Disloyal Opposition

Philly's finest in a candid moment

noreply@blogger.com (J.D. Tuccille) — Fri, 09 May 2008 04:09:00 +0000

Eventually, one of these days, cops will begin to realize that their flip-outs, tantrums, rampages and general acts of misbehavior are increasingly likely to be caught by somebody's camera.

I'll admit, though, I'm a bit puzzled as to how these Philadelphia enforcers of law and order didn't figure out that folks in the helicopter hovering above them just might be taking an interest in the beating they were laying on three suspects.

Most of the officers on the scene have been pulled from the street.

NAACP joins Dibor Roberts case

noreply@blogger.com (J.D. Tuccille) — Thu, 08 May 2008 17:57:00 +0000

Family reasons (fatigue from chasing after a 2 1/2-year-old) kept me away from the rally for Dibor Roberts at Windmill Park in Cornville. But I'm happy to see that somebody rather more important than me did make it: the Rev. Oscar Tillman, president of the Maricopa County Chapter of the NAACP. He has asked the U.S. Justice Department to investigate the case and determine if Roberts's civil rights were violated in the course of her harrowing encounter with Sergeant Jeff Newnum.

Since the NAACP is now involved, I'll say that I have yet to see evidence that racism was at the root of Newnum's misconduct on the night of July 29, 2007. It could be a matter of bigotry, but I suspect that Newnum didn't even know that Roberts was black until he'd forced her car off the road.

More likely, I think, Newnum was acting in accord with the common mindset among police officers that says that police are due instant and complete obedience at all times by members of the public. We've seen evidence of that attitude repeatedly and, increasingly, on video, in instances where civilians have hesitated or -- worse -- asked questions during encounters with the forces of law and order. Police now act like occupation troops, and those of us lacking badges and uniforms are expect to be dutifully submissive as members of a subject population.

If I had to guess, I'd say that Sergeant Newnum flew into a rage over the fact that a mere civilian looked for a safe place to pull over rather than instantly coming to a halt along a dark, deserted road.

But it's beyond doubt that Dibor Roberts's rights were violated, and I'm encouraged to see an organization with the clout and resources of the NAACP come to her assistance.

Cory Maye case gets video treatment

noreply@blogger.com (J.D. Tuccille) — Thu, 08 May 2008 17:21:00 +0000

Reason.tv has posted an excellent video, narrated by Drew Carey, about the horrible injustice being done to Cory Maye. If you're not familiar with the case, Maye was dozing in a living room chair one night, in December 2001, when he was awakened by the sound of somebody trying to break down his front door. He fled to a bedroom where his 18-month-old daughter was sleeping, retrieved a handgun, and prepared to defend himself in the darkened room.

Intruders rapidly forced their way into the house, and into the bedroom. Maye fired three times.

He killed a man -- Officer Ron Jones, the son of Prentiss, Mississippi's police chief. Jones was apparently there to raid Maye's neighbor, a known drug dealer, although the warrant was for both apartments of the duplex.

Maye claims he had no idea the raiders were police. The jury didn't believe him. He's been in prison ever since -- originally on death row, though he's now serving a life sentence.

Maye's attorney was later declared incompetent, the medical examiner who testified on behalf of the prosecution is now the subject of national scrutiny over his credentials and integrity, and the confidential informant relied upon by police has revealed himself as a vicious racist.

The journalistic footwork on Maye's plight has been done by Radley Balko, who is truly one of the best ink-stained wretches in the country today. His original article is here. Balko's continuing blog coverage of the case is here.

And the video is here:

For peddling a buzz, Cindy McCain gets rich and Greg Gibson serves hard time

noreply@blogger.com (J.D. Tuccille) — Wed, 07 May 2008 19:25:00 +0000

What's the reward for selling Americans a little stress relief? If you're the wife of a presidential candidate with her hand in the beer trade, it can mean tens of millions of dollars. But if you're just a guy who peddles the wrong buzz-delivery system, it can be years of hard time.

Hensley & Co. is a major dealer in a popular intoxicant that was once illegal but is now enjoyed by millions of Americans. As the third-largest Anheuser-Busch wholesaler in the United States, Hensley & Co. has made company chairman Cindy McCain, Senator John McCain's wife, wealthy to the tune of about $100 million through its network of 5,000 accounts and over 600 vehicles.

Gregory Alan Gibson allegedly spent a couple of years transporting shipments of a popular intoxicant around the United States, but not in one of Cindy McCain's trucks. Instead, according to Maricopa County, Arizona, prosecutors and jurors, he was paid $4,000, $8,000, or $12,000 at a time to drive shipments of an intoxicant that's still illegal: marijuana. Like one of Hensley's drivers (although he was certainly better-paid), Gibson drove shipments where he was told, and was paid a fee for his services.

Cindy McCain may get deluxe taxpayer-funded quarters in the White House as a partial result of the wealth and connections that come with masterminding sales of her preferred intoxicant. For transporting shipments of his preferred intoxicant, Greg Gibson has already spent years in somewhat less-splendid taxpayer-funded quarters at the Great Plains Correctional Facility, a privately run prison that houses many of Arizona's convicted lawbreakers far from home in Hinton, Oklahoma. And a life of financial ruin along with the dodgy status of a convicted felon awaits him upon his release from prison.

Gibson became a statistic in the war on drugs on March 25, 2003 -- the day his guilty verdicts were handed down. He was sentenced to concurrent prison terms resulting in ten years behind bars, and fined $150,000 for each of twelve counts, plus surcharges of 60%.

Greg Gibson came to my attention courtesy of his fiancee, Melissa. She contacted me after reading a post I wrote in February on the large population of non-violent drug offenders in American prisons. She wrote to me with some trepidation, concerned that corrections authorities might retaliate against Gibson for bringing his case to light -- perhaps by transferring him to a less desirable prison. The reaction of other defendants in the case, particularly those who testified for reduced sentences, was also a concern. In the end, Melissa told me that they decided to go ahead and seek whatever publicity they could get for his situation.

