Howard Fineman, TV Commentator for MSNBC does not know if the Iraq War was a mistake and claims he never offered an opinion on the subject. In 10 years of doing Hardball, Chris Matthews was not able to convince him. All I needed was 10 minutes but he would not talk about it. Instead, he wanted to get revenge for having been exposed.
Three years after being rescued by a taxpayer
bailout, General Motors recently announced some rather ambitious
profit targets for 2012. But even if it meets these targets, writes
Shikha Dalmia, taxpayers should not wait on one foot to recover
their remaining “contributions” to the company. The company’s cash
cushion is more likely to go to unions than to investors.
Join
Reason's DC staff with our friends from Alumni for Liberty and
Students for Liberty
for a viewing of the Stossel show filmed at the
2012 International Students for Liberty Conference!
Come at 8pm to catch up with friends in the liberty movement and have a few drinks. Stossel airs at 9pm ET. If you would like to watch the show in the quiet section of the party, be sure to arrive early to reserve your seat!
Hard and soft beverages will be provided.
Be sure to officially RSVP here: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/StosselViewingRSVP
As details have emerged on the agreement reached
between European authorities, private creditors, and the Greek
government in order to provide enough money so that Greece pays a
March debt bill, it is increasingly clear that this deal will not
be enough. As Reason Foundation Director of Economic Research
Anthony Randazzo explains, this new European bailout will only
delay the inevitable—Greece is going to default on its debt.
Marco Rubio with some
real talk on immigration. Do you want hot links and other Reason goodies delivered to your inbox twice a day? Sign up here for Reason's morning and afternoon news updates.
Moments after White House Press
Secretary Jay Carney eulogized journalists who have died reporting
from Syria, ABC's Jake Tapper asked him why the White House talks
such a big game about press freedom abroad, while back home it
indicts whistleblowers and subpoenas the journalists to whom they
come clean. Carney denied that was the case, and referred Tapper to
the DOJ press office.
The response was blatantly disingenuous, considering that the DOJ is under Obama; and downright disgusting when you recall that before he was getting paid to pretend the president's shit doesn't stink, Carney was a journalist.
Read the transcript of Carney and Tapper's exchange below:
TAPPER: The White House keeps praising these journalists who are — who’ve been killed –
CARNEY: I don’t know about “keep” — I think -
TAPPER: You’ve done it, Vice President Biden did it in a statement. How does that square with the fact that this administration has been so aggressively trying to stop aggressive journalism in the United States by using the Espionage Act to take whistleblowers to court?
You’re — currently I think that you’ve invoked it the sixth time, and before the Obama administration, it had only been used three times in history. You’re — this is the sixth time you’re suing a CIA officer for allegedly providing information in 2009 about CIA torture. Certainly that’s something that’s in the public interest of the United States. The administration is taking this person to court. There just seems to be disconnect here. You want aggressive journalism abroad; you just don’t want it in the United States.
CARNEY: Well, I would hesitate to speak to any particular case, for obvious reasons, and I would refer you to the Department of Justice for more on that.
I think we absolutely honor and praise the bravery of reporters who are placing themselves in extremely dangerous situations in order to bring a story of oppression and brutality to the world. I think that is commendable, and it’s certainly worth noting by us. And as somebody who knew both Anthony and Marie, I particularly appreciate what they did to bring that story to the American people.
I — as for other cases, again, without addressing any specific case, I think that there are issues here that involve highly sensitive classified information, and I think that, you know, those are — divulging or to — divulging that kind of information is a serious issue, and it always has been.
TAPPER: So the truth should come out abroad; it shouldn’t come out here?
CARNEY: Well, that’s not at all what I’m saying, Jake, and you know it’s not. Again, I can’t — specific –
TAPPER: That’s what the Justice Department’s doing.
CARNEY: Well, you’re making a judgment about a broad array of cases, and I can’t address those specifically.
TAPPER: It’s also the judgment that a lot of whistleblowers’ organizations and good government groups are making as well.
CARNEY: Not one that I’m going to make.
.
With Washington state recently legalizing same-sex unions and Maryland about to follow suit, gay marriage hasn't been on this big a roll since Bert and Ernie first shacked up on Sesame Street. When Maryland finalizes its bill, seven states and the District of Columbia will sanction the practice.
