FeedBurner makes it easy to receive content updates in My Yahoo!, Newsgator, Bloglines, and other news readers.
Learn more about syndication and FeedBurner...
.
Yeterday Colorado's House Judiciary Committee heard testimony on a bill that would regulate edible cannabis products sold to patients who are permitted to use marijuana as a medicine under state law. Supporters of strict regulations, who originally advocated a complete ban, claim cannabis comestibles are a threat to children (who else?). In a letter to the committee, the Colorado Drug Investigators Association warned that marijuana munchies are being marketed to kids. The letter included pictures of "Pot Tarts" and "Cap'n Chronic Cereal." But according to the Cannabis Therapy Institute, "the 'Pot Tarts' photograph in the letter came from a DEA bust in California in 1986, and the 'Cap'n Chronic Cereal' photograph was only a T-shirt design and was never documented to be a real product by anyone....During a full hour and a half of testimony from law enforcement, no one could produce an actual medicated 'Pot Tart' or any medicated 'Cap'n Chronic Cereal.'" The Associated Press nevertheless reported that "lawmakers were shown pictures of edible marijuana packaged as 'Pot Tarts' similar to the breakfast pastries 'Pop Tarts,' and a product 'Captain Chronic' designed in a package to look like Cap'n Crunch cereal."
Compounding the deception, the bill's chief sponsor, Rep. Cindy Acree (R-Aurora), displayed boxes of products similar to the ones that supposedly have been showing up in Colorado schoolyards. But "upon closer inspection," the Cannabis Therapy Institute reports, "it was determined that Rep. Acree had purchased several random food products at Target that morning and was parading them in front of the committee as if they were medical marijuana-infused products."
And what better to pour on your Cap'n Chronic than milk flavored with strawberry meth?
[Thanks to Richard Cowan for the tip.]
It’s not every day that the Obama administration borrows a page from the conservative legal playbook. But as Associate Editor Damon Root explains, that’s exactly what happened last week when Attorney General Eric Holder announced that the Justice Department would no longer defend the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act in federal court. As Root notes, that decision followed in the footsteps of two significant conservative precedents.
It’s not every day that the Obama administration borrows a page from the conservative legal playbook. But that’s what happened last week when Attorney General Eric Holder announced that the Justice Department would no longer defend the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) in federal court.
According to a letter Holder sent to Congress, DOMA’s requirement that the federal government recognize only heterosexual marriage “violates the equal protection component of the Fifth Amendment” and should therefore be struck down. “This is the rare case where the proper course is to forgo the defense of this statute,” Holder wrote, though he noted that the administration will continue to enforce the law and will provide Congress “a full and fair opportunity” to assume DOMA’s legal defense.
Despite the angry protestations of leading conservatives—former House Speaker Newt Gingrich fumed that “the president is replacing the rule of law with the rule of Obama” while the Capitol Research Center’s Matthew Vadum argued that Obama could be impeached for failing to defend DOMA—the president’s decision actually follows in the footsteps of two significant conservative precedents.
First, there was Solicitor General (and future Supreme Court nominee) Robert Bork’s approach to the 1976 Supreme Court case Buckley v. Valeo. Bork’s job as solicitor general was to give the government's position in defense of the 1971 Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA). The only problem was that Bork believed one of FECA’s provisions, which allowed Congress to appoint members to the Federal Election Commission (FEC), violated the Constitution’s separation of powers. In Bork’s view, the power to make FEC appointments fell exclusively within the executive branch.
So instead of submitting one brief to the Supreme Court, Bork submitted two, one challenging the constitutionality of the appointments provision and the other strongly defending the rest of FECA. Bork also ensured that the FEC would be filing its own brief defending the provision he had attacked. In its ruling, the Court largely sided with Bork, striking the appointments provision while upholding other aspects of the law. As Bork later explained of his approach, “it would seem to me not only institutionally unnecessary but a betrayal of profound obligations to the Court and to Constitutional processes to take the simplistic position that whatever Congress enacts we will defend, entirely as advocates for the client and without an attempt to present the issues in the round.”
That’s what Obama and Holder did last week. Keep in mind that while the Constitution requires the executive branch to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed,” the president also swears an oath to “preserve, protect, and defend” the Constitution. The question is what happens when the executive is charged with executing a law he deems unconstitutional. Should a contested congressional statute trump an oath to the Constitution?
Deputy Solicitor General (and current Supreme Court Chief Justice) John Roberts faced that dilemma in 1990. At issue that year in Metro Broadcasting, Inc. v. Federal Communications Commission was a government policy giving preferential treatment to minority-owned stations seeking a broadcast license from the FCC. According to the George H.W. Bush administration this racial preference was unconstitutional. Roberts therefore filed a brief with the Supreme Court describing the policy as “precisely the type of racial stereotyping that is anathema to basic constitutional principles” while permitting the FCC to mount its own defense of the minority preference. The Court sided with the FCC.
So unless Gingrich and other conservative critics are also willing to denounce Bork and Roberts for violating the rule of law, they have no coherent argument against Holder and Obama. In fact, conservatives might even want to thank the administration. While Obama’s decision was probably unnecessary to secure DOMA’s eventual legal defeat, it has given the GOP a powerful campaign issue. It may also have set the stage for some political payback. As the liberal UCLA law professor Adam Winkler worried last week in response to Holder’s announcement, “Think of the laws that might be undermined by the next Republican president.”
