Reason articles from March 2008

Reason archives from March 2008

See you at reason.tv.(Editorial)
March 1, 2008... HERE'S SOME news that will (hopefully) disappoint some readers and (surely) delight others: After eight years at the top of the masthead, this is my last issue as editor-in-chief of the print edition of reason. I started with the magazine...

The party of Jefferson.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
March 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Damon Root is wrong when he claims that Cuba was "acquired" by the U.S. in 1898 ("The Party of Jefferson," December). The United States had a protectorate over Cuba for many years and acquired Guantanamo. It...

Thank Deng Xiaoping for little girls.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
March 1, 2008... I enjoyed Jacob Sullum's story on Chinese adoption ("Thank Deng Xiaoping for Little Girls," December). My wife and I came back from China this past summer with our second Chinese daughter. They are true blessings--but yes, it will be a better...

Let the viewer decide.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
March 1, 2008... Frederick Wiseman makes movies for intellectuals--films that are more interesting to talk and write about afterwards than actually watch. That's why reason's interview with him ("Let the Viewer Decide," December) was infinitely more interesting...

'The trouble is the West'.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
March 1, 2008... I wish that Rogier van Bakel's interview with Ayaan Hirsi Ali was required reading for every citizen of the United States ("'The Trouble Is the West'," November). I salute reason for publishing this interview, where the truth is finally told...

License to drink: MADD goes mad.(Mothers Against Drunk Driving, regulation on drunk driving)(Brief article)
March 1, 2008... IF YOU OFFER anyone under 21 a drink in North Carolina, you can lose your driver's license--even if no one goes anywhere near a car. A strict new law took effect in December, just in time to save all those innocent 20-year-olds from a...

Ad lib: free speech fight.(freedom of speech)(Brief article)
March 1, 2008... SPEECHNOW.ORG wants to criticize politicians who support restrictions on political speech. But first it has to get permission from the government. Last fall the Federal Election Commission agreed to decide whether SpeechNow.org, an...

35 years ago in Reason.(Brief article)
March 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] "Every reader of detective fiction knows that private insurance detectives are far more efficient than the police in recovering stolen property." --Murray N. Rothbard, "Free Market Police, Courts, and Law" ...

Slippery slope: subsidized campaigns.(Wisconsin's Supreme Court election )(Brief article)
March 1, 2008... LAST APRIL, Wisconsin had the most expensive Supreme Court election in the state's history. Candidates and third-party groups spent more than $5.8 million on a campaign that ended with the election of Justice Annette Ziegler, who received 58...

Sex flaws: database mistakes.(error on online registry of sex offenders)(Brief article)
March 1, 2008... HARRY BERLIN has never committed a crime in his life. But each time the TV news mentions Las Vegas' online registry of sex offenders, the 71-year-old is harassed and threatened by his neighbors. As the Las Vegas Sun reported in December,...

Quotes.(Quotation)(Brief article)
March 1, 2008... "I think we ought to be out there talking about ways to reduce energy consumption and waste. And we ought to declare that we will be free of energy consumption in this country within a decade, bold as that is." --Republican presidential...

Guns for D.C.? Shooting for the court.(Washington, D.C., and gun control)(Brief article)
March 1, 2008... IN MARCH the U.S. Supreme Court plans to hear oral arguments in its first significant Second Amendment case since 1939. The case, District of Columbia v. Heller, involves the District of Columbia's handgun ban, which the U.S. Court of...

Fly away: airport traffic fixed.(Brief article)
March 1, 2008... NEARLY EVERYONE who has traveled by air through New York during the last few years has sat idly in an airplane waiting impatiently to take off. These delays are not the inescapable result of too many people wanting to fly through New York. The...

Spycatchers: press freedom overseas.(Netherlands and freedom of the press)(Brief article)
March 1, 2008... THE LARGEST newswire in the Netherlands knew something suspicious was going on when a government official lodged a complaint about an interview that hadn't been published yet. According to reports in the Dutch news media, members of the...

DOA departments.(United States government agencies)(Brief article)
March 1, 2008... Texas Rep. Ron Paul's dark-horse campaign for the Republican nomination has become the blockbuster story of the presidential race. Alone among the major party candidates, the anti-war libertarian talks about scrapping vast swaths of the federal...

