Great piece by Matt Welch on Thomas Friedman, David Brooks, & co.

Do something. Is there a two-word phrase in politics more loaded with disguised ideological content? Embedded within is both an urgent call for powerful government action and an up-front declaration that the policy details don’t matter. The bigger the crisis, the more the urgency, the sparser the detail. On September 30, 2008, in a classic of the do-something genre, Brooks argued that the Troubled Asset Relief Program should be rammed through Congress over public objections because the federal government needed “to give people a sense that somebody was in charge, that something was going to be done.” Did that “something” involve buying up toxic assets? Introducing or relaxing certain banking regulations? Taking over or winding down Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac? Not important. “What we need in this situation,” Brooks declared, “is authority.”

American discourse is saddled with a large and influential do-something school of political punditry, a cadre of pragmatists from Meet the Press to your local editorial board who are forever seeking to solve the country’s problems by transcending ideology, demanding collective citizen sacrifice, and—always—empowering authority. In their new book That Used To Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back, Friedman and Johns Hopkins foreign policy professor Michael Mandelbaum lament that people “in positions of authority everywhere have less influence than in the past,” due to a “corrosive cynicism” preventing “the collective action that is required.” America, David Brooks wrote in March 2010, “is suffering a devastating crisis of authority,” resulting in a “corrosive cynicism about public action.” The similarities are not accidental.

Brooks and Friedman may be the most prominent practitioners, but the do-something school is evident just about anywhere the political class is talking shop. Here is former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum at CNN.com on September 26, lamenting that the “old rules” of bipartisan cooperation “have broken down,” unlike those bygone days when “the imperatives of the Cold War inspired a spirit of deference to the president.” There is centrist Matt Miller at Washingtonpost.com the day before, writing an imaginary speech (a favored tactic of the do-something set) for an imaginary independent presidential candidate (ditto) who rejects “the Democrats’ timid half-measures and the Republicans’ mindless anti-government creed” in favor of “a bold agenda equal to the scale of our challenges.”

As Welch has pointed out in this piece and elsewhere, when politicians do take the advice of the “do something” crowd, and that advice results in spectacular failure, . . . they blame the libertarians.

Personally, I get a kick out of how editorial page editors at places like the NY Times and Washington Post fill out their columnist positions. The elite op-ed pages are just brimming with ideological diversity, from big government conservatives like Brooks, Bill Kristol, Michael Gerson, and Ross Douthat, to big government moderates like Friedman, Fareed Zakaria, and Matt Miller, all the way to big government liberals like E.J. Dionne, Paul Krugman, and Nicholas Kristof.

I mean, that pretty much covers all the possible opinions, right?

• Ice finger of death!
• Man falls off bicycle. Cop kills him.
• Red light camera vendor sues Knoxville, Tennessee for not issuing tickets when people turn right at a red light.
• The Pentagon’s $3 billion mercenary war on drugs.
• AFL-CIO, Teamsters, other unions firmly backing SOPA.
• All your fish are belong to government.
• A good reminder as the country goes into panic—and politicians go into “there oughtta be a law” mode—in response to Penn State: False allegations of sex abuse can also ruin lives.

Split, Croatia.

A new study suggests that the more people know about a social problem, the less faith they have in government to solve it. Sounds good so far, right?

The problem is that most people deal with this by choosing to remain ignorant.

Through a series of five studies conducted in 2010 and 2011 with 511 adults in the United States and Canada, the researchers described “a chain reaction from ignorance about a subject to dependence on and trust in the government to deal with the issue.”

In one study, participants who felt most affected by the economic recession avoided information challenging the government’s ability to manage the economy. However, they did not avoid positive information, the study said.

To test the links among dependence, trust and avoidance, researchers provided either a complex or simple description of the economy to a group of 58 Canadians, mean age 42, composed of 20 men and 38 women. The participants who received the complex description indicated higher levels of perceived helplessness in getting through the economic downturn, more dependence on and trust in the government to manage the economy, and less desire to learn more about the issue.

