Reason articles from July 2007

Reason archives from July 2007

Where culture trumps politics.(Editorial)
July 1, 2007... AS THE 2008 presidential race gets cranked up in earnest, releasing more toxic gas into the atmosphere than 1,000 coal-fired electricity plants, it's worth keeping in mind that the most interesting and creative aspects of American life have...

How traffic Jams are made in City Hall.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
July 1, 2007... Sam Staley and Ted Balaker's "How Traffic Jams Are Made in City Hall" (April) relies on data that are not comparable. Mass transit commute times are compared unfavorably to vehicle commutes, but are these for commutes of equal distance? Time...

Be Afraid of President McCain.(Letters)(John McCain)(Letter to the editor)(Brief article)
July 1, 2007... Having known John McCain since he was a plebe at the Naval Academy, I was surprised to read about his "binge drinking" there in "Be Afraid of President McCain" (April), since it was against the rules then to drink within seven and a half miles...

'It's Our Job to Stop That Dream'.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
July 1, 2007... Comparing the large number of deaths along the U.S.-Mexican border with those along the Berlin Wall ("'It's Our Job to Stop That Dream'," April) is wrongheaded for two reasons. The first is that, unlike the technically unified Germany that the...

The Impact of Academic Bias.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
July 1, 2007... I greatly appreciated Cathy Young's decision to use data to examine the presence and impact of liberal bias on university campuses ("The Impact of Academic Bias," April). I would like to clarify and expand on a few of Young's points using data...

Who Owns Your Body Parts?(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
July 1, 2007... Kerry Howley's article about the use of body parts from corpses seems to decry the fact that donors are not rewarded financially while labs, doctors, and hospitals are ("Who Owns Your Body Parts?" March). I have a question: What can I own after...

Hello to arms: Second Amendment victory in D. C.(Citings)
July 1, 2007... THROUGH A combination of possession restrictions and storage requirements, the District of Columbia effectively prohibits the vast majority of Washingtonians from keeping guns in their homes for self-defense. In a sense, then, it was not really...

Facial challenge: pink slips and porn czars.(Citings)(Paul Charlton dismissed)(Brief article)
July 1, 2007... IN DECEMBER 2006, the Department of Justice fired Paul Charlton, the U.S. attorney for Arizona. The dismissal of Charlton, one of eight federal prosecutors controversially terminated by the Justice Department, helped spark a political scandal...

25 years ago in reason.
July 1, 2007... "The leaders of Kampuchea [the official name of Communist Cambodia] seemed to take revolutionary pride in the fact that everyone in the new Cambodia was at last equally poor." --Thomas M. Magstadt, "The Great Leap Downward" "Every...

Out of Africa: brain drain or brain gain?(Citings)(demand of health care workers)
July 1, 2007... LAST YEAR, AS Congress was wrangling over immigration policy, Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) proposed a simple solution to the U.S. nursing shortage: lift the cap on nursing visas. The proposal fizzled, but not before critics charged that such a...

Illegal medicine: immigration and health care.(Citings)(Brief article)
July 1, 2007... "WHILE ILLEGAL immigration isn't generally the first thing Americans think of when they think about health care," Republican presidential hopeful Tom Tancredo has said, "it has a significant impact on the cost, availability, and quality of...

Political payoff: campaign giving and stock prices.(Citings)(Brief article)
July 1, 2007... WHILE THERE are no solid data proving that campaign contributions directly change politicians' behavior, a new study offers evidence that political giving helps corporations. In a new working paper published by the Social Science Research...

Quotes.(Citings)
July 1, 2007... "Like bodybuilders, the environmentalists were thought of as kind of weird fanatics also. You know... serious tree huggers. Environmentalists were no fun. They were like prohibitionists at the fraternity party." --California Gov. Arnold...

Principals of censorship: student speech and the drug war.(Citings)
July 1, 2007... WHEN JOSEPH Frederick, a Juneau, Alaska, high school senior, unrolled a 14-foot banner proclaiming "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" at a 2002 Winter Olympics torch relay rally near his school, he was trying to attract TV cameras. Instead he caught the eye...

Foster follies: the cost of anti-gay discrimination.(Citings)(Brief article)
July 1, 2007... IN MARCH, the Arkansas Senate moved to ban gay couples from adopting or fostering children. As legislators debated the issue, the Williams Institute, a UCLA research group that studies sexual orientation law and public policy, released a report...

History lessons.(List)(Novelist Neal Stephenson's book recommendations)(Brief article)(Book review)
July 1, 2007... Novelist Neal Stephenson is a cult figure among libertarians, thanks to books such as Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon, with their canny looks at the past and future of technology, markets, and the nation-state. His most recent project, The Baroque...

Little criminals: incarcerating teens with adults.(Citings)(lack of juvenile detention slots)(Brief article)
July 1, 2007... LOCKING UP bad kids with bad adults has long been recognized as counterproductive. Yet a recent report from the Justice Policy Institute reveals that many states simply do not have enough juvenile detention slots for young offenders, even those...

Brickbats.(Jeanette Gordon-Crawley and her husband are under investigation for smoking)(men use more parking space than women in Bern)(Otto Chan under police scanner for buying his own goods that have been theft)
July 1, 2007... Parking officials in Bern, Switzerland, have received complaints that men are using extra-large parking spaces reserved for women. Legally, they can't prevent men from taking the spaces, but parking officials hope to deter men by painting the...