But before you bust out the appletinis and Indigo Girls CDs to celebrate, consider that just last year in Maryland - a deep-blue, Democratic-majority state when it comes to politics - gay marriage went down faster than George Michael in a public restroom due to resistance from socially conservative African Americans in the Democratic Party. Indeed, while 71 percent of white Democrats in the Old Line State favor gay marriage, just 41 percent of black Democrats do.
So what's different this time around? Democratic Gov. Martin O'Malley and other pro-marriage legislators took a page from New York's gay playbook and reached around to sympathetic Republicans to seal the deal.
Inconceivable even a generation ago, gay marriage is well on its way to becoming mainstream as a growing majority of Americans now favor it. The only question is when, not if, folks such as Maryland residents Justin and Phillip Terry-Smith will join heterosexuals in the joys of getting married - and divorced - happily ever after.
About 2.30 minutes. Produced by Joshua Swain. Written by Nick Gillespie and Kennedy, who also hosts.
Scroll down for downloadable versions and subscribe to Reason.tv's YouTube Channel to receive automatic updates when new material goes live.
Today the Supreme Court
heard
arguments for and against the Stolen Valor Act of 2006, under which
falsely claiming to have received a military medal or decoration is
a federal crime punishable by up to a year in jail. The case
involves Xavier Alvarez, a minor politician in Southern California
who invented a 25-year record of service in the U.S. Marines,
capped by a Congressional Medal of Honor. Two years ago the U.S.
Court of Appeals
agreed with Alvarez that prosecuting him for his lies violated
the First Amendment. Much of today's debate revolved around the
question of whether lies about purely factual matters have "First
Amendment value," with Antonin Scalia stating that they do not
(which is the government's position) and a few other justices
seeming to agree. Assuming that is correct, the question becomes
whether the Stolen Valor Act leaves enough "breathing space" for
speech that does have value.
But since the Court is applying a constitutional provision that says "Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech," this approach seems backward. Shouldn't the question be whether the government has a compelling enough reason to overcome what sounds like a very strong presumption against punishing speech? At the very least, the First Amendment puts the burden of proof on the censors, who must justify their speech limits, rather than the speaker, who need not show that his words have value. (Alvarez's obviously had value to him, until he was exposed as a liar and subjected to nationwide ridicule and condemnation.) As Jonathan Libby, the federal public defender who urged the Court to uphold the 9th Circuit's ruling, put it, "Our founders believed that Congress as a general principle doesn't get to tell us what we as individuals can and cannot say." Of all the justices who spoke, Sonia Sotomayor came closest to the skeptical attitude that is appropriate when confronted by a new crime that involves saying things the government does not want you to say:
What harm are we protecting [against] here? I thought that the core of the First Amendment was to protect even...offensive speech. We have a legion of cases that said your emotional reaction to offensive speech is not enough. If that is the core of our First Amendment, what I hear, and that's what I think the court below said, is you can't really believe that a war veteran thinks less of the medal that he or she receives because someone's claiming fraudulently that they got one. They don't think less of the medal. We're reacting to the fact that we're offended by the thought that someone's claiming an honor they didn't receive.
So outside of the emotional reaction, where's the harm? And I'm not minimizing it. I too take offense when people make these kinds of claims, but I take offense when someone I'm dating makes a claim that's not true.
I think Sotomayor is right that the Stolen Valor Act really is about punishing offensive speech. But even if it were true that "a war veteran thinks less of the medal that he or she receives because someone's claiming fraudulently that they got one," that is not the sort of injury that justifies legal sanctions. "Stolen valor" is, after all, a metaphor; Alvarez did not actually steal anyone's property.
According to Solicitor General Donald Verrilli, "one of the harms that justifies this statute is the misappropriation of the government-conferred honor and esteem," and "there is also the particularized harm of the erosion of the value of the military honors...conferred by our government....For the government to say this is a really big deal and then to stand idly by when one charlatan after another makes a false claim to have won the medal does debase the value of the medal in the eyes of the soldiers....That is the government's interest." An interest, maybe, but not one that justifies criminalizing speech. Notice that Verrilli never explains whose rights Alvarez violated or how he did so. If debasing the value of a military medal were a crime, you could be thrown in jail for saying the Congressional Medal of Honor is a mark of dishonor that represents the random murder of innocent people who have the misfortunate to live in countries ruled by dictators who piss off the U.S. government.
