A Stitch in Haste

I am off tonight to an undisclosed location for a brief holiday. Returning Sunday.

I have a few posts already prepared, as well as some of my infamous "Kip Clips" intended to spark lively discussions in the comments (though they never do — reach/grasp/heaven, etc.).

Regular blogging resumes Monday.

My recent post on some reported shenanigans by Cablevision in the wake of FCC-mandated digitization of broadcast television reminded me that I haven't blogged about "net neutrality" -- where my position qua libertarian is somewhat anti-consensus -- in some time.

Fortunately Tony gives me an excuse to summarize and restate my position:

I actually support government-imposed net neutrality because these backbone companies (AT&T, Comcast, etc.) were spawned by the government in the first place.

Government-chartered monopoly = government rate regulation.

(The fact that they are no longer rate-regulated does not change the fact that it was the original monopoly charters that gave them the backbone in the first place.)

But if, e.g., Google were to build its own pipe with its own money — as it has threatened to do — then it should be free to price it however it sees fit.

The notion, meanwhile, that the backbone companies need more revenue to build more capacity is all well and good, but you can still get that revenue from one end of the pipe exclusively — the subscriber.

If I use twice as much bandwidth as you do, then I can pay twice as much as you do. No objection there. But leave whence I'm getting all that content (e.g., Netflix, iTunes or YouTube) out of it.

The idea that NetNeut will "choke the pipe" is a Chicken Little canard spread by its opponents, pure and simple.

Counterarguments welcome.

It makes perfect sense to two groups of people — professional journalists* and bloodthirsty dictators:

At around 2 p.m. yesterday, a Zimbabwean police unit raided the York Lodge, a Harare hotel being used by several foreign reporters covering the elections. Five journalists were arrested. Three of them were later released, but two are still being held at Harare police headquarters. One of them is New York Times correspondent Barry Bearak.

Their lawyer, Beatrice Mtetwa, said they would be charged ... with working without accreditation in violation of a 2002 press law known as the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act, under which journalists can be sentenced to up to two years in prison for working without a permit from Media and Information Commission (MIC).

Look on the bright side: Zimbabwe's barbarian censorship laws (two years in jail) are better than China's barbarian censorship laws (3.5 years).

(*One example here.)

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Meanwhile:

The inner circle of President Robert G. Mugabe of Zimbabwe met Friday to decide how to handle the outcome of elections that the opposition contends the president lost.

The options that confront the senior leadership of the ruling party include having the president step down, holding a runoff vote later this month or prolonging their control over the country, regardless of the outcome national elections last Saturday.
...
Before the election, Mr. Mugabe repeatedly said he would not allow the opposition to take power, and since then his aides have said that he "is going to fight to the last."

The first presidential inauguration I remember watching was Reagan's in 1981:

The orderly transfer of authority as called for in the Constitution routinely takes place as it has for almost two centuries and few of us stop to think how unique we really are. In the eyes of many in the world, this every-4-year ceremony we accept as normal is nothing less than a miracle.

Mr. President, I want our fellow citizens to know how much you did to carry on this tradition. By your gracious cooperation in the transition process, you have shown a watching world that we are a united people pledged to maintaining a political system which guarantees individual liberty to a greater degree than any other, and I thank you and your people for all your help in maintaining the continuity which is the bulwark of our Republic.

Translation: "Carter, you really sucked. In fact, you sucked so bad that the nicest thing I can say about you is that you at least didn't try to stage a coup when you lost so pathetically. Thanks for that — and don't let the door hit you on the way out." I remember thinking, in my 14-year-old way, "This guy's supposedly a great orator? For saying stuff like that?"

In retrospect, however, it really is the simplest things — like "we can throw the bums out" and "you don't need a license to write" — that make the United States so obviously superior to so much of the rest of the world. And here I am today, not 14 but 41, blogospherically screaming from the rooftop essentially the same simple message, because it so desperately needs to be screamed:

We are a great nation for a reason. To the extent we forget the reason, we cease to be great.

Since I appear to be the only person in the entire blogosphere who didn't post this, I'll make up for it by posting this:

When it comes, it comes, so you have to seize it, tame it or trick it, beat it into submission, break its neck, take it, hang it upside down, gut it, remove its hide, tan its hide, carve out the post from the tanned hide, submit the carved-out post to the Wordpress, hope people like it, and then, if they don't, well fuck 'em.

Yup, that's blogging alright...

I don't read DailyKos for the same reason I don't read Hardy Boys books: there's no reason to. Neither adds anything to intellectual discourse; neither catalyzes the self-enrichment of the already-literate. DailyKos is the radical leftist blogger equivalent of poi: no taste or consistency whatsoever, but it helps the other, more substantive content last longer.

The latest self-humiliation by Moulitsas (who, recall, is supposedly a leading advocate of the fiction of "left-libertarianism") and his Cult of the Childish Pejorative:

For all the talk of "freedom" that the Paulbots claim to believe in, they sure as heck have been silent on the horrible FISA bill we're fighting to fix in the Senate right now. Same for Ron Paul. Why the silence? And the CATO people and the libertarian publications like Reason, where are they?

