Bill O’Reilly has a long history of sending his producers out with cameras to conduct surprise interviews on people Bill O’Reilly doesn’t like (including one producer who staked out a reporter in front of her home).
So what happens when someone ambushes Bill O’Reilly with a camera? Looks like O’Reilly smacks the guy with his umbrella, then asks the cops to arrest him.
Love, love, love Fark’s year-end headline-of-the-year competition. (See here and here.) Some of my favorites:
And finally . . .
My intern Jessica Greene just wrote her first published article, and it’s the top story at Huffington Post this morning. Not a bad way to kick off a journalism career.
Snippet:
In June 2010 the Nashville Metropolitan City Council passed legislation raising the city’s minimum fee for limo and sedan rentals, bumping it from $25 to $45. Drivers were prohibited by law from charging less. Other new regulations forbid limo companies from using leased vehicles, require cars to be dispatched only from the place of business, compel companies to wait 15 minutes before picking up a client, and ban parking in front of hotels and bars to wait for customers. More laws that take effect in January 2012 would also require companies to replace all sedans and SUVs over seven-years-old, and all limos 10-years-old and older. Vehicles older than five years cannot enter into service.
Passed under the guise of consumer protection, the net effect is to give large, existing car companies (also known as livery services) a huge advantage over smaller companies, and to effectively prevent any new companies from entering the market. Prior to the new laws, Tennesseans could purchase transportation from downtown Nashville to the airport in a limo or sedan for the same price as an average taxi ride. Nashville residents and visitors will now pay almost double for the same service . . .
A transportation battle currently playing out across the country pits large, established car service companies against their smaller and independent competitors. State or local governments in Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas and Oregon, have all passed minimum fare regulations. The fight over new laws in Nashville, where a group of smaller car service owners have filed suit in federal court, belies the black-and-white approach the both Democrats and Republicans take to regulation.
Wesley Hottot, an attorney for the Texas Chapter of Institute for Justice, a non-profit libertarian law firm, says the Tennessee Livery Association (TLA), a coalition of expensive limousine companies, pushed the bill through with a number of provisions that benefit only its members. “There is no point in this regulation. It has nothing to do with public safety. It has everything to do with economic protectionism,” Hottot says. Hottot and his team have litigated similar cases involving economic liberty and property rights in federal and state courts across the country.
Now that I no longer work there, I can encourage you to donate to Reason without feeling like I’m encouraging you to donate to me. Although I guess I’ve done that in the past, too. In any case, Reason is having its annual fundraising drive. You should donate. (Preemptive rebuttal: No, donor-supported organizations are not incompatible or even inconsistent with free markets or with libertarianism.) With new hires Mike Riggs and Lucy Steigerwald (in addition to Jacob Sullum, Tim Cavanugh, and the Reason.tv crew), they’ve more than kept the criminal justice beat alive since I left. In fact, those issues are probably getting more attention over there than ever.
Also, if I may shamelessly self-promote, I somehow missed these kind words Jonathan Rauch had for Reason’s criminal justice issue, which Jacob Sullum and I co-edited:
Hats off to Reason for its July special issue on criminal (in)justice. Strong journalism examining, among other things, the unaccountable “culture of misconduct” among gung-ho prosecutors (names are named); and the prevalence of wrongful convictions; an immigration detention system “that treats treats suspected illegal aliens like criminals, but with fewer rights.” Special kudos to Jacob Sullum for a compelling and, in today’s climate, brave takedown of politically sacred sex-offender laws.
I read the whole magazine with mounting admiration. Every article is solid and the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, on a subject about which Americans are too complacent. This kind of enterprise is why God invented magazines.
Coming from Rauch, a journalist’s journalist, that’s damned flattering.
This is great. Explanation/key and more videos here.
I missed this when it came out a few weeks ago. The state of Illinois will appeal its case against Michael Allison.
I first wrote about Allison in the January issue of Reason. He’s facing up to 75 years in prison for recording police and other public officials with a digital recorder. In September, a Crawford County judge ruled that the state’s eavesdropping law violates the First Amendment. It’s now up to the Illinois Supreme Court. And, after that, I’d imagine the loser will at least try to get the case before a federal court.*
This is bad for Allison, but good for getting the law overturned once and for all. Allison has told me that is his aim. He has said he won’t take a plea bargain.
*A commenter reminds me that a challenge to the law is already before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.
The TSA continues to find new ways to make itself look ridiculous.
Vanessa Gibbs, 17, claims the Transportation Security Administration stopped her at the security gate because of the design of a gun on her handbag.
Gibbs said she had no problem going through security at Jacksonville International Airport, but rather, when she headed home from Virginia.
“It’s my style, it’s camouflage, it has an old western gun on it,” Gibbs said.
But her preference for the pistol style didn’t sit well with TSA agents at the Norfolk airport.
Gibbs said she was headed back home to Jacksonville from a holiday trip when an agent flagged her purse as a security risk.