The crimes Gibson was convicted of consisted of Illegally Conducting an Enterprise, Conspiracy and twelve counts of Transfer for Sale, Sale or Transfer of Marijuana. There's not a crime against property in the lot -- let alone a conviction for even the most minor act of violence.

But as non-violent as his "crimes" were, and despite the fact that about a third of Americans think the activities for which he was convicted should be perfectly legal, Gibson will be cooling his heels for a long time to come. According to the Arizona Department of Corrections Website, Gibson won't be eligible for release until, at best, August 7, 2011. At that time, he'll owe the Arizona Drug Enforcement Fund $2,888,000 -- the total of twelve separate fines of $150,000, plus 60%.

By contrast, when Clifton Bennett, the 18-year-old son of then Arizona state Senate President Ken Bennett, was found guilty in 2006 of sodomizing 18 boys, he received a rather lenient 30 days in jail and three years probation, with the likelihood of no permanent criminal record.

Even people without connections who are convicted of serious crimes get less severe sentences than Gibson did for transporting marijuana. In May of this year, Jonathan David Alldredge received 4 1/2 years in prison for shooting a man to death outside a diner in Lake Havasu City. He pleaded guilty to manslaughter.

And Nicholas David Torres was sentenced to a 3 1/2 years in prison plus five years of probation for beating an elderly man with a baseball bat.

One year is the sentence handed down to Felipe Mazo, for killing a woman in a hit-and-run car accident.

Unfortunately, this disparity between sentences handed down for crimes of violence and abuse of minors on the one hand, and non-violent drug offenses on the other, isn't confined to Gibson's case. In Arizona Prison Crisis: A Call for Smart on Crime Solutions (PDF), a report prepared in 2004 for Families Against Mandatory Minimums, authors Judith Greene and Kevin Pranis point out that Arizona has the highest incarceration rate in the western U.S. and the ninth highest rate in the country.

Why? Well, according to Greene and Pranis, "Arizona’s high incarceration rate is driven by a rigid mandatory sentencing system that severely restricts judges’ discretion in imposing sentences and crowds prisons with non-violent substance abusers." A majority of Arizona's prisoners, they write, are non-violent offenders, with one-in-five behind bars for drug offenses.

In fact, say Greene and Pranis, in Arizona "[s]entences were longer for drug sales than for many violent crimes. The average sentence imposed for drug sales (4.3 years, including marijuana sales), was longer than the average sentence imposed for assault (four years) or weapons charges (3.8 years) and the same as the average sentence for arson."

Note that these lengthy sentences for non-violent drug crimes can be handed down even for first offences. The only other arrest mentioned in Gibson's court records is one in Missouri involving the same activity that resulted in his lengthy sentence in Arizona.

As I mentioned above, Greg Gibson won't be eligible for release until 2011. The long years of his already long sentence that Greg Gibson is expected to serve behind bars can be blamed on the state's "truth-in-sentencing" statute mandating that prisoners serve at least 85 percent of their sentences. Say Greene and Pranis, "Since the law was implemented in 1994, the average time served for non-violent offenses has increased far faster than the time served by violent and other serious person offenders."

It wasn't supposed to be this way. In 1996, Arizona voters passed a ballot initiative -- that year's Proposition 200 -- mandating that non-violent drug offenders arrested for simple possession or use of an illegal drug be sent to drug treatment instead of prison for their first and second offenses. But the measure only applied to use and possession. Once a commercial aspect entered the picture, government officials were not only free, but essentially required, to impose draconian sentences.

Those long sentences for selling officially disfavored intoxicants to willing customers aren't just draconian in their effects on the lives of the convicted, they also raise questions about the integrity of the process that puts them behind bars for such sizable chunks of their lives. Melissa insists that the witnesses against Gibson were much bigger players than he and that they spun tales to please the prosecution and win reduced sentences. I have no way of testing the veracity of the witnesses' testimony, but it's clear they had strong incentive to say whatever would please the prosecutors in the case.

See this exchange between a defense attorney and a prosecution witness against Gibson and his co-defendants.

Q. All right. So, no matter what you do or say, you are not going to get more than 175 months in prison, correct?

A. Correct.

Q. And then depending on what you do and say, you may get substantially less than that, correct?

A. Yes.

Q. All right. And depending on what you do and say here and in Detroit, you theoretically could end up with probation, couldn't you?

A. Yes. ....

Q. Okay. Now, you're obligated under the terms of that agreement to provide active assistance to the United States government in good faith, true?

A. True.

Q. That's in the plea agreement, right?

A. Yes.

Q. But the person who determines whether you have done that, whether you have complied with the agreement, is, in fact, the Assistant U.S. Attorney, correct?

A. Correct.

Q. It's not the judge or somebody else, is it?

A. Correct.

Note that another witness faced a possible sentence of 20 years in federal prison and 269 years in state prison that he was trying to mitigate through his testimony. That's a lot of time behind bars that might tempt anybody to polish the truth to whatever extent is necessary to win the favor of the people holding his freedom in the balance.

Manufacturing testimony is hardly a new phenomenon. As reported ten years ago by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and more recently by Reason magazine, jailhouse networks have sprung up to sell prisoners information they need to craft credible, but false, testimony in an effort to gain reduced sentences. According to the Post-Gazette, at least one man made hundreds of thousands of dollars selling inmates confidential data. Actual participants in a case don't need to buy information -- they already have the knowledge necessary to build a story capable of winning prosecutors' favor.

I'm not arguing that Greg Gibson is an angel. According to prosecutors in his case, he fled custody at one point and tried to bribe the bail bondsman who was sent to retrieve him.

But who can blame him?

Threatened with years of lost freedom for engaging in another victimless, but illegal, trade, Deborah Jeane Palfrey chose to hang herself. Desperation makes people do ... well ... desperate things.

