December 2005 Archives

Alexandra (who has a beautiful blog) sends out a call for a list of the ten worst Americans. Too much fun for me to refuse.

A few qualifiers for my list: No comtemporary political figures, no matter how contemptible. No serial killers, either. Even if he killed hundreds he can't match the harm done by someone with good intentions and bad ideas. This list by no means definitive, as I'm trying to include some people many wouldn't consider.

10. Walter Duranty¹. Saw democide up close and chose to ignore it, to further his own ideology. And for being named Walter.

9. Carrie Nation. Didn't care for liquor or property rights much.

8. J. Edgar Hoover. Turned the FBI into his own fiefdom and stayed there for decades while ruining the lives of countless others and expanding the powers of the federal government. Exactly the kind of person we don't need in that kind of office.

7. Woodrow Wilson. Returned racial segregation to the federal government, caused massive income tax increases, and imprisoned anti-war protestors. As if getting the country into a bloody and unnecessary war wasn't enough.

6. Nathan Bedford Forrest and William Simmons*. Founding fathers of the KKK, the US's most prominent terrorist organization. Favored gun control, to keep Blacks from arming themselves.

5. Horace Mann. The father of the public school system, a bigot who sought to reform Irish Catholic immigrants by instilling Protestant values through compulsory schooling. His work laid the foundation for many later social engineers who use the school system as an indoctrination tool.

4. Brigham Young. Created a religious government complete with secret police.

3. William Randolph Hearst. Probably the worst abuser of the Fourth Estate. Instrumental in igniting the Spanish-American War. Fascist sympathizer. Demonized marijuana in a successful effort to outlaw hemp and boost his timber interests.

2. Franklin Delano Roosevelt. President for life. Stacked the SCOTUS with justices who could explain away the Constitution and enable his expansion of the federal government. His faults are popularly ignored because he was on the right side of the big war.

1. Jefferson Davis. Bottom line, he was fighting to save slavery.

I've noticed others' lists contain Jeffery Amherst. While he might have been a perfectly despicable fellow, he was English. Your own suggestions for this list are welcome.

^{*So I cheated and put two people in this slot. Put me on your own list.}

^{1 Duranty may also be English. If anyone can confirm that he never became a US citizen I'll drop him from the list.}

The FAA has added its contribution to the commercial passenger space flight effort - 120+ pages of regulations.

Don't worry! They're just getting started!

Steve and Melissa have added to the world's overall happiness today. Congratulations!

David Letterman, evil mind control genius.

David Friedman: Does the First Amendment ban public schools?

Short answer; yes, although as the first commenter at his site notes, the courts have restricted the meaning of the the 1st to mean it doesn't legally do so.

This is a point that libertarians have understood for decades, that schools by necessity must teach a specific world view, and as Prof. Friedman says -

[...]one cannot, in practice, educate without either supporting or denying a wide variety of religious claims.

It is my observation that those who most strongly support single provider public education are most likely to want to impose their personal religion, ehh, worldview, on the general populace.

Bolivia's Nightmare (excerpts):

Evo Morales and his party, MAS, have led a successful crusade against foreign investment in Bolivia the last couple of years. Foreign investment has dropped to one tenth of what it was in 2003. By forcing the cancellation of foreign contracts and the introduction of confiscatory new taxes, Morales has prevented Bolivia from developing natural gas reserves amounting to 52 trillion cubic feet.
[...]
One only needs to look at Morales' own life story to realize his own deprivation, like that of so many other Aymara Indians, was the result of nationalism, populism, and socialism, and not, as he maintains, of globalization.

Why did he become a coca grower in the 1980s? He was born in Isallavi, in the tin-mining region of Oruro, at a time when tin mines lay in ruins. The reason for their decline was the 1952 revolution, which "nationalized" them and created a bureaucratic mining entity known by its acronym COMIBOL. The revolution raised miners' salaries by 50 percent but failed to keep up investments, so production collapsed. Eventually, thousands of families, among them the Morales family, had to move elsewhere.

Now Evo Morales wants to do to the natural gas fields of Tarija what the 1952 revolution did to the tin mines of Oruro and other parts of Bolivia.
[...]
In 1953, the revolutionary government had undertaken land reform, expropriating those estates it deemed unproductive and handing them to some peasant associations. Restrictions on property rights were so abundant and legal frameworks so dodgy that a few years later Bolivia had to import food because its unproductive minifundia were useless. Unlike Taiwan's agrarian reform, which created a property-owning mass of peasants, Bolivia's revolution undercapitalized the land. So when Evo Morales arrived in Yungas, he realized agriculture was in no better shape than mining.

