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Recovery Autumn? 9.3.10Episode Description
Jobs: It's not as bad as it could've been. That, as the Labor Day weekend began, was the cold comfort that many in the media took from the still-dismal August jobs report. Can't we expect something a little better?
True enough, 68,000 new private-sector jobs were created last month, showing that private businesses, though gasping for breath, aren't dead yet.
But overall, 54,000 jobs disappeared, raising the toll during the "Recovery Summer" Vice President Joe Biden ridiculously hailed two months ago to 238,000. Nor was the uptick in the unemployment rate to 9.6% from 9.5% what you expect in a "recovery."
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by OutloudOpinion.com For more Podcasts visit www.outloudopinion.com
Investor's Business Daily | Fri Sep, 3 | Share     
End Of Child's Play 9.2.10Episode Description
Overlawyered: Fearing lawsuits over injuries, a West Virginia county is removing swing sets from elementary schools. A minor, local issue? No. America's litigious society has changed the way kids play.
Roughly a year after a child broke his arm jumping off a swing like Superman and his parents are settling a lawsuit for $20,000, Cabell County, W.V., schools are yanking swing sets from school playgrounds. The lawsuit was one of two filed in the last year against Cabell County schools over swing set injuries, the West Virginia Record reported Thursday. School safety manager Tim Stewart, who is overseeing the removal, said he sees "a high potential when it comes to swings and lawsuits."
What's happening in Cabell County is not an isolated case. Local governments, fearful of lawsuits, have been for years closing pools, stripping playgrounds of equipment and banning outdoor games.
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by OutloudOpinion.com For more Podcasts visit www.outloudopinion.com
Investor's Business Daily | Fri Sep, 3 | Share More » See more articles from this podcast.
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On Bullying: It Takes One To Know One 7.26.10Episode Description
President Obama was apparently moved enough by a letter from a Philadelphia fifth-grader about bullying that he wrote back and encouraged his correspondent to continue her quest to end bullying. Oh, how rich the irony!
Barack Obama is nothing if not a bully. There, I said it, and I believe it's true, no matter how politically incorrect and inconsistent with the mainstream media's narrative it is.
Before getting to some examples, let me direct your attention to the White House's comments on the exchange and the reaction of Obama's fifth-grade correspondent, Zina Stokes.
From OutloudOpinion - For Podcasts of IBDeditorials, The New Republic, and Over 30 Syndicated Columnists, go to www.outloudopinion.com
David Limbaugh | Mon Jul, 26 | Share Russia Spies; America Apologizes 7.26.10Episode Description
Arriving at a biker's convention in Ukraine on his Harley Davidson trike, Vladimir Putin offered a few observations on his recent celebratory meeting with the 10 Russian sleeper agents deported from the United States. "They had a very difficult fate," the former KGB colonel noted sympathetically. "They had to carry out a task to benefit their motherland's interests for many, many years without a diplomatic cover, risking themselves and those close to them."
The reunion was heartwarming. They sang patriotic songs and "talked of life." Putin assured them, reports the Associated Press, that they would have good jobs and a "bright" future.
From OutloudOpinion - For Podcasts of IBDeditorials, The New Republic, and Over 30 Syndicated Columnists, go to www.outloudopinion.com
Mona Charen | Mon Jul, 26 | Share The Left Hates Conservatives 7.26.10Episode Description
Perhaps the most telling of the recent revelations of the liberal/left Journolist, a list consisting of about 400 major liberal/left journalists, is the depth of their hatred of conservatives. That they would consult with one another in order to protect candidate and then President Obama and in order to hurt Republicans is unfortunate and ugly. But what is jolting is the hatred of conservatives, as exemplified by the e-mail from an NPR reporter expressing her wish to personally see Rush Limbaugh die a painful death -- and the apparent absence of any objection from the other liberal journalists.
Every one of us on the right has seen this hatred. I am not referring to leftist bloggers or to anonymous extreme comments by angry leftists on conservative blogs -- such things exist on the right as well -- but to mainstream elite liberal journalists. There is simply nothing analogous among elite conservative journalists. Yes, nearly all conservatives believe that the left is leading America to ruin. But while there is plenty of conservative anger over this fact, there is little or nothing on the right to match the left's hatred of conservative individuals. Would mainstream conservative journalists e-mail one another wishes to be present while Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi or Michael Moore dies slowly and painfully of a heart attack?
