Disloyal Opposition

The ethical omnivorean

2010-03-11T09:04:00.000-08:00

Oh sure, we all jump through hoops to cook up the grains and greens when our vegetarian friends pop by, but when the shoe is on the other foot ...

No, mandatory drug treatment is not the answer

2010-03-10T12:24:00.000-08:00

Most of the drug debate takes place over the clear-cut issues: should the government be telling people what they can put into their bodies or shouldn't it? But beyond overt prohibition -- and with the potential to outlast repeal -- is the vast, mushy middle-ground where the government "helps" those poor souls who just can't handle their drugs. Surely, pushing addicts into treatment to help them with their abuse is an act of compassion, not an authoritarian intrusion. Ah, but who is an addict, and what's abuse? And who is to say we don't all run the risk of a bit of compassion in our lives if we award our would be saviors with the power to intervene?

In his guest post, "Leave my drugs alone," Denny Chapin, Managing Editor at AllTreatment.com, writes:

People will always abuse drugs, always disrupt families, and always harm others in pursuit of a high. And people will always defend their abuse, deny its effects, and bring themselves and others down with them. If we accept this reality, we can still act for a future of change, bring hope to families, and shake the dirt from career drug addicts. And to that degree, we must take action. Never is it 'just their problem'; it's ours.

Chapin concedes that "many drug users casually use drugs without negatively impacting those around them," but he asserts that the government may have a duty to intervene and force drug users into treatment when their drug use negatively impacts those around them -- particularly children -- and that it "must enforce mandatory drug treatment" when drug use leads to criminal activity.

There's truth in what Chapin says -- particularly about the ability of many people to casually use drugs "without negatively impacting those around them." While getting solid statistics about addiction is difficult, Reason magazine's Jacob Sullum pointed out in 2003, "A survey of high school seniors found that 1 percent had used heroin in the previous year, while 0.1 percent had used it on 20 or more days in the previous month. Assuming that daily use is a reasonable proxy for opiate addiction, one in 10 of the students who had taken heroin in the last year might have qualified as addicts." By contrast, when it comes to perfectly legal booze, according to the National Institutes of Health, "[a]bout 15 percent of those who experiment become alcohol-dependent at some point in life. This compares to a dependency rate of 25 percent in those who experiment with smoking tobacco, and around 4 percent in marijuana smokers."

Most users, then, do so without becoming addicted, and Chapin quotes Alan I. Leshner, Director of the National Institute of Drug Abuse, to the effect that addiction is "uncontrollable, compulsive drug seeking and use, even in the face of negative health and social consequences."

Chapin is also correct that abusers often do deny that they're abusing drugs and that their behavior is problematic. Then again, so do people accused of addiction and abuse who are actually just engaging in recreational behavior. The difficulty lies in separating use from abuse and in distinguishing criminal behavior caused by an intoxicating substance from criminal behavior caused by a criminal's innate unwillingness to respect the rights and property of others. For starters, what is drug abuse?

That strikes some people as a silly question, but it's absolutely fundamental. And there's no fixed definition of "abuse." Asked whether he thought drug abuse should be illegal, the prominent psychologist, lawyer and drug researcher Stanton Peele replied, "The answer to the question depends on what you mean by drug abuse—whether any use of illicit drugs, extreme or addictive drug use, or illegal behavior associated with drug use or extreme drug use."

Chapin seems to flirt with the first definition, suggesting that the mere act of ingesting certain intoxicants is, itself, abusive:

Does our government have a responsibility to get heroin out of households? "They're my kids, so what if they see a few needles or a joint around? I'm not forcing them to do anything." This disposition is far more dubious, with the potential to truly harm the future generations of Americans, our youth.

Does seeing a few needles or a joint really harm kids? If it does, does it really harm kids so much that their parents should be forced by armed men into drug treatment programs? If that's the case, mandatory treatment for drug abuse becomes something of a tautology, with all ingestion defined as "abuse" and evidence of a need for a forcible response. Drug treatment, then, is less of a medical response than an ideological one, and those providing treatment are acting less as psychologists, physicians and therapists than as agents of state policy.

But what if we go to Peele's second definition: illegal behavior associated with drug use? And by "illegal behavior" we mean real crimes against people and property. It's this definition that Chapin addresses when he says, "many criminals are forced into treatment programs because their crime was caused by, or related to their addiction, resulting from their uncontrolled, compulsive, and harmful behavior."

Since many crimes are a result of drug use, mandatory treatment, we're told, is the obvious response.

Peele differs, saying "addicts—or any drug users—should be liable for any crimes they commit, whether committed while intoxicated, in the pursuit of their addiction, or under any other conditions. In this regard, I differ from many advocates for addicts, who may say that—since addicts are out of control of their behavior—they should not be liable for their actions, at least while intoxicated." (Peele, by the way, also takes issue with the way many 12-step programs go about their business, especially with coerced participants.)

The idea here is that people are responsible for their actions -- the devil didn't make them do it, and neither did the booze or the methamphetamine. Yes, a criminal may have alcohol or drugs in his or her system when he knocks over a convenience store, but that was the culmination of a series of choices. Treatment might be offered to criminals in the same way as other medical and educational services are offered, as a means of maintaining or improving their health and changing their circumstances. But pursuing drug treatment would have to be the choice of the criminal who is responsible for his or her own actions in all circumstances.

Fundamentally, the argument for mandatory treatment comes down to two fundamentals: all drug use is abuse, and drugs make people do bad things they wouldn't otherwise do. But not all use is abusive -- in fact, most drug use is not. And an asshole who does bad things and takes drugs is, at the end of the day, just an asshole.

Forgetting those points creates an invitation to the government to intervene in our lives if we simply engage in behavior that rubs officialdom the wrong way -- and it also allows the powers-that-be to let real criminals off easy for their bad decisions.

Chapin argues that, with mandatory treatment, "[a]t their worst, an addict won't benefit from treatment, simply going through the motions." But that's not the worst; the worst is that people living peaceful lives will lose their freedom and become subjects of forcible government intervention.

If you want to be compassionate toward those who use intoxicants to excess, that's great. Just don't arm that compassion with handcuffs and guns.

Guest post: Mandatory treatment for drug users

2010-03-09T11:51:00.000-08:00

As part of a continuing series that I just started and will repeat whenever I feel like doing so, below is a guest post from a reader who takes a position contrary to my own on at least one topic -- in this case, mandatory treatment for drug users who are perceived to have crossed a line and so necessitated government intervention. The author is Denny Chapin, Managing Editor at AllTreatment.com.

Wait with eager anticipation for my response.

'Leave My Drugs Alone'
by Denny Chapin

As citizens of the United States, we want two things: first to be protected against the Hobbesian Leviathan of governmental power and second, to be protected by that governmental power when other citizens are threatening our freedom. We ask our government to stay out of matters that don't concern them, while demanding they protect us from irate citizens that diminish our quality of life.

In practical terms, we want freedom from government oppression when we want to do something our government does not allow, like taking drugs, and we also want protection from the government when a drug addict breaks into our home to fuel his addiction. The question we must ask is this: when, how, and what actions should our government take to ensure the protection of its citizens? and when is this protection oppressive and negative? How do we weigh these two forces against one another? Is there a satisfying solution, or is will this balancing act always produce argument and dissatisfaction?

Real World Example: Drugs

Alan I. Leshner, Director of the National Institute of Drug Abuse, defines addiction as "uncontrollable, compulsive drug seeking and use, even in the face of negative health and social consequences." Drug addicts, by their nature, act in uncontrolled, compulsive ways, having a negative impact on their health and the social atmosphere around them.

