Rick Sincere News and Thoughts

Remember, Remember

2009-11-05T00:14:00.002-05:00

On this Guy Fawkes' Day, it is appropriate to celebrate an internationally-known political blogger who has assumed the persona of Guy -- or "Guido" -- Fawkes in his attempts to engage, stimulate, influence, and taunt conservative debate and discussion in the United Kingdom.

(For those unfamiliar with Guy Fawkes' Day, it marks the so-called "Gunpowder Plot" by Catholics who wanted to overthrow the stifling Protestant regime of King James I. There has been debate whether Fawkes was a ringleader, a patriot, or just a scapegoat, but his name is celebrated on the 5th of November each year with fireworks, bonfires, and libation. In recent years, the day has acquired some of the style and and customs of American Hallowe'en. The character of Guy Fawkes was also celebrated in the libertarian-themed film, V for Vendetta.)

Last week, as part of its series of reports marking the 4oth anniversary of the Internet, NPR's "All Things Considered" featured the creator of Order-Order.com, Paul Stains, a libertarian/conservative activist who has done for the British blogosphere what Glenn Reynolds or Michelle Malkin have done on this side of the pond. (I mention those names by way of example; there are many others I could have chosen.)

Correspondent Vickie Barker began her report by noting that, in London,

there are arguably only two types of politicians: those who admit they follow the Guy Fawkes blog and those who do, but won't admit it.

She continues:

Five years ago, four centuries after his namesake, Paul Stains created his online alter ego. The nearly bankrupt businessman suddenly had a lot of time on his hands. A libertarian who once organized acid house parties in his student days, he described himself as Thatcher on drugs, Stains consciously set out to become Britain's Matt Drudge.

Like Drudge, he was initially dismissed as a know-nothing outsider, a purveyor of unfounded rumor and gossip. Like Drudge, he's been able to tap into a rich vein of disgruntlement among underpaid, overworked underlings....

He thinks the blog's chatty style - full of accounts of bumping into people in pubs, of getting drunk, of being thrown out of meetings - makes him more approachable to his mostly young sources. Guy Fawkes now registers 100,000 hits a week. It's consistently rated Britain's most influential political blog.

Stains works out of a cramped office in Clerkenwell, a Dickensian corner of East London. He readily acknowledges that he, a non-journalist with a somewhat checkered professional past, could never have reached the heights he has without the Internet. He calls that his strength.

Were it not for NPR, part of the mainstream media, I never would have learned about Order-Order.com, definitely part of the alternative media.

Who can deny that the two are linked in a symbiotic relationship, in which both bloggers and the MSM benefit?

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Soylent Green Is Fido?

2009-11-04T23:37:00.004-05:00

Thursday morning's Washington Times has an editorial about some New Zealand scientists who recommend something straight from the annals of science fiction (or SyFy):

Want to save the planet? Kill your pets. Or better yet, eat them. This radical new suggestion comes from New Zealand professors Brenda and Robert Vale, architects who specialize in sustainable living. Their research has found that pets create tremendous strains on the environment and that a truly green world would have no place for these carbon-emitting parasites.

The Vale duo found that a medium-size dog has a carbon "pawprint" equal to that of about two Toyota Land Cruisers. A cat has almost the same environmental impact as a Volkswagen Golf, and two hamsters somehow equal a plasma TV.

Could two hamsters be anywhere near as entertaining as a plasma TV?

No doubt any objections to eating house pets -- or companion animals, as they are now known -- will be dismissed as manifestations of Western, patriarchal oppression of the differently-cultured.

Will French restaurants now specialize in poodle cuisine? Or, using the example of acorn-fed pigs and grass-fed beef, will we be treated to menu items like "cheese-eating surrender monkeys"?

Or, as Conan O'Brien suggested on The Tonight Show, at the new Disney World in China, "the 101 Dalmatians exhibit will be called 'the food court.'"

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Election Day Twitter Feed

2009-11-04T00:12:00.005-05:00

You can see what I did on Election Day (more or less) by reading this Twitter feed from bottom to top -- past to present.

I wasn't able to follow Twitter much during the day, but I was pleased to see this Tweet from Charlottesville Democrat Jennifer McKeever:

cville folks obviously should be following @rick_sincere for election turnout updates and other cool things

Thanks for the plug!

Remember, scroll down and read up:

I've posted Election Day photos of @creighdeeds and other politicians at http://tinyurl.com/yzxafau #cville #vapolitics #election
3 minutes ago from web

if Charlottesville is a bellwether, @creighdeeds has won in a landslide
about 5 hours ago from mobile web

five minutes left till close of polls!
about 5 hours ago from mobile web

Charlottesville has only 16 provisional votes so far, to be weighed at 11 a.m. Wednesday by Electoral Board #cville
about 7 hours ago from mobile web

most recent numbers from Recreation Precinct are 1305 eSlate, 385 eScan #cville #election
about 7 hours ago from mobile web

Clark Precinct has had 128 paper ballots on eScan and 731 eSlate ballots #cville #election
about 7 hours ago from mobile web

Tonsler precinct has voted 412 on eSlate and 104 on eScan #cville #election
about 8 hours ago from mobile web

Venable Precinct reports 758 voting eSlate and 88 voting paper ballot on eScan #cville #election
about 8 hours ago from mobile web

latest Carver precinct numbers: 481 on eSlate, 126 on eScan #cville #election
about 8 hours ago from mobile web

Liz Palka of CBS 19 interviewed me about turnout and gen'l Election Day topics #tv #cville
about 8 hours ago from mobile web

had a nice chat with former Mayor David Brown about upcoming Va Film Festival #cville
about 8 hours ago from mobile web

Alumni Hall Precinct, new figures: 358 electronic voters + 40 paper voters #cville #vapolitics
about 9 hours ago from mobile web

latest Jefferson Park numbers: 985 eSlate (DRE) and 121 eScan (paper ballot) #cville
about 9 hours ago from mobile web

Creigh Deeds is at Recreation Precinct #cville #vagov #vapolitics
about 12 hours ago from mobile web

documentary film crew following delegate candidate Brandon Smith is shooting inside Recreation #cville #vapolitics
about 13 hours ago from mobile web

Recreation Precinct has voted 165 paper ballots and 596 electronic ballots #cville #vapolitics
about 13 hours ago from mobile web

parking at Jefferson Park cleared up, much better now #cville
about 14 hours ago from mobile web

Jefferson Park voters prefer eSlate - 553 electronic, 65 paper ballots (eScan) #cville #vapolitics
about 14 hours ago from mobile web

parking at Jefferson Park precinct is at a premium right now #cville
about 14 hours ago from mobile web

Clark Precinct - 292 electronic voters, 49 paper voters #cville #vapolitics
about 14 hours ago from mobile web

Mayor Dave Norris is greeting voters at Clark Precinct; he posed for pic #cville #vapolitics
about 14 hours ago from mobile web

write-in City Council candidate Williams was at Walker Precinct a few minutes ago #cville
about 14 hours ago from mobile web

Carver Precinct - 175 voters choose eSlate, 17 choose paper ballots #cville #vapolitics
about 15 hours ago from mobile web

parking is tighter than usual at Carver Precinct (Jefferson School) #cville
about 15 hours ago from mobile web

Alumni Hall Precinct: 101 voters have chosen eSlate (DRE) and 7 have chosen paper ballot (eScan) #cville #vapolitics
about 15 hours ago from mobile web

at Walker Precinct, 239 have voted on eSlate (DRE) and 16 on eScan (paper ballot) #cville #vapolitics
about 16 hours ago from mobile web

City Councilor Huja is campaigning outside Walker Precinct #cville
about 16 hours ago from mobile web

92 voters at Venable have chosen eSlate (DRE) and 15 have chosen eScan (paper ballot) #cville #vapolitics
about 16 hours ago from mobile web

parking situation at Venable Precinct is tremendously improved over years past #cville
about 16 hours ago from mobile web

City Council write-in candidate Andrew Williams is greeting voters at Tonsler #cville #vapolitics
about 17 hours ago from mobile web

Tonsler Precinct has had 52 voters so far, 17 using paper ballots #cville #vapolitics
about 17 hours ago from mobile web

unexpected excitement: sudden smell of smoke brought firefighters to City Hall Annex. All is well!
about 17 hours ago from mobile web

now buying Spudnuts for voting office staff #cville
about 18 hours ago from mobile web

polls are open; just voted at Jefferson Park. About 13 voters queued up at 6 a.m.
about 18 hours ago from mobile web

Polls open in 75 minutes. #vapolitics
about 20 hours ago from web

RT @andylevy To be fair, why should the media understand that the Tea Partiers aren't Republicans when the GOP doesn't? #tcot #tlot
11:45 PM Nov 2nd from web

As I did during the June primary, I'll have an Election Day Twitter stream from early a.m. until after the polls close. #vapolitics #cville
9:31 PM Nov 2nd from web

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Election Day 2009 Photos

2009-11-03T23:55:00.000-05:00

What a long, long day!

