Hancock County, Indiana -- where your humble Agitator spent his formative years -- made Dave Barry's blog!

Apparently, folks are upset with a fella who's just out to make an honest buck -- in this case, by advertising porn to I-70 truckers over CB radio, then selling said porn to them at a Mount Comfort truck stop.

I'll refrain from comment, and cite conflict of interest.

Incidentally, until last year, Hancock County's county seat -- Greenfield -- was one of the larger cities in the country to have an elected Libertarian sit on its city council.

Believe it or not, www.NSFW.org is actually SFW.

Blogads is running a short reader survey to glean demographic information from readers of various bloggers.

If you have a few minutes, go take the survey, and key in "The Agitator" to question 22.

Conservative pundit and Weekly Standard alum Tucker Carlson on the war with Iraq:

"I think it’s a total nightmare and disaster, and I’m ashamed that I went against my own instincts in supporting it," he said. "It’s something I’ll never do again. Never. I got convinced by a friend of mine who’s smarter than I am, and I shouldn’t have done that. No. I want things to work out, but I’m enraged by it, actually."

Hat tip: Digamma via Atrios.

The Washington Post outlines the GOP's Ann Coulter-like scorched earth policy of responding to war critics. Any criticism of President Bush's foreign policy is now likened to giving up. Witness this odd interpretation of one criticims:

"Our failure to surge in terms of troop level and resources needed to prevail in this war has resulted in what appear to be unattainable goals in our current path."

-- Democrat Rep. John Murtha of PA, calling on President Bush to send more troops into Iraq.

"This morning, in a calculated and craven political stunt, the national Democrat Party declared its surrender in the war on terror."

-- GOP Rep. Tom DeLay, responding to Murtha minutes later.

"[The Abu Ghraib abuse] is not the behavior of 99.9 percent of our troops."

-- Kerry.

"John Kerry has suggested that all U.S. troops are somehow universally responsible [for the Abu Ghraib abuses]."

-- Racicot's interpretation of Kerry's quote above.

"We all know that the Democrats are against the war [in Iraq]. They are trying to do everything they can to undermine the war."

-- Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Tex.), May 13 news conference

"We ought to be working . . . in the most bipartisan way we can here in the Congress. And what we're seeing is . . . increased partisanship, partisan attacks" by Democrats.

-- Rep. John Kline (R-Minn.), same news conference.

Which makes DeLay's remark all the more ridiculous.

The U.K.'s Mirror staged a faux reality TV show (follow that?) in which contestants would be locked in a laboratory with various infectious viruses and bacteria. The contestant holding on to his/her health the longest would win 100,000 pounds.

The whole thing was fake, a hoax to see how just many people would risk their health for a shot at fame.

Well, the Mirror got hundreds of applications. And the "why you should pick me essays" are priceless. Or sad. Not sure which. A few excerpts:

"I'm an extreme sort of guy, dazzled by the thought of being on TV and making a complete fool of myself."

"I'm allways [sic] looking for my big break. I applied for Big Brother this year but sadly heard nothing back from them. I feel I would be a great asset to a show like this just because of me [sic] personality."

"I'm willing to risk national humiliation on TV. I've thought long and hard about this show and have come to the conclusion that even if I don't win the cash, I can sleep easy in the knowledge my suffering has brought joy to others."

HL, 36, a flight attendant, wrote: "I'm always in contact with hundreds of disease-ridden, pox-carrying, half-dead people - and that's just the cabin crew! I'm practically superhuman in my resistance to germs. Did I mention that I'm blindingly attractive?"

Hat tip: The LCD.

1) Budget-deficited Congress finds $30 million for a nationwide "Click-It or Ticket" seatbelt campaign.

2) Citing the public relations successes of environmental activists, Monsanto has shut down its genetically-modified wheat program, concluding there's no longer a consumer market for the product. The irony of course is that GM-wheat would enable more wheat to be grown on less land, thus feeding more hungry people without the need to clear untouched land for crops. It might also make it easier to get world's poorest people the vitamins and nutrients they need, or even innoculate them against disease.

Nice work, environmental activists!

3) National Journal's Drew Clark had a nice piece in the Washington Post yesterday calling for an end to the FCC's regulation of "indecency."

Two items for you this morning:

1) I turned my post on AA founder Bill Wilson into a column, and it's running on NRO today.

2) I have a piece on Tech Central about obesity and self ownership.

Here comes the first big wave of lawsuits:

Consumers' attorneys across the nation have begun to target the alcoholic beverage industry, filing lawsuits that claim that some leading brewers and distillers are using slick advertising to sell products to underage drinkers.

