Reason articles from January 2005

Reason archives from January 2005

The public sector and the private.(Editor's Note)(Editorial)
January 1, 2005... LAST SUMMER, when the U.S. Supreme Court issued a series of rulings on the "enemy combatants" cooling their heels at Guantanamo Bay and in military custody within the United States, civil libertarians mostly hailed the decisions as a victory...

John Kerry's Dark Record on Civil Liberties.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
January 1, 2005... Thanks for John Berlau's piece, "John Kerry's Dark Record on Civil Liberties" (October). It is nice to see that I am not the only person who thinks Kerry is too right-wing to pass himself off as a Democrat. In 2000 Gore and the Democrats...

Ten reasons to fire George W. Bush.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
January 1, 2005... The short-sightedness of libertarians like Jesse Walker ("Ten Reasons to Fire George W. Bush," October) never ceases to amaze me. Granted that George Bush is no prize from the libertarian perspective, but when it comes to the most important...

Age of Propaganda.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
January 1, 2005... In "Age of Propaganda" (October), David J. Hanson and Matt Walcoff deride as "junk science" a Department of Justice study that purports to prove that tough U.S. drinking age laws, compared to Europe, produce lower rates of drunkenness and...

Foul ballpark: gays vs. sports welfare.(Citings)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2005... Now THIS IS a culture war: baseball vs. drag queens. One of the few groups concerned about a world-class fiscal error coming down the pike in Washington, D.C., is the city's gay community. The utterly baseball-obsessed city lathers have...

Speed tracers: Sudafed clampdown.(Citings)
January 1, 2005... WHILE THE federal government keeps an eye out for foreigners with terrorist ties, state governments are beginning to track another set of suspicious characters: Americans with runny noses. Under plans being considered in Indiana and Oregon,...

30 years ago in reason.(Citings)
January 1, 2005... "The GOP is in fact a chicken whose head has been cut off. It will run around on its two feet, flap its wings, bang this way and that... until finally in spasms it collapses into final permanent oblivion. Whether that last will occur by 1978...

Homeschool revolt: parents resist regulation.(Citings)
January 1, 2005... PENNSYLVANIA'S Religious Freedom Protection Act says state agencies may not "compel conduct or expression which violates a specific tenet of a person's religious faith." Four families--the Newborn, Hankin, Prevish, and Combs clans--insist that...

Fannie business: dodgy, accounting at Fannie Mae.(Citings)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2005... FANNIE MAE, the government-chartered corporation charged with providing liquidity in secondary mortgage markets, exists in the twilight realm between private and public. A report from the agency charged with overseeing the company suggests that...

Quote.(Citings)(Bob Dylan)
January 1, 2005... "My favorite politician was Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, who reminded me of Tom Mix, and there wasn't any way to explain that to anybody." --Bob Dylan, in his new memoir Chronicles: Volume One, on conversations with Marxist friends in...

Sources.(Citings)(Illustration)
January 1, 2005... The explosion of Internet dating sites has included several catering to different political ideologies. Libertarians looking for love can try their luck at LibertarianPassions.com or eLibertarian.com. Randy Randians can whisper hot passages...

The Detroit City Council wants to earmark $38 million for a highly specific community development project.(Brickbats)(Illustration)
January 1, 2005... The Detroit City Council wants to earmark $38 million for a highly specific community development project. By a 7-2 vote, the council has decreed that only black businessmen and investors can qualify for the money. The idea is to build an...

The Indian government has fired the entire staff of a high school after learning that none of them had worked for the last 23 years.(Brickbats)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2005... The Indian government has fired the entire staff of a high school after learning that none of them had worked for the last 23 years. Most of the employees showed up just twice a year; most of the "students" registered were just fake names. The...

And when Indian cops caught Bhuli Devi selling goods without a license on a train, they allegedly demanded a bribe and, when she refused to pay, threw her from the moving train.(Brickbats)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2005... And when Indian cops caught Bhuli Devi selling goods without a license on a train, they allegedly demanded a bribe and, when she refused to pay, threw her from the moving train. She was admitted to a hospital with injuries.

