EPA’s Agit-Prop division for big government may regret it ever invited entries. Radley Balko kindly posted Reason Foundation’s entries. And the Heritage Foundation has one, too. Who’s next? Cato? Heartland Institute? AEI?
Archive for 2010
May 18, 2010
IN THE MAIL: From Gabriel Schoenfeld, Necessary Secrets: National Security, the Media, and the Rule of Law.
The EPA is holding a video contest in which you, taxpayer, are invited to produce a piece of propaganda touting the glory of regulation. The winner gets $2,500 taxpayer dollars. It takes a peculiarly bureaucratic sort of mendacity to dream up the idea of using taxpayer money to promote a contest in which taxpayers are asked to make videos celebrating the way their tax dollars are being used to make their lives more expensive.
My colleagues at Reason.tv have produced three entries. Here’s one of them:
[youtube TvXmDaqNueU]
BIG BROTHER COMES TO AMERICA WISE GOVERNMENT TEACHES PARKING ATTENDANTS TO WATCH FOR SIGNS OF TERRORISM:
Here’s something new:
A new government program aims to train thousands of parking industry employees nationwide to watch for and report anything suspicious — abandoned cars, for example, or people hanging around garages, taking photographs or asking unusual questions.
What’s new isn’t the program, but the perfectly straight coverage from an outlet like MSNBC. When a similar program, TIPS, was proposed right after the 9/11 attacks, it was the second coming of Stasi, and was opposed by a left-right coalition of civil libertarians. Here’s how it was covered in 2002:
Attorney General John Ashcroft tried to assure dubious Senate Democrats yesterday that a new citizens watchdog program isn’t a Big Brother snooping operation.The attorney general said TIPS is aimed at reporting suspicious activity in public areas and isn’t targeted at people’s homes – a central complaint of libertarians who say the plan encourages neighbors to spy on one another.
TIPS was unveiled in President Bush’s State of the Union speech but has generated little enthusiasm. One of its primary recruiting targets – the Postal Service – has said it won’t encourage mail carriers to participate.
The plan has united liberals and conservatives in opposition. The American Civil Liberties Union contends TIPS would turn many workers into “government-sanctioned Peeping Toms.”
Of course, that was then, and this is now. Apparently we only need a left-right coalition that raises privacy objections to government policies under Republican administrations.
It appears that temptation has brought down another family values crusader. I blame gay marriage!
Rep. Mark Souder (R-Ind.) will reportedly resign over an alleged affair with a staffer. Souder has long championed abstinence-only education, opposed gay marriage (because that would, you know, ruin the sanctity of hetero marriage), and has been one of the most vocal proponents of sending federal SWAT teams in to raid medical marijuana clinics in states that have legalized the drug for treatment. In fact, Souder once said merely discussing the idea of legalizing medical marijuana is akin to debating the legalization of rape.
Souder’s website sums his political phiolosophy as one that’s “committed to fighting the assault on American values.”
I wish my fellow Hoosiers had had the good sense to oust Souder on his record. But this will work.
Good riddance.
UPDATE: Here’s a video produced by Souder’s office in which the congressman explains his passion for abstinence-only education. The woman interviewing him in the video . . . is his mistress.
You really can’t make this stuff up.
HEAVY WONKING ON FINANCIAL REFORM It’s dense, but this is the best post I’ve read on FinReg so far.
SURPRISE! Massachusetts insurers bleed red ink as the state struggles to control cost growth.
Today’s photo: Las Vegas. Five-second exposure. Taken from the roof of the Rio Hotel in 2009.
Why does Obama State Department appointee Michael Posner think he should apologize to the Chinese because Arizona wants to control its borders? Why is anybody surprised? As DiscoverTheNetworks.org documents, people in the Obama crowd have been spelling it A-M-E-R-I-K-A since the 1960s.
PRESIDENT’S AUNT INVOKES BEDROCK PRINCIPLE OF MODERN IMMIGRATION LAW: The litigation isn’t over until the alien wins. And the grounds for her victory?
Onyango first applied for asylum “due to violence in Kenya.” The East African nation has been fractured by cycles of electoral violence every five years.
