This morning the New York Times carries as its lead story something with this headline: States’ Rights Is Rallying Cry of Resistance for Lawmakers. And the article is replete with examples of state lawmakers passing measures that would, in theory, limit the reach of the federal government. So, just to repeat the examples that The Times leads with (having done our work for us already):

Gov. Mike Rounds of South Dakota, a Republican, signed a bill into law on Friday declaring that the federal regulation of firearms is invalid if a weapon is made and used in South Dakota.

On Thursday, Wyoming’s governor, Dave Freudenthal, a Democrat, signed a similar bill for that state. The same day, Oklahoma’s House of Representatives approved a resolution that Oklahomans should be able to vote on a state constitutional amendment allowing them to opt out of the federal health care overhaul.

In Utah, lawmakers embraced states’ rights with a vengeance in the final days of the legislative session last week. One measure said Congress and the federal government could not carry out health care reform, not in Utah anyway, without approval of the Legislature. Another bill declared state authority to take federal lands under the eminent domain process. A resolution asserted the “inviolable sovereignty of the State of Utah under the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution.”

The Times article points out that legal and constitutional scholars are pretty much of the view that this is mostly a bunch of hot air. But that doesn’t seem to be deterring state lawmakers from shouting a lot. Full Story »

Colorado is a beautiful place and it always ranks right at the top of those most desirable places to live rankings (heck, a new poll says the People’s Republic of Boulder is the happiest place in America), but be clear about one thing before you pack up the family to head this way: a consistent voting majority of our citizens are butt-stupid when it comes to taxes. We’re the ones who blazed the trail for the “Taxpayer Bill of Rights” (TABOR) movement, and we’ve been paying a steep price for it ever since. For instance:

• Under TABOR, Colorado declined from 35th to 49th in the nation in K-12 spending as a percentage of personal income.
• Colorado’s average per-pupil funding fell by more than $400 relative to the national average. Full Story »

They’re winning. They’ve been winning for a long time. They’ve convinced us that the national conversation is not about a contest over power and control but rather about twisted definitions of patriotism, morality, the rights of the individual, property rights, and family values. They’re winning because they are ever more in control of the vocabulary of that conversation. They have invested heavily in winning memes — ideas and beliefs parasitically encoded into the politically and culturally unaware.

They recognized long ago that those who control the definitions of words rule the conversation. They know that rigorous repetition of their memes is akin to selling any product — advertise, advertise, advertise. That meme machine, usually cranked up biennually, now operates full time. In 30-second, televised chunks, the memes spew forth in every market. The messages are paid for by political organizations and single-minded groups quietly but heavily underwritten by those who wield wealth and power as a blacksmith’s hammer, bending comprehension by the electorate over an anvil. In hour-long, prime-time, broadcast soliloquies, their public voices ritualistically denigrate that which does not serve The Meme.
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Update: A complete transcript of the encounter with Wessel and Monckton can be found at the Guardian environment blog.

According to Kevin Grandia at DeSmogBlog, climate disruption denier Lord Monckton was talking with a number of youths when he was approached by a couple of other youths he recognized from the Americans for Prosperity event that was temporarily taken over by youth climate activists yesterday. When he was asked to shake one of the activists’ hand, he responded

No, no. I’m not going to shake the hand of Hitler Youth. I’m sorry.

The activist in question, Ben Wessel, is Jewish, and his grandparents escaped the Nazis. Furthermore, Monckton’s remarks yesterday could have been considered intemperate as they were made in the heat of the moment. That Monckton would repeat the charge today when he’s not being shouted over suggests that he truly believes the youth activists to be equal to the Hitler Youth. Full Story »

Here’s what Ken Kesey had to say about Wendell Berry:

“Wendell Berry is the Sargeant York charging unnatural odds across our no-man’s-land of ecology. Conveying the same limber innocence of young Gary Cooper, Wendell advances on the current crop of Krauts armed with naught but his pen and his mythic ridgerunner righteousness. One after the other he picks them off, from the flying bridges of their pleasure boats as they roar through his native Kentucky rivers, from beneath the hard hats in the Hazard county strip mines, from the swivel chairs in the Pentagon where they weigh the various ways to wage war on all forms of enemy life beyond the end of their own friendly chin. He’s a crackshot essayist and, for those given to capture, a genial and captivating poet. He boasts a formidable arsenal of novels, speeches, articles, stories and poems from his outpost in one of the world’s most ravaged battlefields where he writes the good fight and tends his family and his honeybees. Consider him an ally.”