Many drug users desire to be protected against governmental prosecution for using illegal drugs. They say "let me smoke marijuana in peace, it's my body I'm hurting, not anyone else's!" or "I'm less crazy when I take a hit of heroin, otherwise I'd be messing up even more peoples lives". And to a degree, there is some merit to their arguments, since many drug users casually use drugs without negatively impacting those around them.

But what about those drug users who cannot--does the government have a responsibility to step in and demand some form of action when an alcoholic completely ignores, or worse, physically abuses their children? Does our government have a responsibility to get heroin out of households? "They're my kids, so what if they see a few needles or a joint around? I'm not forcing them to do anything." This disposition is far more dubious, with the potential to truly harm the future generations of Americans, our youth.

Landing in Jail

In America, many criminals are forced into treatment programs because their crime was caused by, or related to their addiction, resulting from their uncontrolled, compulsive, and harmful behavior. When it gets to the level of incarceration, our government has a duty to intervene, not for the sake of an addict, but for the sake of the people that addict is surrounded by. It is at this extreme degree of action that we must enforce mandatory drug treatment, irregardless of the intentions of the addict. At their worst, an addict won't benefit from treatment, simply going through the motions. But hopefully, at its best, treatment will give them some perspective, showing them a window of sobriety to look through and see the world as they've built it up, and the world they could have.

There will never be a satisfying answer. People will always abuse drugs, always disrupt families, and always harm others in pursuit of a high. And people will always defend their abuse, deny its effects, and bring themselves and others down with them. If we accept this reality, we can still act for a future of change, bring hope to families, and shake the dirt from career drug addicts. And to that degree, we must take action. Never is it 'just their problem'; it's ours.

My response is here.

Judge Jim Gray calls B.S. on drug prohibition

2010-03-09T11:16:00.000-08:00

"The government has as much of a right to control what I as an adult put into my body as it does what I put into my mind. It's none of their business." So says Jim Gray, who recently retired as the presiding judge of the Superior Court of California for Orange County. A former drug warrior as a prosecutor and then a judge, Gray came to see that prohibition of disfavored intoxicants was a perverse and impractical policy -- and one with serious moral and economic consequences.

Gray was unusual among government officials who have turned against prohibition in that he started speaking out while he was on the bench, making public appearances calling for changes in policy, including full legalization, and authoring a book making the same case.

He presents his arguments in short form in the video below from ReasonTV.

Hüsker Dü -- Don't Want To Know If You Are Lonely

2010-03-03T20:38:00.000-08:00

Apropo of not a goddamned thing, Here's Hüsker Dü's "Don't Want To Know If You Are Lonely." (The video is here, and if you can figure out how to embed that, let me know.)

A lot of Hüsker Dü fans dismiss Candy Apple Gray -- the album that featured "Don't Want To Know If You Are Lonely." I disagree, finding the album mature, but still angry, and connected to real life. There's a reason I keep coming back to it, again and again. Warehouse, on the other hand ...

These guys, the Pogues and the Replacements largely defined my musical life in the '80s. Interestingly, they all continue to sound good to me and multiple albums by each band are loaded on my Sansa Clip. After listening to a lot of jazz and lounge singers recently, I've been turning back to punk, at least partially because my four-year-old has Sinatra on a continuous loop and refuses to listen to "that yelling music." Yeah, really. Maybe we can compromise with Sid Vicious's take on "My Way."

Watch out for 'Tea Party terrorists' -- like Paine and Thoreau

2010-03-01T12:06:00.000-08:00

You'd think that, after a couple of centuries of major American figures describing government as, at most, something to be tolerated, political pundits would have made their peace with the idea that skepticism toward state power has a core place in American political life. If your toes tingle at the thought of more coercive programs, laws, politicians and bureaucrats, you're the (very) odd duck, not the folks with anti-government views. And yet, we still get the likes of Frank Rich throwing high-profile hissy fits because "the unhinged and sometimes armed anti-government right that was thought to have vaporized after its Oklahoma apotheosis is making a comeback," as heralded by ... Andrew Joseph Stack III's Kamikaze-style airborne attack on the Internal Revenue Service building in Austin, Texas?

For those not in the know, Stack, like many people, had a bone to pick with the I.R.S. and with the federal government. But the manifesto he left behind also accused drug and insurance companies of "murdering tens of thousands of people a year," charged that poor people get to die for the mistakes of the wealthy, and quoted Karl Marx. Anti-government Stack was, but his ideology, such as it was, doesn't appear to have been coherently right-wing or left-wing so much as ticked-off and populist.

Rich does appear to be aware that Stack isn't a very logical stick with which to beat the Tea Party movement that has him and his government-cheerleading chums so knicker-twisted. At least, he concedes "it would be both glib and inaccurate to call him a card-carrying Tea Partier or a 'Tea Party terrorist.' But he did leave behind a manifesto whose frothing anti-government, anti-tax rage overlaps with some of those marching under the Tea Party banner."

Nice how Rich works that gratuitious "Tea Party terrorist" bit in there, eh? But even as he smears his political opponents as guilty by distant and tortured association, he manages to overlook the fact that the anti-government sentiment he so regrets is neither a wholly owned subsidiary of the Tea Party movement and the Right, nor an aberration coughed up every decade or two by by unenlightened neanderthals briefly emerging from the philosophical swamps.

Frank Rich is a well-educated man with an Internet connection paid for by a respected news organization that has a vast historical archive of its own, so it's impossible to believe that the New York Times scribbler is unaware that Thomas Paine wrote in one of the more popular political tracts of the revolutionary period that "government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one." Nor can we believe he's unaware that James Madison hedged on Paine's sentiments only to the extent that he wrote, "It has been said that all Government is an evil. It would be more proper to say that the necessity of any Government is a misfortune." And certainly he knows about Thomas Jefferson's warning that "[t]he natural progress of things is for liberty to yield, and government to gain ground."

And Rich must surely be aware that he's skipping over a bit of context when he drops the overworked Joe Stack connection to shriek in shock that "[t]he Tea Partiers want to eliminate most government agencies, starting with the Fed and the I.R.S., and end spending on entitlement programs. They are not to be confused with the Party of No holding forth in Washington -- a party that, after all, is now positioning itself as a defender of Medicare spending. What we are talking about here is the Party of No Government at All." Surely, if only in high school, he read Henry David Thoreau's open hostility to the power of the state:

I heartily accept the motto, "That government is best which governs least"; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe--"That government is best which governs not at all"...

The United States of America was founded on anti-government sentiment. The shapers of its institutions and many of its major thinkers have always clearly viewed the state as something like the equivalent of a portable kerosene heater in a Wisconsin winter -- you might need the damned thing, but be very careful.

True, the fact that the heart and soul of American political history is thoroughly skeptical of government power doesn't mean that Madison and Jefferson were right and that Rich is wrong. Maybe he and his buddies are correct and we should stop worrying and learn to love big, well-armed institutions that claim a monopoly on the use of force and slaughtered 262,000,000 people over the course of the 20th century alone. (It's for the children, don't you know?)

But history shows that anti-government sentiment is in the mainstream of American political life, and Rich and his buddies are the out-liers. No shrieking effort to paint skeptics of state power as kamikaze terrorists -- shoe-horning Joe Stack in with Thomas Paine and Henry David Thoreau -- can change that fact.

Judge reads elegy for the Fourth Amendment

2010-02-24T18:29:00.000-08:00

Last week, admonishing his colleagues, who had just turned away an important search-and-seizure case, Chief Judge Alex Kozinski, of the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, effectively pronounced the Fourth Amendment dead. After the court signed off on police search of an apartment without a warrant, probable cause or reasonable suspicion, Kozinski said, "Whatever may have been left of the Fourth Amendment ... is now gone."