Damon W. Root is an associate editor at Reason magazine.
Writing in the Wash Times, Reason columnist and Mercatus Center economist Veronique de Rugy and her Mercatus colleague Jason Fichtner argue against raising the federal debt limit:
Sen. Pat Toomey, Pennsylvania Republican, proposes that the federal government prioritize paying the national debt above all other spending. The most recent Office of Management and Budget data shows federal revenues will reach $2.17 trillion this fiscal year. Interest payments on the nation’s debt are estimated to be $205 billion this year, or about 10 percent of revenues. Taking that payment off the top, as Mr. Toomey’s plan would, leaves $1.9 trillion for Congress to spend. That’s enough to pay for Social Security ($741 billion), Medicare ($488 billion), and Medicaid ($276 billion), with $395 billion left for other programs.
Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner called Mr. Toomey’s bill “quite harmful” and “unworkable.” And he used this analogy of a typical American homeowner to explain why: “A homeowner could decide to ‘prioritize’ and continue paying monthly mortgage payments, while opting to cease paying other obligations, such as car payments, insurance premiums, student loan and credit-card payments, utilities, and so forth. Although the mortgage would be paid, the damage to that homeowner’s creditworthiness would be severe.”
Mr. Geithner, however, mistakenly assumes that American homeowners always pay their expenses with borrowed funds (the way the government does). Most do not. When tough financial times hit, families eat out less, go to fewer movies, buy fewer clothes and postpone vacations. If those things don’t save enough, then they might borrow money to pay bills or skip payments.
Go here for the whole piece.
And watch this 45-second vid about the topic here:
For more info on the debt limit, go here.
[*] For terrible headline allusion, go here.
And for a previous link to the very same de Rugy article in the Wash Times, go here.
Carmelo Anthony was traded to the New York Knicks last week, an outcome long anticipated by both the primary player and the teams involved. It’s unclear which team benefited most from this laundry swap, but Dr. Teeth fanboy Rick Reilly filed a column gnashing and wailing over the The State of the Game anyway. Playing the part of ownership shill, Reilly proclaims that the NBA’s ruination will come from “very tall, very rich 20-somethings running the league from the backs of limos:”
The NBA used to work on a turn system. You will lose, but if you hang in there, you'll be rewarded with a very high draft pick like an Anthony, and your turn at glory will arrive.
Not anymore. The superstars are in charge now. Now, you lose and you get a pick, and that pick immediately starts texting his pals to see where they'll all wind up in three years. Pretty soon, you're back losing again.
Get ready, Oklahoma City.
LeBron James exploiting his relatively limited labor freedom and taking his talents to Miami last summer got this nonsensical argument going, and it makes no more sense now. There’s never been a “turn system” in the NBA: Only 12 teams have won a championship since the 1976 merger. Losing still leads to high picks, which often leads to players not worth a hoot, as Mr. Pervis Kwame Tractor Darko Olowokandi can attest.
Reilly advocates the NBA adopt a franchise tag so owners can hold on to their players year-by-year against their will. This is a step back toward the 1960s glory days when teams literally owned players for life and athletes kept their mouths shut. Good management will find good players and retain them as needed despite all of the distortions and inequities in the cartelized professional sports market. Just ask Oklahoma City.
More from Reason on the sports here.
Read about Curt Flood, the "Moses of free agency," and other freedom fighters here.
Calculated Risk takes pity on Ben Bernanke by dusting off his predecessor's testimony to the House Committee on Financial Services, dated March 2, 2001.
Ten years ago, Objectivist-trained Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan dazzled us with visions of an $800 billion surplus in 2010, surpluses through 2030, and more:
The most recent projections from OMB and CBO indicate that, if current policies remain in place, the total unified surplus will reach about $800 billion in fiscal year 2010, including an on-budget surplus of almost $500 billion. Moreover, the admittedly quite uncertain long-term budget exercises released by the CBO last October maintain an implicit on-budget surplus under baseline assumptions well past 2030 despite the budgetary pressures from the aging of the baby-boom generation, especially on the major health programs.
These most recent projections, granted their tentativeness, nonetheless make clear that the highly desirable goal of paying off the federal debt is in reach and, indeed, would occur well before the end of the decade under baseline assumptions.
One thing Greenspan did get right:
With today's euphoria surrounding the surpluses, it is not difficult to imagine the hard-earned fiscal restraint developed in recent years rapidly dissipating.
When asked by Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) to define the word "dollar," Bernanke today said a buck is an equivalent of "food, and gasoline, and clothes and all the other things that are in the consumer basket."
If Bernanke here is speaking as the Fed Chairman rather than as a wooly professor of economics, his answer is untrue. When calculating inflation, the Fed uses "PCE" or "personal consumption expenditures" rather than the "CPI" or "consumer price index" used by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. As the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis indicates here, PCE actually leaves out food and energy costs. So if Bernanke believes food and gas (prices for both of which are increasing sharply, you may have noticed) should be factored into the maintained value of the dollar, he should tell the other folks at the Fed next time there's a Fed barbecue.
Daniel Indiviglio explains why inflation means even the vague definition Bernanke gave would not hold up from one year to the next.
Writing in today's Washington Times, Reason economics columnist Veronique de Rugy explains why Congress should not raise the debt ceiling and should instead focus on vital cost-cutting measures. As she writes:
As the national debt and entitlements eat up an increasingly large share of the budget pie, those on the left who want to protect government funding for other programs they view as vital should see the urgency in paying down the debt.
