Reason articles from November 2004

Reason archives from November 2004

Electoral unenthusiasm.(Editorial)
November 1, 2004... IN "WHO'S GETTING YOUR VOTE?," our presidential poll that starts on page 24, I cop to the youthful indiscretion of pulling the lever for Walter Mondale back in 1984, the first presidential contest in which I cast a ballot. What can I say?...

Confessions of a "Woman Owned Business" Owner.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
November 1, 2004... Tama Starr's "Confessions of a 'Woman Owned Business' Owner" (July) made me smile. Decades ago I received a phone call from a representative of the long-departed Mountain Bell, the West's legacy from the AT&V breakup. He had found my name on a...

Bloody Shame.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
November 1, 2004... My husband and I read Caroline Waters' article "Bloody Shame" (July) with interest, as we are both ineligible to donate blood for a period of two years due to our travels. While our deferral in itself did not come as a surprise, the...

Razing objections: eminent domain curtailed.(Citings)(clearing away Poletown)
November 1, 2004... JUST BEFORE DAWN on July 14, 1981, Detroit police hooked a tow truck to the basement door of the Immaculate Conception Church on Trombly Street and tore it off its hinges. They stormed in and arrested a dozen parishioners who were making a...

Subway searches: your baggage, please.(Citings)(Brief Article)
November 1, 2004... MOST PEOPLE ARE resigned to being searched every time they enter an airport. Now baggage searches are spreading to light rail, subways, and buses. Just before the opening of the Democratic National Convention in Boston, the Massachusetts Bay...

25 years ago in reason.(Citings)
November 1, 2004... "To ease the suffering of cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy, California doctors may now use marijuana as part of the treatment process. California becomes the 14th state to enact such a measure." --Robert Poole Jr., "Trends" ...

Spamming voters: political junk ease.(Citings)(Brief Article)
November 1, 2004... WHAT'S WORSE THAN spam? Political spam, the dirtiest, vilest form of spam. Campaign '04 is its coming-out party. One spam-blocking firm, MailFrontier, predicts 1.25 billion unsolicited political e-malls will be sent to prospective voters by...

The big O: erotica in the canon.(Citings)
November 1, 2004... THE STORY OF O, a once-notorious French novel about a woman, an obsession, and a lot of whips and chains, turns 50 this year. To mark the occasion, France has included the work on an official list of national triumphs. "Official"...

Build a better mouse: of mice, men, and aging.(Citings)(the Methuselah mouse prize has many baby boomers showing an interest)(Brief Article)
November 1, 2004... FORGET THE X Prize. What's so great about sending a couple of people 100 kilometers up in the sky? The Methuselah Mouse Prize has a more interesting goal: getting a mouse to have an unusually long and healthy life. The prize is named after...

Quote.(Citings)(Brief Article)
November 1, 2004... "I spent five weeks trying to find good people. I got down into last week interviewing a 70-year-old guy who was a great farm broadcaster in Illinois. He decided because of his health problems he couldn't do it... We needed to find somebody to...

Sources.(Citings)(web sites keep people current with the news)(Brief Article)
November 1, 2004... For the true campaign junkie, even the steady IV drip of the 24-hour news channels may not be enough. If you just want to keep your eye on the big picture, electoral-vote.com compiles the latest polling data to give you a quick look at who's...

Kelly Simo, a 12th-grade student at Anderson Collegiate in Whitby, Ontario, was suspended from school for a day for jaywalking.(Brickbats)(Brief Article)
November 1, 2004... Kelly Simo, a 12th-grade student at Anderson Collegiate in Whitby, Ontario, was suspended from school for a day for jaywalking. Simo claims she crossed with the light on her way home from school. But setting innocence aside, she wants to know...

Tabitha DeSousa was handcuffed and lying on the ground when sheriff's deputies in Clark County, Washington, shot her in the leg, shattering a bone.(Brickbats)(Brief Article)
November 1, 2004... Tabitha DeSousa was hand-cuffed and lying on the ground when sheriff's deputies in Clark County, Washington, shot her in the leg, shattering a bone. DeSousa had just been caught in a drug bust, and the deputies were trying to shoot her dog,...

