The Relationship between Criminal Justice and Joblessness

I have a post up today at the Washington Post's Post Everything that looks at some of the many ways the criminal justice system helps drive poverty, joblessness, and further incarceration, particularly through collateral consequences:

In some jurisdictions, ex-offenders can never hold certain jobs. According to a 2007 article in Criminology and Public Policy, there could be as many as 800 occupations nationwide that automatically disqualify people with felony convictions for life.

Some of these restrictions make sense. Bank teller is probably not the best first job for someone who got out of prison on a bank robbery conviction. Likewise, a serial arsonist probably shouldn’t be a fireman.

Others make no sense at all. In some jurisdictions, a criminal conviction may prevent someone from obtaining a license to cut hair or be a beautician. Sweeney Todd aside, it’s hard to fathom how public safety is enhanced by prohibiting someone from earning a living at a job unrelated to someone’s past crime.

It’s not that certain crimes shouldn’t carry extra burdens, at least for a short time. But any restrictions should be tied directly to public safety or have some clear, offense-related justification.

You can read the whole thing here. 

bellum medicamenti delenda est

This is Your Government on Drugs

My latest piece on the ONDCP is up at Washington Post's PostEverything. A snippet:

For decades, the White House’s Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) and its allies have used government resources to marginalize, stigmatize, and demonize drug users.

There were the nonsensical ads like “this is your brain on drugs” and inexplicable demonstrations like torching cars and valued possessions. The ONDCP, Partnership for a Drug-Free America, the Ad Council, and Above the Influence portrayed small time dealers as snakes and users as rats.

They also showed drug use as a gateway to prostitution and, in the wake of 9/11, explicitly linked casual drug users to supporting terrorism and cop killing. The United States has spent millions stigmatizing drug use, sale and abuse — all before one even begins to calculate the costs to arrest, try, and incarcerate offenders for the past 40 years. This, of course, comes in addition to the stigma that comes with incarceration and criminal records.

The Obama administration says it wants to de-stigmatize drug addiction. But no matter how hard it tries, it’s virtually impossible to de-stigmatize behavior that is still a crime.

Read the whole thing here.

bellum medicamenti delenda est

Drug Free School Zones, Sex Crime Registries, and Other Dumb Laws

Me, at the Washington Post:

The stupid laws and rules promulgated over decades of “tough on crime” rhetoric will take years to reform and correct. Throwing the book at offenders with well-meant but misguided lawmaking has wreaked havoc on correctional budgets while breaking up families and damaging local economies in the process. Policymakers who are now reevaluating laws and extending review to thousands of inmates subjected to blind punishment would do even better than the reforms above to let judges decide who is punished and how severely in the first place.

Read the whole thing here.

NB--I should be writing there, and elsewhere, more often. Hit me up if you have a good idea you want me to write about.

bellum medicamenti delenda est

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

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

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.

Absurdity of Metro Bag Screening

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

Quote of the Day: When Words Have No Meaning

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

The Unintended Consequences of Immigration Enforcement

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.

In Defense of Dave Weigel

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.

Reactionary Imbecility

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.

You can't be serious...

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.

Malcolm's Assassin Paroled

I was out sick yesterday, so I missed the news that the one man who admitted to killing Malcolm X, Thomas Hagan (aka Talmadge X Hayer) has been freed on parole.

All the non-violent drug offenders locked up in New York prisons and they let a guy go who assassinated a good man in front of an audience that included his wife and kids?

As has been well documented, Hagan admitted to the slaying but denied that the other two men convicted in the murder were involved. In the WaPo write-up:

Hagan acknowledged that he was one of three men who shot Malcolm X in front of a crowd of hundreds - including several of his young children - as the civil rights leader began a speech at Harlem's Audubon Ballroom on Feb. 21, 1965. Two other accomplices created a distraction in the audience, Hagan has said.