The thing is, Kesey said this in 1971. Full Story »

For an early 90’s “Dead Head” i was probably among the exceptions. Never mind my cynicism, bitterness and general distaste for joining anything. I was second generation. The turn on was a peer playing “Workingman’s Dead” and me realizing that i already knew the words in my mother’s voice. My first tape was scavenged from my stepfather’s (i’ve known him my entire life, only the context of the relationship has changed) tape collection. 12/14/71 at Hill Auditorium in Ann Arbor, he’d been at the show. It wasn’t rebellion in my family. But before my first show, an honorary uncle sat me down for a pretty serious talk. He stressed that seeing the Dead wasn’t about getting wasted; it wasn’t the scene. It was about seeing the show. The rest of it just came along with the communal-libertarian way it was.

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In early 2008, the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine (OISM) published their Petition Project, a list of names from people who all claimed to be scientists and who rejected the science behind the theory of anthropogenic (human-caused) global warming (AGW). This was an attempt to by the OISM to claim that there were far more scientists opposing AGW theory than there are supporting it. This so-called petition took on special importance coming after the release of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fourth Assessment Report, and specifically the Working Group 1 (WG1) report on the science and attribution of climate change to human civilization.

The WG1 report was authored and reviewed by approximately 2000 scientists with varying expertise in climate and related fields, and so having a list of over 30,000 scientists that rejected the WG1’s conclusions was a powerful meme that AGW skeptics and deniers could use to cast doubt on the IPCC’s conclusions and, indirectly, on the entire theory of climate disruption. And in fact, this meme has become widespread in both legacy and new media today.

It is also false. Full Story »

Break out the linguistic life jackets, folks. We’re about to be inundated with the overuse and abuse of the word mainstream with regard to President Obama’s nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court.

Politics is at its heart a battle for control of language and symbols. Now that the president has nominated Judge Sotomayor, [insert name of political party or faction here] will seek to [support | undercut] that nominee through [messaging | framing | "truth"]. Ideological control of mainstream, a word signifying ownership of the core values of a majority of Americans, is at stake.
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American-style capitalism, sans regulation, has earned its present bad rap. Even so, some market mechanisms do work quite well. Commodities pricing is discovered and costs kept low because markets are very efficient at making sure that metals, oil, food, etc. are moved to where the demand is the highest from where the supply is greatest. Similarly, a market in traded sulfur emissions imposed by the Clean Air Act has enabled fossil fuel plants to reduce sulfur dioxide emissions (the main source of acid rain) dramatically since the market’s inception.

Markets don’t work for everything, however. The sulfur dioxide emissions market works because the effects are not hyper-localized – farmers in Kansas and Iowa won’t notice the difference between the emissions from coal plants in Denver, Boulder, or Fort Collins. However, in the case of mercury emissions from coal plants, an emissions market would be a very, very bad idea. Coal-produced mercury precipitates out of the air in a plume immediately downwind of the emissions source, and so there’s no way to fairly balance the increased emissions of one coal plant with the lower emissions of another. In this case, all the increased mercury emissions would to is poison more mothers and children.

But because markets work so well for so many things, the creation of a cap-and-trade market for carbon dioxide (CO₂) makes a lot of sense. In a similar fashion to sulfur dioxide and unlike mercury emissions, CO₂ emissions mix well with the atmosphere and so trading emission credits between one source and another is viable. Full Story »

Have you ever stumbled into a situation where something made you crave your long forgotten bad habit or addiction again, just one more time? You’d repeatedly proven yourself stronger than your old needs or patterns and were no longer even tempted. But then, perhaps because of the phase of the moon and the alignment of the planets, you found yourself suddenly and unexpectedly thrust back to the threshold of that need?

That happened to me earlier this week. For the first time in 14 years, I smelled cigarette smoke and it smelled good…. Full Story »

I get seriously annoyed when I read that James Hansen and others are comparing climate disruption deniers and skeptics to Nazis and war criminals – it’s too extreme and it leads to polarization and results like the latest Gallup poll. I also get seriously annoyed when I read that garbage coming from said deniers and skeptics.

Yesterday, Dr. Arthur Robinson, Director of the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine and the originator of the petition against Al Gore’s global warming hoax which as of now 32,000 scientists have signed, told the 2nd International Conference on Climate Change, that the people like Al Gore who promote global warming alarmism are committing genocide by the withdrawal of technology from the developing world.

[Robinson] noted, “that the billions of people who live at the lowest level of human existence will suffer greatly from the rationing of energy, and this, in turn, will lead to the death of hundreds of millions, or possibly billions.” Full Story »

A person consists both of their being and of the works that their being produces. Whether those works are physical or as intangible as the time spent on a particular task.