South African troops serving as part of a United Nations mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo have been accused of 50 sexual attacks on underage boys and girls.(Brickbats)
November 1, 2004... South African troops serving as part of a United Nations mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo have been accused of 50 sexual attacks on underage boys and girls. One officer accused of molesting an interpreter had requested only male...

Debora Hobbs was fired from her job as a dispatcher for the Pender County, North Carolina, Sheriff's Office after Sheriff Carson Smith found out she was living with her boyfriend.(Brickbats)(Brief Article)
November 1, 2004... Debora Hobbs was fired from her job as a dispatcher for the Pender County, North Carolina, Sheriff's Office after Sheriff Carson Smith found out she was living with her boyfriend. Smith says state law prohibits unmarried, unrelated adults of...

For 15 years, Junior Achievement in Rochester, Minnesota, has held a rubber duck race to raise money.(Brickbats)(Brief Article)
November 1, 2004... For 15 years, Junior Achievement in Rochester, Minnesota, has held a rubber duck race to raise money. Then state authorities found out. It turns out nonprofits are legally permitted to raise money through gambling, but only if it's limited to...

In July homeland security officers nabbed an alleged marijuana smuggler in Buffalo, New York.(Brickbats)(Brief Article)
November 1, 2004... In July homeland security officers nabbed an alleged marijuana smuggler in Buffalo, New York. One officer, Robert Rhodes, tried to grab a Chinese woman standing near the suspect. He says she tried to run, then Hit at him and scratched him....

Residents of Hampshire County, Great Britain, thought the new lines painted on a local road looked a bit "wavy.".(Brickbats)(Brief Article)
November 1, 2004... Residents of Hampshire County, Great Britain, thought the new lines painted on a local road looked a bit "wavy." County officials initially insisted it was a safety feature, but upon further investigation they discovered the wavy lines were the...

Secession fever: live free ... or in Vermont.(Citings)(Brief Article)
November 1, 2004... RESIDENTS OF Killington, a ski town in Vermont, were so mad about their high state taxes that in March they approved a plan to secede from the state and join neighboring New Hampshire. Now other towns want to flee Vermont as well, and they're...

Selling patriot: propaganda from Ashcroft.(Citings)
November 1, 2004... IN JULY, THE Department of Justice released "Report from the Field: The USA PATRIOT Act at Work," a 29-page effort to persuade its critics that the controversial PATRIOT Act, passed in 2001, is both necessary to fight terrorism and unlikely to...

Balance sheet.
November 1, 2004... Turkish Coffee Building on a local affinity for coffee and coffee houses dating to the 16th century and a successful branch in Istanbul opened last year, Starbucks Coffee opens in Ankara, with plans for stores across Turkey. Fertile...

Lost horizon.(Data)(Brief Article)
November 1, 2004... Last summer, when the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) released its annual mid-session review of the budget, OMB director (and former assistant to the president) Joshua Bolten had some great news: "Because the president's economic policies...

Judge, jury, and cop; the Border Patrol's new powers.(Citings)(Brief Article)
November 1, 2004... SINCE 1996 THE U.S. Border Patrol's "expedited removal" procedure has allowed it to ship illegal immigrants home from airports and seaports without a hearing before an immigration judge. Now this power is being expanded to cover people crossing...

Fluid check: drug test debunking.(Citings)(Brief Article)
November 1, 2004... NEARLY TWO DECADES after drug testing started catching on in U.S. workplaces, it is still relatively unusual in the U.K. A new report from an independent British commission suggests it should stay that way. The Independent Inquiry Into...

Minding your business: partnerships in snooping.(Citings)(Brief Article)
November 1, 2004... FROM THE 1940S through the '70s, the major telegraph companies voluntarily gave the government copies of all cables sent to or from the U.S. as part of an illegal project caned Operation Shamrock. According to "The Surveillance-Industrial...

Political spin doctors.(Soundbite)
November 1, 2004... If you've been to a protest, you've seen the sign: "Bush Lied!" But according to Ben Fritz, Bryan Keefer, and Brendan Nyhan, editors of the nonpartisan media watchdog site Spinsanity, the truth is a bit more complex. In their new book All the...

