Coyote Blog

From the beginning, national security letters had to end badly.  One only has to understand incentives to know that things were going to go off the rails.  Specifically, national security letters are an easy way to for investigators to short-circuit a lot of procedural steps, including review and approval of warrants by judges, steps that have been put in place for a real Constitutional purpose.  Anyone who is at all familiar with the operation of any government bureaucracy had to know that their use would steadily grow well outside the narrow bounds of urgent national security issues.  Anytime government employees can grow their power without supervision or accountability, they will tend to do so.  What absolutely guaranteed that this would happen, and sooner rather than later, was the legal non-disclosure requirements around these letters that prevents anyone from discussing, investigation, or discovering their abuse and misuse.

The Washington Post carries a great anonymous editorial from one person served with such a letter:

Three years ago, I received a national security letter (NSL) in my
capacity as the president of a small Internet access and consulting
business. The letter ordered me to provide sensitive information about
one of my clients. There was no indication that a judge had reviewed or
approved the letter, and it turned out that none had. The letter came
with a gag provision that prohibited me from telling anyone, including
my client, that the FBI was seeking this information. Based on the
context of the demand -- a context that the FBI still won't let me
discuss publicly -- I suspected that the FBI was abusing its power and
that the letter sought information to which the FBI was not entitled....

Without the gag orders issued on recipients of the letters, it is
doubtful that the FBI would have been able to abuse the NSL power the
way that it did. Some recipients would have spoken out about perceived
abuses, and the FBI's actions would have been subject to some degree of
public scrutiny. To be sure, not all recipients would have spoken out;
the inspector general's report suggests that large telecom companies
have been all too willing to share sensitive data with the agency -- in
at least one case, a telecom company gave the FBI even more information
than it asked for. But some recipients would have called attention to
abuses, and some abuse would have been deterred.

I found it
particularly difficult to be silent about my concerns while Congress
was debating the reauthorization of the Patriot Act in 2005 and early
2006. If I hadn't been under a gag order, I would have contacted
members of Congress to discuss my experiences and to advocate changes
in the law.

Tim Lynch makes a point about the national security letters I found intriguing and that has not been discussed very often, that the letters represent effect conscription of ordinary citizens into an intelligence or even big brother role.  The author of the WaPo editorial makes the same point:

I resent being conscripted as a secret informer for the government and
being made to mislead those who are close to me, especially because I
have doubts about the legitimacy of the underlying investigation.

Via Overlawyered:

They're doing it again in California: "State and federal authorities
have opened an investigation into a Norco housewife, alleging that her
vitriolic protests against a high-risk group home in her neighborhood
may constitute housing discrimination." Federal officials asked state
fair housing regulators to investigate Julie Waltz, 61, who had
protested plans to open a group house next to her home for
developmentally disabled residents; among those eligible to reside
there under state law would be persons deemed not competent to stand
trial on sex crime charges.

Yes, you heard that right.  She is being threatened with a housing discrimination charge by the government for exercising free speech on a public policy issue.

Well, we libertarians must be losing the battle, if these are all the rights I have left as a taxpayer:

Today at 10am the Republican Study Committee will
introduce a Tax Payers Bill of Rights with the aim of getting
bi-partisan support for the principles of such a bill of rights and
incorporating them in future legislation. The principles are:

1 Taxpayers have a right to have a federal government that does not grow beyond their ability to pay for it.
2 Taxpayers have a right to receive back each dollar that they entrust to the government for their retirement.
3 Taxpayers have a right to expect the government to balance the budget without having their taxes raised.
4 Taxpayers have a right to a simple, fair tax code that they can understand.

This is pretty thin soup, particularly from the party that once hailed itself as the party of small government.  I can't really disagree any of this stuff, but it really constitutes a low bar, and it is even scarier that this will probably be controversial.  In particular, #2 is a joke.  Getting all your principal back from forty year old retirement investments basically means that all your retirement income was invested by the government at a 0% rate of return.  Unfortunately, as I ran the numbers a while back, a 0% rate of return would actually be an improvement for Social Security.

This is really, really pathetic.

Via Hit and Run:

A blistering Justice Department report accuses the FBI of
underreporting its use of the Patriot Act to force businesses to turn
over customer information in terrorism cases....The report, to be
released Friday, also says the FBI failed to send follow-up subpoenas
to telecommunications firms that were told to expect them.....

Overall,
the FBI underreported the number of national security letters it issued
by about 20 percent between 2003 and 2005..... In 2005 alone, the FBI
delivered a total of 9,254 letters relating to 3,501 U.S. citizens and
legal residents.

The Patriot Act....allows the FBI to issue national
security letters without a judge's approval in terrorism and espionage
cases.

Here is my bet:  Even more interesting will be a review of these letters, if that is ever allowed, to see how many really had any burning relation to national security.  My guess is that many of these are being used in drug cases and financial cases that only the most creative FBI agent could twist into a national security situation.

Via Kevin Drum, the results from a couple of studies in California:

A study released Tuesday by the Public Policy Institute
of California found that immigrants who arrived in the state between
1990 and 2004 increased wages for native workers by an average 4%.

UC Davis economist Giovanni Peri, who conducted the study, said the
benefits were shared by all native-born workers, from high school
dropouts to college graduates....

Another study released Monday by the Washington-based Immigration
Policy Center showed that immigrant men ages 18 to 39 had an
incarceration rate five times lower than native-born citizens in every
ethnic group examined. Among men of Mexican descent, for instance, 0.7%
of those foreign-born were incarcerated compared to 5.9% of
native-born, according to the study, co-written by UC Irvine
sociologist Ruben G. Rumbaut.

This is great stuff, I hope we see more of it, because it takes on two of the more common arguments against immigration.  In particular, its good to see someone taking on the crime angle, an issue I have suspected all along of being more about racial prejudices than true statistics.  This is a particularly telling table:

I previously took on the the meme that immigration causes crime here.  My case for open immigration is here and here.  My proposed plan is here.  Note that I really try to stay away from arguing immigration within the "who is going to pick the lettuce" framework.  I think free movement across borders of people, goods, and services is a basic human right, irrespective of the effect it has on wages or lettuce.

Oddly enough, Drum didn't focus much on the positive results on wages, as he has way too much invested in the whole "erosion of the middle class" thing to acknowledge that immigration might not hurt wages (since if immigration does not hurt wages, neither does free trade or outsourcing).  Mr. Drum says he wants to think about the study.  My prediction is that he will decide the crime study is a good one but the wage study was flawed.

