Reason articles from May 2008

Reason archives from May 2008

When coalitions dissolve: as the GOP breaks apart, some blame the vanishing breed of free market Republicans.(Grand Old Party)
May 1, 2008... "VICTORY HAS 100 fathers," the Italian proverb goes, but "defeat is an orphan." It's an old battlefield saw, trotted out by blame-taking commanders after ignominious defeats, such as President John F. Kennedy following the 1961 Bay of Pigs...

Scenes from the Ron Paul Revolution.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
May 1, 2008... Rep. Ron Paul is definitely the best Republican running for president this year ("Scenes From the Ron Paul Revolution," February), but I fail to see how he can call himself a libertarian with his anti-choice views on abortion rights and his...

Legacies of Injustice.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
May 1, 2008... On the specific topic of legacy-based university admissions I am neutral, though I did not find "Legacies of Injustice" (February) convincing. I'll comment on two aspects of the article that are common to much advocacy relating to universities....

Ending Global Apartheid.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
May 1, 2008... Letter to the Editor "Ending Global Apartheid" (February) made me think. Guest worker programs work well in countries like Singapore and Kuwait: largely culturally homogeneous, geographically compact, and, if not autocratic, at least...

30 years ago in reason.(Citings)(Quotation)(Brief article)
May 1, 2008... "The luckiest beneficiaries of [Ayn Rand's] work are the people who read her and never see her, never meet her, never have any reason to deal with her in person. Then they get the best of what she was." --Nathaniel Branden, "Thank You Ayn...

Need to know: state secrets in court.(evidence and government secrecy)(Brief article)
May 1, 2008... WHEN OFFICIALS in the Bush administration want to stop a plaintiff from obtaining evidence, they often simply declare that evidence a state secret. They have called on this option some 25 percent more times each year than any previous...

Papers please! Big farmer is watching.(National Animal Identification System )(Brief article)
May 1, 2008... BRANDI CALDERWOOD and her steer, Walker, were thrown out of the Colorado State Fair last year--not because Calderwood had cheated but because she hadn't registered Walker with the federal government. The U.S. Department of Agriculture is...

Sin tax creep: no child left inside.(taxation of television and video games)(Brief article)
May 1, 2008... LED BY THE state's Sierra Club, New Mexico's "No Child Left Inside" movement aims to provide school kids with a variety of outdoor education programs. Since the fund will need money, environmental groups are looking to taxpayers for support....

Operation overdose: better dead than high.(Narcan as overdose treatment)(Brief article)
May 1, 2008... WHEN PEOPLE who have overdosed on heroin or morphine arrive in emergency rooms, they're given a drug called naloxone. Public health advocates say a new version of the drug, marketed as Narcan, can be administered outside a hospital setting,...

Mandatory niceness: 'Human rights' in Canada.(huma rights and censorship)
May 1, 2008... IN JANUARY an officer of the Alberta Human Rights and Citizenship Commission interrogated the Canadian journalist Ezra Levant about his decision to reprint the notorious Muhammad cartoons that originally appeared in the Danish newspaper...

Quotes.(Quotation)(Brief article)
May 1, 2008... "It would be hard to concoct something more ridiculous." --anti-obesity crusader and "Twinkle tax" advocate Kelly Brownell, regarding a Mississippi bill requiring restaurants to refuse service to the obese, quoted in USA Today, February 6...

Rewiring the system.(Ed Burns)(Brief article)
May 1, 2008... Ed Burns is co-creator of HBO's critically acclaimed series The Wire, which just concluded its fifth and final season, and coproducer of Generation Kill, a forthcoming HBO miniseries based on journalist Evan Wright's book about the first stages...

Downloading lies: anti-piracy propaganda.(Motion Picture Association of America 's study on piracy)(Brief article)
May 1, 2008... IN 2005 THE Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) released a study of movie piracy that estimated how much money was being lost to copyright infringement. "The typical pirate is age 16-24 and male," the MPAA reported, adding that "44...

Free ride: organ donation debate.(tissue donor's wave of renewal fees for driver's license )(Brief article)
May 1, 2008... IF ALL GOES well, thrifty Vermonters will soon have a new way to save a few bucks. All they have to do is hand over their hearts, kidneys, and corneas. State Reps.James Fitzgerald (D-St.Albans) and Francis McFaun (R-Barre Town) have...

Brickbats.(Brief article)
May 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] One morning in January, in Medford, Massachusetts, an automated telephone system made some 2,100 calls telling parents, inaccurately, that their children were not in school. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] ...

Arrivals down, panic up.(decrease in immigrant arrivals )(Brief article)
May 1, 2008... A new report from the Immigration Policy Center reminds us that immigrant arrivals have been down since well before the current eruption of nativist sentiment. The annual flow of immigrants to the United States was at its height in 2000. The...