We just finished counting up the write-in votes in Charlottesville at 10:35 p.m. Considering that I've been awake since 4:00 o'clock a.m., I'm going to forgo analyzing those results until a more conscious moment, perhaps tomorrow after the canvass is complete.

To whet your appetite, however, I will mention that "Bernard Madoff" earned a vote for Commissioner of the Revenue and "Scrooge McDuck" was someone's preference for Charlottesville Treasurer. Over 800 write-in votes were cast, mostly in the uncontested races for School Board, Commonwealth's Attorney, Commissioner of the Revenue, and Treasurer -- though there were also write-in votes in the triple digits for City Council. By contrast, the statewide races and the contest for the House of Delegates received only a handful of write-in votes.

Here are a few photos I took during the course of the day.

The day began with a smell of smoke in the City Hall Annex, where the Office of Voter Registration and Elections is located. A call to 911 summoned the fire brigade, who found nothing hazardous but who agreed we did the right thing by reporting a possible emergency.

Andrew Williams, a write-in candidate for City Council, seemed to be everywhere during the course of the day. I found him first in the early morning light outside Tonsler Precinct.

A mysterious hot-air balloon hovered over Charlottesville during the morning of Election Day. I caught this photo near Venable Precinct, on Fourteenth Street.

Walker Precinct had a steady stream of voters throughout the day and, as usual, reported the highest percentage of voter turnout among Charlottesville's eight precincts.

Charlottesville Mayor Dave Norris, seen here campaigning outside of Clark Precinct, won re-election to City Council handily, with over 6,000 votes.

Independent candidate Robert Brandon Smith III challenged incumbent Delegate David Toscano in the 57th House district. Here he's campaigning outside of Recreation Precinct. He eventually earned about 21% of the vote in the two-way contest.

Democratic gubernatorial candidate R. Creigh Deeds stopped in Charlottesville as he made his way from Bath County to Richmond. He greeted supporters, including Charlottesville Commonwealth's Attorney Dave Chapman, outside Recreation Precinct at 11:30 a.m.

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Video from Nathanael Greene Freedom Festival

2009-11-02T03:12:00.002-05:00

On Saturday evening, I posted a photograph of five candidates for the GOP congressional nomination in Virginia's Fifth District. All five are campaigning for the privilege of facing incumbent Representative Tom Perriello (R-Ivy) in the general election of November 2010.

I was also able to capture video of four of the five when the spoke to the political activists gathered at the Nathanael Greene Freedom Festival, which took place on the grounds of Ruckersville Elementary School in Greene County. Unfortunately, my videotape ran out just before the fifth candidate, state Senator Robert Hurt, took the stage.

I apologize to Senator Hurt and want to make clear this was not intended as a slight. There were other video cameras present at the event, and they might have captured his speech and posted it to the Internet by now. I am sure I'll have other opportunities to record speeches by Senator Hurt and the other four candidates between now and the convention/primary/unassembled caucus next spring. (The Fifth District Republican Committee has not yet chosen a method of nomination.)

Before the candidates spoke, WINA-AM radio talk-show host Rob Schilling gave a short address. You'll notice how windy it was: papers were blowing everywhere, flags were mostly unfurled, and it often sounds like someone is snorting into the camera's microphone. That's not a snort, it's the wind.

Rob Schilling:

I would like to gently correct Rob for a misquotation. He attributes the line, "A government that is big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take away everything you have," to Thomas Jefferson. This mistaken attribution is common. It was not said by our third president, however, but rather by the 38th president, Gerald R. Ford. He used a similar line in the early 1960s, when he was a congressman, and repeated it in an address to a joint session of Congress in 1974. I remember hearing it in his 1976 speech accepting the GOP presidential nomination, but have not been able to find a reference that confirms my recollection.

Thomas Jefferson said many marvelous things, but this is not one of them. Gerald Ford said more than "Whip Inflation Now" and "Live from New York, it's Saturday night!"

The first congressional candidate to speak was Feda Morton of Fluvanna County:

The second candidate to speak was Michael McPadden of Albemarle County:

The third candidate, also from Albemarle County, was Ken Boyd:

The fourth candidate (another from Albemarle County) was Laurence Verga:

At this point, my camera hit a wall, to my chagrin. I missed several other speakers who followed, including Delegate Rob Bell (R-58) and business owner Tom Slonaker (Forest Lake Arby's) as well as state Senator Hurt.

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Class of 2010 Photo

2009-10-31T17:57:00.001-04:00

Five of the candidates for the Republican nomination in the Fifth Congressional District race to select an opponent to incumbent Representative Tom Perriello (D-Ivy) appeared today at the first annual FreedomFest in Greene County. The event, with multiple sponsorships that included the Jefferson Area Tea Party and the Green County Republican Committee, attracted about 150 to 200 people and featured food, drinks, and a moon bounce for the kids.

For the first time (but probably not the last) the five candidates posed for a photograph (at my suggestion).

From left to right: Ken Boyd, Laurence Verga, Feda Morton, Michael McPadden, Robert Hurt.

Video from the event will be posted later today.

Update: More photos from the Green County FreedomFest can be found on Facebook.

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Watch Your Language!

2009-10-28T19:05:00.000-04:00

A couple of items from today's Daily Progress deserve comment because of their infelicitous use of the English language (which, as Henry Higgins put it, is the language of "Shakespeare, Milton, and the Bible").

First, a Media General News Service article on page 2A about the new U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Virginia, Timothy Heaphy, refers to Heaphy as "a former federal prosecutor and most recently a white-collar criminal defense attorney in Charlottesville."

This is, as an attorney might say, facially false. The same article notes that Heaphy was sworn in on October 16, which makes him the current federal prosecutor. It would be better to say something like this:

Heaphy most recently worked as a white-collar criminal defense attorney and, before that, served as a lower-level federal prosecutor...

By the way, the article does not appear on the Daily Progress web site (or at least it cannot be easily located there), but the same report can be found on the web site of the Lynchburg News & Advance, dated October 27.

Second, in a letter to the editor aimed at discouraging votes for gubernatorial candidate Bob McDonnell, John M. Bowman of Charlottesville uses the hamhanded and demeaning phrase, "gay and lesbian lifestyle," a formulation that betrays what might be called "soft bigotry."

I have a message for Mr. Bowman. I resent his condescension and can assure him that, as a gay man, I do not have a "lifestyle," I have a life.

Would Mr. Bowman talk about the "straight lifestyle" of opposite-sex married couples? I think not. He would, if he gave it the slightest thought, identify such a phrase as bizarre and insulting.

I frankly do not need ill-informed letter-writers deigning to speak on my behalf. If I want your "help," I'll ask for it -- but before that, take a look at a calendar. It's the 21st century now.

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One of the Best Congressional News Releases ... Ever

2009-10-28T17:06:00.001-04:00

By sheer coincidence, I ate at an Asian restaurant last night and received a fortune in my fortune cookie that said "Leaders are readers."

Here is the entirety of a news release from the office of U.S. Representative Jeff Flake (R-Arizona):

Congressman Flake Releases Statement Regarding His Vote Against Honoring the 2560th Birthday of Confucius

Washington, D.C., Oct 28 - Republican Congressman Jeff Flake, who represents Arizona’s Sixth District, today released the following statement regarding his vote against H.Res.784, a bill “honoring the 2560th anniversary of the birth of Confucius and recognizing his invaluable contributions to philosophy and social and political thought.”

“He who spends time passing trivial legislation may find himself out of time to read healthcare bill,” said Flake.

H/T: Radley Balko via Twitter

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Gay Politicos Back McDonnell

2009-10-28T16:20:00.000-04:00

At the invitation of David Lampo of the Log Cabin Republican Club of Northern Virginia, I became one of the signatories to a letter expressing support for GOP gubernatorial candidate Bob McDonnell. The letter expressly addresses McDonnell's positions on issues of concern to members of Virginia's gay and lesbian community (or, as the language of the letter has it, "LGBT community").

Here is the text of the letter, which is being released more widely today. (Amy Gardner already has the story on the Washington Post's Virginia Politics blog.)

An Open Letter to the GLBT Community about Republican Candidate for Governor of Virginia, Bob McDonnell

On November 3, Virginians will choose their next governor. While no GLBT person could reasonably see Bob McDonnell, the Republican candidate for Governor, as a pro-GLBT candidate, we believe that it is important for members of the GLBT community to understand that this campaign and this candidate are fundamentally different from other Republican campaigns and candidates for Governor. The difference is important for us as members of the GLBT community, and, as Republicans, we hope it signals a real commitment to move the Party in the right direction – back toward its historic role as the true guardian of individual liberty.

During this campaign, and particularly during the last few months, McDonnell has repeatedly and without equivocation said that government should not discriminate in employment or services based on sexual orientation. No other Republican candidate for statewide office has ever done that, including his running mates in this election. And in no other statewide election have any two candidates for statewide office from either party sought in debates and other forums to position themselves as people who will seek to govern free from bias against GLBT Virginians.