“This is despite the fact that, all else equal, one should have less trust in someone to effectively manage something that is more complex,” said co-author Aaron C. Kay, PhD, of Duke University. “Instead, people tend to respond by psychologically ‘outsourcing’ the issue to the government, which in turn causes them to trust and feel more dependent on the government. Ultimately, they avoid learning about the issue because that could shatter their faith in the government.”

DEA shuts down mom n’ pop business because some meth dealers use its otherwise perfectly legal product.

Eighty-eight-year-old retired metallurgist Bob Wallace is a self-described tinkerer, but he hardly thinks of himself as the Thomas Edison of the illegal drug world.

He has nothing to hide. His product is packaged by hand in a cluttered Saratoga garage. It’s stored in a garden shed in the backyard. The whole operation is guarded by an aged, congenial dog named Buddy.

But federal and state drug enforcement agents are coming down hard on Wallace’s humble homemade solution, which he concocted to help backpackers purify water.

The U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency and state regulators say druggies can use the single ingredient in his “Polar Pure” water purifier — iodine — to make crystal meth.

Wallace says federal and state agents have effectively put him out of business, because authorities won’t clear the way for him to buy or sell the iodine he needs for his purification bottles. He has been rejected for a state permit by the Department of Justice and is scheduled to appeal his case before an administrative judge in Sacramento next month.

Meanwhile, the exasperated Stanford University-educated engineer and his 85-year-old girlfriend said the government — in its zeal to clamp down on meth labs — has instead stopped hikers, flood victims and others from protecting themselves against a bad case of the runs.

We’re seeing more and more of this. Not content with merely criminalizing consensual behavior, the government involuntarily deputizes private actors to enforce these laws—and also forces them to bear the costs. Don’t comply, and you could lose your business. If they can’t get you with licensing laws, they’ll get you with asset forfeiture. Hell, in some instances they’ll try to throw you in prison for not being a vigilant enough citizen-cop.

Here, they manage to put a small business under, stifle innovation, and prevent consumers from buying a useful product, all in one blow. And the DEA’s infuriating response? “Collateral damage.”

“Methamphetamine is an insidious drug that causes enormous collateral damage,” wrote Barbara Carreno, a DEA spokeswoman. “If Mr. Wallace is no longer in business he has perhaps become part of that collateral damage, for it was not a result of DEA regulations, but rather the selfish actions of criminal opportunists. Individuals that readily sacrifice human lives for money.”

On a lighter note, I think I’d like to have a drink with this guy.

“This old couple, barely surviving old farts, and we’re supposed to be meth dealers? This is just plain stupid,” Wallace said, as he sat in the nerve center of his not-so-clandestine compound surrounded by contoured hiking maps, periodic tables and the prototypes of metal snowshoes he invented a few years ago. “These are the same knotheads that make you take your shoes off in the airport.”…

For Wallace to comply, the state Department of Justice fingerprinted the couple and told Wallace he needed to show them such things as a solid security system for his product. Wallace sent a photograph of Buddy sitting on the front porch.

“These guys don’t go for my humor,” Wallace said. “Cops are the most humorless knotheads on the planet.” Even so, Marco Campagna, Wallace’s lawyer, promised to strengthen security and make other improvements to allay the government’s concerns.

Wallace is not against regulation per se, although he thinks the demand for a customer list is an invasion of privacy and a waste of time…

It’s not so much the financial hardship, Wallace said. It’s the irritation of being prevented by what he calls an over-restrictive government to do whatever his restless mind wants to do.

“What the (expletive) else am I going to do? I’m 88!” he said. “We have to do something.”

Link via Boing Boing.

Lovely.

A 6-year-old Grant County boy has been accused of first-degree sexual assault after playing “doctor” with two 5-year-old friends. Now, a federal lawsuit has been filed against the prosecutor, who attorneys said is trying to force the boy to admit guilt.

The boy’s parents had planned to speak with WISC-TV on Monday to discuss the emotional toll the prosecution has taken on their son. But the prosecutor, Grant County District Attorney Lisa Riniker, on Monday morning asked a judge for a gag order in the case and was granted it. The gag order prohibits the boy’s parents from talking about the case.

