep Obama honest. Unfortunately, most of them are too busy worrying about Republican primary red meat to give a damn about what their man continues to do with the power they labored and lobbied to give him.

Quote of the Day

2011-09-08T15:33:00.000-04:00

"They also noted that he has won awards for his police work and his effort to get guns off the street."

Attorneys discussing their client, Jerome Finnegan--the disgraced cop at center of robbery and kidnapping ring-- who was sentenced to 12 years for murder-for-hire plot to kill cop he thought was aiding the investigation into his aforementioned robbery and kidnapping ring. Chicago Tribune

Jeff Toobin's History: Scarcely Related to Reality

2011-08-23T10:32:00.007-04:00

Jeffery Toobin’s new piece on Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife Ginni leaves one wanting. I was waiting for a “gotcha” moment or perhaps a revelation about the couple that I hadn’t previously known or, at least, anything of interest that would warrant a few thousand words in the New Yorker.

[sad trombone]

Instead, what I read was a bunch of intimation about the Thomases traveling in conservative social circles, the revelation that Justice Thomas is an originalist (!!!), and a smattering of information about his life on the High Court.

One could have gotten as much useful information off of the justice’s Wiki page.

But what got me about the article wasn’t its complete lack of substance—an appalling lack, though it was, given the outlet and the author’s credentials as an astute Court watcher—but its blatant whitewashing of 14^th Amendment history. Toobin writes:

In his jurisprudence, Thomas may be best known for his belief in a “color-blind Constitution”; that is, one that forbids any form of racial preference or affirmative action. But color blind, for Thomas, is not blind to race. Thomas finds a racial angle on a broad array of issues, including those which appear to be scarcely related to traditional civil rights, like campaign finance or gun control.* In Thomas’s view, the Constitution imposes an ideal of racial self-sufficiency, an extreme version of the philosophy associated with Booker T. Washington, whose portrait hangs in his chambers. (This personal gallery also includes Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Ronald Reagan, and Margaret Thatcher.) *emphasis mine

I don't want to get into the campaign finance argument, but the gun rights comment was just too patently ignorant to let go.

Apparently looking to emulate his CNN colleague Wolf Blitzer and become the witless wonder of legal journalism, Toobin exhibits no respect for the substance of either the Heller or McDonald amicus briefs or decisions. Beyond that, Toobin should have a reasonable enough grasp of history—and by reasonable, I mean a basic, non-sanitized history understood by grown-ups—to be familiar with the stripping of blacks' legal protections that came in the post-Reconstruction era and continued up through the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. When marauding bands of hooded murderers ride the nights on horseback, the ability to protect one's family from them is very much a civil right—and the systematic removal of those rights doesn't require a special “angle” of jurisprudence to understand.

UCLA law professor Adam Winkler penned a piece for the September issue of the Atlantic called “The Secret History of Guns.” Professor Winkler spent nearly 2400 words (of roughly 4700) detailing the explicitly race-based nature of various gun control actions—from Andrew Johnson unsuccessfully vetoing the gun rights of Freedmen (the legislative precursors to the 14^th Amendment) to then-Governor Ronald Reagan capitalizing on the spectre of armed Black Panthers at the California capitol. A snippet:

Indisputably, for much of American history, gun-control measures, like many other laws, were used to oppress African Americans. The South had long prohibited blacks, both slave and free, from owning guns. In the North, however, at the end of the Civil War, the Union army allowed soldiers of any color to take home their rifles. Even blacks who hadn’t served could buy guns in the North, amid the glut of firearms produced for the war. President Lincoln had promised a “new birth of freedom,” but many blacks knew that white Southerners were not going to go along easily with such a vision. As one freedman in Louisiana recalled, “I would say to every colored soldier, ‘Bring your gun home.’”

After losing the Civil War, Southern states quickly adopted the Black Codes, laws designed to reestablish white supremacy by dictating what the freedmen could and couldn’t do. One common provision barred blacks from possessing firearms. To enforce the gun ban, white men riding in posses began terrorizing black communities. In January 1866, Harper’s Weekly reported that in Mississippi, such groups had “seized every gun and pistol found in the hands of the (so called) freedmen” in parts of the state. The most infamous of these disarmament posses, of course, was the Ku Klux Klan.

In response to the Black Codes and the mounting atrocities against blacks in the former Confederacy, the North sought to reaffirm the freedmen’s constitutional rights, including their right to possess guns. General Daniel E. Sickles, the commanding Union officer enforcing Reconstruction in South Carolina, ordered in January 1866 that “the constitutional rights of all loyal and well-disposed inhabitants to bear arms will not be infringed.” When South Carolinians ignored Sickles’s order and others like it, Congress passed the Freedmen’s Bureau Act of July 1866, which assured ex-slaves the “full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings concerning personal liberty … including the constitutional right to bear arms.”

That same year, Congress passed the nation’s first Civil Rights Act, which defined the freedmen as United States citizens and made it a federal offense to deprive them of their rights on the basis of race. Senator James Nye, a supporter of both laws, told his colleagues that the freedmen now had an “equal right to protection, and to keep and bear arms for self-defense.” President Andrew Johnson vetoed both laws. Congress overrode the vetoes and eventually made Johnson the first president to be impeached.

Fittingly, as DC readies itself to officially open the memorial to America's most beloved and famously peaceful civil rights leader, Winkler goes on to note that Martin Luther King Jr. applied for—and was denied—a concealed carry permit for a handgun after his home was bombed.

Apparently Dr. King also subscribed to this “extreme” and peculiar “angle” of civil rights.

It's not that I think Toobin wrote this as a hit piece. (It was, if anything, a miss piece.) But by writing this as he did, he mischaracterized an important and well-documented aspect of traditional civil rights in America that—at the very least—any responsible Court watcher would instantly recognize from recent cases, whether or not he agreed with the policy outcomes. Toobin goes further to imply Thomas relies on a revisionist history that is perceived through his putatively unorthodox originalism and colored by his race. That is simply bullshit.

Gun rights and self-defense have gone hand-in-hand with civil rights for blacks since the very first Civil Rights Act in our nation's history. It seems Mr. Toobin is the one with a questionable understanding of traditional American civil rights.

bellum medicamenti delenda est

On the London Riots

2011-08-09T01:49:00.003-04:00

Just before this writing, the riots in London and other parts of Great Britain were well into their third night. And the video that is coming out of them is jarring, if not altogether shocking. Several outlets and writers are contributing their two cents. My former colleague Jesse Walker highlighted an editorial from UK's Guardian, which puts the current riots in context:

There is, though, an important difference between 1981 and 2011. Thirty years ago, Lord Scarman's landmark report concluded that the Brixton riots were "essentially an outburst of anger and resentment by young black people against the police". The evidence for that conclusion was overwhelming. Thirty years ago, London's police had provided repeated provocation for concern and anger. Much policing of that era was too aggressive, too high-handed, based on crude and often racist stereotypes, and lacked any convincing accountability, either strategically or for individual abuses.

It would be reckless to pretend that the latest riots owe nothing to bad policing as well as bad people. The circumstances of the shooting of Mark Duggan in Tottenham, the official response (or lack of it) to a protest against his killing, and the local backdrop to these events, must be fully examined before a final judgment is made. Moreover, police use of guns will always run the risk of lethal abuse. But it is also clear that there have been major changes, almost all of them for the better, in the policing of London and of black communities, in the years since Scarman. Police training, behaviour, leadership, methods and accountability have all been qualitatively improved. Tottenham is also an improved place in countless ways. (links in original, emphasis mine)

And my friend Ned Resnikoff highlighted this blog post by Penny Red, (which you should read in its entirety, btw):

In the scramble to comprehend the riots, every single commentator has opened with a ritual condemnation of the violence, as if it were in any doubt that arson, muggings and lootings are ugly occurrences. That much should be obvious to anyone who is watching Croydon burn down on the BBC right now. David Lammy, MP for Tottenham, called the disorder 'mindless, mindless'. Nick Clegg denounced it as 'needless, opportunistic theft and violence'. Speaking from his Tuscan holiday villa, Prime Minister David Cameron – who has finally decided to return home to take charge - declared simply that the social unrest searing through the poorest boroughs in the country was "utterly unacceptable." The violence on the streets is being dismissed as ‘pure criminality,’ as the work of a ‘violent minority’, as ‘opportunism.’ This is madly insufficient. It is no way to talk about viral civil unrest. Angry young people with nothing to do and little to lose are turning on their own communities, and they cannot be stopped, and they know it. Tonight, in one of the greatest cities in the world, society is ripping itself apart.

Violence is rarely mindless. The politics of a burning building, a smashed-in shop or a young man shot by police may be obscured even to those who lit the rags or fired the gun, but the politics are there. Unquestionably there is far, far more to these riots than the death of Mark Duggan, whose shooting sparked off the unrest on Saturday, when two police cars were set alight after a five-hour vigil at Tottenham police station. A peaceful protest over the death of a man at police hands, in a community where locals have been given every reason to mistrust the forces of law and order, is one sort of political statement. Raiding shops for technology and trainers that cost ten times as much as the benefits you’re no longer entitled to is another. A co-ordinated, viral wave of civil unrest across the poorest boroughs of Britain, with young people coming from across the capital and the country to battle the police, is another. (Emphasis mine)

Now, the problem I have with both pieces -- again, which are both worth reading, especially the blog post -- is the wrongheaded, yet understandable desire to make sense of it all. That somehow, some way, we must be able to put blame on someone, something, some wrong deed that caused the catastrophe to happen; that there is something preventable that we can guard against in the future. Perhaps there is, but even if that were so, it doesn't really explain the violence.

There can be catalysts to violence, and maybe the beginning of the violence had been fueled by righteous rage. But reading anything but dumb, horrible, senseless angst and anger into that violence is fruitless.

I am old enough to remember the Rodney King verdict, and I remember the aftermath. I remember how angry I was--I even threw something across the room, breaking it and denting the entertainment center, and screaming at the television, "How COULD they?!?!?"

I understand violent anger, believe me.

But that doesn't mean that the kids who beat Reginald Denny within an inch of his life were anything but brute thugs when they did it. That doesn't mean that there was any sense to rioters burning the shops in their own neighborhood, owned by immigrants and their own black and brown neighbors. And it sure as hell doesn't mean that the powers that be understand a message being sent by looters, marauders, and 'those black bastards' that were destroying their own community and hauling TVs as booty from their pillaging.

It takes more than an outburst of raw emotion to sustain the devastation of days-long riots, and any political force that may have sparked them will have long-been subsumed into the incoherent havoc that is mob violence. Whatever real problems that exist in the affected communities don't explain the violence any more than the relative peace in the affected areas was indicative of a hunky-dory system til Friday.

In short, there is no more reason to a riot than there is to a lynching. There are causes, there is wanton violence, and there is no shortage of blame after-the-fact. There is a trigger that almost everyone can agree on, and then there is carnage. There really isn't much more to them than that.

Pace Ms. Red, violence is the epitome of mindlessness. Treating riots as anything else elevates them to a level of political significance that they do not deserve.

bellum medicamenti delenda est

Just for Fun Friday: The Stand-Up Economist

2011-07-22T00:00:00.000-04:00

I feel bad about only posting stuff like this without real content, but it isn't that I haven't been writing. I just haven't been happy enough with the final product to post it comfortably.

Anyway, a video for your enjoyment:

Just for Fun Friday: When She Broke English

2011-07-08T10:31:00.000-04:00

Yesterday, a wonderful and awful thing happened: this piece of overwrought ~~high~~ middle school scribbling was published over at Thought Catalog. It's not just that it's bad -- it's that it is so terrible that one has to wonder if it's actually satirical commentary on the state of American education. A sample:

When she closed her eyes sometimes she could smell him, his pungent body odor, the way she possessed it when their blushing bodies rubbed together in awkward embrace, her soft fleshy thigh against his, his flushed chest against her beating breast. She remembered most the heavy weight of his naked body when he shuddered against her, relaxed his muscles, and eased into her torso, those rare moments where the whole world fell away and they became nothing more than each other, an ugly fleshy mass of hair and limbs that was her primal perfection. Then they would sit for hours, nude, absorbed in nothingness, and those were the moments she loved best. She would feed him cheese on crackers and he would turn to her with an expression of complete surprise; it was in those moments that it seemed like he had only just laid his eyes on her for the first time, and while he was momentarily absorbed in a rapt wonderment she would gorge herself on his love.

The unintended consequences of abstinence only sex ed: torso sex. With cheese and crackers.

I could go on for hours, but you really should just read it in its entirety. Additionally, I highly recommend the dramatic reading of this literary monstrosity, as performed by Ms. Emily Crockett:

Remember kids: don't play Mad Libs with a thesaurus. It's not a toy.

Have a good weekend!

bellum medicamenti delenda est

A Belated Response to Tim Lee and American Free Enterprise v. Bennett

2011-07-05T17:07:00.001-04:00

I've been traveling the past three weekends and thus been too busy during the week to keep up with all my reading. I only just read my friend Tim Lee's take on Arizona Free Enterprise v. Bennett, the most recent campaign finance case before SCOTUS. I respectfully disagree with him and would like to explain why here.

Some set-up to Tim's argument:

Let’s start by reviewing the broader campaign finance debate, and especially the arguments in Citizens United. Advocates of regulation argued that “independent expenditures”—that is spending on political speech by people unconnected to any campaign—were a grave threat to the integrity of the democratic process. They warned that a wealthy interest group could walk into the offices of a member of Congress and threaten that if the member didn’t vote the way the group wanted, the group would pour millions of dollars into negative ads in the member’s district. Faced with a threat to his political survival, the member will be forced to do what the interest group wants.

First Amendment zealots like me had two responses. First, running ads praising or criticizing a candidate in the weeks before an election is precisely the kind of “core” political speech the First Amendment is supposed to protect. Therefore, we’d better have an extremely solid reason for restricting such speech.

Second: if it were really true that elections were decided based on which candidate had the most spent on his behalf, this would be a pretty strong argument for regulating independent expenditures. But fortunately, voters are not mindless automatons. They evaluate the messages being presented to them and compare them with elected officials’ records in office. An incumbent with a good record will find his ads reach a receptive audience. Conversely, an interest group whose agenda is broadly unpopular with voters is going to have a harder time using ads to reduce the candidate’s poll numbers.