For the last couple of years, much of the debate about detention at Gitmo has focused  on silly arguments about torture.  Flushing a Koran -- Torture!  Showing a picture of a naked girl -- Torture!  The comfy chair  -- Torture!  As I wrote in this post,

Here is my fervent hope:  If I ever find myself imprisoned by hostile
forces, I pray that they will torture me by sitting me in a chair and
having me watch them flush books down the toilet.

If I bought into the theory of Rovian infallibility, I might argue that this was all a clever trick to distract the country with the left hand while the right was really doing the damage.  Whether planned or not, the media certainly fixated on the left hand, while the right was doing this:

In a series of probing and sometimes testy exchanges with a government
lawyer, two of three judges on a federal appeals court panel here
indicated Thursday that they might not be prepared to accept the Bush
administration's claim that it has the unilateral power to detain
people it calls enemy combatants....

"What would prevent you from plucking up anyone and saying, "˜You are
an enemy combatant?' " Judge Roger L. Gregory of the United States
Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit asked the administration's
lawyer, David B. Salmons.

Mr. Salmons said the executive branch
was entitled to make that judgment in wartime without interference from
the courts. "A citizen, no less than an alien, can be an enemy
combatant," he added.

The real threat to freedom and the American way here was always the Bush administration's incredible theory that it had a right to name anyone a combatant and then detain them forever, without any sort of independent review or appeal.  Particularly in a "war" with no defined enemy.  It's incredible to me that the Congress and courts have let this slide as long as they have, and good to see some scrutiny may finally be applied.  Hat tip: Reason.  More here, here, here.  Looking back through my archives, I seem to have made this same point months ago:

One of the problems I have making common cause with many of the
civil rights critics of the Bush administration is that they tend to
hurt legitimate civil rights by exaggerating their claims into the
ridiculous. 

A good example is detentions at Gitmo.  I believe strongly that the
Bush administration's invented concept of unlimited-length detentions
without trial or judicial review is obscene and needed to be halted.
But critics of Bush quickly shifted the focus to "torture" at Gitmo, a
charge that in light of the facts appears ridiculous
to most rational people, including me.  As a result, the
administration's desire to hold people indefinitely without due process
has been aided by Bush's critics, who have shifted the focus to a
subject that is much more easily defended on the facts.

As a strong libertarian, I have all kinds of problems with the government in this country.  However, I always scratch my head when people try to make the case that certain European countries are more free and open than the US.  The facts just don't bear this out.  First, the US at least has a written Constitution that make some attempt to define government's purpose as the protection of individual rights.  Now, our government fails at this all the time, but at least there is something there in writing we can try to hang on to;  European countries have nothing like it.

In particular, Europe has never had the strong tradition of free speech that we have in the US.  Often folks in the US, particularly on the left, confuse Europe's receptiveness to leftish comments by Americans with general openness to free speech.  In fact, just the opposite is true:

People who question the official history of recent
conflicts in Africa and the Balkans could be jailed for up to three
years for "genocide denial", under proposed EU legislation.

Germany,
current holder of the EU's rotating presidency, will table new
legislation to outlaw "racism and xenophobia" this spring.

Included in the draft EU directive are plans to outlaw Holocaust denial, creating an offence that does not exist in British law.

But
the proposals, seen by The Daily Telegraph, go much further and would
criminalise those who question the extent of war crimes that have taken
place in the past 20 years.

For years, I and most free speech advocates in this country have criticized the holocaust-denial laws as the mother of all slippery slopes.  Holocaust deniers should have the same speech rights as any other moonbat out there.  Now, you can see the EU starting to slide down this slope, as more speech is criminalized.  The article goes on:

If agreed by EU member states, the legislation is likely to declare
open season for human rights activists and organisations seeking to
establish a body of genocide denial law in Europe's courts.

Who needs jackbooted government dictators when we have "human rights activists" available to muzzle our speech. 

Most of you know I tend to avoid the topic of religion like the plague on this blog, but suffice it so say that I am a secular guy.  But that doesn't stop me from being scared of this guy (Chris Hedges at the Nation Institute):

This is the awful paradox of tolerance. There arise moments when
those who would destroy the tolerance that makes an open society
possible should no longer be tolerated. They must be held accountable
by institutions that maintain the free exchange of ideas and liberty.

The radical Christian Right must be forced to include other points
of view to counter their hate talk in their own broadcasts, watched by
tens of millions of Americans. They must be denied the right to
demonize whole segments of American society, saying they are
manipulated by Satan and worthy only of conversion or eradication. They
must be made to treat their opponents with respect and acknowledge the
right of a fair hearing even as they exercise their own freedom to
disagree with their opponents.

Passivity in the face of the rise of the Christian Right threatens
the democratic state. And the movement has targeted the last remaining
obstacles to its systems of indoctrination, mounting a fierce campaign
to defeat hate-crime legislation, fearing the courts could apply it to
them as they spew hate talk over the radio, television and Internet.

Whoa, Nellie.  The "forced to be free" thing never really works out very well, I promise.  I find the outright socialism preached by much of academia to be scary as hell and an incredible threat to me personally as a business owner, but you won't catch me trying to get the government to muzzle them.  Hedges attitude is consistent with opposition to school choice discussed here by Neal McCluskey of Cato:

Another frequent objection to letting parents choose their kids'
schools is that American children need to be steeped in a shared
worldview, lest they be in constant combat as adults. This arose as a
major line of argument in a Free Republic discussion about Why We Fight,
and is very similar to the "Americanization" mission given to
industrial-era public schools, where immigrant students were taught to
reject the customs and values of their parents' lands "” and often their
parents themselves "” and adopt the values political elites deemed
proper.

Now, if one were willing to accept a system that would, by
definition, quash any thoughts not officially sanctioned, then in
theory one would be okay with a public schooling system intended to
force uniform thought. In the context of an otherwise free society,
however, getting such a system to work is impossible, because
it would require that incredibly diverse and constantly combative
adults create and run an education system that somehow produces uniform
and placid graduates. It's no more realistic than hoping a tornado will
drop houses in a more perfect line than it found them.

The practical result of our trying to make uniformity out of diversity has, of course, been constant conflict, as Why We Fight
makes clear. Moreover, there is another by-product of this process that
no one mentions when they weave scenarios about choice producing
schools steeped in ignorance: our schools right now teach very little, especially in the most contentious areas like evolution and history, because they want to avoid conflict.