But the attorneys for the parents in the federal suit, which names Riniker as a defendant, aren’t included in the gag order, and they spoke with WISC-TV from Chicago. Attorneys for the parents of the 6-year-old, who is being referred to as “D,” said that Riniker has gone too far by bringing a felony sex charge against a first-grader for touching a 5-year-old girl inappropriately while playing doctor last fall…

Cooper and attorney David Sigale filed the federal suit last week, alleging that Riniker wants D to sign a consent decree admitting some level of guilt…

Cooper and Sigale said they are prepared to present evidence that D has been psychologically harmed by the court proceedings and is terrified of going to jail.”She (Riniker) bypassed the parents and sent a 6-year-old boy a summons, on which is a threat that the 6-year-old will go to jail for failure to appear,” Cooper said.

And the kicker:

In justification for the charge, Riniker is quoted in the lawsuit saying “the Legislature could have put an age restriction in the statute … the legislature did no such thing.”

Remember this the next time a legislator proposes some broadly-written new law, and argues that we needn’t worry about worst-case scenarios because prosecutors would never charge anyone in those cases.

(Hat tip: Walter Olson.)

• The product of a decade of democracy-fighting in Afghan.
• Speaking of spreading democracy around the world: “Why is the Pentagon spending tens of millions of U.S. tax dollars to whitewash the image of Central Asian dictatorships?”
• Hello.
• ACLU: Local governments are using license plate scanners to monitor citizens’ movement.
• Ditto.
• How we process evidence.
• Cato’s Ben Friedman: Cutting Pentagon budget will limit U.S. military capability . . . and that’s a good thing.
• When academic papers get honest.

A dash cam video shows a Champaign, Illinois cop pepper spraying and possibly choking a man he had confronted for jaywalking.

Champaign Mayor Don Gerard is “gravely disappointed,” but not by anything depicted in the video. His consternation is over the fact that it was released to the public.

Champaign Mayor Don Gerard said he is ‘gravely disappointed’ the police video was posted online, saying it is counteractive to anything the city is trying to achieve in terms of police-community relations. The mayor added that he is ‘very confident’ that state police will investigate the June 5 arrest.

“I hoping that despite (the video being released) that whatever actions the city and the state’s attorney take aren’t compromised,” Gerard said.

Because the best way to preserve police-community relations apparently isn’t to, you know, actually prevent police abuse . . . but to prevent the community from knowing about it when it happens.

And it isn’t the first time Champaign authorities have tried to squelch video of possible police misconduct. From my Reason feature on the war on cameras:

In one high-profile 2004 case, police arrested documentary filmmaker Patrick Thompson for recording their interactions with bar and restaurant patrons in Champaign and Urbana. (Thompson was making a movie about tensions between police and African Americans in the town.) The ACLU of Illinois submitted an amicus brief on Thompson’s behalf, asking the judge overseeing his case to overturn the law on First Amendment grounds . . . A new district attorney was elected while Thompson’s charges were still pending, who then dropped all of the charges against Thompson after taking office.

Thompson’s arrest was of course done under the auspices of that odious Illinois wiretapping law.

• Bill Easterly on how U.S. national security interests and national building have taken over foreign aid.
• New poll shows that 73 percent of Americans think there are too many or shouldn’t be any more “rich people.” If this poll is accurate, I’m with Jason Kuzinski, here. This is insane. Whatever you think about the people who currently, er, occupy the one percent, that nearly three-quarters of the country think we’d be better off with fewer wealthier people overall shows just that all this class warfare—some of it understandable, even justified—is also making people crazy.
• Judge rebukes FBI for lying to a federal court.
• Joe Henry sings for you.
• Obama continues his paltry and spineless use of the pardon power. He issued five pardons and one commutation yesterday. The five pardons were for people who have already served their sentences.
• Man asks shuttle service to stop so he can pee. Shuttle service obliges. Man steps in a hole while walking out to relieve himself, breaks his leg. Man sues shuttle service. Federal judge denies shuttle service summary judgment.
• 569 days after he was arrested, detained, and held in isolation, Bradley Manning gets a date in court for a pre-trial hearing to see if the government has enough evidence to charge him.
• The myth of the meth-damaged brain.