President Obama said Monday that his administration supports “giving states the power to determine their own health care solutions." Great! Apparently, however, that doesn’t extend to giving states what many governors are now asking for: no-strings block grants to run their Medicaid programs.
Currently, the federal government funds state Medicaid programs on a matching basis, with the federal government paying, on average, about 57 cents of each dollar spent. But several GOP governors, including Mississippi’s Haley Barbour and Florida’s Rick Scott, have said they’d prefer to receive pre-negotiated, strictly capped federal grants—and then be allowed to run the programs themselves.
Switching to a block grant system helped reform the welfare system in the 90s. So why are block grants off the table now? Obama’s Medicare and Medicaid director, Donald Berwick, won’t say, according to The Hill:
When pressed for an explanation of why the administration opposes block grants, Berwick declined.
“That’s all I have to say about that right now,” he said.
That’s a shame, because a wholesale reform focused around block grants offers a plausible path toward bringing Medicaid spending under control for both state and federal governments. By the end of the decade, total Medicaid expenditures are projected to hit $840 billion, with more than $500 billion of that the federal government's responsibility.
This year, states face about $125 billion in budget gaps—and Medicaid is one of the biggest contributors to the problem. Today, the program already represents more than a fifth of total state spending; it's the biggest single part of state budgets, and it's getting bigger. State spending growth on Medicaid doubled between 2008 and 2009, the most recent year available—in large part because enrollment grew by 40 percent.
Block granting would on the one hand remove the federal-match incentive to mindlessly ratchet up spending on the program. It would also allow states the freedom and flexibility to manage the programs, including benefits and eligibility, as they see fit—and as they can afford. As former Congressional Budget Office director Douglas Holtz-Eakin and Michael Ramlet note in a report released this week by the American Action Forum, a pre-capped Medicaid waiver program in Rhode Island is already producing big savings:
In January 2009, Rhode Island took the lead on this aspect of reform and became the first state in the nation to cap its entire Medicaid program. The state received approval to operate the Rhode Island Medicaid program under an aggregate budget ceiling of $12.075 billion through 2013. The approved Global Consumer Choice Compact Waiver established an expedited 45 day approval process for any changes to benefits or the Medicaid program during; set new levels of care for determination of long term care eligibility; allowed for benefits in any optional or mandatory program to be customized; placed a priority on preventative services; created a healthy choice account to reward healthy behavior; and implemented new purchasing strategies that focused on quality and competition.
In the first 18 months of Rhode Island’s global waiver yielded $100 million in savings, staving off eligibility limitations. The state projects that it will have saved $146 million by June 2011 with an additional $50 million gained through program integrity efforts and aggressively tracking fraud, waste, and abuse. Concurrent with the substantial savings, new expenditure growth in the Rhode Island Medicaid program has declined from over 8 percent to 3 percent in the past 18 months.
So Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius says she wants to help states find ways to save money on Medicaid. And President Obama says he wants to empower states to manage their own health systems. Sounds reasonable.
But presented with a solution that several governors have explicitly asked for—one that’s been shown to save money where it’s been tried—they’re not interested, and the administration’s Medicaid chief won’t explain why. Seems like Obama’s a lot less interested in doling out power to the states—and a lot more interested in maintaining it for his administration.
The New York Times calls the squatter-filled skyscraper in Caracas a 45-story walkup (there's no working elevator), but as of yet, only the first 28 floors are occupied. Some floors don't even have walls, but satellite dishes abound:
“That building is a symbol of Venezuela’s decline,” said Benedicto Vera, 55, an activist in downtown Caracas. “What’s our future if our people are living like animals in unsafe skyscrapers?” [...]
Once one of Latin America’s most developed cities, Caracas now grapples with an acute housing shortage of about 400,000 units, breeding building invasions. In the area around the Tower of David, squatters have occupied 20 other properties, including the Viasa and Radio Continente towers. White elephants occupying the cityscape, like the Sambil shopping mall close to the Tower of David and seized by the government, now house flood victims.
Private construction of housing here has virtually ground to a halt because of fears of government expropriation. The government, hobbled by inefficiency, has built little housing of its own for the poor.
And yet, even in the midst of Hugo Chávez's unionist-murdering, oil-nationalizing, self-impoverishing Bolivarian Revolution, life finds a way:
Strivers abound in the skyscraper. They chafe at being called “invaders,” the term here for squatters, preferring the less contentious word “neighbor.” A beauty salon operates on one floor. On another, an unlicensed dentist applies the brightly colored braces that are the rage in Caracas street fashion. Almost every floor has a small bodega.
Julieth Tilano, 26, lives inside a small shop on the seventh floor with her husband and in-laws. They sell everything from plantains to Pepsi and Belmont cigarettes. Her husband, Humberto Hidalgo, 23, has a side business in which he charges children from the skyscraper 50 cents per half-hour to play PlayStation games on the four television sets in the family’s living room.
“There’s opportunity in this tower,” said Mr. Hidalgo, who immigrated here last year from Valledupar, Colombia.
Just don't tell Sean Penn. Jesse Walker on squatting in a different South American skyscraper here.