Whatever harm might result from the lack of a criminal penalty for lying about military medals, the country somehow survived it for 230 years. Maybe that's because mendacious blowhards like Alvarez tend to be punished by public humiliation. The more often they make their claims, the more widely publicized those claims are, and the more benefit they derive from them, the more likely they are to be exposed. Rather than "stand idly by," which Verrilli portrays as the only alternative, the government could help the process along by making lists of medal recipients readily accessible and calling out liars. If the government has the resources to investigate, try, and imprison these guys, it surely has the resources to say they're not on the list. And if a phony hero is never exposed, meaning actual medal recipients never hear about his false claims, where is the harm?
The oral argument transcript is here (PDF). Previous coverage of U.S. v. Alvarez here.
Reason Foundation senior policy analyst Shikha Dalmia appeared on The Wall Street Journal's video blog to discuss Ayn Rand's early history in America as an illegal immigrant as well as how immigration policy is playing a decisive role in the GOP race. Air Date: February 16, 2012.
Approximately 6.39 minutes.
And check out Dalmia's column on the same topic, "Ayn Rand Was an Illegal Immigrant."
Join us, as we get our tweeter on tonight in honor of the Arizona GOP debate, right here at Hit&Run.
[Update: I originally incorrectly referred to Representative Justin Amash (R-MI) as a Senator.]
This weekend marked the fifth and largest International Students For Liberty Conference (ISFLC) yet. Over one thousand students, supporters, and organizations convened on the Grand Hyatt Hotel here in Washington, D.C. to discuss the philosophies, applications, and proliferation of libertarian ideas. Of course, given the age range and the rarity of so many like-minded people together in one location, other priorities were likely to surface. As the MC, Gilles Verstraeten, put it, "The best way to spread the ideas of liberty is for libertarians to breed. We're all in a room together now, so get to it."
Besides that, and the beautiful moment when performer GoRemy asked if everyone had a good Valentine's Day and a spontaneous chorus of adolescent male voices boomed No! in response, the highlight of opening night had to be the Alumnus of the Year speech by Peter Thiel, libertarian venture capitalist and founder of of PayPal. Thiel's praise for the advances in the tech world was tempered by admonitions of little to no innovation in other fields, especially transportation. "The failure of innovation in transportation is the result of a failure in energy innovation," he declared, and considered this the outcome of government overregulation. "We've had progress where there was little regulation," meaning the digital world, "but anything in the real world, the world of stuff, has seen little advancement."
Thiel also warned of the third economic bubble we are likely to witness, as he did of the first and second most recent ones: he said it was "the government itself. It is deficit spending and it is bigger and dumber than the other bubbles, if that's even possible."
He called the crisis of rising higher education prices "a very important subcomponent of the government bubble" and said that, as in the mortgage crisis in which "people told trillions of dollars' worth of lies to convince others that there was no bubble," there is an imbalance between those who oppose reckless education spending and those who encourage it. He invited students, entrepreneurs, and individuals in general to ask themselves: "Do you want to do what hundreds of other people have done or do you want to do what's right for you?" The proposition was met with applause.
There was no Alumna of the Year speech, probably proving that libertarians are a bunch of sexist evil lady-haters. Or maybe not: Marty Zupan, president of the Institute for Humane Studies, closed the conference with a speech and a Q&A session. When asked what libertarian women can do to move forward in the promotion of a free society, she smiled and said without hesitation, "Work hard and don't underestimate yourself."
International Students
Not surprisingly, there was a good number of international attendees at this year's conference. One, a young man from the People's Republic of China, received applause for the gravity of his mere presence at a libertarian conference.
One group that generated a lot of excitement was members of the African Students For Liberty chapter. The group was started as an initiative of Atlas Economic Research Foundation, "a nonprofit organization connecting a global network of more than 400 free-market organizations in over 80 countries to the ideas and resources needed to advance the cause of liberty."