Split, Croatia

• Your morning worry.
• Headline of the day.
• Smart kids do drugs.
• Georgia cop admits to falsifying breath test results in DUI cases.
• New York’s highest court ordered the state’s family courts opened to the public in 1997. They’ve mostly stayed closed, anyway. 
• Yale law professors propose paying students to quit law school.

• Good question.
• Chicago journalism professor records an arrest in progress. Police threaten him, seize his camera, and delete the video. If he was using sound, it’s still illegal to record anyone in Illinois without their permission, in which case the police destroyed evidence of a crime. If he wasn’t using sound, they illegally confiscated his camera and destroyed his property.
• Cabin porn. (Link is SFW.)
• An interview with the great John Prine.
• Government announces plan to make citizens safer by devoting more resources to harassing and threatening them.
• Mitt Romney demonstrates one of the most important qualifications to be president.
• Finally, something heartwarming. The first paragraph is really all you need.

In Jefferson, Iowa.

Matthew Spaulding says he and his family were terrorized at their own home by police who slammed his grandmother to the ground and shot his dogs– missing his head by less than an inch. “Told us to get on the ground. I got on the ground they put me in handcuffs,” Spaulding recalls, “Then they threw my dad to the ground and my dog Sadie was right here sniffing my head. She was next to me. They shot her. The blood got on my face and then she took off running behind me and they shot her like three more times.”

Tuesday morning, Greene County Sheriffs Deputies and Perry Police officers arrived at Spaulding’s Jefferson farmhouse to deliver a search warrant. The Spauldings say they were immediately ordered to the ground.. even Matthew Spauldings’ disabled father, Chris. “My son hit the ground I hit the ground but I didn’t make it too fast so (the officer) jumped on the middle of my back, shoved his knee in and held a gun to the back of my head and handcuffed me. After they shot my first dog my mom come out”…

The Spauldings say after the first dog was killed, a second dog running away from the shots — and away from police— was also shot. “They weren’t barking. They weren’t attacking nobody.” Matthew Spaulding says, “They didn’t even give us a chance to put them in the kennel. We have a big kennel outside our house we could have put them in but they wouldn’t give us a chance.”

Perry Police are not commenting. And they’re refusing to turn over any paperwork or reports about the incident saying it’s part of an ongoing investigation. But we were able to get copies of the search warrants. One warrant shows police were looking for any kind of legal or illegal drugs. The other shows police were looking for a stolen X-Box video game system. No drugs and no stolen games were found–and no one was arrested.

I can’t think of a scenario in which what you see in this video would be justified. Even if the students were ordered to move, there are other ways to move them. And the cop’s nonchalant body language is chilling. It’s egregious brutality, and he looks to be enjoying it.

Here’s the story.

While drug war realist Gary Johnson can’t get invited to the debates, and fellow realist Ron Paul got all of 90 seconds to say his piece last time around, Newt Gingrich has  inexplicably risen to the top of the polls in the GOP primary. It’s worth reviewing again just how God-awful Gingrich has been on the drug war over the years.

Over at TalkLeft, Jeralyn Merritt notes that Gingrich once introduced a bill mandating the death penalty for drug smugglers. Gingrich’s bill would have required execution for anyone attempting to bring 2 ounces or more of pot into the country. Merritt also reminds us of this shameless, astonishingly stupid attempt to justify his policies with his own drug use:

“See, when I smoked pot it was illegal, but not immoral. Now, it is illegal AND immoral. The law didn’t change, only the morality… That’s why you get to go to jail and I don’t.”*

There’s much more. In 2009, Gingrich agreed with Bill O’Reilly’s call for Singapore-style drug laws in America. In Singapore, the police can force anyone to submit to a urinalysis without a warrant. They’re permitted to search you without a warrant. And if you’re seen in a building or in the company of drug users, you’re assumed to have been using drugs as well, unless you can prove otherwise. They also have Gingrich’s favored mandatory execution of anyone possessing over a specified amount of illicit drugs. (And there’s little evidence that the policies are working.)