It all kind of makes a mockery of the left's favorite word "diversity."  One suspects what they want is for people of all color and backgrounds to come together and... think just like they do.  This seems to be part of the same strategy here to bring back the fairness doctrine.

PS- Remember, before you flame me, I am a secularist here defending the right of everyone to speak.  I am not defending Pat Robertson per se, because I almost never agree with the guy, but I am defending his right to say whatever he wants on TV.

I went to a dinner with a group of local libertarians who have been meeting for decades.  We had a very interesting discussion on government centralization vs. decentralization concerning which approach has been and can expected to be in the future a better framework for protecting liberty (A similar discussion has been raging in the blogosphere, as represented by this post at Volokh and here).  It has been a long time since I have not been the most radical anarchist in the room, so I had a great time. 

Dale Franks at QandO, quoting some from John Derbyshire, raise a key question that certainly has always concerned me as a pro-immigration libertarian:

As to why I think libertarians are nuts to favor mass uncontrolled
immigration from the third world: I think they are nuts because their
enthusiasm on this matter is suicidal to their cause. Their ideological
passion is blinding them to a rather obvious fact: that libertarianism
is a peculiarly American doctrine, with very little appeal to the
huddled masses of the third world. If libertarianism implies mass
third-world immigration, then it is self-destroying. Libertarianism is
simply not attractive either to illiterate peasants from mercantilist
Latin American states, or to East Asians with traditions of
imperial-bureaucratic paternalism, or to the products of Middle Eastern
Muslim theocracies.

In other words, by open immigration, are we letting in waves of people from statist traditions that will drive the US further away from an open, liberal society.  This worries me from time to time, enough that I don't have a fully crafted response that I consider definitive.  However, I want to offer some initial thoughts.  Before I do, here are two background points:

1. I think the freedom to move to another country, take a job there, buy property, live there, etc. is a basic individual right that should not be limited to the accident of not having been born originally in that country.  Freedom of association is a right of all human beings, not merely a result of citizenship.  I go into these arguments in much more detail here.
2. Note that immigrant status and citizen status are two different things.  Immigrant means that you are present in a country but not a citizen.  As an immigrant, I believe you should be able to own property, accept employment, and most of the other things you and I do every day.  However, immigrants don't vote.  Only the narrow class of people called citizens may vote, and there is some process where over time immigrants can meet some hurdles and become citizens.  The key problem for a libertarian, which I think Dale Franks would agree with, is "which status must you be to get government handouts?"  My view is that only citizens should get most handouts, like welfare and food stamps and such, though immigrants should have access to things like infrastructure (highways) and emergency services.  It is when one argues that any immigrant should have access to all this stuff that the whole immigration picture becomes a total mess.

With those couple of things in mind, here are my thoughts on the issue Franks raises:

• The US is not made up primarily of Scots and Dutch, two areas that can legitimately claim to have strong liberal traditions.  Most of our past immigration has come from Ireland and Germany and Scandinavia and Eastern Europe.  None of these areas particularly have a liberal tradition, and many were nationalistic-militaristic-paternalistic governments.  Also, we may forget it today, but when countries like Ireland where a large source of our immigration in the 19th century, they were a third world country at the time.  Just look at Vietnam -- it has one of the worst traditions I can think of, but as a class Vietnamese immigrants tend to be capitalist tigers.
• Depending on how one counts it, US citizens are already 65%-85% statist anyway, so I am not sure immigration is going to change the mix negatively.  In other words, the statist train has already sailed.  In fact, statism has flourished in this country from 1930-1980 during exactly the same period of time we were most restrictionist in immigration.  Sure, correlation is not causation, but certainly you can't prove to me that restrictionist immigration slows statism in any way. 
• Much of the statist economic policies in this country were launched by Wilson and Roosevelt, from two of the more blue-blooded families in America.  Now this may not mean much.  What I don't know, because I don't know enough history of the period, is this:  Did support for New Deal (and more extreme socialist NRA-type policies) come disproportionately from new immigrants?  My sense is exactly the opposite, that in fact some New Deal policies like the minimum wage were aimed by nativists at circumscribing the opportunities of immigrants.
• In effect, the author is advocating that we limit the freedom of movement and property ownership of people not born in the US because we are afraid that these new entrants into our country will bring political pressure to undermine individual rights.  I think that is a legitimate fear, but if I accept that argument, I don't know why I would not also have to accept the argument that we should take away the freedom of speech from people who argue for limitations of individual rights.  In both cases, we are giving political access to people who want to undermine our basic liberties.  My conclusion:  I can't go there in either case.  I refuse to put a political test on the exercise of individual rights, even for people with really bad politics.
• A well-crafted welfare regime would make the problem a lot better.  I am not so unrealistic to expect the welfare state to go away tomorrow, but I do think that the political will can be mustered to deny substantial benefits to new non-citizen immigrants.  Which way we go on this will decide whether we can open up immigration.  If welfare handouts to immigrants are limited, then new immigrants will tend to self-select towards those looking to work hard and take risks to make it on their own.  This will mitigate the author's concern, and is in fact how we have maintained our culture of liberality through a history that was dominated mostly by open rather than closed immigration.  If welfare handouts are generous to new immigrants, then immigrants will self-select to people looking to live off the state.  If we insist on the latter, then I guess I will agree that immigration needs to be limited (though there is an even better reason for doing so in that we will, in that case, surely bankrupt ourselves.)

This is a weird case, via Radley Balko:  A court issues a search warrant for a bullet, correctly stating the specific location to be searched and the reasons the bullet is needed.  No problem so far, but unfortunately, the bullet is inside someone and must be surgically removed.

In the middle of Joshua Bush's forehead, two inches above his eyes,
lies the evidence that prosecutors say could send the teenager to
prison for attempted murder: a 9 mm bullet, lodged just under the skin.

Prosecutors
say it will prove that Bush, 17, tried to kill the owner of a used-car
lot after a robbery in July. And they have obtained a search warrant to
extract the slug.

But Bush and his lawyer are fighting the
removal, in a legal and medical oddity that raises questions about
patient privacy and how far the government can go to solve crimes
without running afoul of the constitutional protection against
unreasonable searches and seizures.

