On the last day of the year, fittingly. From the New York Post's Christopher Byron, shaming the video game Grand Theft Auto:

In fact, "whatever you want" is what the game is all about. Thanks to its artful and complex programming and its incredibly realistic graphics, the game creates the impression of being inside a totally unscripted, live-action drama in which you can manufacture your mayhem as you go along.

People, this is insane. This is 10,000 times worse than the worst thing anybody thinks Michael Jackson ever did to a little boy - or than any lie the feds think Martha Stewart ever told them, or any line in any song that Bruce Springsteen ever sang that rankled a cop in the Meadowlands...

...This whole age-cutoff thing is simply garbage - just like "Grand Theft Auto" itself - and sooner or later, I would imagine, we'll come to our senses and ban these games from public commerce, just like we ban child pornography and entertainment spectacles such as cock fighting and dwarf throwing.

Greetings from Chicago. Sorry for the light bloggage, but I'm staying with someone without web access. Today's post comes to you courtesy of the Wrigleyville Kinkos. A few items:

1) Chicago blogorama was fun. The mythical Brian Kieffer and I finally met and, strangely, played a game of euchre in the middle of the bar.

2) My Fox column is running today, a day earlier than usual. It's a roundup of a few politicians who, in 2003, managed to be just a smidge less awful than the rest of them.

3) I'll have another booze op-ed in tomorrow's Washington Times. Look for it on this page.

4) The 2003 Agities and my albums of the year will have to wait until I get back to D.C. Apologies for those of you who had already planned your swanky pre- and post-Agity Awards parties.

For those of you in or near the broad-shouldered city, I, co-agitaor Bryan Westoff, and perhaps co-agitator Brian Kieffer, and several others will swill frothy beverages at Southport Lanes and Billiards tonight at 8, maybe 8:30ish.

I'm told the bar is near the intersection of Southport and School.

Superman in a red velvet jacket, nappy bathroom towel cape and green shit-kickin' workboots. My dad pulled out this picture when I arrived home in Indiana this week, and thought y'all would enjoy it. I have more recent Indiana photographs for you, but they'll have to wait until I'm back in D.C. and can access the web from my laptop.

John Kerry on Dean:

"People are left wondering: What will he say next?" said Kerry, addressing about 180 supporters in a city library auditorium.

"We need more than simple answers and the latest slip of the tongue," he said. "This election is too vital for us to lose it if voters refuse to take a gamble on national security and the steadiness of our leadership."

...

"What kind of muddled thinking is it if you can't instantly say that in your heart you know that bin Laden is guilty?" Kerry asked. "After every episode comes a statement trying to explain it away."

So yes, I'm a Republican. I like George Dubya but I'm not closed minded when it comes to potential candidates from other parties. Joe Lieberman is a stand-up guy (though desperately in need of a jowl-lift). John Edwards has a few good ideas. But it seems like what Safire said is right on.

There are three major parties for 2004; the Republicans, the old school Democrats and this "irrational hatred of Bush" Dean party -- located mainly on the Internet forums and knee-jerk liberal blogs.

The very same people who poke fun at Bush's slip ups are somehow deaf to Dean's constant pandering and PR issued "clarifications" of Howie's taffy-tongue.

Although Bush at times is less than eloquent, we typically know what he meant without additional statements from professionals to clarify. Dean is equally if not more so verbally challenged and doesn't have things on his record like capturing Saddam and forcing Ghaddafi's renouncement of WMD; purely out of fear he would otherwise share the fate of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

Not being a gambler, I just don't feel our world is in a state to take a risk with an unproven leader.

What alarms me more than Dubya not getting a second term is that the other candidate (Dean) who seems for now to be a shoo-in for the Democratic party has foreign policy and debating skills on par with that of my 3 year old cousin.

There simply is not another viable candidate.

But at least I can finally say I agree with something John Kerry said.

You think I'm joking.

So Catholic Archdiocese all over the country are encouraging parishioners with cold or flu symptoms to forgo communion so as not to pass the bug to others.

If I correctly remember back to my CCD days, Catholics believe that communion wine doesn't merely represent the blood of Christ, it actually becomes the blood of Christ during mass.

This means that in the opinion of folks who ought to know, this lastest strain of flu bug is so strong, even the blood of God Himself can't kill the thing!

Looks like a long, long winter.

"As a veteran, I strongly believe that fighting for our country must be fairly shared by all racial and economic groups. Nobody wants to go to war, but the burden of service cannot fall only on volunteers who, no matter how patriotic, are attracted to the military for financial reasons. We cannot continue to pretend it is fair that one segment of society makes all the sacrifices."

-- NY Rep. Charlie Rengel, a Democrat.

"I think I'm the only member of the Senate Armed Services Committee who would reinstate the draft. There are huge social benefits that come from it. I can assure you I would not be in the U.S. Senate today if I had not gone through the draft. When I look at the problems of some of our kids in America nowadays and then I go visit the troops, I see what a great benefit it is to give people the opportunity to serve their country."

-- Okla. Sen. James Inhofe, a Republican.

Don't think this couldn't happen.

Number of troops in Iraq: 130,000.

Number of tropps in Afghanistan/Pakistan: 10,000.

Area of Afghanistan: 251,825 square miles.

Area of Iraq: 171,599 square miles.

Number of Americans killed by Osama bin Laden: 3,000+

Number of Americans killed by Saddam Hussein: About 500, if you include U.S. troops.

Interesting choice of quotes on Dick Cheney's Christmas cards this year.

Jim Henley has more on that Telegraph article on the alleged Atta-Nidal-Hussein connection.

Best email I've gotten in months:

Dear Mr. Balko,

I read on the Cato website your article about the latest shenanigans of the nanny state, that appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times December 5.

I have a different nanny state situation.

Let me be right up front, here. I am writing you in the hopes that I can get the Cato Institute to file an amicus brief in support of my upcoming petition for a writ of certiorari before the US Supreme Court. If appropriate, maybe you could forward this note to the correct person in the organization.

My situation is that I prefer to go barefoot just about everywhere. Yes, I know it is weird and peculiar (though, not surprisingly, I tend to prefer the word "eccentric"). The first thing to know, however, is that, despite the common myth, it is *not* illegal do drive barefoot in any of the 50 states, nor are there Health Department regulations requiring shoes in public buildings of any sort (if bare feet spread disease, then certainly flip-flops would be equally culpable; the same argument applies equally to those who say they don't want to see bare feet).

Nonetheless, the Columbus Metropolitan Library has an "Eviction Procedure" for removing barefooted patrons, which they applied against me numerous times. The Eviction Procedure calls bare feet "inappropriate dress." I eventually filed suit against them, arguing that they were violating my right of personal appearance, and my right of access to a free speech forum (public libraries are something called "designated public forums" for First Amendment purposes). I recently lost my appeal in the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, and plan on appealing to the Supreme Court.

The Sixth Circuit ruling is a masterful example of the nanny state in action. They never addressed the issue of "inappropriate dress", probably because all the evidence was that my bare feet disturbed other library patrons not in the least. No, the Court ruled that the regulation was an appropriate exercise of the police power. Why? Because I might hurt myself walking barefoot on their floors. They needed to protect me from myself.

The evidence for this was flimsy, at best. The Library gave an example of some poo on the floor of their restrooms, and argued I might step in it (however, they presented no evidence of exactly *how* that was a danger to me). They also presented evidence of a boy who, while playing on their floor, got his arm scratched by a staple. Even if stepped on, it's hard to see how any injury from it could amount to much of anything. This is the seat belt and motorcycle helmet issue writ large. Except, with seat belts and motorcycle helmets, at least there is extensive evidence that people get killed and severely injured from not wearing them. But shoes?

The Court also found another justification: the unsupported fear of an unjustified lawsuit against the Library. The Court said that, since a barefooted person might get injured in the Library, they were justified in banning them since the Library might get sued. The problem with that is that, first of all, under tort law, the Library is only required not to act in a wanton and willful fashion (going beyond mere negligence). Next, in a suit, a plaintiff could only recover actual injuries--such as the cost of the band-aid for stepping on the staple, for instance. Furthermore, the Library would be covered under their usual tort-liability insurance policy; that policy contained no "barefoot" exclusion or requirement that they force their patrons to wear shoes. Finally, a search of legal databases such as Lexis/Nexis reveals exactly one lawsuit in which a barefooted customer in a store sued that store for a barefooted injury (at which point the doctrine of comparative negligence came into play); this despite dozens of lawsuits from women injured while wearing high heels. So now, the *fear* of litigation is a sufficient reason for the government to ban any activity they don't like (even if that ban leads to litigation challenging the ban).

Going even farther, there is *nothing* in this decision that would limit their ruling to just the Library. The logic applies equally well on a city sidewalk, in a city park or at the beach. *Any* government entity could theoretically ban bare feet (or just about anything else) as long as they think up any less-than-plausible injury that might result. Want to require all men to wear shirts in city parks? Claim that you are protecting them from West Nile Virus (or any lawsuits that might result from somebody claiming the city didn't do enough to prevent the person from catching the virus).

Anyway, I hope I can interest you and the Cato Institute. All of the lawsuit briefs and docket items are available here. I'm afraid there is quite a lot there. Maybe the best place to start to see the legal arguments is the Appellant's Brief, here.

Thank you for your time.

But germs and general yuckiness don't even seem to be the issue, here.

I can certainly sympathize with the library's fear of lawsuits. The city of Chicago doled out close to $100 million in torts settlements for the last two years alone. Trial lawyers who wonder why our kids are getting fat might look at themselves. Cities no longer stock parks with playground equipment because too many parents have sued. Cities and counties are no longer sponsoring little leagues, and they're closing or selling off soccer fields and baseball diamonds (yes, I know -- we libertarians should be happy about this. But privately-run parks, little leagues and baseball diamonds are just as liable).

But I'm not sure forbidding barefoot customers really does much to indemnify the library from potential lawsuits. If there's "poo" on the floor of the library's bathrooms, I would think the main problem is that there's poo on the floor of the library's bathrooms. I'd be more worried about somebody's toddler playing in it than an adult barefoot bookworm stepping in the stuff. Likewise if the guy steps on a nail or a tack. Any amount of culpability the library might have had it seems to me would stem from the fact that there's a nail or tack on the floor, not that the library allowed a barefoot customer through the door.

Bizarre as this guy's case is, I think he may have a point. I'm guessing it's a little too esoteric for Cato to file a brief, though I'll certainly pass it on to the right people.

But if any of you reading want to help the guy out, send me an email and I'll give you his contact information.

Fed up with wartime sweetheart deals between the from-Texas administration occupying the White House and Texas-based contractor-construction outfit Brown & Root, a brazen young Congressman took to the floor of the House of Representatives and declared:

...under one contract, between the U.S. Government and this combine, [RMK-BRJ] it is officially estimated that obligations will reach at least $900 million....why this huge contract has not been and is not now being adequately audited is beyond me. The potential for waste and profiteering under such a contract is substantial.

