Reason articles from December 2008

Reason archives from December 2008

Back to the barricades: free markets are under attack again.(From the Top)
December 1, 2008... SEPTEMBER 24, 2008, should go down in the history books as a day of infamy. And clarity. That's when President George W. Bush looked into the eyes of anxious Americans and told them they weren't being nearly anxious enough. "America could...

The uses of hyperbole.(Letter to the editor)
December 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Matt Welch engages in hyperbole himself when he characterizes Hayek's thesis in The Road to Serfdom as "manifestations of collectivism even in market-based democracies lead inexorably down the road to tyranny,"...

Education for profit.(Letter to the editor)
December 1, 2008... As someone who works in the for-profit higher education sector, I really appreciated Katherine Mangu-Ward's thorough examination of the University of Phoenix model ("Education for Profit," July). There seems to be a prejudice out there that...

The Schnorrer state: the accomplishments Ted Stevens brags about are worse than the crimes he denies.(Column)
December 1, 2008... A FEW YEARS ago, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma suggested taking money earmarked for a notoriously extravagant "bridge to nowhere" in Alaska and using it for reconstruction in Louisiana. Sen. Ted Stevens of...

Making laws free: man, to state: copyright this!(Citings)(Brief article)
December 1, 2008... IN CALIFORNIA the law is copyrighted. That means it's illegal for citizens to copy or distribute the law of the land among themselves. An official digital copy of the California Code costs $1,556; a printed copy is $2,315. According to the...

The peacemaker: sheriffs with tanks.(Citings)
December 1, 2008... IN MARCH the sheriff and SWAT team of Richland County, South Carolina, posed for a photo with an impressive new piece of equipment: an M113A1 armored personnel carrier. The vehicle, which moves on tank-like tracks, features a belt-fed, turreted...

30 years ago in reason.(Citings)
December 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] "If it is important that the noncombatants be immune from attack, it is important that the combatants be distinguishable when encountered; such is the function of military uniforms. (So perhaps we should not scorn...

Empire bloat: bases, bases everywhere.(Citings)(Brief article)
December 1, 2008... THE DEFENSE Department's 2008 Base Structure Report reveals just how far the military has spread across the globe. As of last summer, the Pentagon rents or owns 316,238 buildings around the world with a total value of more than $455 billion....

Innocence denied: DNA testing stalled.(Citings)
December 1, 2008... SINCE THE early 1990s, DNA testing has exonerated 220 people in the United States who were convicted of crimes they didn't commit, according to the criminal justice reform group the Innocence Project. As the science of DNA testing improves,...

Quotes.
December 1, 2008... "Nobody knows exactly what they should do, but anything is better than nothing." --New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, discussing government bailouts of companies in the wake of the stock market crash, on the September 21 edition of Meet...

Groovier and groovier.(List)
December 1, 2008... In reason's 20th anniversary issue in 1988, then-Publisher Robert W. Poole Jr. looked back at life in the year the magazine was born and declared "things are a lot groovier now" (for more, see Follow-Up, page 16). Poole, who was the first to...

Preschool failures: missing benefits.(Citings)(Brief article)
December 1, 2008... THIS YEAR governors have continued to expand state-run preschool programs. Bobby Jindal, a Republican, signed a program to fund preschool for every 4-year-old in Louisiana by 2013. Deval Patrick, a Democrat, signed Massachusetts' universal...

Auditing the auditors: Medicare fraud.(Citings)(Brief article)
December 1, 2008... AN AUGUST report from the Department of Health and Human Services' inspector general casts doubt on recent claims by Medicare officials that they are finally cracking down on fraud. The report found that auditors hired by the Centers for...

Designing women: decorative cartel.(Citings)(Brief article)
December 1, 2008... WHAT HAPPENS when interior designers battle other interior designers? In the 1980s sitcom Designing Women, catfights inevitably ensue, the occasional pantsuit with enormous shoulder pads gets torn asunder, and everyone has to reapply lipstick....