Monday's Supreme Court decision involving a defendant's Sixth Amendment right to confront witnesses against him provides another piece of evidence contradicting the popular caricature of Justice Antonin Scalia as a law-and-order conservative who reflexively sides with the government in criminal procedure cases. The issue was whether a dying victim's identification of the man who shot him could be repeated in court by police. It seems this testimony should be covered by the "dying declaration" exception to the ban on hearsay evidence, as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg suggested in her dissent. But for some reason, the prosecution did not make the argument, instead claiming that the victim's statement should not be considered "testimonial"—a rationale accepted by six justices. (Elena Kagan did not participate in the case because she worked on it as solicitor general.) In his own "slashing dissent" (as New York Times legal writer Adam Liptak describes it), Scalia mocked the majority's conclusion:
Today's tale—a story of five officers conducting successive examinations of a dying man with the primary purpose, not of obtaining and preserving his testimony regarding his killer, but of protecting him, them, and others from a murderer somewhere on the loose—is so transparently false that professing to believe it demeans this institution. But reaching a patently incorrect conclusion on the facts is a relatively benign judicial mischief; it affects, after all, only the case at hand. In its vain attempt to make the incredible plausible, however—or perhaps as an intended second goal—today's opinion distorts our Confrontation Clause jurisprudence and leaves it in a shambles. Instead of clarifying the law, the Court makes itself the obfuscator of last resort....
For all I know, Bryant [the defendant] has received his just deserts. But he surely has not received them pursuant to the procedures that our Constitution requires. And what has been taken away from him has been taken away from us all.
This does not sound like a man who is hostile to the procedural safeguards (a.k.a. "technicalities") that irk authoritarian conservatives. The point is not the Scalia is necessarily right in this case, or that he is a reliable defender of civil liberties. But in this area, as in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld and sentencing cases involving the Sixth Amendment right to trial by jury, he has not been afraid to stake out bold positions based on what he believes the Constitution requires, reaching results that are friendlier to defendants than the conclusions of his left-leaning colleagues. Scalia has a mixed Fourth Amendment record, but here too he has sometimes proven himself more skeptical of the government's position than his allegedly liberal colleagues.
In 2008 I argued that "Scalia's not half bad," which is "more than you can say for most justices."
I've previously written about the peculiar merit system that governs cable news punditry. Shamelessness and pithy soundbite delivery are highly valued. Truthfulness and accuracy, not so much.
So it's nice to see a crappy pundit get some comeuppance. Over at Forbes, Kashmir Hill writes about psychiatrist Carole Lieberman, who has been "Amazon bombed" by video gamers incensed about Lieberman's comments to Fox News linking video games to violence and sexual assault.
Psychiatrist Carole Lieberman has written three books, but were you to check them out on Amazon, you might be discouraged from buying one. They all have a host of negative reviews and sorry ratings of a star and a half (out of five).
If you were to look closely, you might note that the majority of the reviews for the books (written in 1998, 2006, and 2010, respectively) all started pouring in on February 8, 2011. One reviewer calls “Coping with Terrorism” (2006) an “an offensive piece of garbage.” Another calls “Bad Boys” (1998) “the worst book I’ve ever read.” Another reader claims “Bad Girls” (2010) is “the worst piece of crap in the history of mankind!”...
The hundreds of reviews that flooded Lieberman’s Amazon pages last month came as a result of a controversial statement she made to Fox News about video games desensitizing players to violence and causing rape. The statement inflamed video gamers, and they soon set their violent sights on her books. The nasty reviews are part of a new tactic in the war of ideas on the Internet: “Amazon-bombing.”
Hill is fairly sympathetic to Lieberman, whose expertise in media violence includes authoring the books Bad Boys: Why We Love Them, How to Live with Them, and When to Leave Them and Bad Girls: Why Men Love Them & How Good Girls Can Learn Their Secrets. I'm not sure she deserves it.
Here's what Lieberman told Fox News:
Carole Lieberman, a psychiatrist and book author, told FoxNews.com that sexual situations and acts in video games -- highlighted so well in Bulletstorm -- have led to real-world sexual violence.
“The increase in rapes can be attributed in large part to the playing out of [sexual] scenes in video games,” she said.
See a fun bit of digging into the anatomy of the Fox story here.
It's unclear what Lieberman means by "increase in rapes." According to both victim surveys and reported cases, rape has been in dramatic decline since the early 1990s. It's now at its lowest level since the government started tracking the statistic. This would be same period over which video games started to become more violent, more realistic, and more sexually suggestive.
In a subsequent interview with Wired, Lieberman explained her comment:
When shown these figures, Lieberman said the “statistics do not reflect all the rapes, since many go unreported and others relate to child abductions.” When asked for statistics showing an increase of rape in recent years, Lieberman said she did not have time to pull them up.
That's because they don't exist. If anything, the stigma associated with rape has decreased in recent years. I'm sure there still are rape victims who are too afraid or embarrassed to report the crime, but there's no reason at all to think they would be less likely to file a report today than, say, 30 years ago. And it's flat absurd to argue not only that the rape stigma has increased in recent years, but that it has increased enough to compensate for a 60 percent drop in reported rapes since 1993. It's a far safer bet that Lieberman simply has no idea what the hell she's talking about.
It gets better. More from Wired:
“Obviously I know what I’m talking about or I wouldn’t be called upon to testify in front of Congress,” [Lieberman] said.
Persuasive! And John "Bo Duke" Schneider is an authority on constitutional law.