And the brazen young Congressman calling for an investigation?

Donald H. Rumsfeld.

New York Gov. George Pataki issued a posthumous pardon to Lenny Bruce today, thirty-seven years after the groundbreaking comedian's death (groundbreaking, but not always funny). Bruce was convicted in New York on obscenity charges in an outlandish six month trial for what was ultimately a misdemeanor.

Bruce was actually charged with obscenity several times over the course of his career, including one charge for the crime of reading the transcripts of a previous trial in his act, which of course contained the obscenities he was charged wth saying the first time, for which he was then charged again.

The words, of course, were merely a vehicle. Bruce's message was fiercely anti-authoritarian. No topic was taboo. He took on sodomy laws aimed at homosexuals at a time when "gay rights" still meant "happy conservatives." JFK's assasination, the Pope, God -- nothing was safe from Bruce's acid.

Ronald Collins, co-author of the book The Trials of Lenny Bruce (recommended by yours truly last year as an ideal libertarian Christmas gift) started the pardon campaign, and recruited the likes of Robin Williams, Penn & Teller, and civil libertarian extraordinaire (and Bruce chum) Nat Hentoff to the cause.

Praise to Pataki, whose pardon strikes a symbolic blow for free expression.

Let's be honest here, I do hold an amount of sympathy for Tom Ridge. Being placed in a job that no one understands, trying to read the minds and cryptic messages of fighters who are too cowardly to wear uniforms and fight fairly -- the man is set up to fail eventually. But one of his failures was a truly bizarre statement he made yesterday (emphasis is mine):

"I think it's very, very important to send a message to the terrorists of goodwill and resolve"

Just as I thought my Christmas card sending and shopping was done, Tom had to go ahead and make things more difficult.

I don't even have the names and addresses of my local cell. Maybe this is like writing to Santa -- the post office just knows where to deliver it.

Furthermore, for some reason I'm fairly sure Hallmark does not make a greeting card for this type of occasion.

I could always make them a card because home made cards show that 1) You cared enough to make something special and 2) That you are probably broke after buying a lot of new video games for your Xbox. How about a card that says something along the lines of, "Dear Cowardly Rodents, Hope your Holiday Season is filled with peace and joy even though my country and I would like to see every last one of you exterminated. Love, Moxie"?

Perhaps a fruitcake or cheese basket would be more appropriate. Rum-balls and a nice bottle of Merlot are out of the question for obvious reasons.

What do you give to the terrorist who has everything?

Of course the answer is simple: show your goodwill by doing everything you normally would over the Holidays. And on that note -- Happy Hanukkah, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to everyone! (And yes even to any terrorists who might be lurking on The Agitator.)

Right-wing conspiracist Kelly Jane Torrance gets tossed from a health fascist convention -- but not before she gets the skinny on the war against fat. The Naderites say, "We have got to move beyond personal responsibility." You know what that means.

"Big ups" to Radley for inviting me to stop by. It's my pleasure to bring a bit of The Fly Bottle to The Agitator. I started blogging over two years ago, back in November of ought one. Despite my relatively early entry, my esoteric interests combined with sheer lassitude ensure that my blog will never find more than a niche audience. So it'll be fun to hang out for once on a fairly busy intersection of the information superhighway. (No, I will never stop saying "information superhighway. Or "lock box.")

Now, I would be really flattered to be one of the smartest ten people Radley knows if only I was confident that Radley knows more than nine people. Sadly, I am far from one the ten smartest people I know, which is inevitable if you used to work in the Mason Law School (at Mercatus & IHS), had Tyler Cowen as a boss, had the singular pleasure of being belittled by Gordon Tullock while getting morning coffee, and had a job that put you on a first name basis with Doug and Vernon (yet not quite so with the genteel and aristocratic Professor Buchanan). Indeed, of the six or so people who frequently sleep in my house, I may not be in the top five. This fact, above all, is why I love DC.

A year or so ago, I took a great course on democracy with my advisor Chris Morris. Toward the end of the term we went through some works on "deliberative democracy." The deliberative camp colors themselves as adversaries of social choice theorists who emphasize the rationality of voter ignorance, the impossibility of constructing an unambiguous "will of the people" through voting mechanisms (different voting mechanisms give different results and none is the "right" result), and the manipulability of the democratic process by special interests. The deliberative democrats hold onto a strongly procedural conception of the legitimacy of government, democracy being the legitimating procedure. Against the social choice theorists, they argue that democracy is not simply a matter of adding up people's raw preferences and weighing them against each other. Rather, the ideal of democracy is one in which communities of citizens engage each other in conversations that shape their preferences. The expression of deliberatively shaped preferences through the democratic process is what is supposed to give democratically chosen institutions a special sort of authority over us. Trouble is, just as social choice theorists would predict, we squander so much time working, shopping, and filching music from the internet that we leave little for mutually tailoring our policy preferences through painfully earnest civic deliberation. Solution? Deliberation Day!

Deliberation Day is the brainchild of professors Bruce Ackerman and James Fishkin. "Deliberation Day will, of course, be expensive," they tell us. So what can we expect to get out of it? (Will there be presents?)

Well, Ackerman and Fishkin think voter ignorance is a huge problem, and it is, sort of. And they think paying folks $150 to spend two days in a middle school gym to talk it out with the neighbors will have a transformative effect on American politics. Our Deliberation Day gift is an informed electorate, and more enlightened and just policy. I'm doubtful. I think I want what we'll likely get about as much as I want some shitloaf fruitcake.

They cite experiments of Fishkin's in "deliberative polling" that show that people change their policy preferences after these little forums.

The research that has come out of deliberative polls suggests not only that participants change their political attitudes but that these changes are driven by better information. It suggests not only that these changed attitudes generate different voting intentions but that these preferences become more public-spirited and collectively consistent. These changes occur throughout the population and aren't limited to the more educated. Finally, deliberation is intrinsically satisfying once people are given a serious chance to engage with one another in an appropriate setting.

OK. I'm setting aside the imporant matter of how much these changes matter, given the overall structure of the system. So, that aside, is there any reason to expect an actual Deliberation Day to look like Fishkin's experiments? I can't think of any. The fact that his test polls are not actually a part of the institutionalized political process undoubtedly lends these mock proceedings with an unrealistically civil and pleasant tenor. Why not be nice? Nothing's at stake. However, instead of realizing the dream of ideal deliberation among inquiring citizens, a real, institutionalized Deliberation Day would quickly degenerate into a shrill cacophony of ideological strife.

Here's how they set the thing up:

In preparation for the event, the participants receive briefing materials to lay the groundwork for the discussion. These materials are typically supervised for balance and accuracy by an advisory board of relevant experts and stakeholders. On arrival, the participants are randomly assigned to small groups with trained moderators. When they meet, they not only discuss the general issue but try to identify key questions that merit further exploration.

It is simply incoceivable that this process would not become a quickly politicized Pelennor Fields of ideology. Fundamentalist conservatives, leftist activists, and party operatives will battle to the death over control of the preparation of "briefing materials," over the constitution of the "advisory board of relevant experts and stakeholders," and over the training of "moderators." The Day itself will become one of mobilizing ideological interest groups to dominate the local forum, and discussion itself will devolve into heated argument between activists will incomensurable conceptions of the world. I can imagine few for whom this would be worth two days and $150. And as the Day becomes overrun by people with already deeply entrenched preferences hoping to propagandize or otherwise "raise the consciousness" of the masses, the people most likely to change their minds on the basis of informed conversation will stay away.

Judge Posner, in his concise, spot-on critique spies what he thinks is the underlying motivation of Deliberation Day:

I think that what motivates many deliberative democrats is not a love of democracy or a faith in the people, but a desire to change specific political outcomes, which they believe they could do through argument, if only anyone could be persuaded to listen, because they are masters of argumentation. I infer this secret agenda from the fact that most proponents of deliberative democracy advocate aggressive judicial review, which removes many issues from democratic control; are coy about indicating what policies they dislike but would accept; and are uncommonly fond of subjecting U.S. citizens to control by international organizations of questionable, and often of no, democratic pedigree. I sense a power grab by the articulate class whose comparative advantage is—deliberation.

I think there's more than a little something to this. And this is precisely why Deliberation Day, if it should be realized, will simply become one more battleground of ideology and special interest. It is hard to believe that deliberative democrats are interested in the expression of deliberative preferences per se, rather than the expression of their deliberative preferences. Else, why is it that deliberative democrats are almost uniformly soft-socialist welfare state liberals? Where are the conservative and libertarian deliberativists?

While I don't think it's all in bad faith, I think Fishkin and Ackerman at least hope that their people can control the process--control the briefing materials, the advisory boards, the moderators, etc.--and thereby induce preferences and votes that align with their own. I conjecture that they're frustrated at the left's failure to produce a more Swedish America, not to mention the failure of the people to demand it (it's for them, don't they see?), and so why not give this a try? At some level, I think they really must think that if people only understood, we'd all think more like Fishkin and Ackerman. But at another level, I think Posner must be right.

This really isn't about a just procedure that confers legitimacy on whatever outcomes it produces. There is little reason to believe that a real Deliberation Day will nudge people toward more informed and reasoned preferences. It's hard not to see talk of deliberative democratic procedure as rhetorical veneer over ideological realpolitik. If social conservatives effectively co-opted Deliberation Day and "deliberated" their way to huge majorities in favor of the abolition of abortion, the Defense of Marriage Amendment, or the privatization of social security, I don't think the Ackermans and Fishkins of the world would rest content knowing that the deliberative will of the people, and thus justice, was done.

[Cross-posted on The Fly Bottle.]

1) Thanks to those of you made my tip jar jingle.

2) I'm off to Indiana tomorrow. I hope to make stops in Ohio and Bloomington, too, before eventually heading up to Chicago for New Year's. I hope to get to Chicago on the 29th or so, and if I can, I might try to host a little mini Agitator blogorama while there. Details evolving and forthcoming. Also hoping to make good use of the digital camera while on the road.

3) Coming up: My top albums of 2003, and the 2nd annual Agity Awards!

More guest blogging goodness for you today.

Welcome Will Wilkinson to the Agitator mix. Will's a Ph.D. student in philosophy at the University of Maryland and a jack of various trades at the Mercatus Center and the Institute for Humane Studies. He's one of the ten smartest people I know. But he's also a fun read, as you'll see. He'll be elbows deep in a perplexing philosophical give-and-take, then he'll toss in a profanity or two, just to keep your attention.

His blog is actually older than mine. Check it out here.

He has slept on Gene Healy's couch.

A little follow-up.

The football Gods have spoken. And they have proven they are just, mighty, and -- most importantly -- intolerant of foolish, showboaty endzone celebrations. Consider:

1) Joe Horn. Last week, after a touchdown, Joe pulled a cell phone from the field goal padding in a vain, feeble, unoriginal attempt to put himself among the league's elite receivers not through on-field performance, but through showmanship alone. At the time, his team was 6-7, with just a whisp of a chance at the playoffs.