But if Gibson isn't an angel, he's not a devil either. He didn't kill anybody, nor did he molest a single child, or assault an old man, and it's hard to see why he should face fines and prison time more harsh than that given to those who did.

In fact, it's hard to justify punishing Greg Gibson at all for dealing in the means to get a buzz when Cindy McCain is rewarded so richly for doing pretty much the same thing, and on a much larger scale.

Day off

noreply@blogger.com (J.D. Tuccille) — Wed, 07 May 2008 02:34:00 +0000

No, I'm not dead -- I'm just taking a day off. I'll be back on Wednesday.

Incidentally, I'm working on a big post regarding sentencing for drug offences in Arizona. It'll be up within the next few days.

If you make up the crime, serve the time

noreply@blogger.com (J.D. Tuccille) — Mon, 05 May 2008 16:54:00 +0000

Last night's 60 Minutes carried the moving story of the growing number of people sent to prison during the reign of infamous Dallas tough-guy District Attorney Henry Wade who are now being proven innocent and released because of the efforts of the Innocence Project and current DA Craig Watkins. After ten or twenty or more years behind bars without reason, it's remarkable that so many of the wrongly accused have lived long enough to see the light of day again and enjoy at least a modicum of compensation ($50,000 for each year of incarceration, or $100,000 per year if sentenced to death).

The immediate mechanism for the release of these falsely imprisoned Texans has largely been DNA but, in at least some cases, it seems that the original prosecutors deliberately withheld evidence that would have assisted the defense (the Dallas Morning News reports that about half of belated exonerations in the state, and three in Dallas County, involve withheld evidence). That's illegal, but it carries no penalty under law.

DA Watkins wants the power to bring criminal charges against prosecutors who withhold evidence. I think that's appropriate. But what should the penalty be?

Here's an idea: Any prosecutor who withholds exculpatory evidence in a trial, leading to the conviction and imprisonment of an innocent person, should have to serve as many years behind bars as that person did before being exonerated. There should be a minimum sentence, of course, so that any such misconduct carries serious prison time.

Depriving innocent people of their liberty is among the more despicable acts I can imagine.

Unfortunately, Henry Wade himself is immune from prosecution, having gone to Hell in 2001. But some of his staff must still be kicking around.

The crime: embarrassing politicians

noreply@blogger.com (J.D. Tuccille) — Mon, 05 May 2008 16:02:00 +0000

The Sunday Times of Western Australia ran a story revealing that the state government planned to use taxpayer funds as part of its reelection effort. So police raided the paper to find the source of the leak.

The department of Premier Alan Carpenter, a former journalist, admitted today making a complaint that led to the raid by 16 officers on the Perth newsroom of News Ltd's Sunday Times yesterday.

The fraud squad officers were trying to find who leaked information about a $16 million advertising bill for taxpayers to help get the WA government re-elected.

During the raid all exits at the Sunday Times building in Perth's inner-east were blocked and staff were subjected to bag searches when they left.

The article, written by staff reporter Paul Lampathakis and published in February, quoted "government sources'' as saying the money was to be spent on strategic advertising campaigns ahead of an upcoming election.

It said Treasurer Eric Ripper, as chairman of the cabinet sub-committee on communication, had "urgently'' asked the expenditure review committee, which he chaired, for $5.25 million for the first half of the year and a further $10.75 million until July next year.

A search warrant executed by police was for documents relating to information held by Sunday Times employees about the investigation, including notes, scribblings and computer and phone records.

Don't anybody pass this story along to the White House.

Thanks to Anonymous, who pointed the way to this story in the comments to the latest Joe Arpaio post.

Yummy conservation

noreply@blogger.com (J.D. Tuccille) — Fri, 02 May 2008 17:38:00 +0000

I am forever looking for new and exotic things to put on the dinner table. I always search for the wild game items on restaurant menus. I own a guide to the edible plants of Arizona and I've harvested mesquite beans and picked prickly pear fruit. I've also shot a variety of cute, cuddly critters, all in the search for something different and delicious. Now, it seems, I've been doing a public service -- well, at least to the extent that I have adventurous tastes that help fuel demand for otherwise neglected foods. Says the New York Times:

SOME people would just as soon ignore the culinary potential of the Carolina flying squirrel or the Waldoboro green neck rutabaga. To them, the creamy Hutterite soup bean is too obscure and the Tennessee fainting goat, which keels over when startled, sounds more like a sideshow act than the centerpiece of a barbecue.

But not Gary Paul Nabhan. He has spent most of the past four years compiling a list of endangered plants and animals that were once fairly commonplace in American kitchens but are now threatened, endangered or essentially extinct in the marketplace. He has set out to save them, which often involves urging people to eat them.

Nabhan has put together a book, Renewing America’s Food Traditions: Saving and Savoring the Continent’s Most Endangered Foods, on just this subject. It sounds ... tasty.

Don't forget to thank me for my personal efforts.

Arpaio's junta sued for attack on the free press

noreply@blogger.com (J.D. Tuccille) — Thu, 01 May 2008 17:33:00 +0000

Generalissimo ... err ... Sheriff Joe Arpaio, of Maricopa County, Arizona, has landed himself in yet more legal hot water with his insistence on modeling his conduct on that of Robert Mugabe and Hugo Chavez. His jailing of two Phoenix New Times executives has resulted in a lawsuit against Arpaio, County Attorney Andrew Thomas and Dennis Wilenchik, a former special county prosecutor. The lawsuit, which makes fascinating reading (PDF), alleges: negligence; gross negligence; violations of constitutional rights (including violations of free speech, false imprisonment and retaliatory conduct by law enforcement) and conspiracy and racketeering.