Yellow peril: racist stare decisis.(Citings)(Brief article)
December 1, 2008... WHEN THE United States went to war against Japan in 1941' Congress passed a law commanding Japanese Americans to stay inside after dusk. Two years later, in Hirabayashi v. United States, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the curfew. Unlike...

Joseph A. Shepard Sr. sat in a St. Louis jail for two years on drug charges, apparently forgotten by the court, prosecutors, and even his own attorney.(Brickbats)(Brief article)
December 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Joseph A. Shepard Sr. sat in a St. Louis jail for two years on drug charges, apparently forgotten by the court, prosecutors, and even his own attorney. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports that he was held in his cell...

Students at Minnesota's Prior Lake High School will no longer be able to wear hats or hooded shirts during the school day.(Brickbats)(Brief article)
December 1, 2008... Students at Minnesota's Prior Lake High School will no longer be able to wear hats or hooded shirts during the school day, so that security cameras can always capture their faces.

In 2003 Great Britain gave local officials greater power to place people under surveillance and trace their telephone calls and email.(Brickbats)(Brief article)
December 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In 2003 Great Britain gave local officials greater power to place people under surveillance and trace their telephone calls and email. The government said the new powers were necessary to fight terrorism. Instead,...

Eight-year-old guitarist Tallan "T-Man" Latz has jammed with Les Paul and Jackson Browne and played at bars and clubs across the nation.(Brickbats)(Brief article)
December 1, 2008... Eight-year-old guitarist Tallan "T-Man" Latz has jammed with Les Paul and Jackson Browne and played at bars and clubs across the nation. Then someone sent an anonymous email message to state officials saying Latz is too young to be playing in...

Tiffany Dickson of Lawton, Oklahoma, told officials the father of her child was named Michael and his last name might be Thomas.(Brickbats)(Brief article)
December 1, 2008... Tiffany Dickson of Lawton, Oklahoma, told officials the father of her child was named Michael and his last name might be Thomas. So the state Department of Human Resources hounded Micheal Thomas of Tulsa and his mother for almost three years,...

Australia's Belgian Gardens State School.(Brickbats)
December 1, 2008... Australia's Belgian Gardens State School has banned all cartwheels, handstands, and other "gymnastics" during recess. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Shirley Preiss has voted in 19 straight presidential elections.(Brickbats)(Brief article)
December 1, 2008... Shirley Preiss has voted in 19 straight presidential elections. But she may not be able to vote in this year's contest because of Arizona's voter ID law. Preiss was born in 1910 in Kentucky and never got a birth certificate. She hasn't had a...

Seagoville High School in Texas adopted a new dress code this year mandating that students wear only brown or black belts with a "standard buckle" and no designs or logos.(Brickbats)(Brief article)
December 1, 2008... Seagoville High School in Texas adopted a new dress code this year mandating that students wear only brown or black belts with a "standard buckle" and no designs or logos. Students were informed of the new dress code on a Monday. The next day,...

The halfway mark.(Follow-Up)
December 1, 2008... There's something about an anniversary that inspires one to take stock of the past, present, and future, reason's 20th anniversary issue in 1988 was no exception. In "Things Are a Lot Groovier Now," then-Publisher Robert W. Poole Jr....

College dry: drinking age debate.(Citings)
December 1, 2008... IN AUGUST more than 100 university presidents and chancellors called for "an informed and dispassionate public debate" about lowering the drinking age. Under the banner of the Amethyst Initiative, named for the semiprecious stone said to ward...

Lo-cal so-cal? Menu labeling laws.(Citings)(Brief article)
December 1, 2008... MENU LABELING laws are sweeping the nation--or have swept from New York City to L.A., anyway. In September Los Angeles passed a law requiring restaurants with more than 15 locations to post calorie counts on their menu boards, following the...

Sterilized by the state.(Soundbite)(Carrie Buck case)(Interview)
December 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In his startling new book Three Generations, No Imbeciles (Johns Hopkins University Press), University of Georgia law professor Paul A. Lombardo looks at the Supreme Court's notorious 1927 decision in Buck v. Bell,...