In September, after the Washington Post released his 20-year-old thesis that included clearly homophobic language, McDonnell told the press, “Sexual orientation never enters into the equation. Government should not punish or discriminate based on anyone’s sexual orientation.”

In a more recent interview, McDonnell told Style Weekly (10/20/09) that

“… everybody ought to be treated equally under the law. I firmly believe that. When I was attorney general there were no inquiries [of employees] that were made other than this: Are you talented, are you qualified, do you care about Virginia, will you get good results? That was my policy as attorney general, it will be my policy as governor. I believe that everybody has equal civil rights in this state. That’s what I will enforce enthusiastically as governor.… Everybody’s got equal rights that need to be protected.”

Given his history and voting record as a member of the House of Delegates, we understand why many are skeptical of his recent statements, but McDonnell’s actions as Attorney General provide a reasoned basis for believing that, if elected, McDonnell will be a Governor with whom the GLBT community can work in seeking to pass laws that will provide assurance that his commitment to nondiscrimination will last beyond his administration.

As Attorney General:
• McDonnell supported early on two bills introduced by Democrat Del. David Englin (and subsequently supported by most of the Republicans in the state legislature) that established hospital visitation rights for domestic partners and set up a state registry of advanced medical directives. McDonnell’s endorsement of these bills helped galvanize Republican support, and both bills became law.

• McDonnell issued an opinion that found that the state’s so-called marriage amendment would not interfere with contracts, wills, medical directives, and other agreements in the state and “will not modify the application of Virginia’s domestic violence laws” to GLBT couples.

• McDonnell also issued an opinion that allows state employees to designate someone other than a legal spouse to qualify for gym membership benefits, a precedent-setting ruling that provides a legal foundation for extending other state benefits to domestic partners of state employees.
We are under no illusion that McDonnell is now a champion of gay rights. Nonetheless, his more recent statements and actions give us optimism that McDonnell would offer GLBT people meaningful roles in his administration and the opportunity to work with him to enact laws that will secure for GLBT people the equal rights he has said everybody in Virginia has the right to expect. That is quite different from what we had come to expect from Republican candidates for Governor in past elections, and it is something for which McDonnell should receive due credit from our community.

David Lampo, Vice President, Log Cabin Republican Club of Virginia

Chris Barron, Chairman of the Board, GOProud

Jimmy LaSalvia, Executive Director, GOProud

Rick Sincere, At-Large Board Member, Republican Liberty Caucus of Virginia

Robert G. Atkins, Treasurer, Arlington County Republican Committee

Affiliations are for identification purposes only.

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Choo-Choo Chugs Along

2009-10-27T23:07:00.000-04:00

My post on October 2 about how Charlottesville-based travelers to Washington, D.C., have been flim-flammed by promoters of a new Amtrak train to the Nation's Capital has resulted in an invitation to be on the radio.

On Wednesday, October 28, from 12:05 to 1:00 p.m., I will be a guest on The Schilling Show on WINA-AM (1070 on the dial) in Charlottesville, to discuss passenger rail. John Pfaltz will also be on the show, to offer an alternate point of view.

I explained to the show's host, Rob Schilling, that I am not an expert on transportation policy and that I do not pretend to be such. But I'm willing to make my case that, as an individual, it is less expensive for me to travel to Washington by driving my own car than it is to purchase a round-trip ticket on Amtrak, the heavily-subsidized, federally-owned and -operated passenger rail company.

I may point out how British railroads improved markedly after Tony Blair's Labour government privatized them in the 1990s.

The show invites callers to ask questions and express their own points of view. I hope readers will take the opportunity to do that. Let Rob know you heard about the show on this blog, too!

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WaPo Endorses Four GOP House Candidates

2009-10-25T16:32:00.000-04:00

In its endorsements for about two dozen races for the House of Delegates in Northern Virginia, the Washington Post has selected just four Republicans that its editorial board believes are worthy of election. One is an incumbent; one is challenging an incumbent; and two are running in open-seat races. Two are candidates in territory familiar to me, Arlington County.

The incumbent is Thomas Rust. This is what the Post says about him and his race:

District 86: Thomas D. Rust, the incumbent, is one of the more effective lawmakers in the General Assembly, a pro-business Republican who has also gained backing for some of his initiatives from environmentalists. Mr. Rust has enacted important legislation that will ease the way for more toll roads to be built, and he's played a constructive, responsible role in securing funding for education and other priorities that many in his own party opposed. His Democratic opponent, Stevens Miller, is a capable lawyer who's served for two years on the Loudoun County Board of Supervisors.

The GOP challenger to an incumbent is Aaron Ringel:

District 48: Robert H. Brink, the Democratic incumbent, has held this seat for a decade, and in that time he's barely faced a serious challenge. This year he has one in the form of Republican Aaron Ringel, a bright young combat veteran of the war in Iraq who works for a defense contractor. Mr. Brink is a competent legislator but he has opposed widening Interstate 66. That wins points with some homeowners who'd be directly affected but does little for the tens of thousands of commuters who suffer that road daily. Mr. Ringel takes a broader regional view of that issue.

One of the open-seat candidates is Eric Brescia, who is seeking to succeed Al Eisenberg in Arlington's 47th District. I posted a video interview with Brescia back in August. Here is what the Post says about him in Sunday's edition:

District 47: Two excellent candidates--Republican Eric Brescia and Democrat Patrick Hope -- are competing for this open seat. Mr. Hope, a health-care lobbyist, has 10 years of experience as a neighborhood activist and even longer expertise involving Medicaid and mental health issues. By contrast, Mr. Brescia, an economist who's just 24, is a relative newcomer. However, he is exactly what the Republicans need in Northern Virginia: an independent-minded thinker who has fresh and specific ideas for how to save money in health care and make government work better. A Green Party candidate, Joshua F. Ruebner, has a long record of civic engagement but has not mounted a serious campaign.

The Post endorsed Danny Smith, another open-seat candidate, on Friday:

District 38: Danny R. Smith, the Republican candidate, is a bright, independent-minded civic leader who cares about promoting affordable housing. A Realtor and corporate executive, he would bring a refreshingly bipartisan sensibility to Richmond. He's a better choice than his opponent, L. Kaye Kory, a sincere but lackluster Fairfax school board member who beat incumbent Robert Hull in a Democratic primary.

The Post's criteria may not be clear (why Brescia, for instance, but not Rich Anderson or Rafael Lopez?) but its endorsement is sure to carry weight in the near suburbs of Washington. In a race with three candidates like that in the 47th, the Post's endorsement may be enough to carry Eric Brescia over the finish line.

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Welcome Company

2009-10-20T23:30:00.001-04:00

It took me until darkness fell to pick up a paper copy of today's Richmond Times-Dispatch, which is fairly easy to do in Charlottesville. (One of our election officials mentioned to me at training tonight that he had seen and liked my article.) Once I did purchase a copy, I discovered that my op-ed on federal hate-crime laws was placed in juxtaposition to some very good and well-known writers.

My article was positioned on the upper right-hand corner of the page and its two columns extend about two-thirds down along that page. Running parallel, to the left, is a George F. Will column about economic policy. Will's piece does not appear on the Times-Dispatch web site, but, as it was published in last Sunday's Washington Post (under a different headline, "The Real Jobs Threat" instead of "Stimulating Incumbency"), it can be found there.

There is also a Robert Arian editorial cartoon showing Barack Obama at his desk with a plaque that reads "THE BUCK DROPS HERE."

Underneath those two articles, across the bottom third of the page, is an article originally published in the The Wall Street Journal on October 12. Written by Mary Anastasia O'Grady, the original headline was "George Shultz on the Drug War"; the Times-Dispatch headline was "George Shultz Weighs In on the Continuing Drug War."

Will writes:

Republicans are operatic when they pretend to take seriously, in order to wax indignant about, the Democrats' professed plan to partially pay for Sen. Max Baucus's version of reform by cutting at least $400 billion from Medicare. Supporters of the Baucus bill are guilty of many things but not, regarding such cuts, of sincerity. Congress regularly vows to make Medicare cuts, and as regularly defers them.

Today, Washington routinely speaks of trillions, as in: This year's trillion-dollar deficit. And the $9 trillion in projected deficits over 10 years. And the upwards of $1.8 trillion that Baucus's "$829 billion plan" would actually cost in the first 10 years (2014-23) in which its provisions would be fully operational. But the number from which Washington flinches is precisely 999,999,999,997 less than a trillion. It is: 3.

Many Democrats believe that rising unemployment means the nation needs a "second" stimulus -- but one they could call something other than a stimulus because it would be the third. The first was passed in February 2008, two months after the recession began. Its $168 billion tax rebate failed to stimulate because overleveraged Americans perversely saved much of it.

