Naperville, Illinois enters the "most asinine neoprohibitionist law on the books" contest:

In the last six months, Julie Beata, 19, said she has received two citations from Naperville police for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Both times, said the North Central College freshman, she was picking up underage friends who had had a few drinks at a party.

Beata was in violation of Naperville's presence restriction ordinance, said to be the first such law in the nation. The law allows non-drinkers under 21 to be ticketed if they are knowingly in the company of underage people drinking alcohol.

"I understand what they are trying to do, but I also think it's stopping people from [getting] safe rides home," Beata said. "I know a lot of people ended up driving home that shouldn't have."

... Local authorities view the presence restriction as essential to Naperville's quest to curb underage drinking, however.

"If you are at a party [where underage drinking is taking place] and you are under 21, you don't belong there, and you need to leave," said Naperville Police Sgt. Joel Truemper. "We're trying to protect people."

So now the only way Naperville underage drinkers can find a way home from parties where there's underage drinking....is to ride home with others underage drinkers.

If you can find it among the advertisements, search tags, and various other bells and whistles that make up the new site design, my new column is up at FoxNews.com.

It's on sports, ESPN, and race.

Two weird ways to pass the time, one red-state, one blue-state.

Which one's more disturbing?

Patirck Reardon has a cover piece for the Chicago Tribune Magazine on the slow, lamentable death of a fine institution: the neighborhood tavern.

Click "more" for excerpts.

Always interesting Jack Shafer gives the lowdown on background, with this interesting explanation of the D.C. inside information market:

Why can't reporters wean themselves from their overreliance on anonymous sources? The last time I wrapped my mind around this subject, I portrayed Washington reporters as victims: The surplus of journalists and the relative scarcity of knowledgeable sources allow the sources to pick the rules of engagement. If a reporter insists that a source put the information on the record, the source can always say, "Screw you" and shop it to a publication that will agree to anonymity. If what the source has to say is true and newsworthy, he'll find a market. The advantage held by knowledgeable anonymice reduces the likelihood that Washington journalists will ever decrease the number of anonymous sources, let alone eliminate them.

I've always been troubled by Ronald Reagan's decision to open his 1980 presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi. Philadelphia is really only known for one thing -- the murder of three civil rights workers there in 1964. I've never heard a satisfactory explanation for why the Reagan campaign chose Philadelphia as its kickoff stop. In a well-written, critical-but-not-sneering column, William Raspberry again broaches the subject, and adds that Reagan's Philadelphia speech made mention of "states' rights," an important principle unfortunately co-opted by Confederate apologists and segregationists.

The Media Research Center's Brent Bozell responds:

Actually, most of the speech targeted the failures of Jimmy Carter, but Reagan said, "I believe in states' rights; I believe in people doing as much as they can at the private level."

The weird thing about this is that we’ve almost never seen this anecdote in all the liberal screeds of the 1980s and 1990s. You won’t find it much in old TV news transcripts or news magazine stories. The main purveyor of this spin line over the last twenty years is....Jesse Jackson.

But every reporter who recycled Jesse’s old tale left out several crucial facts. First, Reagan wasn’t speaking in code to the KKK. He was dead serious about granting federal powers back to the states, period. One of his primary initiatives was a "New Federalism" that would reverse the trend of centralizing all government power in Washington, returning it to states and localities with block grants.

Second, on the day after the supposedly racist-encouraging Mississippi speech, Reagan traveled to New York for a speech to the Urban League, where the Washington Post reported on August 5, 1980 that Reagan declared, "I am committed to the protection of the civil rights of black Americans. That commitment is interwoven into every phase of the programs I will propose." Adviser Martin Anderson explained Reagan would uphold ongoing "affirmative action" programs. Do those sound like code words for Southern racists? That might explain why the story didn’t become much of a left-wing legend back in the 1980s.

Reagan wasn't a racist. His personal letters and private reflections made public over the years confirm that. But he couldn't have been ignorant of Philadelphia's history. Seems to me the only logical conclusion here is that Reagan calculated the support he'd get from the working white south for the move's symoblism was more important to him than avoiding giving implied approval to the south's nasty racial history.

I think it's an ugly blemish on his record.

