Today the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit once again rebuked the Drug Enforcement Administration for its bizarre, lawless attempt to ban foods made from nonpsychoactive hemp seed. Noting that the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) specifically excludes hemp seeds from the definition of marijuana, the court said the DEA could not ban them by treating the trace amounts of terahydrocannabinol they contain the same as synthesized THC. "The DEA has no authority to regulate drugs that are not scheduled," Judge Betty Fletcher wrote, "and it has not followed procedures required to schedule a substance. The DEA's definition of 'THC' contravenes the unambiguously expressed intent of Congress in the CSA and cannot be upheld."

This was the second time the DEA tried to ban hemp foods. First it tried to get by with a mere "interpretive rule," pretending it was not really changing the law. When the 9th Circuit rejected that maneuver, the DEA restated the ban in the form of new regulations, which today's ruling overturned. Since the 9th Circuit put a hold on enforcement of the ban pending resolution of the case, the cereals, snacks, and salad dressings the DEA found so offensive were never taken off the market.

Over at National Review, Michael Novak is ready for some football, which he sez possesses "inherent beauty." But instead of seeing super-charged, steroid-driven modern-day gladiators dispalying "the love of brothers for one another," whaddya get? Anti-religious cheesecake at half time. As the off-season commences, he channels Allan Bloom and asks the tough questions:

Why...has the NFL been so dense as to allow its halftime show, year after year, to be a celebration of decadence and degradation?

If the moral morons the NFL hires to produce these shows set out to dramatize the last days of the Roman empire in all its legendary sickness, what would they do differently? Who are these seemingly drugged, indifferent, writhing pagan figures they now throw around the platform? These are not living human beings in action, these are sacks of flesh, writhing, grinding, pawing, acting out no higher appeal than bodily functions. They evoke no virtues of the human spirit. It is as if they wish to suffocate any spark of Jewish or Christian womanhood and manhood. It is as if they mean to corrupt, seduce, degrade. A more radically anti-Jewish and anti-Christian assault, embodying the sort of Wagnerian images of pagan disgust and decay that enraptured Hitlerian audiences, would be hard for them to produce.

Novak's final solution to halftime hell?

Why doesn't the NFL stage a ten-year sequence of halftime shows that tell the great story of the Founding of our nation? For this story embodies all the virtues required by championship football, and many others besides.

For a look at how manhandling women fits into championship 'ball, go here.

In his latest attempt to reanimate one of the most famous corpses in history, academic It Boy Slavoj Zizek gives two thumbs up to the 20th century's version of Vlad the Impaler, hero of "formal freedom" (i.e., the freedom to do as Lenin tells you).

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin died on January 21 1924, 80 years ago—does the embarrassed silence over his name mean that he died twice, that his legacy is also dead? His insensitivity toward personal freedoms is effectively foreign to our liberal-tolerant sensibility – who, today, would not experience a shudder apropos his dismissive remarks against the Menshevik and Socialist-Revolutionaries’ critique of the Bolshevik power in 1922?

“Indeed, the sermons which...the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries preach express their true nature: ‘The revolution has gone too far. What you are saying now we have been saying all the time, permit us to say it again.’ But we say in reply: ‘Permit us to put you before a firing squad for saying that. Either you refrain from expressing your views, or, if you insist on expressing your political views publicly in the present circumstances, when our position is far more difficult than it was when the white guards were directly attacking us, then you will have only yourselves to blame if we treat you as the worst and most pernicious white guard elements.’”

This dismissive attitude towards the “liberal” notion of freedom accounts for Lenin’s bad reputation among liberals. Their case largely rests upon their rejection of the standard Marxist-Leninist opposition of “formal” and “actual” freedom, but as even ;eftist liberals like Claude Lefort emphasize again and again, freedom is in its very notion “formal,” so that “actual freedom” equals the lack of freedom. Lenin is best remembered for his famous retort “Freedom - yes, but for whom? To do what?” For him, in the above-quoted case of the Mensheviks, their “freedom” to criticize the Bolshevik government effectively amounted to the “freedom” to undermine the workers’ and peasants’ government on behalf of the counterrevolution.