Admitting that the first stimulus existed would complicate the task of justifying a third one, given that the second one -- the $787 billion extravaganza that galloped through Congress in February -- has not been the success its advocates said it would be.

O'Grady wrote, with regard to the former Secretary of State's realization that the misguided war on drugs has been a failure:

Mr. Shultz recalls what happened shortly after he left government, when his view that interdiction is not the solution came up after a speech to a Stanford alumni group.

Then, as now, he believed that we need to look at the problem from an economic perspective and understand what happens when there is high demand for a prohibited substance. When his comment hit the press, he says he "was inundated with letters. Ninety-eight percent of them agreed with me and over half of those people said I'm glad you said it, but I wouldn't dare say it. The most poignant comment was from [a former member of the House of Representatives] who wrote and said I was glad to see your statement. I said that a few years ago and that's why I'm no longer a congressman!"

I asked Mr. Shultz if he thinks a more sensible approach might come from the states. He says "people can express themselves a little better at the state level." And, with respect to some liberalization of the drug-possession laws at the state level, "I regard these developments as a distinctive statement by people that the present system is not working very well and they want to change it."

It's nice to be in such pleasant, intelligent, and erudite company.

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My Hate-Crimes Op-Ed in the RTD

2009-10-20T01:33:00.003-04:00

Tuesday morning's readers of the Richmond Times-Dispatch will turn to the op-ed page, as they normally do before checking out sports or comics, and see a piece I wrote on the new federal hate-crimes law, which has been passed as part of the massive (1,158 pages) Defense Authorization bill and will soon be signed into law by President Barack Obama.

The law is named for Matthew Shepard, the gay Wyoming college student who died eleven years ago at the hands of violent criminals. His killers were sentenced to life in prison. They could have received the death penalty, but Shepard's family requested the more lenient punishment.

The crux of my argument in the Times-Dispatch is here:

What is particularly disturbing about the Matthew Shepard Act, however, is that this bill federalizes crimes that properly belong under state or local jurisdiction. It signifies creeping encroachment of federal law on state prerogatives and the dulling of the distinction between the central government in Washington and the various state governments.

Previous federal hate-crime statutes were written when state and local authorities often looked the other way if crimes of violence were committed against members of minority groups. These laws were narrowly focused and meant specifically to prosecute crimes against victims engaged in a federally protected civil-rights activity (such as helping to register African-Americans to vote).

The current bill says the federal government can step in to prosecute a case if "the verdict or sentence obtained pursuant to State charges left demonstratively unvindicated the Federal interest in eradicating bias-motivated violence." In other words, if a U.S. attorney dislikes an acquittal or the punishment of someone convicted under state law, he can re-open the case as a federal matter.

By Orwellian logic, this kind of re-prosecution does not violate the Constitution's prohibition on double jeopardy, because the same act becomes two separate crimes -- one state and one federal.

The days when crimes against victims from socially-disliked minority groups were routinely ignored by state and local law-enforcement authorities are in the past. Yes, there may still be exceptions to this welcome trend, and prosecutors who fail to do their jobs properly should be sent packing by the voters. In the majority of cases, however -- including the headline-grabbing murders of James Byrd and Matthew Shepard in the 1990s -- police and prosecutors pursue the perpetrators to the full extent the law allows.

The Matthew Shepard Act is a done deal as far as Congress and the President are concerned. That does not mean we should tolerate it or the further perforation of the lines between federal and state government that is, sadly, sure to follow it.

Update, October 21: The Richmond Times-Dispatch op-ed now also appears on the Independent Gay Forum.

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Obama Administration Gets One Right

2009-10-19T15:31:00.003-04:00

Peter McWilliams must be looking down from heaven with a smile of satisfaction but also with a question: "What took so long?"

McWilliams was the libertarian author of the 1996 book, Ain't Nobody's Business If You Do: The Absurdity of Consensual Crimes in a Free Society, and a patient who used medical marijuana.

He died because the government arrested him and denied him access to his medicine.

The late William F. Buckley, Jr., wrote about McWilliams in June 2000, shortly after McWilliams died:

A federal judge in California (George King) would decide in a few weeks how long a sentence to hand down, and whether to send McWilliams to prison or let him serve his sentence at home.

What was his offense? He collaborated in growing marijuana plants.

What was his defense? Well, the judge wouldn't allow him to plead his defense to the jury. If given a chance, the defense would have argued that under Proposition 215, passed into California constitutional law in 1996, infirm Californians who got medical relief from marijuana were permitted to use it. The judge also forbade any mention that McWilliams suffered from AIDS and cancer, and got relief from the marijuana.

What was he doing when he died? Vomiting. The vomiting hit him while in his bathtub, and he choked to death. Was there nothing he might have done to still the impulse to vomit? Yes, he could have taken marijuana; but the judge's bail terms forbade him to do so, and he submitted to weekly urine tests to confirm that he was living up to the terms of his bail.

Today the Obama Administration struck a blow for life, liberty, and property when it announced that it will no longer be a federal law-enforcement priority to prosecute sick people who use medicinal marijuana to treat their illnesses, or the caregivers who provide them with the medicine.

Carrie Johnson reports in the Washington Post:

The Obama administration delivered new guidance on medical marijuana to federal prosecutors Monday, signaling a broad policy shift that will mean fewer crackdowns against dispensaries and the people who use them.

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. instructed government lawyers that in 14 states where medical marijuana use is legal, federal prosecutors should focus only on cases involving higher level drug traffickers or people who use the state laws as a cover story.

"It will not be a priority to use federal resources to prosecute patients with serious illnesses or their caregivers who are complying with state laws on medical marijuana, but we will not tolerate drug traffickers who hide behind claims of compliance with state law to mask activities that are clearly illegal," Holder said. "This balanced policy formalizes a sensible approach that the Department has been following since January: effectively focus our resources on serious drug traffickers while taking into account state and local laws."

The Administration's decision strikes a blow for life because there are people who may die without access to medicinal marijuana.

It strikes a blow for liberty because people should be free to choose the sorts of treatments they use for their illnesses.

It strikes a blow for property because people should be able to do anything on their private property they wish, as long as they do not violate the rights of other people, without the interference of government.

Or, as Peter McWilliams put it, paraphrasing that blues anthem of the 1920s: "Ain't nobody's business if you do."

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Saintly Mishegoss

2009-10-18T19:14:00.002-04:00

On this weekend's edition of Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me, the humorous news quiz show on National Public Radio, the "Not My Job" guest was Susie Essman, who plays the furious, foul-mouthed Susie Greene on HBO's Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Essman, a Jewish comedienne from New York, had to answer questions about a topic she was unlikely to know anything about.

The producers chose to quiz her about odd-but-true facts about three Catholic saints: St. Simeon Stylites, St. Joseph of Cupertino, and St. Clare of Assisi.

What were the odd facts? Did Essman answer correctly? Did she win a prize for a listener?

You'll have to listen for yourself:

Note: My spelling of "mishegoss" is the one approved by the late William Safire. It has alternative spellings, as well as an interesting etymology.

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Climbing to the Top? A Roundup Roundup

2009-10-18T18:20:00.004-04:00

Yesterday in Glen Allen, Republican activists from the Seventh Congressional District (and from farther away, too -- there was a busload from Page County, as well) gathered at the Innsbrook Pavilion for the fifth annual Republican Roundup.

Not a fundraiser -- anyone who attended did so with no fee -- the Roundup is more of a pep rally timed to the homestretch of the election campaign. Yesterday marked 17 days before Virginia's statewide elections on November 3. Two of the top-of-the-ticket candidates were there, former Attorney General Bob McDonnell (who is running for governor) and state Senator Ken Cuccinelli (who is running for attorney general). Lieutenant Governor Bill Bolling (who is running for re-election) was unable to attend because of a family commitment.

Seventh District Congressman Eric Cantor, who serves as the House Minority Whip, also attended and spent a lot of time in conversation with his constituents. In addition, there were about two dozen past and current elected officials, including members of the House of Delegates, former Governor Jim Gilmore, and former Lieutenant Governor John Hager. RPV chairman Pat Mullins was also in attendance.

The Roundup offered live music, hot dogs and barbecue, moon bounces for the kids, and a climbing wall, in addition to the politicking.

The Seventh District committee set up a "bloggers' row" with electrical connections and tables available for Virginia bloggers. Crystal Clear Conservative was live blogging there, and so was Bearing Drift. Bearing Drift put up at least two posts on the Roundup, including an exclusive video interview with Representative Cantor. Tom White of Virginia Right and Lynn Mitchell of SWAC Girl were also there, but they don't seem to have posted anything about the Roundup (at least not yet).

As for me, I took the opportunity to videotape the speeches, which from start to finish lasted less than 35 minutes. (No Joe Bidens on that stage, that's for sure!)

