Tag: posts

The latest rampage by rageaholic – and ultra-talented, btw –
actor Alec Baldwin is on display at TMZ.com (click above to watch).
After winning a case against a stalker,
Baldwin saw fit to scream at and threaten a shutterbug on the
streets of New York.

During the episode, Baldwin refers to the photographer as a
“cocksucking fag,” an insult that calls to mind a previous incident
in which the 30 Rock alum and current MSNBC host
threatened to foot-fuck a “toxic little queen” and “a toxic
little bitch” who had libeled his wife.

While giving no quarter to what he sees as invasive
photographers, Baldwin has checked in with advisers and
concludes

This tweet came just hours after Baldwin had tweeted
“Anti-gay
slurs are wrong. They not only offend, but threaten hard fought
tolerance of LGBT rights.”

And not long after Baldwin had tweeted (and duly deleted) this
slag on “libertarian trash” who defend gays:

I can’t speak for the Breitbart crowd (though Andrew Breitbart
was certainly a staunch supporter of gay
equality) but the “libertarian trash” at Reason has been
defending gay rights since the magazine’s earliest days in the late
1960s. In fact, when mainstream liberal and conservative
publications were still arguing over whether homosexuality should
be decriminalized, we were already talking about marriage equality.
If the state is going to involve itself in marriage (and it
shouldn’t) among consenting adults, it should not draw invidious
distinctions and treat some people as second-class citizens.

I’d like to think that Alec Baldwin can understand that about
“libertarian trash.” But if his now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t
Twitter feed is any indication, he’s already on to more important
topics, such as conflating “single-bullet theorists” with
minimum-wage flat-earthers:

The latest rampage by rageaholic – and ultra-talented, btw –
actor Alec Baldwin is on display at TMZ.com (click above to watch).
After winning a case against a stalker,
Baldwin saw fit to scream at and threaten a shutterbug on the
streets of New York.

During the episode, Baldwin refers to the photographer as a
“cocksucking fag,” an insult that calls to mind a previous incident
in which the 30 Rock alum and current MSNBC host
threatened to foot-fuck a “toxic little queen” and “a toxic
little bitch” who had libeled his wife.

While giving no quarter to what he sees as invasive
photographers, Baldwin has checked in with advisers and
concludes

This tweet came just hours after Baldwin had tweeted
“Anti-gay
slurs are wrong. They not only offend, but threaten hard fought
tolerance of LGBT rights.”

And not long after Baldwin had tweeted (and duly deleted) this
slag on “libertarian trash” who defend gays:

I can’t speak for the Breitbart crowd (though Andrew Breitbart
was certainly a staunch supporter of gay
equality) but the “libertarian trash” at Reason has been
defending gay rights since the magazine’s earliest days in the late
1960s. In fact, when mainstream liberal and conservative
publications were still arguing over whether homosexuality should
be decriminalized, we were already talking about marriage equality.
If the state is going to involve itself in marriage (and it
shouldn’t) among consenting adults, it should not draw invidious
distinctions and treat some people as second-class citizens.

I’d like to think that Alec Baldwin can understand that about
“libertarian trash.” But if his now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t
Twitter feed is any indication, he’s already on to more important
topics, such as conflating “single-bullet theorists” with
minimum-wage flat-earthers:

• A group of House Republicans introduced a
  resolution to impeach Attorney General Eric Holder. They cited
  scandals such as the “Fast and Furious” gun running operation as
  proof of “high crimes and misdemeanors.”
• FBI Director Jim Comey testified yesterday that the US is
  more vulnerable
  to cyberattacks than terrorists groups like Al Qaeda.
  Don’t worry, though, he assured that law enforcement and national
  intelligence are shifting their focus to the web to keep us
  safe.
• Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) says that she
  lost her health insurance because of Obamacare and that she
  refuses to use the exchange website until it’s fixed.
• The House votes today on a GOP-backed bill to allow insurance
  companies to continue to
  offer their existing plans under Obamacare.
• Alleged crack-smoking Toronto Mayor Rob Ford is apparently
  
  getting his own television show. 
• Norway will
  promote new legislation to “regulate ritual circumcision,” the
  country’s health minister said.

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Bruce Dern gives a brave and unfaltering
performance in Nebraska, the new movie by Alexander
Payne, according to Kurt Loder. Dern has already won the best-actor
award at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, and now his portrayal of
an old man sinking into the confusion of senile dementia is being
touted for an Oscar. This possibility has a sentimental attraction.
On the other hand, Charlie Countryman isn’t a bad
movie; in Loder’s opinion, it’s a movie of jaw-dropping
awfulness.