One week later, the football gods smote down Horn and his New Orleans Saints. The gods allowed the Saints just a nibble at the teat of victory -- allowing for a miraculous three-lateral end-of-game touchdown that brought them within one point of tying, forcing overtime, and perhaps pulling out a victory, thus keeping their playoff hopes alive.

Ah, but the gods then cruelly jerked the teat away. After that inspiring play, invoking Cal-Stanford visions, the gods pushed, of all things, the extra point wide-right, thus causing the Saints to lose by just one point, thus eliminating New Orleans from the playoffs -- an error on perhaps the most routine play in all of sports.

Lesson to Joe Horn: Next time, hand the ball to the referee and walk off the field. The football gods loathe the boastful fool, and so punish him accordingly.

2) Chad Johnson. The Bengals' wide receiver has had a breakout year. But his post-touchdown endzone shenanigans have tweaked the gods all season. I imagine they've given him a pass so that they might bring some relief to the long-suffering patience of Cincinnati fans -- what is generally a pretty good football town. Johnson was fined for one excessive celebration, then pulled out a pre-written posterboard the next week, which tauntingly pleaded with the NFL not to fine him again.

This week, apparently inspired by the Joe Horn show, Johnson boasted all week about what he'd do once he found the end zone against the Rams. He had spent a great deal of time, he told Michael Irvin on the pregame show, choreographing his routine.

The gods had had enough. Johnson failed to score, the Bengals were blown out, and for all intents and purposes, eliminated from playoff contention.

Long-suffering Cincinnatians take note. You may thank Chad Johnson's ego that your team will again be watching the playoffs this year.

3) T.J. Duckett. Last week, with his team trailing 31-0 in the fourth quarter, T.J. Duckett mistakenly wandered into the proper endzone, scoring 6 points for the Atlanta Falcons. Apparently oblivious to the scoreboard, and his team's woefull record, Duckett proceded to engage in an elaborate celebratory dance.

This week, Duckett averaged a medicore 3.4 yards per carry, did not find the endzone, and registered a fumble.

I suspect the Falcons awful season and Duckett's bleak professional prospects caused the gods to pity him, and so impose on him a punishment less severe than those imposed on Horn and Johnson.

Nevertheless, the gods have spoken. Dance, and ye shall be paralyzed. Speaketh on a cell phone, and ye shall be silenced. Gloat, and ye shall be smited.

Showtime is airing five episodes in a row tonight of the Penn & Teller series that debunks the claims of charlatans, junk science alarmists and quacks.

Penn & Teller, most of you know, are devout libertarians, and both are Mencken research fellow with the Cato Institute.

I also can't say enough good things about Marginal Revolution. Just a quick sampling of the stuff you'll learn by checking in over there this morning:

1) The flu vaccine shortage is likely due to liability concerns and the fact that the U.S. government is the biggest buyer of vaccines, which slims profit margins. As the Medicare entitlement swells, the problem's only going to get worse.

We saw a micro version of this problem during the anthrax attacks. Remember how the feds pretty much demanded Bayer slash the cost of Cipro to make it more widely available? Actions have consequences. How many U.S. companies do you think are now going to put devote any research and development resources to antidotes to bugs that could be used for bioweaponry? The one example they have when such a drug might have been needed on a wide scale, sale and distribution of the drug was essentially socialized. That pretty much wipes out any incentive drug makers may have had to find stoppers for whatever other nastiness may be out there.

2) The best Christmas gives aren't things, but experiences.

3) Yoko Ono takes a chapter from Stalin's playbook.

4) We may have Jupiter to thank for intelligent life on earth.

5) Cops and dog droppings: The story from Paris.

Over at the required-reading Adam Smith Institute blog, we learn that at least half the world still drinks moonshine, and that the left has set its anti-corporate crosshairs squarely on Google. Look for the Microsoft-ish demonization of the search engine giant to swing into motion shortly after Google goes public.

I did an interview with a San Francisco Chronicle reporter yesterday which resulted in this nice writeup:

Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown has suggested that one way the state could generate more revenue and solve its budget woes is to levy taxes on unhealthy behaviors such as drinking and eating junk food.

In an interview Thursday, Brown said "there are a number of activities" that could be taxed and suggested a tax on people who eat salty and sugary foods as well as "a tippler tax on those who drink at the bar."

His spokeswoman, T.T. Nhu, said Friday that Brown thinks "it would be beneficial to have a junk food tax" and he's been influenced by policies in Canada, which taxes chocolate in addition to alcohol and cigarettes.

But a writer for the libertarian-oriented think tank the Cato Institute, which is based in Washington, D.C., said Friday that so-called "sin taxes" are a bad idea because they don't stop the behaviors they're supposedly aimed at halting.

The writer, Radley Balko, also said that alcohol taxes are "incredibly regressive," falling disproportionately on the poor, as they spend a greater percentage of their income on alcohol.

Balko said politicians usually say the reason they want to impose sin taxes is to stop unhealthy behavior, and he's never before heard an elected official say, as Brown did, that the real purpose is to raise money.

"That's a novel approach," Balko said.

He said sin taxes do generate revenue, but he questioned the sincerity of government officials who say their real priority is stopping the behavior they're taxing, as sin taxes usually are proposed only when governments face large budget shortfalls.

In the case of tobacco taxes, state and local governments have become addicted to the revenue they generate and would take a financial hit if fewer people smoked, Balko said.

He added that steep tax hikes spur people to buy products on the black market instead of in retail stores. Because of high taxes, the bootleg cigarette market has thrived for decades in New York City, diverting millions of dollars from lawful businesspeople into the pockets of criminals and terrorist organizations such as Hezbollah, Balko said.

The same thing could happen in places where alcohol taxes are dramatically raised, he said.

Balko said the people least likely to stop drinking because of increased alcohol taxes are alcoholics, as they would continue to drink, and those most affected would be social drinkers and lower middle class people.

In a recent paper entitled "Back Door to Prohibition: The New War on Social Drinking," Balko said excise taxes unfairly force all drinkers to pay for the societal costs attributable to a small number of drinkers who abuse alcohol.

The paper notes that this month is the 70th anniversary of the 21st Amendment, which repealed alcohol prohibition in the U.S. The paper says prohibition resulted in a booming black market, increased crime and alcohol abuse, wasted tax dollars and lost civil liberties.

The BBC continues to evolve into a caricature of itself. Apparently, network reporters were instructed via email not to refer to Saddam Hussein as the former Iraqi "dictator," because he was voted into office via several nationwide elections. He's to be called "the former president" of Iraq.

More details emerge about Armin Miewes, the German sex cannibal. From Dan Savage:

According to the BBC, Meiwes had fantasized since age 8 about killing and eating someone. According to the Mirror, he turned down two men who volunteered to be his victims before he killed and ate Brandes. Meiwes rejected one man for being too fat, revealing himself to be a sizeist gay sex cannibal. The other reject "wanted me to burn his balls with a flamethrower and hammer his body down with nails and pins while he was whipped to death," Meiwes said. "I found that a bit weird." (You know you're a freak when you're a bit too weird for a gay sex cannibal.) But it's the Guardian that comes through with the most disturbing detail of all: After cutting off and eating Brandes' penis, Mr. Meiwes sat down and... Jesus, it's difficult even to type this... "read a Star Trek novel." Eesh.

Eugene Volokh points out that the neglected Third Amendment, the officially favored amendment of TheAgitator.com, gets a rare mention on page 31 of the just-decided Padilla case.

No protection from unlawful quartering of soldiers in civilian houses, no peace!

Perhaps we need a better slogan.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for D.C. has overturned a lower court ruling that allowed the RIAA to subpoena Verizon for information on suspected file swappers.

1) The New York Times wants to ban snowmobiles.

2) The leading trial lawyers association urges members to weed out prospective jurors in class action suits who believe in "personal responsibility."

3) Riverside, California has banned its county sheriff's deputies from smoking -- even off the job. Your favorite new Cato policy analyst is qutoed in this particular piece.

4) Add Georgia and Maryland to the list of states looking to ban public smoking.

According to Roll Call, there are 25,627 registered lobbyists in Washington, D.C. -- or 47.9 for every member of Congress. That's not counting unofficial, unregistered lobbyists.

Now, how many of those lobbyists do you suppose are asking our government to spend less money? My guess is that you could count them on one hand, and still have at least one finger left over to express your disgust for the whole process.

Think about how many of these people the typical Congressman meets with every day, each business day of his term. Think about how many requests for money for special projects, some of them unsavory, but others like cancer or Alzheimer's or AIDS research he gets each week. Think about how difficult it would be to turn down one request after another, day after day, for the length of your term, inevitably extracting promises of reprisal come next campaign each time you do.

Almost makes you forgive the old pushovers for growing government.

Almost.

You're not alone. The San Diego Union-Tribune also ran with the faux Purdue scholarship story, word for word. Fark! linked to the article, whereby Farkers then alerted the newspaper's editors, who pulled the piece from the paper's website. Comments thread here.

On an unrelated note, Brian, you might consider sending your resume to the Union-Tribune. I have a feeling they're looking for a sports editor.

I was more than a little suspsicious when the alleged Atta-Saddam link showed up in a very pro-war British newspaper, and featured a document turned over by the provisional Iraqi government. Turns out, there's some justification for that suspicion. From Newsweek:

Dec. 17 - A widely publicized Iraqi document that purports to show that September 11 hijacker Mohammed Atta visited Baghdad in the summer of 2001 is probably a fabrication that is contradicted by U.S. law-enforcement records showing Atta was staying at cheap motels and apartments in the United States when the trip presumably would have taken place, according to U.S. law enforcement officials and FBI documents.

The new document, supposedly written by the chief of the Iraqi intelligence service, was trumpeted by the Sunday Telegraph of London earlier this week in a front-page story that broke hours before the dramatic capture of Saddam Hussein...

...The Telegraph story was apparently written with a political purpose: to bolster Bush administration claims of a connection between Al Qaeda and Saddam's regime. The paper described a "handwritten memo" that was supposedly sent to Saddam Hussein by Tahir Jalil Habbush al-Tikriti, chief of Iraqi intelligence at the time. It describes a three-day "work program" that Atta had undertaken in Baghdad under the tutelage of notorious Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal, who lived in the Iraqi capital until his death under suspicious circumstances in August 2002...

...Ironically, even the Iraqi National Congress of Ahmed Chalabi, which has been vocal in claiming ties between Al Qaeda and Saddam's regime, was dismissive of the new Telegraph story. "The memo is clearly nonsense," an INC spokesman told NEWSWEEK...

...Contacted by Newsweek, The Sunday Telegraph's Con Coughlin acknowledged that he could not prove the authenticity of the document. He said that while he got the memo about Mohammed Atta and Baghdad from a "senior" member of the Iraqi Governing Council who insisted it was "genuine," he and his newspaper had "no way of verifying it. It's our job as journalists to air these things and see what happens," he said.