Relatedly, as Meg Whitman recently learned, advertising dollars are subject to diminishing returns. If the average voter sees candidate A’s ad 10 times and candidate B’ ad only once, that’s likely to give candidate A a sizable advantage. But if the average voter sees candidate A’s ad 1000 times and candidate B’s ad only 100 times, the gap is unlikely to matter. Indeed, some voters might get so tired of seeing candidate A’s ads that they vote for candidate B out of spite.

I'm with him all the way up to the Whitman reference. Whitman's doomed gubernatorial run was plagued with more problems than money could solve--and she didn't have the advantage of name recognition that a former governor (and governor's son) has. Add to that, she was a Republican following an unpopular Republican governor in the midst of a national and state-wide budget calamities...in a famously Democrat-friendly state. Furthermore, as such a visible candidate of one of the most important states in the Union, she was targeted by powerful and experienced advocacy and activist groups who knew how to spend money more wisely than her campaign did. In short, that a lot of money didn't help her doesn't mean the general ability to spend it freely is not important to a candidacy or idea.

Regardless, the Whitman example is one of a predominantly self-financed campaign and doesn't address the role of fundraising in a political campaign. In a campaign, money acts as more than just candidate's speech--it is a signal of political viability of the candidate and, more importantly, is the material product of the speech of his donors. Ron Paul has shown that fundraising doesn't guarantee electoral victory--but it is very effective if you're trying to get a particular message out to people who haven't been exposed to it. Ron Paul made a national name for himself in large part because of the money he raised and then the use of that money on the campaign. A publicly balanced system neutralizes the power of those donations.

People who donated to Ron Paul didn't want to give Sam Brownback or Mike Huckabee a platform: they wanted to say that the Paul brand of limited government is something they supported and wanted explicated to a wider audience. Matching funds, the issue in the present case, would neuter the voices of those people in favor of the status quo in the name of "more speech."(N.B.: I'm using a national figure for illustrative purposes. The AZ state law never would have effected national office.)

Take a more local hypothetical: say there is an open at-large county council seat. There is one private candidate who supports allowing medical cannabis dispensaries in the county and three public candidates who expressly do not. Under the matching funds provision, if Candidate A is supported by people who really want to license a dispensary, public financing triples his opposition without candidates B, C, and D lifting a finger to solicit it. It isn't as if Candidate A was going to have an easy go of it anyway, but now any decided advantage he may have had as a fundraiser is eliminated. As a county council seat, the media deluge that is commonplace to the governorship of California or the United States presidency is absolutely not going to occur so he is unlikely to experience the diminishing returns Tim referenced in Whitman's race--and Candidate A is battling against three times the competition she was. Adding insult to injury, B,C, and D are each using the money he campaigned for against him. Ironically, those who oppose his plan can donate to his campaign to effectively triple their money in opposition. (I fully grant that candidate A could win because the anti-cannabis vote is divided, but in this hypothetical it's certainly not an assumption that he would.)

As this demonstrates, matching funds are as likely, if not more so, to support the status quo--in a voting system that already overwhelmingly favors incumbents. Moreover, the use of matching funds is just another way the state can decide who gets to say what in an election. (Most of the electoral systems in the country have been set up to protect the duopoly of the major parties by crowding out third party or independent challengers, but that's another entire blogpost in itself.) It's hard to understand how a libertarian--or even a liberaltarian--could think of this as liberty-friendly.

And then we get to the constitutionality of the matter--which Tim concedes, sort of:

Obviously, a candidate isn’t going to want his opponent to get a larger public subsidy, and so at the margin it does provide some disincentive to campaign spending.

[...]

Here [unlike Citizens United], the “punishment” is much more indirect and indeed its status as a punishment is somewhat speculative. So First Amendment scrutiny is called for, but the justification probably doesn’t need to be as compelling as you’d need to justify direct censorship.

Government providing "some disincentive" to exercising free speech is akin to saying a man got a woman "a little pregnant."

If we're talking about a marginal candidate--or, more to the point, a candidate with heretofore marginalized ideas who has managed to earn the respect, trust, and money of enough supporters who want to give him a platform--that disincentive can prove most chilling. If every dollar given to Ron Paul is a government dollar to each of three or more mainstream candidates when spent, the mainstream candidates are granted government support to further marginalize him. If Paul supporters understand that their donations will trigger 1:1 financing to each member of the field of GOP candidates, their incentive to support him is greatly diminished. That is a chill on expressly political speech and thus cannot withstand the strict scrutiny test required for acceptable regulation of speech at any level of government.

Tim continues:

Second, the degree to which having your opponent subsidized will be perceived as a “punishment” greatly depends on the circumstances. If the privately candidate is handsome and charismatic with an impressive record, while the publicly-financed incumbent is a politically tone-deaf hack with a long record of corruption and incompetence, then the challenger might welcome his opponent having more money to spend putting his ugly mug on TV. Similarly, if an independent organization is running ads in order to get candidates to talk more about its pet issue, it might not care at all about whether its spending causes certain candidates to get more money in the process.

A donation to a candidate is a private individual's voice of positive support for a particular person. Matching that donation with public money changes the effect of that donation to supporting political speech generally--or, at least, speech among the state-approved candidates. Such a change perverts the essential component of that speech: explicit support with intent to provide material advantage.

Tim concludes:

Finally, the state’s interest in reducing corruption seems pretty compelling. Not compelling enough to justify censorship, but strong enough to justify a system of subsidies that creates a mild disincentive to private spending on political speech.

For actual political corruption, we have a justice system. A nebulous 'appearance of corruption' (as noted in the parties' briefs and page 26 of the majority opinion) is not a compelling justification to chill the speech of political contributors or candidates.

I understand and agree with Tim's underlying principle: more speech--and specifically more free speech--is a good thing. But the present case isn't free speech: it is a state-sanctioned balance of speech that comes at the direct cost of individual speech. Individual political contributions are not value-neutral and their use by a candidate should not render them such by way of matching funds to the candidates' opponents. Such distortion of political speech by government action is bad policy and wholly incompatible with the First Amendment.

bellum medicamenti delenda est

Quote of the Day

2011-05-17T15:29:00.006-04:00

While cover [sic] for the receptionist at my work, I have seen a lot. The blacks come in not even dressed to work, they list felony's [sic] on the applications and some do not look like they really want to work. The hispanics - come in with tatoos [sic] all ...exposed, scary, do not speak english, have a rap sheet, and even put they just got out of jail on application [sic]. I do feel bad for them because they do not realize that their past will haunt them forever and the way they present themselves has a lot to do with it. I have some black and hispanic co-workers who have family's [sic] and care about their jobs. But some you just cannot help.

Cindy Taylor, facebook commenter on this Daily Caller post on black unemployment, entitled "Black unemployment: racism or personal responsibilty?" [sic]

I wonder if simplistic views on race are correlated with bad grammar. I kid, of course, but the piece itself reads like a high school sociology project and is as illuminating as a flashlight is to a blind man.

UPDATE: The Daily Caller has removed the facebook thread I linked to. (sad face.) If reading I-know-a-black-guy expert opinions from people who prefer to remain anonymous is your thing, you can follow the story comments here. So far, the post has 127 facebook likes. SMH

Mood Music Monday

2011-05-09T16:08:00.002-04:00

100 years ago today, Robert Johnson was born. Perhaps the greatest blues man to ever live, he died at age 27--allegedly the victim of poisoned whiskey.

Anyway, happy birthday Mr. Johnson.

Hat tip to Jon Meyers for the link.

bellum medicamenti delenda est

Just for Fun Friday: S*** My Students Write

2011-05-06T16:15:00.001-04:00

In the early days of the mass interwebs--ie, the mid-90s--there were a lot chain emails that got forwarded into everyone's inbox. If you're like me and have older friends and family members, you probably still get them now and again--I just hope yours don't include insane conspiracy theories about Obama or how the Mexicans are invading to take arr jerbs. Anyway, one of the emails that would get forwarded pretty frequently was a list of horribly written or otherwise hilarious excerpts from student tests or papers.

It turns out, someone finally decided to make this a Tumblr, called Shit My Students Write.

One of my favorites:

Keeping it real with that birth thing.
Before, women were multifunctioning objects around the house that could do that birth thing but now women are running corporations and writing great literature all the while still doing that birth thing.

Yes, yes, it's sad that kids today don't have the language skills they should. But having been a teaching assistant in a foreign policy class meant for upperclassmen and thus seen my share of terrible writing and attempted academic bullshittery, it's something you just have to laugh at.

Say goodbye to your afternoon productivity.

NSLs and You

2011-05-04T14:37:00.000-04:00

The lastest video from Cato's multimedia department deals with National Security Letters and the egregious lengths the FBI has gone through (and probably continues to) to exercise unprecedented administrative subpoena power. The subsequent gag orders to render them unchallengeable is maddening.

That these letters exist is problematic in itself; that the documented, widespread abuse of them went generally unnoticed outside of the Beltway (and the telecommunications industry) is scandalous.

bellum medicamenti delenda est

Are Justice and Vengeance Compatible?

2011-05-03T11:38:00.005-04:00

As my Mood Music Monday made clear, as well as my several tweets after bin Laden's death was confirmed Sunday night, I'm glad he's dead. Not jubilant, not ecstatic, not giddy--just glad.

Like most Americans who were adults or close to it ten years ago, I immediately thought back what September 11, 2001 felt like...and how awful it was.

I worked nights and actually went to bed around 7 AM that morning, having just received a used computer from one of my cousins in California that weekend and been tooling around on it til I couldn't keep my eyes open. My then-girlfriend and I were asleep when it all went down and, as usual, we turned the phone off in our upstairs bedroom so that random phone calls wouldn't disturb us while we slept. She got up to walk the dog early that afternoon and said 'Heff left several messages on the answering machine. He said just turn on the television...any channel.'

So curious and confused, I groggily obliged and saw B-roll of one of the smoking towers. I started reading the scroll at the bottom of the page. I thought to myself "Oh, so a plane hit a skyscraper. That's sad, but hardly...OH MY GOD."

We sat in stunned shock as the news went through everything that they knew to that point. The rest of the afternoon is just a fog, really. I went in to my restaurant job to see my friends--it was my day off--and everything in town was eerily quiet on the way in. We talked a bit, and then I left to go home and try to wrap my head around all of it. I remember an enveloping dazed numbness--sort of like a concussion.

That night, my girlfriend and I went to her job--she was a bartender at the 'Townie' bar down the street from my job. It's your typical Midwestern bar--country music dominated the jukebox, regular karaoke nights similarly dominated by country songs; it was staffed by flirty, sassy women and patronized by restaurant workers and good ol' boys. While I'm sure other songs came on, all I remember is Lee Greenwood's "God Bless the USA" and Bruce Springsteen's anti-war classic "Born in the USA." People were singing and crying and just plain angry. There were several vets there that night as well as some guys who knew they were going to get a call very soon from their Reserve battalions. Others, I'm sure, signed up the next day. War--and much more death--was imminent.

So I stood at the end of the bar, talking to a lot of the old men standing around, and I heard racist invective that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. I understand the rage and pain of that day--I felt it too--but mine was focused on the Taliban and al Qaeda, not Arabs generally. The hatred and contempt that so many felt made me fear for every Arab (and Arab-looking) person in America. They talked about the Muslims like animals--like vermin that had to be exterminated. The old men weren't talking genocide per se, but it was clear to them that Arabs and Muslims had to pay for what so very few of them believed and what just a handful of them did.

Don't get me wrong, I wanted it to rain unholy hell down upon Afghanistan. I wanted Chuck Norris Delta Force-style action where our guys swoop in and kill every 'bad guy' they see by any means necessary. Guns, knives, garrote, whatever. There was (apparently unrelated) fighting going on in Kabul that night, if I recall correctly, and we all watched hoping the explosions and small arms fire we saw were Americans going in and exacting righteous vengeance upon our enemies. It wasn't, but 'Death to the terrorists, dammit!'

But when I heard the words of the old men at the bar--and some of the younger ones too--I snapped out of the numb anger and thought "Oh, God. What is going to happen? How many are going to die?" I thought of our soldiers. I thought of Afghan civilians. And I feared so much for Arab Americans. I spoke up, briefly, countering with the absurdity of blaming white Christians for McVeigh and Nichols. Unsurprisingly, they were not persuaded.

Fast forward: Years later, a friend pointed out to me Glenn Beck's "9/12 Project"--to recapture the common cause and American unity that 9/11 had elicited. People tend to remember the touching photos, the crying embraces, and that New Yorkers actually acted like civilized people in public. (I kid.) Long forgotten by so many was the unfiltered hate and rage; that innocent people were yelled at, spit on, beaten up, and that their houses and mosques were damaged or defaced in the days following the attacks for acts that affected them as deeply as any other American. The vile, hateful bloodlust that sprang up in so many of us was like nothing I'd experienced before, nor would I like to feel again.

But when I heard the news Sunday night, I smiled and was happy that OBL was dead. My reaction was part relief, part vengeance, and part justice. I was relieved that while terror will survive him, he personally will no longer be responsible; our national bogeyman is dead. The vengeance, I think, is just a natural albeit unpleasant side to me (and many other people). I don't think vengeance makes good policy, but neither will I deny the feeling when the two coincide. And yes, it was wholly justified to kill him, whether he put up a fight or not.

Now, you may ask, how is a committed libertarian, wary of state power and a proponent of due process, backing this? Because in this extraordinary case, post-mortem desire for incarceration and trial confuse procedure for justice.

Procedure is important when administering criminal law. Procedure is important when determining guilt or innocence, or severity of punishment. Procedure, as used in the Nuremberg trials--which, I think were important despite their many flaws--is important when trying to rebuild a nation state and separate the punishment of criminals from perceived retribution upon an entire citizenry. Procedure is important to keep the enforcers of policy in check: for all those held in Guantanamo, Bagram, and whatever black sites the CIA still have running, and I will continue to call for that. But let's not pretend that putting OBL in a courtroom in order to show all of his videos inciting death to America and claiming responsibility for murders, financing terror here and around the world, and organizing the training of murderers--to all of which there is no substantive contested fact from any quarter--would amount in "more" justice than he got on Sunday.

I am not swayed by the arguments that his capture and trial would be too dangerous for American courts. I surely would not be against a trial, had it worked out that way--but he was a figurehead and titular leader of a terrorist organization and, as such, is a legitimate military target. That the government used a SEAL team instead of a cruise missile--sparing the lives of 17 others or so who were in his compound--is hardly a miscarriage of justice.

