Reason articles from April 2009

Reason archives from April 2009

The liberaltarian Jackalope: the liberal-libertarian rapprochement is probably dead on arrival.(From the top)
April 1, 2009... IN LATE, JANUARY, for the third time since Barack Obama's historic election, a group of Washington, D.C., writers and think tankers, roughly half liberal and half libertarian, gathered for an evening of robust discussion and debate exploring a...

Houses of pain.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
April 1, 2009... Tim Cavanaugh is right that housing prices are a sacred cow ("Houses of Pain" January). But why would that be a surprise? As you folks at reason know better than anyone, most interference with property at the local level takes place in the name...

Burn the speculators.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
April 1, 2009... I laughed out loud while reading Air Transport Association chief economist John Heimlich's letter regarding oil index speculation (Letters, January). His letter shows quite clearly why his industry has been sucking air lately: because it gets...

Correction.(Letters)(Correction notice)
April 1, 2009... In "Bush's Midnight Regulations" (February), the Duquesne University economist Antony Davies' name was misspelled.

Guantanamo state of mind: President Obama should reject the arrogance that made the infamous prison possible.(Columns)(Barack Obama on Guantanamo Naval Base)(Column)
April 1, 2009... IN JANUARY 2002, the Pentagon began imprisoning men it described as "very hard cases"--"the worst of the worst" terrorists in American custody--at the U.S. Naval Base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. During the next seven years it released more than...

Subprime nation: Uncle Sam's mortgage.(Citings)(Brief article)
April 1, 2009... IN JANUARY the financial website creditloan.com asked, "What would happen if Uncle Sam applied for a loan at his local bank?" What sort of deal could he expect to get on a 30-year, fixed-rate mortgage? The site's number crunchers then...

SuperSperm: the DNA-denying prosecutor.(Citings)(Michael Mermel)(Brief article)
April 1, 2009... SIX YEARS AGO, Michael Mermel, chief of the criminal division for the Lake County, Illinois, State's Attorney's Office, dismissed DNA tests exonerating Bernie Starks, a man convicted of raping a 68-year-old woman. Starks had been in prison...

30 years ago in reason.(Citings)(Brief article)
April 1, 2009... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] "The Honorable First Brother escorted a high-level delegation from the Libyan government, best known to American audiences as part-owners of the international terrorist syndicate. Billy [Carter]'s public statement,...

The paramour clause: the state vs. sleepovers.(Citings)(Brief article)
April 1, 2009... THE PARAMOUR Clause sounds like a sexy legal thriller, the kind of movie that involves a handgun tucked into a garter. Alas, it's nothing so glamorous. In several states, the term refers to a legal restriction in child custody agreements that...

An annoying law: free speech in Michigan.(Citings)(Brief article)
April 1, 2009... IN DECEMBER the Brighton, Michigan, City Council managed to simultaneously approve and violate a ban on being annoying in public. The ordinance, which took effect on January 2, makes it illegal "to insult, accost, molest or otherwise annoy,...

Leave Allah alone! Free speech at the U.N.(Citings)("Defamation of Religion" resolution )(Brief article)
April 1, 2009... SCREW YOU, Allah! Up yours, Buddha! Get lost, Yahweh! Say any of the above, and you'll run afoul of the "Defamation of Religion" resolution adopted by the United Nations in December. The resolution, chiefly sponsored by Islamic countries,...

City vs. Church: zoning the homeless.(Citings)(Brief article)
April 1, 2009... FOLLOWING A merger with another congregation, the First Presbyterian Church in downtown Middletown, New York, was scheduled to remain empty and unused this winter. The clergy felt this wasn't in keeping with the church's mission of helping...

Guns in parks? The second amendment in nature.(Citings)(Brief article)
April 1, 2009... SINCE JANUARY 2009, thanks to a regulatory change by the outgoing Bush administration, it is legal to carry concealed and loaded weapons in national parks and wildlife refuges, as long as it's permitted in the state. Since 1960 such gun bearing...

Rank order: changing college ratings.(Citings)
April 1, 2009... IN THE AGE of Google, the problem for consumers sometimes seems to be not too little but too much information. Unless, that is, the consumers are parents shopping for an American university. For whatever reason, there are precious few...

Quotes.
April 1, 2009... "In capitalism of the 21st century, there is room for the state." --French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who called market capitalism "an immoral system" at the New World, New Capitalism symposium in Paris, January 8 "Politicians spent...

Economic forecast.(List)(predictions about President Barack Obama's term)(Brief article)
April 1, 2009... Peter Schiff, president of the brokerage firm Euro Pacific Capital and author of the recent Little Book o[Bull Moves in Bear Markets (Wiley), has become famous as the man who correctly predicted the housing bubble collapse and subsequent...

Rating the Internet: child-proofing the Web?(Citings)(Brief article)
April 1, 2009... BRITAIN'S CULTURE secretary, Andy Burnham, announced in December that he hopes to impose a ratings system for websites. "If you look back at the people who created the Internet," Burnham told the London Telegraph, "they talked very...

