Reason Magazine
Does the DEA Know What Quota Means?
As
Mike Riggs
noted this morning, the
Adderall shortage is not likely to end anytime soon. A recent
Reuters story
sheds some more light on the situation:
A shortage of Adderall, which is used to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, shows little sign of easing as manufacturers struggle to get enough active ingredient to make the drug and demand climbs....
The Drug Enforcement Administration tightly regulates how much of the drug's active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) can be distributed to manufacturers each year.
The system is designed to prevent the creation of stockpiles that could be diverted for inappropriate use...
Under the quota system, drugmakers receive enough material to meet what the DEA estimates will meet the legitimate needs of American patients, but not enough to build inventory...
Adderall manufacturers say they are working flat out to meet demand, and say the DEA does not always approve enough material in time for them to supply customers.
"Our production facilities are currently running at maximum capacity for Adderall utilizing all available API," said Teva's Bradley. "The catalyst for the problem is the quota system, not the business."
The DEA sets its aggregate quota at the beginning of each year, taking into account past quota levels, inventory levels and company sales forecasts. But the DEA's assessment of what a company needs may not be the same as the company's own estimates. It is an ongoing process of negotiation.
"DEA can come back and say, 'we agree with your forecast and issue everything you want,' or they may come back and say 'we don't think you need that much,' and they give you 75 percent," said Matt Cabrey, a spokesman for Shire.
Early last year, Shire suffered shortages of Adderall XR. "It was directly related to the API quota," Cabrey said. In June 2010, Shire calculated that API was running too low. It applied to the DEA for more, but did not receive the additional supply until December. It typically takes Shire three months to then make the product and get it to customers....
The DEA, while insisting its quota for 2011 was sufficient, nonetheless revised it upwards in December.
"We increase the aggregate so that we will have enough to respond to specific companies if their requests for more amphetamine salts are justified and needed," said Carreno. "The companies can and do request more amphetamine salts, and we can and do respond to those requests throughout the year."
Simply increasing the overall national quota, however, does not address company complaints that it takes DEA months to approve individual requests for new product.
In the face of manufacturers' complaints, the DEA continues, absurdly, to deny that it has anything to do with the shortage:
The DEA says recent shortages were not caused by an insufficient quota but by marketing decisions taken by the companies.
"Any shortage of these products is therefore a result of decisions made by industry regarding manufacturing or distribution," Barbara Carreno, a DEA spokeswoman said, though she declined to specify those decisions....
Asked why it might take the agency months to approve a company's request, the DEA said it is required by law to balance providing enough API to meet the legitimate needs of patients while protecting the public from any diversion of potentially lethal substances.
"We do our best to accomplish both missions, and the quota system is part of the process for achieving this," Carreno said.
As with painkillers, the goal of preventing "diversion" fundamentally conflicts with the goal of making sure that everyone who can benefit from the drug has ready access to it. In both cases, the DEA insists there is no such conflict, but the agency's raison d'être is making useful drugs harder to obtain. How could it not be at fault for a shortage it engineered through the quota system it enforces?
[Thanks to Amy Alkon for the tip.]
Iran Saber-Rattling; Fed "Transparency"; Fiddle Sticks, and More: P.M. Links
The Federal Reserve
Bank of the United States will
begin publishing projections for the overnight federal funds
rate as part of its regular quarterly economic forecasts, beginning
after its next meeting on Jan. 24-25.
People still buy albums? Kelly Clarkson sees iTunes sales increase after Ron Paul endorsement. But where is Grammy winner Michelle Branch’s sales boost?
Arson roundup coast to coast. NYPD arrests suspect in string of arsons, claiming he was too cheap even to pay for his own Molotov-cocktail bottles. Previous post on Los Angeles arson suspect updated with a correction.
"High-speed rail must wait for a better day," says Los Angeles Daily News editorial board, noting that the project’s skyrocketing budget and plummeting job-creation figures "pushed us over the edge to oppose a transportation plan we originally supported." Perspective: I have not seen a print copy of the Daily News for several years. The L.A. Times editorial board continues to support the project, though the newsroom appears to have turned against it.
U.S. ignores Iran warning, vows to continue patrolling Persian Gulf. U.S.S. John C. Stennis recently passed through the Strait of Hormuz, as Fox says, "en route to help with the war effort in Afghanistan" – an odd phrasing given that the Strait is the only entrance to and only exit from the [Arabian?] Gulf. Obama spokesman notes that U.S. warships have been projecting power in the Gulf for decades.
Stradivariuses (Stradivarii?) unbowed: Multi-million-dollar violins made by Stradivari and Guarneri del Gesù "do not in fact sound better than high-quality modern instruments, according to a blindfolded play-off."
Four hours left to make your Iowa Caucus bets.
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How Could the Pentagon Possibly Defend Us With the Budget It Had Four Years Ago?
This week Defense Secretary Leon Panetta is
expected to unveil detailed plans for about $260 billion of the
$450 billion in savings that President Obama has asked him to find
in the Penatgon's budget over the course of the next decade.
Because those savings represent reductions in projected spending,
as opposed to actual cuts, the defense budget would continue
rising, but not as fast as it would under current law. Assuming all
the "cuts" are enacted, total military spending will be about 8
percent less than currently projected. If you add the $500 billion
in "automatic" defense cuts imposed by the legislation that
resolved last summer's debt-limit dispute, the total reduction from
projected spending is about 17 percent, bringing the Pentagon's
base budget all the way down to a level last seen in 2007, when the
country was not exactly helpless against its adversaries. Yet
Panetta
says that result would be "catastrophic," and every Republican
presidential candidate, with the notable exception of Ron
Paul, agrees, promising to prevent or reverse the cuts. Mitt
Romney, who
deems even the 8 percent reduction "irresponsible,"
says the additional cuts would "put our national security on
the chopping block." At the October 11 debate, Newt Gingrich
declared, "It is nonsense to say we're going to disarm the United
States unilaterally because we're too stupid to balance the budget
any other way." The New York Times puts
such hyperventilating in perspective:
There were steeper military cuts after the Cold War and the wars in Korea and Vietnam.
“Even at a trillion dollars, this is a shallower build-down than any of the last three we’ve done,” said Gordon Adams, who oversaw military budgets in the Clinton White House and is now a fellow at the Stimson Center, a nonprofit research group in Washington. "It would still be the world's most dominant military. We would be in an arms race with ourselves."
When guardians of the Pentagon's budget say returning to 2007 spending levels is unthinkable, what they really mean is that it requires rethinking what the military is for, and maybe even giving priority to operations that have something to do with national defense. For instance:
Senator Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma, advocates saving $69.5 billion over 10 years by reducing by one-third the number of American military personnel stationed in Europe and Asia.
