Reason articles from January 2009

Reason archives from January 2009

Obama's numbers: the president-elect has promised to make his math add up. Therein lies a glimmer of possibility.(From the Top)(Barack Obama)
January 1, 2009... I NEVER QUITE understood libertarian enthusiasm for Barack Obama. Yes, his early and forceful opposition to the Iraq war made anti-interventionists swoon, but candidate Obama was, if anything, more belligerent than John McCain toward Pakistan,...

Who killed real ID?(Letter to the editor)
January 1, 2009... It was a delight reading about the triumphs of Karen Johnson, Jeff Wood, and the others in their fight against Real ID ("Who Killed Real ID?," October.) For those who love freedom, lately the news seems to be nothing but bad; this was a...

Burn the "Speculators"!(Letter to the editor)
January 1, 2009... "Burn the 'Speculators'!" (October) ignores recent evidence validating the idea that index speculation has contributed to volatility in the price of crude oil. Between January and May, institutional investors poured more than $60 billion into...

Zoning toward oblivion.(Letter to the editor)
January 1, 2009... I enjoyed Damon W. Root's review of Michael Wolf's The Zoning of America, and I'll have to order a copy of the book, but quoting Robert Caro on Robert Moses is like quoting Naomi Klein on Milton Friedman. Caro has spent his career on...

What Part of Legal Immigration Don't You Understand?(Letter to the editor)
January 1, 2009... The hilarious yet accurate immigration flowchart in the October issue ("What Part of Legal Immigration Don't You Understand?") left out one common detour in the path to U.S. citizenship: the fiancee visa. I wanted to marry a Russian woman...

Obama's job fetish: why the government shouldn't view "creating jobs" as an end in itself.(Barack Obama)(Column)
January 1, 2009... IF, AS WIDELY expected, Barack Obama faces a recession when he takes office in January, many Americans will expect him to deliver on his promise to "create jobs." They probably will be disappointed, because Obama seems to view job creation not...

Chicago rules: it's good to be the alderman.(Citings)(Brief article)
January 1, 2009... CHICAGO MAY revise its strictest-in-the-country ban on using cell phones while driving--but only because one of the city's aldermen got caught breaking the law. According to the Chicago SunTimes, Alderman Tom Tunney was pulled over for...

Digital spelunking: data mining failure.(Citings)(Brief article)
January 1, 2009... A NEW STUDY from the National Research Council suggests that data mining--high-tech sifting through the digital leavings of our lives--won't catch the next Osama bin Laden. The idea of scanning Facebook pages, online chats, blogs,...

25 years ago in reason.(Citings)(Brief article)
January 1, 2009... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] "Wisconsin has enacted the 'Clarenbach bill,' legislation sponsored by Rep. David Clarenbach that eliminates criminal penalties for cohabitation, fornication, homosexual acts, and other sexual behavior between (or...

Death by SWAT: collateral raid damage.(Citings)
January 1, 2009... IN JANUARY 2007, a SWAT team in Lima, Ohio, shot and killed Tarika Wilson, a 26-year-old mother, during a drug raid at the home of her boyfriend, Anthony Terry. When the unarmed Wilson was shot, she was kneeling on the ground, complying with...

Baloney Ballistics: gun databases fail.(Citings)
January 1, 2009... SEVEN YEARS ago, New York started a database of "ballistic fingerprints" for all new handguns sold in the state. The bill's backers sold it as a crime-solving device, arguing that the state would now have a sample of a spent shell and bullet...

Soap scum: banning driveway carwashes.(Citings)(Brief article)
January 1, 2009... THE STATE of Washington has ordered local governments to ban driveway car washing. Most storm drains in the Pacific Northwest are separate from sewers and dump water directly into streams and rivers without processing. Bill Moore, a water...

Quotes.
January 1, 2009... "I don't believe the First Amendment is any guarantee to those who wish to disrupt the government." --former Maryland police superintendent Thomas E. Hutchins, defending the decision to add 53 nonviolent activists' names to the federal...

Halo Health: fit, happy gamers.(Citings)(Brief article)
January 1, 2009... TEENAGED video gamers are socially inept, fat, pimpled loners who rarely leave their parents' basements, right? Not according to a September study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. The survey of 1,100 teens, ages I2 to 17, found...

One fish, ten fish: fishery privatization.(Citings)(Brief article)
January 1, 2009... OVERFISHING is a classic example of the tragedy of the commons, a situation where resource users have little incentive to conserve because they don't enjoy the benefits of conservation. For decades various jurisdictions, including Alaska,...

Kentucky Reign: state-owned gambling domains.(Citings)(Brief article)
January 1, 2009... IN 2007 Democrat Steve Beshear was elected governor of Kentucky after pledging to expand state-run gambling. Once in office, Beshear found that competition from online gambling was a huge obstacle. So in September 2008, his state filed a civil...