In the case of United States v. Lemus, police peacefully arrested Juan Hernan Lemus of Calexico, California, outside his home "before he could fully enter the doorway and retreat into his living room." With Lemus in custody, and without a search warrant for the apartment, police then entered the dwelling for a look around.

From the majority decision (which is written like a crime novel):

Diaz, in the living room, got Detective Longoria’s attention. Wasn’t there something sticking out from the couch? Detective Longoria thought it looked like the butt of a weapon. Since Lemus was a felon, having a gun would be a crime. Detective Longoria lifted the couch cushion to make sure, and confirmed that it was a semi-automatic handgun. It was later determined to be a Sturm and Ruger, 9 millimeter.

Unsurprisingly, Lemus's attorneys challenged the search, which was the basis for subsequent charges unrelated to the original arrest. They pointed out that precedent permits search of the immediate area around suspects arrested in their home to assure the safety of the arresting officers, and limited protective sweeps of the full dwelling to make sure no potential allies of the arrestee are lurking in the shadows. But Lemus was already in custody, having been arrested outside. Police chose, on their own, to enter the residence.

No problem, said the district court. The majority of judges at the appeals level agreed. "Lemus was arrested in an area 'immediately adjoining' the living room, a limited search of that room was proper without either reasonable suspicion or probable cause as a protective search incident to the arrest."

But Kozinski objects (PDF):

The panel's fig leaf for this clearly illegal search is that "at most Lemus was only partially outside" of his living room door when the officers seized him. Lemus, 582 F.3d at 963. So what? Under Buie, Lemus’s location at the time of arrest is irrelevant; it's the location of the police that matters. Buie authorizes a search incident to an in-home arrest because being inside a suspect's home "puts the officer at the disadvantage of being on his adversary’s 'turf,' " ...

Frankly, the majority's reasoning seems to suggest that police can conduct a full, warrantless search of your home if they arrange to arrest you within reach of your front door. Not that they would ever game such a legal rule, of course ...

Judge Kozinski points out the startling implications of the appeals court's decision to let the lower-court decision stand.

This is an extraordinary case: Our court approves, without blinking, a police sweep of a person’s home without a warrant, without probable cause, without reasonable suspicion and without exigency -- in other words, with nothing at all to support the entry except the curiosity police always have about what they might find if they go rummaging around a suspect’s home. Once inside, the police managed to turn up a gun "in plain view" -- stuck between two cushions of the living room couch -- and we reward them by upholding the search. ...

The opinion misapplies Supreme Court precedent, conflicts with our own case law and is contrary to the great weight of authority in the other circuits. It is also the only case I know of, in any jurisdiction covered by the Fourth Amendment, where invasion of the home has been approved based on no showing whatsoever. Nada. Gar nichts. Rien du tout. Bupkes.

Whatever may have been left of the Fourth Amendment after Black is now gone. The evisceration of this crucial constitutional protector of the sanctity and privacy of what Americans consider their castles is pretty much complete. Welcome to the fish bowl.

Very well reasoned. Very strongly worded.

But the majority decision in favor of the "fish bowl"still stands.

Pieces published elsewhere

2010-02-23T09:23:00.000-08:00

In line with my recent post on the passing of British anarchist Colin Ward, I have a piece up at the interesting group blog, When Falls the Coliseum, on my increasingly black-flag-y sentiments (and I ain't just talking Greg Ginn).

At the same site, I have an unrelated piece on the changing nature of the writing biz (I can say "biz" can't I?).

The late Colin Ward showed that liberty isn't a Left/Right issue

2010-02-18T08:22:00.000-08:00

Reason magazine's Hit & Run blog has a post up noting the passing of Colin Ward, a British left-anarchist. I'm especially sorry that this is my first encounter with Ward, since he apparently was best known not for looking to some utopian future, but for examining the here and now, as well as the past, for examples of real-life voluntary, cooperative alternatives to state institutions. His aim was to not just argue that an authoritarian state is immoral, but to demonstrate that it is and has been unnecessary.

People like Ward interest me not only because of his practical interest in applied voluntarism, but also because he -- a man who was as critical of social democrats as he was of Margaret Thatcher -- was a living, breathing exemplar of the principle that the real political divide isn't between Left and Right, but between liberty and authority. This may be a tough sell in the simple-minded world of Team Blue/Team Red America, but it's apparent that there are believers in liberty on both the Left and the Right, and that these people have more in common with one another than they do with their supposed comrades who are more interested in top-down control than in freedom.

The connection is especially apparent among out-and-out anarchists like Ward and, say, David D. Friedman, the anarcho-capitalist (and son of Milton). When you remove the coercive power of the state from the equation, not only are their criticisms of authoritarianism largely complementary, but their hyphenations (left- and -capitalist) become little more than expressions of how they would like to arrange their personal affairs, not something they want to force on one another.

As you move away from anarchism, the introduction of some degree of state power complicates things by raising the likelihood that somebody will be coerced to do things they don't want to do. But it's notable that libertarian-socialist Nat Hentoff, after losing his Village Voice column, found a home at the libertarian Cato Institute, which is often accused of being "right-wing." It's also worth noting, on the other hand, that Senators Orrin Hatch and Dianne Feinstein, supposed cross-aisle rivals, so frequently seem to find common cause on odious, authoritarian legislation.

Whatever the details of their differences, advocates of liberty really do have more in common with one another, as do advocates of authority. The real connections cut across the artificial Left/Right divide.

The challenge for liberty advocates, whether of the supposed Left or Right, is to look beyond supposed allies who mouth their favorite platitudes while forever increasing the power of the state over their lives -- and to get past unfamiliar terminology to find allies they didn't know they had.

As the late Colin Ward demonstrated, Left and Right don't matter; liberty and authority do.

Tagged and tracked by your own cell phone

2010-02-16T10:22:00.000-08:00

Last Friday, federal attorneys told the U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals that government officials should be able to track the location of Americans by following their cell phone transmissions -- without having to get a warrant. While the FBI and state and local officials have already obtained logs from mobile phone companies that reveal the locations of customers' telephones, the practice has never formally been endorsed by the courts. The latest federal arguments -- and rebuttals by civil liberties organizations -- give the courts the opportunity to either support or repudiate federal claims that Americans have no "reasonable expectation of privacy" so long as they carry cell phones.

In a lower-court decision (PDF) regarding an ongoing drug investigation, now being appealed by the federal government, Magistrate Judge Lisa Pupo Lenihan warned:

[T]he location information so broadly sought is extraordinarily personal and potentially sensitive; and that the ex parte nature of the proceedings, the comparatively low cost to the Government of the information requested, and the undetectable nature of a CSP’s electronic transfer of such information, render these requests particularly vulnerable to abuse.

Lenihan determined that the information sought by the Justice Department should be available only if the government could meet the usual probable cause standards necessary for a warrant -- a standard the Justice Department claims to find too burdensome.

Responding to the federal government's position that signing a cell phone contract implicitly gives the state the right to know your whereabouts, the American Civil Liberties Union says the government "should not be forcing the nation's 277 million cell-phone subscribers to choose between risking being tracked and going without an essential communications tool."

In a friend-of-the-court brief (PDF), the ACLU, along with the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Center for Democracy and Technology, support Lenihan's refusal to allow federal access to what Justice Department attorney Mark Eckenwiler calls "routine business records held by a communications service provider." Since those records reveal people's locations, the civil liberties groups argue that they were properly withheld, and that their disclosure raises serious Fourth Amendment concerns. Specifically, they agree that revealing such information should require a warrant.