Sure, I can see the ethical implications. And perhaps on some level it is a tad unseemly.

But frankly, I still think this is a swell idea, and the poetic justice of it smacks sweet.

Constantino Diaz-Duran has a touching post on Reagan, patriotism, and where one calls home.

I have a lengthy op-ed in today's National Post, which is sort of a mix of new material and material culled from my TCS dispatches from Williamsburg. It's part of a weeklong series the paper is doing on junk science and obesity.

It's only available via subscription online, so I've pasted the text below.

So what was that about the NBA's (L)Eastern Conference?

Granted, my guys didn't win. But we took the Pistons deeper than the best the west had to offer.

Hats off to Detroit. And hats off to Larry Brown. Great coach. Good guy.

Now, let's see Phil Jackson coach a team that doesn't have the two best players in the league on its roster.

Here's the best advice college grads could possibly get, but is so rarely given to them:

The conclusion is unavoidable: If you have a good education, you shouldn't just consider getting rich. Creating and amassing wealth is an outright moral obligation. Do so and you can take comfort not just in financing public services but in knowing that you are giving people what they need or want, generating jobs and underwriting the affluence that makes art, justice, environmental protection and other social goods possible.

It would almost be worth a lifetime of clandestine leftism just to come out of the free market closet for one brief, shining moment at an elitist university to deliver such a message.

Hat tip: Pieces of Flare.

I'm quoted on obesity in the latest issue of Health Care News.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Extreme Ironing:

Clawing up ice-crusted, razor-sharp mountain peaks can get a little boring. And dangling upside down from a bungee cord over jagged cliffs is, face it, rather ho-hum.

But now there's a way to add excitement, a dash of danger, the adrenaline rush of risk: Take along an ironing board, a sturdy steam iron and a load of wrinkled shirts.

It's not for the faint of heart, to be sure. But extreme ironing - the marriage of activities like cliff jumping and kayaking treacherous rapids with what participants call "the satisfaction of a well-pressed shirt" - has been catching on...

...."Our aim is to have the level of recognition that it becomes an Olympic sport," he said. "If you can have synchronized swimming and curling, I think extreme ironing has as much to offer."

It would be the first Olympic sport in which the athletes did not use their real names. "In order to avoid the ridicule of our peers," Mr. Shaw and his compadres adopt pseudonyms, he wrote in a how-to book, "Extreme Ironing." Mr. Shaw is Steam. Others are Cool Silk, Iron Mike, Fe (the chemical symbol for iron), Jeremy Irons and Iron Lung.

The first Extreme Ironing World Championship was held in Germany in 2002 and was judged by a white-gloved panel of German homemakers. (A second world championship could come soon.) Eighty teams from 10 countries competed on an obstacle course arrayed in the shape of an iron, pressing boxer shorts and blouses while scaling a climbing wall, hanging from a moss-covered tree branch and squeezing under the hood of a car...

...The actual ironing does count. "Ironists," Mr. Shaw wrote in his book, "are sometimes so absorbed in getting themselves into some sort of awkward or dangerous situation with their ironing board that they forget the main reason they are there in the first place: to rid their clothing of creases and wrinkles." The quality of the pressing counts for 60 of 120 points. Style counts for 40 points and speed 20.

Mr. Shaw's team took a gold medal, as did a German contestant, Hot Pants, who won a trip to Hawaii. "She really took care on her collars and cuffs," said Short Fuse, a k a Penny Wilkerson, who is on the American tour along with Starch (Matthew Patrick) and Steam...

...Shirts have been pressed from Everest to the Brazilian rain forest, on bicycles and scuba dives. One of the few American ironists once cut an iron-shaped hole in a frozen lake in Wisconsin. But his shirt, upon surfacing, froze.

Next week, Mr. Shaw's crew will iron on Mount Rushmore and among alligators and bison.

Sorry.

Here's a very cool NY Times article on the what the early cosmos may have sounded like. Prof. Mark Whittle used ripples in the cosmic microwave background to discern what songs were played in the earliest moments of time:

The cosmic sound waves stretched 20,000 light-years, moved at half the speed of light, and were about 50 octaves below what people can hear. Dr. Whittle shifted the sounds to the human audible range, producing a chord like the sound of a jet engine. He used computer models to generate the cosmic chords from creation for the first million years and condensed them to five seconds.