On Larry King tonight, Maher lamented the Medicare prescription drug benefit. But for reasons truly incomprehensible.

"No one addressed the elephant in the room," Maher said. "The real question is, why are we so sick? Why do we need $400 billion worth of drugs? Why do we need all of this medicine? We aren't supposed to be this sick? Why is there so much pain?"

Maher's answer?

"Because we live in a toxic, polluted society."

What? We "need" more drugs because we have more drugs. We're living longer. We're living better. And we have drugs to treat ailments we once had no choice but to bear. Does Maher think that, before the industrial age, men in their sixties regularly got raging erections without medication? Does Maher think that before the industrial revolution, men regularly lived into their sixties?

"Human beings were meant to live until 90 or 100," Maher went on. "But we only live to 70 or 80. Why is that? Because of our toxic environment and pollution."

Maher might visit those countries that have yet to exerpience the toxicity and pollution that comes with industy. Guess how many people in those countries live to 90 or 100?

Just in time for Christmas, I donned my prettiest Ayn Rand wig, threw on my snazziest Gordon Gekko slacks, and wrote a piece on the glory and importance of greed.

Also, my post-reductio America piece on Tech Central will run in this Sunday's Orange County Register.

More perils of competitionless contracts....

Interesting item tucked away in the Washington Post today.

The White House apparently downgraded a state visit by the foreign minister of Qatar after said foreign minister refused a National Security Council request to fire certain employees of al-Jazeera whom the NSC thought were too biased in their coverage of the Iraq war.

The snub even extended to First Lady Laura Bush, who decided she no longer had time for lunch with the foreign minister's wife -- a leading human rights, education, and women's rights activist in the Islamic world -- offering instead to just have coffee.

Qatar, incidentally, is our staunchest ally in the Arab world. Our command post for the Iraq war was based in Doha, and the small country boasts a freer economy than Israel.

Odd, isn't it, that American officials would punish an Arab country for not sufficiently censoring its press?

Isn't the goal supposed to be to give journalists more freedom from state interference in places like Qatar?

1) Read Gene Healy's new paper on the disturbing use of the military for domestic police actions. Politicians are increasingly turning to the military for things like border control, drug prohibition, and preventing domestic terrorism. This is a problem. Police are trained to keep the peace, turning to force only when absolutely necessary. The military is trained to kill, and only to kill. The two don't mix well.

2) With that in mind, read Erik Luna's article on the ever expanding, ever more federalized criminal code. Combined with Gene's paper, it paints a grim picture of where our civil liberties could be headed, particularly if there's another terrorist attack in the months ahead.

3) If you have lots of time, you might also read Cato's amicus brief on a little-known case set to be argued before the Supreme Court this spring. The case is Hiibel v. Humboldt County, Nevada, and it challenges a Nevada statute that says citizens must furnish identification when asked to do so by police. The case is significant because the Supreme Court could either deflate or provide significant momentum for those agitating for a national identification card.

4) Two noteworthy items from "To Be Governed..." Cato's bloggish take on items in the news. First:

One congressional district in the area around DeKalb, Ill., appears to be faring exceptionally well in the Labor and Health and Human Services appropriations conference report. The 14th Congressional District, one of the richest in the state, looks to get 43 percent of all the projects earmarked for Illinois, even though it has only about 5 percent of the population.

Nearly one-third of the $16,445,000 headed for the district would go to Northern Illinois University in DeKalb....

We can be sure of one thing: The proud 14th's success has got nothing to do with who represents it in Washington. That would be House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R), who picked up a graduate degree at Northern Illinois University.

--Washington Post, December 12, 2003

Bush and his right-wing Republican coalition that runs the nation are determined to cut back to a bare minimum the federal government that holds us all together. In addition to finishing off the New Deal's social welfare system and getting rid of the Department of Education, federal regulation has got to go.

--James Ridgeway in the Village Voice, August 20-26, 2003

Go see The Station Agent.

Peter Dinklage is a wonderful actor -- he conveys volumes of expression with mere subtle tics and gestures. And he could be the first dwarf to achieve bona-fide leading man status. I think he ought to get an Oscar nomination.

The movie grows a little heavy toward the end (and even then, it's bearable), but until then is charming, understated, and very funny.

My favorite Onion story of all time...

William Safire Orders Two "Whoppers Junior"

NEW YORK--Stopping for lunch at a Manhattan Burger King, New York Times 'On Language' columnist William Safire ordered two "Whoppers Junior" Monday. "A majority of Burger King patrons operate under the fallacious assumption that the plural is 'Whopper Juniors,'" Safire told a woman standing in line behind him. "This, of course, is a grievous grammatical blunder, akin to saying 'passerbys' or, worse yet, the dreaded 'attorney generals.'" Last week, Safire patronized a midtown Taco Bell, ordering "two Big Beef Burritos Supreme."

Ever eager to burnish its public image, the McDonald's Corporation once hired a public-relations firm to ascertain the correct plural of the Egg McMuffin. Perhaps they were hoping to gain approval for Eggs McMuffin, on the analogy of the more upmarket eggs Benedict. But that quest went nowhere. As far as I know, the company never ruled on what eaters of the Egg McMuffin should order if they want more than one.

And what about the McGriddle? Moot point. You should never order more than one McGriddle. That's just crazy, man.

Your team is 7-7.

For the last two years, I have been able to avoid buying a cell phone. I used to have one, but the thing is that I don't particularly care for being in touch all the time... or talking on the phone. My typical phone conversations last less than a minute. Unfortunately, living off the grid has certain disadvantages when it come to staying in touch with friends and nurturing budding romances.

Still, something more than just a telephone would need to be offered for me to jump back into the world of endlessly complicated rate plans and network coverage.

How about phone, unlimited internet, and a camera? I'm sold. The picture inset is me doing my best Ben Shapiro.

Your Congress, at work.

Ben Shapiro, the pimply-faced, violin-playing, stay-at-home soldier with ambitions of conquering all of Muslimdum has a new look!

I think VH1 needs a new "Divas" special. Only instead of Mariah Carey or Aretha Franklin, the featured performers ought to be Ryan Adams and Jack White.

First, Adams. We've already discussed in this space how the very talented crooner gets his his boots all a-twitter any time a wisenheimer does the Ryan Adams-Bryan Adams thing at one of his shows. He flips out. Now granted, that might get grating after a few dozen shows, but as was also suggested in this space, why not have some fun with it? Why not actually play Bryan Adams tunes? If the jokesters don't relent, just play an entire set. After doing the entire Cuts Like a Knife LP, front to back, I'm guessing the people who came to hear Ryan Adams tunes will have effectively silenced the people who came to taunt Ryan Adams.

At any rate, we learn in the latest GQ that Adams is dating Parker Posey (the bastard!), the he watches Sex in the City, that he likes long baths, and that he once told a fan that he "makes more money in two nights than you make all year."

Okay.

He's also put out three albums this year, all of them pretty disappointing. None comes close to any of his Whiskeytown stuff, let alone Heartbreaker or Gold. In short, it's becoming pretty apparent that Ryan Adams is spending far too much time crafting the Ryan Adams image. Rumor has it that he's back in the studio with the Whiskeytown boys, which can only be a good thing.

Now to Jack White, who, by the way, Adams once called, "a fucking ponce."

White's taking a much more well-travelled road to male rock star divadom. While Adams is picking out killer wicker chair ensembles and hippy-made quilts with GQ reporters, White apparently is discovering hot new bands in his native Detroit, then publicy feuding with them, then promptly beating the ever-loving shit out of them.

The ban is the Von Bondies. White's feud was with the lead singer, Jason Von Bondie. The ass-whoopin' took place onstage, at a Von Bondies show. White apparently spit on Von Bondie, then landed a blow to his nose, then sat on his shoulders and pummeled him with a body blow, body blow, left, left, left.

Here's the story. Here's the police write-up. And here, put the kids in another room, are the pictures:

Purdue has signed a basketball letter of intent with 5'6" 128 lb freshman, Jason Smith. Yeah, there was a bit of a mixup.

Assistant coach Cuonzo Martin was reached, and said, “Technically, we can’t get rid of the kid, but to stay on the team he is going to have to do everything all the other players do; practice, lift weights, run, watch tape. He also has to keep his nose clean and stay out of trouble.”

“That shouldn’t be a problem,” says Jason Parker’s mother, Debbie, “J.P. has always been a good boy. He never has a bad thing to say about anyone and always works hard at everything he does. His scout leader said he is one of the finest young men he has ever known.”

Hilarious.

Update: I got Radleyed on this one. I suppose I could delete this post or pretend that I realized it was satire when I posted it, but no... I'll leave it as a shining monument to my own ignorance and willingness to believe just about anything negative about Indiana.

Because the pro-war blogosphere can't seem to get beyond BBC call-in opiners, extremist bulletin boards, and the isolated academic left in mining the anti-war camp for reaction to Saddam's capture, I'll help them out.

Here, some anti-war reactions I found useful:

Jonathan Wilde
Jesse Walker
Gene Healy
Jim Henley
Max Sawicky
Chris Matthew Sciabarra
Josh Marshall
Jon Mandle

It took about five minutes to find the above posts on my lunch hour. All make nuanced, important, thoughtful points on yesterday's events that aren't easily dismissed with ridicule, sarcasm, and grandstanding.

Perhaps that's why the warbloggers have had so much trouble finding them. Or at least addressing them.

First and foremost, it's a great day for liberty. Lots of Iraqis will sleep with peace tonight. The bogeyman who tormented their thoughts and dreams for a quarter century will haunt them no more.

The circumstances of his capture couldn't have been more optimal. This man who some believed to be the next caliph, who has called for Muslims to offer themselves for martyrdom, who appropriated Islam only when it convenienced him -- he proved himself to be a spineless, shuddering, shameful coward. He emerged from an eight-foot hole in the ground with those bound-for-Bartlett's, jihad-inspiring words, "Don't shoot!"

We took him alive, so there will be no charred remains to leave doubts in the minds of aspiring militants. There will be no murky video or audio tapes emerging in the months ahead to challenge the truth that we nabbed him. He'll be tried in Iraq, presumably by Iraqis, leaving little question about the sincerity of the justice that will be delivered to him.

For Iraqis, a long bad dream is over.

Now comes the "but."

I find it curious that the most prominent reaction on the pro-war Internet is to find the most asinine, foolish anti-war reactions and post and quote them as if they're the reaction of the majority of people who opposed this war. Andrew Sullivan is hosting a contest for the most "mealy-mouthed" responses from the anti-war camp. Others are mining those eternal springs of pacifist eloquence -- Democratic Underground and IndyMedia -- for particularly galling and disturbing responses. I wonder, is this the first thing that popped into the pro-war camp's mind upon seeing the images of Saddam's capture? Not, "thank God that damned butcher is gone," but, "this'll show those damned anti-war people." It's almost as if some people believe we're in Iraq not to defend the security of the United States, but to piss off the BBC, Michael Moore and Howard Dean.

