Reason articles from June 2004

Reason archives from June 2004

Kiss privacy goodbye--and good riddance, too.(Editor's Note)(Editorial)
June 1, 2004... Dear BOOK REVIEW INDEX, This is no ordinary issue of reason--or of any other magazine, either. The cover is an aerial shot of the address to which we mall your subscription. The ads on the back covers are also customized to you and your...

Opening Marriage.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
June 1, 2004... Cathy Young seemed to imply, in "Opening Marriage" (March), that polygamy, one person having multiple spouses, is the same as polyamory. In polyamorous relationships and families, various arrangements of consenting adult men and women choose to...

Confessions of a Welfare Queen.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
June 1, 2004... I was enjoying the article "Confessions of a Welfare Queen" until I stumbled on this bit of liberal-bashing, thrown in for no apparent reason except to break up the monotony of right-wing treachery: "'Every summer,' said Gore, who grew up in a...

About this special issue of reason.(Editorial)
June 1, 2004... AS EXPLAINED BY Editor-in-Chief Nick Gillespie on page 2, this is no ordinary issue of reason (see "Kiss Privacy Goodbye--and Good Riddance, Too"). It represents an unprecedented experiment in hyper-individualizing a commercial print...

Faith, Shame, and Insurgency.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
June 1, 2004... What message is to be taken from Steven Vincent's article "Faith, Shame, and Insurgency" (March) other than "the ends justify the means"? There is no doubt that a vicious tyrant was deposed, or that Saddam Hussein deserves much worse than...

Coercion vs. Consent.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
June 1, 2004... In "Coercion vs. Consent" (March), Randy Barnett writes that "there are very few libertarians today for whom consequences are not ultimately the reason why they believe in liberty," while Richard Epstein cheerfully agrees that libertarians are...

Bitter pill: Catholics and contraception.(Citings)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2004... THE POPE IS, famously, not a big fan of Ortho Tri-Cyclen. But in the wake of a decision by the Supreme Court of California, Catholic Charities of California will have to cover contraception in its prescription drug insurance for employees....

Small town blues: regulating apartments away.(Citings)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2004... ZONING OFFICIALS in Manhattan, a sleepy hamlet on the banks of the Hudson, help preserve the municipality's small-town feeling through a sensible set of regulations designed to prevent rapid growth. Real estate developers are discouraged from...

30 years ago in reason.(Citings)
June 1, 2004... "Consider the effects of a right to reply law. A newspaper... could surrender its editorial prerogatives and allow politicians and bureaucrats free access to its pages.... Or, it could simply refuse to cover controversial public figures." ...

Virtual war chests: blog-based fund raising.(Citings)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2004... THE IMPLOSION OF Howard Dean led many to conclude that the hype over decentralized, Internet-driven campaigning was just one more dot-com delusion. But some candidates are discovering that there's gold in them war weblogs. By the start of...

Up, up, and away? Space is the place.(Citings)(Commercial Space Launch Amendments Act of 2004)
June 1, 2004... FORTY YEARS AFTER the Wright brothers' first flight, more than 1 million people had flown in airplanes. More than 40 years after Yuri Gagarin orbited the earth, barely 500 individuals have flown in space. It turns out that federal...

Quotes.(Citings)
June 1, 2004... "That they deceived us about the weapons of mass destruction, that's true. We were taken for a ride." --Polish president and "Coalition of the Willing" member Aleksander Kwasniewski, to Agence France-Presse reporters, March 18 "I don't...

Source.(Citings)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2004... Maybe you live in one of those states so thoroughly in the grasp of the Democrats or Republicans that a vote for either seems pointless. Or maybe backing the lesser of two evils would leave you feeling dirty. Fortunately, there are scads of...

Police in Victoria, Australia, plan to randomly stop people on the streets and search them for weapons.(Brickbats)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2004... Police in Victoria, Australia, plan to randomly stop people on the streets and search them for weapons. "These types of proactive approaches mean that we have intelligence-led policing that can deter crime before it happens," an official...

Florida news outlets sent staffers posing as ordinary citizens into 234 local agencies to see how they complied with the state's open records law.(Brickbats)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2004... Florida news outlets sent staffers posing as ordinary citizens into 234 local agencies to see how they complied with the state's open records law. About 40 percent didn't or made unlawful demands of information seekers. Broward County...