A few other choice moments from Gingrich’s drug war files:

• “…I met with General McCaffrey two months ago and said, ‘I want a World War Two style victory plan-a decisive, all out cataclysmic effort to break the back of the drug culture’.” (Source)

• The announcement of the Republican drug strategy last week came with set of sound bites produced by the “Speaker’s Task Force for a Drug Free America.” A memorandum to participants in the kick-off urged them to incorporate and emphasize war-sounding “communication ideas.” Some of the specific phrases the Speaker urged were: epidemic, crisis, scourge, poison, mobilize, modern-day plague, front lines, call to arms, deployment, battle plan, attack, fight, engage, conquer and declare victory. The theme was to have “A real War on Drugs; Not a war of words but a war of action.” Their goal is a drug free America by 2002. These militaristic slogans were justified by a backdrop of children. (Source)

• President Clinton and House Speaker Newt Gingrich sparred over drug policy in separate radio addresses Saturday, the president laying out plans to reduce illegal drug use by 50 percent in the next decade, the speaker ridiculing the proposal as a “hodgepodge of half-steps and half- truths.” Gingrich said he will press a resolution in the House urging Clinton and White House drug policy chief Barry McCaffrey to withdraw the plan, which he described as “the definition of failure.””In the Civil War it took just four years to save the Union and abolish slavery,” Gingrich scoffed.  He said World War II was won four years after the United States joined the Allied cause, and yet Clinton’s new drug-fighting schedule prescribes more than twice that long.”This president would have us believe that with all of the resources, ingenuity, dedication and passion of the American people, we can’t even get halfway to victory in the war on drugs until the year 2007 – nine full years from now,” the speaker said. “That is not success. That is the definition of failure. … We cannot accept this administration’s proposed timetable for defeat.” (Source)

• Speaking before the National Religious Broadcasters in Washington, Gingrich said he hopes to eradicate the drug problem by Jan. 1, 2001. The end result would mean “such an amazingly healthier society,” he said. “That would be a vastly greater achievement than the balanced budget.”Talking specifics, Gingrich is proposing a mandatory life prison term for those who cross borders with or produce commercial quantities of illegal drugs. He would also like to see the death sentence imposed for repeat offenders. “If you sell it, we’re going to kill you,” he warned.  (Source)

• House Republicans, led by Speaker Newt Gingrich and his newly-created “Speakers’ Task Force for a Drug-Free America” chaired by J. Dennis Hastert (R-IL), unveiled a “comprehensive, World War II-style” drug war legislative package on Thursday. Details of the package will be presented to the public over an eight-week period at a series of orchestrated media events complete with blue ribbon-wearing participants….The package, which will include at least a dozen separate pieces of legislation, is being compared by House Republican staffers to the 1994 “Contract With America,” both in its scope and its intended centrality to the election-year message of the party.  While much of the legislation is still being written, the bills will range from largely symbolic . . . to overtly war-like, such as the reinstitution and expansion of military deployments on the US side of our national borders. The stated goal of the Republican package is to “win” the drug war by creating a “drug-free” America in four years. Longer sentences, the death penalty, technological upgrades in interdiction and federal law enforcement, a doubling of the border patrol and incentives for expanded work-place drug testing will also be addressed. (Source)

• “The first time we execute 27 or 30 or 35 people at one time, and they go around Colombia and France and Thailand and Mexico, and they say, `Hi, would you like to carry some drugs into the U.S.?’ the price of carrying drugs will have gone up dramatically,” says Gingrich, who has admitted to smoking pot.  (Source)

Of course, if Gingrich somehow miraculously gets the nomination, his opponents will be Obama, who is every bit the hypocrite Gingrich is, and Biden, who may be one of just a few career politicians at the federal level whose legislative record is worse than Gingrich’s.

*MORE/UPDATE/CORRECTION: I somehow missed this Jacob Sullum post from last year suggesting that this Gingrich quote may be apocryphal, though Gingrich has definitely admitted to smoking pot in graduate school.

The Natchez Trace Parkway in Tennessee.

If this story went down the way it’s described here, it’s absolutely horrifying.

• Write your own joke about faking it.
• TSA staff has grown by 400 percent over the last 10 years. Air passenger travel has grown by 12.
• Headline of the day.
• Government protects NFL player from his codeine addiction by putting him in prison for six years.
• Very cool interactive map of migration patterns.
• Romney staff wiped all emails before leaving governor’s office.
• Solyndra isn’t a partisan problem. It’s a “this is the way Washington works” problem.
• Something bacon doesn’t make better.