They go on to mention this problem:

Police then obtained a second search warrant and scheduled the
operation for last week at the University of Texas Medical Branch
hospital in Galveston. It was postponed again, however, after the
hospital decided not to participate for reasons it would not discuss.

Prosecutors said they continue to look for a doctor or hospital willing to remove the bullet.

Duh.  No private doctor or hospital is going to do this procedure.  Whoever removes this bullet is 100% guaranteed to get named on at least one lawsuit seconds after the procedure.  Even if they win the suit, the cost of defending themselves will outweigh anything they might get paid for the procedure.

This is so wrong.  When possessing cash is a crime:

A federal appeals
court ruled yesterday that if a motorist is carrying large sums of
money, it is automatically subject to confiscation. In the case
entitled, "United States of America v. $124,700 in U.S. Currency," the
U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit took that amount of cash
away from Emiliano Gomez Gonzolez, a man with a "lack of significant
criminal history" neither accused nor convicted of any crime.

I know what you are thinking -- there must be some other facts Coyote is leaving out that explain why a man should have his money confiscated for no other reason than he chose to keep it in cash.  Read the whole thing, because you won't find anything that makes this sane.  I do a lot of business down on the border, and get many Mexican customers (legally) visiting as a tourist.  Almost to a one, they show up with large rolls of cash.  Our preference for key fob credit chips and ubiquitous Visa cards is not shared by every other culture, and the desire to keep one's assets in cash should not be a crime (it may not be smart, but not a crime).  Hell, murderers have more protection under the law than this person carrying cash.

I would be interested to hear more about this from folks with a legal background, but I am surprised that an appeals court even has the purview to find that a crime exists when lower courts found none.  The problem here, I think, is that the cash can (legally, which is nuts) be seized and kept without a trial, just on the say-so of the police, who have the incentive to decide that the cash is seizable because they get to drop it into their budget pool.  So I guess the trier of fact is the police (?) and the lower court reversed the police decision and then the circuit court is reinstating it. 

This is just one example of the incredibly high price we pay in civil liberties for the war on drugs.  See this post to measure the countervailing benefits of the war on drugs.  Hat tip:  Catallarchy.

Update: Via Hit and Run, here is another nice feature of the war on drugs:

Tim takes one 24-hour Claritin-D tablet just about every day. That
puts him just under the legal limit of 75-hundred milligrams of pseudo
ephedrine a month. The limit is part of a new law that Quad Cities
authorities are beginning to strictly enforce.

The law limits the
amount of pseudo ephedrine you can buy. Pseudo ephedrine is an
ingredient in medicines like Sudafed and Claritin-D, and it's also a
key ingredient in methamphetamines.

"It's the only allergy medicine that works for me "“ for my allergies," Tim explained.

The only problem is, Tim has a teenaged son who also suffers from allergies. And minors are not allowed to buy pseudo ephedrine.

"I bought some for my boy because he was going away to church camp and he needed it," he said.

  That decision put Tim over the legal limit. Two months later, there was a warrant for his arrest.

And off to jail he went, with no apologies:

But even if you're not making meth, if you go over that limit "“ of one maximum strength pill per day "“ you will be arrested.

  "Does it take drastic measures? Absolutely. Have we seen a positive result? Absolutely," Sandoval stressed.

Do you see the similarity in these two stories.  Two different people, both punished by the state for taking legal actions similar to those taken by drug dealers (holding cash and buying Claritin) with absolutely no evidence they in fact had anything to do with illegal drugs.  Next up:  Anyone driving a Porche 911 will be arrested since those cars are favored by drug dealers. 

Sean Lynch of Catallarchy is dead on with this:

The headline showing on Google News reads: "NJ's Move Toward Same-Sex Unions Called Undemocratic." My first thought upon reading that was, "Duh!"

It seems to me that civil rights are undemocratic by their very
definition, since they are rights that cannot be taken away, even by
the will of the majority, at least in theory. The whole reason our
Constitution even contains anything other than voting procedures is
that it was clear to the framers that if they left everything to the
will of the majority, they'd end up with an even worse tyranny than the
one they just threw off.

As much as some libertarians may complain, the fact that civil
rights today are in as good of a state as they are is a testament to
what a great job the framers did at making the USA an
"undemocratic" country. Heck, even the Second Amendment survives mostly
intact in most states. And the rate at which technology seems to be
empowering individuals seems to be outstripping the rate at which
democracy is attempting to take away our rights, even using that same
technology.

Terrific!  I shared similar thoughts but from a different angle when I wrote that "the right to vote" is the least of our freedoms.

Conservative pundits often observe that "this is a new type of war -- shouldn't the president have new powers to fight it?"  Well, maybe.  But I think there is a question that is at least as valid:  "Given that enemy combatants don't wear uniforms any more, shouldn't we exercise more care than in the past in how we designate people as combatants?"  The much greater ambiguity in naming combatants would seem to demand extra layers of process protection and appeal rights for such persons.

Unfortunately, this Administration, with the aid and comfort of the US Congress, has gone exactly in the opposite direction.  As Jim Bovard writes, via Cato-at-Liberty:

The MCA awarded Bush the power to label anyone on earth an enemy
combatant and lock then up in perpetuity, nullifying the habeas corpus
provision of the Constitution and "turning back the clock 800 years,"
as Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA) said. While only foreigners can be tried
before military tribunals, Americans accused of being enemy combatants
can be detained indefinitely without charges and without appeal. Even
though the Pentagon has effectively admitted that many of the people
detained at Guantanamo were wrongfully seized and held, the MCA
presumes that the president of the United States is both omniscient and
always fair.

Sixty years ago, when the military hauled in a guy dressed in a gray Wermacht uniform captured in the Ardennes Forest, you kindof gave them the benefit of the doubt that he was an enemy combatant.  How long until merely exercising free speech rights in favor of a terrorist group gets one labeled a "combatant."

One of the main salients in the war against free speech is the notion that people somehow have the right not to be offended;  in other words, that authorities may legitimately limit speech that gives offense to anyone.

I could site a zillion examples, particularly on campuses, but this one is at the top of my inbox (emphasis added):

Sparks flew during question period at a Nov. 21 Carleton University
Students' Association (CUSA) council meeting after a motion that would
prevent pro-life groups from assembling on CUSA space was tabled.

The motion -"” moved by Katy McIntyre, CUSA vice-president (student
services), on behalf of the Womyn's Centre -"” would amend the campus
discrimination policy to state that "no CUSA resources, space,
recognition or funding be allocated for anti-choice purposes." ...