Anti-government superheroes.(List)(Brief article)
January 1, 2009... Earlier this year, as he often does, the Canadian cartoonist Chester Brown attended a Libertarian Party pub night. And there he was egged into running to represent his downtown Toronto district in Parliament. "I reluctantly said yes," he...

A security guard at Seagoville High School in Dallas, Texas, ordered a student to take off her rosary.(Brickbats)(Photograph)
January 1, 2009... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] A security guard at Seagoville High School in Dallas, Texas, ordered a student to take off her rosary. Local police say rosary beads are a gang symbol.

In California's Dos Palos High School, an assistant principal forced Jake Shelly to take off his shirt and wear a T-shirt proclaiming him a dress code violator.(Brickbats)(Brief article)
January 1, 2009... In California's Dos Palos High School, an assistant principal forced Jake Shelly to take off his shirt and wear a T-shirt proclaiming him a dress code violator. Shelly's shirt, said the official, violated a provision of the dress code banning...

Dave Alsop parked his car in a lot near Torquy Harbor in England at 2:49 p.m.(Brickbats)(Brief article)
January 1, 2009... Dave Alsop parked his car in a lot near Torquy Harbor in England at 2:49 p.m. He paid for 75 minutes, allowing him to park until 4:04 p.m. But when he got back to his car at 3:41 p.m., he found a traffic warden had just given him a ticket. When...

State law may prohibit some Texans who own beachfront property from rebuilding on it in the wake of Hurricane Ike.(Brickbats)(Brief article)
January 1, 2009... State law may prohibit some Texans who own beachfront property from rebuilding on it in the wake of Hurricane Ike. The state considers anything between the average high-tide line and the average low-tide line public property. In some places,...

Jack Anderson may be just 6, but he's been on the federal government's no-fly list for years.(Brickbats)(Brief article)
January 1, 2009... Jack Anderson may be just 6, but he's been on the federal government's no-fly list for years. Well, actually it's someone with a name similar to his. But it's close enough. His mother says the first time he had trouble with airline security was...

When police in South Charleston, West Virginia, pulled over Jose Cruz for driving under the influence and driving with no headlights, he passed gas and waved his hand, directing the smell toward the officer.(Brickbats)(Brief article)
January 1, 2009... When police in South Charleston, West Virginia, pulled over Jose Cruz for driving under the influence and driving with no headlights, he passed gas and waved his hand, directing the smell toward the officer. So the cops added battery to the...

The poet Friedrich Schiller has been dead for more than 200 years.(Brickbats)(Brief article)
January 1, 2009... The poet Friedrich Schiller has been dead for more than 200 years. But that didn't stop the German government from billing him for his mandatory TV and radio license fee. Bills continue to arrive at the Friedrich Schiller Primary School, even...

When Brazil's Environment Ministry set out to document the 100 biggest illegal loggers, it found the biggest offender was the government itself.(Brickbats)(Brief article)
January 1, 2009... When Brazil's Environment Ministry set out to document the 100 biggest illegal loggers, it found the biggest offender was the government itself. The six largest deforested areas of the Amazon belong to the National Institute for Colonization...

Friendly invasion: end species discrimination!(Citings)(Brief article)
January 1, 2009... FOR YEARS, ecologists have been fretting that foreign species contaminate unique ecosystems. Their fear makes sense: It's easy to see why bringing a family of hungry lions to a small island filled with herbivores might cause serious...

Blind rage: angry Korean masseuses.(Citings)(Brief article)
January 1, 2009... MASSAGE therapy is the only occupation in South Korea where you must be blind to obtain a state license. When sightless masseuses learned that the state might begin licensing competitors who could see, many of them protested by lighting cars on...

Death to Mickey: rated F for fatwa.(Citings)(Brief article)
January 1, 2009... IN 2007 Hamas' Al-Aqsa TV got rid of Farfour, a man-sized mouse with a squeaky voice who preached violent resistance against Israel on a weekly children's show. Station officials said they needed to make room for other programs. But a recent...

Sarbanes-Oxley revisited.(Follow-up)(Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002)
January 1, 2009... In January 2006, reason interviewed four businesspeople and financial professionals to assess the costs and benefits of the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act-the last big federal response to fears of chaos, greed, and fraud in financial markets....

Economics actually.(Soundbite)(Russ Roberts interview)(Interview)
January 1, 2009... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Romance novels and the dismal science don't normally go together, but the George Mason University economist Russ Roberts has gone a long way toward reconciling the two. His previous novels, The Choice: A Fable of...

Beat the new boss: D.C. libertarians plot their Obama administration strategies.(Barack Obama)(Column)
January 1, 2009... FOUR YEARS AGO, after the re-election of George W. Bush, the Permanent Republican Majority had finally taken over. Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform predicted that the Democrats would not even survive four more years. "Without...