The Big Bang actually erupted in complete silence. In the first instant, the mass of the universe was spread out completely evenly. No pressure differences, no sound.

But after that, the quiet vanished.

''For the first 400,000 years,'' Dr. Whittle said, ''it sounds like a descending scream falling into a dull roar.''

Over the first million years, Dr. Whittle said, the music of the cosmos also shifted from a pleasant major chord to a more somber minor one.

1) The New York Times endorses a state bill that would require public and private entities to take measures aimed at curbing "light pollution."

2) Mayor Bloomberg's latest war is on "noise pollution."

Anyone in the Empire State concerned about the dirtying up of New Yorkers' liberty?

Bill Godshall, who has a Smokefree network email address, writes:

Based upon the absurd logic expressed in your op/ed in yesterday's Washington Post advocating so-called property rights of business owners/managers to expose workers and customers to carcinogenic and poisonous chemicals in cigarette smoke, all business owners also have a property right to allow rapes, torture, lychings and other murders as long as it is done on their property.

Sounds like CATO has no respect for the rights of humans not to be harmed or killed by the actions of others, which is a fundamental principle of civiled [sic] society?

Guess not.

But then again, your op/ed also failed to acknowledge the fact that CATO has received millions of dollars from Philip Morris and other cigarette companies in exchange for CATO's pro cigarette industry lobbying and public relations op/eds, reports, etc.

Second, yes, Cato has over the years gotten some money from Philip Morris. Cato folks have also taken positions Philip Morris isn't fond of, such as opposition to the tobacco settlement. Where we're going to come down on an issue is pretty clear if you're familiar with basic classical liberal principles.

Finally, if Smokefree D.C.'s position is that allowing D.C. consumers and bar/restaurant employees to assume the negigable and arguable risk of secondhand smoke when choosing where they want to work and eat is the equivalent of allowing someone to murder, torture and rape others on their private property, I'll debate them as many times in as public a forum as they wish.

I think that line of thought rather aptly captures the extremism and absurdity of the anti-smoking crowd.

Let's have that debate. Let's have it often.

So you remember that State Department report which said that terrorist attacks around the world had declined?

Remember how the pro-war kids hailed it as evidence that "flypaper" was working? From the AP:

A State Department report that incorrectly showed a decline last year in terrorism worldwide was a "big mistake," Secretary of State Colin Powell said. "Very embarrassing. I am not a happy camper over this. We were wrong," the secretary told NBC's "Meet the Press."

1) From Marginal Revolution -- More data on President Bush's awful spending record. In terms of federal agency budget-cutting, his term ranks dead-last with Clinton 2. Of 15 agencies, guess how many have faced Bush's scalpel?

Zero. Oh-fer-fifteen. Also from MR, 70% of French schoolchildren dream of becoming bureaucrats, not entreprenuers or corporate leaders.

Finally, via MR, the frog-in-boiling-water parable is a myth!

2) Counterpunch asked editors, friends and contributors for their 25 favorite ablums, including he of impeccably good taste, Jesse Walker.

3) Merriam-Webster has published a list of what it says are its users "favorite words."

I hate plethora. Otherwise, the list is fun. A few of my favorites: strumpet and harlotte, tomfoolery and shenanigans, curmudgeon, schmuck, fledgling, bustling, flabbergasted, nefarious and malevolent, slobber-knocker, lugubrious and melancholy, burgeoning, plucky, eddying, and bosom.

4) Dallas cops have set up a website where they post they photos of men arrested for soliciting prostitutes. This is before the men have been tried. Hence the disclaimer:

ALL PERSONS ARE CONSIDERED INNOCENT UNTIL PROVEN GUILTY IN A COURT OF LAW.

This webpage is one of many tools implemented to combat street-level prostitution and public indecency crimes in our parks and alleyways, on our streets and in our parking lots. These criminal activities affect Dallas citizens, their neighborhoods and their quality of life. Citizens do not want prostitutes on their sidewalks, customers coming into their neighborhoods seeking sex for hire or their children exposed to sexual activities in public places.

