Presidents from 100 colleges nation-wide are agitating for Congress to lower the legal drinking age to 18, saying the current law is not only ignored but leads to dangerous binge-drinking among college students. Well, sort of (not really). They all signed a petition by the Amethyst Initiative to start a debate on the issue, but close enough for jazz, right?

The Amethyst Initiative’s official statement is actually quite good. In it, the organization calls upon elected officials to:

• Support an informed and dispassionate public debate over the effects of the 21 year-old drinking age.
• Consider whether the 10% highway fund “incentive” encourages or inhibits that debate.
• Invite new ideas about the best ways to prepare young adults to make responsible decisions about alcohol.

Can you guess what teetotaling organization is NOT happy about the news?

Mothers Against Drunk Driving says lowering the drinking age would lead to more fatal car crashes. It accuses the presidents of misrepresenting science and looking for an easy way out of an inconvenient problem. MADD officials are even urging parents to think carefully about the safety of colleges whose presidents have signed on.

“It’s very clear the 21-year-old drinking age will not be enforced at those campuses,” said Laura Dean-Mooney, national president of MADD.

Yes, of course, because admitting a law is flawed is the moral equivalent of breaking said law. Good call, MADD. Of course, this wouldn’t be the organization’s first foray into flights of hyperbole. MADD now occupies the same, rarified heights of fanaticism as PETA and those pro-life activists who set up “holocaust displays” on college campuses. For example, check out this classy move by MADD.

P.S. In case you wondering, Frohnmayer did not sign on.

Writing about the quickly-retracted idea for a new law requiring adult cyclists to wear helmets, Carla Axtman plays at being a libertarian:

 I use that label to infer the idea of the “leave me alone” ethos that tends to be an intregal part of what we’re about in the west. As a rule, the western U.S. seems to be a region whose citizens have a strong preference for government to remain out of their personal decisions… we tend to cast a jaundiced eye at any law which would give the government power over the way we choose to live our lives.

Alright. So far, so good…

We’re not opposed to government taxation and spending per se. In fact, we’ll be the first to embrace it in many cases. [emphasis added]

Hm. Yeah, I’m not entirely sure she gets it. One of her commenters does, though:

I’m not sure from where this ethos began. Perhaps it was from all of those independent-minded pioneers who ventured from parts east on the continent

I’m guessing the ethos began right at about the time a bunch of bicycle riding Portland liberals came to understand that their ox would now be gored by Prozanzki and the rest of his legislative nannycrat buddies.

Heh.

Kari Chisholm at Blue Oregon is expressing shock! and indignation! at a new plan floated by Oregon Republicans: selling water to water-starved states like Nevada and California (though interestingly, his link to the Republicans’ “Leadership Fund” doesn’t mention the plan at all). He quotes Jeff Mapes at the OregonLive blogs:

David Nelson, R-Pendleton, who convinced the Senate R caucus to take up this idea, insists that times have changed and that Oregon could be a Saudi Arabia of water. “We wouldn’t allow them to take it,” he says of other regions. “We would sell it to them.” And he adds that it could make the kind of profits that will help support a level of state services that the taxpayers aren’t willing to fund.

Mapes points out that there are several problems with the plan, not the least of which is that Oregon is already embroiled in all sorts of water-rights litigation involving Native tribes, farmers, and fishermen. Such criticisms are certainly fair and, as the continuing controversies surrounding the Columbia and Klamath flows illustrate, the issues involved are delicate and often intractable.

Chisholm, on the other hand, seems to feel that the idea itself is beyond comprehension, having little to add aside from

Seriously.

You can’t make this stuff up.

Perhaps Kari Chisholm is unaware that the Bonneville Power Administration already sells massive amounts of hydroelectric power from the Columbia to neighboring states and that California already gets huge amounts of water from sources like the Colorado River, which has experienced increasingly smaller flows as places like Arizona, Nevada, and Mexico (which is legally entitled to part of the Colorado River flow), to say nothing of California itself, require increasingly large amounts of water to sustain growth.