Well, perhaps I can fuel their fervor a bit.

Wonderful as Saddam's capture is, great as it is for the Iraqi people, deserving of admiration and respect as it is for the American military, it is a very, very small step in the war on terrorism, if it's a step at all. To borrow a phrase from the pro-war camp, the people of Baghdad will sleep sounder tonight, but the people of Brooklyn are no safer upon Saddam's capture than they were before it. In fact, if Saddam did indeed have the WMDs we thought he did, and now they're floating about on the international black market, we're all quite a bit less safe than we were a year ago. That's not to diminish how important today was to Iraqis, but it simply isn't the responsibility of the U.S. military to slay the world's demons. Only our own.

We spent billions of dollars, seven months, and precious military intelligence and resources to capture a man who is an absolute bastard, yes, but a man for whom the available evidence suggests hasn't a single drop of blood of a single American civilian on his hands. Meanwhile, a man we know for certain is implicated in the deaths of thousands of Americans still roams the Pakistani hinterland. We've expended the few U.S. military personnel fluent in Arabic (that is, those who weren't kicked out for their sexual orientation) chasing down a false or at worst nebulous threat, while an all-too-proven threat continues to elude us.

Capturing Saddam Hussein was vital to the Iraq mission. If we hadn't found him, it would have been a failure. And we should revel for a bit in the fact that we got him. But while getting him was essential to avoiding faiure, capturing him certainly doesn't mean success. Nor does it mean the reasoning behind this war was sound. It means that we have a military we should be proud of. It doesn't mean we should stop questioning the decisions of the political figures directing that military.

I wrote at the onset of the war that I hope I'm wrong about everything. There's still ample opportunity for that to happen. I hope Saddam cracks, and reveals to us where the WMDs are hidden, that he had intended to use them, or to sell them to people who would, and I hope we discover conclusive evidence of his ties to people who want to hurt us. I hope our nation-building endeavors defy history and human experience and prove successful (actually, I hope we give Iraq over to the Iraqis, and stop trying to rebuild their country for them -- but as long as we insist on remaining there, I hope we're successful). And I hope, twenty years from now, it's unfailingly clear to us that this foray into Iraq was indeed the best use of our terror-fighting resources.

But yes, I still have my doubts. In spite of the goosebumps I got seeing Iraqis celebrate in the streets today, despite the lump in my throat I swallowed down upon seeing Iraqi journalists break into cheers when Paul Bremer announced, "We got him," I still have lots of doubt.

If there were WMDs, I wonder how our military can could zero in on one man in a cubby hole on a rural farm, but hasn't yet been able to locate the vast quantities of chemical and biological agents Colin Powell warned the world of last year. If the WMDs were there then, but aren't now, I wonder where they are, and why, if we were so certain they were there, their absence now isn't of more concern to us than it seems to be.

Make no mistake, the world is much better off now that Saddam Hussein is locked away in a place that's dark, lonely, and uncomfortable. But that point was never in question. The question was whether or not we could have better spent the time, lives and treasure it took to get him in that place on endeavors more directly related to our safety and security.

It probably won't surprise you, but I'm a long, long way from conceding that the answer to that question is "no."

But I still hope at some point that I'm able to.

The best news out of Iraq for a long time.

All credit to the troops. May they come home soon.

As so often happens, Auden has the right words:

"Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in the streets."

Lots of you were pretty critical of me for criticizing the Bush policy of not awarding contracts to countries who didn't support the war.

I'm not convinced. First, the government is not a private employer, and pretending it is doesn't make it so. Things change when government is calling the shots.

For example, most libertarians believe private firms should be able to hire and fire at will, for any criteria whatsoever. If I only want to hire white people, or black people, that ought to be my prerogative. Let markets and consumers punish me for those decisions, not bureaucrats. But most libertarians I know would also argue that if the governmen must be an employer, it ought to do its own hiring and firing based on merit and merit alone. Everyone ought to have access to any job that's funded by the taxpayers.

Same goes with government contracts. The U.S. government owes it to U.S. citizens to be sure our rebuliding-Iraq tax dollars are being spent efficiently, that we're finding the best combination of frugality and quality when awarding these contracts, and that they're not being awarded to settle political scores and grudges, or to reward cronies in the industry. When you don't have to compete for the job, when there's no danger of another firm bumping you off should you screw up, you tend to feel a little more free to take liberties such as, for example, charging U.S. taxpayers twice the going rate for fuel.

If there's a German firm that's willing to do the same reconstruction job and not double-bill us for fuel as Kellog did, are we really saying we'd rather go with Kellog because Kellog supported the war, and Germany didn't it?

Is it really fair to punish a corporation because it happened to have incorporated 10 or 20 or 100 years ago in a country whose foreign policy we don't like?

And how is this philosophically different than, say, economic sanctions against regimes we don't like (which most libertarians also oppose)?

The idea that those who supported this war are able to force those of us who opposed it to pay not only for the war, but also for the decades-long reconstruction is bad enough. But I can accept that. I can't accept that we're now forced to pay more than market value for that reconstruction so that the Pentagon can settle petty scores with the countries who didn't sufficiently cheerlead the effort.

No less war boosters than William Kristol and Robert Kagan are able to see the light, here, gang.

Glen Whitman on the campaign finance decision:

Suppose that I think George W. Bush’s presidency has been a miserable failure. Actually, you don’t have to suppose, because I actually think that. And suppose I find a couple of dozen other people who agree with me. All of us want to convince other people of the same thing (that George W. Bush’s presidency has been a miserable failure), but none of us alone has enough money to buy a radio or TV ad. So we pool our funds and come up with enough money to buy an ad blasting the current administration for the miserable failure that it is, in the hope that other citizens will come to support our position.

The activity I’ve just described would seem to be the essence of free speech, no? And yet the Supreme Court has just upheld a ban on precisely that kind of activity.

Incumbents in Congress have just insured that concerned citizens can't reach a mass audience with criticism of them in the months leading up to the day when the public determines whether or not they deserve to be rehired for another term. They've just given themselves job security.

And lest we get too down on the Supreme Court that upheld this dreck, or the Congress that passed it, keep in mind that our president signed it into law, despite expressing his belief that it was unconstiutional, thus violating his oath of office.

Julian has a more lighthearted take. I'd caution him, though. This, after all, is post-reductio America. Today's parody is tomorrow's headline.

So I was thinking of moving to London...

Welcome, Nurse Bloomberg, to the wonderful world of the black market.

Two people have been murdered and two others shot in separate acts of violence tied to a surge in cigarette bootlegging that has rocked the Big Apple in the aftermath of the whopping cigarette tax hike.

The allure of easy profit - as much as $50 per carton - has drawn to the lucrative illegal cigarette trade a variety of criminals, from Russian thugs in Brighton Beach to gangs in Chinatown to suspects with ties to the terror group Hezbollah, police and federal officials say.

The NYPD created a unit called the Cigarette Indiction Group (CIG) to deal with the "anticipated" upturn in "buttlegging" immediately after the city passed a $1.50-a-pack tax increase in July 2002 - an extraordinary 1,900 percent jump from 8 cents a pack...

...McCarthy said the lucrative trafficking and the comparatively modest sanctions suggested the schemes could continue, as could the bloodshed.

"Any money-making scheme will branch into violence," he said.

New Yorkers are still smoking. It's just that now they're paying criminals and international terrorists to get their smokes, instead of legitimate businesses. And now they get to dodge the turf war crossfire to get them.

The NY Post sports an editorial on the taxes today, too.

The funny thing about all of this is that it's government policies that make the underground tobacco (and marijuana, and cocaine, and heroin) markets lucrative enough to attract international terrorists -- policies enacted for the specific purpose of bringing revenue to government.

Then that same government spends your tax dollars to accuse you of supporting international terrorism.

Fabulous speech by Michael Crichton from a few months ago.

Extremist religion kills, and as Crichton notes, we can probably credit post-Earth Day environmentalism with 10-30 million human deaths, the majority of those coming from third world malaria outbreaks that could have been prevented were it not for DDT hysteria.

For an example of the warped sense of risk assessment environmentalists have when it comes to public policy, check out this story detailing an alarmist UN report claiming that 150,000 people per year are dying of malaria because of global warming!

In other words, we need to completely reengineer our industrial, transportation, and energy systems because it's possible that fossil fuels may warm the earth a bit, which might cause extra rain in some places, which can pool and give rise to mosquitos, which can carry malaria, which might kill an additional 150,000 people per year.

Meanwhile, millions of people already die of malaria every year -- and virtually all of those deaths could probably have been prevented if we hadn't rushed to ban DDT before really examining whether claims that it is a carcinogen were true.

Environmentalists have no problem calling for radical overhauls to industrial development (oblivious to the lives of the millions who are bettered by it) in order to prevent 150,000 theoretical deaths from malaria. But dare to suggest that we bring back DDT to save the millions we know die of the disease each year, and the greens scream about thinning eggshells and bogus claims of cancer.

I've been told that Crichton can be something of a kook at times. I've never really read him on matters of public policy before now. He seems fairly sane to me, at least in this speech.

Okay, so I understand the playground logic behind not letting French, Russian or German firms bid on contracts in post-war Iraq. You might call it the Eric Cartman "screw you guys, I'm goin' home" school of dipomacy and commerce.

But here's the bottom line:

The moratorium on bids from firms in those countries means that the American, Italian and Spanish firms get to compete in something that's less than a completely open market. That means that U.S. taxpayers will be footing arficially high tabs for construction projects, and it means that Iraqis will be getting something of less quality than what a truly open market would provide.

Of course, this assumes that we're awarding contracts based on competition and not patronage in the first place, which is a pretty generous assumption.

There's also something decidedly unseemly -- and at odds with free trade principles -- about holding private firms accountable for the foreign policy of their governments. Consider if France or Germany or Russia deicded to punish McDonalds or Microsoft or General Motors for the Bush administration's unilateralism.

We'd be ourtraged, and rightly so.

But then, no one has ever accused the Bush administration of consistent devotion to free trade principles.

I give you Chess Boxing. My new favorite sport.

Hat tip: Gene Healy.

On El Cato.

Be sure to tune in to The O'Reilly Factor tonight at 8:30ish. Reason's Nick Gillespie will be debating Chief Scold on the Abercrombie & Fitch catalog.

I'll be on Cincinnati's WLW tomorrow (Thursday) at 9am ET. Listen here.

And I'll be on Barry Lynn's syndicated radio show Friday at 1 pm ET. Listen here.

Jim Henley's been on a covers kick, inviting the 'sphere to submit their all-time favorites. I've discussed my affinity for covers here before, and listed my favorite covers of Leonard Cohen songs.

I'll submit a few more for Jim's list. This isn't a "greatest" list, though. Most of the greatest covers were so good, the coverers pretty much co-opted the songs as their own. Think Jimi Hendrix's cover of Dylans "All Along the Watchtower," or perhaps the best example, Aretha Franklin's cover of Otis Redding's "Respect."