More:
“I’ve been doing this research for over 20 years....It’s all about violence, it all applies to rape. And it has been done on videogames less violent or less sexual than the current one that we’re talking about.”
On Friday, several days after our initial phone interview, Wired.com asked Lieberman once again if she had found time to dig up a specific study linking videogames to rape. She once again referenced the “Violent Video Game Effects” study and failed to name specific games with sexual content that might encourage rape.
“Over the years, I have read hundreds of studies linking videogames to violence. Rape, as a violent act, is implied in them,” she wrote in an e-mail. “When videogames are violent and sexual, it causes the players to become desensitized to rape and think it is a ‘game.’”
The study referenced above found that some children tend to play more aggressively after playing violent games, but it did not find (or try to find) any link between video games and rape or violence. Wired then spoke to some folks who do actually study media violence, and none could come up with a single study linking video games to rape or violence. Back to you, Dr. Lieberman:
“There are thousands of studies,” Lieberman said. “I’d have to look through them or recent ones as far as finding one that specifically speaks about rape, and I don’t have the time to do that right now.”
At this rate, Lieberman may soon get her own TV show.
The March issue of Wired has the bold cover lines: "1 Million Workers. 90 million iPhones. 17 Suicides. This is Where your Gadgets Come From. Should You Care?"
The suicides are the hook, center on the cover, for this profile of a visit to the Foxconn factory complex in Shenzhen, China. The most interesting actual news in it is the fact that Shenzhen is apparently in the process of losing its prominence as China's cutting-edge industrial center.
But the suicide part, well, you learn pretty early in the article that "American college students kill themselves at four times that rate," and much later in the article discover that "the suicide rate at Foxconn's Shenzhen plant remains below the national averages for both rural and urban China."
That was just the hook, not the point, which is toward the end of the article by Joel Johnson, an editor at gizmodo:
To be soaked in materialism, to directly and indirectly champion it, has also brought guilt. I don’t know if I have a right to the vast quantities of materials and energy I consume in my daily life. Even if I thought I did, I know the planet cannot bear my lifestyle multiplied by 7 billion individuals. I believe this understanding is shared, if only subconsciously, by almost everyone in the Western world.
Every last trifle we touch and consume, right down to the paper on which this magazine is printed or the screen on which it’s displayed, is not only ephemeral but in a real sense irreplaceable. Every consumer good has a cost not borne out by its price but instead falsely bolstered by a vanishing resource economy. We squander millions of years’ worth of stored energy, stored life, from our planet to make not only things that are critical to our survival and comfort but also things that simply satisfy our innate primate desire to possess.
Past blogging from me on Shenzhen's dynamic business models, from 2007. Jesse Walker blogged on the innovations that can arise from Shenzhen's industrial knockoffs in 2009.
Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito is the lone dissenter in the high court's ruling for the Westboro Baptist Church in Snyder v. Phelps.
The case involved a March 2006 demonstration by Rev. Fred Phelps' and some members of his family at the funeral of Marine Lance Cpl. Matthew Snyder.
The protest at Snyder’s funeral -- one of many that members of the Topeka, Kansas church have organized, often (and in this case) bearing signs that read "God Hates the USA/Thank God for 9/11," "Thank God for IEDs," "God Hates Fags," "Pope in Hell," etc. -- was confined to a public area adjacent to the event. At their nearest approach, according to Chief Justice John Roberts' ruling, the demonstrators and the funeral party were separated by a distance of at least 200 feet.
Still, the Maryland U.S. District Court later awarded Snyder's father Albert Snyder $5 million in damages for intentional infliction of emotional distress, intrusion upon seclusion, and civil conspiracy. (Snyder also filed tort claims on defamation and publicity given to private life, which were dismissed.) An appeals court overturned this award, ruling that Westboro's signs were entitled to First Amendment protection because they addressed "matters of public concern, were not provably false, and were expressed solely through hyperbolic rhetoric."
The Supreme Court's 8-1 ruling upholds that judgment. You can read the whole decision here. With all due contempt to Fred Phelps and his offspring, I think the only thing wrong with this ruling is that language about "matters of public concern" and "hyperbolic rhetoric," because it seems to assume speech needs to earn its freedom through a combination of criteria. If, for example, Phelps had not used hyperbolic rhetoric but calmly made the case, "Snyder, I'm glad your son was killed by the enemies of this country," would that be protected speech? (I am relieved to know "Pope in Hell" is not provably false.)
Alito disagrees with the ruling in language that is surprisingly touchy-feely. "Our profound national commitment to free and open debate is not a license for the vicious verbal assault that occurred in this case," he writes, citing with Snyder's "acute emotional vulnerability" and "severe and lasting emotional injury" in the face of a "malevolent verbal attack."
When he says "verbal attack," Alito is speaking literally. Referring to Stephen Breyer's hypothetical case in which "A were to physically assault B, knowing that the assault (being newsworthy) would provide A with an opportunity to transmit to the public his views on a matter of public concern," Alito concludes, "This captures what respondents did in this case."
That seems like a stretch to me. You are free to ignore nasty words in a way that you are not free to ignore physical violence directed at you. The analogy breaks down even further because in this case the offensive speech was not an assault designed to bring attention to the message. It was the message itself. While he believes the majority was wrong in its belief that Westboro's message was general in nature rather than specific to Matthew Snyder (and thus potentially actionable), Alito also seems to be supporting an idea I generally associate with Catherine MacKinnon: that some ideas are in and of themselves capable of causing "great injury" and a form of "brutalization."