Thank you, your honor, may I have another? The stubbornly seductive perils of justice porn.(Column)
January 1, 2009... OK, LET'S SEE, there's Judge Judy, Judge Joe Brown, Judge Cristina, Judge Milian, Judge Hatchett, Judge Mathis, that crazy guy who uses a baseball bat for a gavel, the, uh, um... damn! It is now officially harder to name every reality TV...

Bush's regulatory kiss-off: Obama's assertions to the contrary, the 43rd president was the biggest regulator since Nixon.(George Bush, Barack Obama, Richard Nixon)(Column)
January 1, 2009... WHEN BARACK OBAMA was running for president, he made no secret about his plan to "restore common-sense regulation"--read: increase regulation--by closing the regulatory loopholes he thought the Republicans had opened. Deregulation, he argued...

Anatomy of a breakdown: concerted government policy helped trigger the financial meltdown--and will almost certainly extend it.
January 1, 2009... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] IT WAS NOT AN absence of federal intervention that produced the Great Financial Panic of 2008. Contrary to the assertions of those clamoring for new regulations (see "Is Deregulation to Blame?," page 36), the...

Better than a bailout: four steps policy makers could take to help financial markets.
January 1, 2009... WHAT SHOULD THE federal government have done in lieu of the $700 billion bailout signed into law by President George W. Bush? Here are four common-sense steps that don't involve the partial nationalization of the finance industry: 1) Raise...

Is deregulation to blame? The new Washington consensus says "yes." The facts on the ground say something different.
January 1, 2009... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] You MIGHT NOT BE able to tell by looking at it on the page, but deregulation has become a four-letter word in Washington. In October's vice presidential debate, Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.) practically spat it out: "If...

Houses of pain: when did declining home prices become politically intolerable?
January 1, 2009... YOUR HOUSE isn't worth as much as you'd like it to be. That's probably no surprise right now. Maybe it's unkind to rub it in. But a harsh appraisal has been one simple bit of reality to hold onto amid the frenzied, hysterical, high-pitched...

Lessons from the great inflation: Paul Volcker and Ronald Reagan's forgotten miracle created a quarter century of prosperity--and a dangerous bubble of complacency.
January 1, 2009... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] IF YOU ASKED a group of scholars to name the most important landmarks in the American story of the last half-century, they would list some or all of the following: the war in Vietnam, the civil rights movement, the...

The fed's binge: how the Federal Reserve engineered the most dramatic peacetime experiment in monetary and fiscal stimulus in U.S. history without anyone noticing.
January 1, 2009... UP UNTIL SEPTEMBER, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke effectively sterilized all his financial crisis-fueled monetary injections, either by directly trading Treasury bills for riskier financial securities or by indirectly loaning to...

The real community organizer: Craig Newmark on Craigslist, libertarianism, online democracy, and nerd values.(Culture and Reviews)(Interview)
January 1, 2009... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] IF YOU'RE AN American urbanite under the age of 30, Craig Newmark has probably helped you or someone you know get a job, get a sofa, or get laid. Newmark, 55, is the founder of Craigslist, the massively popular...

The trouble with Thomas Jefferson: the eloquent founder's original sin.(The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family)(Book review)
January 1, 2009... The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, by Annette Gordon-Reed, New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 800 pages, $35 IN 1775 the English essayist and lexicographer Samuel Johnson wrote a spirited political pamphlet rifled Taxation No...

Slipped a Mickey? One man's light pollution is another man's historic landmark.
January 1, 2009... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] If you happen to be 5, a giant illuminated Mickey Mouse dancing on your bedroom walls would probably be the greatest thing that ever happened to you. But for a grown-up, the discovery that the billboard outside your...

The God that flails: Bernard-Henri Levy takes on the rudderless European left.(Left in Dark Times: A Stand Against the New Barbarism)(Book review)
January 1, 2009... Left in Dark Times: A Stand Against the New Barbarism, by Bernard-Henri Levy, New York: Random House, 214 pages, $25 FEW ON THE American left will today defend the Iraq war on moral grounds or suggest that the long-term retention of U.S....

Pixar's stories: an animation company's inspirational rise from Nowheresville to infinity, and beyond.
January 1, 2009... FOR FANS OF animation--or anyone who has had to entertain someone under age 12 in the last decade and a half--Pixar's importance requires little explanation. The studio whose story is told in David A. Price's The Pixar Touch: The Making of a...

The end is near: why does the land of plenty love dystopias?
January 1, 2009... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] PROPHETIC WORKS always promise more than they can deliver. Fans of the Book of Isaiah still wait in vain for lambs, goats, and unicorns to make the dust fat with their fatness. And when was the last time anybody who...

Transparency in action.(Artifact)
January 1, 2009... ON OCTOBER 13, Neel Kashkari, an interim assistant secretary of the U.S. Treasury, sought to ease concerns about how the just-enacted $700 billion financial bailout plan would be implemented. "We are committed to transparency and oversight in...