Lawsuits filed since November in Ohio, California, North Carolina, Colorado and Washington, D.C., appear modeled after cases that were brought against the tobacco industry beginning in the mid-1980s. Those suits focused on youth-oriented ads and sought huge damages for tens of thousands of underage smokers and their parents. The tobacco lawsuits led to a settlement in 1998 in which tobacco companies agreed to pay $246 billion to state governments to cover health care costs and other smoking-related expenses.

The Nick Berg story gets weirder by the minute. 9/11 connections, his parents are members of ANSWER, and his father apparently said he was a "friend" of al-Qaeda and Iraq.

Read here, here, here, and here.

At first, I thought this was the stuff of your usual nutso conspiracy theorists. But it's looking more and more like there are some decidedly weird angles to this story.

UPDATE: In the comments section, "Dave" points to this bizarre bit from a CNN story on one of the court martialled soldiers in Abu Ghraib:

Paul Bergrin, attorney for Davis, said his client was ordered to do what he did, but denied Davis "committed any criminal acts."

...Davis' superiors, Bergrin said, told the specialist it was important to "break the prisoners" in order to "save the lives of innocent soldiers on the outside and civilians and individuals like Nicholas Berg."

Berg was the Pennsylvania businessman whose beheading was posted on a Web page this week. The Abu Ghraib abuses depicted in the photographs took place last fall.

Of course, it could also mean that Davis should get himself a competent lawyer.

My famous Midwest-style sweet chili, which is 10-1-1 in international competition, goes up against five competitors this evening at the Cato Institute's annualy chili cookoff happy hour.

Whipped up a batch last night.

Problem is I probably won't win, mainly because there are some chili bigots here at Cato who won't vote for a sweet chili (though mine does have a spicy kick) out of some sort of Burkean allegiance to "traditional" chili.

Pshaw. On taste alone, I'll take all comers.

As you read this, Nevada Sen. John Ensign is holding hearings aimed at strong-arming movie companies into purging smoking scenes from motion pictures. Says Ensign spokesman Jack Finn, "Children are being influenced by the presence of smoking in movies."

Oh. So it's for the children, eh?

The funny thing is, our tobacco situation is so ass-over-teakettle that we get the prospect of tobacco companies writing movie execs and begging them that if they're going to include scenes where characters are smoking, that they "not use our brand," for fear of retribution from the anti-tobacco fascists.

Officials at Philip Morris, which markets Marlboros, said the company does not pay for or condone the depiction of its cigarettes in movies. "We strongly agree that product placement in movies and television has no place in our society," said rep Jennifer Golisch. "We deny all requests for permission to use, display or make reference to our cigarette brand names and packages in motion pictures and television shows."

Lorillard Tobacco has a similar policy. When its Newport brand appeared in the 2002 Warner Bros. film City by the Sea, the company wrote a letter to the movie studio, asking that "further portrayals of our products do not make it into your films."

Since 9/11, any mention of violence against Americans as "blowback" from our foreign policy has triggered cries from the conservative crowd of treachery. Merely suggesting that we ought not needlessly provoke militant Muslims into further wanting to killing us has always been met with words like "appeasement," "capitulation," and "kowtowing."

Funny how attitudes change when the provocation comes from the news media instead of Republican foreign policy.

The latest meme from the pro-war side says that the media -- 60 Minutes in particular -- should have sat on the Abu Ghraib pictures because airing them has inflamed the Muslim world, and will likely spark retribution against U.S. troops and American citizens -- see Nick Berg.

Jonah Goldberg's latest column contains this sentence:

"Well, CBS' scoop has gotten someone killed and there will be more deaths, on both sides, as a result of this story before it becomes history.

Human rights groups have been reporting abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo for months. The military has known about Abu Ghraib since January. We heard nothing of any courts martial between then and now. Then, less than a week after 60 Minutes broke the story, the Pentagon announces the first round of charges. I doubt that's mere coincidence.

These charges against the press are all the odder considering that conservatives were quick to point out after the abuses came to light that we're different from Iraq and much of the rest of the Middle East in that we expose these kinds of things, we throw light on them, and we then hold responsible those who were accountible (I agree, by the way). You can't make that point, then follow up with an argument against releasing the photos to the public in the first place.

The pictures were needed to get our attention, which was necessary for us to demand accountability from our government and our military.

I don't doubt that those pictures will further inflame Muslim ire. I don't doubt that they'll get plenty more Americans killed. But that abuse -- even filmed and taped abuse -- would crop up somewhere in a fighting force of some 130,000 troops was inevitable. Just the law of averages that you'll get some bad eggs. Our military and political leaders should have anticipated and calculated that risk into the original decision to invade Iraq. War is ugly. It spawns ugly pictures. Ugly pictures don't win us friends. Which is (merely one reason) why we ought to be awfully selective about when and where we go to war in the first place.