Alito also seems to endorse the "funeral exception" Damon Root reported on back in October.
Last year, parents of students in failing California public schools were given a reason to be hopeful when Sacramento politicians passed something called the "parent trigger" law. The way the law works is that if 51% of parents at a failing school sign a petition, they can turn the school into a charter school, replace the staff or simply use the petition as a bargaining chip to initiate a conversation about change.
On December 7, 2010, with help from the non-profit group Parent Revolution, parents of children attending McKinley Elementary in Compton became the first group of parents to pull the parent trigger. Their dream was to transform the school into a Celerity charter school. Instead, the Compton parents were thrust into a prolonged fight with supporters of the status quo: the Compton Unified School District, the teachers' unions, Gov. Jerry Brown and Tom Torlakson, the newly elected Superintendent of Public Instruction.
This is the story about a group of parents in Compton who are fighting to give their children a better education.
Approximately 8.5 minutes.
Produced by Paul Feine and Alex Manning.
Visit Reason.tv for downloadable versions of this and all our videos, and subscribe to Reason.tv's YouTube channel to receive automatic notification when new content is posted.
The Chicago Tribune has put together a great, if depressing, graphic showing all the steps required to fire a tenured but ineffective teacher in the Windy City. The short version? It takes 2-5 years, and as many as 27 steps—which, according to the Tribune, is why many school principals don’t even try. See the whole thing here.
In 2006, Reason published an illustrated guide to firing a teacher in New York City's public school system.
With all the hand-wringing and self-defeating talk from Republicans about the political cost of allowing the federal government to shut down for a couple of weeks, there is a missed opportunity. As David Harsanyi writes, what better way to illustrate just how little taxpayers get back on their "investments"? And what a great time to demolish the myth that even modest cuts would detrimentally affect most Americans.
Did you know that those in the federal government—the folks who brought you $1.6 trillion of yearly deficits, brought you $14 trillion of debt, and make Elmo a reality—offer Americans 56 separate programs to help them better understand their finances? Where will these citizens go for sage advice if Washington shuts down?
With all the hand-wringing and self-defeating talk from Republicans about the political cost of allowing the federal government to shut down for a couple of weeks, there is a missed opportunity. What better way to illustrate just how little taxpayers get back on their "investments"? And what a great time to demolish the myth that even modest cuts would detrimentally affect most Americans.
Alas, it looks as if the Senate and House will agree to federal spending cuts of only $4 billion to avert a government shutdown for two more weeks. Republicans initially asked for $61 billion in spending cuts for the remainder of the year—in real terms, a pittance—which, according to many Democrats, would destroy a brittle economic recovery and kill thousands of jobs.
If you believe that stimulus spending creates productive, self-sustaining jobs, I suspect you're forced to believe that a lack of stimulus spending destroys those jobs. Democrats are relying heavily on the claim by Moody's Analytics' chief economist that 400,000 fewer jobs would be created (and saved?) by the end of 2011—and 700,000 fewer jobs by the end of 2012—if Congress were to cut $61 billion. Now, the Moody's forecast has been battered by a number of economists, and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, a fan of stimulative efforts, dismissed those numbers, as well.
Who knows? Laymen like me can only rely on one scientific truth when it comes to economic forecasts: They're always wrong, except when by some fluke they're right. But it is tough to accept the idea that cutting back less than 1 percent of the debt-heavy budget could be detrimental to the economy. And according to a new Government Accountability Office report, there are hundreds of billions in bloated and duplicative programs Congress could cut before even having to take on entitlements, defense spending, or any supposedly invaluable programs.
The report found there were 18 federal food and nutrition assistance programs, costing taxpayers $62.5 billion in 2008. There was not one study to find out whether any of it was effective. The Wall Street Journal reported there are 82 federal programs to improve teacher quality. Silly, because according to unions, there is not one identifiably ineffective teacher in the entire country.
According to the GAO report, there are some 80 different economic development programs, which have probably created more jobs for bureaucrats manning the programs than they have private-sector jobs.
There are 15 different agencies overseeing food safety. Even though conservatives are pro-salmonella, food producers already have the greatest incentive of all to give us safe food, namely preserving their success and existence. So can't these programs, typically irrelevant and expensive, be at the very least streamlined?
When, as Democrats contend, cutting a single-digit percentage of the budget becomes an abdication of our duty, how can we ever get to $61 billion in spending cuts, much less a balanced budget? If half the government believes that creating debt is an economic stimulant, what are the chances of our ever dealing with national debt?
Any spending cut that does not involve defense (which should be on the table) induces Democrats to lament the inconceivable and imagined personal and economic toll Americans will suffer. The truth is that those who view nearly all government spending as not only a moral obligation but also economically advantageous don't really want to cut a penny.
David Harsanyi is a columnist at The Denver Post. Follow him on Twitter at davidharsanyi.
COPYRIGHT 2011 THE DENVER POST
DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM
Today’s decision is 8-1 in favor of the protesters' right to free speech with Justice Samuel Alito in dissent. Here’s a portion of Chief Justice John Roberts’ majority opinion:
Westboro believes that America is morally flawed; many Americans might feel the same about Westboro. Westboro’s funeral picketing is certainly hurtful and its contribution to public discourse may be negligible. But Westboro addressed matters of public import on public property, in a peaceful manner, in full compliance with the guidance of local officials. The speech was indeed planned to coincide with Matthew Snyder’s funeral, but did not itself disrupt that funeral, and Westboro’s choice to conduct its picketing at that time and place did not alter the nature of its speech.
