Reason articles from November 2008

Reason archives from November 2008

Scared straight: notes from our nation's awful political spectacles.(From the Top)(major-party political conventions)
November 1, 2008... ATTENDING A major-party political convention is a lot like putting a metal dish into a microwave. You know something bad's going to happen, but after four years you need to be reminded of the acrid smell. Whatever was wafting over Denver...

Carbon: tax, trade, or deregulate?(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
November 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] What has happened to the excellent Ronald Bailey? In reason's July issue, he gives a thoroughly sensible argument against some silly creationist film ("Flunk This Movie") but then in a feature on global warming...

Follow state law, go directly to jail: medical marijuana makes conservatives forget federalism.(Column)
November 1, 2008... WHEN OWEN BECK was 17, doctors amputated his right leg to stop the spread of bone cancer. His parents, desperate to find a drug that would relieve their son's excruciating phantom limb pain, brought him to Charlie Lynch's medical marijuana...

Talk of the town: free speech in Philly.(Citings)(Philadelphia)
November 1, 2008... As IT TURNS out, Benjamin Franklin did not have 69 children out of wedlock. Nor did the thrice-widowed Betsy Ross kill her husbands. Philadelphia tour guides have been known to add some extra flavor to their bite-sized history lessons for...

30 years ago in reason.(Citings)
November 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] "Instead of paying the police to chase after prostitutes, investigate bingo games for gambling offenses, and bust marijuana parties, many people might prefer to pay guards to protect their homes and streets.... Tax...

Congress of angels: 'near-perfect' ethics record.(Citings)
November 1, 2008... IN JULY, Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-N.Y.) filed a complaint with the House Ethics Committee requesting an investigation into possible rules violations by a member of Congress: Charlie Rangel. The Washington Post had reported that Rangel may have...

Back to court: Heller v. D.C. II.(Citings)(armed self-defense laws)
November 1, 2008... ON JUNE 26 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the District of Columbia had violated the Second Amendment by making armed self-defense in the home impractical and banning the most popular weapons used for that purpose. On July 15 the D.C. Council...

Bourgeois boom: expanding middle class.(Citings)(Brief article)
November 1, 2008... THOSE WHO fear increasing inequality should take to heart a new study that finds the middle class is expanding, gaining about 70 million people a year in an unprecedented worldwide boom. Better yet, says Jim O'Neill, global chief economist...

Quotes.(Citings)
November 1, 2008... "I encouraged Cindy to compete. It old her with a little luck she could be the only woman ever to serve as First Lady and Miss Buffalo Chip." --Sen. john McCain (R-Ariz.), offering his wife as a participant in a biker beauty pageant,...

Ask a Mexican.(List)(Gustavo Arellano's Orange County: A Personal History)(Brief article)
November 1, 2008... In 2004 the OC Weekly, an alternative paper in Orange County, California, asked its lone Latino staffer, Gustavo Arellano, to answer questions from white people about their puzzling brown brethren. Thus began the scabrous, politically...

Advil strip search: fourth amendment victory.(Citings)(Brief article)
November 1, 2008... "THIS IS a difficult case" wrote Judge Michael Hawkins, dissenting from a July decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit. That is not the way most people respond when they hear about Savana Redding, who was strip-searched at age...

Card sharks: gift certificate rights?(Citings)(Brief article)
November 1, 2008... WHEN MICHIGAN state Rep. Fred Miller (D-Mount Clemens) got married in 2003, he received more gift cards than he knew what to do with. "I didn't want to carry them in my wallet all the time," he remembers. "Of course, some of them expired before...

Moralistic medicine: fundamentalist pharmacists.(Citings)(Brief article)
November 1, 2008... CAN PHARMACIES, stem cell labs, or abortion clinics refuse to hire people who believe their activities are evil? The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services doesn't think so. The agency is circulating draft regulations that would outlaw...