In Worcester, England, Bill Malcolm put barbed wire around his tool shed and vegetable plots after thieves struck three times in four months.(Brickbats)(Brief article)
April 1, 2009... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In Worcester, England, Bill Malcolm put barbed wire around his tool shed and vegetable plots after thieves struck three times in four months. Shortly after that, local officials ordered him to remove the fence...

Six Newton County, Georgia, sheriff's deputies came to Tosha Ford's home and took her to-year-old son, Alandis, to jail, where he was charged with possessing a weapon on school property and with terroristic threats and acts.(Brickbats)(Brief article)
April 1, 2009... Six Newton County, Georgia, sheriff's deputies came to Tosha Ford's home and took her to-year-old son, Alandis, to jail, where he was charged with possessing a weapon on school property and with terroristic threats and acts. The weapon: a toy...

U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents spent more than an hour searching and questioning New York resident Jerilea Zempel when she tried to return to the country from Canada.(Brickbats)(Brief article)
April 1, 2009... U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents spent more than an hour searching and questioning New York resident Jerilea Zempel when she tried to return to the country from Canada. They had found a picture she had drawn of a sport utility vehicle,...

Troy Garcia's neighbors thought it was great that he plowed the snow off the streets of their Spokane Valley, Washington, neighborhood.(Brickbats)(Brief article)
April 1, 2009... Troy Garcia's neighbors thought it was great that he plowed the snow off the streets of their Spokane Valley, Washington, neighborhood. Welt, all of them except the county roads supervisor. He reported Garcia, and police warned him he'd be...

Henry Marshall says several Orlando, Florida, police officers kicked in the doors of his house, pointed guns at him, and ransacked his home.(Brickbats)(Brief article)
April 1, 2009... Henry Marshall says several Orlando, Florida, police officers kicked in the doors of his house, pointed guns at him, and ransacked his home. They were looking for his grandson Quinton, who allegedly had bought a stolen cell phone. Quinton...

Khalin Rivenbark had a cold, so her father put a few cough drops in her book bag before sending her off to school.(Brickbats)(Brief article)
April 1, 2009... Khalin Rivenbark had a cold, so her father put a few cough drops in her book bag before sending her off to school. A classmate of the Clay County, Florida, fourth-grader also had a cold so she shared some cough drops with her. A teacher spotted...

A British Ministry of Defense contractor seems to have misplaced a computer hard drive.(Brickbats)(Brief article)
April 1, 2009... A British Ministry of Defense contractor seems to have misplaced a computer hard drive containing the names, addresses, passport numbers, next of kin, and driver's license data of up to 100,000 members of the armed forces.

A class at New York's New Rochelle High School was asked to compare the book Girl, Interrupted with its film adaptation.(Brickbats)(Brief article)
April 1, 2009... A class at New York's New Rochelle High School was asked to compare the book Girl, Interrupted with its film adaptation. But not before English teachers ripped out several pages of the book that contained sexual content and "inappropriate"...

About a year after Julie Strange's son Paul died, she received a letter from England's Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency, addressed to Paul, that claimed he had not sent in required information on a vehicle he owned.(Brickbats)(Brief article)
April 1, 2009... About a year after Julie Strange's son Paul died, she received a letter from England's Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency, addressed to Paul, that claimed he had not sent in required information on a vehicle he owned. She called the agency and...

Bush's second term: our predictions revisited.(Follow-Up)(George W. Bush)
April 1, 2009... In February 2005, as President George W. Bush's second term began, reason asked "a variety of pundits, pols, and profs to tell us their biggest hopes and fears for the next four years." During the final days of the Bush administration in...

I luv u, mom: tech family unity.(Citings)(Brief article)
April 1, 2009... JIMMY IS alone in his bedroom killing orcs, while his sister Olivia updates her Facebook page in her room. Dad is shopping for hunting gear at hunttheoutdoors.com, while Morn, sequestered in the home office, is finishing up an overdue sales...

Slapp silly: developers vs. free speech.(Citings)
April 1, 2009... reason was going to run an article about touchy developers who sue people for criticizing their abuse of eminent domain. One of those developers is H. Walker Royall of Dallas, who sued Wright Gore III over a website that detailed the city of...

State of insecurity.(Soundbite)(Bruce Schneier interview)(Interview)
April 1, 2009... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Bruce Schneier, columnist for Wired and chief security technology officer of BT, started out as an expert on cryptography. He has gradually become the go-to guy for fresh ideas about all kinds of security questions,...

Criminal Verite: mug shots--funny and unusual punishment.(Columns)(Column)
April 1, 2009... MURDER RATES HAVE dropped during the last decade. Same with rape, robbery, assault, burglary, and theft. Yet somehow we're in the midst of the greatest mug shot epidemic the world has ever known. Every year, more than 14 million people are...