Speech is powerful. It can stir people to action, move them to tears of both joy and sorrow, and—as it did here—inflict great pain. On the facts before us, we cannot react to that pain by punishing the speaker. As a Nation we have chosen a different course—to protect even hurtful speech on public issues to ensure that we do not stifle public debate. That choice requires that we shield Westboro from tort liability for its picketing in this case.
Read the full decision here.
Miami Herald columnist Carl Hiaasen is utterly baffled by Florida Gov. Rick Scott's opposition to an electronic monitoring system for prescription painkillers:
Said Scott: "I don't support the database. I believe it's an invasion of privacy."
His statement raises numerous questions, none of them comforting.
Has Florida finally elected a certifiable whack job as governor?
Is Scott himself overmedicating?
Undermedicating?
Why would any sane or sober public official go out of his way—very publicly—to protect pill pushers and crooked doctors?
The column goes on like that for another 732 words. Hiaasen never addresses Scott's avowed concern about privacy, except to dismiss it as an issue of interest only to "an ideological extremist who doesn't like any form of government snooping." And Hiaasen seems completely oblivious to the conflict between drug control and pain control—the fact that doctors are less inclined to prescribe opioids, even to legitimate patients in horrible pain, when they worry that regulators, police, and federal drug agents are looking over their shoulders, ready to second-guess every decision and transform honest mistakes or medical disagreements into felonies. The Drug Enforcement Administration likes to pretend this conflict can be resolved through a carefully balanced approach. But it can't. Because pain cannot be verified objectively, there is only so much a conscientious doctor can do to make sure a patient is not a malingerer, an addict, or a drug dealer. At a certain point, he has to choose between trusting his patients and helping the government enforce its arbitrary dictates regarding psychoactive chemicals. If he sides with his patients, he runs the risk of losing his license, his livelihood, and his liberty. If he sides with the government, it is inevitable that some patients will suffer needlessly. Every additional layer of scrutiny only compounds the drug war's chilling effect on pain treatment.
Perhaps Hiaasen would say that stopping people from using Vicodin or OxyContin to get high is so important that it's worth the agony inflicted on people in pain. Maybe he could come up with a moral argument in favor of saving people from themselves by punishing innocent bystanders. But before taking sides in the controversy over inadequate pain treatment, which has been a topic of passionate discussion for half a century, he would need to be aware that it exists. He could start educating himself here.
Will government employee unions succeed in dynamiting pension reform?
Can Gov. Jerry Brown, whose campaign was largely funded by labor unions, tell government employees "Mellow out or you will pay"?
If Wisconsin Sen. Glenn Grothman had superpowers, would this happen?
Tim Cavanaugh discusses the battle over government employee compensation in radio appearances all over this great land:
Jerry
Hughes
Accent Radio
Today 3 pm Eastern, Noon Pacific
Tune in your transistors to one of Jerry's affiliates.
Listen live through accentradionetwork.com.
Knightcast, with Jonathan Beaton
WKNT,
University of Central Florida
Today 8 pm Eastern, 5 pm Pacific
Listen on the worldwide cyberwebs.
Mike Rosen Show
KOA Denver
Thursday 12:05 pm Eastern, 9:05 am Pacific
Point your rabbit ears to 850 am in Denver.
Or click Listen Live at the Mike Rosen site.
Clarence C4
Mitchell
WBAL, Baltimore
Thursday 1:30 pm Eastern, 10:30 am Pacific
To listen with your crystal set, tune in to WBAL at 1090 AM.
To listen on the worldwide interwebs, click "Listen Live" at the WBAL.com.
Thomas Friedman's latest fatuous ramblings inspire a parody.
Writing in today's New York Post, Reason Foundation Senior Analyst Shikha Dalmia argues that President Barack Obama might have dropped all talk of action on global warming but that doesn't mean he has given up on his crusade. "There are many ways to skin a cat," Obama has said. And his seems to be to give the anti-warming crusade a new name: clean energy. His new budget is chock full of measures to fund and promote so-called clean energy, even at this time of alleged budgetary austerity.
But don't look to Republicans to kill his clean energy boondoggle, Dalmia notes. They are equally enamored of clean energy because it polls well.
Note: On March 8, 2010, Reason.tv released this interview of Judge Jim Gray about the various groups that benefit from the drug war. The video is back among the most-viewed articles at Reason.com, so we decided to let all of you see just what this persuasive critic of drug prohibition was talking about. Here's the original text for the release.
In 1992, Jim Gray, a conservative judge in conservative Orange County, California, held a press conference during which he recommended that we rethink our drug laws. Back then, it took a great deal of courage to suggest that the war on drugs was a failed policy.
Today, more and more Americans are coming to the realization that prohibition's costs—whether measured in lives and liberties lost or dollars wasted—far exceed any possible or claimed benefits. Reason.tv's Paul Feine interviewed Gray about drug policy and the prospects for reform. The interview was shot by Alex Manning and edited by Hawk Jensen.
Judge Jim Gray is the author of Why Our Drug Laws Have Failed and What We Can Do About It: A Judicial Indictment of the War on Drugs.
Approximately 8.30 minutes.