[Link via Arts & Letters Daily]

More fun with Lenin here.

The Transportation Security Administration has "requested that two pages of public, unclassified congressional testimony on airport security from a hearing last November be expunged from media archives," Congressional Quarterly reports. Some outlets are complying, while others -- including CQ -- are not.

I found the redacted version of McNeil's testimony online with little effort. To see the whole thing, terrorists and curiosity-seekers might have to buy a CQ subscription or pay for a Lexis-Nexis account; so armed, they can learn one part of the "training resolution" for "explosive trace detection" and they can read a description of just how some undercover agents managed to smuggle guns past screeners in Rochester. Or if they're cheap, they can just read CQ's free online article on the controversy, which spills the beans:

TSA undercover security agents easily smuggled small handguns past Rochester airport screeners by taping them to their thighs with Ace bandages and claiming they had just had surgery.

"The screener assumed the agent was being truthful and would not have thought of asking her to remove a surgical bandage," McNeil testified. "Moreover, the screener pointed out that she had never seen, or been trained to detect a small semi-automatic handgun by feeling it through layers of a bandage.

"The agent told us afterward that part of the reason this particular test was done was to show training weaknesses. We would welcome some guidance and training in this particular area," McNeil added.

Not to state the obvious or anything, but it would make a lot more sense to seek us outsiders' input on how to resolve the putative problem than to try to hide it from our prying eyes. Especially when the information is already there in the public record. But if there's one thing we've learned about the TSA, it's that it isn't particularly interested in what the public has to say -- except, of course, when it's interrogating us.

Montana is keeping a close eye on $66 million in bills it got from the Forest Service for fire-fighting services, in the wake of a General Accounting Office report which "notes that historically, the Forest Service hasn't been able to provide Congress or the public 'with a clear understanding of what the Forest Service's 30,000 employees accomplish with the approximately $5 billion the agency receives every year.'" Montana State Forester Bob Harrington

said the state won't pay the other firefighting bills until they've been gone over closely by both the state and the federal agency.

"That bill will not be paid until we have the ability to audit a clean summary from them and ensure the charges are appropriate," Harrington said.

Some dilemmas that arise when trying to ban offensive speech and expression, from Germany.

From the Nexis transcript of Miracle star Kurt Russell's interview with Bill O'Reilly last night:

RUSSELL: ...I've been told by people that there are people who wouldn't work with me because they were afraid of my politics, whatever that was.

O'REILLY: Really? What are your politics?

RUSSELL: Limited constitutional government. I believe in that. Freedom, freedom, freedom. And we're living in a very interesting time right now for Libertarians because this American experiment is having a difficult time in terms of freedom. Certainly, our privacy is...

O'REILLY: So you don't want intrusion by the federal government into your life?

RUSSELL: I think the -- I think that the basic idea of the Constitution in that regard is we wanted to be able to find out who was running for office. We should be able to talk about that freely. Our press should be able to talk about that freely. But I don't think they really meant in terms of the First Amendment that we have our privacy raked across the coals for entertainment value without being paid for it.

O'REILLY: So give me an example of something that really gets you steamed in that area.

RUSSELL: Not much gets me steamed. I think it's kind of fun. I mean I think that the -- you know, the rags that make money or some of the television shows that make money just off of paparazzi, people following you or what not -- I think it's unfair. I think people should get paid for that. I mean that's...

O'REILLY: Look at these books that smear you and the defamation books, and then they get sued, and they -- oh, it's just satire...

RUSSELL: Yes.

O'REILLY: ... and they were calling the guy...

RUSSELL: I don't think that's fair.

O'REILLY: ... every name in the book and they're ripping him to sleds, but we can do this.