From OutloudOpinion - For Podcasts of IBDeditorials, The New Republic, and Over 30 Syndicated Columnists, go to www.outloudopinion.com
Dennis Prager | Mon Jul, 26 | Share Some Welcome Signs of Life From Private Sector 7.23.10Episode Description
Grass somehow manages to grow up through small cracks in the sidewalk. Similarly, the American private sector somehow seems to be exerting itself despite the vast expansion of government by the Barack Obama administration and congressional Democrats.
Case in point: the announcement last week by four oil companies -- Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil and Shell -- that they are setting up a $1 billion joint venture to design, build and operate a rapid-response system to contain offshore oil spills as deep as and deeper than BP's Deepwater Horizon disaster.
Their goal is a system that can start mobilizing within 24 hours of an oil spill. They hope to have it up and running within 18 months.
I suppose one might ask why oil companies didn't do this before. But it seems a vivid contrast with the apparently hapless performance of the Mineral Management Service, recently renamed the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, which seems to have sat on out-of-date response plans for years and which was not able to call in equipment and personnel to respond to the April 20 BP spill for weeks or months.
Journalists tend to assume that effective regulation of potentially hazardous products can come only from government. But industry-generated organizations can provide it, as well.
Consider Underwriters Laboratories, founded in 1894, whose UL stickers come attached to regulator products. Or the Society of Automotive Engineers, founded in 1905, which sets standards for the automobile and other industries.
From OutloudOpinion - For Podcasts of IBDeditorials, The New Republic, and Over 30 Syndicated Columnists, go to www.outloudopinion.com
Michael Barone | Fri Jul, 23 | Share More » See more articles from this podcast.
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The Higher Education Bubble: Ready to Burst? 9.3.10Episode Description
Imagine that you have a product whose price tag for decades rises faster than inflation. But people keep buying it because they're told that it will make them wealthier in the long run. Then, suddenly, they find it doesn't. Prices fall sharply, bankruptcies ensue, great institutions disappear.
Sound like the housing market? Yes, but it also sounds like what Glenn Reynolds, creator of instapundit.com, writing in The Washington Examiner, has called "the higher education bubble."
Government-subsidized loans have injected money into higher education, as they did into housing, causing prices to balloon. But at some point people figure out they're not getting their money's worth, and the bubble bursts.
From OutloudOpinion - For Podcasts of IBDeditorials, The New Republic, and Over 30 Syndicated Columnists, go to www.outloudopinion.com
Michael Barone | Fri Sep, 3 | Share Obama's Burden of Being So Bright 9.2.10Episode Description
Sorry, but I can't allow Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius' statement that "we have a lot of re-education to do" slip by without comment. It's amusing when avowed leftists don't even recognize the Marxist buzzwords they're sputtering.
Sebelius is attributing the public's vehement opposition to Obamacare to "misinformation given on a 24/7 basis. ... Unfortunately," she said, "there still is a great deal of confusion about what is in (the Obamacare law) and what isn't." She is especially peeved about the vulnerability of seniors, who "have been a target of a lot of the misinformation." (The target of Obama's misinformation, perhaps.)
The most remarkable thing is that Sebelius didn't actually use the term "re-education" accidentally or out of school. Perhaps unwittingly, she's quite comfortable using a term long associated with tyrannical regimes. As one of Obama's chief lieutenants, she obviously believes this administration knows better than the public what is good for them.
Indeed, one of the ongoing ironies of liberalism is that it holds itself out as open-minded, democratic and representative of the common man, when it is more comfortable dictating to and indoctrinating the masses. Just look at our universities alone if you need quick, verifiable proof. But let's consider a few other examples of this administration's employing that mindset.
From OutloudOpinion - For Podcasts of IBDeditorials, The New Republic, and Over 30 Syndicated Columnists, go to www.outloudopinion.com
David Limbaugh | Fri Sep, 3 | Share These Talks Are Doomed 9.2.10Episode Description
Hamas sent a greeting card to the quintet of leaders meeting in Washington, D.C., this week to initiate negotiations about a peace settlement between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. In a well-planned ambush, they killed four Israeli civilians near the city of Hebron, two men and two women (one nine months pregnant), creating seven orphans. The murderers escaped, and may perhaps have videotaped the atrocity.