Does this mean that others should get similar treatment? Not really. OBL was a titular figure of the highest order, unambiguously guilty of acts and war and terror against the United States, and a strategic target. On the other hand, Anwar al-Awlaki should be taken alive, if at all possible, to guarantee his due process rights, no matter how despicable he is. The breadth of his crimes are not widely known--indeed, they are classified--and his citizenship is a legal protection that must be respected until or unless he resists capture in a manner that imminently threatens the life of his would-be captors or others. That the administration has marked him for death by saying, essentially, "trust us, he's a bad guy" is not remotely satisfactory to subvert his constitutional rights.

So yes, I'm glad Osama bin Laden is dead--as a policy and personal matter. I don't think it's cause to "celebrate"--indeed, a very serious reassessment of our policy, both our presence in Afghanistan and our support of Pakistan should be in the forefront of our minds--but neither do I think it's appropriate to complain about some fictional justice for OBL lost. He is dead, and that is not a bad thing. It was vengeance. And it was justice.

bellum medicamenti delenda est

Mood Music Monday: Dedication to the CIC and DevGru

2011-05-02T09:00:00.004-04:00

Now usually I don't do this...

..but credit where it is due: here's a shoutout to BHO and the badasses formerly known as Seal Team Six (now "DevGru") who took out OBL yesterday.

It doesn't make up for all the pain, disappointment, and waste of the last two years, but it's not a small accomplishment.

We will now return to our regularly scheduled skepticism and resentment of executive power.

bellum medicamenti delenda est

New Digs

2011-04-30T21:01:00.001-04:00

I accepted an invitation to start blogging over at the Examiner Blogs "Opinion Zone." I'll still be blogging other pieces here--but I can't cross-post my Examiner Blog posts right away. I'll be tweeting my posts when they go up and/or giving you a link here to keep you from adding extra RSS feeds to your GReader.

My first post on Thursday's medical cannabis raids in Washington State went up tonight.

bellum medicamenti delenda est

Crash Course in Black History: New N****r Rule

2011-04-27T15:45:00.002-04:00

By now you've heard that President Obama has released his "long form" birth certificate in order to quell the two-year-old conspiracy theory that a liberal cabal has managed to pull off the greatest case of identity fraud in human history.

Honestly, before I get into the meat of this post, I just want to say that this was the most preposterous allegation/conspiracy theory I have ever heard. The JFK assassination Cuba-Mafia-KGB conspiracy, the 'faked' Moon landing and '9/11 was an inside job' (aka "Truthers") all have more plausible premises--and they are all bullshit too. To have pulled this off, one would have needed to plan, implement, and maintain a flawless conspiracy over the course of four decades between multiple state agencies of Illinois and Hawaii, his posh private school in Hawaii, two Ivy League schools, the Illinois Bar Association, the government of Kenya and/or Indonesia, the Social Security Administration, the State Department, the IRS and god knows what other federal departments and kept it all a secret.

Elvis and Tupac are sitting on a beach somewhere saying "They can't really believe this shit, can they?"

Anyway, a recurring complaint from the Right since the release this morning has been "I just don't get why he didn't release this sooner!" The quick answer is: because he shouldn't have to. This accusation was ridiculous on its face and for all the 'respect for the office' the Right likes to trot out when it suits them, addressing this idiocy really is beneath the president of the United States. But as my friend Adam Serwer so eloquently wrote over at WaPo's Plum Line today:

Aside from being one of the most idiotic moments in American political history, this marks a level of personal humiliation no previous president has ever been asked to endure. Other presidents have been the target of crazy conspiracy theories, sure, but few have been as self-evidently absurd as birtherism. None has been so clearly rooted in anxieties about the president’s racial identity, because no previous American president has been black.

This whole situation is an embarrassment to the country. Yesterday Jesse Jackson described birtherism as racial “code,” but there’s nothing “coded” about it. It’s just racism. I don’t mean that everyone who has doubts about the president’s birthplace is racist. Rather, the vast majority have been deliberately misled by an unscrupulous conservative media and by conservative elites who have failed or refused to challenge these doubts.

And birtherism is only one of a number of racially charged conspiracy theories that have bubbled out of the right-wing swamp and have been allowed to fester by conservative elites. Those who have spent the last two years clinging to the notion that the president wasn’t born in the United States, who have alleged that the president wasn’t intelligent enough to write his own autobiography or somehow coasted to magna cum laude at Harvard law, are carrying on new varieties of an old, dying tradition of American racism. Similar accusations dogged early black writers like Frederick Douglass and Phyllis Wheatley, whose brilliance provoked an existential crisis among people incapable of abandoning myths of black intellectual inferiority.

Indeed, asking more of black people than is asked of or expected from whites is as old as racism itself. Black 'pioneers' have always had to face extra challenges from people incapable of dealing with black achievement or legitimacy. The older generations of black folk would tell their kids--as my father told me--that black people should never try to be as good as our white counterparts: we must strive to be better because 'as good' would not be good enough. (Both because of my complexion and meaningful societal change over my lifetime, this has not been an academic or professional hindrance to me. But the message took.)

Such is the standard operating procedure to confront what has been called, most notably by comedian Paul Mooney, the "New Nigger Rule." My definition follows:

A NNR is a legal or administrative procedure which is enforced with benign pretense, yet has the demonstrable effect of abetting racism, prejudice, or otherwise just screwing the black guy. Historical examples include, but are not limited to, the Grandfather Clause, poll taxes, and literacy/constitutional knowledge tests to vote.

Nota bene: all of these are forms of disenfranchisement.

Mark Thompson of the League explains what Obama had to do to get his long form and make it public:

Quite literally, in order to release this document, the President had to ask to be treated as being above the law, even if it is a relatively trivial law in the grand scheme of things. Quite understandably, the State of Hawaii decided that this was a wise idea. That so many are prepared to insist that the President had an obligation to ask that he be treated as above the law from a very early date is far more troubling.

That Obama should have been expected to file a waiver to get an obscure document that no one else has had to produce and make it public to dispel a rumor based on absurd conjecture and outright lies is clearly a New Nigger Rule.

I agree with Adam that it would not be fair to call all Birthers "racists." Maligning or otherwise assigning such terms to groups of people is unproductive and usually wrong factually and morally. That said, there can be no question at all that Obama had to deal with this because he's black. That is a fucking shame, and that is why he didn't release it earlier.

And he never should have had to.

bellum medicamenti delenda est

The DEA, Charlie Sheen, and Caged Animals

2011-04-15T12:42:00.000-04:00

Last week, WaPo ran a story about how the murderous drug cartels in Mexico are now targeting children. As I've noted before, the cartels there are particularly brutal--decapitations, genital mutilation, and mass graves have become standard operating procedure--so that they've moved on to killing children cannot really be all that surprising:

A Chihuahua state police commander was attacked as she carried her 5-year-old daughter to school two weeks ago. Both died of multiple gunshot wounds.

In February, assassins went hunting for a Ciudad Juarez man, but the intended target wasn’t home, so they killed his three daughters instead, ages 12, 14 and 15

In March, a young woman was bound and gagged, shot and left in a car in Acapulco. Her 4-year-old daughter lay slumped beside her, killed with a single bullet to her chest. She was the fifth child killed in drug violence in the resort city in one bloody week.

Awful, but not surprising.

What was surprising, to me anyway, was the DEA chief's reaction in the story:

“It may seem contradictory, but the unfortunate level of violence is a sign of success in the fight against drugs,” said Michele Leonhart, head of the Drug Enforcement Administration. The cartels “are like caged animals, attacking one another,” she added. (emphasis added)

Tens of thousands of drug war murders in the last four years alone is "success" in a Charlie Sheen sort of way: epic denial of cocaine-fueled violence and humiliating failure, egged-on and financed by self-important sadists who watch from afar.

DEA: Duh, winning.

As for the rhetoric, the cartels aren't caged animals--they are businessmen (and women) who are afforded no property rights. They are rich--Forbes list rich--because drug prohibition makes easily grown plants expensive. Yes, it takes a cold, sociopathic brutality to commit such heinous acts, but history is replete with people of all walks of life committing acts of unspeakable butchery. The animal comparison is unfair to the Mexican people because it depicts them as something different from us--something beneath us--so the horror of their daily lives can be so crassly characterized by the American government as "success."

It makes one wonder who the real "animals" are.

bellum medicamenti delenda est.

Obama's "Plan" and All Its Hollow Glory

2011-04-13T17:54:00.002-04:00

Since the NYT put up its paywall, I've been avoiding the site pretty steadily. But someone tweeted this handy little chart explaining the differences in the President's anti-Paul Ryan budget plan.(click to enlarge)

I'll leave it to the Left to demolish Ryan's plan, as they have already on so many occasions. Let's look at this new plan that so many were defending on Twitter today.

Medicare: "The proposal seeks to reduce the growth in Medicare spending, including lowering prescription drug spending "by leveraging Medicare’s purchasing power.""

Translation: 'Leveraging Medicare's purchasing power' is a nice way to say "extortion." When you have a virtual monopoly on medical care for the elderly--a class dependent on drugs--the monopolistic power of Medicare is a blunt tool with which to extort favorable prices from drug companies. These "savings," of course, will be paid for by younger folks who see their over the counter or chronic ailment medicine increase in price to make up for the lost revenue. We have antitrust laws, in theory, to protect consumers from monopolistic practices and price fixing. Of course, when the government does it, it's just fine. In fairness, this "negotiating" with drug companies isn't anything new, it's just going to be accelerated and amplified because of Bush's Prescription Drug Benefit.

Medicaid: "President Obama has asked governors to recommend ways to make the program more efficient. Medicaid spending would be cut $100 billion over the next decade."

Translation: I hope to cut $100 billion, but will let the governor's do the dirty work because I want to shirk responsibility if things go wrong but will happily take credit if all goes well. (cf. "Clinton's" twice-vetoed Welfare Reform of 1994)

Social Security: "Mr. Obama said that, while Social Security is not a cause of near-term budget problems, "both parties should work together now to strengthen Social Security.""

Translation: PUNT!

Military: "Military spending would be cut $400 billion over the next 12 years."

Translation: Kinetic Military Actions not pursued = SAVINGS!*

Discretionary Spending: "Mr. Obama proposed cutting $600 billion over 10 years, including $400 billion identified in his 2012 budget proposal."

Translation: I'll make symbolic cuts to maintain the entitlement programs that are actually bankrupting us.

Taxes: "Mr. Obama endorsed the Fiscal Commission's recommendation to eliminate tax breaks to both lower tax rates and reduce the deficit. He called for allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire for top earners and limiting itemized deductions for them."

Translation: We've shown we can't spend your money responsibly, so we're going to need more of it. Also, the rest of my budget commission bummed me out, so we're just gonna table the rest of that noise.

Again, Ryan's plan has its own shortcomings, but I don't know how much of the 'Twitter base' it rallied on the Right. But to believe this "plan" is anything but obfuscatory rhetoric is just delusional.

*If he's serious about making Defense cuts, great. But he's shown nothing to indicate that he is, indeed there is much more evidence to the contrary, so I won't treat it like it is.

Absurdity of Metro Bag Screening

2011-03-16T15:42:00.002-04:00

I wrote this letter to the editor regarding Washington Post's recent editorial supporting the "necessary nuisance" of random bag checks on the DC metro system. It didn't get published, but here it is.

In your unsigned editorial “Metro's bag checks: Necessary nuisance for a real threat,” (March 7), you argued that because bad things happen, Fourth Amendment violations are a necessary nuisance. Tellingly, nowhere in the article is the efficiency or efficacy of the bag checks addressed.

Leaving aside the millions of commuters in the other cities mentioned, 600,000 people per day use the DC Metrorail. If Metro Transit Police stopped just one percent of them on any given day, it would take 50 man-hours to stop 6000 people at the “quick” 30 seconds per stop.

Of course, a terrorist could just as easily attack a throng of people lining up for the gates even before getting to security, as the Moscow airport bomber did in January.

Random checks are, by definition, indiscriminate. Given that these searches are occasional and dispersed, the number of riders stopped is statistically insignificant compared to overall ridership and thus these searches amount to simple security theater.

If WMATA believes this method will catch a terrorist, it should start diverting five dollars a week to the lottery to fix its budget shortfall: it has roughly the same chance of success and doesn't involve the pesky Fourth Amendment.

Jonathan Blanks
Alexandria, VA

The Wrong Way to Put Up Street Signs

2011-03-16T15:15:00.001-04:00

This is a No Left Turn (during rush hours) sign at 10th and Massachusetts, NW here in D.C.. Out of context, it may seem rather innocuous -- helpful, even.

However, it's facing southward...on a one way street going south. The sign should read "Wrong Way."

BYU's Honor Code

2011-03-04T17:42:00.003-05:00

For those of you who don't follow college basketball, Brigham Young University is coming to the end of one of their best, if not the best, regular seasons in their program's history. Earlier this week, however, they benched their leading rebounder, Brandon Davies, for the rest of the season and including the NCAA tournament.

Hmm. Since it was an 'Honor Code' violation and not 'conduct detrimental to the team' or anything illegal, the first thing I thought of was "What, did he sleep with a white girl?"

Yep.

Brandon Davies was dismissed from BYU's basketball team after he admitted to having sexual relations with his girlfriend, the Salt Lake Tribune reported Wednesday.

BYU's honor code forbids students from having premarital sex and instructs them to "live a chaste and virtuous life."

I'm sure every other football and basketball player at BYU has been chaste and virtuous.

Look, I'm not calling anyone racist and I don't know what happened. BYU has these rules and place and that's their business--and Davies knew it going in. But does anyone know how often BYU kids get busted for this sort of thing? How regularly is it enforced? And to this degree?

Something I'll be keeping an eye on. Hit me up if you know anything about the way this goes down or has gone down in the past. Will do some digging this weekend.

UPDATE: According to several sources with anecdotal evidence, this is relatively common at BYU among the general student population, though I haven't seen or heard anything about other star athletes getting burned.

My general problem was that such a rule is inherently subjectively applied. Maybe if the administration hears about anyone, they take them down, but I can't believe that he's the first star athlete at BYU who was known to violate the Honor Code that way.

Oh well.

Mood Music Monday

2011-02-21T16:41:00.001-05:00

Just saw this nonsense by Glenn Beck. I'm just in stunned awe of the irresponsible absurdity that he and the greater Fox News Channel has become. Just...flabbergasted.