A traditional Westminster approach to politics, with a typical Left / Right political duopoly, has become the gold standard of democratic representation. It is also conflicted and inherently incapable of resolving its core contradiction. Full Story »

Did you know that Fox News is a liberal news organization? Not because it’s part of the so-called liberal media, but rather because Fox is based in the liberal bastion of New York City. Following similar “logic”, DJ Drummond has labeled every single polling organization in the U.S. as liberal because they’re headquartered in liberal cities or states. Full Story »

In 2004, Yahoo turned over user information to the Chinese government that was used to track down a dissident journalist, Shi Tao, and send him to a labour camp. It was the moment that the Internet knew sin.

Now, Judge Louis Stanton has decided to force Google/YouTube to disclose a complete set of data on all YouTube users. As TechCrunch reports: “That data includes every YouTube username, the associated IP address and the videos that user has watched on YouTube. Google will also be required to hand over copies of every video removed from Youtube for any reason (DMCA notices or user-initiated deletions). Stanton dismissed Google’s argument that the order will violate user privacy, saying such privacy concerns are merely “speculative.”” Full Story »

Most folks don’t realize it – even people who know me fairly well – but I used to be a Republican. Back when I was younger and, one supposes, more naïve about the relevance of certain kinds of economic theory, I was a pretty mouthy GOPper. I voted for Reagan twice and Bush the Elder once, and while I can defend myself by saying things like “Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale and Mike Dukakis,” I think it’s now clear that history will regard those voting decisions as, at best, insufficiently considered.

As time passed and I grew more … educated … I became more and more conflicted. Full Story »

Got hot links if you want ‘em.

In a New York Times article on Memorial Day, “The Wars We Choose to Ignore,” David Carr writes: “Even as we celebrate generations of American soldiers past, the women and men who are making that sacrifice today in Iraq and Afghanistan receive less attention every day. . . . Given public indifference to a war that refuses to end, perhaps a third statue should be added: America at peace with being at war.” Yes, we’ve grown accustomed to the face of war. Full Story »

According to this story from National Public Radio, data from autonomous ocean probes have detected no aggregate ocean warming since the probes came online in 2003. The Argo system comprises 3,000 probes in all of the world’s oceans that dive as deep as 1-2000 meters every ten days and then ascend, taking continuous temperature and salinity measurements in the process. There is no sign of overall oceanic heating in the data since 2003, leading researchers from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the National Center for Atmospheric Research to wonder where all the energy supposedly being dumped into the ocean via global heating is actually going. Full Story »

These accommodations should in no way be taken as a commentary on the quality of our media coverage.

— Doug Hattaway, campaign spokesman for Sen. Hillary Clinton, on placing press accommodations in the men’s locker room of the Berger Activity Center in Austin, Texas; March 3.
Full Story »

I’ve been searching for a reason why I like libertarians even as they drive me round-the-bend out of my mind sometimes. And on Saturday, Michael Kinsley of the Washington Post provided me that reason.

In his column titled The Church Doctrines of Pope Ron Paul – What’s wrong with libertarianism?, Kinsley described libertarianism as a movement that is so devoted to its principles that it is essentially irrelevant, but that is still vital to our political institutions. Libertarians focus so much on “free markets for everyone and everything” that they lose track of the bigger picture – things like pragmatism, or areas where the idea of personal property simply doesn’t (and can’t) apply. For example, Kinsley points out that fundamentalist libertarians (my term, not his) would reject government taxes for national defense, which is a “public good” issue that no individual should ever be allowed to decide for another. Similarly, pollution leeches across all personal property lines, and so must be addressed by governmental entities instead of nebulous “market forces.” And while I do understand (and even agree with) the right to die arguments that Kinsley rightly attributes to the libertarian impulse, he’s also right that the libertarian right to not wear a seat belt and speed runs smack into the brick wall of reality when the libertarian is involved in a fatal accident that snarls up traffic along a major highway for half the day. Full Story »

Welcome to the fifth and final installment of the Scholars & Rogues year-end wrap-up. Today we tackle the dirty, but oddly riveting world of politics. We’ll take a couple shots at the even dirtier world of media that makes it all possible. Let’s start at the top, shall we?

George Walker Bush: I’ve been telling my Republican friends for five years now that Dubya was going to do more damage to their party than an army of Hillarys could dream of doing. And 2007 was the year where I think the truth of this proposition finally started becoming evident. Scandals at the Justice Department and World Bank did him no favors, nor did the conviction of Scooter Libby (which necessitated the most politically debilitating pardon/commutation sequence since Ford saved Nixon). Iraq got worse by the day and we’re not seeing a lot of GOP presidential hopefuls looking to surf that Bush legacy. Full Story »