I think my personal favorite ever is Jeff Buckley's rendition of Cohen's "Hallelujiah," and to be honest, Cohen covers would probably take at least three or four slots of any top ten list I could put together.

So instead, I'll just throw out a few that I like that you likely haven't heard of, in hopes of turning y'all on to some new stuff.

"Better Things" -- Fountains of Wayne covering The Kinks. I think I've mentioned this one before. It's a really upbeat, forward-looking song, particularly for The Kinks, but especially when done by FoW. They did this song live on the first Conan O'Brien Show after 9/11, and given the song's lyrics, it was pretty moving.

"In My Hour of Darkness" -- Rolling Creekdippers covering Gram Parsons. The best song off of a really outstanding Gram Parsons tribute album. Marc Olson (of the Jayhawks) and his wive Victoria Williams do magic to Parsons' gospel/country (and eerily prescient) ode to early death.

"Keep On Rollin'" -- Sheryl Crow covering The Yardbirds -- From the Boys on the Side soundtrack. Crowe's very sexy vocals laid over an up-tempo version of the old song.

"Ol' 55" -- Sara McLachlan covering Tom Waits -- From the same album.

"Dolphins" -- Chris Robinson covering Tim Buckley -- You'll have to look for this one. I saw it live a year or so ago, and managed to hunt down a track online. It's a stripped down, accoustic version of the song. When Robinson isn't attempting to do backflips with his vocals, he really has a beautiful voice.

"Sweet Child O' Mine" -- Luna covering Guns n' Roses. Slowed-down, understated cover of Axl's masterpiece. Crow does a good version of this song, too.

"Bird on a Wire" -- Willie Nelson covering Leonard Cohen. Willie might have the perfect voice for this song.

"Jolene" -- The White Stripes covering Dolly Parton. Just plain wow. Another that you'll have to find on your favorite fileswapping service.

"Magnet & Steel" -- Matthew Sweet and Lindsey Buckingham covering Walter Egan. Fun, live cover.

"Femme Fatale" -- Teenage Fanclub covering the Velvet Underground. The more well-known REM version is good, too.

"Smells Like Teen Spirit" -- The Bad Plus covering Nirvana. Not exactly a cover. More of a progressive piano jazz interpretation. You should be listening to The Bad Plus.

"The Gambler" -- Wyclef Jean covering Kenny Rogers. His "Wish You Were Here" is good too. Best part of this song is when Rogers himself jumps in. You have to hear Kenny Rogers sing "you gotta' count your duckets, when you're spinnin' that turntable," to believe it.

"Yeh Jo Halka Halka Saroor Hai" -- Jeff Buckley covering Nursat Fatah Ali Khan. There are dozens of Buckley covers to choose from, but this one's amazing for how well he pulls off an entire song in Urdu -- and he does it on a spontaneous request from the audience.

"Buckets of Rain" -- Vic Chesnutt covering Bob Dylan. Chesnutt's fragile voice carries this off nicely.

Your suggestions welcome.

So many people complain about the Holidays – too many parties to go to. Oh cry me a river, sister! Just a few weeks ago a friend explained that she would not be able to hang out until New Year's Eve because every December weekend was booked.

Every last one?

That’s right.

And to that I have just one thing to say – who are her other friends and where can I get some like that?

This will be the second Holiday season in a row that I have not a single party to attend. Of course something will spring up, but my calendar is empty as of December 9th.

My closest friends are partygoers, not party planners. Being both a party planner and a realist I see no reason to throw a bash when everyone has been booked for months.

On the bright side I don’t have to buy a lot of wine or trinkets to give as gifts to the host/hostess. There will be no slaving in the kitchen and buying of copious amounts of liquor that makes the check out guy wonder. I’m less (but not that much less) likely to suffer from a Holiday hangover. And last but not least the condiments in my refrigerator and soup cans in my pantry aren’t likely to cause me unwanted weight gain and heartburn.

As you step on the post-holiday scale or nurse a hangover with alka-seltzer, just think of me. It's okay to hate me because my friends are busy. I'll laugh last when they don't fit in their clothes.

And next year -- I’ll send out invites to my Holiday festivities in August.

The merry band of libertarian litigators at the Institute for Justice have latched onto yet another righteous cause.

This time, it's the government-mandated requirement that all producers of certain agricultural products be required pay up for generic ad campaigns designed to boost demand for their product -- be it beek, pork, honey, or in this case, milk. (Imagine you're a pork or beef farmer, and you're required to pay for Cool 2B Real, or Pork 4 Kids?)

So all of those "Got Milk?" ads you've seen aren't the result of milk producers getting together voluntarily to launch an ad campaign, they're the result of a federal mandate requiring every dairy producer to pay up, whether they want to or not.

IJ is representing a small dairy farm that wishes not to associate itself with its Big Dairy competitors.

I think there's another interesting angle to this story, too. The federal government is simultaneously requiring diary producers fund ad campaigns for milk, while cozying up to nanny-state organizations that criticize Big Dairy for promoting an unhealthy product in those very campaigns.

When the day comes that John Banzhaf finally launches his class action suit against Big Dairy or Big Pork, then, will he be able to name as co-defendant every dairy producer who was compelled by law to support the ad campaigns?

That's "Big Government Conservatism."

Doug Bandow has a wonderfully articulated piece on it in the latest American Conservative.

I have a short piece on Tech Central today about Rep. Jim Gibbons and his tadpole-catchin' ways.

Not sure if this is a real screenshot, or a hoax.

Either way, it's kinda' clever.

Given President Bush's go-ahead for the Prescription Drug Benefit today, it's time we dropped the LibertyMeter. Two points this time, and we're now at 40 -- a number of no statistical significance whatsoever.

I wanted to drop it lower, but I'm afraid if I tie LibertyMeter fluctuations with my level of outrage, we'd be down to zero by the time W. finishes his first term, thus rendering the entire excercise more useless than it already is.

So two points. W. stands at a net negative five since we started last February.

One of the few areas in the federal budget where the Bush administaration and the Republican leadership managed make cuts was the COPS program, President Clinton's 1994 proposal to put 40,000 new police officers on the streets at a cost of some $1 billion per year.

COPS doesn't work, as most any criminal justice professor will tell you. More cops don't mean less crime. In fact, more cops usually means more crime, at least statistically, because there are more cops on the streets to cover and report more incidents.

But in lots of cases, the COPS grants resulted not in more boots on the street, but in investment in revenue generators, such as automated speed and red light cameras, neither of which I'd gather most of us envisoned when President Clinton explained to us how the program would make the streets safer.

So no, I'm shedding no tears that COPS may get cut.

But hold on. Aren't we spending some $1.5 billion per year to train and staff an Iraqi police force? So how can the Bush administration justify spending $1.5 billion to protect Iraqis, but cut funding for a 10-year old program to staff and train cops here at home? What's the bigger threat to Americans, criminals on the streets of Brooklyn, or criminals on the streets of Basra?

That's exactly the case the National League of Cities is making:

American taxpayers have been told to pay a hefty premium for services in Iraq because those services are highly specialized, and because conditions there are dangerous. If that’s the case, should the nation be cutting the investment in our own police officers who require increasingly specialized skills and who put their lives on the line every day?

My guess is that the White House will buckle, and refund COPS, while still doling out the $1.5 billion for an Iraqi police force.

Then the precedent will have been set. You see where this is going.

"How come we can spend X dollars to build a public school system in Iraq, while America's public schools are dangerous and dilapidated?"

"How come we're spending X dollars to send Iraqis to business school when there are qualified low-income people in America who can't afford such an education?"

"Why are we paying Iraqi civil servants X dollars when our own civil servants are so vastly underpaid?"

"How come we're paying X dollars to provide Iraqi children with health care while (insert staggering number here) American children haven't seen a doctor in (insert tragic number here) years?"

My own thinking is that central planning will fail just as profoundly in Iraq as it does here at home. But I have to admit, if we're going to waste U.S. taxdollars on failed social programs, I'd rather they be on failed social programs for Americans, who fund them, than for Iraqis, who don't.

Who thinks the Bush administration will summon the courage to close the checkbook in the face of any of these arguments?

Yeah. Me neither.

Evidence from Sweden suggests that (gasp!) heavy government intervention seems to have little or no effect on obesity -- childhood or otherwise.

For years, this nation of nine million has had the sorts of programs, combining healthy diet and physical exercise, that antiobesity advocates elsewhere in the world dream about. Vending machines in Swedish schools are practically unheard of. TV commercials of any kind aimed at kids under 12 are banned. Schoolchildren as young as eight learn to cook healthy meals. Sports programs are heavily subsidized to get youngsters up and about.

But Swedish children are plumping up at alarming rates anyway. The number of kids who are overweight has tripled in the past 15 years -- roughly the same rate as in other European countries -- to 19% of boys and 15% of girls. Those levels are lower than those in Italy, Spain and the U.S., three leaders in childhood obesity, but they have come as a shock nonetheless.

"The increase is much steeper than we had expected," says Carl-Erik Flodmark, head of the childhood obesity unit at University Hospital in Malmo. "We had thought we were better off than other countries."

What is happening in Sweden and elsewhere in Scandinavia offers a note of caution to those searching for public-policy solutions to the growing global problem of obesity. Sweden's public-health programs, comprehensive as they are, still are losing ground to the combined temptations of fast food, heavy TV watching and Web-surfing that have taken hold in Sweden in the past decade.

Shocker.

Unfortunately, Swedish government officials in the article take an unfortunate (if predictable) "what more can we do" attitude instead of, "what we're doing isn't working, so why not just drop it, and leave people be?"

The delicious part of this story comes from Norway, which recently imposed the highest tax on soda in the world, and correspondingly saw per capita soda consumption jump to among the highest rates in the world.

Social planners in the U.S. often look to Scandinavia as the model society from whence we should glean our public policy. Perhaps these results will nudge them to conclude that we're getting fatter simply because we live in an age of convenience (a good thing), where good food abounds (another good thing), and that maybe, just maybe, it's okay to sit back and let people make their own choices about their lives, even if those choices may not necessarily be the healthiest choices.

But I doubt it.

Andrew Sullivan has his "Poseur Alert" running feature, in which he casts some light on people who take themselves far too seriously. The Washington Post Magazine has a feature called "First Person Singular," in which they ask someone to write a Cliff's Notes bio of themselves. This week's feature was Martha Burk, she of "Augusta is this generation's Selma" fame.

Burk has a serious martyr complex. I'd nominate her for poseur of the week.

She writes:

My job is righting wrong. I like it. The earliest I remember is in sixth grade. Somebody in the class was having a party and they invited everybody in the class but two or three kids. I was invited but I was outraged on the part of other kids who weren't invited. It would have been different had it been a group or something. But these kids were clearly being left out in a malicious way. I complained to the teacher, who then tipped off the parents. I got it straightened out.