So long, Seattle: stadium welfare schemes.(referendum on taxpayer subsidies )(Brief article)
May 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] IN NOVEMBER 2006 voters in Seattle overwhelmingly approved a ballot initiative prohibiting taxpayer subsidies to professional sports teams. The vote effectively killed plans to build a $220 million taxpayerfunded...

Planned obsolescence: one man shrinks government.(Ed Hamilton's political candidacy for Kerr County's treasurer post)(Brief article)
May 1, 2008... IN JANUARY Ed Hamilton, a 77-year-old real estate agent, announced his candidacy for treasurer of Kerr County, Texas, challenging the incumbent Republican Mindy Williams. Hamilton, also a Republican, has thus far run a fairly spartan campaign;...

Can you hear the people sing?(James Tusty's The Singing Revolution)(Interview)
May 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Most people of a certain age remember Poland's anti-communist Solidarity movement of the early 1980s and the day the Berlin Wall came down in November 1989. Others may recall Czechoslovakia's inspiring Velvet...

Free market Clintonism, RIP: the death of the free trade democrat.(Hillary Clinton on free trade)
May 1, 2008... HILLARY CLINTON WAS angry about free trade, and she wanted Wisconsin to know it. "I'm tired of being played for a patsy," the candidate said, 48 hours before the state's Democrats would hand a 17-point landslide to Barack Obama. "It's time we...

Hollywood's decency epidemic: an onslaught of wholesome entertainment.(CAMIE Awards )
May 1, 2008... ON MAY 3, at the Wilshire Theater in Beverly Hills, there won't be a single shamelessly naked trophy in the house. The 2008 CAMIE Awards will be celebrating "Character And Morality In Entertainment," and in contrast to the disturbingly...

Serve the (old) people: national service or generational warfare?
May 1, 2008... "ASK NOW WHAT your country can do for you--ask what you can do for your country." If only John F. Kennedy could have known what his 1961 call to service would become: a rallying cry for generations of rich, middle-aged men convinced that the...

The trillion-dollar war: the war on terror is now more expensive than Vietnam or World War I--but the dishonest way Washington is paying for it may prove costliest of all.
May 1, 2008... AT THE END OF December, Congress approved $70 billion in bridge funding--a down payment to cover the gap between the beginning of the fiscal year and the passage of the actual appropriation bill--to keep financing the wars in Afghanistan and...

Power from the people: what happens when creative consumers decide to generate their own energy?
May 1, 2008... HERE'S ONE way to get electricity: First, find two old metal tanks, of varying widths and heights--the kind used to contain compressed gases will do. You might have a few lying around, at least if you hang out in junkyards or machine shops...

Guilty before proven innocent: how police harassment, jailhouse snitches, and a runaway war on drugs imprisoned an innocent family.(Colomb family)
May 1, 2008... ANN COLOMB Scoops a plastic cup of corn from a white pail in her backyard and pours it onto the sod at her feet. A few dozen scraggly chickens scatter as the corn hits the ground, then gather back into a flock to peck up the kernels. ...

'Technology is at the center': entrepreneur and philanthropist Peter Thiel on liberty and scientific progress.(Interview)
May 1, 2008... I FIRST MET Peter Thiel--co-founder of PayPal, angel investor in Facebook, founder of the hedge fund Clarium Capital Management, adviser to the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, and self-described libertarian-at a party in his...

The Blurry edges of Obama's memory: what the senator's pot smoking should have taught him about drug policy.(Barack Obama)
May 1, 2008... By now you probably have heard the rumors about Barack Obama and drugs. A February 9 New York Times report suggested the Democratic presidential candidate had misled the public about his history of drug use-by making it seem more impressive...

Pirate capitalism: remix culture goes corporate.(Book review)
May 1, 2008... The Pirate's Dilemma: How Youth Culture Is Reinventing Capitalism, by Matt Mason, New York: Free Press, 279 pages, $25 IN A WELL-publicized speech two years ago, Disney co-chair Anne Sweeney said,"We understand now that piracy is a business...

Flight of the neocons: from liberal hawks to "National Greatness" conservatives.(Book review)
May 1, 2008... They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons, by Jacob Heilbrunn, New York: Doubleday, 336 pages, $26 IN 1996 Norman Podhoretz, exfriend of the left and high priest of neoconservatism, wrote an elegiac essay in Commentary about the...

Little brother is watching: defending human rights with cameras and Internet connections.(video of police brutality)
May 1, 2008... OVER THE LAST few years, a brave band of Egyptian activists has circulated footage of policemen striking, lashing, and even raping detainees. The torture videos, filmed by the cops themselves, prompted protests both inside and outside the...

Castro shrugged.(Fidel Castro)(Brief article)
May 1, 2008... "I TRIED TO understand the essence of this new world," the now-retired Cuban dictator Fidel Castro said last September. "How did we get here ?" He was discussing what he gleaned from former Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan's memoir The Age...