Security screeners at New Jersey's Newark Liberty International Airport failed to spot one out of four fake bombs and weapons that inspectors tried to sneak past them.(Brickbats)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2005... Security screeners at New Jersey's Newark Liberty International Airport failed to spot one out of four fake bombs and weapons that inspectors tried to sneak past them. The federal Transportation Security Administration, which employs the...

Stancy Nesby has been arrested seven times in 15 months, although she has never committed a crime.(Brickbats)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2005... Stancy Nesby has been arrested seven times in 15 months, although she has never committed a crime. Another woman gave Nesby's name after being arrested for cocaine possession. When she later didn't show up for her court date, a judge issued a...

Two Chicago building inspectors are out of jobs after being accused of lying on their applications.(Brickbats)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2005... Two Chicago building inspectors are out of jobs after being accused of lying on their applications. The two allegedly presented journeyman carpenters' cards as part of their applications for the $50,000-a-year jobs. But local media outlets...

Gerardo Garcia wanted to grow his hair long so he could donate it to a group that makes wigs for children who lose their own hair due to cancer treatment.(Brickbats)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2005... Gerardo Garcia wanted to grow his hair long so he could donate it to a group that makes wigs for children who lose their own hair due to cancer treatment. He says he was motivated by his own family's history of cancer. But he attends Harlingen...

Members of Sweden's Left Party have proposed a special tax on men to cover the "social cost" of violence against women.(Brickbats)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2005... Members of Sweden's Left Party have proposed a special tax on men to cover the "social cost" of violence against women. "We must have a discussion where men understand they as a group have a responsibility," said party deputy Gudrun Schyman.

Medicinal grass: petitioning for pot.(Citings)
January 1, 2005... DESPITE marijuana's low toxicity and long history of medicinal use, federal law puts it in a more restrictive category than morphine, cocaine, or amphetamines. After decades of unsuccessful attempts to correct this anomaly by petitioning the...

Free the Nile: liberalism in Egypt.(Citings)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2005... LEBANON'S Daily Star reported last summer that Egyptian parliamentarians have formed a new liberal political party. Hizbal-Ghad, or the Party of Tomorrow, says it stands for "a free-market economy, respect for the rule of law; good governance,...

Balance sheet.(various)
January 1, 2005... Healing Mist Researchers at Imperial College London find that the anti-inflammatory compound resveratrol, responsible for giving red wine some of its positive health benefits, may be more useful in a different form. Delivered in an aerosol...

Unhealthy regulations.(Data)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2005... Many Americans see government regulation as the only way to ensure high-quality health care and broad access to medical services. It's easy to forget that an excessive regulatory burden can also cost lives by pricing people out of the health...

Allah my children: soap opera controversy.(Citings)('Road to Kabul')
January 1, 2005... EVERY RAMADAN, Arabic-language TV is dominated by loudly hyped, month-long soap operas. Last Ramadan, however, one of the more heavily advertised series, the Qatari-produced Road to Kabul, disappeared from the schedules of every TV service that...

Private flight: Houston, you have a problem.(Citings)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2005... SPACESHIPONE, the privately funded space vehicle, has returned to earth with the $10 million Ansari X-Prize. That one small trip for a ship was a giant leap away from the government's monopoly on space travel. In a press conference shortly...

How America grew rich.(Soundbite)
January 1, 2005... The United States is rare among the great world powers in that its rise to dominance owes at least as much to its economic prowess as it does to its military might. That fact is deftly summarized in the title of John Steele Gordon's book An...

All tomorrow's partisans: the culture war after the 2004 election.(Columns)(book publishing)
January 1, 2005... FIVE DAYS BEFORE the election, it was almost impossible to conceive of a world in which John Kerry and George Bush were no longer running for president. A week seemed like forever, a month like eternity. But these days there's a growing...