According to McIntyre, anti-choice groups are gender-discriminatory and violate CUSA's safe space practices.

The motion focuses on anti-choice groups because they aim to abolish
freedom of choice by criminalizing abortion. McIntyre said this
discriminates against women, and that it violates the Canadian
Constitution by removing a woman's right to "life, liberty and
security" of person....

McIntyre said she received complaints after Lifeline organized an
academic debate on whether or not elective abortion should be made
illegal.

"[These women] were upset the debate was happening on campus in a
space that they thought they were safe and protected, and that
respected their rights and freedoms," said McIntyre....

Julien de Bellefeuille, Student Federation of the University of
Ottawa vice-president (university affairs), said that although his
student association does not currently have any policies regulating
anti-choice groups, he said the motion is a good idea and something
that his school should adopt as well.

Note that the debate is not over whether abortion should be illegal, but whether advocates of abortion bans can even discuss their position publicly.  Ms. McIntyre is arguing straight out, with no possibility of confusion of motives, that she thinks that women who believe as she does should be protected from being anywhere in the vicinity of an opponent of her position (presumably she could protect herself without this motion simply by not listening to such speech, so the purpose most be to eliminate opposing speech altogether.

I have a couple of thoughts.  First, there is no right not to be offended.  Trying to define any such right will be the end of free speech.  Second, its funny how the offense is only treated as one-way.  While I am OK with abortion, I have many friends who vociferously oppose it.  I am positive they are in turn offended by supporters of abortion, but I don't see any motion here to protect them from offense or provide them a "safe zone" free of opposing views.  Third, it strikes me that a better word for the "safe zone" she wants is "echo chamber,"  where like-minded people as her can be free from having to hear any opposing opinion.

Update:  The next item in my inbox happened to be on the same topic, and is from FIRE:

A professor at the University of Idaho has asked students to sign a
"statement of understanding" acknowledging that some of the films he
shows may have content that is offensive to some students. Inside Higher Ed brings us the story.

In a university culture where the avoidance of offense is considered a
sacred principle on many campuses, it's not surprising that Professor
Dennis West would hit on a method already commonly used when engaging
in nearly any activity that comes with even a minimal amount of risk.
It's sad that showing films to students can now be considered a risky
activity, but it's not surprising. Episodes like the University of New
Hampshire's reaction to a joking flyer, or Gonzaga's classification of
a flyer as hate speech simply because the flyer contained the word
"hate," make it clear that film professors"”who sometimes show graphic,
violent, or even merely political films"”do indeed have something to
worry about. This is a sad commentary on today's academic culture.

He warned "that immigration to this country is increasing and"¦is making its greatest relative increase from races most alien to the body of the American people and from the lowest and most illiterate classes among those races....half of whom have no occupation and most of whom represent the rudest form of labor," are "people whom
it is very difficult to assimilate and do not promise well for the standard
of civilization in the United States."

[He] complained that many of them "have no money at all.  They land in this country without a cent in their pockets." ...He objected that many "stay but a short time in the United States" in order to "then return to their native country with such money
as they have been able to save here." He warned that these sorts of
immigrants, "who come to the United States, reduce the rate of wages
by ruinous competition, and then take their savings out of the country, are not desirable. They are mere birds of passage. They form an element
in the population which regards home as a foreign country, instead of
that in which they live and earn money. They have no interest or stake in the country, and they never become American citizens."

Whoa, who is that?  J.D Hayworth?  Tom Tancredo?  Surely its someone bashing on Mexican immigration -- the mantra is so familiar.

Well, no.  Actually, it is Henry Cabot Lodge, in 1891, most likely referring to your grandparents.  In these words, he was speaking mainly of Italians, but they are the same charges made against the Irish in the mid-19th century or Eastern Europeans in the early 20th century or, of course, against Mexicans today.  Do you really want to stake out the position that yes, this argument was wrong every time it has been used in the last 200 years but it's suddenly right today?

For some reason, probably because no one there has actually read my blog, the Minutemen Project has me on their email list for press releases.  This one caught my eye:

Judge John H. Wilson has stepped out of his judicial robes to write a children's book. Hot House Flowers is aimed at entertaining and educating children, but adults will find the story an informative and useful object lesson in politics and current events and a cautionary tale to share with family and friends.

Judge Wilson tackles the topic of illegal immigration in an imaginative manner, and the publisher adds a colorful assortment of illustrations to the Judge's metaphorical story of cartoon "hothouse flowers" which must resist the intrusion of weeds from outside the borders of the protected house.

On first reading this, I wanted to barf.  Comparing immigrants to weeds that attack us lovely (Caucasian) flowers is really insulting.  However, on second thought, I thought this analogy was somewhat apt. 

A hothouse flower is one that can't compete or survive outside of the limited confines of its greenhouse.  Rather than being able to survive on its own, a hothouse flower takes a ton of outside care and feeding.  The very term "hothouse flower" when applied to a person tends to mean someone who can't really function in the real world.  And in some sense this is what our citizens and businesses will become in a Lou-Dobbsian world of limited immigration and trade protectionism, each of us hot house flowers or Marie Antoinette's who have no ability to function in the larger world.  We all need healthy interchange and competition with the world at large to stay vital and growing as a country and as individuals.

By the way, a lot of those weeds turn into flowers:

"Over the past 15 years, immigrants have started 25 percent
of U.S. public companies that were venture-backed." These businesses
employ some 220,000 people in the U.S. and have a current market
capitalization that "exceeds $500 billion, adding significant value to
the American economy."

In this post, when I said that I thought the university had a duty to
intervene with protests only when the protests had the effect of
silencing or preventing invited speakers from speaking, this is the
type of thing I was talking about: 

Students stormed the stage
at Columbia University's Roone auditorium yesterday, knocking over
chairs and tables and attacking Jim Gilchrist, the founder of the
Minutemen, a group that patrols the border between America and Mexico. 

Mr. Gilchrist and Marvin Stewart, another member of his group, were
in the process of giving a speech at the invitation of the Columbia
College Republicans. They were escorted off the stage unharmed and
exited the auditorium by a back door. 

Having wreaked havoc onstage, the students unrolled a banner that
read, in both Arabic and English, "No one is ever illegal." As security
guards closed the curtains and began escorting people from the
auditorium, the students jumped from the stage, pumping their fists,
chanting victoriously, "Si se pudo, si se pudo," Spanish for "Yes we could!"