It's looking more and more like the abuses at Abu Ghraib were far more widespread than we'd like to believe. Reports of the latest round of pictures suggest that the abuse wasn't the result of expressed or implied military policy, but of massive, wholesale dereliction of duty and lack of supervision from commanding officers. We had truck drivers, restaurant managers, and auto mechanics supervising POWs and captured combatants -- folks with little or no training whatsoever in what they were being asked to do. Anyone who's taken a 100-level psych course has read about the Stanford Prison Experiment. Why were these people assigned to guard the prison? Are we stretched that thin?

But I digress.

My point here is that actions either have consequences, or they don't. If CBS should have considered anti-American blowback when deciding whether or not to air those photos, our elected leaders ought to keep the same thing in mind when deciding to what extent we should fund/support Israel, what Arab country we ought to invade next, and when and where to position our troops in the Middle East.

It's unfathomable to me that considering how our actions might resonate with people who don't much like us should factor into whether news executives decide to hold our military accountable, but not into how, when, and where we use that same military in the first place.

Imagine a piece of legislation that...

...empowers [an attorney general] to subpoena any document he wants from anyone doing business in the state; to keep an investigation totally secret or to make it totally public; and to choose between filing civil or criminal charges whenever he wants. People called in for questioning during . . . investigations do not have a right to counsel or a right against self-incrimination. Combined, the act's powers exceed those given any regulator in any other state.

Now for the scary part: To win a case, the AG doesn't have to prove that the defendant intended to defraud anyone, that a transaction took place, or that anyone actually was defrauded. Plus, when the prosecution is over, trial lawyers can gain access to the hoards of documents that the act has churned up and use them as the basis for civil suits.

Nope. It's called the Martin Act, and it's been on the books in New York State for more than eighty years. The act was crafted at a time when rights for the accused were relatively unheard of, and met and survived a panoply of court challenges decades ago.

It was passed largely as a compromise, under the general agreement that prosecutors would use it sparingly. In fact, it's been dormant for most of its life on the books.

Nearly a century after it was signed, however, New York Attorney General, political climber, and corporate scandal latcher-on Eliot Spitzer dug up the Martin Act, and has been harvesting it to take on all corporate comers ever since. Armed with such a powerful law and public outrage at the corporate governance scandals, Spitzer's been bringing down the big boys without so much as an indictment.

...When a securities lawyer and fellow Morgenthau alum named Eric Dinallo talked about the Martin Act during a job interview, Spitzer grasped its potential in a way that his predecessors hadn't. Not long after, Spitzer and his team demonstrated the law's force and effect when they went through the e-mails of a blowhard stock analyst at Merrill Lynch named Henry Blodget...

...Early documents and interviews yielded little, but Spitzer's team kept digging and subpoenaing more information. It called in Blodget for lengthy interviews late that summer.

Under the Martin Act, any refusal by Blodget to answer a question posed in the interviews would, unless rebutted, count as proof that he had committed fraud. In addition, Blodget had no right to counsel. Spitzer let him bring a lawyer to the interviews, but the rule still had an effect. "When you are in one of these sessions, they make it clear that you don't have a right to be there and you are there at their pleasure," said a defense lawyer.

I suppose we can all cheer when the crusading young AG finds ways to poke through the expensive menagerie of legal counsel that keeps the Merrill Lynch's and Arthur Andersen's of the world from accountability. But we oughtta' keep in mind that possessing size, influence, and wealth doesn't mean one forgoes the right to due process.

Still, pity for Smith-Barney and friends is an awfully tough public sell these days.

Less known, however, and less told, are stories of the smaller trophies Spitzer (and Manhattan DA Henry Morgenthau) has collected: the family owned businesses, the mom and pops, the small timers with good intentions who made a mistake or two, and got the book thrown at them by a justice system, press and public swept up in the corporate scandal backlash.

I actually know of a couple of these cases personally, and they don't absorb the hits like the big guys do.

Armed with a bill like the Martin Act, a politically motivated prosecutor like Spitzer can (and has) ruin lives, bankrupt families, and wreak havoc on people without access to decent counsel. That's not mentioning the innocent families, friends, and business acquaintances of the targets that get hurt in the process.

Spitzer gets only glory, and he gets it with very little oversight.

More here.

If you live in a decent sized city, here's what it costs you and your fellow taxpayers for your city's major to belong to the U.S. Conference of Mayors.

And here's one example of the kinds of things the USCM spends that money on.

Spending constiuent tax dollars on lobbying efforts to keep those same constiuents from defending themselves. Of course, if an elected official needs protection from a criminal element, well, we can use tax dollars for that, too.

Reader Benjamin Woolsey, who heads up the University of Texas' "Libertarian Longhorns," sends this rather interesting study:

Carson B Wagner, an assistant professor in the Department of Advertising at The University of Texas at Austin, contends that inadequate research measures are being used to evaluate the effectiveness of anti-drug ads and that more valid tests demonstrate that many anti-drug ads are having the wrong effects on teens, possibly increasing the likelihood for experimentation with drugs...

