Reason articles from June 2008

Reason archives from June 2008

City of rats: "thinking big" at the municipal level means abandoning the basics.(rodent control)
June 1, 2008... WASHINGTON, D.C., is lousy with rats, and not just of the human variety. I knew that before moving here--you'd always see them scampering around sidewalks and alleys when walking around town--but it took living full-time in the city to...

Guns for D.C.?(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
June 1, 2008... Brian Doherty reports ("Guns for D.C.?," March) that "the 1939 case U.S. v. Miller... upheld convictions for moving sawed-off shotguns across state lines." This is a typical example of the unfortunate mythology that has sprung up around this...

Whatever happened to tax cuts?(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
June 1, 2008... David Weigel calls the FairTax idea promoted by Mike Huckabee "glib" ("Whatever Happened to Tax Cuts ?," March). I believe the FairTax was the only idea Huckabee had going for him in the race. It is not just some passing thought that was thrown...

CSI: Mississippi.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
June 1, 2008... "CSI: Mississippi" (November) contains erroneous information that disparages the good name the American College of Forensic Examiners Institute (ACFEI) has worked for many years to achieve. Radley Balko states that the subject of the...

R.J.'s law: 'there oughta be a law'.(R.J. Feild's proposal of stripping welfare benefits of drug abusers)(Brief article)
June 1, 2008... SIXTEEN YEARS ago, R.J. Feild was born to a heroin-addicted welfare mother in Southern California. Brought into the world underweight and premature, he has trouble walking, and his bad eyesight makes it hard for him to read. He was, however,...

Olympic gag order: athletic politics.(Brief article)
June 1, 2008... PRINCE CHARLES once referred to China's leaders as "appalling old waxworks," but the British Olympic Committee seems to find them intimidating enough. "British athletes will have to sign a contract promising not to comment on any...

30 years ago in reason.(Citings)(Quotation)(Brief article)
June 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] "Scarcely a day goes by without new headlines on the decline of the dollar. In just the past 12 months it has dropped 16 percent against the Deutschemark, 20 percent against the yen, and 30 percent against the Swiss...

Kidneys for sale: Iranian organ donation.(Brief article)
June 1, 2008... "WHAT CAN IRAN teach us about good governance?" is not a question often posed in Washington. But according to Benjamin Hippen, a transplant nephrologist in North Carolina, the Iranians have managed to do something American policy makers have...

Japan goes postal: freeing the mail.
June 1, 2008... JAPAN'S POST office has been run by the government for 13O years, but not for much longer. Last fall Japan Post began the first stage of its 10-year privatization plan by officially splitting into four separate businesses: Japan Post Service...

Quotes.(Quotation)(Brief article)
June 1, 2008... "I just think this is one of the least sleazy things he's done." --pundit Tucker Carlson on New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer's fondness for prostitutes, MSNBC, March 18 "I don't want young people thinking that half-dressing is the way to...

Queue up: health care rationing.(emergency medical service standard )(Brief article)
June 1, 2008... FACING LENGTHENING waits at hospitals, the British government has set a targeted turn around time of four hours from arrival in an emergency room to treatment by a medical professional. Apparently this standard has proven too stringent for the...

RateMyCop.com: reviewing the police.(Brief article)
June 1, 2008... MANY POLICE departments have set up Internet registries for sex offenders and drug offenders, and police also have begun posting the pictures and names of suspected johns online. Still, police groups took umbrage when a site called RateMyCop....

Missing pedophiles: online predator hysteria.(Citings)(Brief article)
June 1, 2008... IN MARCH, London's Daily Mail reported that a British elementary school had obscured the heads of children in group photographs on the school's website with oval smiley faces, "apparently to protect them from paedophiles." The widespread...

Fresh from the farm.(Brief article)
June 1, 2008... Joel Salatin is a self-proclaimed "Christian-conservative-libertarian-environmentalist-lunatic" and the proprietor of Polyface Farms in Charlottesville, Virginia, where he practices the kind of small-scale agriculture that baffles (and...

Kill joy: Sic semper tyrannis.(Brief article)
June 1, 2008... LIVING UNDER the bootheel of a dictatorship ? An academic study suggests that taking a potshot at your oppressor might lead to greater democracy. In "Hit or Miss?: The Effect of Assassinations on Institutions and War," a working paper...

