digamma.net - notes

Radley Balko observes that while governments like watching us, they don’t much like us videotaping them.

Surveillance, both private and public, has never bothered me much. If you do something in public, you should expect to be seen. If it’s not a chilling invasion of privacy for a cop to watch you do something from her car and file a report of it, it isn’t that chilling for her to watch it on a TV screen and record it.

That said, I think I favor an absolute right to videotape any event in a public place. If abortion is hidden in the fourth and ninth amendments, surely recording police actions is in the first. I’ll make an exception if military secrets are somehow threatened, but otherwise, if it happens outside, I can put it on tape, no matter how bad it embarasses you.

As I read the comments to Kevin Drum’s post on originalism, the reasonable leftist arguments go something like this:

The fallacy of originalism is that the framers weren’t originalists. The framers deliberately used vague, undefined phrases like “cruel and unusual punishment” or “due process of law” in the expectation that application of those phrases would be worked out over time, as particular circumstances arose.

Well, I have no problem with that. The problem is that they never stop there.

Once you allow that kind of interpretation in the front door, they bring all their crazy friends in through the back. Does “Congress shall pass no law” really mean that, or does it mean “Congress shall pass no law except when it’s a REALLY good idea"? “Well-regulated militia” means “nothing to see here, move along.” “Commerce among the states” means, well, everything.

Vaguely-worded portions of the Constitution should be open to interpretation. Clearly-worded portions should not. Otherwise we’ve got, as Dahlia Lithwick writes, “judges swinging like monkeys from the constitutional chandeliers, making up whatever they want, whenever they want.”

Sweet sassy molassy.

So Merck is paying $259 million because a guy died, and the jury couldn’t understand that there’s no evidence that Vioxx could have caused it.

Merck argued that Vioxx couldn’t have caused Mr. Ernst’s death because, according to his death certificate, he died of an arrhythmia or irregular heartbeat, not a heart attack. While scientific evidence suggests Vioxx can promote blood clots leading to a heart attack, no data have linked the drug with arrhythmias.

Jurors who voted against Merck said much of the science sailed right over their heads. “Whenever Merck was up there, it was like wah, wah, wah,” said juror John Ostrom, imitating the sounds Charlie Brown’s teacher makes in the television cartoon. “We didn’t know what the heck they were talking about.”

I know some of my leftist readers think this isn’t a problem because Merck is an evil corporation. But if this logic holds up in court to convict an evil corporation, there is no reason why it can’t be used against an individual.

You’ve got an alibi? Wah wah wah. DNA exonerates you? Wah wah wah. Your rights were violated? Wah wah wah.

Go to jail, egghead.

Matthew Yglesias on the Iraq war:

It’s a distinctively liberal error to think “massive, flawlessly executed government-sponsored venture” is a real option to be put aside “don’t do it” and “do it but make some mistakes.” Mistakes, when made, should of course be criticized, but on side level some mistakes are inevitable. If your plan depends on the absence of errors, then you’ve got a bad plan.

Other distinctively liberal errors:

• Accusing people who oppose your government-sponsored venture of opposing its goals, particularly goals that might benefit children.
• Insisting that your government-sponsored venture is succeeding, and that information showing otherwise is mere propaganda.
• Blaming your government-sponsored venture’s failures entirely on its your opponents’ failure to support it.

Discussing Iraq with a Republican is a lot like discussing Philadelphia’s public schools with a Democrat.

Radley Balko thinks that Your Flag Decal Won’t Get You Into Heaven Anymore is “as appropriate, wry, and incisive today as it was in 1971.”

I don’t disagree, but lately I’ve been having a lot of trouble believing that Fortunate Son was written before the year 2003.

Some folks inherit star spangled eyes
Ooh, they send you down to war
And when you ask them, “How much should we give?”
Ooh, they only answer More! more! more!

I don’t know why I keep reading The Agitator - sure it’s a great blog, but it always leaves me pissed off and frustrated.

The latest outrage is the arrest of Marc Emery. The arrest was ostensibly for selling marijuana seeds by mail from Canada to the US.

But look how DEA head Karen Tandy describes Emery:

Today’s arrest of Mark (sic) Scott Emery, publisher of Cannabis Culture magazine and the founder of a marijuana legalization group, is a significant blow not only to the marijuana trafficking trade in the U.S. and Canada, but also to the marijuana legalization movement.

Huh. You’d think she’d refer to him as a DEALER, since that’s what he was arrested for, and not as a publisher and activist. Unless he wasn’t really arrested for being a dealer. But arresting a man for publishing and activism would be unconstitutional!

I assume Tandy is most proud that Emery has been stopped from shipping the demon weed into the US, right?

Hundreds of thousands of dollars of Emery’s illicit profits are known to have been channeled to marijuana legalization groups active in the United States and Canada. Drug legalization lobbyists now have one less pot of money to rely on.

Huh. I thought the job of the DEA was stopping the drug trade, not stopping people from speaking out in disagreement with them. In fact, I thought the Constitution said a little something about that exact subject.

You know how the Republican bloggers like to equate opposition to the Iraq war with treason and suggest that perhaps such speech shouldn’t be legal? The drug warriors are way, way ahead of them.

Also, the DEA apparently thinks Canada is a subset of Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.

And with that, Radley Balko has ruined another day for me.

Matthew Yglesias ponders:

The operative question on the table is, how can we get to better highway spending? Simply hoping members of Congress wake up one day and decide to put the national interest over their parochial interests isn’t much of a plan. What’s needed is some kind of centralizing, rationalizing procedural reform.

I’ve got your centralizing rationalizing procedural reform right here.

Make drivers pay for the roads they use. Charge tolls that reflect the supply and demand for a given road at a given hour. The Major Deegan Expressway before a Yankees game should cost more than I-91 in Vermont at midnight, but they have the exact same toll - $0.00. That’s insane.

New roads will be built in areas where road supply exceeds demand to the point that there’s money to be made doing it. Our “highways to nowhere” in Alaska and Pennsylvania that only exist because of powerful Congressmen will fall on hard times, and it may be more profitable to tear them up and use the land for something else.

Not that our current Congress would ever dream of any of this….

I don’t understand why everyone is abuzz about Bob Novak’s supposed “meltdown” on CNN last night. I watched the video, and although he said a Word of Curse, he didn’t seem terribly agitated.

What happened immediately afterward is, most likely, that a producer told him in his earpiece to get off the stage. Carville and the host continued as if nothing happened, which they wouldn’t have done without instructions.

So what we have here is that a guy accidentally dropped the word “bullshit” into a context where it was inappropriate. As a frequent user of the word, I can imagine doing the same thing. Can’t you?

For a long time, I’ve advocated a simple rule to reduce Congressional pork: no federally-funded program or facility shall be named after a sitting Congressman, President, or cabinet member. All these Robert Byrd Highways are too reminiscent of ancient Roman politicians who built shrines to themselves.

Today, via The Agitator, I see that we have a new offender: Representative Don Young (R - Alaska), benefactor of the new Alaskan bridge Don Young’s Way.

I’m glad the era of big government is over.

Is this picture scary or is it just me?

Into what slavery ring is that poor girl being sold?