So what surprised me in this post by my colleague Jacob Sullum wasn’t brutal methods by which the Chinese have enforced the country’s one-child policy. You sort of suspect that a brutal government would enforce an immoral policy by brutal means. What surprised me is that the likes of Ted Turner (five children), Diane Francis (two children), and Thomas Friedman (two children, and who lives in this house), have had nice things to say about the policy.

I guess I knew some fringe environmentalists favored this sort of thing. Had no idea more mainstream personalities did. I mean, Jesus. What horrible, horrible human beings.

Ta-Nehisi Coates:

…it’s my impression that much of cable news is rigged. Complicated questions are forced into small spaces of time, and guests frequently dissemble in order to score debate points and avoid being intellectually honest. Finally, many of the guests don’t seem to be actual experts in the field of which they’re addressing, so much as they’re “strategists” or “analysts.” I strongly suspect that part of the reason this is the case is talking on TV is, itself, a craft and one that requires a skill-set very different than what is required of academics.  I’m sure many academics themselves share the disdain for the format that I’ve outlined.

I’ve posted on this before. I feel the same way. I have to do cable news because it’s part of my job. But it’s often really frustrating. Especially as a libertarian. We hold positions with which most people aren’t immediately familiar. They’re also a bit more nuanced than, say, responding to any story in the news with racial overtones by noting that Robert Byrd was once in the Ku Klux Klan. A couple of anecdotes I’ve previously written about come to mind. There’s this one:

A couple of years ago, I had a telling IM exchange with an aspiring young conservative pundit. (I like the guy personally, so I’m not going to mention his name.) He had just gone on a cable network and said some things about an issue in the news that were completely wrong. So I sent him some links that showed why he was wrong. He thanked me and replied, “One of the really hard things about being a journalist is going on TV to talk about things you’re not really read up on.”

Well, no. That’s one of the “really hard” things about being a hack. I really loathe this about cable news. They bring in the same personalities to talk what’s going on in the news. It doesn’t matter if those personalities have the slightest idea what they’re talking about. They’re on TV not because they have specialized knowledge about a given story, but because they’re talented at applying standard partisan talking points to a wide variety of issues. And now, Dick Morris will talk about the Federal Reserve. Joining us to explain what the drug war violence in Mexico means to you, here’s Democratic strategist Bob Beckell.  Their job is to tell the portion of the audience that already agrees with them what the audience already thinks it knows. Everyone is stupider for it.

And this one:

So last week I did a very brief segment on a we’ll-keep-it-unnamed cable news network. While I was chatting with the producer on the phone before the show, she read me the copy they were going use to introduce me to be sure it was correct. It was just a little bit off, so I offered a change in wording, suggesting they use the phrase “Nanny State policies” instead of what she had prepared.

Her response was pretty amusing. It’s from memory, so this isn’t an exact quote. But her response went something like this: “Oh no, we don’t use that word. We’ve found that when we use the word policy our viewers lose interest, because they think something boring is coming. So our anchors never use that word, and we try to tell our guests not to use it either.”

I have one more. Several years ago I was booked to go on a past incarnation of Joe Scarborough’s show to talk about blogging. I recall that this was just after some conservative blogs had managed to get another network news person fired (but it wasn’t Dan Rather). My position, which I clearly articulated to the producer in the pre-interview, was that I thought the blogs were being a bit triumphalist about it all. Blogs were an important and emerging voice, but the traditional media was still important, blogs wouldn’t be replacing them anytime soon, and that was a good thing. When I got on the air, Scarborough went through the rest of the panel (I believe my co-panelists were Hugh Hewitt and Ana Marie Cox). When he came to me he said something like, “So Radley Balko, you think blogs are destroying America?”

I was at Cato at the time. I found out later that the producer actually got angry with Cato’s media rep because I didn’t take the more confrontational position that would have made for better TV. There’s no room for nuance on cable news.