Three-thirds would be better, but at least Coburn is tenatively trying to think outside the box of our current commitments. So is Panetta (emphasis added):
In a shift of doctrine driven by fiscal reality and a deal last summer that kept the United States from defaulting on its debts, Mr. Panetta is expected to outline plans for carefully shrinking the military — and in so doing make it clear that the Pentagon will not maintain the ability to fight two sustained ground wars at once.
Instead, he will say that the military will be large enough to fight and win one major conflict, while also being able to "spoil" a second adversary’s ambitions in another part of the world while conducting a number of other smaller operations, like providing disaster relief or enforcing a no-flight zone.
The new doctrine is just as abitrary as the old one, but at least it's a little cheaper. I would even venture to say that reducing the U.S. government's ability to engage in pointless, costly, and destructive military interventions might decrease the likelihood of such interventions. "If the Pentagon saves nearly $150 billion in the next 10 years by shrinking the Army to, say, 483,000 troops from 570,000," the Times worries, "would America be prepared for a grinding, lengthy ground war in Asia?" If not, that sounds like a feature, not a bug.
In a recent NRO piece explaining why "Paul’s Foreign Policy Is Truly Outside the Mainstream," Jamie Fly notes that the U.S. has engaged in 26 foreign military operations since 1898, or one every four years or so. "American administrations of both parties end up intervening in foreign conflicts and supporting our allies with overseas deployments because doing so is in our interest and because it embodies the values upon which our nation was founded," he writes. Fly thinks that's a good thing, but the standard seems infinitely elastic to me: As President Obama showed with his illegal war in Libya, there is no military operation that cannot be justified by broadly defined "interests," supplemented by broadly defined "values." Restraining military spending might just force future presidents to be a bit more cautious.
Rick Santorum's Nephew is Just More of a Ron Paul Fan
Oh Rick, how things have changed.
Where there was once no
hope for a Santorum surge, Real Clear Politics now averages the
former senator's poll numbers at
16.3 percent in Iowa (though they are of course much, much
smaller nation-wise, so it's
hard to feel too scared.)
What's frustrating from a libertarian point of view is that evangelical Christians are the reason for Santorum's jump in poll numbers. He particularly appeals to anti-abortion activists and homeschoolers. If you noticed that Paul is also a Republican who is anti-abortion, pro-homeschooling, and Christian, congratulations. If he could just promise to bomb Iran, like some former Pennsylvania senators he might get the votes or endorsements of the truly socially conservative as well.
Because Santorum is just not for a small government; he has said so himself. And we must assume his supporters enjoy some of the glossy, empty rhetoric of down-home American conservatism, but that's about it.
Writes David Boaz at the Cato @ Liberty blog:
[Santorum] declared himself against individualism, against libertarianism, against “this whole idea of personal autonomy, . . . this idea that people should be left alone.” And in this 2005 TV interview, you can hear these classic hits: “This is the mantra of the left: I have a right to do what I want to do” and “We have a whole culture that is focused on immediate gratification and the pursuit of happiness . . . and it is harming America.”
This lack of respect for the individual is apparently what turned off the sweater vest aficionado's 19-year-old nephew John Garver, who is a student at the University of Pittsburgh in Johnstown.
At the Daily Caller under the headline "The Trouble with my Uncle Rick Santorum", Garver writes that he's more of a Ron Paul fan than a fan of his Uncle Rick.
If you want another big-government politician who supports the status quo to run our country, you should vote for my uncle, Rick Santorum. America is based on a strong belief in individual liberty. My uncle’s interventionist policies, both domestic and foreign, stem from his irrational fear of freedom not working.
It is not the government’s job to dictate to individuals how they must live. The Constitution was designed to protect individual liberty. My Uncle Rick cannot fathom a society in which people cooperate and work with each other freely. When Republicans were spending so much money under President Bush, my uncle was right there along with them as a senator. The reason we have so much debt is not only because of Democrats, but also because of big-spending Republicans like my Uncle Rick.
It is because of this inability of status quo politicians to recognize the importance of our individual liberties that I have been drawn to Ron Paul. Unlike my uncle, he does not believe that the American people are incapable of forming decisions. He believes that an individual is more powerful than any group (a notion our founding fathers also believed in).
Another important reason I support Ron Paul is his position on foreign policy. He is the only candidate willing to bring our troops home, not only from the Middle East, but from around the world.
A hundred blogger jokes about awkward Santorum family Thanksgivings were born from that earnest editorial. You have to wonder where Garver got his sense. And you don't have to be head-over-heels about Paul to notice that Garver has got his uncle's number good. Ron Paul is, in many ways, just as square as Santorum (though older, so he has further excuse) but he's pretty keen on personal choice and, most daringly, not running off to war every five minutes. Maybe the kids today like that.
But don't worry, Santorum still has the support of humongous homeschooling brood and reality TV sensations the Duggars. He's the family's bronze medal since former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee could not be enticed into the race and "you're not going to find a perfect candidate unless it's Jesus Christ."
Rupert Murdoch, from his brand new account, has been excitedly tweeting his support for Santorum these last few days as well.
Reason on Santorum, if you must know more.
Has the GOP Abandoned Ronald Reagan’s Legacy on Immigration?
Writing at National Review, Daniel Griswold of the Cato Institute argues that today’s Republicans have betrayed Ronald Reagan when it comes to the issue of immigration:
In April 1980, when Ronald Reagan was competing in the presidential primaries, he rejected the building of a wall between the United States and Mexico: “Rather than talking about putting up a fence, why don’t we work out some recognition of our mutual problems? Make it possible for them to come here legally with a work permit — and then while they’re working and earning here, they pay taxes here. And when they want to go back, they can go back. And open the border both ways by understanding their problems.”
If a Republican presidential candidate said such a thing today, he or she would suffer withering criticism for being soft on illegal immigration. Instead, we hear Reagan’s successors talk about implementing national ID cards, imposing intrusive regulations on the labor market, raiding farms, factories, and restaurants, and harassing small-business owners trying to survive in this tough economy, all in the name of chasing away hard-working immigrants.
Read the whole thing here. Reason Reason on immigration here.
