27 May 2010
Today’s Tabbloid
PERSONAL NEWS FOR craig.kirchoff+webnews@gmail.com
FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
Coalition of 50+ Urge Congress
to Oppose Pomeroy/Casey
Pension Bailout Bills
[Americans for Tax Reform]
MAY 27, 2010 06:00A.M.
The following coalition letter was sent to all members of Congress, the
President, and the acting director of the Pension Benefit Guarantee
Corporation (PBGC) urging them to oppose the pension bail...
FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
Militarizing the Border [Cato at
Liberty]
MAY 26, 2010 10:13P.M.
By David Rittgers
President Obama is sending 1,200 National Guard troops to the border
with Mexico. This should not be viewed as an innovative solution; Bush
sent 1,600 troops to the border under parallel circumstances in 2002. As
Ilya Shapiro recently wrote, sending some Guardsmen is no substitute
for substantive immigration policy reform.
The National Guard, and the military generally, should not be seen as the
go-to solution for domestic problems. Certainly the role they will play on
the border will not be as offensive as policing the streets of an Alabama
town after a mass shooting (which the Department of Defense found was
a violation of the Posse Comitatus Act, but declined to pursue charges) or
using a city in Iowa as a rehearsal site for cordon-and-search operations
looking for weapons, but politicians from both major parties have at one
point or another suggested using the military for domestic operations
that range from the absurd to the frightening.
Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta wanted to put Delta Force
commandos on airliners after the attacks on September 11, 2001. Air
marshals and armed pilots can handle airline counterterrorism; tracking
down Al Qaeda organizers in Afghanistan is a better use of Delta’s
unique skill-set. Marines conducting counter-drug surveillance near the
border shot and killed goat herder Esequiel Hernandez. Something to
1
keep in mind when politicians call for an expanded the role of the
military in border security.
Gene Healy’s excellent policy analysis Deployed in the U.S.A.: The
Creeping Militarization of the Home Front provides more detail on
sensible limits for domestic use of the military. Read the whole thing.
FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
John Brennan on Countering
Terrorism [Cato at Liberty]
MAY 26, 2010 04:52P.M.
By Christopher Preble
Earlier today, I attended a lecture at CSIS by John Brennan, a leading
counterterrorism and homeland security adviser to President Obama.
His speech highlighted some of the key elements of the administration’s
counterterrorism strategy, in advance of tomorrow’s release of the
National Security Strategy (NSS).
I hope that many people will take the opportunity to read (.pdf) or listen
to/watch Brennan’s speech, as opposed to merely reading what other
people said that he said. Echoing key themes that Brennan put forward
last year, also at CSIS, today’s talk reflected a level of sophistication that
is required when addressing the difficult but eminently manageable
problem of terrorism.
Brennan was most eloquent in talking about the nature of the struggle.
He declared, with emphasis, that the United States is indeed at war with
al Qaeda and its affiliates, but not at war with the tactic of terrorism, nor
with Islam, a misconception that is widely held both here in the United
States and within the Muslim world. He stressed the positive role that
Muslim clerics and other leaders within the Muslim community have
played in criticizing the misuse of religion to advance a hateful ideology,
and he lamented that such condemnations of bin Laden and others have
not received enough exposure in the Western media. This inadequate
coverage of the debate raging within the Muslim community contributes
to the mistaken impression that this is chiefly a religious conflict. It isn’t;
or, more accurately, it need not be, unless we make it so.
I also welcomed Brennan’s unabashed defense of a counterterrorism
strategy that placed American values at the forefront. These values
include a respect for the rule of law, transparency, individual liberty,
tolerance, and diversity. And he candidly stated what any responsible
Today’s Tabbloid PERSONAL NEWS FOR craig.kirchoff+webnews@gmail.com
policymaker must: no nation can possibly prevent every single attack. In
those tragic instances where a determined person slips through the
cracks, the goal must be to recover quickly, and to demonstrate a level of
resilience that undermines the appeal of terrorism as a tactic in the
future.
I had an opportunity to ask Brennan a question about the role of
communication in the administration’s counterterrorism strategy. He
assured me that there was such a communications strategy, that
elements of the strategy would come through in the NSS, and that such
elements have informed how the administration has addressed the
problem of terrorism from the outset.
This was comforting to hear, and it is consistent with what I’ve observed
over the past 16 months. Members of the Obama administration, from
the president on down, seem to understand that how you talk about
terrorism is as important as how you disrupt terrorist plots, kill or
capture terrorist leaders, and otherwise enhance the nation’s physical