Lenihan's opinion was signed by four of her colleagues in a show of solidarity that seems, from records of the proceedings, to impress the appeals court judges. The civil liberties implications of the Justice Department move also seem to impress the judges; at one point, Eckenwiler was asked from the bench:

There are governments in the world that would like to know where some of their people are, or have been. For example, have been at what may be happening today in Iran, have been at a protest, or at a meeting, or at a political meeting. Now, can the government assure us that -- one, it will never try to find out that information, and two, whether that information would not be covered ...?

It's unclear, however, whether that's an omen of the final result.

The full oral arguments are available online in audio format at the court Web site (see files beginning with 08-4227)

Hail Caesar ... err ... the President

2010-02-16T08:47:00.000-08:00

Whether you call it Washington's Birthday (the official federal holiday) or Presidents Day (the common name and a holiday recognized in many states), the third Monday in February is set aside to honor the person in whom the executive power of the United States federal government is vested. That's reason enough to be leery of the day, offset just a bit by the happy fact that many Americans are spared a day of school or work as part of the celebration (not to mention the sales!). I say "leery" not just because of the particular individual who holds the office -- however disappointing the guy may be, he's hardly the worst of the bunch -- but because the office itself is so suspect, bloated with more power and expectation than any individual can handle, and any free society can survive.

Jimmy Breslin might have put it best when he said, "The office of president is a bastardized thing, half royalty and half democracy, that nobody knows whether to genuflect or spit."

Half of us might be willing to spit at any given moment, but usually only when the other side's guy has power. The rest of the time, we're busy genuflecting and larding the presidency with vast power to ... well ... wage wars unilaterally, hold ~~enemy combatants~~ terrorism suspects without trial or charges -- and subject them to torture, seize control of private companies, engage in domestic espionage...

And, while he's doing all this, the president is also supposed to act as an example for our children, spokesman to the world, spiritual leader and national recruiter for international sporting events.
As Gene Healy, author of The Cult of the Presidency, put it:

The chief executive of the United States is no longer a mere constitutional officer charged with faithful execution of the laws. He is a soul nourisher, a hope giver, a living American talisman against hurricanes, terrorism, economic downturns, and spiritual malaise. He--or she--is the one who answers the phone at 3 a.m. to keep our children safe from harm. The modern president is America’s shrink, a social worker, our very own national talk show host. He’s also the Supreme Warlord of the Earth.

This is insanity, of course. Only a thoroughgoing egomaniac could even want such an impossible job. Which may be why we get the presidents we've been getting.

It wasn't supposed to be this way. The Constitution mentions the presidency only after describing the powers and structure of Congress. While urging the adoption of that document, James Madison assured Americans in Federalist Number 48, " the executive magistracy is carefully limited; both in the extent and the duration of its power." Presidents before Woodrow Wilson didn't even dare deliver the State of the Union address to Congress in person, fearing that was a bit too monarchical.

The presidency didn't assume its current, monstrous, proportions through a coup. It gained greater power and prestige, slowly at first, and then rapidly through the twentieth century. Frankly, many Americans seem to like it that way, preferring a king to a president when all is said and done.

Maybe, deep down, most humans like doffing their caps and quaking in the presence of a mighty chieftain. Hiring and firing temporary administrators just isn't sufficiently majestic.

So enjoy your Presidents Day/Washington's Birthday. Just don't get carried away with the celebration.

Audi, the Schindler of our eco-totalitarian future

2010-02-08T07:37:00.000-08:00

If you're like me, Audi's Green Police ad during yesterday's Superbowl was sort of a high point of creepiness -- and not just for its boomerific revival of a classic Cheap Trick song. No, the celebration of the right car purchase -- a "clean diesel" -- as a get-out-of jail-free card for a totalitarian eco-state sort of ruined car shopping for you while also hinting a bit too strongly at the direction in which the world is inching in its intolerant, lemming-like way.

Our friends in Britain already have to worry about government snoops pawing through their garbage and forcing their way onto private property to make sure residents of that unfortunate country are separating their glass from their plastic and doing business in officially approved ways. Maybe ... just maybe ... we're not that far off from the day when buying the the "correct" brand will count as a pass at roadblocks staffed by armed recycling fanatics.

I guess the only question is whether Audi thinks this potential Brave New fluorescently lit World is a good thing, or whether the company is warning us that it, Schindler-like, is our only hope.

The ~~Audi advertisement~~ glimpse of our eco-conscious (or else) future is below.

I can see clearly now (my light bulbs are gone)

2010-02-05T07:45:00.000-08:00

Who doesn't like being bossed around and told what to do -- for our own good, of course? Take, for example, incandescent light bulbs. Already banned in Australia in favor of more energy-efficient alternatives -- in particular, compact fluorescent lamps (cfl) -- traditional light bulbs are also on their way out in Europe and due to be banned in the United States starting in 2012.

Nevermind that the more-expensive bulbs deliver cost-savings to users only if people change their light-using habits and leave lamps on for relatively uninterrupted periods (Britain's Daily Telegraph reported in September 2009 that "[t]he lifespan of energy-saving light bulbs can be reduced by up to 85 per cent if they are switched off and on too often.")

Nevermind that the new mercury-laden bulbs have to be disposed of carefully.

And nevermind that some people just don't like the light the damned things throw and would rather stick with the tried-and-true old bulbs. We've all been drafted into the latest social crusade to save energy.

Well ... Maybe some of us don't like being bossed around.

Reason's Nick Gillespie has an interesting take on the world-wide Noble (whether you like it or not) Light Bulb Experiment below.

And beware this (tongue-in-cheek) warning from the future: "Boy, 7, in critical condition after light bulb raid."

Reason number 97 why you should never comply with a law requiring you to register anything

2010-02-04T10:18:00.000-08:00

I've never understood the urge that some people have to "register" allegedly dangerous objects, substances or creatures with the government. Fans of registration act shocked that anybody could object -- after all, we get to keep our dogs, guns, cars and what have you -- without acknowledging that their preferred policies fail to minimize the supposed risks of whatever they've targeted while maximizing the dangers inherent in forcing public interaction with law-enforcement.

Take the case of Joe Fiorito. He's a columnist for the Toronto Star and a citizen of the land up north where ownership of anything that goes "BANG" is tightly regulated by the government. A generally reliable fan of the expansive state, Fiorito has acquired a new-found skepticism toward gun registration after a recent run-in with the law. He wrote in his column on January 29 of events after he responded to a loud pounding on his front door:

I asked Officer K. if he'd mind getting to the point. He thought I was being difficult. Not me. I am, however, uncomfortable playing 20 Questions in the morning with armed men on the porch.

The point?

Officer K. reminded me that my firearms licence had expired. He said I could turn the gun over to them for storage, or they could take the gun and destroy it.

My gun? It is a single-barrel .20 gauge shotgun. It is 40 years old. I used to take it into the woods up north to get partridge in the fall.

The last time I used it, I was walking along a hydro cut when I surprised a deer in the long dry grass. She leapt away in slow motion, flanks rippling, nostrils flaring; too beautiful.

I haven't hunted since.

I own no shells.

But it's my gun, dammit. I guess, when the Feds began the long-gun registry, I should have lied and not bothered to register the damn thing.

Officer K. pressed me about turning the gun over, there and then, for storage or destruction. For a brief moment I thought about handing it over, if only to get rid of him and his pal.

And then it just seemed wrong:

A couple of cops show up at my door, unannounced, and the talkative one says he has reason to believe, and I'm supposed to hand over my property just like that?