I don' t think such thuggery is protected by the first ammendment, and
certainly a private institution should be able to make sure their
invited speakers actually get to speak.  Columbia really needs to rethink its free speech policies, if it allows this behavior to occur but shuts down the hockey team for this.

By the way, I am a strong detractor of the Minutemen, their goals, and
the activities.  It's good for the soul - everyone should take the time
to defend the free speech of someone they disagree with.  Mr. Gilchrist should have been allowed to speak.  This is unfortunately yet
another example of where I am horrified by the actions of people who
agree with me.  I mean, from a PR standpoint alone, the Minutemen could not have scripted a protest that would have done more than this one to enrage and energize its supporters.  STUPID!  For my fellow travellers in the pro-immigration
movement, I would suggest you read this:  Why its good to let your enemies speak.

Update:  I was correct -- immigration foes are using this stupidity as a rallying cry.  While I often disagree quite strongly with LGF on this issue, they have a good quote from the perpetrators of this protest that highlights exactly the "free speech for me but not for thee" logic that I hate.  First they say, as all free speech opponents say:

We celebrate free speech.

Uh, OK.  Then they continue:

for that reason we allowed the Minutemen to
speak

Mr. Gilchrist was an invited guest of a private institution.  Your permission is not required or relevant.  The implication is that you somehow have a veto over everyone's speech, and they speak at your sufferance.  And finally this:

The
Minutemen are not a legitimate voice in the debate on immigration.

This is the key, absolutely dangerous assumption that all-too-many people hold in this country.  That somehow speech can be parsed into "legitimate" and "illegitimate", with the clear implication that illegitimate speech has no first amendment protection.  But who decides what is legitimate?  Of course, implicit to anyone who says this, is the assumption that "why, me and my guys would decide."  It is for this reason I have opposed "hate speech" laws in the past.

Great editorial from George Will:

Seattle"”as the comprehensive and sustained attack on Americans' freedom
of political speech intensifies, this city has become a battleground.
Campaign-finance "reformers," who advocate ever-increasing government
regulation of the quantity, timing and content of political speech,
always argue that they want to regulate "only" money, which, they say,
leaves speech unaffected. But here they argue that political speech is
money, and hence must be regulated. By demanding that the speech of two
talk-radio hosts be monetized and strictly limited, reformers reveal
the next stage in their stealthy repeal of the First Amendment.

I was living in Seattle at the time.  These were not political operatives, like a James Carville, moonlighting as talk radio hosts.  They were just radio guys who found an issue, no more or less than say Oprah when she focuses her audience on Alar or BGH or whatever.  Read the whole thing, but note that, in the name of campaign finance reform which is ostensibly about not letting money rule politics, the government is going after the side that was outspent five to one.  But this is not about campaign finance reform.  This is about protecting the government and its officials from criticism.

This is the America produced by "reformers" led by John McCain. The
U.S. Supreme Court, in affirming the constitutionality of the
McCain-Feingold speech restrictions, advocated deference toward elected
officials when they write laws regulating speech about elected
officials and their deeds. This turned the First Amendment from the
foundation of robust politics into a constitutional trifle to be
"balanced" against competing considerations"”combating the "appearance
of corruption," or elevating political discourse or something. As a
result, attempts to use campaign regulations to silence opponents are
becoming a routine part of vicious political combat.

This study pops up every year or so, and every time I see it I can't believe the results.  100,000 high school students surveyed, along with 8000 teachers:

• 54 percent of the students said all newspapers should be able to
  publish freely without government approval, up from 51 percent in 2004.
• Students say they felt the First Amendment as a
  whole goes too far. In 2006, 45 percent said the First Amendment goes
  too far, versus 35 percent two years ago.
• In 2004, 38
  percent of teachers thought the press had too much freedom. That figure
  dropped in 2006 to 29 percent. Student attitudes are improving as well,
  though more slowly. In 2004, 32 percent thought the press has too much
  freedom. In 2006, that figure dropped to 30 percent.

I guess I won't panic, as some of this is probably just high school kids being muddle-headed about everything.  It would be interesting to see if these attitudes are being caused more by leftish fears (e.g. political correctness, don't say anything bad about women or minorities or gays or handicapped or...) or by rightish fears (e.g. national security activities)

Hat Tip: Hit and Run

A while back, I pointed out that immigration opponents seemed to be depending on American's having poor match skills and a pathetic knowledge of history.  Today in this post from Captain's Quarters we find more statistical funny business.  Captain Ed, like many conservatives, have been stumping for the US to build a big honking fence at the border, nominally as part of the war on terrorism.

Of course according to supporters it is only about security, not xenophobia, which explains why the fence proposal in Congress covers both our northern and southern borders since both are equally porous to terrorists.  Oh, wait, the law only covers the southern border?  Oh.  Well, I hope terrorists can't read a map and don't notice that the northern border is three times as long and in many cases more unpopulated and unguarded than the southern border.

Anyway, another "security" argument by immigration foes is that hordes of criminals are apparently pouring across the border, and walls are proposed as a way to stop them.  The Captain quotes Bill Frist:

One of the most important and most effective ways that we can stop
illegal immigration is through the construction and proper maintenance
of physical fences along the highest trafficked, most commonly violated
sections of our border with Mexico.

Take the case of San Diego. According to the FBI Crime Index, crime
in San Diego County dropped 56.3% between 1989 and 2000, after a fence
stretching from the Ocean to the mountains near San Diego was
substantially completed. And, according to numbers provided by the San
Diego Sector Border Patrol in February 2004, apprehensions decreased
from 531,689 in 1993 to 111,515 in 2003.

Whoa. That sounds impressive.  But, remember what I often say on this site -- correlation is not causation.  Indeed, it is not just random chance that he picked the years 1989 - 2000.  Those were the years that nearly every part of the US saw a huge drop in its crime rate.  Using this data for these years, and presuming Frist is using the crime rate index per 100,000 people, which is the stat that makes the most sense, here are some figures for 1989 - 2000:

Crime Rate Change, 1989-2000:
US :  - 28%
Arizona:  -28%
California: - 45%
New York: -51%

Wow!  The border fence in San Diego even had a similarly large effect on crime in New York State!  That thing is amazing.  Oh, and note these are state figures.  My understanding is that the figures for large metropolitan areas is even more dramatic.  So what happened in 1989 to 2000 is every state and in particular every large metropolitan area in the country saw huge double digit drops in crime, and San Diego was no exception.   But Frist tries to give credit to the border fence.

