Category: reason

 

ReasonTV has been reporting on immigration issues since Drew
Carey first came to reason in 2007. Our YouTube playlist is
above.

So President Obama is going to
defer deportation of five million people without government papers,
mostly parents of children whom the government deems citizens or
legal permanent residents. Under his executive order,
most will get permission to work. Obama will also increase the
number of “dreamers” — children brought here illegally by their
parents and raised in the United States — who will be made safe
from deportation. What’s wrong with this picture? Sheldon Richman
can think of a few things, starting with, why only 5 million?

View this article.

Original post from November 21, 2014:

Ahead of the grand jury decision in Ferguson, Mo., law
enforcement held a press conference detailing how they would
respect the constitutional rights of citizens.

Performed by Justin Monticello. Written and produced by
Monticello and Paul Detrick. Graphics by Will Neff.

Run time: 2:20 minutes.

Subscribe to Reason TV’s YouTube
channel for daily content like this.

View this article.

You may have heard about the
charges that have been brought against rapper Tiny Doo (real
name Brandon Duncan) in San Diego, Calif. Duncan is accused of
promoting murders carried out by a criminal street gang in his
album “No Safety,” which features a picture of a gun and bullets on
the cover. From
the LA Times:

Prosecutors say that shows that Duncan fits the legal definition
of a gang member who “willfully promotes, furthers, or assists in
any felonious criminal conduct by members of that gang.”

Duncan’s lawyer, Brian Watkins, disagrees:

The evidence against Duncan, Watkins said, consists of his rap
album and pictures on a social media page of him and several other
defendants. The latter is not surprising, he said, given the fact
Duncan grew up in San Diego in a neighborhood with gang
members.

Duncan’s album does not encourage violence, Watkins said.

“It’s no different than Snoop Dogg or Tupac,” he said. “It’s
telling the story of street life,” with gritty details and
obscenity-filled language.

Duncan is just the latest rapper to have his music used against
him in a criminal proceeding, a troubling trend that only seems to
be increasing across the country. Reason TV featured the
story of Deandre Mitchell (Rap name is Laz Tha Boy) and the grand
jury proceeding that featured three of his rap videos and no
physical evidence he had committed two acts of attempted murder.
For more watch
Artist or Killer? Why Rap is on Trial.

View this article.

In reason’s
June 1978 financial issue, Charles R. Stahl boldly proclaimed
silver “the superinvestment of the decade ahead.”

Citing both dwindling global reserves and an expected growth in
demand-driven in part by the use of silver in new
technologies-Stahl predicted that there would be a “period of
actual silver shortage” sometime in the early 1980s. Silver-iron
batteries were coming to market, with new uses emerging in the
telecom industry and several possible military applications. Even
silver coins were coming back in fashion. “In the years to come,”
Stahl wrote, “we will probably see a growing need for silver by
current users, and new uses are likely to find worldwide
acceptance.”

With hindsight, it’s clear that Stahl’s recommendation came at
the beginning of a financial bubble. His predictions ought to serve
as a warning for readers considering the advice of financial
commentators bearing bold predictions.

View this article.

Original post from August 17, 2014:

As the protests continue in Ferguson, MO, check out Reason TV’s
on-the-ground coverage from earlier this week. The first video
focuses on protesters in front of the police station and along
Florissant Avenue (where the officer shot Michael Brown) after
Missouri’s governor ordered the Ferguson police to stand down and
assigned security duties to highway patrol.

The 2nd video features protesters reacting to the revelation
that the police department had security footage of Michael Brown
allegedly robbing a convenience store, a fact that the police
officer who shot him was not aware of at the time of the
shooting.

View this article.

There’s a lot
of anger in Montgomery County, Maryland, after the school board
voted to officially remove all religious holidays from the district
calendar. The goal was to placate Muslim families tired of their
kids having to go to school on Muslim holidays while children of
other religions got their holidays off. The end result has been
widespread indignation from people of all religious stripes. But
religion is not the root problem, notes the Cato Institute’s Neal
McCluskey. Public schooling is.

View this article.

Must mayonnaise contain eggs, as FDA regulations
require? Is “mayo” “mayonnaise”?

Concerned sandwich makers everywhere can take comfort in the
fact that these important questions will be answered in a lawsuit
filed late last month by Unilever, maker of Hellman’s, against
Hampton Creek, maker of Just Mayo. The former contains eggs, while
the latter—which contains pea protein—does not, according to Baylen
Linnekin.

At issue are the FDA’s general standards
of identity for various foods and, specifically, the
agency’s standard
of identity for mayonnaise, which requires that any product
labeled as “mayonnaise” must be an “emulsified semisolid food
prepared from vegetable oil(s),” specific “Acidifying ingredients,”
and “Egg yolk-containing ingredients,” and may contain one or more
“Other optional ingredients,” including salt.

Unilever claims that, based on the FDA standard of identity,
egg-less Just Mayo is lying—despite the company’s use of the
non-standard term “mayo”—and that this alleged deceit has harmed
Hellman’s profits. It’s seeking millions
of dollars in damages and wants the judge to bar Just Mayo from
calling itself, well, mayo.