And then there’s what you might call the Wendy Murphy Problem, which is that in the world of cable news things move so fast, the soundbites are so short, the news cycle so ephemeral, that you can pretty much get away with just making shit up. Odds are good that no one who knows better has been paying attention long enough to call you on your errors. And as long as you’re interesting, animated, and provocative, producers aren’t going to stop booking you just because you’re, well, wrong a lot. It’s a gig that rewards shamelessness. (See also this very funny story.)

I think Coates is right that serious thinkers shy away from cable news for these reasons. But I also think most producers don’t want academics and actual experts, for the same reasons. As a TV pundit your objective isn’t to educate, or inform, or even to make an educated argument in favor of your position. Your job is to reinforce what the people watching on your side already believe. People don’t watch cable news to be challenged or to learn. They watch it to get the latest talking points that they can use in their next political argument at the bar, over the water cooler, or at the dinner table. Producers know this. The cable news pundit’s comparative advantage, then, isn’t specialized knowledge. It’s the ability to distill any issue in the news into a pithy argument about why red is better than blue, or left is better than right, or how this is just further proof that the ACLU/NRA wants to eat your baby. I don’t get them as often anymore, but for a while a couple of times each month I’d get a request from cable news producer “looking for someone to come on and argue X.” Not, “We’re looking for someone with some expertise in X.” They already knew the argument they wanted to hear. They just needed a warm body to make it.

Like Coates, my favorite media hits are those that give you half hour or more to talk about an issue in-depth. That’s also why I much prefer radio to TV. (On a side note, TV is also much more difficult. I can do radio in my pajamas. Hell, I don’t even have to wear pants. TV is like playing tennis on roller skates while sipping a martini. You have to be aware of your body language, how animated you look, whether or not you’re smiling (and whether or not that’s appropriate), whether you’re rocking or indulging some other nervous tic, if your jacket is riding up your collar, and so on. What you’re actually saying is only one of about a half dozen things you’re thinking about, usually while sitting in a studio by yourself, staring into a bright light, listening through an earpiece to a host you can’t see. TV hits also take a couple hours out of your day for about five minutes of actual on-air time.)

But back to the original point. I’ll continue to do cable news, if only because I think it’s important to get a libertarian perspective out there on the issues I cover. But I turn down way more requests than I  accept. I won’t go on the air to talk about any issue or story I don’t feel I’m qualified to talk about. And given that cable news isn’t particularly interested in the issues I am qualified to talk about (save for Stossel, Napolitano, and Alyona Minkovsky), I don’t end up doing much TV. I’ve also had producers cancel me because it was pretty clear in pre-interviews that I wasn’t going to take the pre-fab position they wanted me to take.

I don’t mean to blow myself up here. I’m probably every bit as narcissistic as Wendy Murphy, Bob Beckel and the other cable news flacks I’ve slagged. I mean, I’m a blogger for God’s sake. Our marrow churns with vanity. If I could go on TV every night to talk about the issues I think are important, I sure as hell would. And a big reason I won’t go on TV to talk about things I’m not qualified to talk about is that I’m afraid I’ll embarrass myself by saying something that’s factually incorrect, an easy thing to do when you’re basing your arguments not on your own research and reporting but on things you’ve read elsewhere . . . or saw on cable news.

It’s really the noise that I loathe—the fact that you can watch an hour of cable news without learning a damn thing. And save for a few exceptions, noise isn’t just a problem for cable news, it is cable news.

• Beautiful photo.
• Are DHS employees trolling the We Won’t Fly blog?
• Stupid Obama criticism of the week.
• The Christian Science Monitor lists notable pardons, clemencies, or possible pardons and clemencies of the past year. Included on the short list: two turkeys, a dead rock star, and a 19th century folk hero.
• Police militarization watch: Check out the last few graphs of this article on police training. That mentality is a huge part of the problem. And they’re drilling it in to cadets right off the bat.

….it’s the day Christian Coalition founder Pat Robertson took a more sensible, pro-personal freedom position on marijuana than 95 percent of the country’s newspaper editorial boards.

Go easy on them. They’re just kids. But man.