In case you want to believe that Frist does not know what he is doing with these stats (ie that he wasn't intentionally trying to give credit for a national demographic trend to a border fence in San Diego) notice that 1989 was the US crime rate peak and 2000 was the US crime rate low point.  So with data for the years up to 2005 available, he just happens to end his period at 2000.  Oh, and the new style fences he wants to emulate were actually only started in 1996 (and here, search for "triple fence"), AFTER most of these crime gains had been made.  Correlation definitely does not equal causation when the proposed cause occurred after the effect.

For all of you who always wanted to live in Soviet East Berlin, you may soon get a good taste of that experience:

The first fence, 10 feet high, is made of welded metal panels. The
second fence, 15 feet high, consists of steel mesh, and the top is
angled inward to make it harder to climb over. Finally, in high-traffic
areas, there's also a smaller chain-link fence. In between the two main
fences is 150 feet of "no man's land," an area that the Border Patrol
sweeps with flood lights and trucks, and soon, surveillance cameras.

Below are views of Nogales, AZ and Berlin.  Nothing alike.  Nope.  Totally different.

Finally, I will give the last word to Frist, bold added.

That's why I strongly support the Secure Fence Act of 2006 "¦ and that's
why I'm bringing this crucial legislation to the floor of the Senate
this week for an up-or-down vote. By authorizing the construction of
over 700 miles of two-layered reinforced fencing along our southwest
border and by mandating the use of cameras, ground sensors, UAVs and
other forms of hi-tech surveillance, this legislation would help us
gain control over every inch of our borders "“ once and for all.

"gain control over every inch of our borders," except, or course, for those 3000 5525 miles (350 million inches) to the north where the people on the other side have the courtesy not to speak a foreign language.  But its hard to demagogue well about a threat from Canadians, since they are mostly WASPs like we mostly are, or at least it has been for the last 100 years or so.  54-40 or fight!

Update: Here is that terrifying Canadian border barrier (from this site).  This demonstrates why our terrorist security dollars need to all be invested on the southern border, since this one is already locked down tight.  Heck, there is one of these babies (below) every mile!  Beware terrorists!

And don't forget these terrorist-proof border checkpoints along our northern frontier:

But it's not about race.

Update 2:  Yes, my emailers are correct.  I did not actually give Frist the last word like I said I would.  Gosh, I feel so bad about that.

Update 3:  Welcome to readers of my favorite site, Reason's Hit and Run.  It looks like Texas may soon consider a border fence, though with Louisiana instead of Mexico.

A frequent topic of this blog is to point out situations where technocrats translate their distrust for individual decision-making into the justification for government control. 

Kevin Drum provides me with one of the best examples I have seen of late of this phenomena of using distrust of individual decision-making to justify government intervention, in part because he is so honest and up-front about it.  I usually try not to quote another blogger's posts in total, because I want to give folks an incentive to go visit the site, but in this case I need to show the whole thing (the extensive comments are still worth a visit):

If we treat healthcare like any other market, allowing consumers
free rein to purchase the services they like best, will it produce high
quality results? A recent study suggests not:

Researchers
from the Rand Corp. think tank, the University of California at Los
Angeles and the federal Department of Veterans Affairs asked 236
elderly patients at two big managed-care plans, one in the Southwest
and the other in the Northeast, to rate the medical care they were
getting. The average score was high "” about 8.9 on a scale from zero to
10.

....In the second part of their study, the medical researchers
systematically examined 13 months of medical records to gauge the
quality of care the same elderly patients had received....The average
score wasn't as impressive as those in the patient-satisfaction
surveys: 5.5 on a 10-point scale. But here's the interesting part:
Those patients who graded the quality of their care as 10 weren't any
more likely to be getting high-quality care than those who gave it a
grade of 5. The most-satisfied patients didn't get better medical care
than the least-satisfied.

Surprise! Patients are
poor judges of whether they're getting good care. And if consumer
preferences don't map to high quality care, then a free market in
healthcare won't necessarily produce better results or higher
efficiency, as it does in most markets.

Back to the drawing board. Perhaps a national healthcare system
would be a better bet to reduce costs, cover more people, provide
patients with more flexibility, and produce superior outcomes. After
all, why are we satisfied with allowing the French to have a better
healthcare system than ours even though we're half again richer than
them?

There is it, in black and white:  Most of you individual slobs out there cannot be trusted to make good health care decisions for yourselves, so the government should do it for you.  (And by the way, who the hell thinks the French have a better health care system, but that's off-topic for today).

Here is the false premise:  If the intellectuals who ran the study judged that the individuals involved were getting poor care when the individuals themselves thought is was good care, this does not necessarily mean the individuals being studied were wrong.  It may very well mean they have different criteria for judging health care quality and value.  In fact, what goes unquestioned here, and I guess the reader is supposed to swallow, is that there is some sort of Platonic ideal of "high-quality care" that the people who run this study have access to.

But this is ridiculous.   Does high-quality mean fast?  painless?  private?  successful?  pleasant? convenient?  I, for example, have all the patience of an 8-year-old who just ate three pieces of birthday cake washed down by two Cokes.  I need stuff now, now, now.  I hate gourmet restaurants where meals take 3 hours.  Many gourmands, on the other hand, would probably shoot themselves before eating some of the food I eat.  We have different standards.

Let's take an example from another industry:  Cars.  Every year, the "experts" at Consumer Reports and Car and Driver try out all the new cars and publish the two or three they think are the best.  So, does this mean that everyone who does not buy one of these cars selected by the experts as the best are making a bad decision?  Does this fact tell us the government should step in and buy their cars for them because they can't be trusted to make the right evaluations?   NO!  Of course not.  It means that the people who buy other types of cars have different criteria and priorities in judging what a "high-quality" car is.  Some want high gas mileage.  Some want a tight interior with leather.  Some want a big honkin' engine.  Some want a truck jacked way up in the air.  Some want room to carry five kids.   You get the idea.