But he said the two men convicted with him were not involved. They, too, maintained their innocence and were paroled in the 1980s. No one else has ever been charged, a fact that has perpetuated debate and theories surrounding the slaying.

Hmm. Now, who would be the best person to put to bed any debates and theories about the assassination? How about that sonofabitch they just let walk out the front door?!?!?!

The man obviously knows who else was involved, and I have my own suspicions, but for having "repeatedly expressed sorrow for being one of the gunmen" that killed Malcolm, one would think that a condition of his parole would be forthrightness in pointing out who else was involved in the criminal conspiracy to murder that man.

But no.

Hagan and the rest of Malcolm's murderers are free. 45 years later, and the injustice continues.

El Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, RIP.

Ossie Davis's moving eulogy at Malcolm's funeral, retold for the film in this clip. (To pass the reenactment of the murder, skip to 3:30 mark):

Consider Me 'Especially Unchastened'

I don't know who Charles Lane is or how he landed a job at the Post--and regardless of your personal thoughts on medical marijuana--this is just insipid nonsense:

The death of John Patrick Bedell, the 36-year-old man shot and killed by Pentagon police officers after he opened fire on them March 4, is a tragedy. It might have been avoided if Bedell had received timely and effective treatment for his obviously serious mental illness. The fact that he did not is a cause for soul-searching by all of us. Advocates of “medical marijuana” should be especially chastened.

I, for one, am not one bit chastened by my open advocacy for the legalization of drugs, especially medical cannabis. That Bedell's alleged bi-polar disorder went un- or mistreated has absolutely no bearing whatever that he self-medicated with marijuana. His family was apparently well aware of his mental health issues and he did not receive adequate treatment for it hardly makes medical cannabis blameworthy in this.

I have neither the time nor the inclination to delve into Bedell's medical and personal history, but even if we take Mr. Lane's story at face value--that Bedell sought treatment for insomnia in 2006 where his doctor may or may not have properly searched for the underlying cause for that insomnia--blaming a medicine is intellectually derelict.

If some doctor treated a broken leg with Vicodin and no other remedy--such as to properly set the broken bone--the fault lies not with the Vicodin, but with the inadequate treatment on behalf of the physician. Likewise, if a doctor doesn't properly diagnose a severe mental disorder that would be evident through routine examination, the doctor--and not the prescribed inadequate remedy--is to blame.

But Lane continues on this irresponsible crusade against medical cannabis:

Let’s debate legalizing marijuana as a recreational drug. If smoking pot makes terminally ill AIDS and cancer patients feel better, give it to them.

But, for the most part, “medical marijuana” is a pseudo-scientific myth, and a dangerous one at that.

Parsing this a bit: "if it makes terminally ill AIDS and cancer patients feel better" belies the reason many of those patience actually use cannabis: It isn't to escape the pain or feel kinda groovy--which, admittedly, is a side-effect--it allows many of them to eat without vomiting from the chemotherapy and other chemical cocktails they are taking. There are plenty of pain medicines that get you high--"opiates" or "opioids" are among the strongest and derived from the same plant you get opium and heroin. No one doubts their efficacy or propriety just because they--and alternate forms of the drug--are often used recreationally or abused.

Mr. Lane appears to be operating on a fallacious assumption: that because a medicine doesn't come with a stamp from Eli Lilly or Merck that it has no legitimate medicinal purpose. But medicines are just chemicals that interact with the body for an intended effect. If cannabis alleviates nausea and increases appetite in sick people--which it most certainly does--it has a legitimate medicinal effect and should therefore be considered a legitimate treatment. That some doctors may neglect their patients' underlying problems should not be put at the feet of medical cannabis availability--that is medical malpractice.

I mean to make no insinuations about Bedell's prescribing physician, particularly. I don't know what happened and I don't pretend to--although Mr. Lane seems perfectly fine with insinuating malpractice, but that's between him and his editors. Nevertheless, it is blatantly irresponsible of Mr. Lane to assign blame to the medical cannabis activist community because one man with severe mental issues smoked marijuana under medical pretenses for one month during an unknown period of time of already "excessive" marijuana use.

