Reason articles from December 2004

Reason archives from December 2004

Free expression forever!(Editor's Note)
December 1, 2004... I'M WRITING THIS about three weeks before the presidential election, and it's anybody's guess who will win. This much, however, is already clear: Free expression--that most basic of rights--is alive and well in contemporary America. Indeed,...

Watergate Blowback.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
December 1, 2004... For all its selective history, aggregated statistics, dated anecdotes, and anecdotal dates, Matt Welch's "Watergate Blowback" (August/September) manages to avoid almost completely the central issues of the last three years, if not the last 13:...

Taking Science Seriously.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
December 1, 2004... Cathy Young's "Taking Science Seriously" (August/September) should be required reading for doctrinaire conservatives and radical feminists. As usual, Young cuts through half-truths and pseudoscience as well as camouflaged political agendas. ...

The War on Fat.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
December 1, 2004... I am one of the three authors of the University of Baltimore's recently released Obesity Report Card, and I found Jacob Sullum's "The War on Fat" (August/September) a great read. I am far from a proponent of government intervention, but in...

Dr. Feelscared.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
December 1, 2004... As a retired police officer, I am embarrassed by what my colleagues at the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) are doing ("Dr. Feelscared," August/September)--law enforcement professionals second-guessing doctors who have had some 20 years of...

John Perry Barlow 2.0.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
December 1, 2004... After reading Brian Doherty's interview with John Perry Barlow ("John Perry Barlow 2.0," August/September), I was left wondering what Barlow's definition of a libertarian is. He states that "most of the people in the think tanks behind the Bush...

Ad blockers: politicians vs. free speech.(Citings)
December 1, 2004... IN MARCH 2000, Face the Nation panelist Gloria Borger asked George W. Bush about independent ads attacking his chief rival for the Republican presidential nomination, Arizona Sen. John McCain. The future president's reply invoked the freedoms...

25 years ago in reason.(Citings)
December 1, 2004... "It is not literally true that Richard Nixon is a monster, but it is metaphorically true; and we can communicate a good deal of truth about Nixon's character by making the statement that he is a monster, which is a lie. So it is too with those...

Queen of Persia: rock in the lap of the gods.(Citings)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2004... THE FIRST ROCK group to have its music officially authorized for sale by Iran's ruling mullahs is, of all acts, Queen. The band, popular in the 1970s and early '80s, was fronted by the late Freddie Mercury, a gay icon who died of AIDS in 1991....

Illegal music: the war on sampling.(Citings)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2004... THIS ARTICLE IS plagiarized. Every word in it has been brazenly "sampled" from a book, the dictionary, and "remixed" into a news story. That's a pretty silly way to define plagiarism, but it's not far from the logic of a September decision...

Induce vomiting: banning peer-to-peer networks.(Citings)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2004... LAST YEAR A U.S. district court in Los Angeles held that Grokster, a peer-to-peer file sharing network, could not be held responsible for copyright infringements by its users. Since then, the Recording Industry Association of America has been...

Liberal demographic: Clear Channel turns left.(Citings)
December 1, 2004... AS WE GO to press, there are 36 radio stations that broadcast talk shows from the liberal network Air America. Over a third of them are owned by Clear Channel, the nation's largest radio chain. Take out the stations that air only one or two...

Quotes.(Brief Article)
December 1, 2004... "For the first time in human history, global civilization is threatened with collapse." --Stanford population studies professor Paul Ehrlich, in a speech to the Ecological Society of America in Portland, Oregon, August 2 "The battle to...

Sources.(Brief Article)
December 1, 2004... Some people trek out to the polls each November motivated only by a deeply rooted sense of civic duty. For the rest of you, there are the added blandishments of cold cash and hot sex. At VoteOrNot.org, the guys behind the infamous HotOrNot.com...

British broadcast officials have banned an ad for Ford's Land Rover because it shows a woman firing a starting pistol into the air as a man gets into his automobile.(Brickbats)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2004... British broadcast officials have banned an ad for Ford's Land Rover because it shows a woman firing a starting pistol into the air as a man gets into his automobile. They say the ad "normalized" gun ownership.