Slum justice: DIY arbitration in India.(Citings)(do it yourself, panchayat system in Dharavi)(Brief article)
July 1, 2007... A NEW SYSTEM that relies heavily on voluntary arbitration by female-dominated neighborhood councils, or panchayats, is changing the tenor of conflict in Indian slums. A March report in the Chicago Tribune notes that seven women, three men, and...

Pirates of the Caribbean: gambling and free trade.(Citings)(Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006)(Brief article)
July 1, 2007... IN MARCH, for the third time in three years, the World Trade Organization (WTO) ruled against the United States in a gambling dispute with the nation of Antigua. A three-judge panel found that the recently enacted Unlawful Internet Gambling...

Redistributing poverty.(Data)(Brief article)
July 1, 2007... In theory, redistribution of wealth is supposed to benefit the least fortunate. In practice, it doesn't necessarily work out that way. In a new study, Matthew Ladner of the Goldwater Institute and Paul J. Gessig of the Rio Grande Foundation...

Market-based manager.(Soundbite)(Interview)
July 1, 2007... Charles Koch is CEO of Koch Industries, the largest privately held company in America, and a longtime funder of libertarian causes. His new book, The Science of Success (Wiley), explains his concept of "market-based management" (MBM), which he...

Hawks and hogs: why no one dares attack the waste in defense spending.(Column)
July 1, 2007... SHORTLY AFTER THE midterm elections, as his fellow Republicans lay moaning on a row of hospital stretchers, South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint made a decision: He wasn't going to stick earmarks for his state into any more spending bills. If some...

The good Czar: the strange nobility of Boris Yeltsin.(Columns)(In memoriam)(Column)
July 1, 2007... "YELTSIN DIED OF grief" declared the headline of an obituary on the liberal Russian website EJ.ru. The former president of Russia, wrote columnist Andrei Ryklin, simply could not bear to watch the destruction of the freedom he had worked so...

The FCC's not our mommy or daddy: let parents be parents when it comes to TV violence.(Rant)(Federal Communications Commission )
July 1, 2007... IN LATE APRIL the Federal Communications Commission issued a report on "violent television programming and its impact on children" that calls not just for expanding the government's oversight of broadcast TV but extending content regulation to...

The Aquarians and the Evangelicals: how left-wing hippies and right-wing fundamentalists created a libertarian America.(Cover story)
July 1, 2007... ON APRIL 5, 1907, representatives of the San Francisco Oracle, the Diggers, the Family Dog, the Straight Theater, and other parts of the Haight-Ashbury hippie scene held a press conference to announce the formation of the Council for a Summer...

'You can't see why on a fMRI': What science can, and can't, tell us about the insanity defense.(functional magnetic resonance imaging )
July 1, 2007... ON THE MORNING of June 20, 2001, Officer David Knapp responded to a 911 dispatch call in the Houston suburbs. A thin woman with long dark hair, fully dressed but inexplicably wet, answered the door. She was breathing heavily. The cop's first...

The minority leader: is Sen. Tom Coburn an extreme social conservative, a libertarian hero--or both?
July 1, 2007... WHEN TOM COBURN entered the Senate chamber on October 20, 2005, he was girded for battle and ready to lose. The Oklahoma Republican had been sworn into office only 10 months earlier. He was about to take on the Alaska Republican Ted Stevens,...

The horrible truth about super-science: Jackson Publick of The Venture Brothers on superheroes, satire, and the '60s.(Culture and Reviews)(David Bowie)(Interview)
July 1, 2007... MR. FANTASTIC is a sociopath who hides his super-powered brethren in a giant Arctic laboratory. The Scooby Gang is a collection of addled misfits with a talking dog that barks ominous commands only his pill-popping master can hear. And David...

Invasion of the prostitots: another moral panic about American girls.(Culture & Reviews)
July 1, 2007... Just how far along the slick slope of cultural decline have we slid? While you've been reading The Superficial and watching The Surreal Life, the American Psychological Association's Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls has been hard at...

Claiming Paine: the contested legacy of the most controversial founding father.(Thomas Paine and the Promise of America)(Book review)
July 1, 2007... Thomas Paine and the Promise of America, by Harvey J. Kaye, New York: Hill and Wang, 326 pages, $15 "EVERY SPOT in the world is overrun with oppression. Freedom hath been hunted around the globe," lamented Thomas Paine in Common Sense, the...

Leftists for Hayek: what happens when a socialist applies the insights of Austrian economics?(Book review)
July 1, 2007... Socialism After Hayek, by Theodore A. Burczak, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 172 pages, $19.95 IN 1995 THE economist Peter Boettke published a paper tided "Why Are There No Austrian Socialists?" He intended to prod the devotees...

This magic mushroom moment: a fan of funny fungi sorts fact from fantasy.(Shroom: A Cultural History of the Magic Mushroom)(Book review)
July 1, 2007... NOT LONG AGO, at a party in Amsterdam, I was about to swallow some psilocybin mushrooms when the host interceded. Dividing the pieces into two piles, he twirled a small metal ball hanging from a thin chain above each, dangled the same "dowsing"...

Japan draws its guns.(Artifact)(Brief article)
July 1, 2007... MEET PRINCE PICKLES, the adorable mascot of Japan's Self Defense Forces (SDF). For years Pickles and his girlfriend, Parsley-chan, have been spreading warm, fuzzy feelings about Japan's military. The star of his very own government-sponsored...