Or perhaps he does know that electricity generated by the BPA is consumed in other parts of the country and is simply under the same misapprehension as one of the people posting in his comments section and believes that BPA power is simply given away free to people outside the Pacific Northwest rather than being put to good use near where the power is generated.

Either way, and admitting that there are some real potential issues that arise if we start selling water to California and elsewhere, why does Chisholm think that the plan is so utterly beyond the pale? If the water can be spared without endangering fish runs and Tribal fishing rights, etc., one fails to see how making up for budget shortfalls by selling water is supposedly so outrageous.

After all, we all know that the budget isn’t going to shrink itself since taxpayers aren’t terribly excited about taking even more money out of their pockets and the government isn’t willing to alienate interest groups by cutting programs. It’s clear we can’t rely forever on Band-Aid measures like Federal timber payments, so if a profit can be made using some of Oregon’s natural resources, and it can be done without endangering other interests that Oregonians have decided are important (fish runs, etc.), it seems incredibly short-sighted to pass up that opportunity.

[EDIT]

Then again, maybe Kari Chisholm was too caught up in basically calling Gordon Smith a fatty poo-poo head to be bothered to write anything more substantial about potential plans to exploit Oregon’s natural resources.

Some members of Congress, along with certain “women’s groups” (the Times article doesn’t mention which ones), are pushing for gender quotas in the sciences, and Congress “quietly ordered agencies to begin the Title IX compliance reviews in 2006″:

Applying Title IX to science was proposed eight years ago by Debra Rolison, a chemist at the Naval Research Laboratory. She argued that withholding federal money from “poorly diversified departments” was essential to “transform the academic culture.”

Because that’s what’s important, isn’t it? Not good science. Transforming the culture. Science be damned. As usual, every other consideration is to be sacrificed upon the altar of “diversity”.

Thankfully, some people aren’t having it:

“Colleges already practice affirmative action for women in science, but now they’ll be so intimidated by the Title IX legal hammer that they may institute quota systems,” Dr. [Christina] Sommers said. “In sports, they had to eliminate a lot of male teams to achieve Title IX parity. It’ll be devastating to American science if every male-dominated field has to be calibrated to women’s level of interest.”

I’m not sure the diversity gang cares a whit about “American science”. Diversity must come first. Always.

Reason is running an interesting article about the demise of Microsoft’s “PlayForSure” music standard and the legal obstacles that have been put in place to prevent people from circumventing DRM (digital rights management) schemes that supposedly protect “content” from unscrupulous computer users:

Convinced that the tight integration between iTunes and the iPod was the secret to Apple’s success, Microsoft abandoned the PlaysForSure approach, shuttered the MSN Music Store, and built the Zune around yet another proprietary format.

As a result, music in the PlaysForSure format will not play—for sure or otherwise— on a Zune music player.

 …

In ordinary circumstances, you would expect entrepreneurs or volunteers to pick up Microsoft’s slack and offer software to convert those old recordings to another format.But the Digital Millennium Copyright Act transforms what would normally be a promising business opportunity into a federal felony. Not only will PlaysForSure music not play on a Zune, but the DMCA makes it illegal, punishable by up to five years in jail on the first offence, for third parties to offer utilities to bridge that gap…  Under the DMCA, no one may “circumvent” a copy protection scheme without the permission of the platform’s owner.

(more…)

Juan Cole at Salon:

The U.S. Justice Department is considering a change in the grounds on which the FBI can investigate citizens and legal residents of the United States. Till now, DOJ guidelines have required the FBI to have some evidence of wrongdoing before it opens an investigation. The impending new rules, which would be implemented later this summer, allow bureau agents to establish a terrorist profile or pattern of behavior and attributes and, on the basis of that profile, start investigating an individual or group.

…

 If the aim is to identify al-Qaida operatives or close sympathizers in the United States, racial profiling is counterproductive. Such tiny, cultlike terror organizations are multinational. Richard Reid, the shoe bomber, is a Briton whose father hailed from Jamaica, and no racial profile of him would have predicted his al-Qaida ties. Adam Gadahn, an al-Qaida spokesman, is from a mixed Jewish and Christian heritage and hails from suburban Orange County, Calif.