Linnekin interviews Michele Simon, a public health lawyer who’s
been quoted widely for
her extensive
research on the labeling controversy, about the case.

View this article.

Here is
what you get on tonight’s episode of The
Independents (Fox Business Network, 9 p.m. ET, 6 p.m. PT,
repeats three and five hours later):

* Party Panelists Michael Malice (spritely
co-authorist) and Carrie Sheffield
(Forbes
contributor) on President Barack Obama’s
executive immigration orders, on
Jim Webb’s presidential candidacy, and on Jeb Bush’s
fatal attraction to Common Core. The duo will also join myself
and Kmele Foster in taking a Citizenship Quiz at the halfway mark
of the show.

* Former GOP congressman and longshot presidential candidate
Thaddeus McCotter,
who will be talking about his new book
Liberty Risen: The Ultimate Triumph of
Libertarian-Republicans, which is interesting in part
because McCotter doesn’t self-identify as a libertarian, though he
does respect the energy that libertarianism has brought to the
Republican Party of late. Interesting discussion about Andrew
Breitbart, as well.

* Psychedelics researcher Rick Doblin (read about him in Reason
here) on the
long-overdue experimentation of MDMA on veterans suffering from
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

* Hometown
Health CEO
Jimmy Lewis, who will talk about how Obamacare is forcing the
closure of rural hospitals.

* Kmele Foster, who will explain what Jonathan Gruber can teach
us about Net Neutrality and the proposed FCC regulatory takeover of
the Internet.

It is an excellent program of informative content, and will make
you smile on occasion. Follow The Independents on Facebook
at http://ift.tt/QYHXdB,
follow on Twitter @ independentsFBN, hashtag
us at #TheIndependents, and click on this page
for more video of past segments.

Pop-country star Ty Herndon, long rumored
to be gay, finally came out
of the closet this week. Another country singer, Billy Gilman,
almost immediately
followed suit. The double revelation is being hailed as big
pop-culture news, and I suppose it is: There just aren’t many
openly gay musicians in mainstream country music. There’s k.d.
lang, but she left the genre long ago. There’s Chely Wright, of
“Bumper
of My SUV” fame, but honestly, I’d forgotten she existed til I
saw her mentioned in one of the Herndon stories. The
alternative-country world has more than a few gay

performers, of course, but they aren’t really mainstream. And
then there’s that time Willie Nelson
kissed Charlie Pride on the mouth, but that wasn’t really about
sexual attraction, or so they say.

But if the country middle is only barely bi-curious, the country
margins have long had room for queer themes—and no, you don’t have
to go looking for esoteric meanings in the lyrics of “Bareback” or
“Where Is My
Sailor Boy?” to find them. Here’s a brief and far-from-complete
tour.

We’ll start the story with Salty Holmes‘ band
the Prairie Ramblers, which sometimes recorded novelty songs under
a different name, the Sweet Violet Boys. In 1939, wearing their
Sweet Violet hats, they released a catchy sequence of double
entendres called “I Love My Fruit”:

Billy Briggs’ “The Sissy Song,” from 1951, is a lot less
good-natured:

Holmes and Briggs were straight guys going for laughs, but when
Lavender Country released an entire
album of gay country music in 1973, the band was genuinely out
‘n’ proud. (Except the dobro player. He was the token
heterosexual.) They didn’t get much airplay, and the airplay that
they did get didn’t always end happily—when the Seattle
outlet KRAB
played their song “Cryin’ These
Cocksucking Tears,” the FCC slapped the station with a fine.
But the band sounded pretty good, sort of a queer northwestern
version of the Flatlanders:

Lavender Country wasn’t just genuinely gay; it was genuinely
country. More often, if you heard honky-tonk music with gay-themed
lyrics in the 1970s or ’80s, you were listening to interlopers
doing a Nashville pastiche. When Ned Sublette’s “Cowboys Are
Frequently, Secretly Fond of Each Other” came out in 1981, for
example, it appeared on a
poetry record, alongside not-so-country tracks by William
Burroughs, Brion Gysin, and Amiri Baraka:

The lesbian trio Two Nice Girls, similarly, came out of the punk
rock and “woman’s music”
scenes, though they did a pretty good approximation of the Opry
sound when they recorded this in 1989:

By the ’90s and ’00s, the genre had room for gay-focused niche
acts like Doug
Stevens & the Outband and the
CowGirl Sweethearts. A few openly gay country musicians
made bids for
mainstream success, though Nashville wasn’t quite ready for
that yet. And in 2006, Willie Nelson released his own version of
“Cowboys Are Frequently, Secretly Fond of Each Other,” which if
nothing else showed that the margins were becoming mainstream.

Burt Reynolds has a cameo in Nelson’s video. I assume he’s there
because he’s macho in a kind of camp way and because he has that
mustache, but maybe he just happened to be visiting Willie that
day.

Bonus link: “A
collection of links to websites dedicated to gay and lesbian
country western dance events, organizations, dance clubs, and dance
classes.”