Reason articles from December 2007

Reason archives from December 2007

The deep politics of freedom.(Editor's Note)(Editorial)
December 1, 2007... IN "THANK Deng Xiaoping for Little Girls" (page 40), Senior Editor Jacob Sullum details the adventure he and his wife undertook when they adopted their second daughter, Mei, from a Chinese orphanage in 2004. In doing so, they've given Mei a...

The Real Bill Richardson.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
December 1, 2007... The fact that New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson is being embraced by fiscal conservatives ("The Real Bill Richardson," August/September) says more about the demise of the Republican Party on fiscal matters and the abject lack of fiscal restraint...

Robert Heinlein at 100.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
December 1, 2007... I enjoyed your retrospective on Robert Heinlein ("Robert Heinlein at 100," August/September) but feel that readers should be warned that his writing got worse with time. Stranger in a Strange Land was a great novel of ideas but not a very good...

The Limits of Anti-Kelo Legislation.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
December 1, 2007... Ilya Somin complains that the backlash against eminent domain abuse has failed to produce significant changes in the law ("The Limits of And-Kelo Legislation," August/September). He argues, incorrectly, that because of "public ignorance" of...

Getting Beyond Roe.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
December 1, 2007... As a libertarian and a mother of four, I take issue with Radley Balko's characterization of the abortion controversy in "Getting Beyond Roe" (August/September) as a debate about "setting community standards" and his claim that issues such as...

A dirty job: paid to watch porn.(censorsship of internet pornography)(Brief article)
December 1, 2007... TOM ROGERS doesn't worry about getting caught looking at porn while at work, because looking at porn is his work. For the last few years, thanks to a $150,000-a-year federal grant arranged by Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.), the former Indianapolis...

Gimme more: earmark free-for-all.(federal budget procedure)(Brief article)
December 1, 2007... SINCE DEMOCRATS took control of Congress nearly a year ago, both parties have stepped up their rhetoric about ending the practice of earmarking--sending federal money back to home states and districts for pet projects. New rules in the House...

30 years ago in reason.(Citings)(Quotation)(Brief article)
December 1, 2007... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] "A British doctor has proposed that the 'grossly' overweight be involuntarily committed to 'enclosed hospitals' to shed their excess pounds. He justifies this on the grounds that obesity costs British socialized...

Magic trade tricks: IP vanishing act.(intellectual property)(Brief article)
December 1, 2007... FOR YEARS the magic industry has managed to protect intellectual property without any recourse to patent, copyright, or trade secret law, according to a study by Jacob Loshin of Yale Law School, to be published next year in Law and Magic, a...

Pill palaces? 'Drug-infested schools'.(Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse report)(Brief article)
December 1, 2007... AN AUGUST report from the Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA) announced that 80 percent of America's high school students and 44 percent of its middle schoolers "attend drug-infested schools." CASA President Joseph Califano described...

Ganging up: gang violence KO'd.(Citings)(legislation to combat gang violence)
December 1, 2007... SEN. DIANNE Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) recently introduced legislation to combat gang violence. The bills create new federal crimes and sentences, fund a national gang database, and appropriate $700 million for gang...

Quotes.(Citings)(Quotation)
December 1, 2007... "It's always darkest right before you get clobbered over the head with a pipe wrench. But then it actually does get darker." --anonymous GOP pollster on Republicans' chances in 2008, quoted in The Washington Post, September 1 "I'm...

Fools for scandal.(List)(when politicans misbehave)(Brief article)(List)
December 1, 2007... When Sen. Larry Craig (R-Idaho) was arrested for soliciting sex in a public toilet, he prompted a national tutorial on bathroom cruising. Here Dan Savage, author of the popular Savage Love advice column, picks the other great sex scandals of...

Price pilgrims: immigration on the cheap.(Citings)(immigrants and consumer prices)(Brief article)
December 1, 2007... DO IMMIGRANTS drive up consumer prices? Competitive theory predicts they should, as increased demand induces retailers to ask more for the same items. But a forthcoming study in the Journal of Political Economy finds that a wave of immigrants...

Good Neighbors: is capitalism contagious?(Citings)(free trade agreements for better economic freedom)(Brief article)
December 1, 2007... EVERY POLICY maker wants to expand markets, wealth, and human freedom. The economists Russell S. Sobel of West Virginia University and Peter T. Leeson of George Mason University think they know how to accomplish all three at almost no cost....

Flat tax fever: European tax revolution.(Citings)
December 1, 2007... A FLAT TAX revolution is under way in the former communist bloc. In Bulgaria, reports the Sofia News Agency, "after years of rhetoric of 'protecting the poor' against the excesses of the 'capitalist right,' the Socialists have changed their...

Brickbats.(Citings)
December 1, 2007... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Roosevelt Sims was experiencing diabetic shock, but an Amtrak crew thought he was drunk. They put him off the train in the middle of a national forest in Arizona, two miles from the nearest road. He was found several...

Green acres.(Data)(Agricultural subsidies)(Brief article)
December 1, 2007... The decades-old benefit concert called Farm Aid came to New York City for the first time ever in September. And fittingly so: Willie Nelson's crusade to save the family farm has never been so relevant to Park Avenue. In the map below, the red...