The lawsuit includes a detailed summary of the conflict between Maricopa County's ruling junta and the crusading weekly newspaper. In short, though, the New Times has long disliked Arpaio and his cronies, accusing them of civil liberties violations, abuse of power and unethical conduct. In an article on Arpaio's curiously substantial real estate investments for a man who makes a modest income, the New Times published Arpaio's publicly available home address. This ran afoul of an almost-certainly unconstitutional state law forbidding such publication on the Web, but not in any other medium. After prolonged and unsuccessful attempts to get another county to handle the case, Maricopa County officials appointed a special prosecutor who subpoenaed information from the New Times, including names and addresses of its online readers, as well as details of what those readers viewed online. After county officials attempted to set up an inappropriate meeting with the judge handling the case, the New Times published details about the subpoena. County officials promptly arrested Michael Lacey and Jim Larkin, founders of the Phoenix New Times and executives with Village Voice Media.

And that's how we ended up here.

This case is important enough on its own merits, dealing as it does with free speech and abuse of power. It has special importance, though, for Maricopa County residents because the Phoenix New Times is the only media outlet in the area to consistently challenge Joe Arpaio and company's history of self-aggrandizement, bigotry, civil rights violations, ethical lapses, and the tens of millions of dollars accrued in civil settlements. Other Arizona newspapers and even the national press have belatedly begun to pay attention to the excesses of the Maricopa junta, but Arpaio has been in office for 16 years and is running for reelection this year. Only the New Times has kept the spotlight on the sheriff and his cronies through all of those years.

So Maricopa County's jailing of Lacey and Larkin wasn't just an abuse of power and a violation of civil liberties; it was an attempt to muzzle the one journalistic enterprise that has been a thorn in the side of county officials for a decade-and-a-half.

As Joe Arpaio knows, America just isn't as far as we'd like to think from turning its own locally grown egomaniacs into tin-pot dictators.

San Tan Flat customers to boogie down

noreply@blogger.com (J.D. Tuccille) — Thu, 01 May 2008 16:52:00 +0000

Pinal County, Arizona's bizarre crusade against San Tan Flat, a popular bar and restaurant, has come to an end, with victory for the establishment's owners and for would-be dancers everywhere.

Pinal County Superior Court Judge William O'Neil overturned a decision from the county Board of Supervisors that said the country-Western-themed restaurant was operating an illegal dance hall by allowing patrons to dance to live music on its back patio. ...

The Board of Supervisors had said [owner Dale] Bell violated a zoning ordinance from 1962 that bans outdoor dance halls. The county contended the ordinance was designed to prevent excessive or disruptive noise and threatened to fine Bell $700 a day for each day he was found out of compliance.

But O'Neil said the wording of the ordinance has nothing to do with noise. He added that Bell's business and profits rely on food and beverage sales, not dancing.

County officials knew full well that San Tan Flat would have noise, sell liquor and have a stage and "at each step they approved" Bell's plans for the building in the rural area near Ellsworth Road and Hunt Highway, O'Neil said. ...

Bell opened his business in November 2005 and said the county should have objected to the project before they let him build it. Bell sued the county for $1, saying the dance-hall ordinance violated his constitutional right to freely run his business.

"That $1 is about freedom and about civil liberties and the government not being allowed to overreach," Bell said Wednesday.

Judge O'Neil threw in a few slaps at San Tan Flat owner Dale Bell for having had the temerity to operate the place, but agreed that he had dotted every "i" and crossed every "t" on the way to opening San Tan Flat's doors.

Censorship ... err ... campaign finance reform strikes again

noreply@blogger.com (J.D. Tuccille) — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 17:00:00 +0000

George Will tells the unpleasant tale of neighborhood activists in Colorado who were brought up short by modern America's limits on "acceptable" political speech.

Parker North is a cluster of about 300 houses close to the town of Parker. When two residents proposed a vote on annexation of their subdivision to Parker, six others began trying to persuade the rest to oppose annexation. They printed lawn signs and fliers, started an online discussion group and canvassed neighbors, little knowing that they were provoking Colorado's speech police.

One proponent of annexation sued them. This tactic -- wielding campaign finance regulations to suppress opponents' speech -- is common in the America of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law. The complaint did not just threaten the Parker Six for any "illegal activities." It also said that anyone who had contacted them or received a lawn sign might be subjected to "investigation, scrutinization and sanctions for campaign finance violations."

Fortunately, the targets of the attempted muzzling have found an ally in the always excellent Institute for Justice. They, and IJ, are suing to overturn Colorado's burdensome laws limiting free speech.

McCain plays medicine man

noreply@blogger.com (J.D. Tuccille) — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 16:12:00 +0000

John McCain's health care proposal is out and, as I predicted, it's not so much free market-oriented (as it's being touted in the press) as it is less statist than the schemes offered by his Democrat competitors, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

That said, there are some good elements in the plan. For starters, he touts the value of Health Savings Accounts. Some years ago, I had an early version of the HSA (a real one that rolled over from year to year, not one of the accounts that magically ate your money every December). It really did give me a remarkable degree of control over my health expenses and an idea of what everything cost -- and it allowed me to go to providers as a cash-paying patient, with access to lower prices.

McCain also wants to shift tax breaks so that they stop incentivizing employers to offer health coverage and start incentivizing individuals to acquire coverage independent of employers. To that end he's offering credits of $2,500 for individuals and $5,000 for families. That's not enough to pay the full cost of coverage, but it's not supposed to be. It's just supposed to act as a carrot to get people to acquire coverage. McCain also wants to allow people to shop for plans across state lines, potentially buying cheaper insurance that covers just what they need from states with fewer regulations. Overall, that promises increased competition, coverage chosen for its personal fit, and also improved job mobility since people won't stay in unpleasant situations just to retain coverage.

Tort reform is also on McCain's agenda, though I'm curious as to how he's going to address what's really a state-level issue from the White House.

McCain's proposal does not address the problems inherent in a third-party-pays system of health coverage. I don't see how his ideas are going to rein-in the increasing costs that come with the all-you-can-eat model (nor do Obama and Clinton address this).