In Gaza that evening, 3,000 celebrants clogged the streets, waving flags, setting bonfires, passing out candy, and carrying their children on their shoulders. If there is videotape, it will presumably permit the revelers to relive the pleasure, even as the video of Daniel Pearl's beheading has circulated on the Internet.
While the Palestinian Authority did condemn the attack, it did so in mincing terms. Prime Minister Salam Fayyad disapproved, he said, because "the operation went against Palestinian interests." It would be difficult for a leader of the "moderate" (that word is always attached) PA to condemn such attacks as, say, immoral or despicable, as the Palestinian Authority itself (formerly the PLO/Fatah) was conceived in violence and continues to honor its spirit.
From OutloudOpinion - For Podcasts of IBDeditorials, The New Republic, and Over 30 Syndicated Columnists, go to www.outloudopinion.com
Mona Charen | Fri Sep, 3 | Share Bad News for Labor This Labor Day 9.2.10Episode Description
The labor movement doesn't have much to celebrate this Labor Day. Congress first established the national holiday in 1894 at unions' behest. Since then, the American labor movement's fortunes rose to their zenith in 1956, when more than three-in-10 workers were union members, only to decline each year after. Today, only 12 percent of workers hold union cards. And if you discount union members who are public employees, barely 7 percent of private-sector workers are union members.
So why has labor unions' membership declined so far in the last 54 years? Some of it has to do with the changing work trends in the United States. We've moved from large-scale industry to service and white-collar jobs, from big employers to small business, and from lifetime tenure to job insecurity and frequent career changes -- all of which makes union organizing more difficult. But the biggest problem for unions has been their own leadership, which has grown increasingly out of touch with the very people those unions hope to represent.
From OutloudOpinion - For Podcasts of IBDeditorials, The New Republic, and Over 30 Syndicated Columnists, go to www.outloudopinion.com
Linda Chavez | Fri Sep, 3 | Share More » See more articles from this podcast.
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Balancing China?s High Savings 7.29.10Episode Description
China?s national savings rate has been very high in recent years, amounting to 52% of GDP in 2008 (the most recent year for which statistics are available), and is often blamed for today?s global imbalances. Countries that save too much export too much, according to conventional wisdom, resulting in high trade surpluses and growing foreign-exchange reserves.
But this is not always true. For instance, if I save $100, but at the same time I invest $100 in my factories? fixed assets, I am ?balanced domestically? and not running an export surplus with anyone.
Such an example captures China?s recent economic situation. In late 2009 and in early 2010, China?s savings rate might well have remained at 50% of GDP had its trade surplus not narrowed significantly compared to previous years. Indeed, China recorded a trade deficit in part of this period, as high investment in fixed assets (owing to government stimulus policies enacted in the wake of the global financial crisis) fueled domestic demand for goods in the same way that higher consumer spending would.
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Fan Gang | Thu Jul, 29 | Share The Recession Dating Game 7.22.10Episode Description
The optimism that emerged in the early stages of the recovery from the financial crisis and recession has given way to more sobering assessments of the short-, medium-, and long-run challenges facing the global economy and its constituent national parts.
In many countries, fears have even arisen of a prolonged period of slow and occasionally negative growth, persistent obstacles to reducing unemployment, and continued economic anxiety; or worse, of a Japanese-style ?lost decade? with multiple recessions; or, even worse, of a depression, (which politicians and intellectuals have stoked in an attempt to justify continued massive government intervention in the economy for years to come).
But are multiple downturns so unusual in periods of severe economic distress? It would be useful to know the answer to this question before trying repeatedly to pump up the economy in the short run with costly policies that might worsen longer-run prospects.
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Michael Boskin | Tue Jul, 27 | Share Life by the Numbers 7.22.10Episode Description
Last week, I learned that I don't have cancer. My doctor called and said, ?I have some good news!? Fortunately, we were in the middle of a fire drill in my office at the time, so no one noticed as I blinked back tears of relief.
I had found the lump almost two weeks earlier, while at a conference in South Africa. I returned home early to have a biopsy, but the pathology lab was achingly slow; days passed with no word. Clearly they were working hard to figure out exactly how bad my condition was. In fact, they were working hard not to miss anything before they concluded that my tumor was rare but benign.