Toi Pruitt, her three children, and her boyfriend, Joe Pulliam, planned to move into a house Pruitt and Pulliam bought in Black Jack, Missouri.(Brickbats)(Brief article)
November 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Toi Pruitt, her three children, and her boyfriend, Joe Pulliam, planned to move into a house Pruitt and Pulliam bought in Black Jack, Missouri. But city officials refused to issue the family an occupancy permit....

Clyde Scott was in his barbershop cutting hair when a police officer walked in and gave him a ticket--for cutting hair.(Brickbats)(Brief article)
November 1, 2008... Clyde Scott was in his barbershop cutting hair when a police officer walked in and gave him a ticket--for cutting hair. The city of Houma, Louisiana, has a decades-old law banning haircuts on Mondays. It also forbids cutting hair on Sundays, on...

Lenny Woodward is 96 and nearly blind, so you'd think people might understand when he accidentally put two glass jars in the wrong recycling bin.(Brickbats)(Brief article)
November 1, 2008... Lenny Woodward is 96 and nearly blind, so you'd think people might understand when he accidentally put two glass jars in the wrong recycling bin. But sanitation workers in West Earlham, England, told the World War II veteran they would not take...

Steve Kink heard an alarm go off outside his wife's bar in Weymouth, England.(Brickbats)(Brief article)
November 1, 2008... Steve Kink heard an alarm go off outside his wife's bar in Weymouth, England. He found two men breaking into a cell phone store and confronted them. One punched him, but Kink swept his feet from under him and pinned him to the ground. By this...

Massena, New York, code enforcement officer Gregory Fregoe says inflatable pools are a menace, and he has cited at least 20 people so far this year for having them.(Brickbats)(Brief article)
November 1, 2008... Massena, New York, code enforcement officer Gregory Fregoe says inflatable pools are a menace, and he has cited at least 20 people so far this year for having them. City and state codes say any pool with at least 24 inches of water, even...

Tom Kleven thought he'd prepare for a triathlon by swimming across Minnesota's Lake Nokomis.(Brickbats)(Brief article)
November 1, 2008... Tom Kleven thought he'd prepare for a triathlon by swimming across Minnesota's Lake Nokomis. But a lifeguard ordered him back when he was about halfway across. When he returned to shore, the Minneapolis Park Police cited him for swimming too...

Jackson, Mississippi, Mayor Frank Melton has been indicted on federal civil rights charges.(Brickbats)(Brief article)
November 1, 2008... Jackson, Mississippi, Mayor Frank Melton has been indicted on federal civil rights charges. Two years ago, Melton and his two police bodyguards led a gang of youths who attacked a duplex he claimed was a crack house. They ordered the occupants...

Mississippi fires medical examiner Steven Hayne.(Follow-Up)
November 1, 2008... In our November 2007 issue, reason exposed some significant problems with Mississippi's forensic system. The article focused on Steven Hayne, the doctor who for two decades has conducted the vast majority of Mississippi's autopsies. (Hayne says...

Publius blogs: protecting online anonymity.(Citings)
November 1, 2008... BLOGS ARE often likened to the pamphleteering that helped ignite the American Revolution. In some communities, the targets of anonymous blogs are trying to crack down on their Internet critics with the vengeance of King George III. Start...

Digital drinks: Beer Pong controversy.(Citings)(Brief article)
November 1, 2008... DESIGNERS AT JV Games modeled Beer Pong, a video game for the Wii, after a drinking game in which players attempt to throw ping-pong balls across a table into half-full cups of beer. Although there's no alcohol involved in the electronic...

The dangerous failure of McCain-Feingold.(Soundbite)(Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act)(Interview)
November 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Among the many critics of campaign finance reform, Bradley A. Smith may be the only one who has enforced the law he despises. From 2000 to 2005, including a one-year stint as chairman in 2004, Smith, a Republican,...

Divided in Nevada: in America's most libertarian state, libertarians don't know how they'll vote.(Column)
November 1, 2008... IT'S GETTING HARDER to find remnants of Ron Paul's remarkable presidential campaign at the Moonlite Bunny Ranch. But they're still there. On the wall, next to clips from Playboy and Smoke, you'll find a framed local news story about a late 2007...