The Obama Administration Puts Its Historic Commitment to Fighting Medicare Fraud on Hold
The Obama administration and its allies like to brag about how the executive branch is cracking down on fraud and abuse in Medicare and Medicaid, which many believe costs the federal government in the range of $60 billion each year. (Reliable fraud totals are hard to come by, but most experts agree that it’s a very expensive problem, and official estimates indicate that the program made at least $48 billion in “improper payments” last year, including fraud.) StopMedicareFraud.gov, a project of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS), touts President Obama’s “historic support for anti-fraud efforts” under a headline noting that fraud-fighting efforts are a “top priority” for the administration. John McDonough, a former Mitt Romney advisor who consulted with the administration on ObamaCare, points to a record number of prosecutions in fraud cases and argues that ObamaCare gives the government tools to “re-engineer the system” to help stop fraudsters, an argument that the Obama administration has used as well.
As I pointed out in
my October print-edition feature, “Medicare Thieves,” fraud in
government health programs has been a significant, well-known
problem for years. According to the Cato Institute’s health policy
director, Michael Cannon, the Government Accountability Office has
issued 159 reports on fraud since 1986. So why has it taken
until now to tackle the problem?
In part it's because the system is designed to work in such a way that makes fraud easy: Doctors, who are well-liked and carry significant political influence, don’t want a system that forces them to deal with much anti-fraud bureaucracy, especially given that Medicare’s payment rates are already low compared to private insurers. And Medicare patients tend to be wary of any reforms that might upset doctors and drive them from the system.
Which helps explain why Modern Healthcare is reporting that CMS has put two of its vaunted new fraud-fighting programs on indefinite hold after opposition from doctors and other health providers. A historic commitment to a policy priority apparently doesn’t stand up to a thumbs down from the health providers who make big parts of their living off the program.
For much more on Medicare fraud, read "Medicare Thieves."
TSA Workers Want to Arrest You
You know what sucks? Not being able to arrest
people who piss you off when you're on the job. Who wouldn't want
to have the power to slap cuffs on the grumpy people they deal with
at work? But no. When I want someone arrested, I have to call the
cops and wait around until they show up to do the arresting for me.
Lame.
The employees of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) feel the same way. In an article for In These Times, writer Mike Elk (who was fired from the Huffington Post last year for letting union organizers borrow his press credential in order to disrupt a conference of mortgage bankers) describes the work of the nation's 44,000 TSA screeners as one of "the most dangerous jobs in America," citing the 30 (30!) guns a week they pluck from the nation's baggage.
Worse, sometimes people get shouty or even—very occasionally—cross the line into assault when they TSA workers are just doing their jobs. When that happens, "the passengers were allowed to board flights because TSA screeners are unable to arrest passengers who assault them." All because of the finicky detail that "TSA cannot legally arrest or detain power under powers granted to it by the federal government," and must instead "call local police situated in the airport." So inconvenient.
Elk's complaint is situated in the middle of a larger argument about the need for collective bargaining to improve the "often brutal working conditions" of TSA employees—which seem to consist of some male-female pay disparities, low pay overall, and low morale—but it's not clear that arresting unruly passengers who are not otherwise a threat to national security is the sort of thing that would be on the table, should robust collective bargaining rights be granted.
Anyway, it's the media's fault. If "those conditions had received as much media attention as the search procedures they are charged with implementing, it's possible America's newly unionized airport screeners might have had a first contract by now. Instead, negotiations with the federal government continue."
Speaking of which: Check out our January issue about those search procedures the TSA employees are charged with implementing!
Tim Cavanaugh Talks Third Parties with Jerry Doyle 1:30 P.M. Pacific (4:30 Eastern)
Reason.com
managing editor Tim
Cavanaugh will appear on the Jerry Doyle radio
show at 1:30 PM Pacific Time today (4:30 PM Eastern).
Topic: Is the Third Party moment upon us? Gary Johnson is running Libertarian. Massachusetts voters will have a chance to say "Avast" to the Massachusetts Pirate Party. The Donald has been drafted in Texas by the controversially named Make America Great Again Party. And Alan Piecewicz of Port St. Lucie in the Sunshine State says, "The Republican nominee will need every one of your votes to defeat Obama and return this country to sanity. I don't know about you, but I want America to be the country we used to know (strong and respected)."
Big-L Libertarians, Greens, Florida Whigs, Grid Epsilon Irregulars, Copperheads, Communists, Anti-Masonites, Nullifiers, America Firsters, Proletarians, Free Soilers and others are urged to listen in.
Time: 1:30 PM Pacific Time today (4:30 PM Eastern).
Place: Jerry Doyle's show is on 230 radio stations around the country. To find a local station, click here.
To listen live, click here.
For archives, click here.
A. Barton Hinkle on Reversing the Regulatory Pendulum
We need some regulation. Even the most bombastic
conservatives recognize this. So everyone also should recognize
that when President Obama says the GOP favors “dirtier air [and]
dirtier water,” he is committing the fallacy of the false
alternative. The political dispute is not whether to regulate, but
how much, writes A. Barton Hinkle. Everyone also can agree
that if an environmental rule can prevent 1 million birth defects
at a cost of only one dollar, then the regulation merits
adoption—and if a regulation would prevent only one birth defect at
a cost of $100 trillion, then it does not. In the real world
regulations fall within narrower parameters.
Josef Škvorecký, RIP
The world has lost
another important Czech freedom-fighter: Josef
Škvorecký, novelist and essayist, '68er emigre and jazz-lover,
and co-founder of the crucial Toronto-based dissident publishing
house 68
Publishers, has
died of cancer at age 87.
As a novelist Škvorecký is probably most famous for The Engineer of Human Souls; as a nonfiction enthusiast I know him best through his 1988 collection Talkin' Moscow Blues: Essays About Literature, Politics, Movies & Jazz, which really drills home the oftentime minute similarities between applied fascism and communism. It was 68 Publishers, founded in 1971, that proved to be a lifeline to both Czechoslovak literature and dissidence, publishing samizdat works from the likes of Havel and Milan Kundera and Bohumil Hrabal that would often be re-smuggled back into the country.
Some people left Czechoslovakia after the 1968 Soviet invasion (just as many escaped Hungary after 1956), and–quite understandably–turned their backs on the mangled countries they left behind. Škvorecký was not one of them. He was committed to helping his native land, helping his native language, and perpetuating the free flow of ideas under arduous circumstances. He will be missed.
Link via the Twitter feed of the Czech Center in New York.
ObamaCare's Dangerous Device Tax
Congressional Democrats got the
Congressional Budget Office to
score ObamaCare's trillion dollars in new spending as a net
deficit reducer by trimming approximately $500 billion in planned
spending out of Medicare and by raising the rest in new tax
revenue.