Residents of the Italian town of Reggio Emilia better take good care of their pets.(Brickbats)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2004... Residents of the Italian town of Reggio Emilia better take good care of their pets. They can be fined 500 euros for dyeing their pets' fur, boiling live lobsters, or failing to provide their dogs with spacious housing in the shade.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration can't account for some $34 million in government property.(Brickbats)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2004... The National Aeronautics and Space Administration can't account for some $34 million in government property. The missing goods range from laptop computers to a robot.

Following a WOIO-TV report that the city of Cleveland had paid police officers tens of thousands of dollars in overtime to chauffeur Mayor Jane Campbell's daughter and her friends around, the mayor took quick action.(Brickbats)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2004... Following a WOIO-TV report that the city of Cleveland had paid police officers tens of thousands of dollars in overtime to chauffeur Mayor Jane Campbell's daughter and her friends around, the mayor took quick action. She barred employees at...

The Atlanta Police Department has consistently underreported crime for many years, according to an internal audit.(Brickbats)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2004... The Atlanta Police Department has consistently underreported crime for many years, according to an internal audit. Linder & Associates found evidence that the underreporting resulted from a combination of negligence and deliberate efforts to...

Norwegian school officials have told teacher Inge Telhaug not to wear a Star of David medallion in his classroom.(Brickbats)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2004... Norwegian school officials have told teacher Inge Telhaug not to wear a Star of David medallion in his classroom. They're worried it might provoke Muslim students.

The city of Chicago spends some $40 million a year hiring trucks.(Brickbats)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2004... The city of Chicago spends some $40 million a year hiring trucks. But a Chicago Sun-Times investigation found the vehicles do little or no work. Some of the firms the trucks are hired from seem to have no other clients, and the paper claims...

Pennsylvania's Meyer Packaging closed its doors.(Brickbats)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2004... Pennsylvania's Meyer Packaging closed its doors just six months after receiving $6 million in federal loan guarantees... to keep it from closing.

Two rookie police officers in Porterdale, Georgia, were suspended after allegedly betting on who could write more tickets.(Brickbats)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2004... Two rookie police officers in Porterdale, Georgia, were suspended after allegedly betting on who could write more tickets. The pair wrote more than half the tickets issued in a single month, raising the city's citation tally to double the...

Firefighters in Sallaumine, France, were concerned their station might be closed because there were too few calls.(Brickbats)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2004... Firefighters in Sallaumine, France, were concerned their station might be closed because there were too few calls. Now they're charged with recruiting teenagers to start fires so they could have more work.

Kiss off: banning affection.(Citings)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2004... INDONESIAN couples caught kissing on the mouth in public could soon face five years in the slammer, under a bill drafted in March by Jakarta legislators. "It is unclear," a dry Agence France-Presse account notes, "whether the ban would also...

Will it fly? CAPPS II update.(Citings)(Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System II)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2004... THE TRANSPORTATION Security Administration (TSA) still plans to launch the Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System II (CAPPS II) this year. But in February the General Accounting Office (GAO) issued a report pointing out that the...

Balance sheet.
June 1, 2004... Free Head Tennessee may follow Kentucky and Louisiana in ditching its mandatory motorcycle helmet laws. File Finding Canadian Justice Konrad von Finckenstein rules that music swappers do not violate Canadian copyright laws. The...

Trade barriers.(Data)(Free trade)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2004... Free trade, widely regarded as a boon by economists, has always been less popular with human beings; now its friends seem to be getting fewer by the day. A recent survey conducted by the Center on Policy Attitudes (COPA) reveals that, in the...

Holy rail: mass transit boondoggles.(Citings)
June 1, 2004... ALTHOUGH THE drawbacks of rail-based mass transit are well-known enough to have inspired an episode of The Simpsons, local authorities' enthusiasm for laying track seems undimmed. As a new report from the Colorado-based Independence Institute...

Importing affluence: the economics offshoring.(Citings)(Outsourcing)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2004... DEMOCRATS AND Republicans are now engaged in a partisan Three Stooges slap fight over who is more outraged by offshore outsourcing. Wasn't it just a few months ago that both parties were trying to outdo each other in their support for free...

Probing privacy.(Soundbite)(Interview)
June 1, 2004... In the uncharted terrain that, is privacy policy in the digital age, there are few compasses as reliable as Jeffrey Rosen. His new book The Naked Crowd (Random House) is a nuanced attempt to reconcile the demands of security with respect for...