Albany High School in Oregon suspended Jaime Salazar and Marco Castro for wearing crucifixes.(Brickbats)
June 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Albany High School in Oregon suspended Jaime Salazar and Marco Castro for wearing crucifixes. School officials say crucifixes are gang symbols.

When officials at New Jersey's Readington Middle School cut the lunch period to 30 minutes, students got upset.(Brief article)
June 1, 2008... When officials at New Jersey's Readington Middle School cut the lunch period to 30 minutes, students got upset. Some of them showed their displeasure by paying the $2 cost of their lunches in pennies. Twenty-nine kids received detention for...

For 62 years, Betty Davies has swept the sidewalk outside her house in Wales.(Brickbats)(Brief article)
June 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] For 62 years, Betty Davies has swept the sidewalk outside her house in Wales. But a council worker recently told the 88-year-old woman to stop. The man informed her she could be taken to court and fined for breaking...

In West Virginia, the Monongalia County Commission upheld a 1,531 percent property tax increase levied on Jim Jones.(Brief article)
June 1, 2008... In West Virginia, the Monongalia County Commission upheld a 1,531 percent property tax increase levied on Jim Jones. Jones says the taxes skyrocketed after he rejected an offer from Chief Deputy Assessor Bill Perry to buy the property. Perry...

Steve Brook and Mandy Smith started to take a photo of their 11-month-old daughter on a swing in Oldham, England.(Brickbats)(Brief article)
June 1, 2008... Steve Brook and Mandy Smith started to take a photo of their 11-month-old daughter on a swing in Oldham, England. A park warden rushed over and ordered them to stop, declaring that it was illegal to take pictures of children in the park. Town...

City officials in Dibble, Oklahoma, cited Carol Mendenhall after a neighbor complained her goats were "doing it" in Mendenhall's yard.(Brief article)
June 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] City officials in Dibble, Oklahoma, cited Carol Mendenhall after a neighbor complained her goats were "doing it" in Mendenhall's yard. Turns out there was a city law against animals' mating in public, even on private...

Denise George's Amish neighbors' religion doesn't allow them to own automobiles, so she drives them to town every now and then.(Brief article)
June 1, 2008... Denise George's Amish neighbors' religion doesn't allow them to own automobiles, so she drives them to town every now and then. They give her gas money, and sometimes homemade goods and crafts. Many people would say she is just being...

Mick Forsythe accidentally scratched Lorna Steele's car while parking outside a tattoo parlor she runs in Newtown, Wales.(Brief article)
June 1, 2008... Mick Forsythe accidentally scratched Lorna Steele's car while parking outside a tattoo parlor she runs in Newtown, Wales. A subsequent discussion got heated, and Forsythe called Steele an "English bitch." Apparently, British law takes a dim...

Rogers, Arkansas, Police Chief Steve Helms has suspended Lt. David Mitchell for videotaping himself using a Taser on a cow, then attempting to Tase another cow but accidentally shocking himself and another man instead.(Brief article)
June 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Rogers, Arkansas, Police Chief Steve Helms has suspended Lt. David Mitchell for videotaping himself using a Taser on a cow, then attempting to Tase another cow but accidentally shocking himself and another man...

Incarceration nation.(Brief article)
June 1, 2008... Does the U.S. really lock up more people per capita than China? Maybe not. Press coverage of a recent Pew Center on the States report on the U.S. incarceration rate highlighted the unfavorable U.S.-China comparison. But China's...

Republic of Montana? Second Amendment secession.(Brief article)
June 1, 2008... SEVERAL DOZEN Montana politicians, including Secretary of State Brad Johnson, have adopted an unconventional take on the Second Amendment case currently before the U.S. Supreme Court: They've threatened secession. D.C. v. Heller, the first...

Collectivist genes: selecting for statism.(Brief article)
June 1, 2008... ARE BULLYING, haranguing, collectivists just expressing adaptive evolutionary behavior? A new paper in the Royal Society journal Proceedings B suggests that when societies are hostile to individualism, sexual selection may be to blame. ...