security. On numerous occasions, the president has stressed that the
United States cannot be brought down by a band of murderous thugs.
Brennan reiterated that point today. This should be obvious, and yet
such comments stand in stark contrast to the apolocalytpic warnings
from a few years ago of an evil Islamic caliphate sweeping across the
globe.
Talking about terrorism might seem an esoteric point. It isn’t. Indeed, it
is a key theme in our just released book, Terrorizing Ourselves: Why
U.S. Counterterrorism Policy Is Failing and How to Fix It. Because the
object of terrorism is to terrorize, to elicit from a targeted state or people
a response, and to (in the terrorists’s wildest dreams) cause the state to
waste blood and treasure, or come loose from its ideological moorings, a
comprehensive counterterrorism strategy should aim at building a
psychologically resilient society. Such a society should possess an
accurate understanding of the nature of the threat, a clear sense of what
policies or measures are useful in mitigating that threat, and an
awareness of how overreaction does the terrorists’s work for them. The
true measure of a resilient society, one that isn’t in thrall to the specter of
terrorism, is the degree to which it can conduct an adult conversation
about the topic.
We aren’t there yet, but I’m encouraged by what I’ve seen so far, and by
what I heard today.
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27 May 2010
FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
Ill. Democrats force Gov. Quinn
to abandon Income Tax Hike
[Americans for Tax Reform]
MAY 26, 2010 04:33P.M.
Finally, some fiscal responsibility will come out of Illinois and its
Democratic Party. On Monday, the Illinois State Senate and House
proposed $1.2 billion worth of cuts to the state budget af...
FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
Wednesday Links [Cato at
Liberty]
MAY 26, 2010 03:38P.M.
By Chris Moody
• Special interest groups are lobbying to reverse legalizing direct
wine shipping. Translation: Prepare to spend more on booze if they
get their way.
• A lesson in free market economics … from Montenegro?
• Nat Hentoff on Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan’s record on
free speech: “I know that a solicitor general is required to argue the
legal positions of the administration that hired her — but to this
extent?”
• Mark Calabria explains Sen. Dodd’s financial overhaul bill in a
nutshell: “Give the bureaucrats more power and discretion, without
any accountability. Its main achievement is to set up a new agency
that will largely determine who, what and how it will regulate.”
• Podcast: “Obama’s Drug War” featuring Gene Healy.
Today’s Tabbloid PERSONAL NEWS FOR craig.kirchoff+webnews@gmail.com
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“Extenders Package” Raises
Taxes on1 Million Small
Businesses [Americans for Tax
Reform]
MAY 26, 2010 03:35P.M.
When the House takes up the extenders package, one of the provisions
(found in Section 413, Page 282 of the amendment language) would for
the first time impose the self-employment tax on S-corp...
FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
School Vouchers vs. Tax Credits
[Cato at Liberty]
MAY 26, 2010 03:15P.M.
By Andrew J. Coulson
NRO editor Robert VerBruggen has weighed in a couple of times this
week on the relative merits of school vouchers and education tax credits,
raising interesting and important issues.
In response to my earlier post today about an education tax credit case
now before the U.S. Supreme Court, VerBruggen writes:
If the Supreme Court buys this logic — which I suppose is
sound on its face — it could lead to some very interesting
programs. Any time it’s illegal for a government to fund
something directly, it could simply make a dollar-for-dollar
“tax credit” program for it, allowing sympathetic taxpayers to
technically “donate” — but actually just redirect the taxes
they’d otherwise have to pay — to the cause.
This is actually an argument presented by critics of the program in their
brief asking the Supreme Court not to hear the appeal that it… just
decided to hear. The fact that this argument is fallacious is no doubt one
reason that the Supreme Court decided to reject critics’ request. Here’s
where it goes wrong:
Under a constitutional tax credit program such as Arizona’s, the state
has no power to pressure/encourage taxpayers to do anything that the
state could not do directly. Taxpayers can choose to give no money to
religious charities, or to give all their money to them. The state is unable
to affect their decisions in any way.
As Ilya Shapiro and I pointed out in Cato’s amicus brief in this case, this
is identical to the law pertaining to federal charitable tax deductions.
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27 May 2010
Religious charities get more tax deductible donations than any other
kind of entity, and the Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld their
constitutionality because the decisions regarding such donations are left
entirely to the unfettered choices of private citizens.
While it would be unconstitutional for a tax credit program to only allow
donations to religious charities, it is perfectly consistent with the U.S.