Fair-weather friends: when journalists desert from free speech battles.(Columns)
June 1, 2004... ON MARCH 1 the Santa Monica radio station KCRW, the most lucrative link in the National Public Radio chain, fired the Los Angeles humorist Sandra Tsing Loh for saying the word fuck in a pretaped commentary. It was supposed to be bleeped for...

Opting out: the press discovers the mommy wars, again.(Columns)
June 1, 2004... EVER SINCE THE rise of the modern women's movement in the 1960s, two genres of "trend" stories have periodically appeared in the media: stories about women advancing into new, nontraditional roles, and stories about women going back to...

The age of uncertainty: all we know is that we know something.(Rant)
June 1, 2004... SO, HOW'S IT going in Iraq? No, really. As we learn to measure the U.S. engagement there in years and (let's face reality) decades, only this much seems absolutely beyond question: On a very basic level, it's virtually impossible to know...

Confessions of a lazy anti-warrior.(Comic)
June 1, 2004... 18 MONTHS AGO EVERY BONE IN MY BODY WAS TELLING ME THAT A WAR IN IRAQ WOULD BE EVERY BIT THE UNMITIGATED DISASTER THAT I THINK IT'S TURNED OUT TO BE... WAGING AN UNPROVOKED WAR ON IRAQ WOULD BE THE SMARTEST THING WE'VE EVER DONE! ...

Database nation: the upside of "zero privacy".
June 1, 2004... IF YOU HAVEN'T noticed it already, flip back a few pages and take a good look at the front cover. Unless you picked this magazine up on a newsstand, you should see your neighborhood's grinning mug shot, exposed in all its glory from above....

Objections to these unions: what Friedrich Hayek can teach us about gay marriage.
June 1, 2004... THERE ARE ONLY two objections to same-sex marriage that are intellectually honest and internally consistent. One is the simple anti-gay position: "It is the law's job to stigmatize and disadvantage homosexuals, and the marriage ban is a means...

Criminal representation: did Congress quietly make it a crime for lawyers to defend terror suspects?
June 1, 2004... ON MAY 17, 2004, the left-wing lawyer Lynne Stewart will go on trial in New York for allegedly helping a convicted terrorist leader direct jihad operations from inside a federal prison. Stewart has admitted in interviews since her...

The urine police.
June 1, 2004... Home run king Barry Bond's personal trainer has been charged with illegal drug distribution, adding fuel to the rumors that Bonds has used anabolic steroids to bulk up his already muscular frame. But there are plenty of other bigger and...

Out of the info loop: why information networks are crucial to modern warfare.(The New Face of War: How War will Be Fought in the 21st Century)(The CIA at War: Inside the Secret Campaign Against Terror)(Book Review)
June 1, 2004... The New Face of War: How War will Be Fought in the 21st Century, by Bruce D. Berkowitz, New York: Free Press, 272 pages, $26 The CIA at War: Inside the Secret Campaign Against Terror, by Ronald Kessler, New York: St. Martin's Press, 496...

Messing with the blues: revisionism comes to the Delta.(Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues)(Book Review)
June 1, 2004... Every casual blues fan has met a hard case, the guy--it is always a guy--who pores over the tiny ads in the back of Goldmine in search of "real" blues recordings. He is the keeper of esoteric sideman knowledge, the arbiter of notes bent and...

That old new economy: a leftist tries to make sense of the '90s boom.(After the New Economy)(Book Review)
June 1, 2004... After the New Economy, by Doug Henwood, New York: The New Press, 269 pages, $24.95 IT SEEMS LIKE only yesterday. Gross domestic product was booming. Labor productivity was skyrocketing. And price inflation, at least as measured by...

Mr. Showbiz goes to Washington; wish-fulfillment fantasies and paranoid nightmares.
June 1, 2004... SEVENTY YEARS AGO, Hamilton MacFadden made a New Deal comedy called Stand Up and Cheer. Quick summary: The president creates a new Department of Amusement because Americans are so depressed, what with the Depression and all. A Broadway producer...

Fluid structure.(Artifact)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2004... THIS DRAMATIC SKI jump in Innsbruck, Austria, described by The New York Times as "a swoosh in steel," is the work of Zaha Hadid, the winner of this year's Pritzker Architecture Prize. The structure's energy is typical of Hadid's designs, which...