The Middle East trap?
In POLITICO’s Arena, some discussion of my Middle East story today: Aaron David Miller writes that "Barack Obama was dealt a bad-to-middling hand on Arab-Israeli peace by his predecessor [and] proceeded to make it worse," while Yousef Munayyer writes that my piece was a work of "Israeli propaganda."
A Recession-Driven Speed Trap in Falls Church?
(Ilya Somin)
Economic studies show that local governments often step up enforcement of minor traffic offenses during recessions in order to increase revenue. I seem to have been the victim of this kind of recession-driven revenue-mongering by the authorities in Falls Church, Virginia.
Twice during the past year, I have been ticketed for driving over the 25 MPH speed limit on Leesburg Pike (Route 7) near downtown Falls Church, Virginia. Both times, the officers claimed I was going over 40 MPH, even though there was heavy traffic and it would have been physically impossible for me to have gone that fast without hitting the car ahead of me (which,I didn’t come close to doing). I admit that it is quite possible that I was in fact going over 25 MPH. But this is a busy commercial thoroughfare where nearly all the traffic goes faster than that. As the officer in the second incident admitted to me, “all the cars [he] checked were going over 25 MPH.” Had I chosen to go much slower than the rest of the traffic, I would have endangered both myself and others. That’s why I got nailed in the second incident despite the fact that I knew to be careful in this area after what happened the first time.
During normal times, police generally let minor infringements of the speed limit go because they recognize that it is unrealistic to expect drivers to fully obey the speed limit and because they know that going much slower than the surrounding traffic is dangerous. During a deep recession, however, local governments pressure police to crack down and increase revenue. I suspect that such pressure is particularly likely in areas like Leesburg Pike where much of the traffic is by people who don’t live in the jurisdiction. That way, local governments can fleece drivers who can’t even punish them at the polls for doing so. Such behavior undermines the implicit social contract between police and drivers under which the former focus on motorists who pose a genuine threat to public safety, while the latter can be assured that if they drive safely, minor infractions won’t be punished. The implicit contract is especially vital in an area like this stretch of Route 7, where the posted speed limit is simply unrealistic.
Between 2003 and 2009, I lived in Falls Church and drove down the very same road hundreds of times. I didn’t do anything differently than I have over the last year. Yet I never had any problems with traffic police. Since leaving Falls Church in August 2009, I have been stopped twice in that location, despite going there far less often (no more than 10–12 times in all). It’s possible that I somehow became a much more reckless driver since the recession began (though social science data suggest that men become more cautious drivers as they pass into their thirties, and I am now 37). But it’s far more likely that it was enforcement that changed rather than me.
I was so angry that I actually contested the first incident in court, notwithstanding folk wisdom suggesting that I was wasting my time. Despite the facts that 1) the officer admitted that she misidentified the color of my Mazda 3, 2) both I and and my then-fiancee (who was with me in the car at the time) testified to the nature of the traffic, which made it impossible to drive 40 MPH, 3) the officer didn’t contest our testimony, and 4) the Mazda 3 is a very common car, the judge ruled against me. I don’t claim that these facts definitively prove that I was innocent. As I said, I don’t know for sure exactly how fast I was going. But they should surely have been enough to prove reasonable doubt, the standard of proof the judge was supposed to be applying.
I’m not an expert on traffic judges. But I suspect that people in that position tend to be biased in favor of the authorities, partly for the understandable reason that the police are usually right, and partly because local governments lobby for the selection of judges who will serve their revenue-raising interests. The driving public, by contrast, pays little attention to traffic courts because of rational ignorance. Moreover, even a completely unbiased judge can’t do much to protect drivers in cases where the driver really did exceed the speed limit, but in a way that should not have been punished. For these reasons, the judiciary may not be a very effective check against this kind of abuse.
I don’t have the expertise to propose any definitive solutions to this problem. But a few tentative thoughts occur. One possible option is to adopt speed limit laws under which speed limits automatically go up by, say, 5 MPH during a recession. That could offset the tendency towards overenforcement during such periods. Another option is to impose more rigorous state government control over speed limits in areas that get a great deal of traffic from outside the local jurisdiction. That might curb the ability of local governments to use speed traps to fleece out of towners.
Hopefully, those more expert in this field than I am can suggest more and better reforms than I can. In the meantime, I’m going to avoid driving near downtown Falls Church as much as possible. If you live in northern Virginia, you might want to do the same.
The GOP Trap
Tomorrow, the people will have spoken. GOP members disregard the message at their own peril.