Here we are engaged in a huge civil liberties issue, and progressives are being forced to fight this thing alone. It's easy to talk about "liberty". It's much more impressive to actually do something about it.

That was, incidentally, the entire post.

It's true that I haven't blogged about FISA for a long time — by which I mean six days. It's true that "Terror v. Civil Liberties" (which I have also called the "War on Civil Liberties") is only one of my blogpost categories — have I no shame? It's true that my (non-exhaustive) chain of warrantless wiretapping posts "only" contains fifty entries, each of which is more substantive than Moulitsas' post by "only" an order of magnitude — what kind of libertarian am I?

More responses at Reason, Distributed Republic, Publius Endures.

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Moulitsas is of course as popular as he is precisely because he's so intellectually unsophisticated. Nothing appeals more to the Great Unwashed than an unwashed argument.

And nothing demonstrates this better than the kindergarten playground / tantrum factory that is his comments section:

--Why do Libertarians care so much about liberty from taxes, but not from oppression or government interference in one's private affairs? If they genuinely gave a crap about civil liberties ... well, they wouldn't all be Republicans, anyway.

--The truth is that many so-called libertarians just don't really give a damn about civil liberties.

--A libertarian is mostly a Republican who supports gay marriage and wants to smoke pot.

--I'll say it again — "libertarians" are simply wingnut Republicans trying to describe themselves in more fashionable terms. That's all they are.

--There is no such thing as a libertarian. It's simply a fictional concept put together in the abstract for purposes of argument, but there are no actual, real senitent [sic] beings who actually believe in classic "libertarianism", as we academically understand the word.

--The majority of Libertarians I've run across seem to only believe in liberty for themselves. The rest of the world can go to shit so long as nobody tells them what to do, takes their money, or interrupts their masturbatory fantasies of being rich by expecting them to do anything that is not ultimately self-serving.

--Libertarians just hate taxes and minorities and want to live in gated communities.

--Libertarianism is Pre-School for Republicans.

--This goes to the very heart of the libertarian philosophy. Not the one they profess, but the one they actually hold: Not giving a shit about others.

And that's just a sample of the high-brow discourse in the thread. As is always the case with sundry partisanship: when enemies are in short supply, they must be manufactured, like any other scarce good.

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This one's my favorite, incidentally:

George Bush was the libertarian that the Randoids dreamed about, I mean he was the John Galt who cut taxes, got rid of regulations and hell, he is doing a heckavajob with New Orleans and Baghdad so some future Howard Roark can do some work there.

Actually, I've long thought that George W. Bush was eerily reminiscent of "Mr. Thompson," who is clearly the President in the novel, though I believe that word is never used to describe him:

Head of State and a crafty pragmatist who believes everyone is open to compromise. When his goons capture Galt, Mr. Thompson tries futilely to persuade the inventor to take charge of the collapsing economy, tempting him with money and the trappings of power. When that fails, Mr. Thompson finally agrees to use torture.

Remind you of anyone?

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Meanwhile, I blogged previously:

Those political mainstreamers who do not share in this movement-that-Paul-did-not-create, the liberals and conservatives who prior to this presidential campaign had barely heard of an "isolationist / neoconfederate / 95% of all blacks are criminals / bring back the closet / Lincoln started the Civil War / the WHO invented AIDS / conspiracies everywhere" fervor now have — thanks to Ron Paul — a name for it: libertarianism.

Well, you can imagine how many times the words "Ron Paul" and "libertarian" appear together in the contributions to that don't-think-too-hard-it-hurts comment thread.

So now we have two radical anti-libertarians — Paul and Moulitsas — going out of their way to misrepresent libertarianism though a bizarre, self-contradicting hybrid of straw man attacks and guilt by association. They must really be scared of us.

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Turning now to our right flank: If we "sell our souls for a tax cut" libertarians are all in cahoots with the Republicans, then whence this?

The moral vacuity of dogmatic libertarianism is poisonous to public life. By teaching that 'greed is good,' strict free-market ideology holds out the promise that private vices can be public virtues.

The ironic part is that this wood-paneled-den drivel, written by infantile radical conservatives, could just as easily have been written by the infantile radical liberal Moulitsas. There would have been no way to tell without a byline. Go figure.

I repeat: They must really be scared of us.

I am adding Publius Endures to The Elite Eleven.

This new libertarian blog (I think "publius endures" is Latin for "Why should I have to endure the public?") focuses on

the principles espoused in Madison's Federalist Number 10: namely that factions (aka "interest groups") cannot be controlled or eliminated without unacceptable effects on liberty. The best that can be hoped for is for government to permit as many factions/interest groups as possible so that no one faction ever gains too much power.

I've been known to quote Federalist #10 every so often...

This new entry replaces Atlas Blogged.

What is The Elite Eleven?

For those who, like me, can't stand thomas.loc.gov —

Register an account with OpenCongress using your e-mail address and you'll receive a profile page — "My OpenCongress" — that provides a personalized view of all the information you want about the laws being made in Washington. Users can track any bill, senator, representative, or issue area on the site, simply by clicking "track this" at the top of any page. Back on your profile, you'll have assembled a one-stop platform of everything you're watching in Congress, with a continually-updated stream of their latest actions.