Anyway, this came on my iTunes shortly after I finished the video linked above, so I thought it only appropriate: Arcade Fire's "Antichrist Television Blues."

PS -- if you were one of the people who'd never heard of Arcade Fire before they won Album of the Year at the Grammy's, get to know them. They are great. Got to see them live last year at Merriweather Post Pavillion--great show.

Hitting the Road...

2011-02-09T09:14:00.000-05:00

About to pick up my rental car and head to Indiana. I appreciate all the emails and phone calls of support that have come my way. Thank you so much.

Mood Music Monday

2011-02-07T11:34:00.000-05:00

My brother Philip called me this morning to tell me my father passed away. He was 83.

Among many other things, I developed my appreciation for gospel music from my dad. He was a huge fan of Mahalia Jackson, so I can't really think of a better song for today than "Soon I Will be Done."

Paul A. Blanks, Sr. (1928-2011) Rest in peace, Dad.

Housekeeping Note

2011-02-01T22:32:00.000-05:00

I'm a little bored with my layout, so if you're not reading this in Google Reader or some other RSS aggregator, you may notice a few changes in the next few days or weeks. Indeed, I'll probably get around to moving to WordPress sooner or later, but in the meantime, I'll be futzing around with the layout. Hope it's not too disconcerting for you.

And for no reason whatsoever, a little Ray Charles.

Quote of the Day: When Words Have No Meaning

2011-01-23T14:25:00.003-05:00

This requires a little background, so please bear with:

A friend sent me a link to this piece in Forbes about the Founders' "socialized medicine." Ezra Klein at the Washington Post picked it up. One of the MoJo journos I follow on twitter, Nick Baumann, linked to it saying: "Amazing."

Similar to what I commented at Forbes, I tweeted back to Baumann that the law in question dealt with enumerated powers, taxing power and the maintenance of a Navy, so that they fell well-within the proper legal understanding of the Necessary and Proper clause.

Baumann responded in three parts. The one that concerns me is the second one, but his other tweets are here and here. His second tweet, said (with edits for blog clarity):

Ultimately the whole constitutional debate misses the point. We're really arguing about what government should be allowed to do.

This way of thinking probably appeals to many people of various political stripes, but to constitutionalists, beyond the rhetorical subtlety that resembles the effect of a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster, it is akin to saying, "We're not talking about speed limits, we're talking about how fast we can make the car go."

The Constitution is more than a parchment relic that represents the Founding principles of our country: it is the explicit grant and, to my point, the limitation of power given to our federal government. To say that we're talking about the scope of government without recognizing its proper, delineated limits is to miss the point entirely.

Legislating is not a grand philosophical exercise on tabula rasa to decide what idea sounds good right now. Unconstitutional laws usually seem like good ideas at the time -- to the pols who implement them, at any rate. Unchecked, the government regularly acts beyond its proper authority in everything from speech to imprisonment to wiretapping and torture. Just because the party in power has a policy preference doesn't make it legitimate or constitutional.

Given my affinity for team sports, I understand the "look the other way" mentality when your team commits a foul and gets away with it. But when every time Team A stretches the limits of Congress beyond it's constitutional bounds, they directly empower Team B to do the same on their own pet issues--essentially, that's how precedent works. How The winners, of course, are the teams--they get more power so everybody's happy. The losers, however, are the rest of us who get screwed by civil liberties violations or dying in excruciating pain.

I am not exaggerating. Ironically, the government's arguments for the individual mandate of PPACA, the health care bill, rest primarily on Raich, the Supreme Court case declaring that medical marijuana grown in the home for personal use that is legal under state law is somehow regulable under the Interstate Commerce clause in the Constitution.

In a way, Attorneys General John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzales--by way of unconstitutionally prohibiting state-sanctioned medical remedy for chronic pain--forcing Angel Raich and others like her to live (or die) (yes, die) in excruciating pain or leaving them unable to eat because of unabating nausea during chemotherapy could lead to the Dems' triumph in the PPACA litigation.

I wonder if Nancy Pelosi is going to send Alberto Gonzales a thank you note?

Faithful adherence to the text of the Constitution is the best protection for individual rights in the United States. Relying upon Supreme Court justices to be "smart enough" to reach a decision that jives with your policy preferences invites government overreach and the suffering of countless Americans. (see Korematsu) Given the sorry state of medical and insurance pricing, I would never say that government has no role in attempting to remedy our health care system. That said, one cannot responsibly discard the limits of the Constitution for subjectively "good"--or in the opinion of a lot of PPACA supporters, "better than nothing"--policy: torture seems like a "good idea" to some people. Constitutional restraints should mean something.

Years ago, three years after resigning from office, disgraced former president Richard Nixon gave an infamous interview to David Frost in which he said "When the president does it, it's not illegal." This caused an uproar--yet his logic is in lock step with those who wish not to concern themselves with the limits of government.

At what point did disregard for the law move from the profane to standard public policy?

bellum medicamenti delenda est

Quote of the Day

2011-01-18T10:30:00.004-05:00

"Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage — torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians — which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by ‘our’ side." -George Orwell, 1945

The next time a Prog wants to wax optimistic about Obama's accomplishments, think of this and do your best not to slap them in the face.

Please, read the whole thing here.

HT: Adam Serwer

bellum medicamenti delenda est

Mood Music Monday: Hysterical Fears Edition

2011-01-10T14:05:00.002-05:00

I am not going to comment too much on the assassination attempt in Tuscon over the weekend, but the reaction to it has been predictably ugly. Suffice it to say that the blame placed on the Right--namely Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck--for this, directly or implicitly, is irresponsible and serves no purpose other than political point-scoring at the expense of free speech.

American politics is full of harsh rhetoric, as it has been and will continue to be. There are already calls to institute speech restrictions -- which will do no good whatsoever other than to quash dissent. It's already illegal to threaten the life of a congressman, or anyone for that matter, as well it should be--but saying "we're targeting this senator this election" is no more a threat than printing that senator's face on toilet paper. The time we live in certainly isn't the nadir of American political discourse--though the number of times this country has been goaded into pointless wars makes a singular nadir hard to pinpoint--but let's not pretend we've lost some sort of bygone civility from more genteel times.

The histrionics coming from the Left are unsubstantiated and unhelpful. It's just their most recent attempt at fear-mongering: the cheap and effective political technique used by pols of all stripes that requires little or no resemblance to reality whatsoever. And as Adam Serwer noted, the Republicans would, in all likelihood, engage in the same if Rep. Giffords were a Republican or the assailant was Muslim, Arab, or an immigrant. But that doesn't make the Left's behavior any less despicable--it just proves they are as boorish and loathsome as their counterparts.

Anyway, in the spirit of using media to create bogeymen and incite irrational fears of those whom you disagree, my MMM for this week is the man responsible for everything bad that happened to kids in the late 1990s:

It's the edited version, I still doubt it's "safe" for work. And yes, I just compared Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin to Marilyn Manson.

bellum medicamenti delenda est

Update: OH FOR GOD'S SAKE: Some are actually blaming the music: "It's a sign of the shifting culture wars that little attention has been paid to Drowning Pool since the Arizona shooting on Saturday."

Just For Fun Friday

2011-01-07T13:53:00.000-05:00

WOW.

Via @notjessewalker

Mitch Daniels: Yielding to 'Forces of Homosexual Extremism'

2011-01-06T15:11:00.002-05:00

From a profile of Indiana's Republican governor, Mitch Daniels:

And then, [Daniels] says, the next president, whoever he is, “would have to call a truce on the so-called social issues. We’re going to just have to agree to get along for a little while,” until the economic issues are resolved. Daniels is pro-life himself, and he gets high marks from conservative religious groups in his state. He serves as an elder at the Tabernacle Presbyterian Church, in inner-city Indianapolis, which he’s attended for 50 years. In 1998, with a few other couples from Tabernacle and a nearby Baptist congregation, he and his wife founded a “Christ-centered” school, The Oaks Academy, in a downtown neighborhood the local cops called “Dodge City.” It’s flourishing now with 315 mostly poor kids who pursue a classical education: Latin from third grade on, logic in middle school, rhetoric in eighth grade, an emphasis throughout on the treasures of Western Civilization. “It’s the most important thing I’ve ever been involved in,” he told me. (emphases mine)

Bryan Fischer, the American Family Association's director of issue analysis, says,

"When you [call a truce], you're yielding the field to the forces of homosexual extremism."

Perhaps such purportedly callow surrender, as practiced by Mitch Daniels, is something more conservatives should consider instead of arming the circular firing squad now gathering outside of CPAC.

HT: Dara

Just for Fun Thursday

2011-01-06T11:48:00.000-05:00

Man, sometimes the Onion just hits a little too close to home.

I'm Only Really Happy When I'm Writing, Or When I'm Having Lots Of Fun With My Friends And Family

Ouch.

Quote of the Day: Post-Racial America

2011-01-06T10:29:00.001-05:00

"I was talking with some of the parents from leo high school, and the general consensus is that the busing of the harding students to our school is going to create a mass exodus of wealthy famillies from the area, as... well as many of us pulling our children out of the school and sending them to cantebury [prep school] and bishop luers [one of two local Catholic high schools], also auburn schools came up in the conversation. the long term effect of this will be the selling of homes to move to better school districts. It really sucks that i just paid $400,000 for a house in the best school district in northern indiana, only to have a bunch of saggy pant snoop dog wanna be's trucked into my neighborhood like cattle." (emphasis mine)

- A blog comment, supposedly from a Leo High School parent, discussing the closure of my poor, mostly black high school alma mater and the forced busing of its students to the rest of the mostly white district and specifically to Leo, the (overwhelmingly white) crown jewel of the East Allen County School system.

Welcome to post-racial America.

Via my friend Jamie Garwood.

Addendum: This is not to say I support the busing plan -- indeed, this battle has been raging since I was a student and I'm generally opposed for several reasons. I shared this for the characterization of the school and the students in it--not any tacit support of the plan. -jpb

An Impossible Dilemma

2010-12-27T17:43:00.000-05:00

Ryan Grim, author of the informative and entertaining book "This Is Your Country on Drugs: The Secret History of Getting High in America," writes about the recent WikiLeaks cables about the corruption of Afghanistan:

President Hamid Karzai has repeatedly released well-connected officials convicted of or charged with drug trafficking in Afghanistan, frustrating efforts to combat corruption and providing additional evidence that the United States' top ally in the country is himself corrupt. (emphasis mine)

This is a tad too simplistic, I think, given the situation in which we have placed Mr. Karzai. This is not to apologize for Karzai, or even excuse the actions and pardons detailed in the cables, but comments like this are misleading outside the context in which they take place.

Afghanistan produces 90% of the world's illicit heroin and opium. It is less of a country than it is federalism ad absurdum and its meager economy is dependent on that illicit trade. Poppy farmers are, for the most part, backward, illiterate tribesmen who care nothing for national politics. (No, really, Afghans are the most dangerously ignorant people this side of Glenn Beck.) There is no viable economic alternative to what they do.

So, at the same time the U.S. armed forces are trying to establish rapport with the locals--i.e., opium farmers--our DEA is doing everything in its power to stop them from making a living.

Enter Hamid Karzai. He has to run this pitiful, fractious, not-quite-a-state. Every domestic political interest of note is tied to opium one way or another. In addition, he is expected to balance this with American demands for accountability, open democracy, functional government, and, um, drug prohibition. Oh, and the Karzai administration doesn't exist without explicit support from Washington.

Good luck with that. Maybe when Karzai is done doing the impossible in Afghanistan, we can put him to work on cold fusion.

I don't doubt that Karzai is corrupt. I don't doubt that his administration is corrupt. But the United States government's policy in Afghanistan is impossible to reconcile with itself. That we expect a man to ~~run a~~ establish a functional country made up of tribal drug peddlers, with no hope of legitimizing the drugs for licit medical use, is criminally absurd.

bellum medicamenti delenda est.

Quote of the Day

2010-12-15T12:18:00.001-05:00

"But ultimately, what one thinks of Manning's alleged acts is irrelevant to the issue here. The U.S. ought at least to abide by minimal standards of humane treatment in how it detains him. That's true for every prisoner, at all times. But departures from such standards are particularly egregious where, as here, the detainee has merely been accused, but never convicted, of wrongdoing. These inhumane conditions make a mockery of Barack Obama's repeated pledge to end detainee abuse and torture, as prolonged isolation -- exacerbated by these other deprivations -- is at least as damaging, as violative of international legal standards, and almost as reviled around the world, as the waterboard, hypothermia and other Bush-era tactics that caused so much controversy."

-- Glenn Greenwald, discussing the inhumane conditions the U.S. government is imposing upon accused leaker Pfc. Bradley Manning.

Read the entire disturbing account here.

Quote(s) of the Day

2010-12-03T11:30:00.000-05:00

First, Megan McArdle on Julian Assange:

Julian Assange seems to have fallen prey to what I call Supply-Sider's Disease, a little-known, yet surprising widespread psychiatric disorder in which people become convinced that things they very much want to do from strong moral convictions, must therefore have no downside.

The whole post is worth a read and the last graf screams truth.

Second, an excerpted Thomas Mallon, courtesy of Hitch:

Washington novels, such as they are, tend to be found on racks at National Airport, the raised gold letters of their titles promising a bomb on Air Force One or a terrorist kidnapping of the First Lady. There’s a reason for all the goofiness. A serious novelist must take his characters seriously, regard them as three-dimensional creatures with inner lives and authentic moral crises; and that’s just what, out of a certain democratic pride, Americans refuse to do with their politicians.

Hitchens' City Journal article on the search for the great DC novel is simply excellent top to bottom.

Sorry blogging has been ~~light~~ non-existent recently -- been buried in research.

Have a good weekend!

Mood Music Monday

2010-11-22T14:30:00.012-05:00

A driving noise was coming from the office next to mine Friday afternoon, so I went to check it out. It was this song--a throwback bluesy rock track with a dark side. In short, I love it.

I haven't sampled the rest of their catalog yet--I'm not sure it can live up to this song, and given iTunes users ratings, the rest of that album probably falls well short of it. But I'll definitely check the rest out when I get a moment. Til then, I give you the Black Rebel Motorcycle Club:

If that's not your thing, perhaps you'll enjoy what at least one researcher claims to be the first Rock n' Roll song ever recorded. (Shocker: Elvis covered it.)

bellum medicamenti delenda est.