I allow a pretty free range of discussion in the comments section. I generally only delete comments that are gratuitously bigoted or gratuitously insulting. That is, if you make an actual point, I’ll let most things stand. I’ve only banned about 20 people in nine years, most for habitual trolling.

All of that said, I won’t tolerate death threats. This site hits public officials pretty hard, I like to think only when it’s merited. Threatening to kill a public official is never merited. It isn’t an argument, and it taints everything we try to do here. Do it on this site and you’ll be banned. Immediately.

Something else: I’m not sticking my neck out for you. When you make a death threat here, you put me in potential legal jeopardy. In most cases, I’d go to jail to protect a source who gives me information that’s important to a story. I won’t do that for you. If you abuse the platform I’ve provided for you by playing Internet tough guy in a way that results in me getting harassed by Johnny Law, I’ll turn over your IP address and any other identifying information I have on you in a heartbeat.* If that makes me a hypocrite or a bad libertarian (and I don’t think it does either), so be it. These are the conditions for you commenting here.

I don’t want to give the impression that this is common. It isn’t. But it has happened twice in the last week. So I want to be sure we’re clear.

(*Note: I’m only talking about actual death threats, here. I’d of course oppose any government attempt to get identifying information for other purposes, though I doubt it would ever happen)

• Tanya Treadway is now trying to prevent Kansas pain doctor Linda Schneider from getting a public defender for her appeal. Remember, Treadway tried to prevent the couple from getting a public defender during their trial, too. The problem is, given that nearly all of their assets are subject to forfeiture, it’s hard to find attorneys willing to take these cases.
• Earmark in new spending bill provides $600,000 to digitize Grateful Dead paraphernalia. Also note that former House Speaker Dennis Hastert gets $440,000 for a private office. More on that scam here.
• Photos of abandoned London.
• Who will benefit from Net Neutrality regs? Lobbyists!
• New Jersey town spends $17,000 defending $5 records fee.
• War on Christmas lands ACLU on Tennessee state agency’s terrorism map.
• Niagara Falls, without water.

Friend of TheAgitator.com Noel St. John (who did that great time-lapse of the D.C. blizzard earlier this year), made another a time lapse composition of last night’s lunar eclipse. Very cool.

I have a piece in Slate today on Assistant U.S. Attorney Tanya Treadway’s use of the grand jury to harass pain patient advocate Siobhan Reynolds.

• So if there’s anything uglier than Haley Barbour’s “Mississippi blacks didn’t have it so bad in the 1960s” comments, it’s this defense of Barbour by National Review‘s Jim Geraghty. Here’s a tip for Geraghty: The main reason people keep bringing up those Citizens Councils is that Barbour keeps praising them.
• The FCC’s threat to Internet Freedom.
• http://whenparentstext.com/
• “Legislation that bears the name of a victim of a particular crime or accident is often bad legislation.”
• Tennessee program funded by 2009 stimulus produced “shoddy work, mismanagement.”
• An evolutionary case for cannibalism.
• A science writer reads the SkyMall catalog.
• The Daily Beast: These four bodies that washed up in Long Island had nothing to do with sex ads on Craigslist. But we’re going to go ahead and make the connection, anyway.

This is great news:

Brian Aitken, who was convicted of illegally possessing two handguns that he had legally purchased in Colorado, will be spending Christmas out of prison.

Gov. Chris Christie commuted Aitken’s sentence, from seven years to time served, according to an order the governor signed today.

Aitken had appealed to Christie for commutation after being sentenced in August. According to the commutation order, Aitken will be released as “soon administratively possible.”

I’m waiting to hear back from Aitken’s attorney and family about what exactly this means. It would be nice if the guy could get his record cleared completely. But getting him out of prison is obviously the most important thing. Good for Gov. Christie. Cases like this one are exactly what the pardon and clemency power is for.

My column on Aitken’s case here.

From the Star-Ledger.

Lisa Segal wakes up every morning locked in a fetal position, her muscles in spasm from multiple sclerosis.

She’s 59 years old, and has tried everything. The only medicine that relaxes those muscles and settles her nausea is marijuana.