Fiorito declined the officers' request and told them to take whatever step they thought appropriate.

An hour later Officers F. and K. showed up with their boss, Officer Nicolle. He was as angry as he was pushy and he said he wanted the gun or he'd come back with a search warrant.

I was offered no options.

No one ever said, look, you have to renew your licence; we'll give you two weeks, here's the paperwork you need; and in two weeks, if you don't have the licence we'll have to ask you for the gun.

In the absence of options, faced with a search warrant and outnumbered three to one, I said I'd get the damn shotgun.

Of course, being a columnist -- even one who traditionally supports restrictive gun control -- Fiorito wrote about his unpleasant experience with Toronto's finest. The cops, apparently, weren't pleased. A few days later, he revisited the subject.

An aside: as I began to write this – on the afternoon of the day the column about the gun-snatching appeared – two cop cars spent five minutes idling in front of my house. Surely a coincidence. ...

A final aside: Officer N., the cop with the sneer, said as he was leaving that some sort of understanding might have been reached but not with a guy like me. All he knows about a guy like me is that I have a sharp tongue when I'm being bullied. If that's all he knows, he doesn't read the papers much.

That's right. The cops responded with a crude effort at intimidation -- and were open about their selective enforcement of the law. Decline to kiss their asses and they're not so nice.

Is there any wonder that Fiorito, a self-identified social democrat who opposes private ownership of handguns and supports Canada's gun registry, writes, "I guess, when the Feds began the long-gun registry, I should have lied and not bothered to register the damn thing."

Lots of people subject to arbitrary and intrusive regulations surely feel that way now -- especially those who can't easily publicize their ordeals. It's impossible to avoid drawing a conclusion from Fiorito's situation about the wisdom of submitting to any government registration scheme, whatever the subject of the registration may be -- or indeed, the wisdom of expanding government officials' authority over our lives, so that we require permission and forbearance just to get through our days.

Soon, smooching the sergeant won't get you out of the draft

2010-02-03T08:44:00.000-08:00

Following on President Barack Obama's comments on allowing gays to openly serve in the military, Tuesday's endorsement of the idea by Admiral Michael Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, suggests that the administration is moving beyond stroking its supporters on the issue and poised to actually implement the idea as policy. When the United States military finally allows gays and lesbians equality in uniform with their straight comrades, it will be following in the footsteps of countries like Canada and Australia, since most of America's allies have already taken this step.

Last week, in his state of the union address, President Obama promised, "This year, I will work with Congress and our military to finally repeal the law that denies gay Americans the right to serve the country they love because of who they are." That's no surprise coming from Obama, who promised on the campaign trail and soon after taking office to do away with the "don't ask, don't tell" policy implemented during the Clinton years. But promises made in speeches don't necessarily indicate immediate changes in rules and regulations.

But yesterday, speaking before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Admiral Mullen commented:

[I]t is my personal belief that allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly would be the right thing to do. No matter how I look at this issue, I cannot escape being troubled by the fact that we have in place a policy which forces young men and women to lie about who they are in order to defend their fellow citizens.

Of course, Mullen framed his commitment to loosening anti-gay and anti-lesbian policies in terms of how to "best make such a major policy change in a time of two wars." The admiral echoed Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who has established a working group to study the issue, take testimony and develop an approach for making the policy change. Speaking before the same committee, Gates acknowledged that "our approach may cause some to wonder why it will take the better part of the year to accomplish the task." That approach may raise fears that the issue will be committeed to death, with little accomplished in the end.

Then again, President Truman's racial desegregation of the military took two years to accomplish after his executive order to that effect was issued.

The United States is a latecomer to sexual integration of the military. According to the Palm Center at the University of California -- Santa Barbara, countries that allow gays and lesbians to serve in uniform (PDF) include:

Australia
Austria
Belgium
Canada
Czech Republic
Denmark
Estonia
Finland
France
Germany
Ireland
Israel
Italy
Lithuania
Luxembourg
Netherlands
New Zealand
Norway
Slovenia
South Africa
Spain
Sweden
Switzerland
UK
Uruguay

While advocates of personal freedom will applaud a policy change that would bring the government closer to treating gays and straights equally, there is one potential downside. If -- or when -- the government next decides to force unwilling victims into uniform with a return to conscription, it will no longer be possible to escape the draft by claiming to be homosexual.

Is permit-free 'Vermont carry' coming to Arizona?

2010-02-02T10:54:00.000-08:00

On February 1, Arizona's State Senate Judiciary Committee voted in favor of a bill that would eliminate criminal penalties for people who carry firearms concealed without a permit. The measure has provoked opposition from an association representing chiefs of police in the Grand Canyon State -- which some cynics might well take as an implicit endorsement of the proposal.

Arizona already allows open carry -- carrying a firearm in plain view -- without a permit, and is a "must-issue" state in which carry permits are readily available to people with a clean record who satisfy basic requirements. But it's not uncommon for un-permitted Arizonans to tuck guns in their pockets when stepping out for a hike, to run dogs or for other purposes, and so risk criminal penalties for a victimless act if caught. That has prompted legislators to consider following in the footsteps of Vermont and Alaska, states which don't require carry permits and have seen little in the way of a downside from removing one pitfall among many from the lawbooks.

The proposed bill, SB 1102, strikes language from the law that penalizes carrying any concealed weapon, except a pocket knife, without a permit, and that also bans having a weapon "concealed within immediate control of any person in or on a means of transportation." The measure passed the Senate Judicary Committee by a 4-3 vote.

If it becomes law, the bill would still leave permits available for those who want them -- especially people who want to carry their guns in other states that offer reciprocity to Arizona permit-holders.

In response, John Thomas, the lobbyist for the Arizona Association of Chiefs of Police, said, "SB 1102, if enacted into law, will take Arizona back to the Wild West carry, with no consideration of officer safety.''

Historians might note that Arizona should be so lucky -- several studies have found the "Wild West" to have lower crime rates than modern America. In Gunfighters, Highwaymen & Vigilantes, author Roger D. McGrath, a professor of history, referring to the "rough" mining towns he researched, wrote, "Bodie's rates of robery, burglary and theft were dramatically lower than those of most U.S. cities in 1980." He added, "Aurora and Bodie women, other than prostitutes, suffered little from crime or violence." Not to minimize the crimes suffered by women in the sex trade, but women in that socially and legally stigmatized business continue to suffer more severely from crime than other women.

The towns McGrath studied did have high homicide rates but "those killed, with only a few exceptions, had been willing combatants, and many of them were roughs or badmen." Basically, the violence was largely confined to a subculture of voluntary participants -- which is almost the only part of the Old West we see in the movies.

Tellingly, McGrath found, "[t]he citizens themselves, armed with various types of firearms and willing to kill to protect their persons or property, were evidently the most important deterrent to larcenous crime."

It's not to much of a stretch to infer that Arizona's modern chiefs of police oppose SB 1102 and its looser firearms restrictions because they just don't want to be rendered unnecessary.

Changes coming

2010-02-02T09:22:00.000-08:00

It seems that Blogger, at long last, will be dropping support for FTP-published blogs in March. A few of you fearless readers have urged me to switch over to WordPress, and it looks like I'll be doing that out of necessity, instead of choice, in the near future.

Please bear with me as I inevitably blow the place up a few times, and accidentally translate all the content into Portuguese.

Hayek and Keynes face off over free markets -- rap-style

2010-01-26T09:34:00.000-08:00

Explaining the massive hurdles you'd have to overcome to impose a "rational" controlled society to people -- the sheer impossibility of substituting government planning for the values and preferences of millions of people -- is often a lost cause. Eyes glaze over, yawns are politely stifled (or not stifled at all), and the virtues of freedom and dynamism get lost in the vast disinterest many people harbor toward matters philosophical. Frankly, people want bad times made better -- and they're not interested in hearing anybody tell them that the cure is usually worse than the disease.