Constitution and Supreme Court precedent for a tax credit program to be
religiously neutral, leaving the donating decisions to private citizens.
But there’s much more to it than this. Credits are not just constitutional,
they offer an important advantage over vouchers. Under voucher
programs, all taxpayers must support every kind of schooling, which can
be a source of social conflict in a diverse society. [Think liberals being
forced to fund religious-conservative-capitalist schooling; or
conservatives being forced to fund schools supporting
homosexuality as natural and without any inherent moral implications].
While this doesn’t violate the U.S. constitution (see Zelman v. Simmons
Harris), it’s still a less-than-ideal outcome, as was observed in all three
dissents in the Zelman case.
Tax credits, as I explained in the last section of our amicus brief (p. 21),
avoid this source of social conflict. Not just families but taxpayers enjoy
the benefits of free choice and voluntary association. Tax credits are
thus a way to ensure universal access to a free educational marketplace
without putting citizens into conflict with one another on matters of
conscience. For this and many other reasons, they are the best
realistic policy for advancing educational freedom yet devised.
FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
Regulatory Spending Actually
Rose under Bush [Cato at
Liberty]
MAY 26, 2010 03:07P.M.
By Tad DeHaven
Analysts across the ideological spectrum generally agree that the
government’s regulatory bodies fail far too frequently. However, analysts
seem to learn different lessons from this experience.
Washington Post business columnist Steve Pearlstein cites numerous
examples of failure and concludes, “It’s time for the business community
to give up its jihad against regulation.”
He says:
It hardly captures the breadth and depth of these regulatory
failures to say that during the Bush administration the
pendulum swung a bit too far in the direction of
Today’s Tabbloid PERSONAL NEWS FOR craig.kirchoff+webnews@gmail.com
deregulation and lax enforcement. What it misses is
just how dramatically the regulatory agencies have been
shrunken in size, stripped of talent and resources,
demoralized by lousy leadership, captured by the industries
they were meant to oversee and undermined by political
interference and relentless attacks on their competence and
purpose.
It’s true that regulators often do the bidding of the industries that they
regulate. But “regulatory capture” is a long recognized phenomenon that
undermines the contention that the government is well-suited to be a
watchdog.
Regardless, is Pearlstein right that federal regulatory agencies were
“dramatically” shrunk? Not according to a new study from George
Washington University and Washington University in St. Louis. The
figure shows that regulatory spending actually rose an inflation-adjusted
31 percent during the Bush administration (FY2002-FY2009):
Similarly, regulatory staff jumped by 42 percent under Bush’s watch:
4
27 May 2010
FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
Daily Media Spotlight May 26,
2010 [Americans for Tax
Reform]
MAY 26, 2010 03:06P.M.
In a blog posted on National Review’s “The Corner” Grover distinguishes
the role governors must play in combating the federal government’s vast
spending spree. “At the...
FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
TSA Behavioral Screening [Cato
at Liberty]
MAY 26, 2010 02:44P.M.
By David Rittgers
Behavioral screening is a useful tool in deterring and preventing terrorist
attacks. As I noted in this piece at Politico, a border patrol agent
successfully used behavioral screening to stop the would-be Millennium
Bomber. She noticed something “hinky” about a man driving south
across the Canadian border. That “hinky” – fidgety and nervous behavior
when asked routine customs questions – exposed a car full of explosives
intended for the passenger terminal of Los Angeles International
Airport.
Two items from the USA Today travel section highlight some mixed
results with TSA behavioral screening. Today’s edition reports that
behavioral screening, applied by Behavioral Detection Officers (BDOs)
missed at least 16 people later linked to terror plots. On the other side of
the equation, false positives can impose burdens on those who are
nervous or upset for reasons other than terrorism aspirations.
The TSA Blog defended the program: “If you’re one of those travelers
that gets frazzled easily (not hard to do at airports), you have no reason
to worry. BDOs set a baseline based on the normal airport behavior and
look for behaviors that go above that baseline. So if you’re stressing
about missing a flight, that’s not a guaranteed visit from the BDOs.”
That would be reassuring if yesterday’s travel section hadn’t revealed
that TSA screeners are keeping a list of those who get upset at intrusive
screening procedures. “Airline passengers who get frustrated and kick a
wall, throw a suitcase or make a pithy comment to a screener could find
themselves in a little-known Homeland Security database.”
Of course, we can take comfort from the words of a TSA screener to
security expert Bruce Schneier. “This isn’t the sort of job that rewards
Today’s Tabbloid PERSONAL NEWS FOR craig.kirchoff+webnews@gmail.com 27 May 2010