David Nolan, RIP

2010-11-22T13:18:00.001-05:00

I never met David Nolan, founder of the Libertarian Party, who died this weekend at the age of 66. I've never been an adherent of "the LP," as we call it, though I have voted for their candidates on several occasions.

In addition to founding the LP, Nolan was famous for creating the Nolan Chart, a two-dimensional map upon which the views of economic and political freedom are measured after the answering 10 relatively simple questions. There have been many maps, surveys and quizzes based upon Nolan's chart--some more objective than others. (I did some digging and thought this one seemed to be the most even-handed online.)

I bring this up, and felt I should note Nolan's passing, because that chart helped start me down the path to my current life. I took a survey based on this chart for the first time in 1992. I was an ardent Republican then, but had already become disaffected by Rush Limbaugh and the Religious Right and knew which side I would take if the latent schism between the fiscal and social conservatives ever materialized. (Of course, it did in the late 90s and early 00s.) The quiz we took, oddly enough in my sophomore year English class, separated me from my classmates even more than I had been already. I was, apparently, a "libertarian" and I'm pretty sure it was the first time I'd ever read the term "classical liberal."

It may not seem like much to you, but it helped me by chipping away at the stigma associated with the term "libertarian"--those 'crazy people' who protest the post office on tax day and implore you to vote for someone you've never heard of who has no chance of winning. The result would lead me to find that I was, in fact, different--but that there were others, however few, that believed the things that I believe: that fiscal prudence and social tolerance are not mutually exclusive; that government welfare programs promote sloth and dependence, despite the good intentions of their designers; and that the government should be drastically smaller than it is now and the country would be better for it if it were.

Thus, for this seemingly innocuous survey--or, at least, the chart upon which the survey was based--I am indebted to David Nolan. My former colleague Dave Weigel has a nice write-up at Slate that's worth a read. Bob Poole, Nolan's personal friend and classmate, in reason here.

David Nolan, RIP

bellum medicamenti delenda est.

Just for Fun Friday: Libertarian Cheat Sheet

2010-11-12T12:00:00.007-05:00

There was much ado on the Twitters this week about what conservatism is, thanks to patently false comments by Jim DeMint, because people tend to lump all conservatives together as if they all believe the same thing.

Similarly, people often think of libertarians as having a monolithic way of thinking, but this could not be further from the truth. Indeed, to paraphrase Brian Doherty's book Radicals for Capitalism, if two libertarians agree on something, one invariably will accuse the other of selling out.

To clear this up, then, I've put together a short list of the many kinds of libertarians so you can tell us apart:

Catoites: Associated with the Cato Institute, typically urbane libertines. Work in a giant greenhouse. Often mistaken for Republicans, but indeed they are too principled.

Reasonoids: Associated with reason magazine, typically libertine urbanites with an aversion to professional attire and a penchant for Johnny Cash impersonators.

CEIers: Convinced that the polar bear floating down the Potomac was just a hallucination brought on by delerium tremens. Remedy: more drink.

Classical Liberals: aging ex-hippies familiar with Latin, Greek and/or the Western Canon.

Randians/Objectivists:Making the principled argument for selfishness since 1957. They believe in objective truth as told by Rand, so they are very much like fundamentalist Muslims though thankfully they're too self-absorbed to blow themselves up.

Paulistas: A cult of personality much like the Randians but lack any cognizable sense of humor. They are best known for driving flame-traffic on websites that criticize the great and powerful Ron.

Liberaltarians: The one group in America that can legitimately blame Obama for their unemployment.

Beckians: Nominal libertarians but de facto conservative populists whose manifesto pines for the day when America was collectively at the height of its irrationality and bloodlust as we entered the anger stage of the grief process. (No, really.) Also, they seem to believe Jesus wrote the Constitution.

Constitutionalists: Lawyers and legal types who take the Constitution much more seriously than the Founders ever did. They seem to believe that Madison was Jesus.

Austrian Economists: Economists who hate math.

Chicago Economists: Economists who hate English.

Anarchists: Statists who've never been mugged.

Minarchists: Anarchists with commitment issues.

Seasteaders: Anarchists (on a boat!) who've never been marauded by pirates.

There you go. So the next time you're navigating a room full of drunk libertarians, this little cheat sheet will give you a good idea of what kind of person you're dealing with.

Have a good weekend!

bellum medicamenti delenda est.

Random Thought for Today

2010-11-11T17:00:00.002-05:00

People aren't especially insane now. They've always been this way--it's just now, thanks to technology, we don't have the luxury of giving them the benefit of the doubt. Think of it like a window into the box with Schrodinger's cat. We knew the populace was unsophisticated and tribal, but now we can see exactly what that entails.

Ergo, Schrodinger's cat was Bill.

This Is What Happens When You Prosecute a Senseless War on a Commodity

2010-11-04T12:13:00.000-04:00

Although I had said that I was going to change the focus of this blog to more criminal justice issues, I haven't really done so to date, save adding the tagline "bellum medicamenti delenda est" to most of my blogposts. This is just crude Latin for "The Drug War Must End."

I have, however, focused my reading to more criminal justice and drug war issues. One of the blogs I read is El Blog Del Narco, a Spanish language blog that chronicles the drug war in Mexico--which, of course, is just America's drug war exported.

The blog is run anonymously, as one would expect when dealing with people who murder en masse with impunity. And not just simple murder: they make a spectacle of it. [N.B.: gruesome details of murders follow. Most links NSFW. ]

Take for example the latest entry: It's entitled "Fotos de ocho ejecutados en cd mante" which translates to "Pictures of Eight Beheaded [people] in Ciudad Mante, Tamaulipas." The pics are as gruesome as they sound, yet having followed this blog for several weeks now, I can tell you it's not shocking to me anymore.

The heads are laid out, eyes closed--some blindfolded--on the opened tailgate of a pickup truck. The bodies of the victims are laid out behind them in the flatbed, with the gaping wounds, left behind by the blades that severed the heads, pointed outward. Underneath the heads is a banner--which often accompany these murders--that reads, very roughly*, "This is what happens when you work for the Zetas. Here are your dirty fucking hawks. Sincerely, the Gulf Cartel."

Other posts this week have included, inter alia, pictures of a group of men going down to authorities Bonnie and Clyde style, video of an ultimately successful but botched two-man hit on one man in what appears to be the entrance to a shopping mall, photo of one guy wearing beachwear in Acapulco shot 14 times at close range--with a three shot coup de grâce--a mass grave in Acapulco that contained 18 bodies, a story of two informants killed in the same clothes in which they made their statements to police, and a video of an interrogation and beheading of another man confessing to working for another dealer. This is in addition to recent photos of a woman decapitated and put on display with her severed head between her legs and several people strung up on an overpass--both with banners explaining their murders.

Since January of 2007, there have been an estimated 28,228 drug-war related deaths in Mexico. Notice they are not drug-related-- they drug-war related. Our prohibitionist policy, exported around the globe via treaty and trade agreements, has cost countless lives in our country and around the world. El Blog Del Narco is a remarkable source that brings home the unspeakable brutality of the consequences of our misguided moralist policy. That Proposition 19 went down to defeat Tuesday because people are afraid of the consequences of legalization would be laughable if it were not enabling further this ongoing tragedy.

This is Mexico on America's War on Drugs. Any questions?

bellum medicamenti delenda est

*I can't speak Spanish, and only can read it on a very basic level thanks to my fading acquaintance with Latin. I used the site's auto-translate and asked my wonderful girlfriend, Dara, to fill in the gaps.

What, there's a difference?

2010-11-03T20:56:00.001-04:00

A funny website I just found about one of the pains of owning an iPhone: Damn You, Auto Correct.

But I don't get this one...

Tomato, to-mah-to.

bellum medicamenti delenda est.

Change: Ur Doin It Wrong

2010-11-03T10:40:00.002-04:00

No, I'm not talking about Obama.

Even in last night's anti-incumbent "bloodbath," House incumbents had an 87% survival rate, roughly. That anyone thinks last night was a radical shift in our government is a damning indictment of the intelligence of the electorate and demonstrates an expectation to protect our professional liars class.

And these people are scared of "corporate money"--what the hell is it going to do? Knock the incumbency rate down to 84%?

Gimme a break.

bellum medicamenti delenda est.

Vox Populi, Vox Humbug

2010-11-02T17:25:00.000-04:00

Unsurprisingly, a lot of organizations went to the Restore Sanity rally in DC this past weekend and brought along video cameras--just as many people who came to the Tea Party rallies did. Even less surprisingly, they found a bunch of idiots...just like they did at the Tea Party rallies. In large groups of people, of any political or other persuasion, idiots are always in abundance.

Anyway, some vids are funnier than others. This vid was done by folks at the Second City Network:

After I posted it on my facebook page, my friend Libby put it up on hers with a note saying, with other similarly unflattering commentary, "There is no [gosh darn] country named "Keynesia."

Which got me thinking: there should be some sort of economics fable with a land called Keynesia. Or maybe a limerick:

There once was a land called Keynesia,
where all in the land had amnesia,
they spent all their money,
and wasn't it funny,
that nobody knows where it went?

*Headline stolen from William Tecumseh Sherman.

bellum medicamenti delenda est.

Random Thoughts for Today

2010-11-02T00:14:00.000-04:00

I've decided to post some random musings for get-to-know-your-blogger purposes, but this is not a "link round up." There may be links, but usually it will be to clarify the comment for those who don't happen to know to what I am referring. Also, I don't plan on making this a daily thing because sometimes I don't have anything worthwhile to share with you and I don't want to force it.

Yes, for reasons I've explained before, I'm voting today. The Voting Rights Act passed in 1965...when my dad was 37 years old. (Call me sentimental.) Oh, and if someone posts pics of me from later tonight smiling, that's not joy--that's just deep-seated schadenfreude.

Congrats to the Giants on winning the World Series. As the champagne corks popped in San Fran, I'm sure Brian Cashman was on the phone with Cliff Lee's agent expressing his heartfelt condolences as Pink Floyd's "Money" was playing in the background. [insert evil laughter here.]

Say what you will about Donovan McNabb, on no planet and in no parallel universe is benching him for Rex Grossman a reasonable decision. I'm sure many Chicagoans were rushed to emergency rooms after falling off bar stools and laughing uncontrollably after seeing the substitution...and then the hit...and then the fumble...and then the touchdown.

bellum medicamenti delenda est.

Mood Music Monday

2010-11-01T15:25:00.000-04:00

Keynes versus Hayek Rap Battle: The Sequel

HT: Tim Andrews

Cato's Botched-Raid Map

2010-10-28T14:25:00.001-04:00

One of the most meaningful and inspiring works I've read since coming to DC was Radley Balko's Cato white paper, Overkill. It is an eye-opening work that helped inspire me to do the work and research on which I plan to make my career.

Subsequently, Radley and Cato developed an online map that chronicled the "isolated incidents" of raids-gone-wrong. While I and others have contributed to the project since Radley's move to reason (and happy subsequent return to Cato as an adjunct scholar), it is most certainly his baby--along with Cato web guru Lee Laslo--and all praise goes to them.

It is now embeddable on various websites. Please pass around.

View Original Map and Database

A Little Deductive Reasoning

2010-10-27T11:05:00.000-04:00

When I was rather young, the higher functioning patients from the state hospital (read: mentally challenged folks) would go on bike rides around town, adorned with the reflective orange flag on the back. Years later, I realized that the orange flag represented "slow moving vehicle."

At the time, as a six year old with not yet developed deductive reasoning skills, I just thought the flags meant "I'm retarded."

Good thing I'm not growing up in Catalonia:

Women touting for customers on a rural highway outside Els Alamus near Lleida in Catalonia have been told to don the yellow fluorescent bibs or pay fines of 40 euros (£36) under road traffic laws.

Police claim the sex workers on the LL-11 road are not being specifically targeted because of what they do but because they posed a danger to drivers.

HT: Jesse Walker at reason.

Old and Busted: Situational Constitiutionalism

2010-10-26T15:46:00.000-04:00

New hotness: Cafeteria Constitutionalism-- n. the act of selecting the parts of the Constitution that best support your worldview while ignoring those that preclude your policy preferences.

I was encouraged to stake my claim to the phrase. I happen to like it better than "Situational Constitutionalism" ~~so consider the claim staked.~~ but, alas, a quick google search and it seems I'm a few months too late.

I understand that this becomes a pretty weak blogpost, then, so to make up for it I give you kittehs playing paddy cake:

Selective Outrage

2010-10-26T13:36:00.005-04:00

I admit, as someone who loathes both the Republican and Democratic parties, it may be easier for me to be equally disgusted with the acts of each party and its respective adherents. Thus, when I saw this incident this morning, I was appalled that it happened and am even more angered by the fact that the thug who forcefully battered this woman with his foot is walking free right now.

It instantly brought to mind this incident from August 2009:

Political violence of this sort is inexcusable. Absolutely and unquestionably inexcusable. The perpetrators of both incidents should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

Appropriately, the Left is rather outraged that this young woman was attacked. Thankfully, she only sustained minor injuries.

The same outrage was noticeably absent when Kenneth Gladney, the man in the second video, was thrown to the ground by union members/Russ Carnahan supporters in Missouri. While I grant showing up at later events in a wheelchair was probably indulgent, the only mention that the attack gets on TAPPED and ThinkProgress was to mock the later-debunked assertion that Gladney didn't have insurance. What a hilarious irony that a man roughed up at a health care reform event trying to sell Gadsden flag merch would be out of a job and without insurance! HA! (Subsequently, it appears, there are some in the Missouri NAACP who are supporting the defendants by calling Gladney an Uncle Tom. Lovely.)

Adding insult to injury, Jamelle Bouie decided to 'libertarian-punch' in his response today titled "Libertarians against dissent."

"In fairness," he writes, "we don't know if these supporters are libertarians." That's an odd title for someone trying to be "fair."

I don't know what Bouie thought of the Gladney situation, but the libertarian broad-brush is just offensive here. This is especially offensive because he lumps libertarians in with anti-gay, anti-Muslim folks that don't reflect libertarian values at all, in order to describe a handful of outwardly violent people. Usually, when people assign malicious tendencies to an entire group for the actions of a few (who may or may not actually be members of said group), we give it a name: prejudice. Hey, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe some of his best friends are libertarian.