First, Seventh District GOP Chairman Linwood Cobb welcomed the crowd. His remarks about respecting the property rights of the owners of the Innsbrook Pavilion (they do not permit firearms on their property) have attracted a flurry of criticism on the YouTube page where I posted the video last night. Judge Cobb's explanation for yourself:

Second, Delegate John O'Bannon delivered a prayer:

Third, a candidate for the House of Delegates in the 69th District, Ernesto Sampson, led the group in reciting the Pledge of Allegiance:

Fourth, Ken Cuccinelli stimulated the crowd with a broom and chants of "Sweep! Sweep! Sweep!," referring to the Republicans' chances of winning all three statewide offices on November 3, a repeat of what happened in 1997, when Jim Gilmore, John Hager, and Mark Earley were elected, respectively, Governor, Lt. Governor, and Attorney General.

Fifth, Bob McDonnell encouraged the activists to reach out to their friends and neighbors to get them to vote, because political success is determined by who shows up:

Finally, Minority Whip Eric Cantor took the stage. He said, "We have a stellar statewide team" in McDonnell, Bolling, and Cuccinelli. "We're going to win," he said, "because this is a campaign about ideas." Check out the rest:

I have posted more photos from the Roundup on Facebook. They can be seen here, even by non-members of the world's most popular social networking site. (You know who you are!)

Update: SWAC Girl has photographs and an additional, detailed report on the Roundup.

Another Update: My most popular video on YouTube, the speech by Adnan Barqawi at the 2009 Republican Party of Virginia state convention, is about to have its 15,000th view. As of right now (7:28 p.m., October 18) it has had 14,997 views.

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Video Interview with Garrett Peck

2009-10-17T02:35:00.001-04:00

On Friday night, I was able to nab an exclusive interview with Arlington-based author Garrett Peck, who was in Charlottesville to speak about his new book, The Prohibition Hangover: Alcohol in America from Demon Rum to Cult Cabernet, at the Barnes & Noble book store at Barracks Road Shopping Center. Earlier in the day, Peck had spoken in Lexington to a group of VMI cadets at his alma mater and to other area residents.

I first encountered Peck a few weeks ago when I was in D.C. on business. Stuck in traffic on Interstate 66 in mid-afternoon, I tuned to the Kojo Nnamdi Show on WAMU-FM. The conversation was about alcoholic beverage regulation -- a topic that has long interested me -- but it wasn't until the end of the interview that I learned the guest's name and that he was scheduled to speak that night at the Arlington Central Library. Since the library was just a few blocks from where my car would be parked, I decided to attend the presentation.

Peck's talk was interesting and entertaining. (It was accompanied by a slide show with images of the temperance movement and drinking culture.) When he mentioned that he would soon be in Charlottesville to talk about his book, I made a note of it.

That's how I found myself in the religion section of Barnes & Noble last evening, sitting with Garrett Peck and asking him questions about alcoholic beverage regulation, the drinking age, regional differences in attitudes toward alcohol consumption (and preferences for types of beverages), and other topics touched upon in The Prohibition Hangover.

The interview is in two parts of about seven minutes each, both also available on YouTube.

The first part includes introductory material. The second part addresses the most controversial question -- should the drinking age be lowered back to 18 -- and the efforts of groups like the Amethyst Initiative.

Part I:

Part II:

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TV and Human Fertility

2009-10-16T02:59:00.000-04:00

In an article on Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's plan to ban the sale of big-screen television sets in California (apparently he hasn't heard that Californians with cars can drive to Nevada, Oregon, or Mexico to go appliance shopping), the Daily Mail includes this paragraph:

Televisions account for about 10 per cent of residential energy use in California, the state with the highest population in the U.S., driven largely by the surge in sales of large flat screens.

So California's population growth is due to the sale of big screen TVs? What is it that people are watching there?

Does China have a two-plasma-TV-set-per-family policy?

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Libertarian Evolution

2009-10-16T02:22:00.000-04:00

The front page of the Style section of Thursday's Washington Post had a long article on the announcement of a new exhibition at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History.

The article, by Jacqueline Trescott, begins:

The National Museum of Natural History announced Wednesday that it is dedicating a new hall to the story of human evolution, giving emphasis not only to how we became humans but how changes in the natural world affected human development.

The Hall of Human Origins, tracing a 6 million-year history, is scheduled to open March 17 -- 100 years to the day that the museum opened.

A news release from the Smithsonian Institution states:

The $20.7 million exhibition hall will be complemented by ongoing human origins research and education programs, which are all key components of the museum’s broader initiative, “Human Origins: What Does It Mean to Be Human?” The initiative focuses on the epic story of human evolution and how the defining characteristics of the species have evolved over 6 million years as its ancestors adapted to a changing world. The museum will launch a compelling new Smithsonian Human Origins Web site and a revolutionary virtual experience hosted on the Blue Mars 2150 virtual Web site. It will include a complete reproduction of the physical exhibition plus additional features visitors can only experience on the Web....

More than 50 U.S. and international scientific research and education organizations, such as the U.S. National Academies of Science, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the National Museum of Kenya and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and more than 70 distinguished scientists and educators are collaborating with the Human Origins Initiative’s research, education and outreach programs.

Visitors to the 15,000-square-foot Hall of Human Origins will be immersed in a unique, interactive museum experience illuminating the major milestones in the origin of human beings and the drama of climate change, survival and extinction that have characterized humans’ ancient past. On entering the exhibition from the Sant Ocean Hall, visitors will travel through a dramatic time tunnel depicting life and environments over the past 6 million years. Visitors will also engage with life-size forensically reconstructed faces of early human species, all designed to provide visitors with a sense of personal connection as they look into the eyes and faces of their distant ancestors.

Other key features in the exhibition include interactive snapshots in time using the actual field sites where research is being conducted, a display of more than 75 skulls (cast reproductions) and an interactive human family tree showcasing 6 million years of evolutionary evidence from around the world, a “One Species Living Worldwide” amphitheater show and a special “Changing the World” gallery, in which visitors can address pressing questions and issues surrounding climate change and humans’ impact on the Earth.

It turns out that the new exhibition is being funded, in large part, with a donation from libertarian philanthropist David Koch -- the same David Koch who was Ed Clark's running mate on the LP presidential ticket in 1980. Trescott continues:

The 15,000-square-foot space will be named for David H. Koch, a chemical engineer and executive vice president of Koch Industries who gave $15 million for the hall's construction. The other primary donor to the project is Peter Buck, a physicist and co-founder of Subway restaurants, who gave $15 million to an endowment for research and accompanying education programs.

The total cost of the hall is $20.7 million, with $3.5 million from other private sources and $2.2 million from the Smithsonian's federal funds.

In a statement, Koch saluted the Human Origins Program, saying, it "has the power to influence the way we view our identity as humans, not only today, but for generations to come." Koch, an MIT-educated engineer, has given generously to many educational, cultural and medical institutions, as well as to conservative political groups. He was the 1980 Libertarian vice presidential candidate.

The article doesn't mention that in 1995, Koch purchased the apartment that once belonged to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis when she lived in New York City. Koch sold the flat in 2006. (File that under "real estate trivia.")

No doubt there will be some complaints that the exhibition -- whose displays will trace back human evolution some four million years and include the recently discovered "Ardi" -- is the work of godless libertarians.

Such complaints might come from the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky. Those behind the Creation Museum believe -- and offer as scientific fact -- that the Earth is only about 10,000 years old, or younger, and that men and dinosaurs co-existed. Though the Answers in Genesis Creation Museum boasts that it is within a 650-mile drive for two-thirds of the U.S. population, it only attracted some 750,000 visitors in the two years after it opened in May 2007.

In contrast, the National Museum of Natural History has drawn about 6 million visitors already this year, as well as 7 million in 2008, 7.1 million in 2007, and 5.8 million in 2006.

Of course, the Natural History Museum offers more than a male porn star portraying Adam in the Garden of Eden. It also has the Hope Diamond, "Wild Ocean 3D" in on an Imax screen, and the reconstructed skeleton of a triceratops. So not everyone who wanders through the Natural History Museum's doors from the National Mall is coming for edification about evolution.

Even so, it is heartening to learn that millions more people are interested in actual science than in charlatanism.

(Illustrations credit: RPDI [Reich & Petch Design International]; courtesy of Smithsonian Institution)

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Blog Action Day 2009

2009-10-15T00:01:00.002-04:00

Today is Blog Action Day '09, an annual even that this year has at least 7,262 sites participating. (You can see this blog listed on page 119 of some 303 pages categorized as "Who's Participating?" -- just after the German blog Der Tobe and just before Bobolhando of Brazil and HonestGreen of the United States.)

The topic for Blog Action Day in 2008 was "Poverty." In 2007, the topic was "the Environment."

This year the topic is "climate change," a subject I have addressed in the past. (Also here and here.) As the Blog Action Day web site explains,

Blog Action Day is an annual event that unites the world's bloggers in posting about the same issue on the same day on their own blogs with the aim of sparking discussion around an issue of global importance. Blog Action Day 2009 will be the largest-ever social change event on the web. One day. One issue. Thousands of voices.