The problem with Putin: an unreliable ally, an unlikely democrat.(Columns)(Column)
January 1, 2005... A COUPLE OF WEEKS before the U.S. presidential election, one of the Republicans' tropes--the terrorists want Kerry to win--got some unexpected support from Russian President Vladimir Putin. Speaking at a press conference in Tajikistan after a...

Iraq's summer soldiers: liberal hawks as ideological deserters.(Rant)
January 1, 2005... IF PRESIDENT Bush's re-election demonstrated wide support for his "forward strategy of freedom"--the aggressive region-building scheme embodied in the Iraq war--you never would have known it from the people who took that strategy most seriously...

Civil liberties and enemy combatants: why the Supreme Court's widely praised rulings are bad for America.(Cover Story)
January 1, 2005... IF YOU WERE relying solely on media accounts for guidance, you would have gotten the impression that the Supreme Court's June 28 rulings on "enemy combatants" were a clean sweep for civil liberties. With few exceptions, reporters and...

Fly the frugal skies: how low-cost airlines have transformed Europe--and what it means for America.
January 1, 2005... EVERY FRIDAY AFTERNOON at a Heathrow Airport bar, there is an informal gathering of the "Pojkvan Club"--a group of London men who jet off every weekend to visit their far-flung girlfriends. (Pojkvan is Swedish for "boyfriend.") "Of my six...

Cut-rate diplomas: how doubts about the government's own "Dr. Laura" exposed a resume fraud scandal.
January 1, 2005... LAURA L. CALLAHAN was very proud of her Ph.D. When she received it a few years ago, she promptly rewrote her official biography to highlight the academic accomplishment, referring to it not once or twice but nine times in a single-page summary...

Hayek for the 21st Century: biographer Bruce Caldwell on the Road to Serfdom author's enduring lessons about bad planning, distributed information, and the liberating power of choice.(Biography)
January 1, 2005... IN 1944, with World War II raging and the fate of the Free World far from clear, Friedrich A. Hayek (1889-1992), one of the great intellectual heroes of reason, published his best-known work. The Road to Serfdom became a bestseller even as it...

Imperial waltz: is American power good, bad, or distressingly reluctant?(Culture and Reviews)(Colossus: The Price of America's Empire)(An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror)(Resurrecting Empire: Western Footprints and America's Perilous Path in the Middle East)(Book Review)
January 1, 2005... Colossus: The Price of America's Empire, by Niall Ferguson, New York: Penguin Press, 384 pages, $25.95 An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror, by David Frum and Richard Perle, New York: Random House, 284 pages, $25.95 ...

Trans-Atlantic tripe: Jeremy Rifkin's theory of failed states.(Dream)(Critical Essay)
January 1, 2005... The American Dream, warns Jeremy Rifkin, is on the ropes, thanks to "depleting resources, increased pollution, rising costs of production, spiraling inflation, low return on investments, escalating capital shortfalls and limits to technology."...

John Locke Lite: the strange philosophy of a "left libertarian".(Libertarianism without Inequality)(Book Review)
January 1, 2005... Libertarianism without Inequality, by Michael Otsuka, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 180 pages, $39.95 PEOPLE FIGHT ABOUT love and lucre. They also fight about labels. A little tussle is under way right now among academic political...

Among the non-believers: the tedium of dogmatic atheism.(The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason)(Book Review)
January 1, 2005... The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, by Sam Harris, New York: Norton, 336 pages, $24.95 FOR NEARLY AS long as there have been villages, there have been village atheists, the hypervigilant debunkers who lovingly...

Dear Playwright: Team America is not Kim Jong Il's first foray into musical drama.(Biography)
January 1, 2005... SHORTLY BEFORE appearing as the villain in the marionette comedy Team America: World Police, Kim Jong Il, the self-proclaimed Dear Leader of North Korea, revealed that he possesses nuclear weapons. That makes him the most heavily armed drama...

Shock me, Amadeus.(Artifact)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2005... YEARS AGO, THIS nearly toothless skull was removed from public display after complaints that it not only screamed but also emitted music. A nice story, given that the skull is reputedly Mozart's. Now the mysteries of the skull--devoid of life...