Now Morales is proposing to do to his country's farms precisely what was done to the land in 1953.
[...]
Morales accuses U.S. capitalism of impoverishing Bolivia. But the U.S. should actually be faulted for funding populism and socialism! Between the start of the 1952 revolution and Morales' internal migration in the 1980s, nine tenths of the money Bolivia received from abroad were grants and soft credits from the U.S. By 1957, the United States was subsidizing 30 percent of the government's budget. With this encouragement, more nationalizations took place in the late 60s under general Ovando and in the early 70s under general Juan José Torres. Needless to say, the protectionist policies in vogue throughout the region, including import substitution, were dominant under most Bolivian governments.

Depressing.

Remember just a few weeks ago when the Senate fought off an enormous boondoggle called the 'bridge to nowhere?' That was the pet highway project of Sen. Ted Stevens, (R-Alaska) spending hundreds of millions of federal dollars on projects of questionable benefit in remote areas.

Did we just dream that was cut from the budget? Might as well have, because it's still there, in the budget. They just took the specifics project out of the budget and gave Alaska a blank check for the same amount instead. The whole episode was a sham.

Jim Henley says a lot in a few words:

I do get a whipsaw feeling, though, not just when Repubs defend the domestic spying program as ”just like Echelon” AND THEN Dems say, ”Nah, Echelon was cool.” Echelon wasn’t cool.

I'll add one thing. If the Pres were a Democrat we would see the blogosphere and the rest of the deep thinkers reverse arguments effortlessly. It would sound exactly the same, but with the reds and blues switched around..

Bolivian President Elect Evo Morales is backing coca control now.

Seems he's playing both sides. We'll check back...

Mark Pollock.

Well, he deserves some kind of prize. Ever heard of dragees? They're those little silver balls you find on cookies and cupcakes. He's managed to get them off the shelves in California. Via nuisance lawsuits, natch.

H/T Virginia Postrel.

On a blog I'd never read before:

Walter in Denver is not as good as I remember it to be.

Which got me thinking, when was this any better?

Anyway, welcome dearest reader.

What a remarkable smackdown from the trial judge in the intelligent design case in Dover:

"Those who disagree with our holding will likely mark it as the product of an activist judge. If so, they will have erred as this is manifestly not an activist Court. Rather, this case came to us as the result of the activism of an ill-informed faction on a school board, aided by a national public interest law firm eager to find a constitutional test case on ID, who in combination drove the Board to adopt an imprudent and ultimately unconstitutional policy. The breathtaking inanity of the Board's decision is evident when considered against the factual backdrop which has not been fully revealed through this trial. The students, parents, and teachers of the Dover Area School District deserved better than to be dragged into this legal maelstrom, with its resulting utter waste of monetary and personal resources."

"The citizens of the Dover area were poorly served by the members of the Board who voted for the ID Policy. It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID Policy."

I don't know how anyone could think that effort could help promote their religious beliefs. Quite the opposite, it seems.

Socialist Evo Morales has won the presidential election in Bolivia.

The good news; he plans on relaxing restrictions on coca farming. The US reaction could be very interesting.

I should have posted this from David Kopel's Rocky column on Saturday:

After all the attention the mainstream media, including the Denver dailies, gave to the execution of the unrepentant quadruple- murderer Tookie Williams, it would be nice if the media focused on a man on death row who is actually innocent.

That man is Cory Maye, currently on death row in Mississippi. In brief, the home occupied by Maye and his baby daughter was violently invaded at 11 p.m. one night by three men. Maye grabbed his handgun and fatally shot one of the invaders.

The invaders turned out to be police officers executing a search warrant based on uncorroborated information supposedly from a "confidential informant." Maye had no criminal record, and the police initially found no drugs, but later claimed to have found a tiny quantity of marijuana.

Maye's plight has gotten major attention in the blogosphere since Radley Balko of www.the agitator.com broke it in early December. The superb Denver criminal law blog TalkLeft has also helped advance the story.

Glenn Reynolds posted this, and reminded me this morning. So you probably saw it already.

I'll admit I've lost some of the drug war focus on this blog of late. Outrage fatigue, I guess. All the stories about innocents killed in drug raids, people incarcerated for years over miniscule amounts of contraband, it all starts to sound the same after a while. As the Cory Maye story illustrates, it hasn't stopped happening, of course.

What's very important to remember these days, is the incroachment on liberty over the past decades due to the drug war, and how that's laid the foundation for GWOT excesses in the past few years. Indeed, much of the (ostensibly) terrorism related legislation is being used in drug cases instead. The two topics aren't separable.