As one of those "thousands of voices," let me first see what's in the news about "climate change."

Here's BBC News, asking "What happened to global warming?":

This headline may come as a bit of a surprise, so too might that fact that the warmest year recorded globally was not in 2008 or 2007, but in 1998.

But it is true. For the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures.

....last month Mojib Latif, a member of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) says that we may indeed be in a period of cooling worldwide temperatures that could last another 10-20 years.

Strangely enough, yesterday Steve Shannon, a candidate for Attorney General in the Commonwealth of Virginia, circulated a video accusing his opponent, state Senator Ken Cuccinelli, of being "anti-science" because Cuccinelli said in an interview with WTOP Radio in Washington, D.C. (at marker 0:33 on the video):

"The last ten years, the globe hasn't warmed."

Is it anti-science to state a scientific fact?

It's not just the BBC that has taken note of the plateau in global temperatures. Christopher Booker wrote in the Daily Telegraph last December 27:

Easily one of the most important stories of 2008 has been all the evidence suggesting that this may be looked back on as the year when there was a turning point in the great worldwide panic over man-made global warming. Just when politicians in Europe and America have been adopting the most costly and damaging measures politicians have ever proposed, to combat this supposed menace, the tide has turned in three significant respects.

First, all over the world, temperatures have been dropping in a way wholly unpredicted by all those computer models which have been used as the main drivers of the scare. Last winter, as temperatures plummeted, many parts of the world had snowfalls on a scale not seen for decades. This winter, with the whole of Canada and half the US under snow, looks likely to be even worse. After several years flatlining, global temperatures have dropped sharply enough to cancel out much of their net rise in the 20th century....

Secondly, 2008 was the year when any pretence that there was a "scientific consensus" in favour of man-made global warming collapsed. At long last, as in the Manhattan Declaration last March, hundreds of proper scientists, including many of the world's most eminent climate experts, have been rallying to pour scorn on that "consensus" which was only a politically engineered artefact, based on ever more blatantly manipulated data and computer models programmed to produce no more than convenient fictions.

Next Sunday will see the simultaneous premiere, at dozens of locations around the country, of a new documentary film called Not Evil Just Wrong. (The film will be shown in Charlottesville at 8:00 p.m. in room 402 of Wilson Hall on the grounds of the University of Virginia; the screening is cosponsored by the Network of Enlightened Women and the College Republicans.)

A front-page article in the Washington Times on Tuesday described the entrepreneurial efforts of the filmmakers as they try to distribute their final product without the support of major studios or a big-name distributor. Movie critic Sonny Bunch reports:

Unable to get Hollywood studio backing for their new documentary, "Not Evil Just Wrong" - an answer to Al Gore's climate-change lecture "An Inconvenient Truth" - husband-and-wife filmmakers Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney have taken matters into their own hands.

Hoping to tap the surge of populist anger and activism on the right, they are bypassing traditional distribution avenues and bringing their film directly to motivated audiences through "cinematic tea parties," their term for the patchwork of grass-roots screenings in living rooms, campus auditoriums and rented theaters across the country that they have scheduled for Oct. 18.

Mr. McAleer and Ms. McElhinney are part of a new breed of guerrilla documentarians across the political spectrum. Taking advantage of cheaper, more accessible video-production technology and innovative, Internet-based direct marketing and distribution techniques, they are assembling new audiences for their films from the ground up - without the studio middlemen.

McAleer and McElhinney are also the producers of Mine Your Own Business: The Dark Side of Environmentalism.

As an indication of some of the hurdles faced by McAleer and McElhinney, John Fund reported in the Wall Street Journal earlier this week of a public appearance by former Vice President Al Gore at a gathering in Madison, Wisconsin, of the Society of Environmental Journalists, where the Nobel laureate agreed to answer questions from the audience:

Irish documentary filmmaker Phelim McAleer was in the line. A former Financial Times journalist, his new film, "Not Evil, Just Wrong," is a direct refutation of Mr. Gore's thesis and warns that rushing to judgment in combating climate change would threaten the world's poor. When his turn came, Mr. McAleer asked Mr. Gore about a court case in Britain in which a parent had objected to "An Inconvenient Truth" being shown to British schoolchildren because it was largely propaganda, not science.

Mr. Gore swatted away the question by claiming the judge had found in favor of his film. He also briefly addressed one of the objections to his film by scoffing at claims that polar bears weren't an endangered species. Mr. McAleer tried to follow up by pointing out that polar bear populations were increasing, but his microphone was quickly cut off. Organizers insisted that several other people were waiting with questions and they had to move on.

In fact, Mr. Gore didn't answer Mr. McAleer's question and was wrong on the facts. The British court found that An Inconvenient Truth "is a political film" riddled with scientific errors.

ReasonTV has produced a short (less than 5 minutes long) interview with environmental scientist Bjorn Lomborg, author of Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming and Global Crises, Global Solutions. The interview is conducted by Charlottesville's Ronald Bailey, who is science correspondent for Reason magazine. Both Lomborg and Bailey accept the validity of anthropogenic global warming. Lomborg posits that, based on an analysis by a panel that included three Nobel-prize-winning economists, government-mandated action (such as cap-and-trade legislation or other forms of carbon taxes) is likely to be the least successful approach to ameliorating the effects of global warming. As the infobox that accompanies this video on YouTube says:

What's the best way for humanity to reduce suffering from man-made global warming? No individual has been a stronger voice for rational cost-benefit analysis on this issue than Bjorn Lomborg, the head of Copenhagen Consensus Center, and author of The Skeptical Environmentalist and Cool It! On Thursday, September 3, 2009, Lomborg stopped by Reason's DC HQ to discuss the latest iteration of his ongoing project with Reason magazine science correspondent Ronald Bailey.

The Copenhagen Consensus Center's expert panel of five top economists, including three Nobel laureates, has concluded that greater resources should be spent on research into climate engineering and green energy. They also concluded that the least cost-effective way to deal with climate change is carbon taxes. Such carbon taxes are the economic equivalent of cap-and-trade carbon rationing schemes like the Waxman-Markey bill being considered by Congress and which are being negotiated by the U.N.

The expert panel consisted of Nobel laureate economists Thomas Schelling, Vernon Smith, and Finn Kydland. They were joined by University of Chicago economist Nancy Stokey and Columbia University economist Jagdish Bhagwati. The panel considered and ranked 21 ground-breaking research proposals by top climate economists on the basis their benefits and costs in dealing with global warming.

You can watch the video for yourself:

People around the world are starting to catch on to what the costs of various government-mandated "solutions" to climate change will be. In Australia, for instance, the Sydney Morning Herald reported on October 12:

The Lowy Institute of International Policy is releasing its 2009 survey on attitudes to global affairs, which finds climate change has slipped in importance on a list of Australia's Top 10 foreign policy goals.

The survey, taken in July, showed protecting jobs was the foreign policy priority for the community.

Climate change had slipped to seven on a list of 10 goals in 2009, down from equal first in 2007.

Opposition environment spokesman Greg Hunt wants the government to heed the results.

"I think the government would be slightly shocked by these results," he told ABC Radio.

"They spend all their days talking about international negotiations and yet the message that comes through from people is we want a stable economic environment, we want to have a stable future, we want the opportunity of employment and hope and aspiration for our children and our grandchildren."

A commentary on that poll in the Wall Street Journal expands on the reasons Australians might have let climate-change concerns slip in their list of priorities:

Less than half of all Australians consider global warming a "serious and pressing problem," according to a poll released yesterday by the Lowy Institute, a Sydney-based think tank. That's 12 percentage points lower than in last year's survey. "Climate change" ranked 7th in a list of 10 "most important" foreign-policy goals—down from first only two years ago.

The poll, which surveyed 1,003 Australians by telephone in July, goes to show that fighting global warming is an expensive fad, not a moral imperative. Down under, citizens and businesses have grown more alarmed about Canberra's efforts to limit carbon emissions as the costs of doing so have become clearer. A July report by Melbourne-based research firm RepuTex estimated the cost of the bill for Australia's top 200 companies could reach as much as 2.8 billion Australian dollars ($2.5 billion) annually, costing thousands of jobs. Industry opposition was a big factor in the Senate's rejection of the government's first shot at passing the emissions-trading scheme in August.

Australians aren't the only citizens of Western industrialized democracies to have their doubts about carbon taxes and cap-and-trade schemes.

A Rasmussen Reports survey in early May had some surprising findings, given the large amount of coverage the legislation was getting in the news media at the time:

Given a choice of three options, just 24% of voters can correctly identify the cap-and-trade proposal as something that deals with environmental issues. A slightly higher number (29%) believe the proposal has something to do with regulating Wall Street while 17% think the term applies to health care reform. A plurality (30%) have no idea.

Another Rasmussen Reports poll, conducted in June, showed that 42 percent of Americans believe that the House-passed bill will hurt the economy. A majority of Republicans – 56 percent -- and independents – 52 percent -- said the bill would hurt the economy, while 23 percent of Democrats said the same thing. Thirty percent of Democrats said it would help.