So when her supply runs out, she drives an hour from her Gloucester County home to Philadelphia, and walks the streets to buy pot, leaning on her cane. It scares her to death, but it’s better than spending her remaining years curled up in bed, in pain…

The medical marijuana movement aims to end this official cruelty, and allow people like Segal to live in dignity. That was the idea, anyway, when the Legislature passed the law last year. It was supposed to be up and running by now.

But thanks to Gov. Chris Christie, this effort has gone terribly off track. So Segal still has to sneak to Philly for her fix, like a criminal.

“The way the rules are written now, I’ll have no choice but to continue doing what I’m doing,” she says.

The rules drafted by the Christie administration amount to bureaucratic sabotage. And the political and legal fights they have sparked mean the delay is certain to continue for months.

One rule places a limit on potency, so the legal pot can’t be as strong as the varieties Segal can find on the street. Home delivery was allowed at first, and then banned, for reasons the Department of Health will not explain.

If a doctor wants to prescribe pot, he needs to warn patients every three months that some experts believe this treatment is ineffective, and that marijuana can be addictive.

Each distribution center can carry only three strains of pot, and hold no excess inventory. They can’t make pot cookies or brownies, even for patients with cancer or AIDS who have lung problems.

You get the idea. Sure, the law is on the books. But it was signed by former Gov. Jon Corzine, and Christie never liked it. So he is trying to strangle this baby in its crib by drafting one unworkable rule after another. Call it bureaucratic sabotage.

Lisa Segal would make for a pretty compelling Gary Johnson 2012 primary campaign commercial, don’t you think?

Here’s lefty blogger Roger Ailes, in a post that went up Sunday morning:

Libertarian Fonzie and his toadys [sic] haven’t weighed in on the DADT repeal either. Maybe they don’t think federal regulation of sexual orientation implicates liberty cocerns, at least when the regulations don’t interfere their patron’s anal sex film empire. Or maybe they’re still at Joe Manchin’s Christmas party.

For those of you unfamiliar with lefty blog code, “Libertarian Fonzie” is Reason.tv editor Nick Gillespie. “His toadys” I guess refers to the rest of us at Reason.

So there are a number of ways that you could ferret out where Reason and its writers stand on gay equality issues. You could, for example, do what Ailes did here, which is to set an arbitrary deadline in your head by which Reason must respond to a gay issue in the news and, if we fail to meet said arbitrary deadline, you conclude that we just don’t care very much about gay people. Or at least not as much as we do about whatever frivolous issue you think we spend too much time covering. (In this case, Ailes throws in the bonus ad hominem attack that we only cover obscenity laws because one of our donors, John Stagliano, was recently prosecuted under them.) Ailes’ deadline was apparently 7:30 am on the Sunday after a Saturday vote in the Senate.

But here’s another way you could find out where Reason stands on gay issues:  You could take 15 fucking seconds to use Reason’s search engine, where you’d find the thousands of words we’ve published in our magazine and on our website advocating the repeal of DADT. You’d also find the dozens of articles we’ve published advocating gay marriage, regular ridicule of homophobes, and support for gay adoption.

But then you wouldn’t get to make Fonzie jokes.

(BTW: This arbitrary deadline/”notice the silence from x” method of argumentation will henceforth be known as the Balloon Juice fallacy.)

MORE: Check out this response from John Cole at Balloon Juice. He runs off a list of Reason articles that allegedly commit the same fallacy I accuse him and Ailes of making, and adds, “Too funny.”

Hilarious. Except not one of the articles actually commits that fallacy. It looks like someone just did a search for the word “silence” on the Reason website. Which means Cole is either stupid, or he didn’t actually bother to read the articles before posting them to his main page. Here are the articles:

• In this one, Jacob Sullum criticizes Elena Kagan for refusing to answer any questions about natural rights during her confirmation hearings. Sullum’s column is about how the confirmation process robs the public from getting a sense of a Supreme Court nominee’s judicial philosophy before before deciding whether she should be confirmed.
• In this one, Matt Welch criticizes neoliberal Democrats for not opposing Obama’s profligate spending policies. John apparently doesn’t understand the difference between criticizing a website for not responding to a given issue within 24 hours and criticizing politicians for not standing up for their principles when their own party is in power.
• In this one, Steve Chapman criticizes anti-gay marriage Republicans (yes, in all of this, John’s is using an example of a Reason article defending gay marriage to prove his point) who say gay marriage will lead to all sorts of other moral decay. Chapman actually called gay marriage critics up and asked them to go on the record with specific predictions of what moral outrages would come next. None of them would answer him. Again, this isn’t remotely similar to my complaint about Cole and Ailes. I mean, not even on the same planet.
• In this one, Michael Moynihan responds to this exact variety of ad hominem attack. In this case, a New York Press editor criticized Reason for not addressing Naomi Klein’s horrible book about Milton Friedman, and tried to draw broad conclusions what our silence means. Moynihan chides him for it. At the end of the article, Moynihan turns the tables, and asks what we can infer about the New York Press silence about a libertarian book, but only to point out how stupid this sort of argument can be. Cole then uses this as an example . . . Reason making that sort of argument. Again, this either illustrates that Cole isn’t particularly bright, didn’t read the link before posting (which only bolsters my contention that he regularly makes sweeping accusations against Reason without bothering to check first to see if there’s any evidence for them), or he did read the link, knows doesn’t prove anything remotely like what he claims, yet posted it anyway thinking no one would call him on it. Which would make him a dishonest hack.
• Finally, this article mentions Hugo Chavez’s silence after an opposition coalition won a majority of seats in the Venezuelan parliament. Again, not remotely similar to the way Cole draws grand conclusions about Reason’s “silence” on a given issue.

That’s zero for five, John. Too funny.

I’ve said this before:  I don’t expect everyone or even most people to agree with Reason. I do expect adults to make adult arguments. And to actually do some checking to make sure we’ve actually done whatever it is you’re attacking us for doing.

My column this week looks at Right on Crime, a new criminal justice reform project started by a group of conservatives. I agree with them in places, disagree in others, but mostly have praise for them for being serious and thoughtful. Which is better than conservatives have been on these issues for about 40 years.

Here’s a Skype interview I did about the death penalty with the Alyona Show a couple weeks ago.

• Police militarization watch. I like that it’s resistant to land mines.
• Jury rebellion in Montana. We need more of this.
• Another reason to like Rep. Jeff Flake.
• I’ll bet there are people who could find a Commerce Clause justification for this.
• More mockery of the pardon power.
• The tone of this article is unfortunate. The reporter seems irritated not by the fact that cops are lying on the witness stand, but that when they caught, it can on some occasions make it more difficult for them to do their jobs.
• Nigeria’s burgeoning film industry.

Syndicated columnist Deroy Murdock joins the ranks of those calling for the execution of Bradley Manning and Julian Assange.

The U.S. remains at war with Muslim fanatics who plot mass murder against Americans and our friends overseas. From Mogadishu to Tehran to Pyongyang, bad men wish America the worst. That’s why WikiLeaks is neither funny nor cute nor just a “newsy” offshoot of the logorrhea that fuels breathless “tweets” about Kardashian leg-waxings and such.

Underscoring this point also serves justice. WikiLeaks’s alleged chief source, Pfc. Bradley Manning, should be court-martialed for espionage and treason. If convicted, he should be placed against a wall and executed by firing squad. (If extradited here, Assange deserves the same sendoff.) Maybe that will persuade Americans to stop flapping their gums about things that will enable murderers.

Murdock also posits a counterfactual American Revolution in which Bradley Manning tips off the British at Valley Forge Battle of Trenton. Given Murdock’s fondness for imperialism and his eagerness to do away with anyone who gets in its way, I don’t know that he’s doing himself many favors by invoking the colonists who shook off the British empire.*

Reader Johnny Cook sent me Murdock’s column, and also pointed to this 2005 Murdock column about the Danziger Bridge shootings shortly after Hurricane Katrina:

Rather than applaud as 14 contractors crossed the Danziger Bridge to fix the 17th Street Canal that faltered and submerged their city, a well-armed band of hoodlums instead opened fire on these engineers. NOPD officers, on hand to provide security, shot back at these hooligans. In a magnificent and morally pristine use of force, the NOPD killed two of these goons and wounded two others in a firefight. They also captured two more who fled, one of whom was injured in an exchange of bullets.