Dissatisfaction is creeping into the ranks of the Pres' supporters. Prof Bainbridge:

Coercive interrogations. A gulag of secret prisons. And now warrantless surveillance.

We're supposed to be better than this.

There's been some argument as to whether the warrantless wiretaps were legal or not, all of which avoids a bigger question-

Why did anyone think they were necessary? Warrants aren't hard to get.

A timely revelation; a U Mass student was privileged to receive a visit from federal agents after requesting a copy of Mao Tse-Tung's "The Little Red Book." Seems he was researching Communism for a class on fascism and totalitarianism. (I think he leaned more than he wanted to know.)

According to his professor, the agents told him the book was on a 'watch list.'

Update 12/23: The story is a hoax?

It pleases me greatly that this country's founders included smugglers and tax protesters.

Included? I mean they got the whole thing rolling. Today is the 232nd anniversary of the Boston Tea Party. Celebrate accordingly.

It's been noted that the left and right wings of the blogosphere, and the voting public by extension, are working off two different sets of facts. Most (the theory goes) consider only those news stories that support their side of any argument, and wind up working with a warped worldview.

Is that what's going on with Kos here?

Republicans claim they support the troops, yet those very same troops have returned home, and, given the choice, overwhelmingly chosen the Democratic Party.

What's that say about the Republicans' supposed "support" of the troops?

Or perhaps I'm mistaken and there some data out there showing Iraq veterans are voting Democratic? I've heard the opposite. Anyone have actual stats?

Update: In October of '04 Rasmussen polled veterans at 58% for Bush vs 35% for Kerry, but nothing specific to Iraq veterans.

Tom Tancredo press reslease:

Congressman Tom Tancredo (R-CO) today revealed figures which show that since October, 2004, 51 persons who have crossed into the U.S. illegally were arrested on suspicion of terrorism. The figures, part of a Department of Homeland Security response to a inquiry by the Congressman, document the national security risk our porous borders pose on the eve of Congress’ first attempt to rewrite immigration law in nearly a decade.

Scary, until someone checks the facts:

In fact, none of the 51 people arrested from September 2004 through September 2005 were charged with terrorism offenses, according to officials from two divisions of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security as well as the document released by Tancredo. Many were arrested on immigration violations.

The suspects were investigated by federal terrorism officials because they came from "countries of interest," such as Iran, Iraq, Lebanon and Syria, the FBI said.

"I'm unaware of any instances at this time of individuals that have been charged with terrorism-related offenses (among) individuals who have been smuggled across the border," said FBI spokesman Bill Carter.

As you were.

I'll note this isn't the first time Tancredo's gotten the facts wrong.

Our friend Jeralyn Merritt gets a nice write-up. Bonus: mentions of Vodkapundit and Protein Wisdom.

Odd that the Post's token conservative columnist is the one profiling Denver's prominent lefty blogger.

Maggie Bailey would be on a postage stamp. Or maybe have a statue in DC.

12 Days of the Revolution, skipping to the last verse:

On the twelfth day of the revolution my comrade gave to me --
Twelve factions splintering
Eleven farmers starving
Ten warheads pointing
Nine fields a-fallow
Eight communes failing
seven sacks of old grain
Six years in prison
One Five-Year Plan
four World Congresses
Three armed invasions
two mad mensheviki
and a centrally planned economy.

from Lauri the Chica.

1PM Mountain: I suppose if I wanted people to read this I should have announced it ahead of time. Ah, well. If you happen to wander by in the next hour you'll want to refresh your browser to keep this post current.

Anyway, here's how it works. The 32 teams that qualified over the last two years will be drawn into eight groups. Each group will contain one top seed, those being Brazil, Germany, England, Spain, Mexico, France, Argentina and Italy.

The US didn't get a top seed in spite of finishing ahead of Mexico in qualifying.

1:10 While ESPN interviews Damarcus Beasley I'll remind you of the top ten worldwide rankings according to FIFA:

1 Brazil 2 Czech Republic 3 Netherlands 4 Argentina 5 France 6 Spain 7 Mexico 8 USA 9 England 10 Portugal

I can imagine some Limeys are quite galled about being ranked behind the US. Yay.

From today's Rocky:

Gov. Bill Owens on Thursday warned state employees that they would be subject to disciplinary action if they use state computers to post comments on political Web sites.