So, don't waste your time boring your friends. Instead, point them toward this video, the work of economist Russ Roberts and creative director John Papola, in which free-market economist F.A. Hayek and liberty-distrusting economist John Maynard Keynes lay down their opposing views in rap form while out on the town.

No, really -- it's good.

By the way, this economic debate is important beyond the economic sphere because the fact of the matter is that liberty is not divisible -- you can't expect to enjoy full civil liberties, like freedom of the press, if the government nationalizes the media. As Hayek wrote, "Economic control is not merely control of a sector of human life which can be separated from the rest. It is the control of the means for all our ends."

Supreme Court decision a win for free speech

2010-01-21T14:17:00.000-08:00

In a closely watched case involving an opinionated documentary film that was highly critical of Hillary Clinton and her then-current run for the Democratic presidential nomination, the United States Supreme Court rolled back limits on political speech and delivered a resounding victory to First Amendment advocates. The court rejected arguments in favor of a narrow decision that would have preserved many limits on speech, and instead broadly expanded the ability of non-profit organizations, corporations and labor unions to expend resources on political advocacy.

Hillary: The Movie isn't a subtle exercise in political speech. Produced by the conservative group, Citizens United, the film was a torpedo aimed at Hillary Clinton's presidential ambitions. The torpedo never reached its goal, having been scuttled by the Federal Election Commission, which called it a violation of the censorious Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, a piece of legislation that goes so far as to regulate "electioneering communications" by corporations, unions and non-profits in the weeks before federal elections. Specifically, broadcasting a film like the one at issue here is banned for 30 days before primaries and 60 days before general elections. Newspapers are excluded, as are new media, like YouTube, that were unknown at the time the law was passed.

A lower court upheld the law -- and the muzzling of Citizens United -- and the case made its way to the Supreme Court. Writing for the majority in the case of Citizens United v Federal Elections Commission (PDF), Justice Anthony Kennedy summarized the extreme nature of the law -- and the reason many observers expected at least an incremental win for free speech rights:

The law before us is an outright ban, backed by criminal sanctions. Section 441b makes it a felony for all corpora-tions -- including nonprofit advocacy corporations -- either to expressly advocate the election or defeat of candidates or to broadcast electioneering communications within 30days of a primary election and 60 days of a general elec-tion. Thus, the following acts would all be felonies under §441b: The Sierra Club runs an ad, within the crucial phase of 60 days before the general election, that exhorts the public to disapprove of a Congressman who favors logging in national forests; the National Rifle Associationpublishes a book urging the public to vote for the challenger because the incumbent U. S. Senator supports a handgun ban; and the American Civil Liberties Unioncreates a Web site telling the public to vote for a Presidential candidate in light of that candidate’s defense of free speech. These prohibitions are classic examples of censorship.

Anticipating that the court would role back at leat some of the law's restrictions, some groups had urged interpretations that would keep at least some censorship in place. These friend-of-the-court briefs called for fairly complex legal needle-threading that would have applied the law in some cases, but not others. Justice Kennedy bought none of it.

The First Amendment does not permit laws that force speakers to retain a campaign finance attorney, conduct demographic marketing re-search, or seek declaratory rulings before discussing themost salient political issues of our day. Prolix laws chill speech for the same reason that vague laws chill speech: People "of common intelligence must necessarily guess at [the law’s] meaning and differ as to its application."

For the same reason, Kennedy rejected the argument that the existence of highly regulated political action committees provides sufficient outlets for free speech.

The majority decision also rejected the recent trend toward recognizing media companies as a protected class that enjoys special free speech rights denied others.

Ultimately, wrote Kennedy, "If the First Amendment has any force, it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech."

The lower court decision against Citizens United's right to engage in independent expenditures in order to publicize its members' opinion of a presidential candidate was, therefore, reversed, although disclosure and disclaimer requirements remain in place. The ultimate decision, overturning pro-censorship precedent and joined in whole or part by Chief Justice Roberts, and Justices Alito, Scalia and Thomas (the last of whom would also would have knocked down diclosure, disclaimer and reporting requirements), was a broader victory for free speech than most observers had expected.

A little reality check on the choices in the Massachusetts Senate race

2010-01-19T09:27:00.000-08:00

I'm as big a believer in throwing a monkeywrench into people's plans as anybody. Stripping the Senate Democrats of their filibuster-proof majority and reintroducing a wee bit of gridlock gives me a certain frisson of joy. But I don't get all the love for Scott Brown by critics of metastasizing government when there's a seemingly excellent candidate in the Massachusetts Senate race in the form of small-l libertarian Joe Kennedy, running as an independent.

Martha Coakley, the Democrat, is as disgusting a candidate as I can imagine. Not only is she for an ever-more expansive state that would intrude itself further into our lives, most particularly, into our medical decisions, but her record as a prosecutor has demonstrated a hideous disregard for civil liberties and even simple justice -- abandoning the usual advantage that Democrats, if only theoretically, maintain over Republicans.

But Scott Brown, aside from his clear appeal to straight women and gay men (and a reminder to the rest of us to do our sit-ups), seems to function largely as a representative of the dominant wing of the Republican Party that brought us eight years of suckage. On the issues, he's an authoritarian social conservative who supported Romneycare and is terrible on civil liberties -- even mediocre on gun rights, one liberty conservatives usually support.

A side-by-side comparison of the three candidates' positions shows Kennedy as the only one with consistent smaller-government, expanded-freedom credentials. Yet at least one faction of the Tea Party movement -- that supposedly independent, shrink-the-state grassroots network, urged Joe Kennedy to drop out in Brown's favor. (Kennedy declined.)

Yes, I understand that popular wisdom has it that only two candidates -- the Republican and the Democrat -- are serious contenders. But that's self-fulfilling prophecy. In other countries, when the dominant political parties prove to be repulsive to large swathes of the population, people start new parties or elevate small ones. I'm not just talking about nations with proportional representation, either. Canada and the United Kingdom, while parliamentary systems, use winner-take-all voting like the U.S. for picking legislators. Twenty years ago, the Canadian Prime Minister was Brian Mulroney, of the Progressive Conservative Party. That party doesn't exist anymore, having been challenged by the rather more ideologically rigorous Reform Party, and then absorbed by a new Conservative Party spawned by Reform.

In the United Kingdom, the twentieth century saw the replacement of the Liberal Party as one of the two major parties by the Labour Party. Having merged with the up-start Social Democrats, the Liberal Democrats continue as a significant player in British politics. More recently, the UK Independence Party has risen as a serious contender, out-polling Labour in the last election for the European Parliament.

In the United States, however, we treat the two major political parties as if they're features of the natural landscape, like the Grand Canyon, rather than human-made institutions than can be replaced when they cease to ... well ... not make us puke.

As long as we insist that we have to abandon something preferable in favor of officially approved Lousy Choice A or Lousy Choice B, we'll keep getting more of what we've suffered over the past decade.

In Arizona, it's not a party without pepper spray

2010-01-18T13:50:00.000-08:00

At a protest march that Arizona Republic columnist E.J. Montini described as "accommodating. Polite, even," police still found opportunity to hose the crowd down with pepper spray. Organized by Puente Arizona, the January 16 March targeted Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio's nativist-courting anti-immigration jihad, which has sent deputies crashing through the doors of homes, businesses and even government offices, and that has many hispanics who came to Arizona from elsewhere wondering if maybe the human rights record back home doesn't look so bad by comparison.