A swift boat kick in the teeth: how the mainstream media grapple with partisans.
November 1, 2004... WHEN THE PARTISAN tsunami started by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth began inundating several weblogs I frequent, especially Glenn Reynolds' InstaPundit.com and the eponymous rogerlsimon.com, my reaction was almost exactly the same as it was...

Defending repression: why are conservatives trying to rehabilitate McCarthyism and the Japanese internment?
November 1, 2004... DURING WORLD WAR II, the U.S. government interned about 120,000 ethnic Japanese living in America, two-thirds of whom were U.S. citizens. This is almost universally regarded as a shameful blot on America's history, a cautionary tale of racism,...

Talk like an Egyptian: is Arab popular culture uniformly anti-American?(Rant)
November 1, 2004... IN AUGUST The Washington Post ran a front-page story about the rising popularity of anti-American themes in Egyptian pop culture, offering as its lead example the latest work by Egypt's best-known filmmaker, Youssef Chahine. Entitled Alexandria...

Who's getting your vote? reason's revealing presidential poll.
November 1, 2004... VOTING FOR PRESIDENT IS A LOT LIKE SEX--and not just because it takes place once every four years in the solitude of a semi-private booth. Both are intensely personal activities that nonetheless can have profound public consequences. We might...

Mandatory health insurance now! It will save private medicine--and spur medical innovation.
November 1, 2004... In an ABC News/Washington Post poll last fall, 62 percent of the respondents favored a universal, government-run medical insurance program. Such surveys reflect a widespread frustration with a health care system that is too expensive, too...

Losing patients: a film questions Canada's nationalized health care.(Movie Review)
November 1, 2004... The Barbarian Invasions, recently released on DVD by Buena Vista Home Video, offers a disturbing vision of state-run medicine. The Canadian film won two awards at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival (best screenplay and best actress) and took home...

Meanwhile in Afghanistan: the coming "warlord war" in America's other occupation.
November 1, 2004... MAIMANA, AFGHANISTAN -- U.S. Army Maj. Kerry Trent, a member of the 45th Infantry Brigade, a National Guard unit from Oklahoma, walks to the illegal checkpoint to meet with the armed men who run it. The Afghan soldiers escorting him scurry into...

In search of ... an honest republican.(Culture and Reviews Comic)
November 1, 2004... 8/5/04: I'm deep in the bowels of Safeco which U.S. Representative George Nethercutt (R-WA) has rented out to remind his fellow Washingtonians that he wants to be our next senator... Nethercutt is best known for reneging on his original...

Right-wingers redux: are we a conservative nation? Does it matter?(Book Review)
November 1, 2004... The Republican Noise Machine: Right-Wing Media and How It Corrupts Democracy, by David Brock, New York: Crown Publishers, 420 pages, $25.95 The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America, by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, New...

Cramped style: how regulators derailed California's most environmentally progressive development.
November 1, 2004... The Sea Ranch coastal development, some 100 miles north of San Francisco in Sonoma County, is probably the best-known attempt to address environmental issues with innovative architecture and private covenants. As the development's Chamber of...

Free culture vs. big media: Lawrence Lessig leads the charge to retake the public domain.
November 1, 2004... Free culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity, by Lawrence Lessig, New York: Penguin Press, 240 pages, $24.9; EIGHT YEARS AGO in this magazine, I wrote about the "First Internet War":...

Burning man's piano mover: turning ruined instruments into a desert spectacle.
November 1, 2004... STEVE HECK IS a thick Grendel of a man, with a long beard he hacks with a knife and ties off at the bottom. He can move a piano over a foot merely by smacking it with one hand. He lives in a warehouse in Oakland. Plato would be amazed at...

Stretching condoms.(Artifact)(condoms become hats in the hands of a creative person!)(Brief Article)
November 1, 2004... NICE HAT, NO? It has a sort of post-Carmen Miranda quality, in that its orchid-like appearance is garish enough to make you look without being so garish as to make you laugh. Its petals even have a certain gleam, as if this "orchid" had been...