I had been preparing for the diagnosis for more than a week?and to some extent for years, as I turned my investing focus from ?all things Internet? to all things health-related. It turns out that understanding and promoting health is a great application of information technology. Health increasingly involves numbers. Many of those numbers aren't just medical probabilities; they concern daily life choices that you can make before you get sick (or are threatened, as I was).
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Esther Dyson | Tue Jul, 27 | Share Consolidators versus Stimulators 7.20.10Episode Description
All intellectual systems rely on assumptions that do not need to be spelled out because all members of that particular intellectual community accept them. These ?deep? axioms are implicit in economics as well, but, if left unscrutinized, they can steer policymakers into a blind alley. That is what is happening in today?s effort, in country after country, to slash spending and bring down budget deficits.
The chief task that John Maynard Keynes set himself in writing his General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money was to uncover the deep axioms underlying the economic orthodoxy of his day, which assumed away the possibility of persistent mass unemployment. The question he asked of his opponents was: ?What must they believe in order to claim that persistent mass unemployment is impossible, so that government ?stimulus? to raise the employment level could do no good?? In answering this question, Keynes reconstructed the orthodox theory ? and then proceeded to demolish it.
Today, despite the Keynesian revolution, the same question demands an answer. What do people who demand rapid ?fiscal consolidation? amid heavy unemployment need to believe about the economy to make their policy coherent?
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Robert Skidelsky | Tue Jul, 27 | Share Russia?s Lost Opportunity with Japan 7.19.10Episode Description
The recent smooth exchange of spies between Russia and the United States appears to demonstrate that the ?reset? in relations between the two countries has worked. But Russia has so far done little to ?reset? its relations with Japan. That is not only a lost opportunity, given Russia?s need to modernize its economy, but a grave strategic error in view of Russia?s increasing worries about China?s ambitions in Asia, which includes Russia?s lightly populated Siberian provinces.
In April, China?s navy carried out military exercises near Japan, and its Fleet No. 91756, recognized as one of its finest, conducted a live-fire exercise in the East China Sea off the coast of Zhejiang province, including missile-interception training with new vessels. China?s objectives appear to have been to enhance its navy?s operational capacity, particularly in terms of jamming and electronic warfare, and to test its joint capabilities with the Chinese air force.
Perhaps more importantly, the Chinese seem to have intended to send a warning signal to US and South Korean naval forces as their joint maneuvers in the Yellow Sea approach. But the Chinese also sent a powerful signal to Japan and Russia.
Read by OutloudOpinion
Yuriko Koike | Tue Jul, 27 | Share
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The Unwisdom of Crowds 9.7.10Episode Description
Toward the end of Defying Hitler, his extraordinary memoir of the rise of Nazism in Germany, Sebastian Haffner describes how the Nazis had ?made all Germans everywhere into comrades.? This, he argued, had been a moral catastrophe. This emphatically was not because comradeship was never a good thing. To the contrary, as Haffner was at pains to insist, it was a great and necessary comfort and help for people who had to live under unbearable, inhuman conditions, above all in war. But Haffner was equally adamant that, in normal times, in ordinary civilian life, comradeship became a vice, for it relieved people of ?responsibility for their actions, before themselves, before God, before their consciences. ... Their comrades are their conscience and give absolution for everything, provided they do what everyone else does.?
Anyone who was ever bullied in a schoolyard, or, more to the point, anyone who ever joined in the bullying or just stood by while it was going on, knows full well where that feeling that no blame attaches to you if you are doing what everyone else is can lead. You end up doing, or at least condoning, things that you would never do solo, and that you have a hard time justifying once the crowd disperses and you are on your own again.
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by OutloudOpinion
David Reiff | Tue Sep, 7 | Share What Can France Teach Us About Botched Immigration Policies? 9.3.10Episode Description
On both sides of the Atlantic, it has been an uncomfortable summer for immigrant groups. Here in the United States there have been the quarrels over the "Ground Zero Mosque," ?anchor babies,? and Arizona?s new illegal immigrant bill (not to mention yet more calls for the deportation of our ?Muslim? president to his ?native? Kenya by the surprisingly large proportion of the Republican Party that seems to have taken up permanent residence on Planet Zorg). Meanwhile, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, faced with removal from office by the voters in 2012, has continued to push legislation outlawing the wearing of the burqa in public and acted to expel several hundred Roma to Romania and Bulgaria. This last move in particular has earned him widespread criticism from the media, and widespread support from the French public.