The next time I remember [righting a wrong] was in college. An acquaintance, not even a good friend, was told by an apartment complex that they didn't have any vacant apartments, and I knew they did. So, she and I went to the mayor's office and had a two-person sit-in until a mysterious call came in that, yes, there were some vacant apartments. We never got to see the mayor, but we got our desired result.

There's always a consequence to rocking the boat, but I've never been fired from a job, or something like that. Most of the consequences I've suffered have been things like getting called bad names, getting vilified publicly, having my life threatened. There have been times that I have been scared. When we were doing the protests at Augusta [National Golf Club], I hired bodyguards because I had had some very explicit threats on my life. That's the reason to go on. As long as there's that kind of hatred in the world, and that kind of prejudice, then that's every bit of reason to go on -- not a reason to stop.

I think it's a little bit sad that some women are not aware of what the women's movement in general does for them, and some of the ways they're experiencing discrimination. They've become so used to it that they don't even notice it anymore. It's my job to make them notice.

You can't just be a hired gun in a job like this. You have to feel it, because it's hard. I get tired, but I don't get discouraged.

1) Do you think those kids who weren't given party invites were even more embarassed when Martha got involved, forced the party-throwers to include them, and thus further publicized the fact that they weren't invited in the first place? Do you think they felt welcome at the party?

The overwhelming evidence from playground history says the answers to those questions are yes and no, respectively.

2) The apartment story is curiously coy. Why was Burk's acquaintance not allowed to rent? She hints that this was a race thing, but I wonder why she wouldn't come out and say so if it was. Does Burk feel that a landlord should be required to rent to anyone, at any time? Are landlords allowed any discretion at all?

3) The second to last paragraph is the kicker. Burk has decided it is her duty to let women know they're still victims. Even those women who don't particularly feel like victims. This is a pretty consistent line of thought for Burk. During a debate on ESPN at the height of the Masters imbroglio, a female professional golfer who supported Augusta (her name escapes me) told Burk that she speaks for only a small group of people. Burk responded, "I wouldn't call 51% of the population a small group of people."

In Burk's mind, she speaks for all women. If you disagree with her, you aren't a free-thinking woman with her own opinions, you're a misguided soul who doesn't realize she's being oppressed.

If the front lines for gender equity these days involve fighting for the right of rich southern women to hit golf balls at clubs with rich southern men who don't particularly want them there, I'd say we're doing pretty darned well.

Your Congress, at work. Included in the new year-end spending bill, $50 million to build a rain forest...in Iowa. And $225,000 earmarked for no other reason than so one Congressman can clear his conscience at taxpayer expense:

Rep. Jim Gibbons, R-Nevada, says his swimming-pool project has more to do with polliwogs than pork.

He says he and some friends were responsible for clogging the drain with tadpoles, causing the pool to be temporarily shut down in the 1950s. He expects Congress to approve the $225,000 to repair the 61-year-old pool in the working-class neighborhood where he grew up in Sparks.

"I have an enormous guilty conscience for putting frogs in the swimming pool when I was about 10 years old," he said.

Like others who defend the federal money they secure for pet projects, Gibbons is not ashamed to elbow his way to the federal trough on behalf of his constituents.

After all, he reasons, everybody else in Congress does it. And if he didn't, the money would go to somebody else's district.

"This is a very meritorious project, one that I am not embarrassed about at all," he said in a telephone interview Thursday from Las Vegas.

UPDATE: The more I think about Rep. Gibbons, the angrier I get. No, $225,000 isn't a lot of money in the grand scheme of things. But why the hell should we let him get away with this? He's using almost a quarter million dollars of our money so he can feel better about a stunt he pulled as a kid? Fix the pool with your own damned money, Congressman. It's all the more aggravating that he isn't the least bit embarassed about it.

I'm thinking we ought to do something. I'm just not sure what.

Any ideas?

I must say, I was happy to see Oklahoma lose last night, but only because every college football season, I cheer for as much calamity to come to the Bowl Championship Series as possible. It looks like we'll get that this year. Delicious!

A buddy of mine (who blogs here) has an idea for college football that I think just might work, if only we could find ourselves a billionaire to make the whole thing come about.

Here's his plan:

Someone with lots of money to burn and who nurses a healthy loathing for the NCAA approaches the top four college football teams after all the bowls have been played. He offers each school a ridiculous amount of money to participate in a four-team playoff -- let's in mid-January. He rents out a huge stadium. The teams play.

The scheme would basically render the NCAA's end-of-year rankings useless. No matter what the scorebooks say, the team that wins our billionaire's private playoff would be known to most of the country as college football's best team. The NCAA would be left limp and cold. The organization would no longer have any validity in college football. Particularly if it's own "champion" lost in the playoff.

Of course, the NCAA would likely take drastic action against the four participating schools. And there'd be a ton of litigation afterward. But I think anti-NCAA angst is about to reach the boiling point. I think the day is coming when the four top teams in the land would have a price, though I'd imagine it would be a very, very expensive one.

But our billionaire need only show some savvy to pull this thing off. He'd need to convince the top four teams and their schools that the playoff is worth doing on principle, in addition to the paycheck. He would need to convince them that any repercussions the NCAA took against them would be meaningless because if all four agreed to play, the NCAA would instantly become meaningless.

I'm not even certain our billionaire would lose money on the deal. First, he'd be a national hero. Second, he'd likely recoup his investment on TV rights alone. Even if the major networks bow to the NCAA and refuse to pay for rights, he could make a fortune on pay-per-view. Hell, he could probably do pay-per-view with commercials. I'd buy the package on principle alone. I'd imagine there are millions just like me.

Imagine if, after the bowls this year, Oklahoma, LSU, USC and whoever finishes best among Michigan, Texas and Kansas State -- held a privately-funded playoff just before the Super Bowl.

Wouldn't you pay 50 bucks to watch it? And wouldn't the winner have a more legitimate claim to "best team in the country" than whoever wins the Sugar Bowl?

So let's see, you're the biggest spending president since FDR. Polls show you've blown your rally-round-the-flag bump presidents generally get from going to war, because Americans are growing ever skeptical of the motives and planning for that war.

What do you do? You ask your national greatness neocon advisors for an expensive, patriotism-building endeavor that will make you seem bold, visionary, and forward-thinking.

You announce a grand, money-pit plan to boldly go where....um....we already went. Thirty years ago. And to do it, you'll need to hand over a ton of money to NASA, a federal agency that has done little to win public confidence over the last ten years.

I'm fairly sure this "go back to the moon" thing is still in trial-balloon mode. But it's monumentally stupid. There's nothing on the moon for us, save for a plan to install a telescope, which most scientists think can be done with an unmanned spacecraft.

Advice to the president: You wanna' put a man on the moon in the next five years? Dissolve NASA. Immediately. At the very least, lift the monopoly the agency has over domestic space flight. Open space up to the private sector. Let rich sci-fi geeks buy lunar landing thrill vacations.

Not only will you put another man on the moon, in ten years, there'll be a Starbucks. In 20, the first lunar Star Trek convention.

The Wall Street Journal's "Best of the Web" gave my paper a plug on Friday, though in wry BOTW fashion:

Let's raise a glass to Utah, which 70 years ago today became the 36th state to ratify the 21st Amendment, and thus repealed Prohibition. In honor of the anniversary, the Cato Institute has a new paper out on what it calls "the new war on social drinking." It just goes to show you that a think tank is a place where people go to think about getting tanked.

Looks like the Washington Post, of all places, is picking up on the post-reductio America meme--am I using "meme" correctly?

Anyway, check out this list of ways your celebration of the birth of the baby Jesus can kill you. Look for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to come for your eggnog...

Seems the White House isn't content with merely growing government at rates unseen since the New Deal, it has also decided to take political repercussions against those few principled Republicans who are putting up some resistance.

From The Hill:

Well-placed sources said Bush hung up on freshman Rep. Tom Feeney after Feeney said he couldn’t support the Medicare bill. The House passed it by only two votes after Hastert kept the roll-call vote open for an unprecedented stretch of nearly three hours in the middle of the night.

Feeney, a former Speaker of the Florida House of Representatives whom many see as a rising star in the party, reportedly told Bush: “I came here to cut entitlements, not grow them.”

Sources said Bush shot back, “Me too, pal,” and hung up the phone...

...Republican aides said conservatives who voted against the bill, including Reps. Mike Pence (Ind.), John Culberson (Texas), Jeff Flake (Ariz.), Roscoe Bartlett (Md.) and Jim Ryun (Kan.), would suffer for their votes against the Medicare bill.

Leadership aides said those members “can expect to remain on the back bench” in the months ahead.

Words fail me.

The search for an unembarassing alternative to Bush for 2004 continues.

For the last couple of weeks, I've thought about supporting Joe Lieberman. His pro-trade, pro-market rhetoric in the debates has been refreshing, particularly in the face of the protectionist tripe coming from Dean and Gephardt, and was nearly enough to blur his silly positions on cultural issues and the "I'm God's favorite" shtick he he pulled in the 2000 campaign.

Well, to hell with that. Joe Lieberman, libertarian, meet Joe Lieberman, nanny statist.

I have an op-ed in this morming's Chicago Sun-Times. Y'all are probably familiar with most of the arguments.

Also, I had an interview last night with CBS Radio, which I was told would be included in a news package this morning on the 70th anniversary of Prohibition's repeal.

So unless the story got bumped, there's a pretty good chance you'll hear it at the top of the hour national news this morning if you listen to a radio station that uses CBS for its national news report.

Upcoming radio interviews w/ your favorite Agitator:

2:30pm ET today: The Dolans on WOR in New York City.

4:30pm ET today: The Andy Thomas Show, statewide in South Carolina.

8:45am ET Monday: WTIC FM in Hartford, CT.

My interview in Seattle this morning was interesting. I was debating the .08 BAC threshold with the host, who then brought on a guest -- the Washington State president of Mothers Against Drunk Driving. She then informed us that she had been hit by a drunk driver, was in a coma for a month, and lost a leg in the accident.

Tough way to start a debate.

Turns out, however, that the driver who hit her had a BAC of .26, and was an admitted alcoholic. Which sort of only proves the point that using law enforcement resources to man well-publicized roadblocks aimed at the .08 to .10 crowd is a misallocation of resources.

Alcoholics who regularly drive with a .26 BAC aren't going to be dissuaded by newspaper articles letting them know there's going to be a sobriety checkpoint at 5th and Elm this weekend. They'll find another route home.

You really need to read this NY Times article to believe it. Not only can you no longer smoke New York City's public places, it is also illlegal to possess an ashtray in public. That would include collectables, antiques, even that lump of fired clay your kid made for you in art class. And "inspectors" can raid your office or place of business without a search warrant to find them.

Think I'm exaggerating? Read:

As some New Yorkers have learned the hard way, the mere existence of an ashtray in a place where smoking is prohibited can lead to a summons. It doesn't matter if the ashtray is stored well away from public areas. It doesn't matter if it is used as a decoration, or to hold paper clips or M & M's. No ashtrays are allowed, period...