Of course, if you’ve followed media coverage of the Tea Party, you might wonder whether she’s really any safer here.
THE FORGOTTEN MAN: In Honor of a President Few Remember.
FOOTNOTE TO LIBERAL FASCISM: Woody Allen seems to be taking the theme of his earlier, funnier movie Bananas just a mite too seriously these days. Not to mention the theme of Manhattan…
Update: Related thoughts on the Woodman from the L.A. Times’ Andrew Malcolm.
LIFE AFTER LIFE AFTER TELEVISION: With nearly 20 years of hindsight, the blurb for George Gilder’s book Life After Television, published in 1992, shortly before the first browser was available for consumers to access the still-nascent World Wide Web, sounds remarkably prescient:
Gilder’s thesis, written in layman’s terms, is that the United States will soon lose its rightful preeminence in the telecommunications field to foreign competitors, particularly the Japanese. Unless, that is, American business executives, legislators, judges, and consumers look beyond separate, limited, and hierarchical forms of communication such as television, telephones, and online databases to a multifunctional, interactive, and democratic “telecomputer.” Instead of envisioning a brave new telecomputerized world, the powers that be in American business, government, and law are wasting time protecting obsolete existing systems, he posits. Gilder also warns that expensive, user-unfriendly online databases such as Dialog and NEXIS are, at best, transitional technologies. Though much of Gilder’s argument is based on his own opinions and peculiar personal preferences (Gilder doesn’t seem to like to leave the house*) rather than real evidence, his thoughts make interesting reading.
In the latest issue of Videomaker magazine, video producer D. Eric Franks takes Gilder’s thesis to the next level: “TV is Dead,” adding “Everything you grew up with in terms of mass multimedia is dead; it just doesn’t know it yet.” (Franks’ Videopia blog is also a fun browse, even if DIY video isn’t your thing.)
* Given a new round of rising gas prices, who does like leaving the house, knowing that telecommuting is an increasingly viable option? And incidentally, in-between Gilder’s book from the early ’90s, and Franks’ article today, it’s also worth flashing back, via this 2008 Slate piece by Jack Shafer, to the late Michael Crichton’s equally prescient thoughts on how the legacy news media got that way.
Related: Still though, no media ever dies entirely: James Lileks has some thoughts on “The Persistence of Print,” including the announcement of a new Lileksian publication!
AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH: S. T. Karnick explores “The Inconvenient Facts About Global Warming” in the shadow of the faithful at the Heartland Institute’s fourth international conference on climate change. Meanwhile, physicist John Droz, Jr. has some thoughts on what he calls “The Insane Myth of ‘Renewable’ Energy.”
Or as Michael Fumento asks, “Why Do We Continue to Believe Bizarre Things?”
May 17, 2010
“DON’T WORRY, BABY. I’VE HAD MY SMALLPOX BOOSTER.” Good news for boomers about sex: Your smallpox shots may protect you from HIV.
Too young for that solution? Try joining the US military!
CLAIRE BERLINSKI at City Journal wonders why hardly anyone cares about the unread Soviet archives.
NO HISTORY PLEASE, WE’RE AMERICANS: So say some, but not Ian Johnson, journalist and author of A Mosque in Munich: Nazis, the CIA, and the Rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in the West. Johnson is big on Islam and history:
It starts during World War II with the Nazis deciding they could use Muslims to fight the Soviet Union. Then, after the war, the very same group of Muslims are recruited by the CIA to do the same thing–fight the Soviets by using Islam. This group is then taken over by the Muslim Brotherhood, which uses Munich as a beachhead to spread into the West. This is twenty years before Afghanistan and the mujahidin; it’s the prequel to a lot of what’s gone on since.
Plus, this continues right up to the present. The Muslim Brotherhood still plays a key role in setting a radical agenda for Islam in Europe. It’s no coincidence that the mosque in Munich is associated with many major terrorist attacks in the West, including the two attacks on the World Trade Center. As our governments try to figure out how to deal with Islam, we need to know our own history first.
UPDATE: Duplicate material in quote deleted. Thanks, Matthew T.