American Thinker Blog
Obama’s Excruciating Trap On Civil Rights
Irony of ironies: the Log Cabin Republicans have beaten Barack Obama in trying to end the ban on openly gay members of the military. The ruling, of course, is almost certainly going to be appealed by the Justice Department, and, I'd wager, a stay granted. This is a bit of hyperbole from LCR's lawyer, but not far off either:
"Don't ask, don't tell, as of today at least, is done, and the government is going to have to do something now to resurrect it. This is an extremely significant, historic decision. Once and for all, this failed policy is stopped. Fortunately now we hope all Americans who wish to serve their country can."
So once again, we will have the political prospect of the Obama administration simultaneously legally defending the Defense of Marriage Act and Don't Ask, Don't Tell in court, while politically saying they oppose both. There is a case for such a position, and Obama's insistence on orderly executive defenses of laws passed by Congress is constitutionally sound. But in the arc of history and morality it is an increasingly perverse and bizarre one. It could also mean disaster for gay servicemembers.
Here's the thing. We have no guarantee that the Senate will pass legislative repeal of DADT in this session; and there's every chance that a radically Christianist GOP will win majorities in one or both Houses and definitely be able to sustain a filibuster against repeal in the next session if necessary. This is not because even most Republican voters back DADT; it is because it is a party hijacked by religious fundamentalists who cannot conceive of openly gay people serving their country. Look at the party of Paladino and DeMint and Palin. You think they will support anything that could remotely be deemed pro-gay?
In the long run, this will hurt the GOP - and watching the Log Cabin Republicans fight this battle is heartening. But in the short run, it could very well mean that this awful policy, opposed by 75 percent of the country, that imposes intolerable burdens on servicemembers risking their lives for us … could be in place for the indefinite future. And Obama will be the commander-in-chief enforcing it.
Yes, the GOP is the main party to blame. But no, this does not excuse the extra-cautious, gays-are-radioactive mindset of the Obama administration. This ruling therefore represents a chance for the president. He has the executive authority simply to issue a stop-loss order to end the firing of gay troops until further notice. If the Senate does not pass legislative repeal this session, he should use it.
These men and women are putting their lives at risk for us. Every day we wait, they are victimized and stigmatized. It is immoral, wrong, and damaging to national security. And if Obama thinks gay voters and our families are going to be happy when he ends his first term with nothing accomplished except the lifting of the HIV ban (backed by Bush) and a hate crimes bill that has so far had zero prosecutions, he is mistaken.
Or perhaps it is better put this way: if this president cannot take a stand on civil rights when it is supported by three quarters of the public, when will he?
The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan
Lured Into a Trap, Then Tortured for Being Gay
That’s the headline from a story on the front page of the NYTimes this morning. So graphic it’s hard to read, we’re moving closer to calling hate what it is: HATE.
He showed up last Sunday night as instructed, with plenty of cans of malt liquor. What he walked into was not a party at all, but a night of torture — he was sodomized, burned and whipped.
All punishment, the police said Friday, for being gay.
There were nine attackers, ranging from 16 to 23 years old and calling themselves the Latin King Goonies, the police said. Before setting upon their 30-year-old victim, they had snatched up two teenage boys whom they beat, the police said — until the boys — one of whom was sodomized with a plunger — admitted to having had sex with the man.
The attackers forced the man to strip to his underwear and tied him to a chair, the police said. One of the teenage victims was still there, and the “Goonies” ordered him to attack the man. The teenager hit him in the face and burned him with a cigarette on his nipple and penis as the others jeered and shouted gay slurs, the police said. Then the attackers whipped the man with a chain and sodomized him with a small baseball bat.
The beatings and robberies went on for hours.
The victims didn’t come forward “fearing reprisal and wanting to keep their lives a secret.”
The bailout trap
One more interesting bit from Scheiber’s profile, on the paradoxical politics of the bailout:
Just before the larger meeting [in December, '08], Axelrod had huddled with the incoming economic team, including Romer and Austan Goolsbee, another senior aide, to hear their prognosis. The political team had polled the public’s knowledge of the crisis, and after the economists brought him up to speed, Axelrod lamented how little the average voter grasped its seriousness. “The world hasn’t had a holy sh** moment, where they say, ‘Holy sh**, we have to do something,’” he said, according to Goolsbee.
If you want to understand the overwhelming source of Obama’s political troubles, you can trace it back to this problem. The Bush and Obama administrations (and the Fed) stopped the spiral into depression. But the ordering of events most people observed—first the government intervened, then unemployment reached 26-year highs—made the response look like it had either failed or exacerbated the problem.
That Axelrod would home in on this from the outset—he told the president-elect after the meeting that his numbers would be in the toilet in twelve to 18 months and “all of us who were geniuses are going to be idiots”—is a testament to his legendary fatalism.