Meanwhile, a Washington Post/ABC News poll published on June 25 showed that only 52 percent of Americans support a cap-and-trade approach to limiting greenhouse gas emissions similar to Waxman-Markey (see below). That was slightly less support than cap and trade enjoyed in a late July 2008 poll. Forty-two percent of those surveyed in June 2009 opposed such a program. That 42 percent and the 42 percent that Rasmussen found saying cap-and-trade policies would be harmful to the economy neatly match up, don't they?

The American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 (H.R. 2454), also known as “Waxman-Markey” after its two principal sponsors in the House of Representatives (Democrats Henry Waxman of California and Edward Markey of Massachusetts), passed the House on June 26, 2009, by a close vote of 219-212. In its printed form, H.R. 2454 runs to 1,428 pages. (That number is not a typo.)

The companion bill in the U.S. Senate (S. 1733), was introduced on September 30 and referred to the Committee on Environment and Public Works. The principal sponsors are Senators John Kerry (D-Massachusetts) and Barbara Boxer (D-California). In its printed form, S. 1733 only has 821 pages. S. 1733 is sort of The Fountainhead to H.R. 2454's Atlas Shrugged.

The spirit of Blog Action Day suggests that I should urge my readers to take action on the topic of climate change. So I shall.

Readers, I encourage you to call your Senators and ask them to vote "no" on S. 1733, the so-called "Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act" (also known as "Kerry-Boxer"). The number for the Capitol Hill switchboard is (202) 224-3121. If you don't know the names of your Senators, you can look them up on the U.S. Senate web site or at Congress.org, where you can plug in your ZIP Code and learn the names of all your elected representatives, along with their contact information.

Remember the message: Vote NO on cap-and-trade. Vote NO on Kerry-Boxer. Vote NO on S. 1733.

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Cheapening the Nobel Peace Prize

2009-10-09T05:55:00.000-04:00

Is lutefisk hallucinogenic?

That's the question that first sprang to mind when I heard on NPR this morning that the Norwegian Nobel committee had awarded its peace prize to freshman President Barack Obama of the United States, a person who has been in office for too short a time (not even 9 months) to accomplish anything of lasting significance in the pursuit of international peace.

The Bloomberg news service inadvertently expressed the same sort of incredulousness with this headline:

Nobel Peace Prize Awarded to U.S. President Obama (Correct)

The deadline for submitting nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize was February 1 -- just days after President Obama's inauguration. Did he really do so much in a fortnight that he bested other contenders with far more experience and a longer record of achievements?

The last U.S. President to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize was Jimmy Carter (in retirement), which will no doubt lead to more and more explicit comparisons between him and Obama -- in terms of their naivete and their mismanagement of U.S. foreign policy.

Both Obama and Carter share a Wilsonian idealism -- that is, they lack a sense of Realpolitik -- that is also appropriate, since Woodrow Wilson won his Nobel Peace Prize for his work on the Versailles Treaty after World War I.

And we all know how well that turned out.

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Weekly Wrap-Up 2

2009-10-09T01:42:00.000-04:00

This is the second in an irregular series of quirky and informative items that have shown up recently in the news media or in the blogosphere.

Eric Brescia, a Republican candidate for the House of Delegates in Virginia's 47th District (in Arlington; he's aiming to succeed retiring Democratic Delegate Al Eisenberg), had an opinion piece in The Washington Blade last week headlined "Equal rights requires Republican allies; I need your support to become a pro-gay GOP voice in Va. legislature." In it, he says:

IF THE REPUBLICAN Party wants to be relevant for the newest generation of voters, it cannot continue to drive a social wedge between those who seek to protect “traditional marriage” and those who seek to extend the rights and responsibilities to couples who want to enjoy such a commitment.

And if gays and lesbians want to enter into civil marriages in states like Virginia, they’re going to need Republicans in Richmond advocating on their behalf.

Brescia is one of the new breed of confident, thoughtful, libertarian-minded Republicans who are trying to rescue the legacies of Barry Goldwater, Gerald Ford, and Ronald Reagan from the pages of history books by making them relevant for today. To see the candidate himself answer questions about the issues that animate his campaign, check out my blog post from August 13.

By the way, Brescia is one of those Republican candidates who do not use Twitter for campaign communications. Let's just say I'm surprised.

Meanwhile, in last Sunday's Examiner, the Cato Institute's David Boaz replied to a pessimistic Outlook piece on the future of conservativism by Steven Hayward in the same day's Washington Post. Boaz notes:

The good news about the Obama era is that the president has returned the issue of the size, scope, and power of the federal government to center stage. And that in turn has revived the long-dormant small-government spirit in American conservatism.

In that regard, I’m more positive than Hayward is about the “tea party” movement. True, it is somewhat “unfocused,” without a clear “connection to a concrete ideology.” But it reflects and galvanizes the natural American antipathy to big government.

Now the responsibility of the conservative media and political leaders is to give the tea partiers a positive cause to rally around, by shining light on scholars with good ideas. There are plenty of free-market intellectuals today, far more than in the era when Milton Friedman dined alone. Glenn Beck does indeed sometimes devote significant time to a single intellectual; other talk show hosts should do the same.

In a helpful frame of mind a few days later, Yorktown University's Richard Bishirjian offered a few books that young conservatives should read to advance their educations and stretch their minds. Writing in The Washington Times on Wednesday, Bishirjian said:

The American Council of Trustees and Alumni has published several studies that demonstrate that required courses in English literature, American history and the history of Western civilization are no longer required to earn the bachelor of arts degree. Is there anything that can be done? Yes. Read these books:

- Ludwig von Mises' "Human Action" (1940)

- Friedrich Hayek's "The Road to Serfdom" (1944)

- Friedrich Hayek's "The Constitution of Liberty" (1960)

- Richard Weaver's "Ideas Have Consequences" (1948)

- Eric Voegelin's "The New Science of Politics" (1952)

- Russell Kirk's "The Conservative Mind" (1953)

- Robert Nisbet's "The Quest for Community" (1953)

- Eric Voegelin's "Israel and Revelation" (1956)

- Wilhelm Roepke's, "A Humane Economy" (1962)

- Alexander Solzhenitsyn's "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" (1962)

Once again, conservatism doesn't need to be reinvented. Its principles need to be relearned to be passed on to this generation and to future generations. The surest way to do that is not by reading the popular polemics of today's overheated partisans, but through the writings of the passionate original thinkers and scholars who helped found the modern conservative movement.

A good list, though -- as David Boaz points out in his Examiner piece -- Hayek explicitly excluded himself from the label "conservative," calling himself (and Margaret Thatcher, among others) a "liberal." At least Hayek's essay, "Why I Am Not a Conservative," is indirectly included in Bishirjian's syllabus (as part of The Constitution of Liberty).

In other education news, Virginia's James Madison University earned the dubious distinction of having the "Speech Code of the Month," as designated by the civil-liberties organization known as FIRE ("Foundation for Individual Rights in Education"). According to FIRE's Samantha Harris:

JMU's policy on "Obscene Conduct" provides that "[n]o student shall engage in lewd, indecent or obscene conduct or expression, regardless of proximity to campus." (Emphasis added.) Torch readers may already be familiar with this policy, because we blogged about it several weeks ago. Our post caught the attention of student reporters at JMU, who have published several articles in the student paper The Breeze since our post first appeared. The first article, on Sept. 24, expressed FIRE's concern that this broadly worded policy could be used to punish a great deal of student expression, including expression taking place online in e-mails or on sites like Facebook. Because "lewd" and "indecent" have no defined legal meaning, they could be interpreted to include almost any crude or vulgar language that someone found offensive, most of which would nonetheless be constitutionally protected. The policy allows for punishment of lewd and indecent expression on or off campus, so virtually everything that students say or write is fair game — and I would venture to guess that college students use plenty of crude and vulgar language on Facebook and elsewhere.

Free speech is sometimes irreverent, and it's seldom as irreverent as it is on Red Eye, the 3:00 a.m. news and chat show on the Fox News Channel that is virtually the only FNC show I watch. I was pleased to learn that Red Eye is getting great ratings -- even though it is aired in the middle of the night. Host Greg Gutfeld and his gang of regulars are entertaining and informative, and unafraid of being politically incorrect.

I use energy-saving lightbulbs throughout my house -- the ones known as CFLs that take a long time to warm up -- by my own choice. Governments, however, are lining up to deny me that choice and make the venerable, Edison-invented incandescent lamp illegal.

Reason.tv put together an informative and entertaining video, called "Light Bulbs vs. the Nanny State," about CFLs, hooking it to the European Union's new prohibition on incandescents:

The video is also available on YouTube and it suggested this question to me: Before Edison, how did cartoonists indicate that someone had a bright idea?

Finally, next week I will be participating in Blog Action Day 2009. Some will be surprised, some will be pleased at what I'll have to say.