Sarkozy?s actions and France?s continuing struggles with the immigration issue have gotten relatively little coverage in the United States. They are worth taking a closer look at, however, because they starkly illustrate many of the issues that arise from the world-wide movement of populations?issues that the United States will be confronting more and more over the coming decades.
This podcast brought to you by GoToMeeting - Save time and money traveling by using GoToMeeting. For a free 45 day trial visit Gotomeeting.com/podcast
by OutloudOpinion
David Bell | Fri Sep, 3 | Share Whatever Happened to Crazy? Not every nutjob has a political affiliation. 9.3.10Episode Description
Lord have mercy. These days, a man can?t even strap on a bunch of explosives, take a network building hostage, and get himself shot dead by police without touching off a partisan slap fest.
Before I fired up my computer this morning, I assumed that conservative partisans would have been busy little beavers during the night. Sure enough, not one but two e-mails awaited me, crowing about James Lee?s environmental extremism. Since then, I?ve run across plenty more Web posts with headlines dubbing Lee a ?Violent Liberal Environmentalist? or a ?Liberal Ecoterrorist? or otherwise crowing about his not-a-conservative status.
I was more surprised, I confess, by a post at the liberal blog Think Progress, detailing how Lee?s online manifesto ?Echoes Anti-immigrant Groups? Malthusian Screed,? then walking readers through the sinister phenomenon of nativism?s greenwashing. It?s not that I think liberals are necessarily above that sort of opportunistic bashing. But linking Lee?s behavior to an ugly right-wing ideology took considerably more creativity and chutzpah than the right?s gloating about Lee?s fondness for An Inconvenient Truth.
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by OutloudOpinion
Michelle Cottle | Fri Sep, 3 | Share The Environment Is Falling Apart, and yet Humanity Has Never Been Better. What Gives? 9.2.10Episode Description
Here's a paradox for you. Most ecologists would agree that we're ravaging the Earth's natural resources at an unsustainable rate?and pushing up against some dangerous thresholds in the biosphere. (See my old piece on planetary boundaries for the gloomy version of this tale.) Broadly speaking, the planet's ecosystems are in terrible shape, and this is widely believed to have negative consequences for humanity. And yet, at the same time, human well-being has never been better. People are living longer, healthier, and richer lives. If you could rev up a time machine and choose to be plopped at any point in history, 2010 would be a sound choice.
So what gives? Why the disparity? And does this mean that we shouldn't worry too much about global warming, ocean acidification, and other ecological crises-in-waiting, since it sure looks like we'll just continue to get richer even as we cause irreversible damage to the planet? (Jim Manzi has argued a version of this position in our debates on climate change.) Those are all good questions. And in the September issue of BioScience, a team of researchers led by McGill's Ciara Raudsepp-Hearne tried to come up with a bunch of explanations for the "environmentalist's paradox." Here are the big four:
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by OutloudOpinion
Bradford Plumer | Thu Sep, 2 | Share Obama Wants Us To Forget the Lessons of Iraq 9.1.10Episode Description
The Iraq war? Fuggedaboudit. ?Now, it is time to turn the page.? So advises the commander-in-chief at least. ?[T]he bottom line is this,? President Obama remarked last Saturday, ?the war is ending.? Alas, it?s not. Instead, the conflict is simply entering a new phase. And before we hasten to turn the page?something that the great majority of Americans are keen to do?common decency demands that we reflect on all that has occurred in bringing us to this moment. Absent reflection, learning becomes an impossibility.
For those Americans still persuaded that everything changed the moment Obama entered the Oval Office, let?s provide a little context. The event that historians will enshrine as the Iraq war actually began back in 1990 when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, Iraq?s unloved and unlovable neighbor. Through much of the previous decade, the United States had viewed Saddam as an ally of sorts, a secular bulwark against the looming threat of Islamic radicalism then seemingly centered in Tehran. Saddam?s war of aggression against Iran, launched in 1980, did not much discomfit Washington, which offered the Iraqi dictator a helping hand when his legions faced apparent defeat.
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by OutloudOpinion
Andrew J. Bacevich | Wed Sep, 1 | Share More » See more articles from this podcast.