Sadly, this sounds a lot less far-fetched than the Department of Homeland Security’s “shock bracelet” story from a couple of days ago. That famous old Benjamin Franklin quote seems particularly apt here. Our government has long been intent on selling away our liberties for safety and security, often with the cowed acquiescence — if not outright encouragement — of the people. Perhaps in this case the tradeoff will appear so high enough as to a reaction not limited merely to the ACLU, disgruntled, anti-Bush liberals, and other civil libertarians.

(via Tololy’s Box)

Hot on the heels of the Mark Steyn/Maclean’s case in Canada, a British law firm, acting on behalf of Mohammed Sawalha, the President of the British Muslim Initiative and mastermind of “much of Hamas’ political and military strategy”, has filed suit against UK blog Harry’s Place:

Mr Sawalha claims that we have “chosen a malevolent interpretation of a meaningless word”. In fact, we did no more than translate a phrase which appeared in an Al Jazeera report of Mr Sawalha’s speech. When Al Jazeera changed that phrase from “Evil Jew” to “Jewish Lobby”, we reported that fact, along with the statement that it had been a typographical error.

Mr Sawalha says that the attribution of the phrase “Evil Jew” to him implies that he is “anti-semitic and hateful”. Notably, he does not take issue with our reporting of the revelation, made in a Panorama documentary in 2006, that he is a senior activist in the clerical fascist terrorist organisation, Hamas.

…

A member of Hamas has no reputation to defend.

…

If Mr Sawalha persists in attempting to silence us with this desperate legal suit, we will need your help.

We won’t be able to stand up to them alone.

Proponents of legalizing pot have begun collecting signatures to place an initiative on the 2010 ballot that would decriminalize marijuana in Oregon. Sounds groovy, right? Well …

The Oregon Liquor Control Commission would manage the program, which would license approved individuals to cultivate the product for sale.

Oy vey! If you thought the OLCC’s alcohol regulations were asinine, just wait until they have control of weed. Even if passed, I wonder how effective the program would be when citizens are given the choice between trying to navigate all of the OLCC’s sure-to-be maddening regulations or just going to a black market dealer.

A similar initiative might end up on California’s ballot this November.

As The Oregonian reports, payday lenders have all but disappeared from Oregon due to broad-sweeping legislation that put a cap on the interest rates they could charge. The moral crusade, led by the Oregon Legislature to get some feel-good, populist approval, enjoyed widespread support from consumer advocacy groups who claimed payday lenders were “predatory.”

Indeed, everyone’s been slapping each other on the back and declaring the “end of the predatory lending crisis,” but have they really quashed the insufferable evil of short-term, high-risk loans? No. (Surprise!)

In Oregon, officials now worry most about residents going into debt with payday lenders on the Internet, Tatman said.

Internet lenders selling to Oregonians are required by law to register with the state and abide by its regulations, but many do not.

It is difficult for the state to control Internet payday lenders who charge triple-digit interest rates, Tatman said. “If we could just get our arms around the Internet better to make sure people don’t jump out of the fire and into the frying pan.”

Who could have seen that coming? Why, It’s almost as if people seek out services to fulfill their needs! And if they can’t find a loan on the Internet, they can still seek out an illegal loan shark who will break their fingers if they’re late on payment. Huzzah!

Also, I haven’t heard a peep out of the Legislature about other “predatory” ventures such as the Oregon Lottery and its video poker machines. Is it any coincidence that payday lenders would often open up offices next to establishments that owned video poker machines? Oh, but that money goes into the state coffers, so it must be alright. I guess the moral of the story is the government won’t abide competition when it comes to swindling people.

Reason also has a write-up of the story.

Some Washington Times blogger is reporting that:

[a] senior government official with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has expressed great interest in a so-called safety bracelet that would serve as a stun device, similar to that of a police Taser®.

