Reason articles from February 2008

Reason archives from February 2008

A better choice.(Ron Paul)(Editorial)
February 1, 2008... MY FIRST EXPERIENCE with voting in a presidential race was enough to turn me off the whole process pretty much for good. It was 1968, and I was in kindergarten in suburban New Jersey, about an hour's train ride from New York. For some reason,...

Prohibition returns!(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
February 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Shame on reason for featuring an article (which, by the way, was very well-written and very right-on) even suggesting that prohibition has ever been absent from this "land of the free" ("Prohibition Returns!,"...

'The Trouble Is the West'.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
February 1, 2008... As the former executive director of the Institute for the Secularization of Islamic Society and an open advocate of Islamic apostasy, I nonetheless take strong exception to Ayaan Hirsi Ali's call to close down Muslim schools in this country by...

CSI: Mississippi.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
February 1, 2008... As a retired crime scene investigator and fingerprint specialist, I read Radley Balko's "CSI: Mississippi" (November) with great interest. Balko's article illuminated the major problem facing forensic science today, namely, a gradual but...

Eight Million Sots in the Naked City.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
February 1, 2008... I enjoyed Jackson Kuhl's review of books on alcohol prohibition ("Eight Million Sots in the Naked City," November). Greater wartime centralization of power in Washington, along with hostility to the Irish and Italians, surely helped fuel Uncle...

The day of the flying fish.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
February 1, 2008... I enjoyed Katherine Mangu-Ward's article on sushi in the November issue ("The Day of the Flying Fish"). I spent many years cooking in high-end French-Asian fusion restaurants while that trend was in its heyday. Having spent considerable...

Correction.(Letters)(Correction notice)
February 1, 2008... "No Money, No Justice" (December) referred to the former governor of Illinois as Jim Ryan. He is in fact named George Ryan.

Intern at reason.(Letters)
February 1, 2008... reason is accepting applications for the 2008 Burton C. Gray Memorial Internship. The intern works 10 weeks during the summer in our Washington, D.C., office and receives housing, a $2,000 stipend, and up to $400 in travel expenses. The...

Kangaroo feast: the other red meat.(Brief article)
February 1, 2008... KANGAROO: It's what's for dinner. Or it will be a lot more often, if Greenpeace gets its way. In an October report, Greenpeace Australia argued that kangaroo is a more environmentally friendly meat than beef, since cows emit methane when...

Home invasion: California's new smoking bans.(Citings)(Brief article)
February 1, 2008... THE INCREASINGLY stringent smoking bans of the last decade seem to be aimed at transforming what was once a widely accepted habit into a shameful vice practiced only in the privacy of one's home. But even that refuge is no longer available to...

30 years ago in reason.(Brief article)
February 1, 2008... "Within the first few months of the Carter administration, I sold every stock I owned, and I wouldn't buy a stock right now with your money." --William E. Simon, "A reason Interview" "'Without some kind of Affirmative Action program,...

Losing our initiative: state's wrongs.(political activists' conspiracy case on taxpayer's bill of rights initiative)(Brief article)
February 1, 2008... THREE POLITICAL activists face criminal charges for trying to put a taxpayer's bill of rights on a state ballot in 2005. Oklahoma, which prohibits out-of-state residents from collecting signatures to put an initiative on the ballot, has...

Drugged up: insane asylum seekers?(immigrants' psychological disorder)(Brief article)
February 1, 2008... IN DECEMBER 2004, immigration officials pinned down asylum seeker Raymond Soeoth in his holding cell, pulled down his pants, and forced a syringe into his buttocks. The 38-year-old Christian pastor, who was fleeing religious persecution in...

House of death: feds shield snitches.(Federal Bureau of Investigation, protection of informants)
February 1, 2008... DO FEDERAL police agencies exist to catch criminals or to protect them? Last July the House Judiciary Committee held hearings in response to a series of high-profile cases in which FBI informants had committed crimes, or in which the agency had...

Quotes.(Quotation)(Brief article)
February 1, 2008... "I'm not going to throw my friend under the bus for something he did 25 years ago.... On the other hand, I'm running for president; I've got, you know, to do the right thing." --presidential hopeful Fred Thompson, defending campaign adviser...

Unconstitutional conventions.(Brief article)
February 1, 2008... Andrew P. Napolitano is senior judicial analyst at Fox News, where he flogs his unique brand of constitutionalism and frequently goes head to head with Bill O'Reilly. His new book, A Nation of Sheep (Nelson), asks "what has happened to the...

Gun crazy: 'curing' campus dissent.(Hamline University's curriculum )(Brief article)
February 1, 2008... THE SPIRIT of Soviet psychiatry, which treated dissent as a sign of mental illness, seems to be alive and well at Hamline University, a private school in St. Paul, Minnesota, that is officially devoted to "freedom of expression and inquiry."...

Hit the brakes: truth in advertising.(advertising regulation on junk food and tobacco)(Brief article)
February 1, 2008... EUROPEAN regulators have adopted limits on junk food advertising directed at children, on alcohol advertising directed at everyone, and on tobacco advertising and promotion, including a requirement that each box of cigarettes carry a warning...

Mortgage crisis: subprime solutions.(Brief article)
February 1, 2008... TO HEAR THE pundits and politicians tell it, the mortgage industry is a monster-sized production of The Sting: Fiendish brokers are giving homeowners loans they can't pay back, while predatory lenders are fleecing poor saps who bought...