I got a chance to speak to their founder, Adedayo Thomas (pictured, far left). He said he met Tom Palmer, Vice President for International Programs, at a 2007 conference in Kenya, where they discussed "the issue of African liberty." He lamented that students in Africa have little to no knowledge of classical liberal philosophy, mainly because "the history of Africa has been distorted by the misconception of capitalism as colonialism.... This makes Africa what it is today." When asked how he became concerned with introducing students to the ideas of liberty, he told me he had considered talking to politicians to be a waste of time and saw more potential in going directly to people and to students in particular.
Thomas' argument for exactly why colonialism was bad seems to be refreshingly uncommon. "There were no borders in pre-colonial Africa. People freely moved their wares, voluntarily. We had a king who was not a dictator and a council of chiefs" who served solely as mediators in disputes. "Individualism existed in pre-colonial Africa. Dictatorship was an import of colonialism." When describing the system of voluntary enterprise that characterized pre-colonial African commerce, he said, "What we had was exactly capitalism."
Goodies and Politicians
The event came with lots of good swag, including T-shirts, bumper stickers, and even a souvenir from the Young Americans for Liberty's photo booth:
One of the most interesting breakout sessions was a Q&A session on Saturday night with Representative Justin Amash (R-Michigan). Attendees of ISFLC got to hear about how the youngest freshman Congressman became what he calls "a Libertarian Republican." He pointed to his father, a Palestinian refugee, who he said "taught me the importance of liberty."
There was a lot of emphasis on the power of social media in Amash's talk as well. He claimed that "Facebook is helping to break down the two-party system" and said he first discovered libertarianism as a concrete political philosophy by Googling his own views on issues. Continuing on the theme of individualism, he urged the audience to contact their senators more. He said that senators so rarely hear from their constituents on specific issues that they are easily swayed by such appeals. "If ten people call, they panic. They say, 'No, I've got to vote no on that one. Every single person who called today said they opposed it.' Even if only three people called, that's what usually happens."
Read more from reason on Peter Thiel, Justin Amash, and teens having sex. More coverage from me on ISFLC 2012.
We’ve been seeing some better—if not good—economic numbers lately, mainly in employment, but also in industrial production, and general business conditions. One might be tempted to believe there’s at least a mild recovery on the way. That’d be nice.
But I’m…troubled. First, there’s this:
Oil prices aren’t high right now. In fact, they are unusually low. Gasoline prices would have to rise by another $0.65 to $0.75 per gallon from where they are now just to be “normal”. And, because gasoline prices are low right now, it is very likely that they are going to go up more—perhaps a lot more…
In terms of judging whether the price of WTI is high or low, here is the price that truly matters: 0.0602 ounces of gold per barrel (which can be written as Au0.0602/bbl). What this number means is that, right now, a barrel of WTI has the same market value as 0.0602 ounces of gold.
During the 493 months since January 1, 1971, the price of WTI has averaged Au0.0732/bbl…
At this point, we can be certain that, unless gold prices come down, gasoline prices are going to go up—by a lot.
In other words, there’s at least an 18% price differential in the current price of oil compared to gold, compared to the historical average.
Another important thing to remember is that the current rise in energy prices does NOT appear to be related to demand for energy. According to the US Energy Information Agency, the US demand for both electricity and petroleum has been decreasing.
Statistics for energy use usually run a couple of months behind, but the recent figures for petroleum are that from August, 2011 until November 11, Total Crude Oil and Petroleum Products consumed, in thousands of barrels per month, fell from 593,757 to 562,019. Figures for the same months in 2010 are 609,517 and 569,312, respectively.
Similarly, the most recent electrical generation numbers, in millions of kilowatt hours, show that from August to November, 2011, total electricity consumption fell from 370,073 to 273,053. Both figures are about 2 million kWh less than the same months in 2010.
Now, maybe in the last two months there’s been a huge turnaround in energy consumption, but please note that the year-on-year demand is declining, and in general, has been since 2006.
So, if energy use is declining, while prices are increasing, and supply remains steady—or is increasing—then we can reasonably look to monetary reasons for the price increase, as the economic fundamentals do not explain the price changes.
The implications for energy prices, therefore, are not good. Start saving those pennies, kids.
For all the good it’ll do you.
Oh, and by the way, if the economy is recovering, why is energy demand decreasing, rather than increasing? Just asking.