But inevitably there are costs to extracting that sort of revenue from the economy. As Ramesh Ponnuru points out in his Bloomberg column, the medical device industry, which faces a major new tax under the law, is already blaming the law for layoffs and decisions to move its operations overseas:
In November, citing the new tax, Stryker Corp. (SYK), whose products include artificial hips and knees, announced that it would let go about 1,000 of its workers. Earlier last year, Covidien Plc (COV), maker of surgical instruments, said it would lay off 200 workers in the U.S. and move production to Costa Rica and Mexico. It, too, cited the tax.
Other companies in the field have announced similar measures -- or plans to expand production overseas but not in the U.S. -- without mentioning the tax. The sluggish economy is clearly part of the explanation, but the medical-devices industry had been a relative bright spot within U.S. manufacturing, losing only 1.1 percent of its employees during 2007-2008 while manufacturing as a whole lost 4.8 percent. A study done for AdvaMed, a trade association for the industry, claims the tax could ultimately cost more than 45,000 jobs.
Medical-device companies employ more than 400,000 Americans. Their wages are higher than the national average. The U.S. is a net exporter of medical devices.
The tax will change these numbers for the worse. It will be levied at 2.3 percent of sales; on average, profits make up less than 4 percent of sales in the industry. The AdvaMed study concludes, “The new 2.3 percent excise tax will roughly double their total tax bill and raise the average effective corporate income tax rate to one of the highest effective tax rates faced by any industry in the world.”
Why go after the device industry? The plan was for a big chunk of the law's new revenue to come from various fees and taxes and the health care industry itself on the theory that expanding health insurance coverage to 30-some million people would provide new business to health providers. There's a certain circularity to this argument: Essentially, the idea was to tax health providers in order to pay for millions of new customers for those same health providers. And now it seems that instead of generating extra business for the device industry, ObamaCare may end up slowing it down.
Somehow, though, I doubt that outcome was on the minds of any of the Congress critters who voted to fund ObamaCare using provisions like this. Indeed, the grab-bag of pay fors they relied on to nab a favorable CBO score has proved exceedingly troublesome; the 1099 tax reporting requirement for small businesses, which was designed to raise $17 billion in new revenue, had to be ditched after it became clear that compliance would be a giant pain in the neck.
Not Only Did the Climate of Hate Influence Jared Loughner, Denying That Truism Is "Actively dangerous"
So says Chapman University Associate English
Professor Tom Zoellner, author of a new book called
A Safeway in Arizona: What the Gabrielle Giffords Shooting
Tells Us About the Grand Canyon State and Life in America.
In an excerpt
reprinted column published by Zócalo Public Square under the
misleading headling "Who
Shot Gabrielle Giffords?" (I say "misleading" because we learn
exactly nothing about the not-irrelevant man who pulled the
trigger), Zollner argues that after all, it was you and me...but
mostly you:
The months leading up to the attempted assassination of U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords were unusually paranoid ones. I saw the tension up close, because Tucson is my hometown, and I worked on my friend Gabrielle's campaign as a speechwriter, watching as her face was all over television and outdoor ads portraying her as the embodiment of a government that was wrecking the local economy. There was a feeling in Tucson that I did not recognize.
Much has been made of the website put up by Sarah Palin's political action committee (with target markets over the districts of vulnerable Democrats, including Gabrielle's) and the newspaper ad for her opponent calling on his supporters to help him shoot an M-16 at a fundraiser. I think these gestures are unimportant in themselves—in dubious taste but certainly not the motivating reason why the paranoid schizophrenic Jared Loughner brought a gun to the Safeway with the intention of assassinating Gabrielle.
What they were, though, were symptoms of the larger causes of Tucson's unease: a fragile economy, a fear of illegal immigrants, a toxic political culture that favors passion over reason, and the disconnected neighborhoods of newcomers where loneliness festers and lack of concern for one's neighbor becomes a habit. This is the environment in which the punitive and ridiculous law SB 1070 was passed, requiring local police to demand the immigration papers of anybody they stop who appears to fit a suspicious profile—such as a Latino who happened to dress down that day.
Loughner was suffering from a grave mental illness, but he was not living in a world made entirely of his own delusions. He could still hear and see what surrounded him, and those surroundings helped him formulate a plot against a specific target: Gabrielle Giffords, who, besides the president, may have been the most reviled public face in Tucson that year. The slime was directed at her personally, but it was only a convenient channel for the fear that the American dream was lost and that a crisis was at hand. [...]
Dismissing Loughner as a random "black swan," free of all antecedents or influences, is worse than facile or lazy. It is actively dangerous, for it allows us to ignore the contributing human context, which is something we can change.
One of many problems with this line of argument is that you can, at any given point, always find larger indices of "unease," toxic political debates, and "disconnected neighborhoods of newcomers." I am trying to imagine any period of American history where those descriptions would not apply. So do we pin partial blame for the L.A. arsonist on our maddening immigration process? Do we blame every crime at or near an Occupy encampment on overheated anti-capitalist rhetoric? No, we (and here I mean most of us, as opposed to commentators who have become debased by partisanship) do not.
Reason's April 2011 issue was largely devoted to this topic; for those interested, start with "The Loughner Panic," continue to my column "Against 'Incitement,'" and wash it all down with Jesse Walker's classic essay on "The Paranoid Center."
A.M. Links: Newt Goes Negative, Ron Paul Crosses His Fingers, FDA Predicts Adderall Shortage Through 2012
Newt Gingrich finally
calls Romney a name ("liar"). - Ron Paul from Iowa last night: "We, the people, are growing and I’m optimistic."
- The DEA will continue to interrupt the supply of ADHD drugs through 2012.
- The liberal paper of record wonders if America is "prepared for a grinding, lengthy ground war in Asia."
- Retail gift returns are up 8 percent this year.
- Crude climbs over Iran tension.
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New at Reason.tv: "Government Tracking Our Kids?! - Lisa Snell Discusses Student Privacy on CNN's OutFront"
Reason.tv in Iowa: Why Are People Digging Ron Paul?
"I'm keeping my fingers crossed," says presidential hopeful Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) the night before the Iowa caucus. "I think we may have some dramatic, good news for tomorrow night." Paul supporters at the Prime N Wine in Mason City, Iowa were in high spirits during his final stop on the Iowa Whistle-Stop Tour, which he embarked upon with his son, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.).
Reason.tv was on the scene to gauge the mood and to investigate what it is about the Texas congressman that inspires such a devoted following. Answers varied, but common themes were Ron Paul's consistency, his peaceful foreign policy, and his willingness to take serious steps to reduce the deficit.