The directive came after the Rocky Mountain News informed the governor that anonymous and sometimes caustic postings from someone using the nickname "Real Deal" had been traced to a computer in the governor's office, which has more than 100 computers.
[...]
"Today, the governor ordered that we develop new policy prohibiting the use of government computers from being used to post to any such sites. Please make certain that all members of your respective staffs are notified that this policy is effective immediately."

The ColoradoPols.com Web site has been a must-read for politicos since it went online at the beginning of the year.

Those posting to the site thought their identities were anonymous.

But late last month, state Republican Party officials sounded the alarm that someone had created a database purportedly linking postings to computers where the messages originated.

Republicans initially blamed Democrats, but two GOP operatives, Laura Teal and Andy George, admitted to compiling the data after Teal was granted special password access to the blog as a regular contributor nicknamed "Red Hawk."

Why would they do that? Hmmm...

George said he was motivated to unmask the blog users after some, including the poster nicknamed "Real Deal," criticized him and his friends.

"Real Deal" was particularly active in April and May, according to the database.

In one posting, "Real Deal" criticized Schaffer's Senate campaign staff.

"As far as his staff goes, I personally find them to be a joke," "Real Deal" wrote. "They got in way over their heads . . . and they didn't have a clue what real campaigning is all about."

Ah.

What's the best word for that kind of behaviour? Petty? Catty? Juvenile? I can't decide.

Gov. Owens responds by doing what minor tyrants tend to do; restrict avenues of expression. That itself seems like a fairly useless gesture, as he well knows he can't block "Real Deal's" posting activities from computers other than the State's.

Advice to "Real Deal:" get yourself some IP blocking software and post freely from home. And keep up the good work.

Here's Colorado Pols' own coverage.

We are soooooo hoping we can afford to send the twins to private school.

Hey, maybe if we didn't pay so much in taxes....

Pic found here.

Wrote she:

I got an email from an "I'm a former gun owner and believe in the Second Amendment, but" person. Unfortunately, I've not got the energy to give it the response it deserves. So do any readers or other bloggers want to take a stab at politely responding to fisking this email?

I bit, and she sent me the e-mail, here in italics, my responses in bold.

I've been enjoying your page/site/blog/or whatever it's called for a
couple of weeks since finding it on the list of channels on a news
aggregator I have installed. Really appreciate the feisty attitude.

I no longer own firearms, no longer hunt, and never did find target
shooting a whole lot of fun. Now, please don't jump to any conclusions== I
have no issue with people who own guns, people who hunt, or people who enjoy
target shooting.

I did enjoy shooting, otherwise this last paragraph describes me as well.

Where I do cop an attitude is with the reality that those on both sides of
the issue, who are generally the most publicly outspoken, so often have a
rigid, unbending, inflexible, unyielding and shrill attitude which leaves no
room for engaging in a willing dialogue with the intent to find ways
reasonably to meet at least some of the concerns of each side.

There are, I believe, legitimate concerns on both sides-- a concern on the
part of firearms owners for their rights to gun ownership, and a concern on
the part of advocates of strict(er) gun controls for what they see as a risk
to public safety (my choice of terms).

The two sides of this debate may not be finding common ground, but shrillness and rigidity aren't the basic causes. The problem is each side is working at cross purposes. I'll get to that in a bit...

I believe that compromises could be found if both sides felt they could
engage in discussions without risking that such engagement might be showing
a "weakness" which the other guys might take advantage of. Example-- Gun
guys say "All right, you got a point, kids living in a home where there are
firearms are more likely to use farms inappropriately than are kids from a
home where there are no guns. (Now hold every thing, I'm not saying this is
true or false-- I'm only suggesting that this COULD be a starting point for
a discussion where some committed and willing people could seek compromises,
where the other guys could say,"Of course you have a right to own and enjoy
the use of your guns. Given that, what can we do to minimize the problem,
as we see it, of guns getting into the hands of criminals,and bad guys in
general?"

Thanks,
(Redacted)

The hypothetical statement about kids at home with guns is a good enough place to illustrate the positions of each side of this argument. To the gun controller, safety is paramount, and if restrictions on guns would make kids safer, well, that's good enough reason to restrict them.

If I were to concede restrictions on gun rights I would be denying the status of self defence as a basic human right. The letter writer, by looking for ways to compromise, shows that he fails to understand gun ownership as a basic right.

According to this post at Colorado Pols Denver is gaining momentum as the potential host of the '08 Democratic national convention.

Little known fact - if pharaoh hadn't relented after the tenth plague, the eleventh plague was to be a major political convention.

Cato Unbound, a blog dedicated to organized topical debate.

Ya know, if you're in to that sort of thing. Like me.