The Junior Statesmen Foundation selected Benjamin Traslavina, the 16-year-old vice president of his high school's Honor Society and editor of the school paper, to attend the Republican National Convention.(Brickbats)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2004... The Junior Statesmen Foundation selected Benjamin Traslavina, the 16-year-old vice president of his high school's Honor Society and editor of the school paper, to attend the Republican National Convention. When AIDS protesters tried to disrupt...

Children in the Sacramento area don't play tag, dodge ball, Red Rover, or any game involving physical contact, including pushing each other on the swing during recess.(Brickbats)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2004... Children in the Sacramento area don't play tag, dodge ball, Red Rover, or any game involving physical contact, including pushing each other on the swing during recess. Concerns about children's self-esteem--and lawsuits--have led local school...

Some students in Thailand have it even worse.(Brickbats)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2004... Some students in Thailand have it even worse. Their teacher was very strict about the school dress code: If a pupil's hair was too long, he'd simply lop it off. He chopped one 15-year-old girl's earlobe in the process.

Iran has banned shops from displaying women's lingerie in their windows.(Brickbats)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2004... Iran has banned shops from displaying women's lingerie in their windows. The Islamic government has also prohibited "unveiled mannequins with noticeable curves" and barred men from selling women's underwear.

For five years, SwordStaff.com ran one of the most popular booths at the Canadian Comic Book Expo, selling replica swords, maces, and hammers.(Brickbats)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2004... For five years, SwordStaff.com ran one of the most popular booths at the Canadian Comic Book Expo, selling replica swords, maces, and hammers. When the Toronto police found out, they arrested the four Americans and two Canadians manning the...

Elsewhere in Canada, 12 police officers, many wearing ski masks, burst into an Indian restaurant in Ottawa looking for drugs.(Brickbats)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2004... Elsewhere in Canada, 12 police officers, many wearing ski masks, burst into an Indian restaurant in Ottawa looking for drugs. They cut holes in the walls and ceiling and even searched the food. It was the fourth raid on the restaurant, and...

Clarence Henry had four different Social Security numbers and a conviction for shoplifting.(Brickbats)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2004... Clarence Henry had four different Social Security numbers and a conviction for shoplifting. Naturally, the Transportation Security Administration hired him to search checked baggage. Just as naturally, he was eventually arrested for stealing...

Privacy in the skies: CAPPS II: the sequel.(Citings)
December 1, 2004... A YEARLONG CHORUS OF anguish from privacy activists killed the proposed Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System, better known as CAPPS II. That program would have allowed the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) to search a...

Balance sheet.
December 1, 2004... Cereal Killer General Mills switches to whole grains for all its breakfast cereals, the latest case of a big food retailer giving its customers what they demand in the absence of federal mandates. The Trix Rabbit is now very regular and...

Wage wars.(Data)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2004... John Kerry has repeatedly claimed that new jobs in the U.S. pay $9,000 less, on average, than those lost to offshore outsourcing. An ad put out by the pro-Democrat group MoveOn shows a fiftyish man who lost his job to a foreign worker. He has,...

Lost in transition: the costs of tighter borders.(Citings)
December 1, 2004... FEW CONTEST THE need to secure American borders against terrorists. But if immigration policy can't offer such security without unduly burdening commerce and education, the cost may come not merely in the form of a delay here or there but as a...

Easy target: anti-gun litigation.(Citings)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2004... DURING A THREE-year period, Bull's Eye Shooter Supply in Tacoma, Washington, somehow lost track of 238 guns. One of them, a Bushmaster XM-15 rifle, ended up in the hands of John Lee Malvo and John Allen Muhammad, who used it in the D.C.-area...

Politicizing the Web.(Soundbite)(Interview)
December 1, 2004... Erstwhile Howard Dean campaign guru Joe Trippi pioneered the political use of blogs and other online tools. Since the dot-com bust of the late '90s, Americans have gotten burned out on rhetoric about the Internet's revolutionary promise. But as...

Biased about bias: the hunt for ideology becomes an ideology.(Columns)
December 1, 2004... ANDREW BREITBART IS a paid assistant to the excitable editor of The Drudge Report; he cheerfully describes himself as "Matt Drudge's bitch." "Twelve years into this adult nightmare," he tells me and two dozen other reporters, "I woke up, after...