Reason Senior Editor Brian Doherty, whose biography of Paul will be published in May, was also there to document the event and provide political commentary. "The interesting thing about Ron Paul fans that I found is that whatever hooks them first," says Doherty, "once they're hooked in, they decide, almost universally, that they like everything about him." Perhaps because they value his logical consistency, most of Paul's supporters told us that they would not be willing to support another Republican candidate should he fail to get the nomination.
While many pundits still consider a Paul nomination a long shot, Paul and his supporters feel optimistic about his chances in Iowa. "I definitely expect Ron Paul to come in over 20 [percent]," says Doherty. "Absolutely he'll finish a strong second, and a win is definitely still a possibility."
About 2.30 minutes. Produced by Sharif Matar and Zach Weissmueller.
Go to Reason.tv for downloadable versions, and subscribe to Reason.tv's YouTube Channel to receive immediate updates when new material goes live.
The Ron Paul Challenge for Progressives
As conservative voters in Iowa get
set to
deliver their verdict on whether the GOP should have at its
head someone with a long and clear philosophy about reducing the
size of government, some liberal commenters around the country are
grappling with a similar conundrum: What to say about a
presidential candidate who wants to end foreign and domestic wars
and protect civil liberties against the imperial presidency?
While there is plenty of material in the don't be fooled, he's really a moral monster category, here's a roundup of progressives defending the Texas congressmen from their ideological fellow travelers.
Glenn Greenwald, Salon:
Whatever else one wants to say, it is indisputably true that Ron Paul is the only political figure with any sort of a national platform — certainly the only major presidential candidate in either party — who advocates policy views on issues that liberals and progressives have long flamboyantly claimed are both compelling and crucial. The converse is equally true: the candidate supported by liberals and progressives and for whom most will vote — [...]
Ron Paul's candidacy is a mirror held up in front of the face of America's Democratic Party and its progressive wing, and the image that is reflected is an ugly one; more to the point, it's one they do not want to see because it so violently conflicts with their desired self-perception.
Matt Stoller, Naked Capitalism:
Modern liberalism is a mixture of two elements. One is a support of Federal power – what came out of the late 1930s, World War II, and the civil rights era where a social safety net and warfare were financed by Wall Street, the Federal Reserve and the RFC, and human rights were enforced by a Federal government, unions, and a cadre of corporate, journalistic and technocratic experts (and cheap oil made the whole system run.) America mobilized militarily for national priorities, be they war-like or social in nature. And two, it originates from the anti-war sentiment of the Vietnam era, with its distrust of centralized authority mobilizing national resources for what were perceived to be immoral priorities. When you throw in the recent financial crisis, the corruption of big finance, the increasing militarization of society, Iraq and Afghanistan, and the collapse of the moral authority of the technocrats, you have a big problem. Liberalism doesn't really exist much within the Democratic Party so much anymore, but it also has a profound challenge insofar as the rudiments of liberalism going back to the 1930s don't work.
This is why Ron Paul can critique the Federal Reserve and American empire, and why liberals have essentially no answer to his ideas, arguing instead over Paul having character defects. Ron Paul's stance should be seen as a challenge to better create a coherent structural critique of the American political order. It's quite obvious that there isn't one coming from the left, otherwise the figure challenging the war on drugs and American empire wouldn't be in the Republican primary as the libertarian candidate.
Robert Scheer, Truthdig:
It is official now. The Ron Paul campaign, despite surging in the Iowa polls, is not worthy of serious consideration, according to a New York Times editorial; "Ron Paul long ago disqualified himself for the presidency by peddling claptrap proposals like abolishing the Federal Reserve, returning to the gold standard, cutting a third of the federal budget and all foreign aid and opposing the Civil Rights Act of 1964."
That last item, along with the decade-old racist comments in the newsletters Paul published, is certainly worthy of criticism. But not as an alternative to seriously engaging the substance of Paul's current campaign—his devastating critique of crony capitalism and his equally trenchant challenge to imperial wars and the assault on our civil liberties that they engender.
Paul is being denigrated as a presidential contender even though on the vital issues of the economy, war and peace, and civil liberties, he has made the most sense of the Republican candidates. And by what standard of logic is it "claptrap" for Paul to attempt to hold the Fed accountable for its destructive policies? That's the giveaway reference to the raw nerve that his favorable prospects in the Iowa caucuses have exposed. Too much anti-Wall Street populism in the heartland can be a truly scary thing to the intellectual parasites residing in the belly of the beast that controls American capitalism.
Coleen Rowley and John Walsh, Des Moines Register:
There is today only one anti-war, anti-corruption, pro-Constitution, pro-civil liberties candidate for president in either party who stands squarely against expanding military empire and for democracy. That candidate is Ron Paul. Like prairie anti-interventionists Eugene McCarthy, George McGovern and Harold Hughes in an earlier era, Paul is a maverick in his own party. He believes in an adequate force to defend America but not 1 cent for wars of aggression.
Tactically it makes sense for anti-war activists to vote in the Republican caucuses/primaries for Paul. If he wins or does well in Iowa and New Hampshire, then the questions of war and peace will appear on the national scene. If Paul goes on to win his party’s nomination, these questions will finally make their appearance in the general election.
And if Paul wins the presidency, hundreds of wasteful overseas military bases will be dismantled. Our costly, counterproductive military empire could hopefully be reigned in before the blowback worsens.
Reason on Ron Paul here.
Read Our Complete January 2012 Issue!
Our entire January 2012 issue is now
available online. Don’t miss Matt Welch on the lies used to
manufacture the bipartisan consensus, Judge Andrew Napolitano on
the government’s unconstitutional restrictions on our freedom to
travel, Peter Suderman on why health care price controls always
fail, and Tim Cavanaugh on the Solyndra story, plus our Complete
Citings and Briefly Noted sections, the Artifact, and much
more.
Ron Paul on the Eve of the Iowa Caucus
As I sit--actually in Iowa! On the ground!!--watching Sean Hannity on Fox ask every other candidate and pundit about Ron Paul's newsletters, here (in Iowa!) on the evening before the day Dr. Paul either does or doesn't make history for his libertarian ideas by winning the Iowa caucus, let's talk about Ron Paul's whistle-stop tour across the state with his son, Senator Rand Paul.
I don't think they literally rode a train--I saw no tracks near the Prime and Wine restaurant in Mason City, in whose back meeting room I caught event five-of-five of the political Pauls' busy pre-caucus day.
But they were certainly barnstorming, pounding the pavement, burning rubber, and various other metaphorical displays implying lots of strenuous effort involving travel, to rally the troops one last time to make sure they show up at their precinct to caucus! caucus!! caucus!!! for Ron Paul and liberty, starting Tuesday night at 7 p.m. Iowa time.