The Natchez Trace Parkway in Tennessee.

• George Washington sociology professor argues in favor of  giving the government the power to track you through your cell phone without a warrant.
• Want.
• One thing Newt Gingrich does really well: He comes up with new ways for me to think less of him.
• “Could you make it look a little more like something Hitler would like?”
• Obama expands the empire.
• The DOJ continues to nip away at FOIA, despite public assurances.
• Even assuming it that it’s legitimate to arrest someone for photographing a covert police car (and I don’t think it is), if the cop is doing a good job being covert, how would you know he’s a cop? And if he’s not doing a good job being covert, then he really isn’t covert, no?
• Bruce Wayne’s annual physical.
• The Supreme Court: A Prosecutor’s Best Friend

The Natchez Trace Parkway in Tennessee.

I don’t know what’s going on here. But I like it.

The New York Times looks at the e-cigarette debate:

A team led by Riccardo Polosa of the University of Catania recruited 40 hard-core smokers — ones who had turned down a free spot in a smoking-cessation program — and simply gave them a gadget already available in stores for $50. This electronic cigarette, or e-cigarette, contains a small reservoir of liquid nicotine solution that is vaporized to form an aerosol mist.

The user “vapes,” or puffs on the vapor, to get a hit of the addictive nicotine (and the familiar sensation of bringing a cigarette to one’s mouth) without the noxious substances found in cigarette smoke.

After six months, more than half the subjects in Dr. Polosa’s experiment had cut their regular cigarette consumption by at least 50 percent. Nearly a quarter had stopped altogether. Though this was just a small pilot study, the results fit with other encouraging evidence and bolster hopes that these e-cigarettes could be the most effective tool yet for reducing the global death toll from smoking.

Good news. But wait . . .

But there’s a powerful group working against this innovation — and it’s not Big Tobacco. It’s a coalition of government officials and antismoking groups who have been warning about the dangers of e-cigarettes and trying to ban their sale.

The controversy is part of a long-running philosophical debate about public health policy, but with an odd role reversal. In the past, conservatives have leaned toward “abstinence only” policies for dealing with problems like teenage pregnancy and heroin addiction, while liberals have been open to “harm reduction” strategies like encouraging birth control and dispensing methadone.

When it comes to nicotine, though, the abstinence forces tend to be more liberal, including Democratic officials at the state and national level who have been trying to stop the sale of e-cigarettes and ban their use in smoke-free places. They’ve argued that smokers who want an alternative source of nicotine should use only thoroughly tested products like Nicorette gum and prescription patches — and use them only briefly, as a way to get off nicotine altogether.

The article points out that the FDA has warned that there are traces of harmful and possibly toxic substances in e-cigarette vapor, but . . .

…the agency has never presented evidence that the trace amounts actually cause any harm, and it has neglected to mention that similar traces of these chemicals have been found in other F.D.A.-approved products, including nicotine patches and gum. The agency’s methodology and warnings have been lambasted in scientific journals by Dr. Polosa and other researchers, including Brad Rodu, a professor of medicine at the University of Louisville in Kentucky.

Writing in Harm Reduction Journal this year, Dr. Rodu concludes that the F.D.A.’s results “are highly unlikely to have any possible significance to users” because it detected chemicals at “about one million times lower concentrations than are conceivably related to human health.” His conclusion is shared by Michael Siegel, a professor at the Boston University School of Public Health.

“It boggles my mind why there is a bias against e-cigarettes among antismoking groups,” Dr. Siegel said. He added that it made no sense to fret about hypothetical risks from minuscule levels of several chemicals in e-cigarettes when the alternative is known to be deadly: cigarettes containing thousands of chemicals, including dozens of carcinogens and hundreds of toxins.

The analogy to abstinence-only sex education is spot-on. And it’s more evidence that the public health fanatics on the left can be just as ideology-driven and anti-science as the moral crusaders on the right. Of course if you’ve been following the medical marijuana debate, it shouldn’t be all that surprising that the FDA would let politics and fearmongering trump science. And on that issue, left and right are guilty.