Brickbats.(Brief article)
February 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] When officers Thomas Elliassen and Michael Danese caught a 14-year-old boy tossing eggs at cars on Staten Island last Halloween, they did what any cops would do. They took him to a swampy area, made him strip to his...

Safe, legal, and rare.(abortion rates)(Brief article)
February 1, 2008... Abortion rates are lowest in countries where abortions are easiest to get, according to a study in the October 13 issue of the British medical journal The Lancet. Researchers at the Guttmacher Institute and the World Health Organization looked...

Cut taxes and spend: the beast still eats.(Brief article)
February 1, 2008... FROM MILTON Friedman to Ronald Reagan, fiscal conservatives have hoped tax cuts could keep government from overspending by denying it revenues--a theory dubbed "starving the beast." A new study by University of California at Berkeley economists...

Anti-China town: free trade and Florida.(Florida's trade policy and no to Chinese products)(Brief article)
February 1, 2008... PALM BAY, Florida, Mayor John Mazziotti says he tries to restrict himself to locally made goods. Now he wants taxpayers to do the same, or at least to avoid products from countries he dislikes. In October, Mazziotti became the first American...

Prisoner of pain.(wrongful conviction of a paraplegic)
February 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Richard Paey, a paraplegic with multiple sclerosis, served three years of a 25-year prison sentence before Florida's Republican governor, Charlie Crist, pardoned him. Paey requires high-dose opiate therapy to treat...

The accidental congressman: the surprising success and strict constitutionalism of Georgia Rep. Paul Broun.(Columns)
February 1, 2008... PUNDITS, ACADEMICS, AND Republican activists in Georgia want to make this perfectly clear: Paul Broun is an accidental congressman. "I was flabbergasted when he won the election," admits Jim Box, one of many eminences in the Georgia...

The virtues of conspicuous giving: how self-righteous, empty-headed celebrities promote private charity.(Columns)
February 1, 2008... ON FEBRUARY 6, Madonna will help save Africa by attending the opening of the planet's largest Gucci store. The party she's hosting is expected to raise approximately $2 million for children who will never get to visit even the planet's smallest...

The statue of security: you won't find much liberty at Lady Liberty.(Liberty Island's security)
February 1, 2008... NEARLY 2 MILLION tourists, many from overseas, descend on Liberty Island each year to commune with that green icon of American freedom, the Statue of Liberty. Most of them will actually get to see the monument--as long they put out their...

Scenes from the Ron Paul revolution: the rise of an eclectic anti-statist movement.(Cover story)
February 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] ON THE MORNING of October 30, a large group of people gathered outside The Tonight Show's Burbank studio. According to GloZell, a local eccentric who attends every taping of the show, only the lines attracted by...

Legacies of injustice: alumni preferences threaten educational equity--and no one seems to care.(Brief article)
February 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] COLLEGE-BOUND high school students do not always lose their chastity before graduation, but they certainly lose their innocence. Nearly every senior who has gone through the admissions mill can recount stories of...

Ending global apartheid: economist Lant Pritchett defends immigration, the least-popular--and most-proven--idea for helping the world's poor.
February 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] IMAGINE AN ECONOMIC distortion so massive that its effects dwarf those of all existing tariffs, quotas, and subsidies. This distortion is relatively new and inarguably regressive; created by policy makers in wealthy...

The war on fornication.(Culture and Reviews)(Cartoon)
February 1, 2008... YEARS AGO, A FRIEND OF MINE WENT TO THE DRUGSTORE TO PURCHASE THE NEW "MORNING AFTER" PILL, AKA PLAN B.... SLUT! SO SHE WENT TO ANOTHER PHARMACIST, WHO FILLED HER PRESCRIPTION, NO QUESTIONS ASKED. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] IT...

'You can't turn back the ocean': MTV's Kurt Loder on the delusions of celebrity culture, the coming collapse of mainstream media outlets, and the rising tide of free expression that can't be stopped.(Culture and Reviews)(Interview)
February 1, 2008... KURT LODER HAS been chronicling cutting-edge culture in the United States since the 1970s, first with the defunct rock magazine Circus and then during a legendary stint at Rolling Stone. Along the way, he co-authored Tina Turner's memoir, which...

Steve Earle's hammer: a talented songwriter puts his message before his music.
February 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] "One of these days, I'm gonna lay this hammer down," the singer-songwriter Steve Earle declares on his newest CD, Washington Square Serenade. "Leave my burden restin' on the ground/When the air don't choke ya and the...

Open-source warfare: how do you defend a country against small stateless bands of terrorists?(Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization)(Book review)
February 1, 2008... Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization, by John Robb, Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley, 224 pages, $24. 95 AT THE END of Alfred Bester's 1956 science fiction novel The Stars My Destination, protagonist and anti-hero...

Iraq 2011: a graphic novel shows an Iraq in chaos.(Shooting War)(Book review)
February 1, 2008... ONE OF THE grim consolations of political fiction is its ability to show us how things can always get worse, and soon, and in sadly believable ways. That's part of the appeal of the new graphic novel Shooting War, written by the freelance...

The counterfeit olympics.(product counterfeiting in China)(Brief article)
February 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] CHINA'S ROLE as the world's knock-off sanctuary has long been a scourge of brand managers, who complain that the Chinese government doesn't do enough to police the use of names like Rolex and Burberry. But the...