..."Years ago, I noticed that every time a news story was broadcast about illicit drug use among teens, a small epidemic would ensue,” says Wagner...

...Adding to this oddity was a 1999 study from the Institute for Social Research finding that—despite their enormous exposure to anti-drug ads—tracking studies revealed that adolescents’ perceived risk of illicit drugs had rapidly decreased and their drug use had sharply increased since 1991.

Wagner’s most compelling finding based on more effective research methods has important implications for the strategy behind producing and distributing anti-drug ads. Experimentation demonstrated that the higher the motivation to watch an anti-drug ad—such as one that grabs your attention with an edgy, in-your-face message or runs during a prime, high-audience timeslot—the more positive the teens’ SOA toward drugs, meaning the more likely they would be to try drugs when faced with a choice.

Jacob Sullum does a good job putting into perspective a new survey purporting to show that Bloomberg's anti-smoking policies have cut smoking in the city by by 11% -- from 21.6 to 19.3%.

I'd also point out that the survey's margin of error is plus or minus 1%, meaning the only reliable decrease in smokers stands at about 0.3%

Of course, whether bans and excise taxes work isn't really the point. The point is that they're regressive, they trigger crime and black markets, they're an affront to property rights, and they're efforts by government agents to restrict and control our behavior.

If Bloomberg had NYC cops put one bullet into a five chamber pistol, aim it at someone about to light up, and pull the trigger if they succeeded in lighting up, that would probably cut down on smoking, too.

Here are the pictures.

I hope Tim decides to change the headline.

I'm blogging on a laptop via cable modem. I have a digital camera near my left hand that can instantly capture what I see here in Alexandria, Virginia, and transmit it to anyone in the world with a similar connection. I can, if I want, listen to virtually any kind of music at pretty much any time I want. I can instantly get amounts of information from all over the world so vast, the mind is incapable of comprehending just how much is out there -- and it is all literally at my fingertips. My apartment is being kept cool and temperate, though it hit 90 degrees today. Though it rained Sunday night, I slept in a dry bed. I am well fed, well clothed, and can get medical attention any time I need it. I've been inocculated against most of the diseases most threatening to me. My dog lives better than 99% of the human beings who have ever lived.

Sometimes it seems like we've come a very long way, doesn't it?

Other times, it feels like we haven't moved a goddamned inch.

UPDATE: Here's a link to the video. Much as I think this kind of stuff should be available, I really don't recommend watching it.

Jonathan Last has an interesting piece on President Bush, paternalism, and Arab/Muslim folk.

Madsen Pirie and Alex Singleton debunk the fallacies of the modern time crunch, and the alleged misery wrought by the Industrial Revolution.

Earlier today, I was talking to Gene Healy about the porn industry's self-imposed moratorium on filming while its actors get HIV tested. Gene said he'd read somewhere, but couldn't remember where, someone making the point that it's odd how California trusts its porn workers to choose whether or not to assume the risk of unprotected sex, but doesn't trust its bar and restaurant workers to assume the risk of working in the presence of secondhand smoke.

I thought that was a good point.

Of course, it'll probably soon be a moot point. The latest HIV scare has California legislators and regulators looking into mandating the use of condoms in porn shoots.

And given that porn consumers don't want condoms in their fantasies, such legislation will only push porn to other states, further underground, or overseas (don't tell the kids at AmericanJobBlog!).

Still, can you imagine being California's OSHA guy in charge of random porn-set condom checks?

Talk about the middle-aged bureaucrat's dream.

Stephen Rodrick's wonderfully well-written ode to the back-up catcher.

1) Arizona politician who is frequently on television wants to force television networks to put politicians on television more often. Surprise!

2) Chicago politician won't let Chicagoans protect themselves with handguns, but will use taxpayer dollars to protect her own home from burglars.

3) Canadian politician touts the country's socialized health care, scolds those who want to privatize it -- but uses private sector doctor for himself and his family.

Well now this is rich.

Actually, it's a pretty clever way for these guys to get themselves some attention. They're absolutely delusional, of course. They're pulling conspiracies, coordinated attacks, "Daivd vs. Goliath," and the "throwing down of gauntlets" out of two blog links, and that the folks at Catallarchy decided to make them actually defend their position.

Just FYI, Cato had nothing to do with it. Cato's trade guys have more important things to do than coordinate "attacks" in the discussion threads of obscure blogs. Micha, Jonathan and the gang handled themselves well, but they have no affiliation with Cato other than that Micah applied for a summer internship, and that they link to Cato from their site.

It probably goes without saying that the release falsely depicts my position and the position of Cato's trade folks on a number of issues, darn-near to the point of libel.