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From the Killing Fields to the Tea Party: A Cambodian refugee and self-described Reagan Republican runs for Congress in the Bay State. 9.7.10Episode Description
Lowell, Mass.?Sam Meas isn't your typical congressional candidate. For one thing, the Cambodian refugee doesn't know his birthday.
"I tell people I am 38 years old?plus or minus two years." In 1973, Meas's father was sent to be "re-educated" by the Khmer Rouge and was never heard from again. During the chaos following the regime's collapse in 1979, Meas was separated from his mother. He never saw her again. Marching night and day toward the Thai border with a cousin, Meas recalls stepping over corpses and watching bloated bodies float down jungle waterways.
After years in a Thai refugee camp, in 1986 Meas was brought to the United States by the aid organization Catholic Charities. He spent months watching General Hospital and All My Children to improve his vocabulary. Twenty-five years later?after stints as a shoe-shine boy, a grocery-bagger, and a financial adviser?Meas is learning the craft of politics. "Health care should not be in the realm of government," he tells me in carefully accented English at a Cambodian restaurant where he is something of a celebrity. America is "on a slow path towards socialism." And "we need to get government out of managing people's lives."
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From OutloudOpinion - For Podcasts of IBDeditorials, The New Republic, and Over 30 Syndicated Columnists, go to www.outloudopinion.com
Michael C. Moynihan | Tue Sep, 7 | Share Knowing is Half the Battle. But It's the Easy Half. 9.1.10Episode Description
They say that knowing is half the battle. But it?s the easy half.
On Sunday, the Los Angeles Times caused quite a stir by releasing individual performance data about 6,000 of the system?s primary teachers after weeks of hyping the story. The paper took the simple but ingenious step of filing a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for the district?s raw math and reading standardized test scores over several years. For each teacher, the paper calculated a score based on the gains shown by his or her individual students from the time they arrived in the classroom in the fall to the time they left?a value-added score?and then rated the teachers? effectiveness.
Information is power, and the school system and teachers union had access to this data long before the Times. But instead of releasing scores?and thus seizing the opportunity to frame the information and the debate?they sat on the data for years, stalling, hoping no one would notice that it existed at all. Their mindset dates from a time when processing a large amount of data and offering a granular analysis was a difficult and expensive business. But number crunching on this scale is no longer the province of big bureaucracies with major computing power. Anyone can do it, and it was only a matter of time before someone did.
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From OutloudOpinion - For Podcasts of IBDeditorials, The New Republic, and Over 30 Syndicated Columnists, go to www.outloudopinion.com
Katherine Mangu-Ward | Thu Sep, 2 | Share Gas Prices Explained: Solving the deep mystery of gasoline price fluctuations 9.1.10Episode Description
Good news for American drivers! Just in time for the Labor Day weekend, gasoline prices are falling. According to the Energy Information Administration (EIA) gas prices peaked in the spring. Gas prices usually rise in the spring because of the supply constraints created by the switchover to specially formulated summer gasoline mandated by the Environmental Protection Agency. The EIA reports that in May the average price for a gallon of regular got up to $2.87. Since then prices have been wiggling downward to around $2.65 per gallon today.
So what determines the price of gasoline? Speculators? Evil conspiring oil companies? Well, actually no. It's demand and supply, of course. On the demand side the American automobile fleet gets better gas mileage than it did a few years ago and Americans, whacked by the recession and high unemployment rates, are driving a bit less than they used to. In addition, thanks to government subsidies, about 9 percent of what goes into our gas tanks is ethanol produced from corn, which also reduces the demand for refined crude. On the supply side, global oil supplies are ample and refiners in the U.S. evidently believed the Obama administration?s rosy ?recovery summer? scenarios and stockpiled a lot of gasoline.
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From OutloudOpinion - For Podcasts of IBDeditorials, The New Republic, and Over 30 Syndicated Columnists, go to www.outloudopinion.com
Ronald Bailey | Wed Sep, 1 | Share Trust Me: You Can Trust Us 8.31.10Episode Description
In April I wrote a column about the secretive habits of three large police departments in Virginia's Washington, D.C., suburbs: Fairfax County, Alexandria, and Arlington. As Connection Newspapers reporter Michael Pope showed in a series of reports that began in March, they are among the least transparent departments in the country, having interpreted Virginia's Freedom of Information Act in a way that allows them to turn down nearly all requests for information.