Freeing the innocent.(Craig Watkins )(Interview)
June 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In 2006 Craig Watkins became the first elected African-American district attorney in Texas history. He presides in Dallas County, where the D.A.'s office is known for its aggressive prosecution tactics. A former...

Union rules: the democratic coalition rubs its hands at the prospect of taking over Washington.
June 1, 2008... IF YOU EVER want a window into the needs and desires of the labor movement, you should listen to Stewart Acuff. And if you get within 50 yards of Acuff, you'll be listening: The snow-bearded activist, now the AFL-CIO's director of organizing,...

The birth of the nuppie: high-end designers target nomadic urban professionals.(Columns)
June 1, 2008... AT 31 INCHES long and 48 inches wide, weighing approximately 300 pounds, Casulo may be the largest, heaviest gadget in the history of gee-whiz technology. And yet for a few days in February, as news of its existence traveled from one...

When Washington pleads weakness: why the U.S. won't crack down on reckless military contractors in Iraq.
June 1, 2008... THE U.S. GOVERNMENT must not have much power, because no one seems able to figure out how to bring American security contractors to justice for violent crimes committed in Iraq. In September 2007, Blackwater employees opened fire in Baghdad's...

The cult of the Presidency: who can we blame for the radical expansion of executive power? Look no further than you and me.
June 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] "I AIN'T RUNNING FOR preacher," Republican presidential candidate Phil Gramm snarled to religious right activists in 1995 when they urged him to run a campaign stressing moral themes. Several months later, despite...

The coming recession: seven observers the (sorry) state of the economy.
June 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] AS THIS ISSUE of reason goes to press, the dollar is at a record low against the euro, oil is more than $100 a barrel, consumer prices are up 4 percent from a year ago, and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke is...

Some bets are off: the strangely selective and self-defeating crackdown on internet gambling.
June 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] ON JULY 16, 2006, the CEO of BetOnSports.com attacked an anti-online gambling bill that the House of Representatives had overwhelmingly approved a few days before. "We want to be regulated," David Carruthers wrote in...

'30 Years of Failure': a conversation about the war on drugs with Ed Burns, cocreator of The Wire.(TV Against the Drug War: The Wire and the damage done, to Baltimore and to America)(Interview)
June 1, 2008... HBO's CRITICALLY acclaimed drama The Wire wrapped up its final season in March. The show has been widely praised for its raw and cynical realism, its huge cast of multidimensional characters interweaving across complex story arcs, and above all...

High comedies great moments in the drug war Kulturkampf.(TV Against the Drug War: The Wire and the damage done, to Baltimore and to America)
June 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] If the recently concluded HBO series The Wire is arguably the most aesthetically accomplished fictional indictment of the decades-long war on drugs, there is no shortage of contenders for the most absurd bit of...

The Wire vs. The Sun: TV's best drama takes on the press.(TV Against the Drug War: The Wire and the damage done, to Baltimore and to America)
June 1, 2008... UNTIL THE FIFTH and final season of The Wire aired this year, critics had been nearly unanimous in their praise for the Baltimore-based HBO show. But the last 10 episodes provoked furious debates between the program's defenders and its suddenly...

Goldwater unfiltered: the private journals of the father of the modern conservative movement.(Pure Goldwater)(Book review)
June 1, 2008... Pure Goldwater, edited by Barry M. Goldwater Fr. and John W.. Dean, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 416 pages, $27. 95 EVEN THOUGH the names on the cover of Pure Goldwater are those of Barry Goldwater Jr. (son of the senator) and John w. Dean...

Virtually free: an online world embraces regulation.(Second Life)
June 1, 2008... IN FEBRUARY, subscribers to the virtual world of Second Life awoke to a surprise: The garish, skyscraper-sized billboards they had learned to tolerate as part of their three-dimensional landscape were about to be vaporized, the site's creators...

God on the lawn.(Statue and freedom of expression)(Brief article)
June 1, 2008... BEHOLD THE Flying Spaghetti Monster, noodle-god of the Pastafarians. In March, He manifested Himself on the lawn of the Cumberland County courthouse in Crossville, Tennessee, where He took the form of a statue built by Ariel and David Safdie....