Here's a new blog that covers the same beat as your humble Agitator -- sin, vice, and pleasure.

Should be a good resource.

To the roster of co-bloggers who filled in for me while I was in Williamsburg.

Your humble Agitator has a piece on the D.C. smoking ban in this week's Sunday Washington Post.

Except it's out on Saturday.

I'm also quoted in the Columbus Post-Dispatch on the same topic. It's only available onlie via subscription, but here's the relevant excerpt:

"The big thing that has changed is the people who are behind these bans are more organized now and they have tons of money now," said Radley Balko, policy analyst with the Cato Institute, a libertarian research group based in Washington, D.C.

SmokeFree Columbus is operating with a $390,000 grant from the Ohio Tobacco Use Prevention and Control Foundation.

Furthermore, Balko says, the tobacco industry doesn't appear to be attacking attempted bans with as much fervor.

However, there are still pro-smoking warriors. In Columbus, the Ohio Licensed Beverage Association is coordinating a group of opponents, including Andy Shaffer, vice president of Shaffer Services, which supplies cigarette vending machines and other items to bars and restaurants.

Earlier this week, opponents of a ban said they were shocked to hear the City Council might vote as soon as June 28. They have begun gathering data and market research in hopes of beating the SmokeFree proposal, or at least getting some concessions, Shaffer said.

The proposal SmokeFree Columbus presented Monday allows almost no exemptions. The only notable concession is an allowance for smoking in 20 percent of hotel rooms. The group originally wanted a smaller percentage but agreed to a more liberal policy when one hotel owner expressed concern he'd be hard-pressed to meet the needs of the annual smoker-heavy All-American Quarter Horse Congress.

Mostly, opponents of the ban say they want City Council members to listen to the experience of those elsewhere who say they've lost money or had to shutter their businesses after smoking restrictions were enacted.

And they look hopefully elsewhere: to New York, where the legislature is considering a bill to allow smoking in some businesses that use air-filtration systems; and to states such as Montana that have enacted so-called pre-emptive laws restricting bans by local government.

Another glimmer of hope, foes say, is a recent ruling in Washington, D.C., where a Superior Court judge stopped a ballot initiative banning smoking in bars and restaurants. Opponents argued that only elected officials should be able to make decisions that affect city income.

"I'd like to think that what's happened here in Washington could sort of represent a turning point," Balko said.

"I really do think we're going to hit a tipping point . . . where people say this is pretty much ridiculous."

Jim Henley asks, Brian Kieffer delivers.

Reason senior editor and syndicated columnist Jacob Sullum writes on the Monday forum I hosted here at Cato:

Since rising weight trends appeared in adults before they showed up among children, it looks like kids are imitating their parents' habits. "For better or worse," Zywicki said, "kids eat what their parents eat."

In his book Food Fight, Yale obesity expert Kelly Brownell—who, like Kunkel, wants to eliminate advertising to children—says, " It is easy to blame parents." No, it's not. It is easy to blame big corporations. Blaming parents means expecting them to take an active role in monitoring their kids' diets.

As New York University nutritionist Marion Nestle, another ad banner, suggests in her book Food Politics, that is not a popular message. "Most parents of my acquaintance tell me they are constantly arguing with their children over food choices," she writes. "Many prefer to reserve family arguments about setting limits for dealing with aspects of behavior that they consider more important."

Please. If parents don't have the wherewithal to say no when their kids ask for something they saw on TV, their problems go far beyond the risk of chubby offspring.

A health committee in the British House of Commons published an alarming report on obesity two weeks ago. The most alarming part, however, was an anecdote about a three year old girl with a BMI of nearly 40 who choked to death on her own fat. The girl was supposet to be emblamatic of the Brits' fat problem.

Except that the committee mislead the girl's real condition in the report. From the Independent:

Then it emerged that the girl was not, after all, a victim of the "obesogenic" environment - one which encourages over-eating and sedentary behaviour. Instead, she had a rare genetic defect which affected the appetite control mechanism located in the hypothalamus in her brain. The result was she had a ravenous appetite immune to the efforts of her parents to control it and unaffected by junk food advertising, school sports policy or government behaviour.