And the plan does nothing to challenge the entitlement mentality that has converted health care in the minds of too many people into a "right" that somebody else has to provide at any and all cost. As long as people insist that unknown others owe them endless fixes for their booboos, health care will remain a political football, with the advantage going to the politicians who promise the most free stuff (Who pays the bill? Who cares?).

McCain also promises what sounds like a pricey but vague state-federal fix for the problems of "higher-risk" patients who have trouble getting approved for coverage under the third-party-pays system.

And there's some inscrutable stuff in there, including an endorsement of "coordinated care."

We should pay a single bill for high-quality disease care which will make every single provider accountable and responsive to the patients' needs.

Talk about counter-intuitive. If I want a doctor's attention, I expect that I'll get it not from one pre-paid bill, but because I haven't yet signed a check to her.

My verdict: Less bad than what the Democrats offer, with some actual quasi-market-oriented improvements over the current system. The model also allows for continuing individual experimentation, unlike Clinton's plan to conscript the entire population into a government-designed system.

Obama the free marketeer?

noreply@blogger.com (J.D. Tuccille) — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 22:34:00 +0000

In the comments to a post by Michael C. Moynihan at Reason's Hit & Run, Tim Cavanaugh, late of Reason and now Web editor of the Los Angeles Times opinion page, reinforces Moynihan's contention that Barack Obama may well be the more market-oriented of the two Democrat contenders for president.

We had both of the Tiresome Twosome in for L.A. Times endorsement interviews within a day or two of each other. Obama easily clinched it right there, and the split was exactly as Moynihan lays out in his post.

To wit: On all economic topics you got vague-but-encouraging, generally New Democrat pro-market stuff out of Obama, and you got straight-up socialism out of Clinton. That was true for free trade, for punishment of the "CEOs who have caused this mess," for making sure "the workers who created the wealth get their fair share," for the bailout of sub-prime deadbeats, for everything. This was not exactly a Fox-News-type crowd they were addressing either: With a handful of exceptions, everybody in the room was quite eager to hear hang-the-rich, protect-the-people-from-themselves claptrap.

I'm not exaggerating when I say Clinton's rhetoric was openly socialist and Obama's at least showed familiarity with the basic notion of a free market. That doesn't mean Clinton will rule that way or that she's legislated that way, and it doesn't mean Obama won't suck. But just counting their comments on economics, Obama was orders of magnitude less objectionable than Clinton.

That's an interesting peek into what the two presidential hopefuls are telling a select audience of (mostly) economically authoritarian newspaper editors about their economic views.

FLDS gives its version of events

noreply@blogger.com (J.D. Tuccille) — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 20:41:00 +0000

The Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS) has published a Website giving its own version of the raid by Texas authorities on the Yearning for Zion ranch and the subsequent kidnapping by officials of hundreds of the odd sect's children. The photos of heavily armed raiders are especially chilling.

Why do doctors stick with the health care system?

noreply@blogger.com (J.D. Tuccille) — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 17:14:00 +0000

In response to yesterday's post on John McCain's sort-of, not-quite rejection of a government-designed health-care system, a reader writes to ask me:

If they are so dissatisfied with the current state of medical insurance, why aren't more doctors operating outside of the insurance industry by providing good care for a reasonable cost and completely boycotting medical insurance?

That's a good question, since the current system is a disaster and proposals put forward by the leading presidential candidates promise to enhance the worst aspects of what's already in place. To quote a Forbes column by Yaron Brook recommended to me by the same reader:

But by the time Medicare and Medicaid were enacted in 1965, this view of health care as an economic product--for which each individual must assume responsibility--had given way to a view of health care as a "right," an unearned "entitlement," to be provided at others' expense.

This entitlement mentality fueled the rise of our current third-party-payer system, a blend of government programs, such as Medicare and Medicaid, together with government-controlled employer-based health insurance (itself spawned by perverse tax incentives during the wage and price controls of World War II).

Today, what we have is not a system grounded in American individualism, but a collectivist system that aims to relieve the individual of the "burden" of paying for his own health care by coercively imposing its costs on his neighbors. For every dollar's worth of hospital care a patient consumes, that patient pays only about 3 cents out-of-pocket; the rest is paid by third-party coverage. And for the health care system as a whole, patients pay only about 14%.

The result of shifting the responsibility for health care costs away from the individuals who accrue them was an explosion in spending.

This is exactly right. The dominant means of paying for health care in the United States has little to do with the discipline and consumer feedback of the free market. Prices for procedures and visits are set not according to supply and demand in the local market, but according to insurance company compensation and the mysteries of medical coding. Each procedure must be coded at the highest justifiable level -- too low and you're giving services away, too high and you're flirting with fraud. The charges for each code are then set at a level above expected insurance company (including Medicare and Medicaid) compensation. To maximize compensation, medical practices charge at a level well above what the companies are actually willing to compensate. If a practice is being compensated equivalent to its charges, the assumption is that the office is charging too little.

Smart cash-paying patients who know to ask at well-run practices will often find an entirely separate and unadvertised price list that bears little resemblance to what insurance companies are charged. That is, it's a lot lower. These separate price lists for cash-paying customers have been adopted at a very few medical practices as the only price lists. Practices that use SimpleCare charge patients directly and don't deal with insurance companies or government programs at all, although patients are free to submit their bills to insurers for reimbursement.

How much lower are these cash prices? SimpleCare providers are reported to charge 30% to 50% less than competitors who work through the traditional insurance schemes. And that's with much less effort and expense in collecting payments.

All right. So the system of codes and insurers as it now exists is arcane, difficult to navigate and drives up costs. So, as my reader asks, "why aren't more doctors operating outside of the insurance industry by providing good care for a reasonable cost and completely boycotting medical insurance?"

The fact is, doctors are some of the least business savvy people I've ever met. Most will admit that, too. Medical school teaches them how to save lives, but not how to run an office. Unfamiliar with alternatives, physicians go with what they know, which is the system in place. Successful practices almost always rely on practice managers who are trained in the arcane art of extracting money from insurance companies and the government. They have conferences, newsletters and mailing lists devoted to proper coding and price-setting. Practice managers are highly skilled at running medical practices under the current system and only under the current system.