Now, when you go to vote, all right, are you voting for a philosophy of some kind? You're going to have Kerry against Bush, all right? I'm sure there are things you like about both guys and things you don't like about both guys, right? What's the deciding factor for a Libertarian because you're not...

RUSSELL: I usually -- I usually vote for issues and people who I think are going to look at it the way I'd like it best to be seen. I just -- being a Libertarian, I do believe that limited government is good.

O'REILLY: Right. So you don't like the Patriot Act, for example? That's not...

RUSSELL: I think the Patriot Act is very necessary for right now.

O'REILLY: Do you?

RUSSELL: Yes, I think it's a fluctuating thing. I mean I believe in flexibility. I believe that's our government has the ability to do, be flexible. You try something.

O'REILLY: Right.

RUSSELL: If it becomes overwhelmingly oppressive, people will tell you. People like you will start talking about it and saying this is wrong, and the...

O'REILLY: You bet.

RUSSELL: ... and people will respond. And we go vote. We change.

New at Reason: Neil Steinberg goes on a politically incorrect eating binge.

New at Reason: A federally funded Shakespeare tour may not add much to the deficit, but does the country really need it? Jacob Sullum explains why a budget that doesn't cut the obviously dispensable won't be cutting much of anything else.

Brad Rodu, the oral pathologist who has documented how cigarette smokers can dramatically reduce their health risks by switching to smokeless tobacco, comments on a bill banning tobacco in California prisons. He argues that a more enlightened policy would have allowed oral snuff as an alternative to cigarettes, thereby eliminating smoke while minimizing the black market that is bound to develop.

Sharman Networks, Brilliant Digital Entertainment, and other Kazaa-related entities have been raided in Australia by reps of copyright holders bent on showing Kazaa violates Aussie law.

Significantly, several ISPs will be hauled into court on the grounds they allowed copyright infringement to take place and benefited from it.

A New Mexico legislator has introduced a bill that would tackle drunk driving by requiring an ignition interlock device in every new or used car that changes hands in the state. Before a you could start up the car, and periodically while you were driving, you'd have to prove you were not intoxicated by blowing into a tube. "Imagine that we technologically prevent someone from driving while drunk because the car just won't start," says the bill's sponsor, Rep. Ken Martinez (D-Grants). "Imagine how much money would we save."

A whole lot, I guess, assuming that it costs nothing to retrofit every car in the state. While we're at it, why not add a tube for urine so the car can do a battery of drug tests? And what about fatigue, a major contributor to traffic accidents? Perhaps every car should be equipped with a retractable rod that would periodically poke the driver to make sure he's alert.

Or maybe the car could just say to you, over and over, "Ken Martinez is writing legislation." That would keep me awake.

[Thanks to George Passantino for the link.]

Occasional Reason contributor Fred Turner has a thoughtful and interesting essay on Tech Central Station in which he argues that the real division in American politics is now libertarian vs. communitarian. A snippet:

More interesting than taking one side or the other would be exploring how the debate itself might throw up excellent new ideas, solutions to old problems, and creative opportunities for cultural and political leadership. Perhaps we should look for a candidate in future presidential primaries and elections to attempt to seize one side of the debate and to define his opponents as on the other side. Will either or both of the major parties begin to split? If one party collapses altogether, as is possible for the Democrats, will the other fission into two in order to fit our two-party paradigm? We live in interesting times.

Did UN weapons inspectors in Iraq know that Saddam Hussein no longer had weapons of mass destruction, and did they fail to notify the Security Council? In other words, could the inspectors have averted war in Iraq? David Ignatius, writing in today's Washington Post, thinks so, and is basing his assumption on an interview with an Iraqi nuclear scientist.

Citizens Against Government Waste has anointed Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) Porker of the Year for 2003, based on an online poll that asked respondents to choose among five finalists. Specter, you may recall, "was selected as the October Porker of the Month for including language in the fiscal 2003 Emergency Supplemental portion of the fiscal 2004 Legislative Branch Appropriations Act that provided $1.4 million for three pork-barrel projects in Pennsylvania."