Driving in to the event from Des Moines, I heard on leading Iowa talk station WHO-AM a Paul campaign ad specifically hitting Romney for being a TARP and ObamaCare loving liberal. (I also heard a Rick Perry ad attacking Rick Santorum for being a big spender and a loser. Rick Perry, former lead singer of Journey, is apparently still running for president.)
In the back room of the Prime and Wine, all 50 or so chairs were full a half hour before start time. The Paul crowd eventually spilled over into the other section of the meeting room as a sliding wall was slid away to make room for them. The crowd ranged from infant to aged, and was not particularly youth-oriented, though probably at least 15 percent were under 30.
Rand Paul did the usual Rand Paul thing, leading with an anti-Washington joke involving the girl who asks God for $100 (I don't want to ruin the punchline if you don't know it) and delivering more of an emphasis on "welfare cheat" style wasting of government giveaway resources than dad ever does. Rand reminds us that the government is borrowing $2 million a minute, and talks up his dad's resolute refusal to take congressional perks or junkets, his refusal to vote for an unbalanced budget, and his big support among donating members of the military.
Ron Paul did a quick and condensed version of his usual campaign stump speech, uncomposed and unrehearsed (except in the sense he gives a version of it over and over again). Paul jumps quickly from point to point, hitting on the federal abuse of the interstate commerce clause to interfere with trade between the states rather than help keep it free and unrestricted, how we have 100 years of bad thinking about freedom and the role of government to reverse, how we foolishly divide personal and economic liberty, and how his foreign policy of peace and free trade has a sterling GOP pedigree (mentioning Eisenhower's military-industrial complex speech).
He tells us how our responsibility is to care for our people at home, not manage or save the world. He makes one of his rare references to his not-quite-open-borders, not-quite-border-wall attitude about immigration by mentioning we ignore our border while we are busily defending borders in the Middle East and Asia. He only gets ornery when mentioning the NDAA's codification of the president's ability to lock us up for any old reason he pleases. And I wondered: who needs conspiracy theories when this kind of law is passed in full public view?
My take on the expectation game as it's being played today by the campaign: Rand Paul is boldly declaring victory earlier today, though not in Mason City. Ron sounded quite optimistic in Mason City tonight though not swearing a victory--merely saying "I think we may have dramatic good news tomorrow night." A source close to the Iowa campaign tells me he's sure they won't win, though granting most of the grassroots volunteers still think he will, but who knows how the expectations are being spun and why. Paul's political director Jesse Benton in the MSNBC clip below is confident but not bragging and insists Paul could beat Obama:
Both before and after the presentation--Ron rushes right out afterward, none of the usual questions or meet-and-greet--I meet and talk to an almost perfect range of stereotypical Ron Paul fans: the teen who spends most of his time following Ron around the country and photographing him, just because he thinks Ron's cool and hanging out with Ron's fans across the land is fun; the local volunteer precinct chair for Paul, who also holds office with the local GOP, who makes sure he emphasizes the grassroots volunteers don't necessarily just do what the official campaign tries to tell them to do; the mom from Minneapolis who drove down with her daughter because she thinks only Ron Paul can save America's future (and who likes to take photos of his crowds because she insists the media constantly underestimates them; my estimate for this Mason City event was 120 or so); the proud dad of a nuclear engineer on a Navy Sub, who got a photo of the son and his submarine signed by Ron and Rand--both dad (a farmer) and son love Ron Paul; the Alex Jones fan who carries around a silver certificate to remember the time money was real; the over-50 builder of vehicles that run on vegetable oil in a rasta hat who is also a Republican Party precinct worker and manager because he loves Ron Paul; and a random handful of other earnest Iowans, almost all of whom were volunteering a lot of their time and effort for their man, serving as precinct reprentatives for Ron Paul at the caucus tomorrow, making sure someone gave a good pro-Ron speech at the caucus, and that Ron signs and stickers and swag were available for the folk.
A handful of the people I spoke to had done this same caucusing work for Ron in 2008, but swear that the overall vibe of Ron love is way, way higher now--and the polls certainly bear that out, where he's doing more than twice as well as he did in 2008. Volunteers hand out a volunteer-written suggested set of talking points for selling Ron to the caucus-goers Tuesday, including his consistency, desire to end the wars, prescience on the dangers of the housing bubble and the Federal Reserve, and plan to cut $1 trillion in year one.
One bit of bad news I heard from a frequent Iowa Ron Paul phone banker, casting shadows on the strategy of getting independents and Democrats to show up tomorrow and switch registration to Republican in order to caucus for Ron Paul, which they legally can do: he says even many Democrats who love Ron and would vote for him in a general election still refuse to have anything to do with the GOP caucus process when they are called, and say they will not do so tomorrow. Of course, he merely talked to the people he talked to, but he said that lack of willingness to switch parties for Ron this week was something he heard a lot.
Remember: the caucus is non-binding and has no necessary connection with how Iowa's delegates vote at the Republican National Convention in Tampa this summer. Here's how the Iowa caucus process works, briefly noted. And remember: lots of RP fans are quite suspicious that the vote will be gamed and faked tomorrow (although the official campaign poo-poohs such fears.)
Driving back from Mason City to Des Moines, I heard leading evangelical Iowan radio star Steve Deace try to finesse his endorsement of Newt Gingrich, by saying that while both Ron Paul and Newt had major and good Biblical beliefs--Paul on the welfare state and Newt on the rule of law--he cannot ultimately countenance Ron Paul because Paul has a Pelagian foreign policy.
Deace cannot, he says, stand a commander in chief who can actually understand why Iran might want a nuclear weapon ("I don't want my president sympathizing with the Mullahs," more or less), and that all good Christians understand that the reason you have a military is so they can kill other people before they kill you, thus answering the question: Who Would Jesus Bomb? Anyone he suspects might bomb him!
Real Clear Politics poll aggregation 10-day average has Romney up 1.3, but a Public Policy Polling of likely caucus voters from the past two days has Paul ahead by a point, though falling in overall percentage committed and finally falling below 50 percent in favorability, but still leading in strong commitment from his potential voters. (Biggest shock of that poll: Buddy Roemer at 2 percent!) Neither I, nor apparently the people of Iowa reached by phone by pollsters, are making any sure and firm predictions.
Wrap-up Ron-o-rama:
*details on his campaigns' plans to work the caucus system to their advantage in other states moving forward;
*a summation of Paul defending himself from inaccurate media charges over the past weekend;
*Yahoo! reporting on Paul's earlier Iowa appearances on Monday;
*and a profile of that most famous and numerous of Iowa voter, the still-undecided one....