If these derelicts hindered the levee-doctors’ work for even a quarter hour, that would have been 15 minutes too many. Katrina’s still-trapped victims can thank these criminals, not George W. Bush, for this latest delay in getting help.

Murdock was entirely wrong about what happened on Danziger Bridge. The two men killed by NOPD weren’t weren’t “hooligans” or “goons”. They hadn’t fired on anyone. They weren’t even armed. James Brissette, 19, and the 40-year-old Ronald Madison, who was mentally handicapped, were gunned down by cops on both sides of the bridge as they tried to escape the flooding. Six other people were wounded. Four NOPD officers have since been charged under federal civil rights law for the murders and subsequent cover-up. Two other NOPD officers, investigators who initially cleared the other cops, have been charged with obstruction and falsifying reports. Murdock gets bonus points for being so thoroughly, bombastically wrong (“morally pristine use of force”?) in the same column in which he actually mocks civil rights activist Randall Robinson for perpetuating a separate falsehood about Katrina because it fit Robinson’s own narrative about race relations. (Robinson at least issued a retraction. If Murdock has corrected his slander of the Danziger Bridge victims, I can’t find it.) Even Murdock’s narrative was wrong. Danziger Bridge was hardly the only example of jaw-dropping police brutality after the storm.

There’s a point here—beyond Murdock’s habit of cheering on state executions. Murdock botched the Danziger Bridge story (as did a number of other people) because he credulously parroted government officials, in this case, the NOPD officers on the bridge and their enablers in the police department. But the government lied. These cops killed people, and then they and the police department lied about it. Then Murdock, who holds a healthy distrust of government on matters unrelated to crime and national security, bought the lie, and used his platform to smear Brissette and Madison, and make heroes of the government employees who killed them.

Obviously NOPD isn’t the State Department. The stakes and the stage were much smaller in New Orleans than they are in the Wikileaks story. But the premise is the same. Governments and the people who work for them lie. They do it all the time. And on things that matter, like war and murder. This is why we need whistleblowers, leakers, and outlets willing to give them a forum. We were told that Iraq had huge quantities of weapons of mass destruction. We were told that everyone imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay represented the “worst of the worst”. These were lies. The case that gave us the state secrets doctrine—the judge-made law the Obama and Bush administrations have invoked to cover up yet more government lies and mistakes, including the abduction and torture of an innocent man—was itself based on a lie. Murdock has in various ways helped perpetuate the government’s lies on these stories over the years, too.

For all Murdock’s huffing about how Wikileaks has endangered lives, Defense Secretary Robert Gates has indicated that the document dumps in both July and late last month have done minimal damage. Government lies have killed far more people than leaked documents and whistle blowers ever could. As a conservative, Murdock is supposed to be skeptical of government. But when it comes to the government’s most serious powers—the power to make war and to use lethal force on its own citizens—he cheers government on. And not only does he not use his platform to keep government transparent and accountable, he uses it to call for the prosecution and execution of the people who do.

UPDATE: *Via email, Murdock writes:

“I may be an imperialist, but I am not a monarchist!”

• Tuesday will be the darkest day in 456 years. I suggest some Leonard Cohen.
• Awkward photos of office holiday parties.
• Obama issues directive to regulatory agencies on striving for scientific integrity. But per federal law, the Office of National Drug Control Policy is, of course, exempted.
• Swedish med students perform an autopsy on their professor.
• Solving the city.
• I think Patrick at Popehat has the best take yet on the stupid CSPI lawsuit against Happy Meal toys.

The great Tom Waits was elected to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame this week. I’d submit that his first three albums rank among the best first three releases of any artist in popular music.

Here’s “Martha” from Closing Time. If it catches you in the right mood, this song will make you weep.