I grew up in Northeastern Pennsylvania, home of such legendary pork-barrel spenders as Reps. Dan Flood (D) and Joseph McDade (R). I found that Specter at least had a sense of humor about funneling tax dollars to his constituents. When I was working for my hometown paper in the late '80s, he visited a postal processing center (I think) in Wilkes-Barre that was threatened with closure. After walking around the facility for a few minutes, he announced that it was indispensable and that he would do everything in his power to keep it open. I suggested that it was hard to believe he could arrive at that conclusion based on a five-minute tour. He corrected me: It was more like 10 minutes.

Let's build a simple model. Assume I'm a New Hampshire Democratic primary voter. I want to vote for the candidate I like best—let's say Dean—but have a stronger preference for picking someone who's electable, and I'd also like for whomever's going to win to come out of the primarys strong. That is, if (say) Kerry's going to win anyway, I'd rather he be the clear favorite so he can start focusing on Bush rather than sniping at other candidates. The Iowa results, then, have the clear potential to set off a social cascade effect. And I think it's pretty straightforward to show that the level of calculation people go through in deciding how to vote will determine the strength of that cascade.

Call my intrinsic preference—the candidate I like best on policy and personality—my first order calculation. The second order calculation weighs in the probabilities of victory gleaned from Iowa, which will factor into my reasoning, but may not be dispositive. But then there's my third order calculation: I assume other people in NH are also doing a second order calculation, which may further increase my sense that Kerry's likely to win. The effect is further magnified as I do more metacalculations. Obviously, that doesn't mean we all ultimately end up converging on Kerry—some people want to make a statement, and they'll vote for Kucinich. But there's definitely a feedback effect of some magnitude.

Here's the more controversial part: Because most people don't actually do many metas in their own calculations, the speed of the news cycle, which feeds back the previous iteration of the calculus for us, should correlate with the magnitude of the cascade effect. That is, each poll that's conducted reflects people's prior electability estimates and then feeds back into them. I mention this because Adam Clymer's got a Times op-ed today suggesting that a bigger gap between Iowa and New Hampshire might have muted this follow-the-leader effect. But if the feedback effect I'm imagining is sufficiently strong, just the opposite might be the case.

Tonight on CNN's Paula Zahn Now you can watch Nick Gillespie expose his views on the FCC's reaction to the Super Bowl halftime show. The program airs at 8 pm eastern and his segment will appear around 8:30, hopefully without enhanced tape delay.

Here's something different: a story in The Village Voice that says that Roger Stone, "the longtime Republican dirty-tricks operative," is "financing, staffing, and orchestrating the presidential campaign of Reverend Al Sharpton."

Quickly, name three candidates campaigning hard to reach a position of power this year, one of whom is playing the Washington scene, but also pointedly distancing himself from it. No, we're not talking in the latter case about Howard "The Hindenburg" Dean, but about Iraqi Governing Council member and Pentagon favorite Ahmad Chalabi.

The Los Angeles Times has an interesting story on how Chalabi and two other Iraqi officials, Iyad Allawi and Adnan Pachachi, are lobbying in Washington to advance their pawns back home in Baghdad. Said one U.S. official, with some irritation: "They're all campaigning to be president."

Indeed, and wasn't that one reason why the U.S. went into Iraq, so that more than one person could campaign for president--preferably in Washington?

New at Reason: Ron Bailey takes to the soapbox against "Free Speech Zones."

Britney Spears checks into a London hotel and instead of doing something wholesome like watching the Super Bowl half-time show, she calls in some girls and watches porn. Says an MSNBC report, citing the British News of the World tabloid which broke the story (and which may get sued in the process): "Britney and her girlfriends were giggling throughout the flicks."

Boy, read that and now define letdown.