But if the protest didn't really touch on Arpaio's thuggery against people who speak out against him, it sure seemed to offer a taste of the risks of such an approach. People at the scene captured video of officers -- specifically, a female Phoenix officer on horseback -- spraying the crowd, including families with children, with a substance that appeared to be pepper spray.

In their defense, police say they arrested five "anarchists" and claim that officers were assaulted. That may or may not be true, but it's not apparent from the video of the mounted officer.

It's not just the feds; watch out for the neighborhood control freaks

2010-01-15T06:42:00.000-08:00

There's been lots of justified concern in recent years that the federal government -- that crazy uncle in the attic -- has broken free of its restraints and is smashing the crockery and scaring the kids. Between George W. Bush's police state and Barack Obama's fascist economics (or is that Bush's fascism and Obama's police state?), the peril on the Potomac seems to represent an ever-growing threat to our liberty. But as the column I wrote earlier this week about a SWAT raid in small-town Arizona suggests, it's too easy to keep your eyes focused on D.C. and so miss the machinations of the control freaks in the local city hall.

The fact is that local governments have enormous power over the petty details of our day-to-day lives. Yes, the federal government may keep you awake at night fretting about wiretaps, bans, taxes and mandates, but it's local officials who get to decide whether you even have a bed in which to toss and turn. City councilmen, zoning and planning officials, building inspectors and the like get to determine whether you can move into a new home or open a business. A denied occupancy permit, a refused zoning variance or a hiked water fee can make all the difference in the world.

In a February 2010 article in Vanity Fair on the '70s disco scene, Ian Schrager of Studio 54 fame makes an interesting point about the far-reaching effects of petty regulations:

It wasn’t aids that made the nightclub business difficult. Government regulations did it in. Steve and I did our first nightclub [the Enchanted Garden, in Douglaston, Queens] for $27,000 and Studio 54 we did for $400,000. Now, with all the regulations, fire codes, sprinkler requirements, neighborhood issues, community planning boards … before you even put on the first coat of paint, you’re into it for over a million dollars. What it’s done is disenfranchise young people.

An April 2005 article in the North Bay Bohemian on the rise of underground restaurants in California made the same point:

"It costs $200,000 just for a permit to be allowed to buy water from the city!" exclaims [former underground restaurateur Michael] Hale. "You have to get tons of permits from various people. You've got to get a building permit, a permit if you want to remodel, you have to get licenses for beer and wine, and you have to get certified by the Health Board."

And, of course, the power of eminent domain is largely exercised at the local level, where bureaucrats and politicians decide who will be pushed off their own property to make way for some government-favored use.

Those rules can be a nightmare to navigate -- or an insurmountable hurdle -- if they are properly applied. But local government is a personal business. People know each other, develop friendships and enmities, and personal feelings can easily spill over into the application and enforcement of local rules. David Carl, the subject of my last column, insists that the SWAT raid on his Cottonwood, Arizona, business, over which he is filing a lawsuit, began as a dispute over signage regulations and an occupancy permit that turned personal. Indeed, a review of city records shows that one zoning commissioner displayed a continuing interest in the progress of the case.

Does that prove that local rules were abusively applied? No. But it's suggestive. And even the fear of such abuse can cause people to mind their manners when dealing with local officials.

I remember when my wife and I, and our partners, went shopping for a general contractor to construct a building for my wife's medical practice. We received a lot of advice on who to use and who to avoid -- not just based on their personal merits, but also on their relations with local officials. We were warned that good relations could ease the way for permits and make inspections a breeze, while bad feelings could sabotage the whole project.

Given how matter-of-factly that advice was given -- and how often I've heard of similar advice given to people elsewhere -- that offers an important insight into the destructive power posed by local officials and their rules.

Local government is certainly closer to the people. But closer isn't always better. Often, we need to maintain a healthy distance from the people who want to wield coercive power over our lives. And as our experience with the federal government has demonstrated, even 3,000 miles and more isn't always enough.

Boldly going where people have already screwed up before

2010-01-13T11:46:00.000-08:00

I've been involved with Web publications for just about as long as there has been a commercial presence on the World Wide Web. I was an associate editor on the launch of ZDNet on the Web in 1994 (we hand-coded the HTML for those pages). My new media experience goes back a bit further, since earlier I was an associate editor on ZDNet's presence on the old Prodigy online service.

After that, I was senior editor on the launch of the New York Daily News online. I was editorial director of a dot-com during the gold-rush days. I was one of the original "guides" for The Mining Company/About.com ...

I'm sort of like a Zelig of the online world -- present at some pretty cool happenings, without actually making much of an impact myself. If you squint, you can just make out my face in the corner of the yellowing photo there...

I cite my history here, because I've been writing for The Examiner for a year and a half now, and I'm ...what? ... perplexed to see a company act, at this late date, as if it's inventing the business of publishing on the Web -- and in the process, making stupid mistakes that proved nearly disastrous for other companies a decade ago.

As I write, articles published by The Examiner aren't being picked up by Google News, and apparently not by regular Google Search either. That's for a good reason -- after an encouraging start, The Examiner has been publishing pretty much any crap by any warm body with access to a computer, devoid of quality control, in an effort to maximize page views and ad revenue for the short term. There's a lot of good material in there, too, but there's a flood of junk. Google apparently got tired of junk -- some of it plagiarized -- jamming its search results and has, at least temporarily, bounced The Examiner. This isn't precipitous -- the publisher has been on the equivalent of super-secret probation with Google for a while now.

The queered relationship comes after The Examiner has pretty much worn out its welcome at most of the social media sites, like Digg and Reddit, because examiners were pumping their pieces and those of their co-workers.

But we've been down this path before. In the late '90s, The Mining Company gained a miserable reputation for hiring guides with little vetting, and exercising essentially no quality control over the content they produced. Guides were also urged to go out and manipulate their rankings on the search engines of the day (remember Altavista? Lycos? Infoseek?), many of which allowed results to be voted up or down.

Like The Examiner (and plenty of other modern publications), The Mining Company compensated writers according to traffic. And as with The Examiner, the emphasis came to be on quantity rather than quality in an effort to drive traffic and maximize revenue.

But when a brand gets a lousy reputation, people stop dropping by ...

That tactic made a certain sense in the context of the late '90s, when many dot-coms were in it for short-term venture capital and had little intention of building a long-term presence. That dot-com where I was the editorial director was one such operation, and it was a running joke in-house that the only business plan was to find new investors.

After a few years, the re-named About.com decided to take a long-term approach and cleaned up its act. There were several brutal purges of guides -- I think the first one dumped 40% of the topics and their writers. And greater editorial control was instituted over content (along with some other, problematic, policies -- but that's another issue).

But The Examiner is owned by an established company: Clarity Media. Presumably, Clarity, which also controls two print newspapers also called Examiner, doesn't plan to stuff its pockets with ad revenue and abandon its offices and its name. Driving the brand into the ground makes no sense under the circumstances since it's not a fly-by-night operation.

So it seems like The Examiner is staggering along in the poorly placed footsteps of its predecessors not, as part of a well-thought-out business strategy, but from sheer failure to learn from the past. In the end, if the project is to continue, the company will have to purge bad writers, implement some quality control and rebuild its reputation and relationships.

I hope it does so, because The Examiner's approach is an interesting one. I like the idea of a low-overhead platform for targeted journalists and opinionators. It has real potential. Provided, that is, that the project looks to long-term viability.