Bedell was a troubled man and it's a shame that whatever help he sought/was given was insufficient. It is certainly plausible that other people culpable in all of this, (i.e., how did a mentally disturbed man acquire two handguns?), but people who want to improve the life of very sick people are not among them.

You don't have to believe that medical cannabis is legitimate treatment to realize that this piece was half-assed scapegoating. Charles Lane and the Washington Post should be ashamed of themselves.

In Defense of the South

I don't really make excuses for my antipathy for a lot of "Southern Heritage." I don't like the way so many still call the Civil War the 'War of Northern Aggression;' or their use of the most offensive euphemism in history--their 'peculiar institution'; and I really can't stand the "libertarian" apologists that think the Confederacy itself was started for anything but keeping a chokehold on the liberty of others--namely, people like me and my family.

But, this is a rather fair rebuke by Michael Lind on some recent attacks on the South:

In a recent Washington Post column, Kathleen Parker quoted Ohio Sen. George Voinovich's assertion that the Republican Party is "being taken over by Southerners" to suggest that the GOP risks becoming a permanent minority party of the old Confederacy. In itself this is a legitimate point that I and many other critics of Republican conservatism have made for years. However, at Mother Jones, the blogger Kevin Drum used Parker's political argument as an excuse for all-too-typical liberal Southern-bashing. According to Drum: "There are, needless to say, plenty of individual Southern whites who are wholly admirable. But taken as a whole, Southern white culture is [redacted]. Jim Webb can pretty it up all he wants, but it's a [redacted]." Drum did the redacting on his own blog post, explaining he'd blacked out the offending text "on the advice of my frontal lobe."

Drum's creepy bigotry becomes clear when other groups are substituted: "There are, needless to say, plenty of individual blacks who are wholly admirable. But taken as a whole, black culture is [redacted]. Barack Obama can pretty it up all he wants, but it's a [redacted]." Or maybe this: "There are, needless to say, plenty of individual Jews who are wholly admirable. But taken as a whole, Jewish culture is [redacted]. The late Irving Howe can pretty it up all he wants, but it's a [redacted]."

I like the first page much better than the second page because it, as many Southern defenses in the past, devolves into a "but look at the blacks! They're crazy too!" defense. However, I share it with you because it's sentiment is right, if delivered somewhat poorly at the end with the "your blacks are as dumb as our rednecks" argumentation. (This resentment is probably because the policy preferences he highlights where blacks agree with conservatives are the exact preferences that ideologically alienate me from both blacks and conservatives. Anti-gay marriage, anti-immigration, etc.)

Anyway, never let it be said that I never said anything in defense of the South on my blog.

Where's George (Orwell)?

I don't usually dig features.

Seriously, I cringe every time I see what I have dubbed "Oprah Moments" on ESPN--some harrowing tale of some amateur or has-been professional athlete--or worse, sick and/or dying kids-- overcoming ridiculous adversity to arrive at some sort of peace in their life. If I wanted to watch stuff like this, I'd watch Lifetime. (Granted, I sit there and watch them as I wait for the second-run of the Yankees highlights that air late in the show. And, predictably, the very-much intended touching moment touches me too, but it doesn't mean I have to like it.)

So, too, would I read Reader's Digest if I wanted to read stories and articles about random happenstance "You'll never guess what happened after Timmy got the cat out of the tree" yarn.

Bah.

I have forsaken television news--save the rarity I'm home to watch the NewsHour (which I unashamedly follow on Twitter)--not only for its general lack of substance, but the choice to air some sort of feel-good filler at some point in the broadcast. Of all the stuff going on in the world, the fact that Jane Hemshaw has been cooking pies down on Main Street for 47 years doesn't rise to the level of making me give a good [gosh darn.]