View this article.

My latest column for
The Daily Beast looks at pot legalization developments in
Colorado and Washington state. Voters in both places overwhelmingly
approved recreational use of marijuana last year. In January, both
states will implement insanely high taxes on weed and, in Colorado
at least, all manner of bans on which counties and cities can sell
pot.

The spirit behind the legalization efforts in both states was
that marijuana should be treated in a “manner similar
to alcohol.”

Unfortunately, it’s starting to look like both states are going
to treat pot in a manner similar to alcohol during
Prohibition. Not only are pot taxes likely to be sky high,
various sorts of restrictions on pot shops may well make it easier
to buy, sell, and use black-market marijuana rather than the legal
variety. That’s a bummer all around: States and municipalities will
collect less revenue than expected, law-abiding residents will
effectively be denied access to pot, and the crime, corruption, and
violence that inevitably surrounds black markets will continue
apace.

Read the whole thing.

Miami Township, Ohio, has agreed to pay
$100,000 to settle a lawsuit brought by the family of a 17-year-old
girl who was forced to strip naked then hosed
down by former deputy police chief John DiPietro. He did
this ostensibly to decontaminate her after she was pepper-sprayed.
DiPietro also photographed a tattoo on the girl’s back and sent it
to a friend, but he insisted she was not naked when he did
that.

The most inevitable thing about politics is that
not a fucking thing is inevitable. At the moment, that’s
undoubtedly true of the Democratic Party’s much ballyhooed grip on
America-to-come—enabled more by the Republican Party’s loving
embrace of repulsive officials and policies than by its own
efforts, but what the hell. Just last year, Nate Silver told us
that
President Obama had a lock on Silicon Valley checkbooks, and
only weeks ago, USA Today predicted that
young voters promised to turn Virginia into a donkey party
province. And in such a short time, without any assistance from the
largely self-sabotaging major opposition party, the Democrats have
managed to piss off both constituencies. The future may well be
democratic, but it’s looking less certainly Democratic by the
day.

Writes Dana Liebelson at
The Week:

In the months leading up to the 2012 presidential election,
Silicon Valley was squarely in President Obama’s corner.

Google’s executive chairman coached Obama’s campaign team;
executives from Craigslist, Napster, and Linkedin helped him
fundraise; and when the dust settled, Obama had won nine counties
in the liberal and tech-heavy Bay Area, scoring 84 percent of the
vote in San Francisco. But a little over a year later, following
explosive allegations from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden
that the government is exploiting tech companies to spy on
Americans, some members of Silicon Valley are taking a new
perspective: “F— these guys.”

That’s what Brandon Downey, a security engineer with Google,
wrote late last month, upon learning that the NSA had broken into
Google and Yahoo and was exploiting the data of millions of users,
allegedly without the companies’ knowledge. He added, “We suspected
this was happening, [but] it still makes me terribly sad. It makes
me sad because I believe in America…The U.S. has to be better
than this.”

Likewise, while the Democrats’ Terry McAuliffe did win the
Virginia gubernatorial election, he did so by a narrower margin
than expected. Importantly, he did it without the youngest
voters. According to
exit polling, voters between the ages of 18 and 24 went 45
percent for Republican Ken Cuccinelli, 39 percent for McAuliffe,
and 15 percent for Libertarian Robert Sarvis.

The why of the transformation from a predicted Democratic lock
on the youth vote to a Republican plurality among the youngest is
unclear, but the College Republican National Committee
ran ads in Virginia comparing McAuliffe to an online scammer
and playing up disappointment with Democratic promises.

In the year of
Obamacare, NSA spying revelations, DOJ investigation of
journalists, politicized IRS treatment of nonprofits, ad nauseum,
it’s not too surprising that young Americans have
lost that shiny, happy feeling about the guy in the White House and
his playmates.

Likewise, Silicon Valley techies concerned about civil liberties
and an open society are very clearly shocked to discover that the
politicians who whispered sweet nothings in their ears
meant…nothing.

“There’s a strong libertarian streak that dampens support for
the Obama administration… Entrepreneurs don’t like the government
telling them what they can or can’t do with their bodies or their
wallets,” Craig Montuori, a politically active Caltech aerospace
engineer, told The Week. If that’s what you’re looking
for, you’re not seeing it in the party that controls the White
House and the Senate—now or ten years ago, for that matter.

And it’s not just local. The Democrats, overall, have
lost their edge in congressional polling.