...As first reported in The New York Post the other day, health officials, acting on an anonymous tip, insisted last week on inspecting the office of the club's executive director, John Martello.

They found no one smoking. But — shades of Eliot Ness on the trail of rum runners from Canada — they came upon three ashtrays on a shelf behind a desk.

THEY were there just to get them out of the way," Mr. Martello said yesterday. "We had to get them out of the public eye. They were collected. Who thinks about throwing them out?"

"I think what I was most appalled about," he said, "was the constitutionality of them being able to come in and search my office. Unlike the police, they don't need a search warrant. They just walked in on an anonymous tip."

Ms. Mullin acknowledged that "there is some discretion offered to our inspectors."

"If we do see stacks of ashtrays," she said, "it is tantamount to the potential that people are permitting smoking."

You can be fined for actions "tantamount to the potential" that you're allowing people to smoke. Actual smoking need never have taken place.

(Hat tip: Sasha Castel)

My Cato paper on neoprohibition is now live. Read it here.

My Fox column this week ties this week's anniversary of the end of the original Prohibition with the drug war and similar failed government attempts to curb our appetite for sin. Read it here. Also, note the new spiffy graphic. It's now called "Straight Talk....Radley Balko." That's me.

Finally, I'll be on the Mike Siegel show on KTTH in Seattle tomorrow at 11am ET, or 8am local time. No online streaming, unfortunately.

UPDATE: If you go to the Fox "Views" page, you'll see that my column today comparing the failures of drug prohibtion to the failures of alcohol prohibition is teased at the top.

If you hit "reload" a few times, eventually you'll get the amusing sight of my column being teased just under a banner ad sponsored by the ONDCP.

Doesn't always work. The ads are rotated in and out. But when it does, it makes me smile.

Duane Freese keeps the post-reductio meme rolling along.

Geez. This is absolutely heartbreaking. A 7 year-old boy in Louisisana was disciplined by his school because, when asked by another student about his parents, he explained that this two mothers were gay.

The teacher -- who ought to be slapped -- made the poor kid to fill out a disciplinary form in which he was forced to write out what he did:

"I sed bad wurds,"

...and what he should have done:

"Cep my mouf shut."

To get the full effect of just what this poor kid was forced to do -- basically admit that his own parents were vulgar -- be sure and read the disciplinary slip, which the ACLU has uploaded in PDF form. Note this shithead teacher's scribble at the top. Note the double underline for emphasis. Seems pretty clear to me little Marcus was this witch's tool to express moral disaproval of Marcus' parents orientation.

I will curse her now: May little Marcus's teacher soon fall deeply in love with the man of her dreams. And may that man devatate her, break her heart, by leaving her for another man.

Shameful.

The school superintendent now denies it, but Marcus' parents claim he was later forced to attend a special disciplinary session, in which he was required to repeatedly write, "I will never use the word 'gay' in school again."

Hat tip to Volokh, who has updates here and here.

Law school chum Sarah sends this piece on the licensing of theaters (theaters?) from the Chicago Tribune:

Several small, non-profit Chicago theaters still are reeling from a surprise Nov. 21 crackdown by the City of Chicago's Department of Revenue on venues without the required Public Place of Amusement (PPA) licenses. And at least one of the city's theaters consequently has given up its home for good...

...The long-standing city requirement that all venues offering live entertainment for an admission fee have a PPA license appears clear. "Like any other business, theaters cannot operate unless they have the necessary license," said Bea Reyna-Hickey, the city's revenue director. "We're charged with enforcing the municipal code for the safety and welfare of the public."

Yet some tiny theaters--such as Profiles--have operated for a decade or more without one.

The application process for a PPA typically takes at least 60 days, with a mandatory 30 days for neighborhood comment. For a hand-to-mouth arts group, that's an eternity. "Storefront theater in Chicago will be gone as we know it if the city doesn't stop this crazy stuff," said Daryl W. Cox, of Profiles Theatre. "The process takes forever."

Timeline Theatre was forced to close its hit production of "The Lion in Winter" three weeks early. "There has been a theater in this space for 45 years," said P.J. Powers, Timeline's artistic director. "We were never contacted by anyone. The first time we heard from the city, it was to close us down."

Reyna-Hickey said the inspectors merely were working their "complaint-related queues" on Nov. 21. "We will do everything we can to work with these theaters," she said, "but the public would not want to be in any location that's not up to code."

Will Wilkinson reports in the comments section on the D.C. city council meeting this morning, where they discussed the proposed smoking ban:

...it sounds like [D.C. Mayor]Tony Williams said he'd veto the ban. And Carol Schwartz submitted an alternative -- with 7 co-sponsors! -- that would provide tax breaks to businesses that become non-smoking, but doesn't require anyone to do so. Health fascist and Vin Diesel wannabe Adrian Fenty was visibly pissed this morning. So I think the Schwartz thing is what we're going to get. And I think we may have more or less won.... For now.

But my second thought was, how sad is it when a "victory" for personal freedom is not when our government decides to give us some of our liberty back, but when it merely agrees not to take more of it away?

Yeah. Guess I'm a cynic. Nevertheless, kudos to the Ban the Ban crew for a job well done.

Marilyn Manson has upset the Swiss.

From the article "[Manson] is under criminal investigation in Switzerland after a religious group filed a formal complaint about his stage act, saying Manson went too far by breaking laws in place to protect the sanctity of Swiss religion."

Apparently, you can claim neutrality in the face of mass genocide and attempted world domination, but ripping up the Bible on stage is unacceptable.

Go to Google, type "miserable failure", click "I'm feeling lucky".

Report back with your results. This was mine.

Props to Moore's Lore.

Go read Gene Healy's piece on the D.C. smoking ban.

There's a public hearing this morning at 10am. It looks like a done deal. The city council will also probably ban cell phone use while driving.

Up next: The city council will mandate that you wipe from front to back, and not vice-versa.

Lots of you have asked how you can support me, your favorite blogger. And Virginia Postrel keeps telling me I should mention the tip jar more often.

Okay. Both of those are lies.

But if you don't want to hit the tip jar, there is another way you can help out, and it costs you nothing.

If you're doing any of your holiday shopping on Amazon, come to TheAgitator.com first, then click on the Amazon button over there on the right. Amazon then gives me a little cash for every item you buy.

Doesn't cost you a penny!

Also, if you buy me something from my Amazon wish list, I'll send you a polaroid of my left shoulder.

Via Missy Schwarz, I find the D.C. Nightlife Coalition, which aims to fight onerous regulations on D.C.'s bars, clubs and concert venues. That includes the smoking ban, but also the RAVE Act, building codes, and alcohol regs.

Check 'em out.

Jessica Lynch, coward? I think these two letters to the editor of the latest Time magazine make a pretty good case:

Instead of being raised to hero status by the press and the media, Lynch should have been court-martialed. By her own admission, she threw down her weapon and just prayed. This is cowardice in the face of the enemy. I am a Vietnam verteran, and I can assure you that the only heroes in the Jessica Lynch story are the troops who rescued her.

Dan Raveia
Fairfax, VA

If Lynch were male, she would be called a coward. There have been countless acts of real heroism in Iraq by soldiers who have put their lives on the line to save others. The media should be reporting those stories, not trying to manufacture a female war hero.

Kirk J. Macolini
Ithaca, NY

This is odd.

At least a dozen New York firemen have left their wives for the widows of other firemen who died on September 11.

So Rummy won the 2003 Foot in Mouth Award however I spent far more time thinking about one of the notable runner-ups.

Arnold Schwarzenegger, MY state's Governator:

"I think that gay marriage is something that should be between a man and a woman."

His gaffe reminded me of the outdated attitude of past decades -- when gay marriage WAS typically between a man and a woman.

Even back in the not-so-distant 1990's -- living in San Francisco I knew a number of gay men who were married to women. Though it was sad to see the pain inevitable with divorce, we'd cheer for our guy pals as they started dating men and at last feeling free to be themselves.

It's hard for me to understand the justification in NOT wanting to see two adults in love get married. Life-long commitment should be between the two people involved, afterall. But it seems Arnold has yet to realize that.

1) Jim Henley (via TalkLeft) on trouble in GitMo.

2) Jesse Walker crosses over to the dark side (congratulations!).

3) Colby Cosh reviews Gregg Easterbrook's new book, and conjures up some sympathy for the closed-minded.

4) Joanne McNeil with insight on Cap Hill staffer sex habits in a cleverly-headlined post.

5) Jefferson Kiely ponders a certain pillow-lipped Agitator.com favorite Fox Newstress.

6) Tom G. Palmer debunks the myth of the ignorant American.

7) Moxie is cheating on us already, gang. And with....Wil Wheaton.

8) I don't know which is more pathetic, that I understand this joke, or that I'm slightly offended that I wasn't included in it.

9) Okay fellas, you're reaching, here.

10) Obligatory nanny-culture link: Heh.

Longtime reader Brian Hipp writes:

Do you and libertarians think it should be legal to sell organs? I've always thought that this should be legal. I saw an ad for donating spinal fluid once, and I thought about it, until I read that I would have to pay a substantial fee to the hospital for extracting it.

I also think about it whenever I read a sad story about people waiting years for a kidney or whatever. It seems to me that if we legalized it, some private companies could set up clinics to test prospective donors and set up national databases.

There are certainly lots of people who would be willing to donate organs. We could supply the whole world with kidneys, livers, and the like.

I suppose most people find the practice distasteful and fear exploitation of the poor, but it seems to me that the benefits outweigh the costs. Hell, I'd give
up a kidney to help pay off my student loans.

Not only that, but I'm sure some entrepeneur would be willing to pay people a small sum now in exchange for access to their organs after death.

Critics say that poor people would be more willing to risk giving up a kidney or the like because they're more in need of the money. Likewise, if there were a real market for donated organs, the rich would benefit most, because they're the ones who could afford them.

The answer to both questions is....so what? If a poor person has something that a rich person is willing to pay for, why should we prevent that from happening? And it isn't as if the priviliged don't already get bumped to the front of the line, anyway. Mickey Mantle, anyone?

I suppose the ultimate paranoia is that poor people, or greedy people, will begin having babies solely for the harvesting of organs. That seems farfetched to me. And besides, once a baby's born, he of course assumes all the rights the rest of us have, which means mom and dad can't go selling his pancreas to the highest bidder.

Thomas Sowell makes these points much more eloquently than I.

I'll be doing Blanquita Cullum's syndicated radio show today at 1:30pm ET.

Topic: Neoprohibition.

Listen here.

Okay, so I agree with the gist of what John McCain's saying, but since when are "drunken sailors" known for their crazy spending habits? I'm pretty sure it's "swear like a drunken sailor," isn't it?

Note to Sen. McCain: Despite our disagreements, I'm with you on this one. So please feel free to use my metaphor next time, "spending like Ally Hilfiger on meth."

It's sorta' funny, pop culture literate, and the youngsters will think you're hip.