So all that being said, I LOVED this piece in WaPo today. I loved it because I'm a book reader and, since coming to DC, I am enamored by decentralized autonomous happenings. Yes, I know all about the 'Where's George' dollar tracking--but this is actually spreading ideas around the globe as opposed to "I wonder where that piece of paper is."

[Christal] Groves is a member of BookCrossing, a free-book-tracking Web site where anyone can, as a brochure puts it, "share your books with the world and follow their paths forever more!" Its fans can register a book, add a brief journal entry, then place it in a public spot. The hope is that someone else will pick it up, record their find online and pass it on -- becoming a link in a long chain of serendipitous literary discoveries.

Of course, the first thing I thought of is sharing books on the ideas of liberty, though I think leaving Human Action or An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations around may be counterproductive. (You kinda have to WANT to read those to get through them. And even then, they're a challenge.) I think it would probably be best to start out with Economics in One Lesson or The Road to Serfdom--or, perhaps for the less strictly-libertarian inclined: 1984 or Animal Farm.

Anyway, I thought I'd share the feature with you before I dive back into the dreary news of skyrocketing national debt, a possible war brewing in Zimbabwe, and, worst of all, the Red Sox gaining a game back against my beloved Yankees.

Treat yourself today and pick a up a book.

Whoa

Ok. I hate reality shows. I watched the first two seasons of 'The Real World,' and that's about it--oh, and I did watch the first season of The Osbournes. I've never watched 'American Idol' or any of that mess.

So, it's taken me some time to finally click on the pic and news story of this 40-something Scot who'd never been kissed on 'Britain's Got Talent' that has been just about everywhere I look. But once it made the Washington Post, I relented and thought "Ok. Fine. I give up. Let's see how good this woman really is."

Damn. I love Les Misérables, so this was particularly touching. If you're a fan of music at all, you should watch. (Sorry, it's not embeddable)

Gideon and the Right to Counsel

Walter Mondale has an op-ed in WaPo today calling for the states and the federal government to"rededicate" themselves to ensure that all defendants in criminal cases have adequate counsel, as assured in Gideon v. Wainwright. In addition, the former vice president alludes to expansion of this right to "certain" civil litigants.

Walter, you had me until "civil litigants."

In my current professional capacity, I come across requests for assistance from prisoners, criminal defendants, and civil plaintiffs in cases against the government. I work in a policy shop and always have to refer them to actual law firms or organizations that actually handle litigation, but the requests pour in nonetheless. I have never figured out the ratio of legitimate claims to frivolous ones, but I assure you that there is no shortage of the latter in regards to civil litigation.

People with no real concept of law, our legal system, or even basic understanding of the Constitution file cases in courts regularly, often on a pro se basis (i.e., without a lawyer). If all the paperwork is done, then the courts have to at least entertain the claim and find a legal reason to dismiss it. (I can only imagine the awful job sifting through mounds of paranoid, rambling incoherence and trying to come up with a decent reason to dismiss if the dedicated simpleton successfully addresses the issue of standing.) Such cases allege monitoring by all extant--and some fictitious and extra-terrestrial--government agencies, unfair seizure of property due to defaulted mortgages that they somehow try to argue away, and other farcical thoughts that should never be conceived, let alone addressed in a court of law.

Expanding the right to counsel to civil litigation is not only a logistical nightmare, but one in which provides the perverse incentive to increase the amount of litigation in an already overly litigious society. Yes, courts play a vital role in keeping businesses in check. But, good god, the product and medical liability suits are already choking the courts--which are understaffed, by the way (thanks Pat Leahy!)--and making it difficult to do business or take care of people. This is not a good thing.