Just as the incursions, arrogance, and presumptions of the Bush
years really didn’t mean, as we’re discovering, an inevitably
Democratic future, the failures and abuses of the Obama years don’t
necessarily hand the ball back to the GOP. Both major political
parties have demonstrated an unerring ability to replicate and even
surpass their opponents’ flaws.

Maybe something about politics is inevitable, after all:
crushing disappointment for those who place their faith in the
creatures who inhabit government.

The most inevitable thing about politics is that
not a fucking thing is inevitable. At the moment, that’s
undoubtedly true of the Democratic Party’s much ballyhooed grip on
America-to-come—enabled more by the Republican Party’s loving
embrace of repulsive officials and policies than by its own
efforts, but what the hell. Just last year, Nate Silver told us
that
President Obama had a lock on Silicon Valley checkbooks, and
only weeks ago, USA Today predicted that
young voters promised to turn Virginia into a donkey party
province. And in such a short time, without any assistance from the
largely self-sabotaging major opposition party, the Democrats have
managed to piss off both constituencies. The future may well be
democratic, but it’s looking less certainly Democratic by the
day.

Writes Dana Liebelson at
The Week:

In the months leading up to the 2012 presidential election,
Silicon Valley was squarely in President Obama’s corner.

Google’s executive chairman coached Obama’s campaign team;
executives from Craigslist, Napster, and Linkedin helped him
fundraise; and when the dust settled, Obama had won nine counties
in the liberal and tech-heavy Bay Area, scoring 84 percent of the
vote in San Francisco. But a little over a year later, following
explosive allegations from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden
that the government is exploiting tech companies to spy on
Americans, some members of Silicon Valley are taking a new
perspective: “F— these guys.”

That’s what Brandon Downey, a security engineer with Google,
wrote late last month, upon learning that the NSA had broken into
Google and Yahoo and was exploiting the data of millions of users,
allegedly without the companies’ knowledge. He added, “We suspected
this was happening, [but] it still makes me terribly sad. It makes
me sad because I believe in America…The U.S. has to be better
than this.”

Likewise, while the Democrats’ Terry McAuliffe did win the
Virginia gubernatorial election, he did so by a narrower margin
than expected. Importantly, he did it without the youngest
voters. According to
exit polling, voters between the ages of 18 and 24 went 45
percent for Republican Ken Cuccinelli, 39 percent for McAuliffe,
and 15 percent for Libertarian Robert Sarvis.

The why of the transformation from a predicted Democratic lock
on the youth vote to a Republican plurality among the youngest is
unclear, but the College Republican National Committee
ran ads in Virginia comparing McAuliffe to an online scammer
and playing up disappointment with Democratic promises.

In the year of
Obamacare, NSA spying revelations, DOJ investigation of
journalists, politicized IRS treatment of nonprofits, ad nauseum,
it’s not too surprising that young Americans have
lost that shiny, happy feeling about the guy in the White House and
his playmates.

Likewise, Silicon Valley techies concerned about civil liberties
and an open society are very clearly shocked to discover that the
politicians who whispered sweet nothings in their ears
meant…nothing.

“There’s a strong libertarian streak that dampens support for
the Obama administration… Entrepreneurs don’t like the government
telling them what they can or can’t do with their bodies or their
wallets,” Craig Montuori, a politically active Caltech aerospace
engineer, told The Week. If that’s what you’re looking
for, you’re not seeing it in the party that controls the White
House and the Senate—now or ten years ago, for that matter.

And it’s not just local. The Democrats, overall, have
lost their edge in congressional polling.

Just as the incursions, arrogance, and presumptions of the Bush
years really didn’t mean, as we’re discovering, an inevitably
Democratic future, the failures and abuses of the Obama years don’t
necessarily hand the ball back to the GOP. Both major political
parties have demonstrated an unerring ability to replicate and even
surpass their opponents’ flaws.

Maybe something about politics is inevitable, after all:
crushing disappointment for those who place their faith in the
creatures who inhabit government.

Tonight’s episode of John Stossel’s eponymous Fox Business show
is called “The Rise of the Libertarians.”

Matt Welch and I appear on the program to discuss the themes we
outlined in our book
The Declaration of Independents and to talk about all the
recent developments that argue for what we’ve called “the
Libertarian Moment” and even “the
Libertarian Era.”

Other guests include Penn Jillette, members of Students for
Liberty, and former Rep. Ron Paul.

Follow the show on Twitter at the hashtag #TheRise.

Stossel airs tonight at 9pm ET. Go here
for more information on the show.

Stossel’s syndicated column appears every Wednesday at
Reason.com.
Read the latest here and check out his archive
here.