We're British: assimilation, please.(Citings)(Brief article)
March 1, 2008... IN 1990 THE Tory politician Norman Tebbit proposed the "cricket test" as a way of discerning the loyalty of British immigrants and their progeny. Loyal Brits, he suggested, would root for the home team. Alan Manning and Sanchari Roy, two...

Florida's Golden Gate High School suspended student Austin Perkins for wearing a jacket and tie to school.(Brickbats)(Brief article)
March 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Florida's Golden Gate High School suspended student Austin Perkins for wearing a jacket and tie to school. School officials say he'd been warned that those clothes violated the school dress code.

The British government unveiled plans to issue fines on the spot to any teenagers who are not working, in school, or in a job training program.(Brickbats)(Brief article)
March 1, 2008... The British government unveiled plans to issue fines on the spot to any teenagers who are not working, in school, or in a job training program. Children's Secretary Ed Balls reportedly called the move "the biggest educational reform in the...

Police in Manchester, England, charged a 12-year-old boy with assault.(Brickbats)
March 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Police in Manchester, England, charged a 12-year-old boy with assault. His crime: throwing a cocktail sausage at an old man.

Discovery Canyon Campus Elementary School in Colorado Springs has banned tag.(Brickbats)
March 1, 2008... Discovery Canyon Campus Elementary School in Colorado Springs has banned tag. Assistant Principal Cindy Fesgen says students were complaining about being chased.

Deputies from the Crow Wing County, Minnesota, Sheriff's Department showed up at Jennifer Stiernagel's home one morning.(Brickbats)(Brief article)
March 1, 2008... Deputies from the Crow Wing County, Minnesota, Sheriff's Department showed up at Jennifer Stiernagel's home one morning. Someone driving a silver Camry had robbed a bank earlier that day in nearby Garrison, and the cops noticed a silver Camry...

Inflation in Zimbabwe is running at around 8,000 percent.(Brickbats)(Brief article)
March 1, 2008... Inflation in Zimbabwe is running at around 8,000 percent. In response, President Robert Mugabe has banned increases in wages, prices, rents, and service charges. Anyone caught raising prices or salaries without government approval faces fines,...

Denise Berndsen lives in West Allis, Wisconsin, but it was a SWAT team from Milwaukee that knocked in the door to her apartment.(Brickbats)(Brief article)
March 1, 2008... Denise Berndsen lives in West Allis, Wisconsin, but it was a SWAT team from Milwaukee that knocked in the door to her apartment. After handcuffing everyone, including her 74-year-old father, pointing guns at them, and breaking furniture, the...

The coming of winter doesn't mean that Islamic police in Iran will end their crackdown on "immodest" clothing.(Brief article)
March 1, 2008... The coming of winter doesn't mean that Islamic police in Iran will end their crackdown on "immodest" clothing. "Tight trousers tucked inside long boots while wearing short overcoats are against Islamic codes," Tehran's police chief announced....

Marvin Lopez went to the Orange County, Florida, courthouse to pay a traffic ticket.(Brief article)
March 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Marvin Lopez went to the Orange County, Florida, courthouse to pay a traffic ticket. That's where he was arrested on an outstanding warrant for DUI and reckless driving. Lopez told authorities they had the wrong guy,...

Petty cash: immigrant injustice.(Pedro Zapeta, an immigrant's money have been taken away by the government)(Brief article)
March 1, 2008... MORE THAN two years ago, Pedro Zapeta tried to board a plane home to Guatemala from the United States. He carried a small blue duffel bag filled with what he says were his savings from seven years of working as a dishwasher in Matin County,...

Bad bounce: payday lending bans.(Brief article)
March 1, 2008... A NEW REPORT finds that banning payday lending--small, short-term, high-interest loans available from companies like Cash Advance and Check'n Go--makes customers worse off. The study, released in November by the Federal Reserve Bank of New...

Weathering storms.(mortality and global warming)(Brief article)
March 1, 2008... Man-made global warming could spark more-extreme weather events: stronger storms, bigger floods, and longer droughts. And even if it doesn't, there has been no shortage of terrible weather recently. A 2003 heat wave in Europe was responsible...