The College Debt Trap
After giving a talk on "the higher education bubble," Glenn Reynolds writes:
The government decides to try to increase the middle class by subsidizing things that middle class people have: If middle-class people go to college and own homes, then surely if more people go to college and own homes, we’ll have more middle-class people. But homeownership and college aren’t causes of middle-class status, they’re markers for possessing the kinds of traits — self-discipline, the ability to defer gratification, etc. — that let you enter, and stay, in the middle class. Subsidizing the markers doesn’t produce the traits; if anything, it undermines them.
There is much truth to this, though the GI Bill is an obvious counterexample – most beneficiaries proved their self-discipline and ability to defer gratification far more than your average entering freshmen from the upper class, and many of these former soldiers were helped into the middle class by the government help. Megan says the problem is subsidy in the form of loans:
In the past, college degrees conferred higher incomes on those who earned them. But almost all of that surplus went to the student rather than the college, because aside from a small number of extremely affluent families, the students were young and did not have that much cash. If colleges wanted to expand their market, college tuition was constrained to what an average student, or their family, could pay.
Introducing subsidized loans into the picture allowed students to monetize that future income now. It's hardly surprising that colleges began to claim more and more of the surplus created by their college degree. Think about it this way: if colleges create an extra million in lifetime salary, you're theoretically better off if you pay them the discounted present value of $ 999,999 in order to earn that extra million.
Glenn Reynolds - Education - Higher education - Colleges and Universities - Academic degree
The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan
Hamas paranoia: Egypt opened Rafah to “trap” Hamas officials
I’ve mentioned the recent detention of a Hamas security chief in Egypt (auto-translated as Mohamed Debabeche.)
Now Hamas says that it was all a trap:
Hamas accused Cairo Tuesday of using the Rafah crossing’s opening to detain party officials as they travel abroad via Egypt following the detention of the Gaza government’s intelligence chief in Cairo.
Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum told reporters that opening the border to trap Hamas officials was “unacceptable and inappropriate,” following the detention of General Security Service Commander Muhammad Dabaeesh, also known as Abu Radwan, at the Cairo International Airport.
Egypt’s move seems to have been as a way to pressure Hamas to hand over the person who shot and killed an Egyptian policeman during the Viva Palestina protests last December, as Dabaeesh is the killer’s boss.
Time Editor to Obama: Don’t Go to Church! It’s a ‘Piety Trap’!
Time executive editor Nancy Gibbs, the writer of many ridiculously gooey leg-thrill sentences about Democratic politicians, is now begging President Obama to avoid going to church — it’s "The Piety Trap." Her headline continues: "Sure, we want to know what a president believes in…but that doesn’t always mean he should tell us." Obama is much more likely to end up in a sand trap than a piety trap on Sundays, but Gibbs doesn’t want him to go to church anyway: Many a pundit has predicted that we are sure to see the Obamas attending some nice, safe church one day soon, the girls in their Sunday best, Obama with a big Bill Clinton Bible under his arm or explaining what Glenn Beck calls Obama’s "version of Christianity." I devoutly hope the President resists this advice or, if he feels the call to worship, that he finds a way to do it that meets his private needs rather than his political ones.
He invited his exhausted audience to take a holiday from Lewinsky and spend a refreshing hour and 12 minutes feeling like a country again. For once the talk on the screen was not of oral sex, but of our lives and fortunes and sacred happiness. He had become all human nature, the best and the worst, standing there naked in a sharp, dark suit, behind the TelePrompTer. That which does not kill him only makes him stronger, and his poll numbers went through the roof….That may have been a miracle, but it was no accident: Americans are less puritanical and more forgiving than the cartoon version suggests, and this President is never better than in his worst moments." — Time magazine Senior Editor Nancy Gibbs, February 9, 1998 issue.
Gibbs clearly doesn’t like her presidents to be overtly religious. She declared "We’ve seen what happens when it serves a president’s interest to flaunt his faith — which is almost inevitably does, since every poll affirms that Americans want their leader to submit to some higher power." So what happens? She never elaborated. She lamented "Religious tests, a constitutional taboo, are a political tradition."
Her liberal hero, naturally, is John F. Kennedy, who declared in 1960 that he came to Protestant pastors to talk about "now what kind of church I believe in , for that should be important only to me — but what kind of America I believe in." She insisted "That was an America where church and state were absolutely separate and priests and preachers did not tell parishioners how to vote."
Clearly, Gibbs doesn’t really mean that progressive Reverends like Jesse Jackson (or even Reverend Wright) can’t tell their parishioners how to vote. She simply doesn’t like it when priests and preachers tell parishioners not to vote straight-ticket Democrat, like most well-coached Time magazine staffers.
NewsBusters.org - Exposing Liberal Media Bias
Beware falling into the ‘Demonization’ trap
Factual analysis and reasonable criticism beats name calling every time.
American Thinker Blog