And once physicians who've opened their own practices find themselves bringing in more money than they put out in expenses, they have little incentive to start jiggering with the business model. Shifting gears would involve putting profitability on the line for the hope of reestablishing profitability under a different (if more sensible) business model -- all the while swimming upstream against the prevailing assumption, so well described by Yaron Brook, that health care is a "right" that should be free. Switching to a pay-as-you-go model requires getting patients who balk at coughing up $20 for a co-pay to pay the full (but discounted off of current prices) cost of their health care.

That's one of the maddening things about medicine. People who drive to the office in a new truck with a carton of cigarettes in the back and who just spent a couple of hundred bucks to get their dogs de-wormed will bitch about handing over $20 for a co-pay. People don't mind paying the veterinarian, but that greedy doctor ...

The prevailing entitlement attitude toward medicine is another big barrier toward changing to a more market-oriented model that would lower costs.

And, of course, since most health care consumers pay little or none of the actual cost of the services they consume, there's a strong incentive among an expensive subset of patients to demand ever-more tests, more medication, more visits and more specialized treatments that drive up costs overall for the whole system.

There are health-care providers who do use a market model, though. If you're a fan of alternative medicine, chances are that your homeopath or naturopath, right after a monologue about the evils of profit-driven mainstream medicine, will guide you to the counter where you're expected to pay, in full, for all services rendered that day.

McCain just won my wife's vote

noreply@blogger.com (J.D. Tuccille) — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 19:06:00 +0000

My wife is pretty much a single-issue voter this year. As a physician who owns her own practice and already despises the extent to which the government has intruded itself into her business, she's reserving her vote for the major-party candidate who promises the least expansion of the state sector in medicine. So, while we haven't discussed the latest development yet, I think this announcement will clinch it for her:

Sen. John McCain on Monday rejected a "big government" takeover of the health care system, saying he wants to empower families to make more medical decisions.

"I've made it very clear that what I want is for families to make decisions about their health care, not government, and that's the fundamental difference between myself and Sen. Obama and Sen. Clinton," McCain told reporters in Miami, Florida, referring to the two remaining Democratic presidential candidates, Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

"They want the government to make the decisions, I want the families to make decisions," he said.

But, McCain goes on to denounce "parochial interests" in medicine and said:

"We must move away from a system that is fragmented and pays for expensive procedures, toward one where a family has a medical home, providers coordinate their efforts and take advantage of technology to do so cheaply, and where the focus is on affordable quality outcomes."

That doesn't really sound to me like a candidate who wants to get the government out of the way and let the market provide medical care in a variety of ways to consumers with different needs -- free markets are, pretty much by definition, "fragmented" -- so I'm not sure what his assurances are worth.

But with Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama promising to stick the insurance companies with the cost of government-designed coverage (until they close their doors) that (under Hillary's plan) everybody is forced to sign up for, basically denying people access to low-cost, bare-bones plans, McCain sounds at least a bit less dangerous. And that's before we even get to the Democrats' vow to limit drug companies' prices and profits, pretty much eliminating the incentive to incur the $802 million cost of developing and getting approved a new drug or the $1.2 billion cost of developing and winning approval for a new biotech product.

I still think that to whatever extent McCain is more market-oriented than his donkey-party rivals, it's more by default than by conviction -- he wants to distinguish himself from the competition, and Republicans can't really go more socialist than Democrats. On his own, though, he's generally distrustful of the free market, and convinced that the government needs to intervene and throw its elbows around. His prescriptive vision for health care, revealed above, sounds to me like a military man's gut-level instinct to address a perceived problem by issuing orders from above rather than by getting out of the way and letting people work out grassroots-level solutions -- probably a multitude of solutions to address many needs and preferences.

I think, then, that McCain's instinct is to move in the same coercive direction as Clinton and Obama, with the right solution (whatever in hell that is) imposed from the top down, but less so, just because he's a Republican.

That'll probably be enough for a lot of voters (including my wonderful wife), but a slower road to a bad destination doesn't sound too enticing to me.

Dibor Roberts rally

noreply@blogger.com (J.D. Tuccille) — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 17:13:00 +0000

"A Woman's Right to Light" Rally for Dibor

Community members from throughout Arizona's Verde Valley are organizing a rally to support Dibor Roberts, the 48-year-old Cottonwood woman pulled over for speeding by a Yavapai County Sheriff's officer in July 2007 around 10:40pm on Beaverhead Flats Road on her way home from her nursing assistant's job at Sedona Winds in the Village of Oak Creek. The Friends of Dibor seek justice for Dibor Roberts and all women, and want the County to recognize "A Woman's Right to Light" -- the right of a woman to get to a lighted area before stopping. The Roberts case goes to trial in mid-May.

The rally will take place on Sunday, May 4 at 3pm at Windmill Park on Cornville Road in downtown Cornville. Included in the rally will be speakers from the community, music, tee shirts, a bake sale and door prizes to raise funds for Dibor's defense.

Note: The above is drawn from a press release issued by the ad-hoc committee supporting Dibor Roberts (links added by yours truly) in anticipation of her May 14-16 trial on felony charges of unlawful flight from a law officer and resisting arrest.

Of additional interest is the revelation in the latest news story about the Roberts case that the day after Dibor Roberts was arrested, a warrant was issued for the arrest of her husband Merrill "apparently as an accomplice to the unlawful flight charge that had been leveled against Dibor." The warrant was based on nothing more than the assumption that Dibor had been talking on her cell phone with her husband when an enraged Sergeant Jeff Newnum drove her off the road, smashed her window and snatched the phone from her hands. The warrant was quashed only when phone records revealed that Dibor Roberts never completed a call to her husband or to 911 -- unsurprising considering the violent circumstances and the spotty cell coverage in that area.