So, for example, you could easily track the progress of the bill in the Senate repealing Don't Ask Don't Tell...

...if there were such a bill, that is.

If only there were a sitting senator (or two) who (truthfully) advocated repealing DADT. They could introduce such a Senate bill, comparable to the Military Readiness Enhancement Act (H.R. 1246) already working its way through the House.

Alas, there are no such senators.

(Seriously though, this new site looks very user friendly.)

It's a bit earlier than I planned, but I've fallen behind in real-world tasks due to a lingering head cold, and I need to get ready for an extended visit from a fellow blogger who will be staying with me next week. After New Year's, I'm off to Europe for a quick vacation.

So expect little substantive blogging through around January 10th.

Merry Christmas everyone!

I let it go the first three times I saw it. No longer:


(Click to enlarge.)
Seriously, is it too much to ask our "professional" journalists, the ones who are so much better than bloggers, to find a different picture to use with Supreme Court stories than an irrelevant (and, quite frankly, unflattering) picture of a Justice who has been retired for almost two years?

Apparently, it is.

It has been brought to my attention that this blogpost of mine, on the recent Supreme Court case Samson v. California, No. 04-9728 (2006), has been quoted in the latest supplement to the leading criminal procedure casebook, Modern Criminal Procedure: Cases, Comments and Questions, by Kamisar, LaFave, Israel, King ... and now also Orin Kerr.

Here's the passage that Kerr the authors apparently considered casebook-worthy:

[G]iven the ongoing sex offender mania and its premise of permanent recidivism as the basis for lifetime registries and prohibitions on residence and occupation and such, one wonders whether some activist legislature will now jump the shark and propose extending Samson to a lifetime forfeiture of Fourth Amendment protection for convicted sex offenders, even after the term of the parole has ended.

Legislatures, including Congress, have certainly not relented in their sex-offender-mania activism since Samson. Neither has the Fourth Amendment fared well recently, especially in the context of the War on Terror. Bottom line: One still wonders.

I'll be humble and presume that the quote won't find its way into the next full-blown edition of the casebook itself. But thanks to Professor Kerr for the inclusion in the supplement.

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And if that's not enough — the casebook quote of my post has itself been quoted in the Wikipedia entry for "Jumping the Shark." So now I am not only a legal authority, but a pop culture specialist too. Go figure.

(First posted Thanksgiving Day, 2005)
In honor of Thanksgiving, here's what I'm thankful for.

I'm thankful for my readers. With however many millions of blogs there are, I know shelf space is limited. The fact that a few hundred people choose to find the time to read my posts each day is truly astounding to me, and I'm truly grateful.

I'm thankful for the comments people leave on my blog. Writing is of course more time consuming than reading, and the fact that what I write is provocative and evocative enough to generate responses reminds me how important it is to research, proofread and self-fisk my work before I post it. Comments must be earned, and I'm thankful that people think I've done so. I'm also thankful that people understand that I can't respond to every comment left at every post. Time constraints simply make it impossible.

I'm thankful for the people who send me emails. I'm very bad about responding to all the emails I receive; the people who send them deserve better. But I'm running at full capacity as it is, and of course new blogposts must always take priority.

I'm thankful for my blogroll. That there are so many people who are so smart and such good writers restores my confidence in the state of our intellectual world.

--I'm thankful for the libertarian bloggers who refuse to let dream of a proper society with a proper government go quietly into that Red State / Blue State night.

--I'm thankful for the blawgers who help keep my legal training from atrophying.

--I'm thankful for the econo-bloggers who try to help us understand the world in no less real and important a sense than do physicists.

--I'm thankful for the political bloggers, of whatever leaning, who help me see the events of the world in new ways.

--I'm thankful for the science & medicine bloggers who foster and perpetuate my sense of wonder at the universe, our planet and the human body.

--I'm thankful for the gay politics bloggers who, in their very special way, fight the good fight toward equal rights and basic human dignities.

--I'm thankful for the bloggers in the gay community who share their personal and social lives through their blogs and remind us why we invoke the image of the rainbow.

--Finally, I'm thankful for anyone else who has earned my thanks in some other way that I may have overlooked.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

For those not yet old, cynical and bitter:

Take this chance to experience the challenge of college-level instruction before you leave high school! The Bill of Rights Institute's Constitutional Academy gives you the opportunity to ask important questions with other bright students from across the country who share your interest in history, American government, and personal liberty, and to explore these questions under the guidance of a faculty of distinguished teachers and college professors.

Thirty outstanding high school juniors and seniors will be selected for each program week in this college-level, residential program. Through readings, discussions, and active learning experiences, you will deepen your understanding of the constitutional principles that were so important to our nation's Founders, and that continue to be important today.

When I was in high school I attended a similar program called Washington Workshops. This program sounds much more libertarian.

(For those who are old, cynical and bitter: Cato@Liberty also links to the grown-up version.)