Garden gnome politics: the age-old battle over landscape expression.(Column)
November 1, 2008... RECONNOITER A FEW suburban subdivisions these days, and it'll be clearer than ever that there are two Americas. One decorates its front yards with giant patriotic teddy bears and half-buried zombies. The other has to get approval from its...

Fear of a united government: what happens to federal spending when the Democrats control both Congress and the presidency?(Column)
November 1, 2008... WHEN IT COMES to out-of-control spending, conventional wisdom says the Democrats are most likely to bust open the coffers. That's why many fear an increased Democratic majority in Congress topped by a Democratic president. And we should be...

Bob Barr talks: the best-known nominee in Libertarian Party history talks to reason about war, drugs, pornography, Bill Clinton, George Bush, and Ayn Rand.(Interview)(Cover story)
November 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] ON MEMORIAL DAY WEEKEND, former four-term Republican Rep. Bob Burr took the stage at the Sheraton Denver and asked a skeptical Libertarian Party to make him its nominee for president. Hundreds of party delegates were...

Beyond the fairness doctrine: Barack Obama says he wouldn't reintroduce the Federal Communications Commission's most notorious speech-squashing regulation. But there are more mundane reasons to fear the next FCC.
November 1, 2008... FIRST THE GOOD NEWS: The fairness doctrine is still dead, and it probably will stay dead even if Barack Obama becomes president. The doctrine, a rule that gave the government the power to punish broadcasters for being insufficiently balanced,...

Is there any hope for this man? Assessments of Barack Obama from planet reason.
November 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] IN JULY a Rasmussen poll found that libertarians make up 4 percent of the nation's likely voters--and that they favor Barack Obama over John McCain, 53 percent to 38 percent. There's a Libertarians for Obama blog...

A transformation on race: Barack Obama's "post-racial" posture reflects a quiet but radical shift in liberal ideas about race in America.(Culture and Reviews)(Critical essay)
November 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Sellout: The Politics of Racial Betrayal, by Randall Kennedy, New York: Pantheon. 228 pages, $22.00 Racial Paranoia: The Unintended Consequences of Political Correctness, by John L. Jackson, Jr., New York: Basic...

30 years of Dallas: the TV show that won the Cold War.
November 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In November fans of Dallas, the family and business%/drama centered on the flashy double-dealings and boozy bedroom antics of the Ewing clan, will mark the show's 30th anniversary in flashy and boozy style. Diehards...

The Republican civil war: can the GOP make a comeback by embracing the welfare state?(Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream)(Critical essay)
November 1, 2008... Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream, by Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam, New York: Doubleday, 256 pages, $23.95 AFTER SEVEN-PLUS years of George W. Bush, conservatives find themselves in a...

Between Iraq and a soft place: Democrats counter with a kinder, gentler interventionism.(Heads in the Sand: How the Republicans Screw Up Foreign Policy and Foreign Policy Screws Up the Democrats)(Critical essay)
November 1, 2008... Heads in the Sand: How the Republicans Screw Up Foreign Policy and Foreign Policy Screws Up the Democrats, by Matthew Yglesias, New York: Wiley, 272 pages, $25.95 WHEN BARACK Obama clinched the Democratic presidential nomination in early...

Idiocracy now! Hollywood makes a dumb movie about dumb voters.(Swing Vote )(Movie review)
November 1, 2008... IF YOU CAN see Swing Vote the way I saw it, do so. First, score a free ticket from a D.C. activist group (in my case, Americans for Tax Reform). Second, get a seat next to an assistant secretary of education for the Bush administration and five...

Every man a derrida: a nation on the verge of self-deconstructing.
November 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] ARE THE GREAT American habits of directness, foursquare honesty, and a hearty handshake being undermined by fancy-pants French critical theory? You betcha! From the Obama-McCain struggle to find the proper...

Emo rescue.(Artifact)(Brief article)
November 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] EMO--A MUSICAL subculture defined by melodramatic, sometimes whiny lyrics delivered over distorted guitars--faces a global assault. In Russia the Duma is considering a law to ban emo dress in government buildings. In...