The topic for Blog Action Day is climate change, or what used to be known as "global warming" (a term that has fallen out of usage as evidence emerged that planetary temperatures plateaued about 11 years ago and may actually be declining.)

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Exposing the 'Twitter Gap'

2009-10-08T21:46:00.000-04:00

According to a news release from Project Virginia, a campaign consulting service, more Republican than Democratic candidates in the Old Dominion use Twitter as a means of campaign outreach.

As of 12:00 p.m. (does that mean 12:00 noon?) on October 7:

BY THE NUMBERS:
• Republicans in Virginia have more than twice as many total Twitter users following them as their Democratic counterparts. Followers: “R” = 13,074. “D” = 6,328.
• Republicans hold a 33-18 lead among candidates using a dedicated campaign Twitter account.
• 9 of the Top 10 Candidates for VA House of Delegates with the most Twitter followers are Republicans.
• Republican statewide candidates – McDonnell, Bolling, Cuccinelli – have 8,462 followers versus the 5,073 users following Democratic statewide candidates Deeds, Wagner, and Shannon.

Ford O'Connell, the president of Project Virginia, commented:

“It’s clear Virginia Republicans have taken the lead in using Twitter to connect with voters. Twitter’s overall impact on politics has yet to be fully realized or quantified, but it’s apparent that campaigns which are early adopters of social media tools will be more engaged with their supporters.”

The news release also provided a link to all of the Virginia politicians (at least those running for office this year) who have -- and don't have -- Twitter accounts.

I'm not sure whether the "Twitter gap" is significant enough to make a major difference in the outcome of this year's elections for the General Assembly and for statewide offices. It might make a difference in some close races or in contests for open seats, where a slight communications superiority could pull a candidate over the finish line.

I hope that on November 4, somebody does an analysis of Twitter vs. non-Twitter candidates, to see if tweeting gives candidates a winning edge.

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2009 Virginia Film Festival Program Announced

2009-10-08T00:45:00.001-04:00

Oscar-winning screenwriter Alan Ball. Oscar-nominated actress Annette Bening. Tony-winning actor Matthew Broderick. Tony winner Cherry Jones. Academy Award-winner Norman Jewison. Cult-film director and arbiter of good taste John Waters.

These are among the dozens of artists, scholars, and film lovers who will be attending this year's Virginia Film Festival in Charlottesville.

Virginia Film Festival director Jody Kielbasa, who just recently succeeded Richard Herskowitz in that job (Kielbasa and his family moved to Charlottesville in June), announced the line-up of films, panel discussions, and special events at a news conference at the UVA Art Museum on Wednesday. About 90 minutes later, he repeated the announcement at a reception for the festival's supporters and staff.

Kielbasa inherited a theme that had been selected by the festival's board earlier this year, "Funny Business." He noted that the natural meaning to draw from that is "comedy," but upon reflection it is easy to widen the scope, since "funny business" also means "shenanigans," "double-dealing," and mischief-making.

Consequently, the festival will include movies about the "funny business of politics" (Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, for instance) and the "funny business of business" (Wall Street).

The film festival will also feature several regional premieres, including an opening-night presentation of the documentary film Marching Band, which focuses on the Marching Cavaliers of the University of Virginia and the Marching Trojans of Virginia State University. Marching Band was directed by French documentarian Claude Miller and was previously screened at the Cannes Film Festival.

A special emphasis on local topics and Virginia film making will include the documentary Bedford: The Town They Left Behind, about the small town that lost the most (proportional) number of servicemen in the D-Day invasion, and how the town's residents today face the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Locked Out: The Fall of Massive Resistance is a documentary film about the decision to close Charlottesville's government schools rather than open them up to racial integration; it will be followed by a panel discussion with former Virginia Governor L. Douglas Wilder, UVA political scientist Larry Sabato, and several of the students whose educations were disrupted by massive resistance. A film about Prince William County's immigration policy, 9500 Liberty, will also be screened, as well as With These Hands, a documentary about the closing of a Martinsville factory.

Classic films that are marking their -5 or -0 anniversaries this year will also be screened, including Buster Keaton's Sherlock, Jr. (85 years old); Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot (50 years old); Police Academy (25 years old); Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing and Steven Soderbergh's sex, lies, and videotape (both 20 years old); and Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction (15 years old).

Other classics on the program are the Marx Brothers' Duck Soup, Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and a newly restored 35mm print of Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon.

All of Jody Kielbasa's remarks, both at the press conference and at the reception that followed, are now available on YouTube. Here they are, divided into six (nearly equal) parts. (I apologize for the low lighting conditions. It was dim inside the UVA Art Museum.)

Part I (news conference):

Part II:

Part III:

Part IV (reception):

Part V:

Part VI:

The Virginia Film Festival takes place the weekend of November 5-8, 2009, at various venues in Charlottesville, including Culbreth Hall and Newcomb Hall on the grounds of the University of Virginia, and the Paramount Theatre and Regal Cinemas on the downtown mall. A full schedule of confirmed screenings and other events should be on line already; tickets go on sale through the Virginia Film Festival web site on Friday morning at 10:00 o'clock.

Lisa Provence has a brief report in The Hook. Keith McGilvery has the story at NBC29. Sharon C. Fitzgerald reports on the film festival in the Daily Progress.

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And Now for Something Completely Different ...

2009-10-05T21:56:00.002-04:00

It was forty years ago today -- October 5, 1969 -- that Monty Python's Flying Circus first took to the airwaves on the BBC. A leader in today's Guardian notes:

"I'll give you 13 shows, but that's all," said the BBC's head of light entertainment in 1969, and Monty Python's Flying Circus aired to a perplexed, but eventually grateful, British audience on Monday 5 October that same year. Over the subsequent 45 shows, the rules of television comedy were rewritten as John Cleese, Graham Chapman, Michael Palin, Terry Jones, Eric Idle and Terry Gilliam created lunatic characters and sketches, as funny today as they were 40 years ago.

The Oxbridge-educated group brought silliness and erudition in nearly equal amounts to television sketch comedy. Not exactly sui generis -- the Pythons had roots in pantomime, music hall, and British radio and movie comedies of the 1940s and '50s, as well as the satirical shows at Oxford and Cambridge, the Edinburgh Fringe, and even Beyond the Fringe -- when it reached America via public television, Monty Python seemed revolutionary.

In Milwaukee in the mid-1970s, Monty Python's Flying Circus was played on Tuesday evenings at 10:30 on WMVS-TV (Channel 10), so on Wednesday mornings, the senior lounge, the Blue & Gold Room, and the cafeteria at Marquette University High School were all abuzz with teenage boys imitating and trying their best to recreate, verbatim, the sketches they had seen the night before. It's a tribute to the quality of Python performances that, even after a single viewing, they could be recreated (at least by the smartest ones). Later, when vinyl LP recordings became available, memorization became easier, if a bit less daunting. We would spend hours on "The Argument Clinic," "Dead Parrot," and, among many others, "The Spanish Inquisition." (Bet you didn't expect that!) For a sample of Monty Python's influence on MUHS students, check out "Life on Film" from 2007.

It was under the influence of Monty Python -- how else would 16-year-old Midwesterners be introduced to existential philosophers? -- that I and some of my classmates came up with this cheer for the MUHS sports teams (nicknamed the Hilltoppers):

Socrates, Plato, Bertrand Russell
Here we go, Toppers --
Husserl, Husserl!

It might not have inspired anyone to audition for place kicker, but whoever said public TV can't be educational?

Monty Python's Flying Circus is being celebrated all over the web today. For instance, Stephen Beard, a correspondence for public radio's Marketplace, had a report on today's broadcast about how many of the early Monty Python sketches reflected the socio-economic realities of Britain in the 1950s and 1960s.

Entertainment Weekly's Josh Wolk offers "10 Ways Monty Python Changed Comedy," in which he mentions The Whitest Kids U' Know (brainchild of Charlottesville's Trevor Moore and his co-conspirators) in the same breath as Python and The Kids in the Hall.

Michael Saba at Paste Magazine offers four of his favorite Python moments, with videos culled from YouTube.

The Christian Science Monitor notes:

It's Monty Python week on IFC, where the cable film channel marks the 40th anniversary of the cheeky, British comedy troupe. Events will include a six-episode interview/documentary, "Monty Python: Almost the Truth (The Lawyer's Cut)," featuring all of the remaining group members discussing the ensemble's cultural impact and legacy. The week will also include, of course, the classic Python films.

Radio Times has a whole set of Monty Python features, including a collection of Python-related covers, film reviews (for Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Monty Python's The Meaning of Life, Monty Python's Life Of Brian, and Erik the Viking), and a blog post with Terry Jones' favorite Python moments.

And here, ladies and Bruces, from a live performance at the Hollywood Bowl, Monty Python performs "The Philosophers' Song":

"I drink, therefore I am." Now that's a way to get high school boys interested in serious philosophical discourse!

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