For now, I'm still writing for The Examiner -- until somebody in the Denver office stumbles on this blog post, that is. But if you know anybody who might be interested in a slightly used writer/editor/blogger (who was there when it all started, I'm tellin' ya), don't be afraid to drop me a line.

What? You mean there are consequences to calling out SWAT without a reason?

2010-01-11T12:02:00.000-08:00

Just about anytime a journalist covers some bizarre excess of law-enforcement behavior, in which armored vehicles, or heavy weapons or military tactics are invoked in obviously inappropriate contexts, the police-state cheerleaders come out of the woodwork. They assure us that we'll regret our words when it's shown that the target of some podunk town's aerial strike to collect overdue parking tickets was a danger to the republic worthy of the harshest measures. So it's with a measure of satisfaction that I report that David Carl, the fellow on the receiving end of a SWAT raid in Cottonwood, Arizona, last summer, not only faces no charges in the wake of that raid, but the city planning department even dropped a civil action against him. Not surprisingly, Carl plans to sue.

"Helmeted officers ... armed with automatic weapons" (according to a local newspaper, the Verde Independent) crashed through the doors of Carl's Wild West Express -- a package handling and delivery service -- last summer, supposedly on allegations that the man had abused his twin teenage daughters. Returning to town after the fact of the raid, Police Chief Jody Fanning justified a subordinate's decision to call out the troops by saying, "We didn't know if he had a safe house or fortress." Officials also said that Carl owned guns and claimed he had anti-government views.

As I pointed out at the time, though, police can always claim that you might have forted up your residence -- we all might have done anything to prepare for a siege. "Might" is a weasel word that requires no evidence. And as for guns and anti-government views ... This is Arizona. Rural Arizona. If the Constitution were to be suspended and anti-government political views and gun ownership declared sufficient rationale for forceful police action, they'd have to build a wall around the state.

But the official story that David Carl was a threat to children and law-enforcement officers seemed flawed from the very beginning. For starters, police didn't take the guns they claimed to fear so much. And after an initial trip to the police station, they let the girls go back home.

In fact, David Carl's conflicts with local authorities are more long-standing, deep-seated -- and boring -- than the dramatic raid suggests. At the time of the raid, Carl insisted that the city was just escalating a zoning battle over signs and an occupancy permit to a ridiculous extreme. In fact, city Planning and Zoning Commission records document precisely such a conflict -- pursued, in particular, by Darold Smith, a then-board member and current City Council member.

From May 19, 2008 minutes (PDF):

Two pending Hearing Officer cases: one involving a contract post office substation owned by David Carl and operating without a certificate of occupancy; and Gardner’s recycling operation on North Main Street.

From June 18, 2008 minutes (PDF):

Commissioner Smith talked about the Code Enforcement report, boarding houses, and that it
appears that David Carl is going out of business.

From October 20, 2008 minutes (PDF):

Darold Smith questioned enforcement status of zoning violations against David Carl (Wild West
Express) and Angela Lozano (boarding houses).

From November 17, 2008 minutes (PDF):

Darold Smith asked about the David Carl case and why it has taken over a year.

From February 23, 2009 minutes (PDF):

Darold Smith asked when David Carl would be shut down. Gehlert said after the
administrative process was exhausted, it went into the criminal phase, but the City Magistrate
refused to hear it.

From March 16, 2009 minutes (PDF):

Darold Smith inquired about the David Carl zoning enforcement case. Director Gehlert said
there was nothing new. He understood they would send it back through the system.

From April 20, 2009 minutes (PDF):

Darold Smith asked about enforcement on Gila (David Karl) and group homes.
Gehlert answered that on the Gila matter they were waiting for the new magistrate to
come onboard. The group home code was on the Council agenda the next evening.

Ummm ... Did David Carl run over Darold Smith's dog? The city official's interest seems a bit ... stalker-iffic.
In any case, the April 20 Planning and Zoning minutes were the last mention I could find of Carl (or Karl, assuming that's the same person) in city records, with Darold Smith's pet case apparently going nowhere in the courts. Smith took a seat on the city council in May. And then the police raided Wild West Express on July 20.

And now, according to the latest news, "Police Chief Jody Fanning says the County Attorney's Office will not prosecute Carl at this time. There are no pending charges against Carl or the business. An earlier planning department civil case against Carl was dismissed by the city."

There may well be more to this case than the public record shows. Perhaps David Carl is truly a danger and the police screwed up with their violent raid and its aftermath -- that is, they're incompetent rather than malevolent.

But I wouldn't bet on it. Right now, I'd take the scandal in Cottonwood, Arizona, as a lesson to be careful who you're ticking off when you go head-to-head with government officials. And keep a good lawyer on speed dial.

It's a rule, damn it, it doesn't have to make sense

2010-01-03T21:28:00.000-08:00

I'm parked, with my family, in a tiny bungalow in the Los Angeles area right now. The bungalow belongs to my mother-in-law, who is in Pasadena's Huntington Memorial Hospital, awaiting either a quadruple or quintuple heart bypass operation tomorrow, as the situation dictates at the time (oh hell, why not go for six?).

Anyway, the hospital currently has unusual restrictive limits on visits by kids in place. It's not uncommon for hospitals to have some limits on minors during "RSV season" -- the time of year when kids might catch a virus that causes a cold in adults, but can be nastier in little ones. The RSV concerns often get wound up with flu season fears and result in restrictions -- like those at the Flagstaff Medical Center, near my home, confining the fresh-faced little weaklings (and potential vectors of contagion) to common areas, ground floors, and the like.

At Huntington Memorial Hospital, the restrictions (PDF) are a bit more far-reaching -- as in absolute. Taking the whole oh-so-last-summer swine flu panic and running with it, the hospital administration has apparently barred everybody's favorite beasties from anyplace to which the provider of "quality, uninterrupted healthcare" (editorial note: the word "quality" requires a modifier) can lay claim.

Today, not only was my four-year-old barred from wishing grandma the best, but he and I were then tossed out of an outdoor courtyard open to the street at either end and the sky above -- you know, a place where squirrels and pigeons shit -- while we waited for my wife. The uniformed security guard was polite enough, but he was insistent that the courtyard was hospital grounds, and children can't be anywhere on hospital grounds.

He was kind enough to suggest that we could wait outside the main entrance. Thanks anyway. We preferred a stroll through the streets of Pasadena.

Never mind that H1N1 has proved to be yet another disappointment to our neighborhood false Cassandras -- sure it's unpleasant to catch, but that's true of any flu, and lots of other bugs besides. Swine flu just hasn't been as big a threat as originally feared -- it's such a bust, epidemic-wise, that many European countries are trying to unload their wildly excessive H1N1 vaccine stocks, even though half the doses haven't even been delivered yet (buy your swine flu novelty collectibles now and watch the value soar!).

Nobody is putting in place specific swine flu-related restrictions these days -- especially not panicky ones that treat toddlers like emissaries from the Children of the Corn. The Huntington Memorial Hospital policy was clearly implemented months ago, at the height of the panic. Now that flu frenzy is passe, we're still stuck with security guards enforcing draconian policies that kick tykes to the curb.

But so it often is with rules and restrictions of any sort. Some urgent concern (often a social panic of one sort or another) seems to call for immediate response -- a really poorly thought out and wide-sweeping response, thank you. Fears subside, but the boneheaded policies remain in place months or years later, having acquired an awesome bureaucratic inertia that can overcome even irrefutable pointlessness.

As that security guard told me that, for the sake of protecting against an epidemic that fizzled, my son was persona non grata in a place where rodents run free and wind rats rule the skies, I couldn't help imagining what airports will be like, long after the fruit of the loom bomber has, himself, been forgotten.