I understand that Mr. Mondale wrote "certain" civil cases and would presumably be insulated from the more blatantly ridiculous claims--I'm not trying to straw man him here. However, this could lead to an entirely new strain of litigation that could very well expand any "narrowly tailored" legislation limiting whom is eligible for counsel. Any case or plaintiff deemed outside of the direct scope of the statute can appeal the original judgment, and any successful challenge would start the entire process over again. There would be no uniformity among the states, so different states' statutes would be pitted against one another and judged differently in different jurisdictions. It would work its way up and back down through the various court systems for years to come--and with all that litigation comes lawyer's fees that can be extracted from the respondent parties and taxpayers (since this all relies on the plaintiffs being unable to pay the first place). Is it any wonder the ABA is leading this charge?

We need tort reform, of that there is little question. But giving more people access to an overrun court system is not the answer.

It's Like the Study of Economics Never Happened...

Honestly. Top headline at WaPo.com:

U.S. to Toughen Its Stance On Trade

It might as well read:

America to Punish Own Consumers, Poor

Point Guard-in-Chief

I don't often watch the late night talk shows anymore. If I do happen to have them on, as I did the other night, I watch Letterman.

I happened to be watching this week when Don Rickles was on and he made a joke that bombed:

[Rickles] was absolutely killing the audience on David Letterman's show the other night with his trademark scorched-earth put-downs. Rickles seemed at the top of his game -- until he tried to tell a joke about the new president-elect. Not even a well-timed rimshot from the band could have saved him.

It was just a quick bit in which he imagined Obama, faced with his first international crisis, telling his advisers he couldn't be interrupted because he was busy playing basketball.

Yeah. And?

Apparently, people got uncomfortable when an old white guy mentions our first black president in the same sentence as "basketball."

I don't read entertainment news because, well, its vapid and soul-sucking, so I don't know what kind of attention this seeming faux pas has been getting. But it certainly was enough to get an op-ed in the Washington Post today.

If President-elect Obama had not campaigned as a basketball player, or put up videos of him playing basketball on his campaign's YouTube site, or talked about basketball being his "first love", I could see a certain amount of "Oh no he didn't just say that" directed at Rickles. But Obama repeatedly played up his b-ball skillz as a reason to vote for him--especially in places like Indiana. (The night before the election, ESPN played this interview where Obama talks about the wisdom of his coach whom he favorably compares to Bobby Knight. This is my best guess as to how he won the once unquestionably red Hoosier state.*)

I can understand the sensitivity of the Letterman audience that led them to think that the boundary-pushing comic may have gone too far, but he didn't. Funny? Perhaps not. But Rickles is not a racist and his joke wasn't either.

Lighten up, America. It is still ok to poke fun at people--even if they're black.

*And just in case you're wondering, that's a joke too.

Hatethought?

So, while I am not the movie fan I used to be--basically because I lack the free time to go see them these days-- I wanted to go see Adam Sandler's Don't Mess with the Zohan. Sure, it's bound to be juvenile and silly--that's kind of his thing. But one reviewer over at WaPo doesn't seem amused:

In the world according to Adam, Arabs are childish, violent, stupid; Israelis are aggressive, mendacious, oversexed; white Americans are gun-crazed, violent rednecks or smarmy aristocratic businessmen/gangsters; post-menopausal women are riven with lust. And all this hatethought is expressed in support of a political argument that's no more sophisticated than "Can't we just all get along?"

I haven't yet seen the movie--and it very well may suck--but this little diatribe isn't about to stop me from seeing it. Anyone who has ever seen a Sandler film knows that the characters are always exaggerated, stereotypical, and crude. That's what makes them funny.

And before you ask "What if he was doing that to black people? Would you still be as forgiving?," I'll give you two words: Soul Plane.

Without debating the merits of the film or Sandler's value as an "artist," he is clearly a satirical absurdist. The preview shows an array of ridiculously impossible feats (and feet) that only highlights the unreality of the film's setting. This isn't a movie promoting hatred in any way--save, perhaps, for the sheer banality of Hollywood film making.

So, Mr. Stephen Hunter, lighten up. Just because you don't find someone funny, it is irresponsible to accuse him of 'hate'--and even more so make up the word "hatethought" to express it.