Atlas blinked: fiscally conservative Republicans were lost at sea in the Panic of 2008.(Column)
December 1, 2008... EVERY WEDNESDAY in Washington, conservatives gather in the conference room of Grover Norquist's pressure group, Americans for Tax Reform, to hash out arguments and promote their projects. The off-the-record meetings are notorious among...

The spin we love to hate: do we really want news without a point of view?(Column)
December 1, 2008... A SIDE FROM young Arab males who enjoy wearing bulky sweaters on transcontinental flights, is there any entity that attracts greater scrutiny these days than the average A.P. sentence? In this era of bitter partisanship and hypermediation,...

Are you better off than you were 40 years ago? Government has grown, but freedom has grown faster.(Column)
December 1, 2008... IN THE NOVEMBER 1968 Mechanix Illustrated, James Berry gave an eerily prescient glimpse of life in the typical American household today: "The single most important item in 2008 households is the computer. These electronic brains govern...

40 years of free minds and free markets: an oral history of reason.(Cover story)
December 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] WHEN reason began in 1968, it was just one of many mimeographed zines then pushing a mostly obscure political and philosophical vision known as libertarianism. At the time, aside from rare outliers such as the...

Speculation, innovation, regulation: 40 years of covering science and technology.
December 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] THE TIME IS sometime between 1973 and 1980. Our man sits clown to his telephone. It is a deluxe model, with a television screen, television camera, teletype outlet, electronic writing pad, copier, and, yes, a...

How the Second Amendment was restored: the inside story of how a gang of libertarian lawyers made constitutional history.
December 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] ON THE LAST DATE of the U.S. Supreme Court's 2008 spring session, justices declared by a 5-4 decision in D.C. v. Heller that, yes, the Second Amendment does secure an individual right to keep and bear arms. With...

Four decades of defending self-defense.
December 1, 2008... reason has been on the gun beat since the very first issue of the magazine appeared 40 years ago. In "Violence in the U.S.--the Reversal of Cause and Effect," founding editor Lanny Friedlander described the political reaction to the...

The libertarian moment: despite all leading indicators to the contrary, America is poised to enter a new age of freedom.
December 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] IF SOMEONE LOOKED you in the eye in 1971 and said "Man, you know what? We're about to get a whole lot freer," you might have reasonably concluded that he was nuts, driven mad by taking too much LSD and staring into...

What's the matter with libertarians? Thomas Frank blames the freedom movement for Jack Abramoff and George W. Bush.(The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule)(Book review)
December 1, 2008... The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule, by Thomas Frank, New York: Metropolitan Books, 353 pages, $25 ONE OF THE screwier sentiments circulating in libertarian circles holds that liberals should love George W. Bush. After all, he spends...

Sharks stuffed with money: the curious economics of contemporary art.(Culture and Reviews)
December 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The poet Wallace Stevens, wealthy from his position as vice president of the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, once remarked that there was a huge difference between appreciating art and owning it. But Don...

Tor's worlds without death or taxes: when is a mainstream publisher also an anti-authoritarian propagandist? When it publishes science fiction.(Culture and Reviews)
December 1, 2008... HIGH IN Manhattan's famous Flatiron Building you'll find the headquarters of Tor Books, the most successful science fiction publisher in the world. The Flatiron is a monument to mad Belle Epoque futurism, with a wedge shape that makes right...

The old-school individualist: independent game designer Jeff Vogel on putting morality into play.(Interview)
December 1, 2008... THE GAMES THAT Jeff Vogel creates have their share of cool graphics, streamlined interface designs, and other technological elements that were mere fantasies in the early 1980S. Nonetheless, they hark back to the first generation of computer...

Stop the journalismisms! The media business is chock full of platitudes, most of them wrong.
December 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] IF THERE'S ANY reason to be saddened by the long, humiliating death of the great American newspaper, it may be that we'll no longer have a treasure trove of tough-sounding catch phrases about the news biz. Where else...

The look of reason.(Artifact)
December 1, 2008... THE FIRST ISSUE of reason consisted of seven typewritten, mimeographed pages. Over the years, the magazine got fancier, with photos replacing moody pen-and-ink sketches and color hitting the cover in 1979. reason's most recent redesign hit...