Go to Reason.tv for downloadable iPod, HD, and audio versions.
Subscribe to Reason.tv's YouTube Channel and receive automatic notifications when new material goes live.
Last week Mitch Daniels, Indiana's governor, told The Daily Princetonian that "justice was served" when he was arrested for marijuana possession during his junior year at Princeton. But like many pot smokers who became politicians, says Senior Editor Jacob Sullum, Daniels seems to have two standards of justice: one for him and one for anyone else who does what he did.
Last week Mitch Daniels, Indiana's governor, told The Daily Princetonian that "justice was served" when he was arrested for marijuana possession during his junior year at Princeton. But like many pot smokers who became politicians, Daniels, a potential contender for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, seems to have two standards of justice: one for him and one for anyone else who does what he did.
Although Daniels was caught with enough marijuana to trigger a prison sentence, he got off with a $350 fine. Yet he has advocated "jail time" for "casual users"—a stark illustration of the schizophrenic attitudes that help perpetuate drug policies widely recognized as unjust.
According to the Princetonian, "officers found enough marijuana in [Daniels'] room to fill two size 12 shoe boxes." Under current New Jersey law, possessing more than 50 grams (about 1.8 ounces) of marijuana is a felony punishable by up to 18 months in prison. Given the amount of pot Daniels had, he easily could have been charged with intent to distribute, which under current law triggers a penalty of three to five years.
At the time of Daniels' arrest in May 1970, New Jersey's marijuana penalties were even more severe. Six months after his arrest, the New Jersey Supreme Court decided a case involving an 18-year-old who received a sentence of two to three years in prison after police found a pot pipe and part of a joint in his house.
Concluding that "the sentence was entirely too harsh," the court ruled that "a suspended sentence with an appropriate term of probation is sufficient penalty for a person who is convicted for the first time of possessing marihuana for his own use." But given the legal situation prior to this ruling, Daniels was very lucky to escape with no more than a fine. This lenient treatment was possible because he did not plead guilty to marijuana possession—only to the lesser offense of "maintaining a common nuisance."
In 1989, when he was president of the Hudson Institute, Daniels recounted his brush with the law in a Washington Post op-ed piece. Amazingly, he did so in support of harsher treatment for "casual users," who he said were getting off too lightly.
"Absent a resumption of enforcement against the casual user," Daniels wrote, "we will neither slash the demand that fuels the drug economy nor will we demonstrate to ourselves the seriousness of purpose inherent to any real 'war.'" He said "the threshold test of seriousness on the drug issue" is a willingness to endorse "user sanctions," including "jail time."
A few years after Daniels called for a crackdown on drug users, the number of marijuana arrests in the U.S. began a steady climb, peaking at 873,000 in 2007, up from 327,000 in 1990. In 2009 there were 858,000 marijuana arrests, of which 87 percent were for possession.
The increase in pot busts has been especially dramatic in New York City under Mayor Michael Bloomberg. This is what Bloomberg said in 2001, shortly before he announced his candidacy for mayor, when a reporter asked him whether he had smoked marijuana: "You bet I did, and I enjoyed it."
Bloomberg's honesty was refreshing compared to the evasiveness of Bill Clinton, who said he'd tried pot without inhaling, and George W. Bush, who refused to address the subject. But whatever points Bloomberg earned for candor he lost for the blatant hypocrisy of his continuing anti-pot campaign. Likewise Barack Obama, another self-identified former pot smoker who stopped supporting marijuana decriminalization when he ran for president and now literally laughs at the idea.
To his credit, Daniels today advocates criminal justice reform, including a reconsideration of sentences for nonviolent drug offenders. But if he really believes a fine is the appropriate penalty for someone caught with two shoeboxes of marijuana, he should at least support decriminalizing possession and treating it as a citable offense. Currently in Indiana, the amount of pot Daniels had triggers a sentence of six months to three years.
Jacob Sullum is a senior editor at Reason and a nationally syndicated columnist.
© Copyright 2011 by Creators Syndicate Inc.
Susan Lee Burke, a teacher in Montgomery County, Maryland's Greencastle Elementary School, has been charged with assault after eight students accused her of choking, punching, and kicking them.
The Harlan Institute’s Josh Blackman reviews a batch of recent Supreme Court decisions and finds little evidence for the popular left-wing charge that the Roberts Court has a pro-business agenda:
In FCC v. AT&T Inc. Chief Justice Roberts, the great illusionist, wrote for a unanimous Court that corporations do not possess personal privacy rights under FOIA....
In Staub v. Proctor Hospital, Justice Scalia writing for 6 members expanded the ability of employees to sue their employers under USERRA under the “cat’s paw” theory. Justice Alito, joined by Justice Thomas, concurred in judgment, and would have reached the same result through reference to the statutory text, rather than to principles of agency law.
Last week in Williamson v. Mazda Motor of America, Inc., the Court unanimously found that a California car-safety law was not pre-empted.
In January in Thompson v. North American Stainless, LP, Justice Scalia wrote for a unanimous Court, and found that Title VII’s ban on workplace retaliation against an employee who challenges discrimination also protects a co-worker who is a relative or close associate of the targeted employee.
We live in interesting times. Long repressed peoples are revolting against decades of tyranny throughout the Middle East and North Africa. Will it end happily? Reason Science Correspondent Ronald Bailey looks at what recent economic theory has to say about the fall of dictators and the prospects of liberty.