Martial vices: Zell Miller's un-American view of the armed forces.(Columns)
December 1, 2004... THE FIERY KEYNOTE speech by Sen. Zell Miller (D-Ga.) was one of the defining moments of the 2004 Republican National Convention. Besides being the week's most vehement attack on John Kerry, it was a ringing affirmation of military virtues....

War of addition: the Pentagon's manpower crunch.(Rant)
December 1, 2004... PENTAGON PLANNERS did handstands after the October 1 battle of Samarra. Even colicky Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld praised the operation as proff of the soundness of the Bush plan for Iraq. "What has to be done in that country is what...

Disney's war against the counterculture: why a decades-old copyright case matters now more than ever.
December 1, 2004... DRAW A MOUSE, go to jail. That, it seemed, was the ultimate conclusion of a case that wended its way throughout the 1970s from the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California to the Supreme Court and back. In an age of easy and...

The reluctant planner: FCC Chairman Michael Powell on indecency, innovation, consolidation, and competition.
December 1, 2004... HIS DECISION TO loosen media ownership rules "insulted your intelligence and wounded democracy," one newspaper columnist declares. He's obsessed with "trying to save America's virtue" writes another. He has presided over "an end to an era of...

Revolt of the Porcupines! The Free State Project wants libertarians to take over New Hampshire. Is this a revolutionary plan or a pipe dream?
December 1, 2004... IT'S NOT OFTEN that libertarians are enough of a threat to anyone else's interests that they generate protests. But that is what has been happening in New Hampshire lately. In June, 200 residents showed up at a heated town meeting in tiny...

The first free state project: the brief, tumultuous history of Franklin.
December 1, 2004... Never heard of the state of Franklin? Its existence was brief, from 1784 to about 1788, though as with such still-existing post-Revolution states as Maine and Vermont, self-rule had been the norm there for years beforehand. In 1769 Virginians...

Love and memory and humanity: magician and novelist Penn Jillette on censorship, sock monkeys, and Bullshit!(Culture and Reviews)
December 1, 2004... WHEN reason last caught up with PennJillette--the self-described "larger, louder half" of the magical duo Penn & Teller--the year was 1994, and then-Attorney General Janet Reno and other Clinton administration figures were threatening to...

Poor, sexy Berlin: the failure of urban planning.
December 1, 2004... ON AN ENGLISH-language walking tour of Berlin--before the Irish tour guide can deliver his own rant against the misguided urban planning at Potsdamer Platz--a Vietnamese woman points to a triangular skyscraper across the square that was...

Hippie heaven: the liberating legacy of those "hideous, spotty little teenagers".(Book Review)
December 1, 2004... Strolling through Haight-Ashbury in 1967, it was George Harrison--the quiet Beatle, for God's sake, and the one with the sitar!--who delivered one of the most caustic putdowns of hippies ever. "Somehow I expected them all to own their own...

Indefensible internment: there was no good reason for the mass internment of Japanese Americans during WWII.
December 1, 2004... In Defense of Internment: The Case for 'Racial Profiling' in World War II and the War on Terror, by Michelle Malkin, Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 416 pages, $27.95 SINCE 9/11, some civil libertarians have denounced every antiterrorism policy...

Severed heads: Arab literary fantasy and terrible reality.
December 1, 2004... "MY BLOOD FLOWED on the pavement. The head had separated from the body as though it had been chopped off by a sharp sword. I was sorry to see my body lying on the macadam only to be run over by some truck or lorry. I tried to order my hands to...

Dirty pictures.(Artifact)(company called Moose creates art where dirt was)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2004... SEE THOSE HAPPY, eye-catching ducks on the wall? Are they art? Or is this, as authorities in the British city of Leeds have complained, mere public vandalism? Before deciding, you should know two things. First, the ducks haven't been...

The monster in our backyard.(local governments often have more power than the federal one)
December 1, 2004... Bill Clinton famously proclaimed that "the era of big government is over." He was wrong: it just moved to the suburbs. State and local governments now dwarf the national government. Fully 86 percent of civilian government employees work for...