Myths of sexual slavery.(sex trafficking and abused women)
March 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The U.S. State Department has long claimed that between 600,000 and 800,000 women are trafficked worldwide every year. But in a 2006 report, the Government Accountability Office concluded that estimate was riddled...

Whatever happened to tax cuts? In the GOP, free markets are losing to Huckanomics.(Grand Old Party's Mike Huckabee)
March 1, 2008... MIKE HUCKABEE WAS supposed to be dead right now, politically speaking, and the Club for Growth was supposed to be standing over the corpse holding the knife. The Club--an eight-year-old coalition of supply-siders that helped elect such anti-tax...

The golden age: how Americans learned to stop worrying and love workplace drug testing.(`)
March 1, 2008... IN THE INCREASINGLY divided American landscape, where language, faith, and prime-time television no longer unite us as they once did, a thin golden line holds the nation together. It connects entities as disparate as Britney Spears, the Miami...

Make mine Mormon: if only Mitt Romney were as colorful as his faith.
March 1, 2008... THE PROBLEM WITH Mitt Romney is that he isn't Mormon enough. His unusual, unpopular religion is the one part of his public image that doesn't feel like it came out of a focus group. Naturally, he does everything he can to minimize, marginalize,...

Neither Gods nor goo: avoiding both utopian and apocalyptic forecasts for nanotechnology.
March 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] BY THE MIDDLE of the century, the inventor Ray Kurzweil suggests in his 2005 book The Singularity Is Near, human beings will live in perpetual clouds of nanobots, molecule-sized robots that spend each moment altering...

Litigating for liberty: the Institute for Justice's Chip Mellor on campaign-finance reform, eminent-domain abuse, and licensing laws gone wild.
March 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] IF YOU'VE SEEN a case of state-on-citizen injustice become a mainstream outrage from coast to coast, chances are Chip Mellor had something to do with it. Mellor founded the Institute for Justice, arguably the most...

A secular fantasy: the flawed but fascinating fiction of Philip Pullman.(The Golden Compass)
March 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] THE CONTROVERSY surrounding The Golden Compass, the recently released screen adaptation of the first book of Philip Pullman's bestselling fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials, was not exactly unexpected. Pullman, a...

Vuitton values: the delicate balancing act of luxury for the masses.(Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster)(Book review)
March 1, 2008... Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster, by Dana Thomas, New York: Penguin Press, 373 pages, $27.95 IN SEPTEMBER 2005, following the worst natural disaster in American history, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) began distributing...

They said what? A happy history of lies and propaganda.(Bill Fawcett's You Said What?)
March 1, 2008... Here's a history test no currently breathing American citizen should fail: Name a president whose "only reading materials were government documents and Bible scriptures" and whose tenure was linked to an increasingly unpopular war started under...

The pomo mind: was the conservative intellectual Russell Kirk a postmodernist?(The Postmodern Imagination of Russell Kirk)(Book review)
March 1, 2008... The Postmodern Imagination of Russell Kirk, by Gerald F. Russello, Columbia, Mo.: University of Missouri Press, 248 pages, $44.95 TOWARD THE END of The Postmodern Imagination of Russell Kirk, the conservative scholar Gerald Russello...

McCarthy and his friends: the unconvincing rehabilitation of Tail Gunner Joe.(Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America's Enemies)(Book review)
March 1, 2008... Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America's Enemies, by M. Stanton Evans, New York: Crown Forum, 672 pages, $29.95 HERE IS A precis of what is now known, based on evidence revealed since...

The cost of a free lunch: David Cay Johnston on how the government protects the privileged.(Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense )(Interview)
March 1, 2008... DAVID CAY JOHNSTON, a Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter, is the author of Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and Stick You With the Bill) (Portfolio). The heavily reported book takes...

The world needs citations.(Wikipedia's citation and source)(Brief article)
March 1, 2008... WIKIPEDIA'S detractors criticize the online, user-written, constantly changing encyclopedia's sometimes dubious sourcing, which they say makes it unreliable. Wikipedia's defenders counter that the site's mutable, fluid nature engenders a...