X crops: mutants for biotech.(Citings)(genetically modified crops and mutation breeding)(Brief article)
December 1, 2007... NO ONE HAS ever suffered so much as a cough, sniffle, or stomach ache from eating foods made with ingredients from currently commercialized varieties of biotech crops. Yet anti-biotech activists continue to fret about the possible dangers of...

Observing Orwell: Big brother was watching.(Citings)(writer Eric Blair also known as Mr. George Orewell with a state of paranoid obsession)(Brief article)
December 1, 2007... WHILE KIM Philby and the Cambridge Five plundered British secrets for the Soviet Union during the 1930s and '40s, the Special Branch--Britain's version of the U.S. National Security Agency--kept its eyes on a different target: the democratic...

Terrified of libel litigation.(pulling out the book, Alms for Jihad: Charity and Terrorism in the Islamic World)(Interview)
December 1, 2007... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] A copy of Alms for Jihad: Charity and Terrorism in the Islamic World, by J. Millard Burr and Robert O. Collins, recently sold on eBay for more than $500. This is no decades-old, out-of-print title; it was published...

This is John Campbell speaking: can a pork-busting Randian lead the GOP?(Grand Old Party, Ayn Rand's influence)
December 1, 2007... IF REP. JOHN Campbell (R-Calif.) said his book shelf was a time capsule, a memorial to the modern GOP, you'd believe him. Here is Stephen Slivinski's Buck Wild, a jeremiad against the Bush-era big-spending Republicans. Here is Bruce Bawer's...

Say you love Santa: pop culture's war on secularists.
December 1, 2007... EVERY YEAR AT this time, as visions of nondenominational sugar plums dance in our heads, Christmas derives great spiritual power from candy cane bagels, reggae versions of "Silent Night," and Kwanzaa stockings hung by the chimney with care....

Unconnected dots: why the FBI failed to stop 9/11.(Federal Bureau of Investigation, terrorism acts)
December 1, 2007... FOR YEARS FEDERAL authorities have argued that antiquated laws kept the cops from stopping 9/11. They said the failure to prevent the terrorist attacks demonstrated the need for the PATRIOTAct and every other proposed expansion of the...

The liberal candidate: is Rudy Guiliani a new Barry Goldwater or a new Bobby Kennedy?
December 1, 2007... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] ONE AFTERNOON IN 1957, a 13-year-old Rudy Ginliani switched on his family's TV and watched a lawyer pick a fight. Jimmy Hoffa, president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, had been called before the U.S....

The party of Jefferson: what the Democrats can learn from a dead libertarian lawyer.(Democratic Party, Moorfield Storey)
December 1, 2007... [ILLUSTRATIONS OMITTED] ACCORDING TO A December 2004 survey by the Pew Research Center, about 9 percent of the electorate--enough to carry a tight race--prefers candidates who offer the basic libertarian mix of fiscal conservatism and...

Thank Deng Xiaoping for little girls: the tyrannical roots of China's international adoption program.
December 1, 2007... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] IN JUNE 2004 at a hotel in Changsha, a caretaker from the Hengshan County Children's Welfare Institute handed my wife and me a 17-month-old girl the orphanage had named She Mei Chun. We stayed in China for another...

Let the viewer decide: documentarian Frederick Wiseman on free speech, complexity, and the trouble with Michael Moore.(Culture and Reviews)(Interview)
December 1, 2007... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] IT HAS BEEN 40 years since the premiere of Titicut Follies, a bleak and scathing documentary about an asylum for the criminally insane. The audience at that first screening saw a cascade of disturbing images of...

Atlas shrugged at 50: what the American right could learn from a Russian novelist.(Ayn Rand)
December 1, 2007... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] By the time her novel Atlas Shrugged was published on October 10, 1957, Ayn Rand realized she was no conservative, despite her opposition to government controls imposed in the New Deal era. Instead, she declared, she...

The great depression: is an epidemic of depressive disorder really sweeping America?(The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow Into Depressive Disorder)(Book review)
December 1, 2007... The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow Into Depressive Disorder, by Allan V. Horwitz and Jerome C. Wakefield, New York: Oxford University Press, 287 pages, $29.95 IS TONY SOPRANO really depressed? That is one of...

No money, no justice: do public defenders deserve scorn, or bigger budgets?(Defending the Damned: Inside Chicago's Cook County Public Defender's Office)(Book review)
December 1, 2007... Defending the Damned: Inside Chicago's Cook County Public Defender's Office, by Kevin Davis, New York: Atria Books, 308 pages, $25 ADVANCED DNA testing has compelled America to confront some uncomfortable truths about its criminal justice...

McCain: no surrender! For John McCain, critical inquiry stops at the water's edge.
December 1, 2007... AT THE September 5 Republican presidential debate in Durham, New Hampshire, Arizona Sen. John McCain put forth the Reader's Digest version of his candidacy's rationale: It's the War Against Islamic Extremism, stupid. "I've spent my life on...

Warhol goes to China.(Artifact)(Andy Warhol)(art forgery in a sweatshop in Dafen, China)(Brief article)
December 1, 2007... THIS LOOKS a lot like a Godfrey Kneller portrait of William III painted in the 17th century, but it's actually a copy of Kneller painted the other day in a sweatshop in Dafen, China. The painter, who received less than $1 for the portrait, is...