Anyway, I'm not upset that the Left is outraged by this attack. They should be. We all should be. But the outrage should be directed at the violence of the attackers, not the ideological persuasion of anyone involved.

And a Silver Star for Prison Nurseries!

2010-10-25T15:26:00.005-04:00

There is just so much wrong with this Northern Ohio editorial about a report on incarcerated women:

The report, released Thursday by the National Women's Law Center and the Rebecca Project for Human Rights, analyzes policies in three areas — prenatal care, shackling of pregnant women during childbirth, and community-based alternatives to incarceration enabling mothers to be with their children.

Only one state, Pennsylvania, received an A. Ohio received a C, scoring a D in prenatal care, a D in shackling policies and an A in community-based alternatives. Ohio also earned a B for its prison nurseries.

Let's put aside the awfulness of reading a sentence that "also" gives a letter grade to a prison nursery system and discuss the "alternatives to incarceration." Here's an alternative: let's try eliminating mandatory minimums:

As a backdrop to its findings, the report noted the number of women in prison — more than 115,000 as of 2009 — has risen at a higher rate than that of men since the introduction of mandatory sentencing policies for many drug offenses. It said most of the women are nonviolent, first-time offenders, and about two-thirds have at least one child under 18. (emphasis mine)

Put two and two together: legislative overreach into the judicial branch has authorized the government to put shackles on non-violent first-time offenders giving birth to children. In what bizarro world is this considered humane? What kind of society does this to a woman?

Well, the News-Herald has an original idea to prevent these situations: Just say "no":

While we support greater accountability and consistency, and while we don't feel women should be shackled to the extent they suffer lasting hip and back injuries while giving birth, as an Arkansas women alleges in a lawsuit, we feel the better way for mothers to avoid these problems is simply to stay out of prison in the first place.

Certainly a pregnant woman's health — and the health of her child — should be accounted for, but ultimately, incarcerated mothers are in the situation they're in because they committed a crime — for which they knew there would be consequences. (emphases added; smug contempt for justice in original.)

Shorter News-Herald: Well, so long as the shackles allow certain leeway so as to prevent injury, we see nothing wrong with treating a woman giving birth with less respect than we would give an animal in a zoo.

The 'crime ergo punishment' argument is as weak as it is tired. Yes, if you commit a crime, you can expect punishment if caught. This does not mean that any and all punishments are acceptable for any given crime.

There is a genuine and disturbing disconnect in this country between those who believe in blind justice, as I do, and those who believe that law and order should be blind to justice.

Photo courtesy of Jane Evelyn Atwood; used without permission.

That someone is labeled a "convict" or a "criminal" is not license to treat them inhumanely. This is even more true for those who have violated laws that are themselves unjust--as most of our drug laws and sentencing laws are.

bellum medicamenti delenda est.

Quick Comment on Juan Williams Fiasco

2010-10-25T11:20:00.000-04:00

I don't listen to NPR. I don't watch FoxNews. As far as I can tell, Juan got canned by one organization of stunning hypocrites to work for another organization full of stunning hypocrites. Meanwhile, hypocrites unaffiliated with either NPR or FoxNews are being stunningly hypocritical when discussing the matter.

Admittedly, if I watched as much FoxNews as Juan presumably does, I'd probably be irrationally afraid of Muslims too.

Mood Music Monday

2010-10-25T11:18:00.000-04:00

Just because it was stuck in my head this morning:

I will never get tired of reading Ta-Nehisi Coates

2010-10-20T12:17:00.000-04:00

Growing up where I did, there was a different code you lived by; and a different way you handled yourself and those who challenged you. I didn't grow up in Baltimore, as Ta-Nehisi did, but the principle (though certainly not the level of violence) is the same. This later incident is reminiscent of how a confrontation might go down:

The gentleman kept after me, even following me out the tent, and by this point, taunting.

At the door of the tent, and I looked at him and said, "You really need to back off."

He looked back and said, "Or what."

I closed in on him, and quietly but seriously, responded, "You really want to find out?"

He walked back inside.

I was recently recounting to someone how I threw a football player up against a concrete wall for cutting in front of me in the lunch line in high school. He could have easily beaten my ass, but my gambit worked. But the projection of violence was essential to that moment--that "don't fuck with me" moment--after I had finally, after so many years of being picked on, attained enough self-confidence to stand up for myself. I was proud of that moment, and would do it again--if I was back in my high school.

TNC's latest gem about the stupidity of his moment in 2008 screams Truth to me. "Civil" society, where fistfights aren't commonplace and projections of power are exhibited by displays of earned (or, just as often, inherited) professional and educational status, will not tolerate the behavior that separated the "men" from the "punks" back home. Now, though I have been away from that life for a decade and a half, the temptation remains. But wisdom and forethought win out, because they have to. Those of us without Ivy League credentials and trust funds to fall back on don't get to bounce back like they do. I can't take a swing at someone just because they deserve it--and trust me, they do--because I am living my one chance. I got out, and I'm not going back.

If you want to get into the mind of a kid made good, you have to read this.

Too Much of a Good Thing?

2010-10-15T16:55:00.003-04:00

Adam Serwer takes exception to Dave Weigel's belief that the Dems' latest bugaboo--funding for the Chamber of Commerce--basically boils down to the message "foreign = bad."

I'm not on the SCARY FOREIGN MONEY train, but like Antonin frickin' Scalia, I think democracy works best when people are publicly accountable for their political speech, that anonymity under these circumstances undermines civic responsibility, and that the First Amendment protects your freedom to speak and doesn't confer a freedom not to be criticized, particularly if you're an individual with the means to spend millions to swing the outcome of a political contest. Who is saying something, and who is paying them to say it, matters.

I wonder how far Serwer thinks this 'transparency' should go. Where is the line--by which I mean legal standard--drawn? Is it just particularly widespread or effective political speech? What if IOZ becomes insanely popular, a la Glenn Beck, and launches effective rants against a candidate? Should we then compel him to reveal himself and all his sources of income? I don't think so.

There is nothing in the Constitution that requires, or even suggests, that people should reveal their identities when engaging in political speech.

Indeed, the suggestion that they should would have been rather odd coming from that Publius guy.

Look, I'm all for government transparency and we need a lot more of it. Freedom of speech is one of our most cherished rights and disclosure requirements can act as a preemptive chill on speakers. Despite the opinions of Mr. Serwer and Justice Scalia, our democracy has worked just fine when we don't know exactly who is saying what. Speech should be judged for its content and not necessarily for the identities of its speakers.

Why I'm Not a 'Feminist'

2010-10-14T14:20:00.000-04:00

Via Ta-Nehisi Coates, E.J. Graff's commentary from Slate's navel-gazing on the use of the label "feminist" :

Who gets to be a feminist? It's the wrong question. And debating it leads to the wrong answers. Identity labels always mislead.

They don't disclose the contents of the bottle; they proclaim that the bottle is powerful, meaningful, and important. Debates over who gets to wear those labels are tribal battles about who runs the group and who gets to patrol its borders, about who holds power. Declaring that someone is--or isn't--"really" white, black, Jewish, Christian, radical, conservative--or feminist--says nothing about the value of particular policies, ideas, or goals...

Here's the debate I believe is genuinely worth having: What would full equality look like--and what do we have to do to get there?

I think including ethnic groups muddies the point a bit, but in the main I think this is exactly right. Anyone who believes that Glenn Beck is an actual heir to the mantle of Martin Luther King, has deeper problems that can not be corrected by fiddling with labels.

Indeed.

Because I am for equal rights for all people, I refer to myself as a "classical liberal" or "libertarian"; and while I understand that activists who concentrate on certain issues feel they need to label themselves as specifically interested in issues of a certain gender, race or other identity/classification, I think the specialization obscures the point of freedom and equality generally. I am a black man and a libertarian, but I am not a 'black libertarian' as a political identity or focus.

But 'feminist,' as a word, bothers me. I'm not a 'homosexualist' because I believe in full and unfettered rights of gays (not to mention the diversity of queer identities not encapsulated in the term). I don't like the term "straight ally" because that perpetuates the ubiquitous war metaphor and accepts a barrier between straights and gays (or other queer identifications) when the whole point is equality. (This is the same tension present in the 'colorblind society' versus 'accept me as a black person and all that entails' narratives, but that's another story.) I just am more concerned with the views and laws that prevent equality and justice and less concerned with nominally identifying myself in relation to specific injustices.

Look, if you want to call me a feminist, fine. I liken it to "African-American" --it's not a term that I use for myself or others, for various reasons, but I'm not offended by it. It's just a preference.

Just for Fun Friday: Baseball Edition

2010-10-08T10:00:00.002-04:00

Not to rub it in to Mets fans, but I saw this last week and thought it was absolutely hilarious. (If you don't follow baseball, this will not really do much for you. Sorry 'bout that.)

The Unintended Consequences of Immigration Enforcement

2010-10-04T12:18:00.001-04:00

One of the recurring tropes I hear from the anti-immigrant folks is that undocumented immigrants get in car accidents and have no insurance, thus costing innocent, responsible drivers money by forcing out-of-pocket payments for damages or consequent higher premiums, due to no fault of their own. While I can certainly empathize with the people who feel 'cheated' by these folks, they should actually be blaming the system.

Why? Because the enforcement mechanisms in place in many states forbid undocumented immigrants to have drivers' licenses, thus rendering them ineligible to purchase auto insurance. Given that 'driving while undocumented' has become a deportable offense, one can assume that many of the hardworking immigrants who risked so much to get here would pay a few bucks a month to drive legally and pay for inadvertent damage their mistake may have caused.

It's good to see this story making headlines, finally. Kudos to WaPo for covering it, albeit too late for the CIR battle.

Moron More On One Nation

2010-10-04T11:42:00.000-04:00

My former boss Nick Gillespie pokes around the One Nation rally:

Takeaways: Dick Gregory is out of his damned mind. Julian Bond says he hasn't seen 'too much government' yet. (What?!?!?) AFL-CIO head sez 'Bailouts For Me, but not for Thee.' Ed Shultz of MSNBC says of racism in the Tea Parties "look at their signs"--one wonders if he would appreciate the same broad-brushed treatment.

Goose, Gander, and Whatnot

2010-10-04T11:05:00.002-04:00

So I'm going through my Twitter feed this morning and a conservative IU alum I follow retweeted the following video from Americans for Prosperity. Now, I would imagine the title of the video is misleading, but no more misleading than the accusations that racism 'dominates' the heart of the Tea Parties. You see, when you get thousands of people together, you're gonna have a certain number of crazies that seem to justify the worst fears of the march's opponents.

Granted, the racists at the Tea Parties aren't this organized.

I'm not saying the Left's agenda is avowedly Socialist, as the economically illiterate morons in this video evidently are. I'm just saying before you get on your high horse and start accusing one side of being one thing because a braying yahoo holds up a sign, it doesn't mean that everyone around them buys into their nonsense.

Just for Fun Friday

2010-10-01T13:29:00.000-04:00

"Reasons to Date Writers" as critiqued by a writer.

Also, for those of you less amused by writer's humor, the latest internet sensation:

Every Little Step with Mike Tyson & Wayne Brady from Mike Tyson

One of These Things Is Not Like the Others

2010-09-30T17:13:00.010-04:00

So The Nation recently published its list of "The Fifty Most Influential Progressives of the Twentieth Century." Regardless of your political leanings, the list is certainly debatable. (I may write more on some of their selections later.) But one of the last paragraphs of the introduction to the list struck me as offensively off-base:

A few of the people on the list expressed views, at some point in their lives, that progressives consider objectionable, such as Margaret Sanger's endorsement of eugenics, Earl Warren's support for rounding up Japanese-Americans during World War II, Bayard Rustin's support for the Vietnam War and Jackie Robinson's attack on Paul Robeson. They made mistakes, which may be understandable in historical context, but which should be acknowledged as part of their lives and times.

Now, it must be mentioned that Jackie did testify before ~~McCarthy's~~ the House Un-American Activities Committee. That's a big deal. But here's some background on exactly went down:

More here.

What, pray tell, do you suppose would have happened if some uppity nigger baseball player told HUAC, by way of polite declination, to shove it's "invitation"? Yet somehow, this action--the reluctant testimony to separate the fight for racial equality from the looming specter of communism--is mentioned in the same sentence with support for a war that killed over a million soldiers and civilians, Margaret Sanger's enthusiastic genocidal attachment to Eugenics and throwing thousands of American citizens into detention camps for their ethnicity. (Without mentioning FDR's role in it, no less.)

This "attack" was mentioned again in Robinson's profile--as was Warren's culpability in the Japanese internment in his own--but Rustin's and Sanger's "mistakes" are stricken from their laudatory bios. Apparently, to Professor Dreier and The Nation's editors, an effectively coerced statement that illustrates differing civil rights approaches--while maintaining the shared contempt of the United States' criminal and unconstitutional discrimination policies--reflects as poorly on Jackie Robinson as the racist dedication of Margaret Sanger and authorizing the false imprisonment of over 100,000 innocent people.

Unbelievable.

Just for Fun Friday: Triumphant Return Edition

2010-09-24T12:39:00.000-04:00

Hey all. Sorry about the hiatus. My busy time is over, so I'm starting up my research and writing again. This will probably make the blog a little more focused on criminal justice issues, but I hope to still keep it entertaining for the rest of you too.

Anyway, courtesy of Julian's twitter feed, I give you a collection of animated gifs and music mashups. The audio isn't safe for work, unless melodic F-bombs are cool at your job. Most of the video is safe, though you will see a canine sexually assault a plush toy. You've been warned.

Hopefully I'll have some decent content up next week. Til then, enjoy.

Cache Rules Everything Around Me from Evan Roth on Vimeo.

Stare Decisis: Latin for "Because We Said So"

2010-08-26T17:29:00.002-04:00

I was writing another post about "situational constitutionalism" and one of the links I was going to use was Justice Scalia's scathing dissent* from the 1992 abortion case, Planned Parenthood v. Casey. I found myself no longer wanting to write the post because Scalia does such a marvelous job deconstructing the plurality's incoherent stare decisis argument that Casey upholds the constitutionality of Roe while it simultaneously guts everything substantive in the opinion. Re-reading it brought back memories of Con Law back at IU--and of a Scalia I admired so much more than I do now.