“She was like, ‘This is a federal offense because it’s in the shape of a gun,’” Gibbs said. “I’m like, ‘But it’s a design on a purse. How is it a federal offense?’”
After agents figured out the gun was a fake, Gibbs said, TSA told her to check the bag or turn it over.
By the time security wrapped up the inspection, the pregnant teen missed her flight, and Southwest Airlines sent her to Orlando instead, worrying her mother, who was already waiting for her to arrive at JIA….
TSA isn’t budging on the handbag, arguing the phony gun could be considered a “replica weapon.” The TSA says “replica weapons have prohibited since 2002.”
It’s a rule that Vanessa feels can’t be applied to a purse.
“Common sense,” she said. “It’s a purse, not a weapon.”
A TSA official at JIA said it’s not that uncommon for passengers to wear something that could be considered a gun replica, but the official encourages everyone to check the prohibited items list, which can be found online or at the airport before going through security.
Mull that over for a sec. TSA isn’t budging . . . over a design of a gun on a handbag.
These are the people charged with keeping us safe.
…in a case we’ll just call “The Department of Justice vs. Cancer Patients.”
The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals today issued a unanimous opinion granting victory to cancer patients and their supporters from across the nation in a landmark constitutional challenge brought against the U.S. Attorney General. The lawsuit, filed by the Institute for Justice on behalf of cancer patients, their families, an internationally renowned marrow-transplant surgeon, and a California nonprofit group, seeks to allow individuals to create a pilot program that would encourage more bone-marrow donations by offering modest compensation—such as a scholarship or housing allowance—to donors. The program had been blocked by a federal law, the National Organ Transplant Act (NOTA), which makes compensating donors of these renewable cells a major felony punishable by up to five years in prison.
Under today’s decision (PDF Download), this pilot program will be perfectly legal, provided the donated cells are taken from a donor’s bloodstream rather than the hip. (Approximately 70 percent of all bone marrow donations are offered through the arm in a manner similar to donating whole blood.) Now, as a result of this legal victory, not only will the pilot programs the plaintiffs looked to create be considered legal, but any form of compensation for marrow donors would be legal within the boundaries of the Ninth Circuit, which includes California, Alaska, Arizona, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Washington and various other U.S. territories.
It’s a shame it had to be litigated in the first place. Now, let’s repeal the ban on organ sales, too.
The sad thing is, it will probably help him.
Here you have a power-mad, office-abusing sheriff who has misspent millions in taxpayer funds, and who once let a celebrity drive a damned tank into a man’s home (on suspicion of cockfighting, no less).
And the leading candidates vying for the nomination of the alleged party of “limited government” have been falling all over themselves to win his blessing.
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?
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.”
If this story went down the way it’s described here, it’s absolutely horrifying.
I don’t know what’s going on here. But I like it.
I’m giving a talk at Pepperdine Law School on Monday.
Incredible story. Part of me envies the kid. And part of me feels bad for him.
The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals just ruled in favor of Hank Skinner’s request for DNA testing. request for a stay to determine if he should get DNA testing.
I’ll post the statement from Skinner’s attorneys once I receive it.
MORE: Here’s the language from the court order:
This is a direct appeal of the trial court’s ruling on a motion for DNA testing filed in the 31st Judicial District Court of Gray County, Cause No. 5216, styled The State of Texas v. Henry Watkins Skinner. See TEX. CODE CRIM. PROC. art. 64.05. Appellant’s execution is stayed pending the resolution of this appeal.
Texas Code of Criminal Procedure Chapter 64, which provides for DNA testing, has undergone several changes since its creation, but those changes have never been reviewed in the particular context of this case. Because the DNA statute has changed, and because some of those changes were because of this case, we find that it would be prudent for this Court to take time to fully review the changes in the statute as they pertain to this case.
Furthermore, in denying the motion for DNA testing, the convicting court has failed to enter determinations under Texas Code of Criminal Procedure article 64.03. The convicting court shall enter an order containing the relevant Article 64.03 determinations within 15 days of the date of this order. That order shall then be included within a supplemental clerk’s record, which record shall be forwarded to this Court within 30 days of the date of this order.
IT IS SO ORDERED THIS THE 7th DAY OF NOVEMBER, 2011.
So it doesn’t look like this is an order for DNA testing so much as a stay to determine whether the new law allows Skinner to get DNA testing.
MORE: Statement from Skinner’s attorney:
“The Court of Criminal Appeals with its decision today, has ensured that Mr. Skinner’s request for DNA testing will receive the thorough and serious consideration it deserves. We are grateful for the Court’s action and look forward to the opportunity to make Mr. Skinner’s case for DNA testing in that forum.”Rob Owen, attorney for Mr. SkinnerNovember 7, 2011
I’ll be giving my speech on police militarization at Hanover College in Hanover, Indiana on Monday.
It’ll be at Horner Center, room 102, at 7:30 pm. Open to the public.
Reason.tv interviews Steven Pinker about his new book.
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