Think about that. While a phone conversation never occurred in this instance, the police apparently consider it a criminal act for a man to counsel his frightened wife when she's pursued by somebody she fears may be impersonating a police officer. That's outrageous.

You know you're evil when ...

noreply@blogger.com (J.D. Tuccille) — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 22:35:00 +0000

... in response to your wife's "what did you do today?" query, you respond that you kidnapped your political opponents' children and held them hostage in order to force the adults into submission.

Uncharitable prohibitionists snuff out fund-raising

noreply@blogger.com (J.D. Tuccille) — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 18:11:00 +0000

Advocates of forbidding private businesses to allow their customers to smoke are fond of claiming the bans have little impact on business, and whatever loss of patronage there is is purely temporary as smokers adjust to the new normal. At least for some businesses, though, that's not proving to be true. According to the New York Times, charity bingo games are withering and dying wherever cigarettes have been snuffed out.

In Minnesota, which adopted a statewide ban on smoking in all indoor workplaces in October, revenue from all charity gambling dropped nearly 13 percent in the last quarter of 2007, compared to the same quarter the year before, according to state officials. More than half of the drop — the equivalent of about $100 million annually — was attributed to the new law, they said.

Charlie Lindstrom, who runs the bingo nights at an American Legion post in Fergus Falls, Minn., said some of his former customers now drove to casinos on Indian reservations, where they can puff away, or across the border to Fargo, N.D., where veterans’ organizations are exempt from that state’s smoking ban.

...

Mr. Lindstrom is not alone. Managers of charity bingo games in California, New Jersey, New York and Washington State also say their states’ smoking bans have forced cutbacks in their budgets and in their support for various causes.

Few believe they can cultivate new nonsmoking players. They say smoking goes with bingo like peanut butter with jelly. Michael J. Surwill, bingo chairman at Elks Lodge No. 2501 in Ocean Springs, Miss., estimated that smokers outnumbered nonsmokers three to one at the lodge’s weekly game.

And the dip in fund-raising doesn't appear to be a temporary phenomenon either.

[B]ingo managers in states where bans on smoking have been in effect longer say nonsmokers cannot make up for the decline in revenues from smokers. Instead, they say, their industry has undergone a wave of forced consolidation.

“We actually benefited from it, but for the wrong reason — my competition was forced to close,” said Clyde Bock, bingo manager for the Ruth Dykeman Children’s Center in Seattle.

When Washington’s ban on smoking took effect in 2005, Mr. Bock was able to partially enclose a porch where bingo players could still smoke, and he got it approved as a separate facility. “It cost me $8,000, but it protected my customer base,” he said. “Other games weren’t so lucky.”

Still, revenues are down. In 2006, the bingo operation at the children’s center, which then belonged to Big Brothers Big Sisters, generated about $325,000 a year, after expenses, and employed 17 people. A year later, under the auspices of the center, it produced $150,000 and employed 13 people.

“People underestimate the impact smoking bans will have,” Mr. Bock said.

Washington used to be home to 100 bingo halls that raised money for charity. Now there are fewer than 20.

Culturally, it seems, bingo really is linked to smoking. If you take smoking out of the game, the players go elsewhere. Maybe they stay at home, or maybe they play bingo at friends houses where they can smoke, but they don't go to fund-raiser bingo games.

The article doesn't delve into the issue, but I have to assume that's a particular problem for charity-related games. Where a neighborhood bar can thumb its nose at the law and pay a few fines that amount to less than the profits from disobedience, or an underground-economy entrepreneur can operate a smoking-friendly business completely in the shadows (like the strip-joint smoke-easies proliferating in Cleveland), Big Brothers/Big Sisters or a children's hospital have limited options. By and large, they really don't want to be linked to civil disobedience or shadow economic activity. The charities are well and truly screwed.

Eventually, the charities will find new ways of raising funds. In the meantime, though, the fate of bingo games serves as an object lesson in the economic damage wreaked by restrictive laws on businesses that don't have the option of defying those laws. The customers offended by those laws can go elsewhere, including underground; the businesses just suffer.

FLDS raid faces scrutiny

noreply@blogger.com (J.D. Tuccille) — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 23:37:00 +0000

The wildly over-the-top raid by Texas authorities on the FLDS-owned Yearnings for Zion ranch, resulting in the kidnapping of hundreds of children by state officials, is finally drawing mainstream attention over civil liberties issues.

Lost in the (fragrant) smoke screen

noreply@blogger.com (J.D. Tuccille) — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 17:52:00 +0000

For the traditional 4/20 smokeout at the University of Colorado in Boulder, roughly 10,000 people showed up to defy marijuana prohibition and call for changes in the law.

With all of that highly illegal sweet-smelling smoke hovering over the crowd, did police continue their past efforts to harass, identify and arrest scofflaws?

Nope -- not a chance.

Officers in the past have gone to great lengths to catch people in the illegal act of smoking pot on 4/20.

In 2006, CU police dispatched undercover photographers to snap pictures of smokers. Photos of 150 alleged offenders then were posted on the department’s Web site, and witnesses were offered $50 to positively identify the suspects — who then were ticketed. Another year, smokers on Farrand were doused with sprinklers.

“We can’t do the same thing year after year,” [CU police Cmdr. Brad] Wiesley said hours before Sunday’s smoking began. “So I doubt we’ll do anything like the pictures. ... There’s no way our 12 to 15 officers are going to be able to deal with a crowd of 10,000. We just can’t do strong enforcement when we’re outnumbered 700 or 800 to one.”

Roughly 5,000 people gathered at the University of California - Santa Cruz for a similar event. Rich Westphal, task force commander with the Santa Cruz County Narcotics Enforcement Team, called the mass display of civil disobedience "a moral slap in the face to the cause" of drug prohibition.