That said, I have three things to mention before linking to the opinion:

First, I am personally "pro-choice" and legal abortion is my policy preference, for a number of reasons. There is nothing inconsistent with Scalia's dissent and holding these positions because I don't believe abortion access should be a federal matter, for reasons Scalia explains better than I could.

Second, part of the inspiration for this post still requires mentioning, especially in the context of policy assertions divorced from reality: referring to abortion clinics as "reproductive centers" is enough to make Orwell proud. There is no doubt that Ms. Lithwick is not the first person to have used this insultingly absurd misnomer, but I read it and nearly suffered ocular strain from the eyeroll it induced.

Third, I wish the Scalia who wrote this opinion was present in the McDonald decision. Instead, we got a conservative hiding behind insults to the legal academy to ~~capitulate~~ sell-out to substantive due process; proof in a black robe that the Right, just as easily as the Left, can lack the intellectual honesty to be constitutionally consistent.

Unfortuately, I couldn't find a PDF of the slip opinion that isn't behind a pay wall, so HTML will have to do.

*Technically, it's a concurrence in part and a dissent in part, but the text makes pretty clear that Nino isn't being very agreeable.

Mood Music Monday

2010-08-09T22:43:00.001-04:00

If livin' was actually easy, it wouldn't be almost 11PM before I posted my Mood Music Monday--but it just came on my iTunes and it's a great song. The embedded video could have used a spell check, but spelling isn't really the point, now is it? Enjoy--I hope to post something substantive soon.

The Systemic Unfairness of the Criminal Justice System

2010-08-02T10:56:00.002-04:00

A rich man railroaded by an unconstitutional law reflects on his 28 months in federal prison:

It had been an interesting experience, from which I developed a much greater practical knowledge than I had ever had before of those who had drawn a short straw from the system; of the realities of street level American race relations; of the pathology of incorrigible criminals; and of the wasted opportunities for the reintegration of many of these people into society. I saw at close range the failure of the U.S. War on Drugs, with absurd sentences, (including 20 years for marijuana offences, although 42% of Americans have used marijuana and it is the greatest cash crop in California.) A trillion dollars have been spent, a million easily replaceable small fry are in prison, and the targeted substances are more available and of better quality than ever, while producing countries such as Colombia and Mexico are in a state of civil war.

I had seen at close range the injustice of sentences one hundred times more severe for crack cocaine than for powder cocaine, a straight act of discrimination against African-Americans, that even the first black president and attorney general have only ameliorated with tepid support for a measure, still being debated, to reduce the disparity of sentence from 100 to one to 18 to one.

And I had heard the vehement allegations of many fellow residents of the fraudulence of the public defender system, where court-appointed lawyers, it is universally and plausibly alleged, are more often than not stooges of the prosecutors. They are paid for the number of clients they represent rather than for their level of success, and they do usually plead their clients to prison. They provide a thin veneer for the fable of the poor citizen’s day in court to receive impartial justice through due process.

And I had the opportunity to see why the United States has six to twelve times as many incarcerated people as other prosperous democracies, (Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom), how the prison industry grew, and successfully sought more prisoners, longer sentences, and maximal possibilities of probation violations and a swift return to custody.

Before I got into the maw of the U.S. legal system, I did not realize the country has 47 million people with a criminal record, (most for relatively trivial offenses,) or that prosecutors won more than 90% of their cases. There, at Coleman, I had seen the courage of self-help, the pathos of broken men, the drawn faces of the hopeless, the glazed expression of the heavily medicated, (90% of Americans judged to require confinement for psychiatric reasons are in the prison system), and the nonchalance of those who find prison a comfortable welfare system compared to the skid row that was their former milieu. America’s 2.4 million prisoners, and millions more awaiting trial or on supervised release, are an ostracized, voiceless legion of the walking dead; they are no one’s constituency.

The whole thing, very much worth the read, here.

UPDATE: I should mention that I don't endorse everything Mr. Black says in the piece and I think he is guilty of over-generalization, especially painting public defenders as "in league" with the prosecutors. I think the PD system needs serious adjustment, as does the plea bargaining process. I stand by my encouragement to read it, but not without a critical eye. -JPB

Post: Racial.

2010-07-23T11:30:00.014-04:00

I've been hesitant to weigh in on the numerous stories discussing "racism" that have pervaded my Google Reader and Twitter feed this week, but I'm so incredibly angry that I have to get it off my chest. I saw a teaser on CNN Thursday asking "Who is to blame for the Shirley Sherrod controversy?" Frankly, I'm blaming everybody.

First, shame on the NAACP for their inane stunt condemning "racism" in the Tea Parties. (This should be viewed with only slightly more seriousness than their last major pointless condemnation--burying the N-word.) Yeah, racists show up to Tea Party rallies. Yeah, a lot of tea partiers are pretty clueless on race issues--as are a lot of people. What the hell does that have to do with anything? It's not part of their platform. It's a convenient distraction that maligns them in order to obscure their actual message.

The Tea Parties are a decentralized group of people of divergent interests who generally oppose the president's policies. I am not a Tea Partier, I think they're misguided on a lot of issues, but I am certainly sympathetic to some of their objectives. That some of them are ignorant bigots is no surprise to me, but the vast majority of them are average folks who could probably not care less what color the president is. You get thousands of people together in any sort of group and I can find you fringe idiots with offensive signage. Does the Tea Party crowd have more than most, at least in terms of racial insensitivity? Perhaps, but it's not as if anyone can revoke someone else's membership in a national club that doesn't exist.

What the NAACP did was foolish and inflammatory. They could have, as Rachel Maddow did Wednesday night, come up with a bunch of evidence that Fox, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and so many others are intentionally race-baiting, and condemned that. But no, they went after a decentralized group of mostly white people and, effectively, called them "racists."*

Now, I know as well as anyone that no word, and I mean NO WORD, in the English language has the emotive power of "nigger." The history, the resentment, the hate, the anger that it elicits is simply and unquestionably unmatched in the context of American society. That said, I can't think of a word that puts white people on the defensive as quickly and angrily as "racist." It's a tag so vile that it hits them like a slap in the face, because they now have to defend themselves against a charge that attacks their thoughts and feelings--their very nature. How does one go about proving or disproving that? ("Some of my best friends are black," has become a mocking trope about white people dodging the accusation, with good reason.) Even if the claim is accurate, such an acerbic accusation precludes any reasonable discussion from that point on.

This is because no one thinks of himself as a racist. Not even David Duke. But when "racist" is used, Duke comes to mind. Bull Connor. George Wallace. The Klan. They're racists, to be sure. Yet, they are mostly relics of the old, explicit racism--not the implicit, institutional, or otherwise veiled racism that still pervades society. (Yes, Virginia, there is still racism all around you.) Which is where many white people, I think, get lost. They think of fire hoses and dogs; black men hanging from trees. We think of those too, but also clutched purses, hopeless job interviews and denied loan applications. We think of living through "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" nights and nigger jokes. We think of Willie Horton ads and monkey t-shirts. Those too are, or can be, evidence of racism, but of a more insidious kind.

Given all that, the preeminent organization representing black interests in America effectively called a large group of white people "racist." In response, at least one prominent member of the Tea Party reacted to the charge--with a wretched "satire" that seemed to prove the NAACP's point. I cannot and will not defend the man for his vile response, but that he reacted bitterly to a perceived attack should surprise no one. (Consequently, he and his organization, the Tea Party Express, were purged from at least one Tea Party coalition group, and rightfully so.)

Predictably, Andrew Breitbart lashed out and released a severely edited video of a speech at a NAACP Freedom Fund Banquet Dinner--oddly enough, I was awarded** a small FFBD scholarship by the IU chapter--by Ms. Shirley Sherrod, an appointed bureaucrat, recounting a time where she let her prejudices get the better of her. Even in the original release, it appeared to me that it was past tense, and her comment about it not being about it not about "black or white" issues, but rather the plight of the "poor," further cemented that she was being reflecting with remorse over her actions.

That said, I thought her use of "his own kind" to describe the lawyers to whom she took the white farmer she wronged, made her firing, if not warranted, unsurprising.

The rest of the tape was eventually released, and it turns out that my initial thoughts about her intent were correct. People then fell all over themselves to rush to her defense--some in much more reverential terms than I think were due her--and she's since been offered a new job in the Department of Agriculture.

Thus, my Google Reader was full of blogposts like the one linked above (though most were not as well-written). My Twitter feed lit up with condemnations of the Administration's actions and the NAACP's disavowal of her, then the reaction to the White House and NAACP retractions, and on and on as the story unfolded. Then the Right started in on the NAACP's audience in the video (a smattering of whom were audibly clapping at some of the more unseemly parts of her story) with more accusations of...racism.

So these are the people having the 'national conversation' on race? It would be just as productive for them to have a national conversation on astrophysics.

I went to bed Wednesday night annoyed, but mostly past the anger that had been welling up in me as I read this mindless and sickening back-and-forth. I came to work Thursday and a colleague sent me a link to a WaPo blog entry titled:

Shirley Sherrod blasts Fox News as racist

God. Damn. It.

The money quote, from the interview she gave to Media Matters:

"They were looking for the result they got yesterday," [Sherrod] said of Fox. "I am just a pawn. I was just here. They are after a bigger thing, they would love to take us back to where we were many years ago. Back to where black people were looking down, not looking white folks in the face, not being able to compete for a job out there and not be a whole person." (emphasis mine)

That's right. Fox News wants to bring back Jim Crow. Now, I'm no fan of FNC, and certainly not of Glenn Beck or his ilk, but this is just absurd. Are there racists at Fox News? Yeah, probably. (I wouldn't put it past MSNBC either.) There are certainly race-baiters, as shown in the Maddow clip linked to above, but I don't think for one second that Fox is a cabal of racist neo-segregationists trying to return to the days of crippling racial separation. This is hyperbolic nonsense that just makes matters worse.

As much as I used to respect the NAACP, it has, indeed, fallen from its once-proud heights. And, certainly, I think it could still play a vital role in making our society a better place, if it were only inclined to do so. But engaging the amorphous Tea Parties by singling them out for racism was, in its own right, baiting them. That is not constructive--as we have seen over the past few days--as accusations of racism are traded back-and-forth by windbags, bloggers, the Twitterati, and government officials, all trying to make themselves look good as they crawl out of this cesspool of racial animosity.

This is not to say the NAACP should be wary of white backlash when they are standing for something important, but it shouldn't look to provoke antipathy with a symbolic political gesture tinged with loaded language either. They should be better than that. This is not "advancement."

And let it be clear, while the NAACP's proclamation was the catalyst for this, everyone involved deserves a large amount of blame: Breitbart for irresponsibly releasing an edited video out of context and writing a damning blogpost to accompany it (find it yourself, I'm not linking it here); that ridiculous Tea Party Express [idiot] who wrote the 'letter to Lincoln' in a shocking display of callow ignorance and racial insensitivity; the bloggers and Twitterers (of all political stripes) who were all over this story with self-righteous indignation as they leapt, fingers pointed, into the fray; the Administration and the Ag Department for jumping the gun and making a decision without finding out the facts, and yes, Shirley Sherrod for her poor choice of words and subsequent hyperbolic accusations against Fox News, who can and should be rebuked for so much of what they actually believe and put on the air.

It's all a disgusting mess, and we're all covered in it.

*I understand their disclaimer that they "take no issue with the Tea Party movement." Yet, given the title of their press release and separate references to unnamed racist "leaders," "elements," and "factions," the accusation was directed a broad and undefined target. The awful incidents, though their veracity has since been called into question--most famously by Andrew Breitbart's $100,000 bounty for evidence that they occurred--had already been condemned by GOP leadership and, ironically, the now disgraced Tea Party Express. Furthermore, that those incidents were perpetrated by racist "leaders" or "factions" has, to my knowledge, not even been alleged, let alone substantiated.

**In 2004, I won a $300 scholarship from the Indiana University chapter of the NAACP for an essay on overcoming adversity to get back into school. I was unable to attend the dinner because I couldn't get my shift off at work, and I never actually received the money. I followed up once, but to no avail. The honor was, and is, more important to me than the $300, despite my ongoing disappointment with the national organization.

It seems Texas education wasn't working that well before... you shouldn't judge Congresspeople by their alma maters

2010-07-19T10:53:00.002-04:00

I present Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee (D-TX), national embarrassment:

Someone get this idiot a map and a history book please.

UPDATE: It was brought to my attention that Rep. Jackson-Lee went to Yale, and in confirming this it turns out she's also a grad of UVA Law...and Jamaica High School in Queens, NY. So, apparently, she's a carpetbagging Yankee and not a product of Texas's school system. Apologies to the Lone Star State for the mix-up.

Burying the Lede

2010-07-19T10:49:00.002-04:00

So I'm doing my usual morning news round-up for work, checking out the major papers' headlines and features, and when I get to the LA Times, I come across, "L.A. County sheriff says budget cuts have slowed agency's analysis of drug evidence."

Now, for those who don't share my opinions regarding legalization may read this and just think that Los Angeles needs to get its budgetary house in order (which, of course, it does). But at the end of the story, where many people never manage to reach (such is the fate of most news stories), are these troubling revelations (my emphasis):

Sheriff's officials say cost-saving measures have put them on track to meet their budget-reduction goals — but not without sacrifice. Restrictions on overtime, for example, were shown last month to have significantly slowed fingerprint collection and analysis, often resulting in the destruction of potentially vital evidence.

The lag has delayed dozens of homicide investigations. It's also forced burglary victims to wait longer to have their homes or cars fingerprinted. In May, more than 120 burglary victims decided they couldn't continue preserving the crime scene, calling the Sheriff's Department to cancel fingerprinting altogether.

Cuts have also affected air support, according to Baca's report, with more than 150 requests from patrol units on the ground going unanswered during a two-week span in June.

Clearly, it's more important to spend so much time and resources on consensual exchange and personal drug use than it is to allocate basic services to victims of robbery and murder.

To be fair, some of the drug charges are probably tied to other more serious crimes, but that is not apparent in the thrust of the story, nor would most of those crimes ever be committed if it weren't for drug prohibition enforcement in the first place. What gets me about this story is not simply the police department's priorities, but that the implicit acceptance of those priorities, resulting in the 'oh by the way, murder and burglary cases are growing cold too.' If it was your house that was robbed--and your sense of security shattered--or your loved one dead at the hands of another human being, how would you feel about your case being discarded or delayed to pursue unrelated, non-violent drug busts?