...and as I've continued to watch Fox for the past hour, every single interview devolves into a dumb attack on Ron Paul, whether it be with his opponents, Donald Trump, Dick Morris, Tucker Carlson, or RNC chair Reince Priebus. Fox has spoken tonight!
Tuesday, Iowa gets to do the same.
Buy my forthcoming book on Ron Paul, and get it in about four and a half months.
Obama Ranks Third in ACLU Grades for Presidential Candidates
The ACLU grades
the presidential candidates in seven categories: "humane
immigration policy," "closing Guantanamo Bay and indefinite
detention," "gays and lesbians serving openly in the military,"
"ending torture," "ending a surveillance state," "freedom to marry
for gay couples," and "reproductive choice." Gary Johnson finishes
first over all, followed by Ron Paul, Barack Obama, and Jon
Huntsman. Tied for last: Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, and Michele
Bachmann. A few overlooked issues that might have changed the
rankings a bit, pushing Obama down relative to the others:
religious freedom, freedom of speech, gun rights, assassination,
property rights, federalism, drug policy.
Clarification: While all those issues would have lowered Obama's overall score, adding drug policy or assassination would not have changed his ranking, since Paul and Johnson are the only Republican candidates who are better in those areas.
Will Scotch in a Can Get the Four Loko Treatment?
Here is a
product that seems designed to make the heads of FTC
bureaucrats and state
attorneys general explode: Scotch in a can. And I'm not talking
about Scotch
ale. The Huffington Post's Ben Muessig
reports that a company called Scottish Spirits Imports
plans to sell its 80-proof "single grain scotch whisky" in 12-ounce
cans. That's the alcohol equivalent of 1.7 Four Lokos or eight
beers (assuming an alcohol content of 5 percent). Worse, the
containers are nonresealable, although "Scottish Spirits
hopes to begin shipping the cans with an attachment that allows
them to be resealed." (Under pressure from the FTC, Phusion
Projects, which makes Four Loko, agreed
to sell it only in resealable containers as of April.) Scottish
Spirits says the eight shots per can are meant to be sipped and
shared, not guzzled by one person. "They'll crack it open and pour
it with Coke or some kind of mixer," says Ken Rubenfeld, the
company's vice president of operations, "and have fun with it with
their friends." If the container did not tip you off, that scenario
probably tells you all you need to know about the quality of this
product.
It still might be classy enough to avoid trouble with federal regulators, whose main complaint about Four Loko was not its caffeine (since removed but contained in many other alcoholic beverages that remain on the market), its Chardonnay-level alcoholic strength, or the size of its cans (23.5 ounces) but rather its garish marketing aimed at "young adults" looking to get drunk cheaply, quickly, and easily. Scottish Spirits 3-Year-Old Single Grain Scotch Whisky, which will sell for about $5 a can (pricier, per ounce of pure ethanol, than Four Loko), seems intended for an older, if not wiser, demographic than the fruity, bubbly, neon-colored malt beverage. "A lot of people like to have beverages by their pool, on their boat, in a campground, at sporting events or tailgate parties," Rubenfeld explains. "It's easier to bring a six-pack of a beverage versus bringing a bottle of scotch."
Just to be clear: Although I do not care for Four Loko and probably will not start carrying my Scotch around in six-packs, such choices should be left to consumers, not paternalistic prosecutors or busybody bureaucrats. I suspect Scottish Spirits will have more luck in that respect than Phusion Projects did, for reasons that have more to do with taste than public safety.
[Thanks to Max Minkoff for the tip.]
Washington Post Fears Ron Paul; Hollywood Arson Suspect Arrested, and More: P.M. Links
"I fear that Ron Paul may win
Iowa," writes Washington
Post’s Marc A. Thiessen, who lets fear to get the best of his
vocabulary with this sentence: "Paul supporters are nothing short
of rapid."
Occupy 101: Columbia University will give students credit for an Occupy Wall Street class taught by an OWS organizer and including protest participation as course work.
LAPD arrests [possible Chechen named "Harry Burkhart"] in string of Los Angeles arson attacks. Cops say person of interest detained at Fairfax and Sunset matches security camera image (white hair in ponytail) and was driving a Canadian-licensed minivan containing "materials...that could have been used to set fires." The subject may be in a dispute with Federal migra over a relative’s immigration status.
[I initially reported that the suspect was a native of Germany. He was traveling on Chechen travel papers and had spent time in Germany. As you can see at the 42-second mark here, Harry Bukrhart's eyes literally glow with the fires of hell, and the 26-year-old does seem to match with the description taken from the Hollywood and Highland parking deck of a man at the end of youth with a receding hairline and ponytail. Burkhart's arrest by a $1-a-year reserve sheriff's deputy came in response to a tip by an "official" who had observed Burkhart criticizing the United States in immigration court.]
Arab League observers are doing a mediocre job of holding back Syria’s government, dissidents say.
Rose Bowl live blog.
Raiders of the Lost Ark cross-referenced with 30 other adventure movies made between 1919 and 1973.
Voting district high jinx: In honor of Steven Greenhut’s dismal new report on California redistricting, a Reason.tv video from more hopeful days:
Ira Stoll on the Curse of Obama's Jobs Council
Employees who
hope to keep their jobs and investors who hope their shares will
rise may want to hope their executives avoid President Obama’s
Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. When the council’s
members were announced February 23, among the concerns raised was
that the members would use their status to the advantage of their
companies, writes Ira Stoll. In fact, what’s happened since then is
that the 13 publicly traded companies whose executives were
appointed to the council, taken together, have declined in value by
about 7% through year-end, worse than the decline of about 4% in
the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index over the same period.
Cops Total BMW While Looking for Nonexistent Marijuana
When police in Pompton Lakes, New Jersey, pulled
Darren Richardson over, it was supposedly because he had narrowly
avoided a collision at an intersection. After they detected what
they later described as a "strong odor of raw marijuana," they
impounded Richardson's black BMW 325i and tore it apart over the
course of three weeks with the help of drug-sniffing dogs, causing
more than $12,000 in damages—so much that Richardson's insurer
declared the car totaled. They found nothing. NJ.com
reports that the September 23 incident "has led to an internal
affairs investigation by the Pompton Lakes Police Department,
opened the door for litigation that could cost local taxpayers and
left experts wondering whether the department wasted resources in
pursuit of what many see as a minor crime."