Stimulating ourselves to death: they might sound great, but do stimulus packages work?(Columns)
April 1, 2009... BARACK OBAMA says his "unprecedented" economic stimulus package will not merely be "a short-term program to boost employment." No, it "will invest in our most important priorities like energy and education; health care; and a new...

Unclenching the fist: U.S.-Russian relations in the age of Obama.
April 1, 2009... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] LAST SUMMER, for the first time since the now-misty days of Soviet communism, U.S.-Russia relations took center stage in American politics. In the wake of the war in Georgia, with its unnerving sight of Russian tanks...

Forensics Fraud? Experts say this video shows a doctor manufacturing evidence. So why is a man still on death row?(Cover story)
April 1, 2009... THE NUDE, LIFELESS body of 23-month-old Haley Oliveaux lies awkwardly across a metal autopsy table in a Mississippi morgue. A red block propped under the little girl's shoulders elevates her chest, causing her head to tilt backward and her arms...

Putting stars behind bars: how did breaking sports rules become a federal offense?
April 1, 2009... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] BEFORE HIS untimely death in 2006, Logan Young faced six months in federal prison for "conspiracy to commit racketeering" and "crossing state lines to commit racketeering," both felonies. While those charges made...

'We have a lot of work to do': ABC's John Stossel on defending the market from within the liberal media.(Culture and Reviews)(Interview)
April 1, 2009... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] JOHN STOSSEL is the best-known libertarian in the news media. As the co-anchor of the long-running and immensely popular ABC News program 20/20, auteur of a continuing series of specials on topics ranging from...

Psychedelic old time radio.(Briefly Noted)(Firesign Theater's comedy album)(Brief article)
April 1, 2009... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In the late 1960s, a quartet called the Firesign Theater created a striking new species of comedy album. These records told dense, non-linear stories, with scenes linked by the logic of dreams, puns, free...

A forgotten civil rights hero: the unappreciated legacy of entrepreneur-activist T.R.M. Howard.(Biography)
April 1, 2009... Black Maverick: T.R.M. Howard's Fight for Civil Rights and Economic Power, by David T. Beito and Linda Royster Beito, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 312 pages, $35 ON AUGUST 31, 1955, the mutilated body of 14-year-old Emmett Till...

Marketplace of ideas.(Briefly Noted)(Catalog: The Illustrated History of Mail-Order Shopping )(Brief article)(Book review)
April 1, 2009... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In 1872, traveling salesman Aaron Montgomery Ward experimented with mail order catalogs to sell products directly to his rural customers, lowering prices by removing the middleman at the general store. Today, the...

Whitewashing FDR: a New Deal apologia arrives just in time for Barack Obama.(Nothing to Fear: FDR's Inner Circle and the Hundred Days That Created Modern America)(Book review)
April 1, 2009... Nothing to Fear: FDR's Inner Circle and the Hundred Days That Created Modern America, by Adam Cohen, New York: Penguin, 352 pages, $29.95 WHEN IT STARTED becoming fashionable to compare the current economic malaise to the Great Depression,...

Selling the moon.(Briefly Noted)(Who Owns the Moon?)(Brief article)(Book review)
April 1, 2009... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] While private property rights have gained widespread acceptance across the planet, the same can't yet be said for the rest of the solar system. In Who Owns the Moon? (Springer), the Romanian space lawyer Virgiliu Pop...

Outlaw art.(Briefly Noted)(Graffiti Lives: Beyond the Tag in New York's Urban Underground )(Brief article)(Book review)
April 1, 2009... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] "Writers talk all the time that they won't write graffiti on churches, on private property, on people's houses," one graffiti "writer" told sociologist Gregory Snyder in Snyder's book Graffiti Lives: Beyond the Tag...

The totalitarian architect.(Briefly Noted)(Le Corbusier: A Life )(Brief article)(Book review)
April 1, 2009... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The ideas of Le Corbusier, the Swiss-French designer of uniform, soulless skyscrapers, are recounted in a new biography, Nicholas Fox Weber's Le Corbusier: A Life (Knopf). Le Corbusier's passion for imposed order...

Who moved my government cheese? The second coming of Rainmakers frontman Bob Walkenhorst.(Interview)
April 1, 2009... IT'S WEDNESDAY night at the Record Bar in Kansas City's Westport entertainment district. As two notes on his guitar's E string alternate in the background, singer-songwriter Bob Walkenhorst is introducing his next number: "I didn't play this...

Stop the great chastisement, I'm not getting off: why aren't opponents of consumption happy about the recession?
April 1, 2009... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] IF THERE'S A Silver lining in the clouds over the global economy, Live Simplers are the people you'd expect to find it. Proponents of voluntary simplicity, critics of excessive consumption, localists,...

Europe gets punk'd.(Artifact)("Entropa" installation by David Cerny)(Brief article)
April 1, 2009... WHEN THE CZECH Republic took over the rotating presidency of the European Union, it asked David Cerny, the enfant terrible of the Czech art world, to produce a sculpture symbolizing European unity and cooperation. The result was an eight-ton...