That's right. Mass civil disobedience creates a reality of its own. The police either have to massively escalate their efforts and expense in an effort to counter the non-compliers -- and probably fail anyway -- or else give up. Police in Boulder and Santa Cruz quite sensibly chose to step back and leave the crowds to their peaceful, albeit illegal, pursuits.

There's a lesson here for opponents of any law. The more people they can convince to join them in disobedience of the law, the more difficult it becomes to enforce the law. Eventually, the disagreeable regulation becomes nothing more than an annoying technicality to be ignored by opponents and enforcers alike.

Spread it thick

noreply@blogger.com (J.D. Tuccille) — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 17:45:00 +0000

Marijuana butter?

Prescott Valley Police arrested a Prescott Valley man on April 20 in the 3200 block of Robert Road on various charges including marijuana for sale. ...

They found nine 5-ounce jars of marijuana butter in the refrigerator. Marijuana butter is a combination of ordinary household butter and a cooked-down version of marijuana.

I don't eat dairy products -- can't stand the stuff -- but I wonder if that would work with hummus?

Sorry about that illegal search ...

noreply@blogger.com (J.D. Tuccille) — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 04:01:00 +0000

... but we'll use the evidence anyway.

Still number one at putting people behind bars

noreply@blogger.com (J.D. Tuccille) — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 17:54:00 +0000

Visiting an issue I've written about in the past, a New York Times story starts off with a troubling lede:

The United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population. But it has almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners.

Unfortunately, as with too many Times articles, you have to go digging to find the meat of the story. The end result is still troubling, but rather more mixed than the lede suggests. As it turns out, the U.S. does have an extraordinarily high incarceration rate: 751 people behind bars for every 100,000 in population.

The only other major industrialized nation that even comes close is Russia, with 627 prisoners for every 100,000 people. The others have much lower rates. England’s rate is 151; Germany’s is 88; and Japan’s is 63.

The median among all nations is about 125, roughly a sixth of the American rate.

That puts the U.S. as, by far, the leader in an embarrassing category, and raises the question: why?

A big part of the answer is drug prohibition. The Times reports that, of the 2.3 million incarcerated Americans, 500,000 are in jails and prisons for drug crimes. That's up from 40,000 in 1980. About one-fifth of the prison population is there for engaging in activities that shouldn't be punishable at all.

And that's without even touching on other "crimes" that the government has no right to punish, such as gambling, prostitution and violation of many firearms laws.

But other countries have stupid laws on the books, too. And even if you eliminate victimless offenses, that still leaves the U.S. with a high incarceration rate. What gives?

For starters, more than half (52.1%) of all prisoners in state facilities committed violent offenses, according to the Department of Justice. Another one-fifth (20.8%) of prisoners in state facilities committed property crimes. That means that a lot of crimes that should be punished are being committed.

But how should they be punished? Here's where the difference lies. As the Times puts it: "If lists were compiled based on annual admissions to prison per capita, several European countries would outpace the United States. But American prison stays are much longer, so the total incarceration rate is higher."

As an example, the articles cites the fact that American burglars serve an average of 16 months in prison, compared with five months in Canada and seven months in England. And English-speaking countries tend to have longer sentences than non-English-speaking countries.

That's especially bad when you're talking about prisoners who shouldn't be incarcerated at all. It's also bad when you consider prisoners caught up by various states' three-strikes laws, which can impose draconian penalties on criminals convicted of even minor crimes. According to a 2004 Justice Policy Institute analysis of California's three-strikes provision, "over 42,000 persons—or more than one-in-four prisoners—are serving a doubled or 25-years-to-life sentence."

But is the U.S. wrong to lock up murderers, muggers and rapists for longer than their counterparts in other countries?

“As one might expect, a good case can be made that fewer Americans are now being victimized” thanks to the tougher crime policies, Paul G. Cassell, an authority on sentencing and a former federal judge, wrote in The Stanford Law Review.

From 1981 to 1996, according to Justice Department statistics, the risk of punishment rose in the United States and fell in England. The crime rates predictably moved in the opposite directions, falling in the United States and rising in England.

“These figures,” Mr. Cassell wrote, “should give one pause before too quickly concluding that European sentences are appropriate.”

Other commentators were more definitive. “The simple truth is that imprisonment works,” wrote Kent Scheidegger and Michael Rushford of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation in The Stanford Law and Policy Review. “Locking up criminals for longer periods reduces the level of crime. The benefits of doing so far offset the costs.”

But, the Times goes on to point out, Canada experiences rises and falls in crime in parallel with the U.S. without imposing U.S.-style punishments.

So, what's the verdict?

I think the case is clear for eliminating laws against victimless "crimes" in which people have the right to engage whether politicians like it or not. It's bad enough to arrest somebody for selling a few pills or trading sex for money; it compounds the wrong to then impose some of the world's toughest sentences when no punishment at all is appropriate.

Also, three-strikes laws should be revisited, if only to ensure that severe sentences are being imposed only for serious crimes.

And some relatively minor crimes that are deserving of punishment are probably best treated through means other than long -- or any -- prison sentence.

But is a high incarceration rate an entirely bad thing when applied to real crimes against people and property?

That's just not clear yet.

The circus continues

noreply@blogger.com (J.D. Tuccille) — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 16:20:00 +0000

So Hillary Clinton took Pennsylvania by ten percent. That's enough of a margin to revive her campaign and keep it going for a few weeks, but not enough to give her a shot at the nomination unless she wins over superdelegates or poaches Obama's elected delegates -- which could happen, but would probably devastate the Democratic Party. That means continuing spectacle for us political junkies who enjoy watching power-hungry politicians go at each other tooth and claw.

The only thing better would be a cage match with an assortment of edged weapons scattered in the dust, but I think Hillary would win hands down. Hands down that is, until she stood to display Barack Obama's still-beating heart for the assembled audience.

Extra credit to Hillary for driving the New York Times editorial board into a hissy fit.

I just wish the Republicans had a similar battle going on to keep things evenly balanced and that much more interesting.