In addition to trashing his car, police charged Richardson with evidence tampering and resisting arrest (because he argued with them). They charged his passenger with making "terroristic threats." After it turned out there was no evidence to tamper with, the charges were reduced to "petty disorderly persons offenses." Police claimed two different dogs "signaled" the presence of drugs (in two different locations, the trunk and the dashboard) and speculated that the car may have been used to transport marijuana at some point in the past.
More on pot-sniffing cops here and here. More on drug-sniffing dogs here.
[Thanks to Richard Cowan for the tip.]
Ron Paul Does Not Call Himself an Isolationist, but 'Many Others' (Including New York Times Reporters) Do
The
lead story in today's New York Times refers to
Ron Paul's "non-interventionist foreign policy views," in contrast
with the paper's usual description of his position as
"isolationist," which is both pejorative and
inaccurate. Isolationism suggests not merely a
bias against the use of military force but a desire to avoid any
engagement with the rest of the world, including trade, diplomacy,
immigration, and cultural exchange. Paul has never been an
isolationist in that sense.
An archive search shows this confusion is a longstanding problem at the Times. In a January 1984 story about the U.S. Senate race in Texas, for instance, reporter Wayne King said Paul's "foreign policy views are regarded [by whom?] as noninterventionist to isolationist," which suggests isolationism is an extreme version of noninterventionism, perhaps akin to pacifism. That does not describe Paul either, since he supports the use of military force when it is necessary for national defense (following thr 9/11 attacks, for example). Less than a week later, King more accurately called Paul "a noninterventionist in foreign policy." The Times continued to flip back and forth between the terms in reference to Paul during the next two decades:
In a September 1987 story about the Libertarian Party's presidential nomination, Wallace Turner reported that Paul was "basically isolationist on foreign affairs."
In an October 1988 story about Paul's L.P. campaign for president, Andrew Rosenthal reported that "Dr. Paul refuses to call himself an isolationist, but that is how many others see him."
In a January 2008 review of Pat Buchanan's book Day of Reckoning (titled "The Isolationist"), Chris Suellentrop called Paul "a foreign policy noninterventionist."
In a June 6, 2011 story, James Dao quoted John Isaacs, executive director of the Council for a Livable World, who called Paul and Rep. Walter Jones (R-N.C.) "military noninterventionists."
In an October 7, 2011, blog post, Richard Stevenson said Paul's "libertarian views line up with the neo-isolationist strain within the Tea Party."
In an October 8 story, Helen Cooper and Ashley Parker said Paul, as compared to Jon Huntsman, represents "a more isolationist strain of thinking."
In an October 23 "news analysis," Sam Tanenhaus (editor of The New York Times Book Review) used isolationist and noninterventionist interchangeably, saying the skepticism reflected in Paul's warnings about an American empire and Republican resistance to the attack on Libya "recalls the isolationism of a bygone age."
In a November 5 blog post, Richard Oppel reported that Paul "espoused a noninterventionist foreign policy."
In a November 19 story, Trip Gabriel reported that Paul's ads "conveniently avoid his isolationist foreign policy."
A November 22 blog post about the Republican presidential debate in Washington (which is on Nexis but does not seem to be available on the New York Times site anymore) noted that "Mr. Paul calls his foreign policy position non-interventionist" but added, "To outsiders, it can sound isolationist."
In a December 15 story, Jeremy Peters referred to Paul's "noninterventionist foreign policy."
Two days later, Peters and Michael Barbaro reported that "Ron Paul's isolationist worldview evolved into a 'strong national defense' in the post-debate "spin room."
In a December 24 story, Katherine Seelye reported that Newt Gingrich "sharply criticized Mr. Paul for what he said were his isolationist views on foreign policy."
In a December 25 story, Jim Rutenberg and Serge Kovaleski said Paul's "noninterventionist" views help explain his appeal among disreputable right-wingers.
In a December 28 story, Jeff Zeleny and Michael Shear reported that Rick Santorum "urged Republicans to carefully study Mr. Paul's isolationist foreign policy views."
A unbylined December 31 summary of "Where the Republican Candidates Stand on Key Issues" referred matter-of-factly to Paul's "isolationism" and said "Mr. Paul's status among the front-runners in Iowa has set off a debate that has stirred historic isolationist strains in the party."
Putting all these references together, people who write for the Times are intermittently aware that Paul does not call himself an isolationist and that the term has negative connotations (hence Gingrich criticized Paul "for what he said were his isolationist views on foreign policy"). They also occasionally note that "others" or "outsiders" (such as New York Times reporters?) consider Paul an isolationist. Usually, however, the Times treats isolationist as a synonym for noninterventionist—not just in reference to Paul but also in describing elements of the Tea Party and the conservative movement generally.
I have not noticed such promiscuous use of isolationist in the paper's coverage of people on the left who take a relatively narrow view of national defense and believe the U.S. government too quickly resorts to military force. In any case, such use of the term is imprecise at best and hostile at worst. A good indicator of whether isolationist can be treated as a neutral adjective: Does any politician describe himself that way?
Steven Greenhut on Rampant Corruption in California Redistricting
The political left exploited the redistricting
process in California to assure strong gains for the Democratic
Party, reports Steven Greenhut. His evidence includes an exclusive
interview with a redistricting commission member who alleged
partisan behavior by his supposedly non-partisan commission
colleagues. Who would have ever imagined that a commission formed
with the best of intentions—i.e., taking backroom political
deal-making out of the process by which political lines were
drawn—would be cynically manipulated to create a partisan
advantage?
Katherine Mangu-Ward on the Protest Art of Occupy Oakland
In the Artifact from our January 2012 issue,
Managing Editor Katherine Mangu-Ward looks at how the denizens of
the Occupy Oakland camp, a West Coast outpost of the Occupy Wall
Street protest movement, turned chain link into art.
Reason RUPE: Public Opinion Survey
- Americans Reluctant to Extend Unemployment Benefits to 99 Weeks, Open to 52 Weeks (12.21)
- Emily Ekins Discusses Results from the Q4 2011 Reason-Rupe Poll (12.21)
- 44 Percent Say They Will Definitely Not Vote For Obama in 2012, 29 Percent Say They Definitely Will (12.21)
- 45 Percent of Americans Say Abolish and Consolidate HUD, 46 Percent Say Keep It As Is (12.21)
- Newt Leads Mitt, But Not by Much (12.21)
Most Popular Stories
- New Anti-Piracy Legislation Would Break the Internet Without Stopping Piracy (11.8)
- Will Scotch in a Can Get the Four Loko Treatment? (1.2)
- The Moral Foundations of Occupy Wall Street (12.30)
- The Curse of President Obama’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness (1.2)
- The Ron Paul Challenge for Progressives (1.3)
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