There are at least two better explanations for the study results.  Let's first be clear what the study results were:  The study found that the patients studied graded health care differently than did the people who ran the study.  That's all it found.  This could mean that the intellectuals who ran the study and the individuals studied judged care on different dimensions and with different priorities.  Or it could mean that the individuals studied had incomplete information about their care and their choices.  Neither justifies a government takeover of the industry.  (In fact, to the latter point about information, markets that are truly allowed by the government to be free, which health care has not, often develop information sources for consumers, like the car magazines mentioned above.)

The thinking in Drum's post betrays the elitist-technocratic impulses behind a lot of the world's bad government.  Look at "progressive" causes around the world, and you will see a unifying theme of individual decisions that are not trusted, whether its a poor Chinese farmer who can't be trusted to choose the right factory work or an American worker who can't be trusted to make her own investment decisions for retirement.

Postscript:  In some past era, I might have called this one of the worst excuses for fascism I had ever heard.  Unfortunately, Brad DeLong recently took that title with his post that the government needs to take even more money from the rich because the rich are ostentatious and that hurts other people's feelings.  No really, I don't exaggerate, he said exactly that.  If somehow you have missed this one, look here.

Apparently, conservative Republicans are gearing up for a big Congressional push on "border security", hoping to decouple it from any discussion of immigration liberalization.

I know from my email and comments that many of my readers disagree with my stand for open immigration.  Reasonable people can disagree, but the hypocrisy of the "border security" and its linking to the war on terror really set me on edge.

If you are a "border security" supporter, then say what you mean -- that you want to string a lot of razor wire and enlist the US Army to secure the border from ... poor people looking for a job.  I get email every other day from the "minutemen" who triumph their brave defense of the border.  I will virtually guarantee that they have not found a single terrorist and probably have not found a single person coming over the border solely for criminal intent, and that 100% of their impact has been to set the authorities on people who are looking for work.  Yes I know that foreign born people looking for work in the US without the proper paperwork is currently illegal, but so is speeding and making a rolling stop at a stop sign  (which are, by the way, a lot more dangerous).  The question is, who is being harmed?  To be precise, the government's job is not to "secure the borders" but to "secure its citizens".  Doing so presupposes we can clearly state, "against what?"

Yeah, but what about the terrorists?  Don't make me laugh.  There are so many other, easier ways for a terrorist to get into the US that every terrorist act to date has been committed by people who came through normal border checkpoints and not across the Sonoran desert.  And I have written several times about open immigration would actually make it harder on known terrorists entering illegally, by eliminating the camouflage of other people crossing the desert for them to hide in.  And besides, every plan I have ever seen of late involves a wall along the Mexican border, but nothing along the Canadian border.  A terrorist can sneak over either just as easily, so a plan that was really aimed at terrorism would be putting walls on both borders.

I am sympathetic to the argument that you can't provide full government handouts, err, benefits to everyone who shows up at the border.  So fix the eligibility rules on government benefits, as I suggested in my plan here.

So lets be honest.  If you want border security, lets not pretend that a wall along the Mexican border  is about terrorism or security.  Its about stopping people who were not born in this country from working here.  Though I am opposed to the efforts, it is actually kind of refreshing to see nativist groups going after day labor centers.  This at least represents an honest and open statement of their intentions, that they want to prevent a certain class of people from getting work.

Update: Kerry Howley at Reason has some similar thoughts

I sense I am in the minority on this (what's new) but I just don't understand the outrage directed at the decision to let Muhammad Khatemi into the US for some speaking engagements.  I guess I am enjoying the spectacle, though, of conservatives attacking McCain-Feingold for limiting free speech and then attacking the state department for letting a former head of state (albeit a fairly crazy one) into the country to, uh, speak.

The letter says that allowing
Mr. Khatemi to visit America "undermines U.S. national security
interests with respect to Iran and the broader Middle East." It also
says permitting Mr. Khatemi's "unrestricted travel through the United
States runs contrary to U.S. priorities regarding homeland security."

Taking the first part of this objection, I suppose they are arguing that granting this person a visa is somehow a reward, and we don't want to reward Iran.  Now, I will confess that Iran sucks, but I don't get how this rewards them or sets back our cause.  Yes, if he was received in the White House or by a prominent government official, I can understand it, and I would oppose doing so.  Besides, when our former head of state Jimmy Carter goes to other countries, the trips always seem to have the opposite effect that people fear here, as he tends to hurt rather than somehow advance his home country's interests every time.

As to the second part, I could understand it if someone had a legitimate concern that this was a terrorist leader and he would be spending his time visiting and organizing terrorist cells, but I have not seen anyone make that claim.  Besides, if I was in the FBI, I would love it if he was here to do that, and would follow him all over the place.  The CIA and FBI often leave known agents in place, because it is much easier to stay on top of the person you know about than the person you don't.  A high profile visit by Khatemi should be the least of our security concerns.

This just strikes me as one of those silly political loyalty tests that Democrats seem to like to conduct on domestic policy and Republicans conduct on foreign policy.  If you let this guy in, you are branded as a supporter of terrorism and fascism and whatever else. 

As I said just two days ago:

I am constantly irritated by efforts to ban a certain speaker from
speaking or to drown out their message with taunts and chanting.  If
you think someone is advocating something so terrible - let him talk.
If you are right in your judgment, their speech will likely rally
people to your side in opposition.  As I like to tell students who want
to ban speakers from campus -- Hitler told everyone exactly what he was
going to do if people had bothered to pay attention.

By the way, in explanation of the title of this post, I was reacting to something quoted from Rick Santorum.  Now, I often hesitate to react to comments by Santorum, because, like Howard Dean and a few others, he is sort of a human walking straw man.  But here goes:

On it, Mr. Santorum, who
has cut his deficit against his Senate challenger in Pennsylvania to
single digits, wrote that he should be granted a visa only if Iran
allows their people to hear "free American voices."

Mr. Santorum wrote: "We should insist, at a minimum, that the
Iranian people can hear free American voices. Iran is frightened of
freedom. They are jamming our radio and television broadcasts and
tearing down television satellite dishes in all the major cities of the
country. It seems only fair that we be able to speak to the Iranians
suffering under a regime of which Muhammad Khatemi is an integral part."

So now are we going to allow people free speech only if their country does so in a bilateral manner?  All you Americans of North Korean, Chinese, Iranian, Saudi Arabian, Venezuelan, etc. decent, Beware!   This logic betrays a theory of government that rights don't extend from the fact of our existence, but are concessions granted by the government.  By this logic, people have free speech only as long as the government allows it, and the government has the right to trade away an individual's free speech as a part of a negotiation.