This bracelet would:

• take the place of an airline boarding pass

• contain personal information about the traveler

• be able to monitor the whereabouts of each passenger and his/her luggage

• shock the wearer on command, completely immobilizing him/her for several minutes

I’m pretty inclined to take all this with a healthy dose of salt. I say this because it is the Washington Times after all, and the scanned letter purportedly originating from the DHS official that he links to is incomplete and refers to a meeting that took place in 2006. And nevermind the fact that the idea of giving airline passengers shock bracelets instead of boarding passes is one of the most batshit crazy things I’ve ever heard.

If it is true, though, then everything that’s been said about the dangers of an intrusive government is true.

[UPDATE]

A recent comment on the Washington Times site from “S&Tspokesman” clears things up:

The bracelet was never intended to replace boarding passes, contain ID information or be worn by all passengers as asserted in the Lamberd video and discussed in the Washington Times Blog.

The hypothetical use of the bracelet would have been for transporting already apprehended prisoners and detainees at prisons and border patrol facilities, and DHS was looking to see if there were potential air travel applications for apprehended suspects.

This concept was never funded or supported by the DHS or TSA and hasn’t even been discussed for two years. The letter circulating throughout the blogosphere from Paul Ruwaldt was not addressed to Lamberd and merely states the DHS was interested in learning more about the technology. Neither side followed up.

DHS/TSA does NOT support the asserted use and has not pursued the development of such technology.

One hopes that this news report from the UK is wildly inaccurate:

The National Children’s Bureau… has issued guidance to play leaders and nursery teachers advising them to be alert for racist incidents among youngsters in their care.

This could include a child of as young as three who says “yuk” in response to being served unfamiliar foreign food.

…

[The report] alerts playgroup leaders that even babies can not be ignored in the drive to root out prejudice as they can “recognise different people in their lives”. 

The world has gone fucking mad.

The U.S. Government has a patent on medical marijuana. Go figure.

(Via The Agitator)

(more…)

According to Ezra Levant, the Canadian Human Rights Commission has opted to drop its case against Mark Steyn and Maclean’s (which I previously wrote about here). The plaintiff’s reaction can be read here. Maclean’s, for its part, seems a bit unimpressed:

Though gratified by the decision, Maclean’s continues to assert that no human rights commission, whether at the federal or provincial level, has the mandate or the expertise to monitor, inquire into, or assess the editorial decisions of the nation’s media. And we continue to have grave concerns about a system of complaint and adjudication that allows a media outlet to be pursued in multiple jurisdictions on the same complaint, brought by the same complainants, subjecting it to costs of hundreds of thousands of dollars, to say nothing of the inconvenience.

The story isn’t over yet, however, as a separate decision in British Columbia is still pending.

[UPDATE 10/10]

The case has been dismissed by the courts in BC.

As you’ve probably read, the Supreme Court decision in DC v. Heller came down today. The response from the right is pretty much what you’d expect (”Yeehaw!” *fires gun into air*). However, Radley Balko said the decision, while a philosophic victory for the Second Amendment, was too weak in practice. From his article:

Scalia’s opinion does interpret the Second Amendment as an individual right, but only for self-protection, and only in the home.  The concept of the Second Amendment as a bulwark against an overly oppressive government seems dead.

Despite being freedom-hating libruls, the response over at Blue Oregon was fairly muted and neutral, except for this exasperating paragraph:

It is the highest-profile case to be decided by the Roberts Court, and suggests that the Court will not blanch at the opportunity to decide in favor of conservative positions in politically-charged cases.

Sorry, but since when has the Constitution been a “conservative position?” For all the whining from the left about the evil, boogieman Roberts Court, most of its decisions have been surprisingly moderate and narrow. They even stuck it to the Bush administration on habeas corpus. Oh those radical right-wing judges and their respect for our founding documents!

P.S. Slightly off-topic, but this Onion video on the Supreme Court is totally wicked awesome.

Via Scotusblog, the US Supreme Court has struck down the D.C. gun ban and also affirmed the right of individual citizens to arm themselves. The decision was 5-4, along exactly the lines you’d expect: Scalia, Roberts, Kennedy, Thomas, Alito in majority.

So, congratulations residents of D.C., may I suggest a side-arm?