This week, my crime column for Reason looks at 117 audio recordings of roll call meetings in a Brooklyn NYPD precinct that were recently obtained by the Village Voice.
Some background: Last March, a study from Molloy college suggested that NYPD higher-ups were pressuring police officers to under-report or reclassify serious crimes to juke the city’s crime stats. At about the same time, an NYPD officer released a few recordings in which his commanding officers can be heard telling rank-and-file cops that they’re required to meet a minimum number of arrests and citations each month. Both stories were played down by NYPD and its supporters.
The new recordings obtained by the Village Voice reinforce both sets of allegations made last March. The implications are pretty startling: As a matter of policy, NYPD seems to be encouraging its officers to harass innocent people, even to the point of arresting and detaining them for non-crimes (the city had a record 570,000 stop-and-frisk searches last year). At the same time, the department may be pressuring some officers and citizens to downgrade actual crimes–even serious ones–or to not report them at all.
We obviously want to hold government employees accountable. But it’s important that the metrics we use in doing so both reflect political realities and create a proper alignment of incentives. Much of what’s wrong with the criminal justice system today isn’t the product of evil or malevolent law enforcement personnel, but of poorly structured incentives put in place by bad policy. And bad policy usually comes from clueless politicians (the issue of crime seems particularly prone to unnuanced, slogan-based policy making).
I’ll look at other incentive problems within the criminal justice sysem in future posts this week.
NEWSWEEK STARTS THE SPIN EARLY ON TOMORROW’S PRIMARIES:
Why Tomorrow’s Primaries Won’t Be a Big Deal—No Matter What Happens
Prepare yourself. Political types are billing tomorrow as a Super Duper Tuesday of sorts—”a date that ranks as the most important of the election calendar so far,” according to Politico’s Charles Mahtesian. That means, of course, that there will be some banner election contests: Democratic Senate primaries in Pennsylvania and Arkansas, a Republican Senate primary in Kentucky, and a special election to fill the late John Murtha’s congressional seat, again in the Keystone State. But even more, it means that there will be a lot of people like me taking to the airwaves and the Internet to tell people like you what “really’s going on here.”
Here’s a tip: don’t listen to us. Truth is, you already know what’s going on.
Curiously, that’s the one piece of advice that millions have already taken in recent years from Newsweek.
Related: Jack Kelly in Real Clear Politics on “The Media’s Primary Double Standard.”
STOLEN VALOR: Democratic Senate candidate lied about serving in Vietnam:
Not just any Democratic Senate candidate, either. It’s Richard Blumenthal, current attorney general of Connecticut, whom Chris Dodd made way for by retiring earlier this year. He’s been leading all Republican challengers by upwards of 20 points in the polls and was considered a mortal lock to win the seat in November. Until now.
Read the whole thing, as the Professor would say. And incidentally, if by chance Blumenthal is elected, he wouldn’t be the only Democrat in the Senate caught lying about serving in Vietnam.
PLEASE DON’T STARE WHILE I’M EATING: Another shocking privacy violation by Google:
“Using NASA satellite data and Google Earth, a Purdue University researcher has reported finding evidence that North Korea has been logging in what is designated as a protected United Nations forest preserve.
Shao said Mount Paekdu – together with an adjacent biosphere in China – has the world’s highest plant biodiversity in a cool, temperate zone and is the habitat for many wildlife species, including the endangered Siberian tiger.
NASA images didn’t have the resolution Shao needed to pinpoint what those changes were or how they were occurring, so he used Google Earth, which has a clear resolution down to 1 meter.
HAIR OF THE DOG: Stephen Green, the VodkaPundit, watches the Sunday talk shows so you don’t have to — except to watch Steve ladle on the snark at PJTV. And speaking of vodka, don’t try this at home — or anywhere else — kids!
WHAT COULD GO WRONG?
“The Santa Clara County Registrar of Voters made history Friday when it allowed eight county residents to register to vote by writing their signatures on iPads, iPhones and other mobile touch-screen devices.”
Well, to be fair, it should enfranchise a bunch of new voters in China.