Recently there have been a couple of attempts to make Virginia's law enforcement agencies more transparent. As I reported in June, Nicholas Beltrante, an 82-year-old former cop and Navy medic, started the Virginia Citizens Coalition for Police Accountability. And in January, state Sen. John Edwards (D-Roanoke) introduced a bill that would force police to turn over public records in cases where the investigation has been completed.
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From OutloudOpinion - For Podcasts of IBDeditorials, The New Republic, and Over 30 Syndicated Columnists, go to www.outloudopinion.com
Radley Balko | Tue Aug, 31 | Share Taking Economic Liberty Seriously: Does the Constitution protect the right to earn a living? 8.27.10Episode Description
On March 5, 1934, the U.S. Supreme Court declared New York shopkeeper Leo Nebbia to be a criminal because he sold two quarts of milk and a 5 cent loaf of bread for the combined low price of 18 cents. As Justice Owen Roberts explained in his 5-4 majority opinion in Nebbia v. New York, the state?s Milk Control Board had fixed the minimum price of milk at 9 cents a quart to eliminate the ?evils? of price-cutting.
As for the constitutionality of this action, which raised the price of milk during the lean years of the Great Depression in an effort to boost the profits of New York dairy farmers, while doing absolutely nothing to improve the health or safety of the milk-drinking public, Roberts simply shrugged. ?A state is free to adopt whatever economic policy may reasonably be deemed to promote public welfare, and to enforce that policy by legislation adapted to its purpose." Furthermore, ?If the laws passed are seen to have a reasonable relation to a proper legislative purpose, and are neither arbitrary nor discriminatory, the requirements of due process are satisfied.? In other words, when it came to economic regulations, the courts needed only to rubber stamp whatever the lawmakers deemed ?reasonable.?
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From OutloudOpinion - For Podcasts of IBDeditorials, The New Republic, and Over 30 Syndicated Columnists, go to www.outloudopinion.com
Damon W. Root | Fri Aug, 27 | Share A Superhero For Mayor? Brian K. Vaughan?s Ex Machina chronicles the perils of power?political and otherwise. 8.26.10Episode Description
Look! Up in the sky! It?s a bird! It?s a plane! It?s...the mayor of New York City? What if the mayor of the Big Apple was also the world?s only honest-to-goodness superhero? For the last six years, that?s been the question driving Brian K. Vaughan?s politically charged serial, Ex Machina. As comic book adventures go, Vaughan?s deftly scripted 50-issue comic book series, which published its final issue last week, offered an unexpectedly clever mix of high-flying action and city-management melodrama. But as political fiction, Ex Machina offered something far more subtle?a slow-burning portrait of the corrupting fallibility of political systems, and a warning about how, eventually, those systems demean and diminish even those who believe in their powers the most.
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From OutloudOpinion - For Podcasts of IBDeditorials, The New Republic, and Over 30 Syndicated Columnists, go to www.outloudopinion.com
Peter Suderman | Thu Aug, 26 | Share More » See more articles from this podcast.
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CR 08/21/10 - Obama's Failures, Nuclear Iran, Streaking, and More Mosque Talk.Episode Description
James, joined by special guest, Mike Morrison, takes over Natalie Arceneaux's "The Civil Right:" for a day. Topics include: Obama's many failures (health care, cap and tax, etc), streaking, Dr. Laure, the ground zero mosque and more. http://breakingright.com
James Wright and Damon Rexroad | Sun Aug, 22 | Share
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July/Aug - The Tea Parties and the Future of Liberty - Stephen F. HayesEpisode Description
Barack Obama was inaugurated on January 20, 2009. Within a month he signed a $787 billion ?stimulus package? with virtually no Republican support. It was necessary, we were told, to keep unemployment under eight percent. Overnight, the federal government had, as one of its highest priorities, weatherizing government buildings and housing projects. Streets and highways in no need of repair would be broken up and repaved. The Department of Transportation and other government agencies would spend millions on signs advertising the supposed benefits of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. I saw one of them on Roosevelt Island in Washington, D.C. It boasted that the federal park would be receiving a generous grant to facilitate the involvement of local youth in the removal of ?non-indigenous plants.? In other words, kids would be weeding. We need a sign to announce that? And this was going to save the economy?