Quick Comment on LeBron

2010-07-09T17:15:00.001-04:00

For my sports fan readers:

I don't watch the NBA. I grew up watching it, but haven't been invested in a team since Sir Charles retired. I may get into the reasons why at another time, but suffice it to say that I could not have cared less where LeBron James chose to play.

The way he did it, however, was nauseating.

How nauseating? That a lifelong Red Sox fan unfavorably compared LeBron to Roger Clemens. It's hard to explain the depth of disgust that Boston feels for the Rocket, but part one is a pretty good explanation. The whole post is worth the read, but the comments/mailbag is just...well. You should at least skim it for the Cleveland(er? ite?) comments.

Pro tip on image: If whatever you do makes someone like Kobe Bryant look humble by comparison, YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG.

Colin McLain, RIP

2010-07-06T23:25:00.002-04:00

With a certain amount of regularity, I write about the deaths of celebrities and other people who have influenced me over the course of my life. While their lives were meaningful to me superficially, their deaths are but margin notes in my life. Today is different.

With a heavy heart, I write to honor a friend and former colleague: Colin McLain.

Undoubtedly, Colin and I were not as close as some as our other friends and colleagues. As I have written before, I detest people who try to bring undue attention to themselves in times of tragedy so I refuse to embellish my relationship with him for sympathy. His parents, close friends, and extended family are infinitely more deserving of whatever sympathy or prayers you may deem appropriate, so please do not mistake this post as a plea for pity or condolences.

Nevertheless, hearing about Colin's passing today was a wounding shock to me, and to anyone who knew him. Our mutual friend Caleb put it well: "Colin McLain was smart, witty, curious, relaxed, fun and skeptical. I will miss him." I would add that he was exuberant, charismatic, and generous, and I will always remember his wonderfully wry sense of humor.

I am normally loath to use the term "tragedy," as I tend to think of events as generally unfortunate, or otherwise just sad. But Colin's death, at age 25, was indeed a tragic loss for everyone fortunate enough to have known him. I remain convinced that he was going to do great and amazing things in his life, no matter what he ended up doing professionally. He was a magnetic and dynamic young man. I'm going to miss him and forever wonder what could have been for him.

My heart goes out to his family for their loss. I can only imagine their terrible grief.

Colin McLain, R.I.P.

Photo courtesy of Colin's family, by way of KFVS12 Heartland News.

A Modest Proposal Compromise

2010-07-06T12:00:00.008-04:00

There is a growing concern that the benefits of citizenship are too broadly given to ~~undesirables~~ children born in this country of non-citizen parents. Further, there is another concern that those who are accused of taking-up arms against their country, or aiding those who do, should have their citizenship revoked without trial or proof of treasonable acts. To address both of these issues, may I suggest a compromise: combine the two, and make them retroactive to 1860. After all, this is a matter of national security and one cannot be too careful.

As you may recall, beginning in 1860, millions of Americans renounced their citizenship and took up arms against their former country. Their deeds, through direct confrontation or diseases brought on by wartime conditions, ended up in the deaths of over 300,000 loyal Americans--100 times the number killed on September 11, 2001. By the logic outlined above, that treason should be recognized and all the descendants of those who took up arms, aided their traitorous comrades, or participated in the government of the insurrectionists should have their citizenship revoked as they are progeny of traitors. They owe their heretofore recognized citizenship to the birthright. That is, of course, unacceptable.

These descendants often still fly the flag of treason and commemorate their forebears' disloyalty in numerous ways. Thus, the combined legislation should include the confiscation and destruction of all property bearing the treasonous flag, including but not exclusive to real estate, monuments, clothing, transportation, and music--so we can once and for all rid the nation of "Freebird."

This may be problematic for many so-called Americans. As we cannot let the fact that perhaps 12 million workers are here in the United States illegally dissuade us from deportations and other law enforcement efforts, millions of descendants of those who would tear apart our nation should get no different treatment. The American birthright to citizenship has allowed children of murderous traitors to grow up around us. Thus, for those ~~white people~~ individuals under reasonable suspicion of traitorous descent, documentation of legal immigration and/or non-traitorous bloodline shall be required by law enforcement officers. (All current law enforcement and other government employees will have to provide this paperwork to remain gainfully employed by the state.)

We are not savages, so let us make sure that all the illegal traitor descendants may apply for citizenship through the proper legal channels. They may start at the back of the line, just like every other non-citizen who wants to be an American. That they're here illegally and contributing to society is not a valid excuse for skirting the law. The law is the law, and it's not fair to all those who have waited for years to come here legally, that some simply being present is enough to grant immunity. It's not like we told their great-great grandfathers to take up arms against their own country.

Slave descendants whose lineage can be traced to slaveholders predating emancipation, of course, would be exempted. Questionable cases and all other challenges will go through the newly formed Bureau of American Integrity, which will be overseen by a non-partisan board made up of genealogists, Native American chiefs, and angry black studies professors.

Some may complain that these measures are too harsh and unconstitutional. To them, I say, everything changed on April 12, 1861.

Mood Music Monday

2010-06-28T09:14:00.000-04:00

I think you probably know why...

Today is going to be busy with the Kagan hearings and the last (and most important, in many respects) SCOTUS cases of the term being released, so I don't know if I'll get to eulogize ol' Bobby Byrd today. If I don't, suffice it to say that I shed no tears.

Just for Fun Friday

2010-06-25T12:07:00.002-04:00

In Defense of Dave Weigel

2010-06-24T17:45:00.001-04:00

Full Disclosure: Dave Weigel and I are friendly former colleagues. I don't know about "friends," per se--but I helped him move once, with Matt Yglesias (!!) inter alia, and we usually exchange a few words when we see each other out. So, while this may be biased, I'd say much the same thing about journos I don't know at all or as well, like Ezra Klein, Spencer Ackerman or even, gasp, Yglesias.

So, there is an off-the-record listserv known as Journolist--not surprisingly, made up of journalists. Now, if there is a group of people outside of the government who better understand what "off the record" means, it's friggin' journalists. Yet, someone on the list has decided to leak an off the record rant of Dave's to a gossip site.

I think anyone who cares about their job--which would be a majority of the people I know in this town--is going to be upset from time to time with the work they do and the reactions to it. We are passionate people who moved to this city to, if you'll pardon the cliche, make a difference. Dave is a serious and dedicated journalist who is good at what he does--and is attacked by all sides for it. Beyond my personal affection for him, I respect the hell out of what he does and how he does it.

God forbid if any of the many off-the-record conversations I've been party to in this town were ever to become public. People share emotional responses to stressful stuff all the time. Some vents are rational, others are hyperbolic overreactions to a set of circumstances, often well-beyond the subject of a particular rant. Sometimes you're just so pissed you let loose a stream of verbal bile that would offend most people out of context--but is understood (or at least, forgiven) among your own. This is what, I imagine, Dave felt Journolist was good for.

He was obviously wrong to trust them, and shame on them for it.

Predictably, WaPo commenters are having a field day at Dave's expense--and I would bet in no small part because there are thousands of people who have "Paultard" in their Google Alerts just so they can pounce on any (virtual) utterance defaming the great and powerful Ron. Sigh.

The point is, we need more journalists like Dave and much less of the gossipy nonsense he's fallen victim to.

Mood Music Monday

2010-06-14T22:47:00.000-04:00

Forgive the tardiness. Working on a bunch of stuff today. Should have a real post up Tuesday.

This was inspired by an ex-roomie's post on facebook, an episode of CSI:LA...and because I'm a tall light-skinned brotha with dimples.

Yes, the vid is corny, but he was 19. Give him a break.

Just for Fun Friday: World Cup Edition

2010-06-11T12:00:00.000-04:00

GO USA! BEAT THE BRITS!!

Reactionary Imbecility

2010-06-11T11:14:00.003-04:00

One of the dangers of working at a place like Cato is living with a constant target on your back. Any time you do something that can possibly be construed the wrong way, chances are it will be -- and often very publicly. This just happened to a colleague last night after he tweeted something with his tongue firmly planted in his cheek.

Predictably, Think Progress went ape:

Michael Cannon, a health policy expert for Cato, the libertarian think tank founded by Charles Koch of the oil conglomerate Koch Industries, took to Twitter today to trade jokes about the oil spill. Responding to a tragic story about a New Orleans area sheriff asking federal authorities to investigate reports that undocumented workers are involved in the oil spill clean up, Cannon tweeted that undocumented workers “are very absorbent.”...While Cannon might have gotten a good laugh out of his comment, pervasive anti-immigrant rhetoric leads to dehumanization and sometimes violence.

Never mind that Charles Koch is no longer associated with Cato. Never mind that Cannon has previously tweeted about the unfair and racist anti-immigrant law in Arizona. And never mind that the person he was responding to is herself a child of an immigrant and is a grandchild of Japanese internment camp victims--camps, of course, established by heroic lefty icon Franklin Roosevelt. No, we at Cato are racist shills for big oil because we believe in private property and free markets. We are fully incapable of holding views in line with the Left and joking at the expense of irrational sheriffs who make headlines with their idiocy. We are evil people whom deserve no benefit of the doubt--or even simple fact-checking our policy stances.(PDF)

Kudos to Dave Weigel for debunking this baseless nonsense over at his WaPo blog.

Mood Music Monday

2010-06-07T09:01:00.003-04:00

I really need to get "Motown 25" on DVD--(is it even available?). If you're not old enough to remember this show, you really should look into it. It was amazing.

Oh, and this was the first time most of America had ever seen the 'Moonwalk.' For anyone interested in pop culture/history, this entire event was remarkable.

Just for Fun Friday

2010-06-04T11:56:00.001-04:00

It's pretty goofy, but I enjoyed it thoroughly.

You can't be serious...

2010-06-02T17:18:00.001-04:00

Teaser from Washington Post.com:

After Gores, is there hope for us?
Al and Tipper's split doesn't just make us sad. It means that maybe we can't succeed in marriage.

I refuse to click through and read it, mainly because I'm not a ridiculous naïf who looks to professional prudes and liars to give my life meaning.

Gimme a f'n break.

Major Andy Olmsted, RIP

2010-05-28T12:00:00.006-04:00

I've linked to this before, but I read it again recently and have no doubt it is worth sharing again as we head into this Memorial Day weekend.

All the background is in the post, but this is a moving farewell from a soldier and blogger killed in Iraq in January 2008. If you haven't read it yet, you should. If you have, read it again.

Andy Olmsted, RIP

Just for Fun Friday

2010-05-28T09:32:00.000-04:00

WANT:

Via my friend Carrie. Full link here.

Just for Fun Friday

2010-05-21T13:23:00.001-04:00

Today is Pac-Man's 30th birthday. In honor of that, here is an interview with the little yellow hero of my youth.

Enjoy.

H/T Dara Lind

Situational Constitutionalism: Jurisdiction of Federal Judiciary

2010-05-19T16:16:00.003-04:00

Predictably--and certainly not without warrant--the Left is now attacking last night's GOP victor for Kentucky's vacated Senate seat, Rand (son of Ron) Paul. One of the sticking points, as explained by TAP's Adam Serwer, is Paul's desire to restrict the federal judiciary from hearing abortion cases:

He also wants to offer legislation "restricting federal courts from hearing cases like Roe v. Wade."

Yeah, that sounds constitutional.

Unfortunately, it very well may be.

Article III, Section 2 of the Constitution clearly states:

The judicial power shall extend to all cases, in law and equity, arising under this Constitution, the laws of the United States, and treaties made, or which shall be made, under their authority;--to all cases affecting ambassadors, other public ministers and consuls;--to all cases of admiralty and maritime jurisdiction;--to controversies to which the United States shall be a party;--to controversies between two or more states;--between a state and citizens of another state;--between citizens of different states;--between citizens of the same state claiming lands under grants of different states, and between a state, or the citizens thereof, and foreign states, citizens or subjects.

In all cases affecting ambassadors, other public ministers and consuls, and those in which a state shall be party, the Supreme Court shall have original jurisdiction. In all the other cases before mentioned, the Supreme Court shall have appellate jurisdiction, both as to law and fact, with such exceptions, and under such regulations as the Congress shall make. (emphasis added)

Whether we like it or not--and I, for one, don't--Congress's authority to limit federal jurisdiction is explicit in the text of the Constitution and thus has the full force of law. Though the "least dangerous branch" of our federal system, the Judiciary is nevertheless limited by a hefty Congressional check on its authority.

That Congress has not often acted to reduce the scope of federal jurisdiction is a testament to the reverence our system typically pays to the Judiciary. But no less important is the political cost that any Congress would be forced to pay if it overstepped its conventional prerogatives, even if they acted within their legal capacity. Between the political pressure and the sort of gentlemen's agreement between Congress and the Court, unpopular SCOTUS decisions tend to be sustained, or contravened only at the margins. This is certainly not the most secure way to maintain the Court's independence--trusting politicians to be responsible--but it seems to be enough to be a large enough counterweight to aggressive overreach when combined with Congressional electoral self-interest.

I engaged Mr. Serwer on this issue before and after my lunch break, and at one point he wrote:

[I]t would make the bill of rights irrelevant if you could strip the court's authority to review cases involving them

This is not actually true. The Court has ruled that where it has original jurisdiction and explicit (enumerated) authority is not within the power of Congress to restrict. Certainly, the Bill of Rights (or any other explicit power or protection in the Constitution) qualifies by its very existence. Emanations and penumbras? Well...not so much.

The point is, the Constitution means what it says. We can disagree about some of the more ambiguous passages, but we can't just ignore the plain text when the implications give us pause. To do so is the hypocrisy I refer to as "situational constitutionalism." We can't just toss aside parts we don't agree with because they may lead to policies we don't like--whether they involve right to counsel, habeas corpus, or jury trials for suspected terrorists, or First Amendment expression by third parties in election campaigns. Conversely, we can't just pretend limits don't exist to implement policies we might like, such as federally protected abortion access, eminent domain for revitalization/rezoning projects, or health insurance mandates. All these exceptions are proposed, for the most part, with good intent. But good intent doesn't trump the Constitution any more than bad policy outcomes do. Everybody has a reason why they want to skirt the Constitution--but if we always ignore it for reasons we think important, then the limits placed by the document cease to mean anything once our political adversaries take power. (Or, in the case of libertarians, seemingly when anyone is in power.)

I share Mr. Serwer's disgust with Congressional authority over federal jurisdiction--but that doesn't make it unconstitutional.