Not one, not two, not three, but four films about Che Guevara will soon hit theaters, all from major studios. And that barely scratches the surface of Che chic. Writing in the Miami New Times, Brett Sokol takes stock of the guerrilla's media moment:

While it's certainly true that one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter, with Che Guevara that maxim has become downright surreal. Today the revolutionary icon's writings are simultaneously admired by teenage Howard Dean volunteers in Burlington and Taliban leaders in the Afghan countryside; they are parsed for strategies by narco-guerrillas in Colombia as well as counterinsurgency experts at the U.S. Southern Command.

Meanwhile the same Che T-shirt spotted on several masked anarchists cavorting through downtown Miami during November's FTAA protests was also sported by actress Elizabeth Hurley as she club-hopped across London. Hurley, though, chose to accessorize her sartorial ode to class struggle with a $4500 Louis Vuitton handbag. And just to add a further dash of the ridiculous, consider the recent sight of supermodel Gisele Bündchen strutting down the catwalk in a Che bikini, Madonna's Che-inspired CD cover, or Smirnoff vodka's Che ad campaign.

For many local Cuban exiles, however, Guevara's current cultural moment is hardly a laughing matter. To them the very mention of Guevara -- let alone the thought that his visage adorns countless dorm rooms -- is deeply disturbing. The Argentine-born rebel, after all, was Fidel Castro's right-hand man during Cuba's 1959 revolution, personally presiding over several key events that forced so many to flee to South Florida: commanding scores of firing-squad executions of political opponents inside Havana's La Cabaña waterfront fortress; managing the wholesale nationalization of private businesses and homes; hunting down anti-Castro groups in the Escambray mountains; even demanding that the Soviets launch their island-based nukes at Washington, D.C., during the 1961 Cuban Missile Crisis.

Sokol draws the obvious conclusion that Che's iconic stature owes less to who he was or what he did than to what he seems to symbolize. Which may beg the question So just how did a guy like this come to be such an appealing symbol?, but at least it spares us the suspicion that Hurley and Bündchen fantasize about commanding firing squads of their own.

Footnote: Libertarians have not been immune to Dr. Guevara's charms. Consider Murray Rothbard's obituary for the man. Here's the opening:

Che is dead, and so we all mourn him. Why? How is it that so many libertarians mourn this man; how is it that we just received a letter from a brilliant young libertarian, a former objectivist and Birchite, which said, in part: "if they finally did get Che...I am sure that his memory will live to haunt both Latin America and the U.S. for decades to come. Long live Che!"

When the executive, legislative, and judicial branches all fail to stand up for the First Amendment, maybe the bureaucratic branch should get a crack. The Washington Post profiles Bradley A. Smith, incoming chairman of the Federal Election Commission:

For Chairman Smith, almost all campaign finance regulation is wrongheaded, does the opposite of what it claims and routinely infringes on the right to free speech. Intellectual convictions, partisan interests and a Supreme Court decision are all pounding this former law professor, and he is getting a little testy.

"I'm not going to get sucked into this 'Will you enforce the law?' stuff," he replied to a question about how he will deal with one of the biggest issues to face the FEC. "I just don't want to answer it."

My hope is that he will enforce the law not at all, and McCain-Feingold will eventually sink into obscurity. My backup hope is that he will enforce the law with vigor and punctiliousness, prosecuting Americans of all stripes, Republican, Democrat, and Miscellaneous, Red, White, Blue, Purple, and Green—until it becomes intolerable to everybody. My expectation is that he will not enforce it until "The Republicans' failure to enforce McCain-Feingold" becomes an issue, and then will pick out a victim, perhaps Martha Stewart when she chooses her candidate.

Thanks to Free-Market.net for the link.

A bit of institutional self-promotion: the Daily Star in Beirut has just published a commentary by Jessica Stern on how the U.S. must engage terrorists. Reason readers will know Stern from the learned interview web editor Tim Cavanaugh conducted with her last August.

Bald Holstein cows with hairplugs infiltrate Ohio State Fair. Fair officials say no to body modification. Prize money will be forfeited, says Department of Ag spokeswoman "Wilt."