Then there was American Recovery and Reinvestment Act project number 1R01AA01658001A, a study entitled: ?Malt Liquor and Marijuana: Factors in their Concurrent Versus Separate Use.? I?m not making this up. This is a $400,000 project being directed by a professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo. The following is from the official abstract: ?We appreciate the opportunity to refocus this application to achieve a single important aim related to our understanding of young adults? use of male [sic] liquor (ML), other alcoholic beverages, and marijuana (MJ), all of which confer high risks for experiencing negative consequences, including addiction. As we have noted, reviews of this grant application have noted numerous strength [sic], which are summarized below.?
Brought to you by OutloudOpinion.com
Imprimis | Wed Sep, 1 | Share May/June - The New New Deal - Charles R. KeslerEpisode Description
In President Obama, conservatives face the most formidable liberal politician in at least a generation. In 2008, he won the presidency with a majority of the popular vote?something a Democrat had not done since Jimmy Carter?s squeaker in 1976?and handily increased the Democrats? control of both houses of Congress. Measured against roughly two centuries worth of presidential victories by Democratic non-incumbents, his win as a percentage of the popular vote comes in third behind FDR?s in 1932 and Andrew Jackson?s in 1828.
More importantly, Obama won election not as a status quo liberal, but as an ambitious reformer. Far from being content with incremental gains, he set his sights on major systemic change in health care, energy and environmental policy, taxation, financial regulation, education, and even immigration, all pursued as elements of a grand strategy to ?remake America.? In other words, he longs to be another FDR, building a New New Deal for the 21st century, dictating the politics of his age, and enshrining the Democrats as the new majority party for several decades to come. Suddenly, the era of big government being over is over; and tax-and-spend liberalism is back with a vengeance. We face a $1.4 trillion federal deficit this fiscal year alone and $10-12 trillion in total debt over the coming decade.
Brought to you by OutloudOpinion.com
Imprimis | Wed Jun, 16 | Share April - The Coming Constitutional Debate - Stephen MarkmanEpisode Description
AS ASSISTANT ATTORNEY GENERAL under President Ronald Reagan, I prepared a report for Attorney General Edwin Meese entitled ?The Constitution in the Year 2000: Choices Ahead.? This report sought to identify a range of areas in which significant constitutional controversy could be expected over the next 20 years. As critical as I believe those controversies were, they pale in significance before the controversies that will arise over the next several decades. The resolution of these emerging controversies will determine whether the Constitution of 2030 bears any resemblance to the Constitution of 1787?the Framers? Constitution that has guided this nation for most of its first two centuries and has rendered it the freest, most prosperous, and most creative nation in the history of the world.
Proponents of a ?21st century constitution? or ?living constitution? aim to transform our nation?s supreme law beyond recognition?and with a minimum of public attention and debate. Indeed, if there is an overarching theme to what they wish to achieve, it is the diminishment of the democratic and representative processes of American government. It is the replacement of a system of republican government, in which the constitution is largely focused upon the architecture of government in order to minimize the likelihood of abuse of power, with a system of judicial government, in which substantive policy outcomes are increasingly determined by federal judges. Rather than merely defining broad rules of the game for the legislative and executive branches of government, the new constitution would compel specific outcomes.
Brought to you by OutloudOpinion.com
Imprimis | Tue Apr, 27 | Share February - Health Care in a Free Society - Paul RyanEpisode Description
SOMEONE once said that before there was the New Deal, there was the Wisconsin Deal. In my home state, the University of Wisconsin was an early hotbed of progressivism, whose goal was to reorder society along lines other than those of the Constitution. The best known Wisconsin progressive in American politics was Robert LaFollette. ?Fighting Bob,? as he was called, was a Republican?as was Theodore Roosevelt, another early progressive. Today we tend to associate progressivism mostly with Democrats, and trace it back to Woodrow Wilson. But it had its roots in both parties.
The social and political programs of the progressives came in on two great waves: the New Deal of the 1930s and the Great Society of the 1960s. Today, President Obama often invokes progressivism and hopes to generate its third great wave of public policy. In thinking about what this would mean, we need look no farther than the health care reform program he is promoting along with the leadership in Congress.
Brought to you by OutloudOpinion.com
Imprimis | Mon Mar, 8 | Share More » Go to our Imprimis Page.
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