~
Dale Franks
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Did you know if your passport is damaged, you can be stopped from traveling Internationally?
Well, it happened to the Gosnell family from Denver, CO earlier this week while on their way to a family vacation in Belize.
When the family attempted to board a flight in Dallas, TX, American Airline officials refused to allow Kyle Gosnell to board the flight because his passport had a small crease on the back cover and appeared weathered and worn down.
A report from attorney Michael Gennaco of the Los Angeles County Office of Independent Review said February 22, that the Fullerton police department did not deceive or falsify information regarding the July 5, 2011, fatal beating of Kelly Thomas, a 37-year-old homeless drifter.
The city hired Gennaco to investigate the incident after outcry over the handling of the case from the public and Thomas' family. Called into question was the department release of a two-year-old booking photo of Thomas looking disheveled as well an incorrect information given to the local media that two officers suffered broken bones during the incident.
Ron Thomas, Kelly Thomas' father, told the Los Angeles Times, that he didn't believe the report and, "All of it was intended to make Kelly look bad."
Officer Manuel Ramos was charged with second-degree murder and Officer Jay Cicinelli was charged with involuntary manslaughter for their roles in the incident.
Reason TV looked at the Kelly Thomas beating and in Cops vs. Cameras: The Killing of Kelly Thomas & The Power of New Media:
The rule of centralized state and bureaucratic machines is one of those things that the cultural reproduction apparatus teaches people to accept as “natural” or “inevitable” (“it must be more efficient, or it wouldn’t be this way;” “the people in charge make these rules for a reason”).
But in fact it is very much the result of human agency. In the U.S., it was deliberate collusion between the state and big business, especially in the 1850s and the Gilded Age, to set up a centralized corporate economy. There simply wouldn’t have been an economy dominated by large manufacturers and wholesalers serving a single national market, were it not for things like railroad land grants and other subsidies to make long-distance distribution artificially cheap, and the pooling or exchange of industrial patents to cartelize markets. Not to mention gunboat diplomacy to make sure overbuilt U.S. industry could operate at capacity.
This was a top-down revolution, in which the state was very much involved. The groundwork for intensifying the process was laid by the “Great Betrayal” of the Hayes election, in which the landed aristocracy of the South acquiesced in Republican corporatism on a national level in return for a free hand to reinstitute Apartheid in their own region.
According to John Curl, in “For All the People,” the Great Betrayal turned into a civil war when labor and farm populist movements — what he calls the “Great Uprising” — tried to reverse the corporate coup. The climax of this civil war came with the Knights of Labor’s nationwide general strike for an eight-hour day (the original, 100% American origin of May Day as a workers’ holiday) and the ensuing post-Haymarket repression.
Grover Cleveland’s military intervention to suppress the Pullman Strike was one of the last big battles in defeating the counter-revolution, after which the alliance between big business and big government was able to fully reshape the country in its own image. The Left attempted rearguard actions on the eve of World War One — most notably the Wobblies’ Lawrence strike — but was liquidated during the War Hysteria and Red Scare.
The managerial/professional New Class of corporate managers was first recruited from industrial engineers after the Civil War, and around the turn of the 20th century the new corporate-state alliance gave rise to other centralized institutions (bureaucratic charitable foundations, universities, large urban public school systems) that served as auxiliaries to the corporate state either by processing human resources for it, or by mitigating the human casualties of corporate rule (e.g., managing the underclass through the welfare and prison systems).
And now, after 150 years of this, people see the administration of every aspect of life by centralized bureaucratic machines as natural and inevitable, the only conceivable way of doing things. But it’s not. It’s not only the creature of deliberate human design; it requires deliberate, ongoing intervention by the state for its very survival.
More importantly, it’s in the process of being dismantled by human action. Despite the system’s attempts to indoctrinate us to the contrary, we are not powerless. We’re in the midst of another Great Uprising — fought by The Pirate Bay, Wikileaks, Anonymous, and a thousand other networked insurrections around the world as in the Arab Spring and Occupy movements. And unlike the last time, this time the technological revolution has put the advantage on the side of the Uprising. This time it’s us building the revolution, and the corporate state finds itself fighting a desperate rearguard action to stop us.
“Other worlds are possible.”