competence, you know.” Using its own Keynesian model, the White House last year said that
wasting $800 billion was necessary to keep the unemployment rate from
rising above 8 percent. Yet the joblessness rate quickly jumped to 10
percent and remains stubbornly high. We’ve already beaten this dead
FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS horse (here, here, here, here, and here), in part because the White House
has embarrassed itself even further with silly attempts to find some way
Fact Checking President of turning a sow’s ear into a silk purse. This is why Obama Adminisration
estimates have evolved from “jobs created” to “jobs saved” to “jobs
Obama’s Fuel Efficiency financed.”

Standards Speech [Americans The CBO’s most recent ”calculations” are just another version of the
same economic alchemy. But don’t believe me. Buried at the end of the
for Tax Reform] report is this passage, where CBO basically admits that its new
MAY 26, 2010 02:42P.M. “research” simply plugged new spending numbers into its Keynesian
formula. This sounds absurd, and it is, but don’t forget that these are the
[PDF Document] Recently, President Obama gathered union leaders, same geniuses that predicted that a giant new health care entitlement
Members of Congress, and business owners in the Rose Garden for a would reduce long-run budget deficits.
forum on vehicle fuel efficiency standards (FES). However, man...
CBO’s current estimates of the impact of ARRA on output
and employment differ slightly from those presented in its
February 2010 report primarily because the agency has
FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS revised its estimates of ARRA’s impact on federal spending
on the basis of new information. Outlays resulting from
New Poll Shows Commanding ARRA in the first quarter of calendar year 2010 were higher
than the amount that CBO projected in February 2010 in
Lead for Tim Scott in SC-01 preparing its estimate of the law’s likely impact on output and
employment, primarily because a larger-than-expected
[The Club for Growth] amount of refundable tax credits was disbursed in the first
MAY 26, 2010 02:42P.M. quarter rather than later in the year. That change makes the
estimated impact of ARRA on output and employment in the
WASHINGTON ### first quarter slightly higher than what CBO projected in
February.

FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS

FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
More Garbage-In-Garbage-Out
The FCC’s False Marketing
from CBO [Cato at Liberty]
MAY 26, 2010 02:18P.M. Campaign to Regulate the
By Daniel J. Mitchell Internet [Americans for Tax
You don’t need to watch old Gunsmoke episodes if you want to travel Reform]
into the past. Just read the latest Congressional Budget Office “research” MAY 26, 2010 12:00P.M.
claiming that Obama’s so-called stimulus “increased the number of full-
time-equivalent jobs by 1.8 million to 4.1 million.” CBO’s analysis is a Yesterday, I took issue with progressive organizations calling Internet
throwback to the widely discredited Keynesian theory that assumes you regulation a mere “consumer protection.” Today, I have a piece in the
can enrich yourself by switching money from your left pocket to right Washington Times taking aim at the Fe...
pocket. For all intents and purposes, CBO wants us to believe their
Keynesian model and ignore real world data. This is akin to the famous
line attributed to Willie Nelson, who was caught with another woman by
his wife and supposedly said, “Are you going to believe me or your lying
eyes?”

5
Today’s Tabbloid PERSONAL NEWS FOR craig.kirchoff+webnews@gmail.com
FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
‘All Your Income Are Belong to
the State’ [‘Cato at Liberty]
MAY 26, 2010 11:56A.M.
By Andrew J. Coulson
An otherwise very good story in the Arizona Republic today begins
badly:
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday agreed to review the
constitutionality of an Arizona program that diverts state
tax revenue into private-school scholarships.
Here’s the thing: it doesn’t do that. No state tax revenue is used in
Arizona’s program, which offers a tax cut (a.k.a. “credit”) to folks who
donate to non-profit k-12 tuition assistance organizations. Those non-
profits then subsidize private school tuition for families seeking financial
help.
Back in 1999, the Arizona Supreme Court made all this clear. Those who
were trying to kill the program (at the time, the “petitioners”) claimed
that the donated funds were “public money.” The Court begged to differ,
writing:
Petitioners argue that this tax credit channels public money
to private and sectarian schools in violation of the state
constitution…. As respondents note, however, no money ever
enters the state’s control as a result of this tax credit. Nothing
is deposited in the state treasury or other accounts under the
management or possession of governmental agencies or
public officials. Thus, under any common understanding of
the words, we are not here dealing with “public money.” (p.
19-21)
It would be fine for the Arizona Republic to report that critics refuse to
accept the Arizona Supreme Court’s interpretation, and that they are
hoping the U.S. Supreme Court will see things their way (FYI: not gonna
happen). But it is not okay for the Republic, on its “news” pages, to take
sides in a case now before the U.S. Supreme Court by adopting the legal
assumptions of the program’s critics.
P.S. Yes, the title is a reference to this.
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27 May 2010
FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
Good Thing There Are So Few
Bad Guys [Cato at Liberty]
MAY 26, 2010 11:47A.M.
By Jim Harper
Returning from Chicago this past weekend, I noticed that they were
using strip-search machines in several security lanes at the TSA
checkpoint (ORD Terminal 1). Naturally, after the ID check—yes, I did
show ID this time—I chose a lane that lead to a magnetometer rather
than a strip-search machine.
Annnnnd, anyone wanting to smuggle a plastic weapon could do the
same.
For all the money spent on strip-search machines at ORD, and for all the
exposure law-abiding travelers are getting, the incremental security
benefit has been just about exactly zero. Security theater. TSA has to
direct people to lanes mandatorily or install strip-search machines at all
lanes to get whatever small security benefit they provide.
Going through the strip-search machine is optional—you can get a pat-
down instead. Signage to that effect was poorly placed for informing the
public, at the entrance to the strip-search machine. Travelers might read
it as they stepped into the machine, realizing from that standing spread-
eagle position that they didn’t have to be there.
FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
Sell Your Soul for What’s
Behind Curtain #1? [Cato at
Liberty]
MAY 26, 2010 11:44A.M.
By Neal McCluskey
Today’s Tabbloid PERSONAL NEWS FOR craig.kirchoff+webnews@gmail.com 27 May 2010

FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS

Barack Obama’s War on

‘Chooming’ [Cato at
Liberty‘Chooming’]
MAY 26, 2010 11:33A.M.

By Gene Healy

My Washington Examiner column this week begins with a look back at

the Disco Era:

Would you agree to sell your soul? And not just sell it, but sell it for an
undisclosed prize? The states of Maryland and Kentucky would: Both
have endorsed as-yet unpublished national curriculum standards for
mathematics and language arts, declaring that they will relinquish their
ability to set their own standards — to control their own educational
souls — in those key subjects.

Alright, maybe they haven’t completely signed away their souls in

exchange for what they hope will be supernaturally inspired standards.
For one thing, both states could still turn away from the final standards if
they end up being utterly horrific. More important, it’s not really the
standards that the states are Faustian-bargaining for. As this
Washington Post article makes clear, it is the federal money at stake in
the Obama administration’s Race to the Top. So Maryland isn’t about
to give up control of it’s educational destiny in exchange for truly
extraordinary standards, but a mere $250 million – a big chunk of
change to you and me, but just 2% of the nearly $11.1 billion the state
spends on K-12 education.
Unfortunately, the transparent protestations of Education Secretary
Arne Duncan and other national-standards supporters
notwithstanding, what is making states endorse such standards is
no powerful argument that the standards will improve education, but an
obvious pursuit of federal ducats. But is that how we should want
education run? States taking standards just to get DC
ducats? Unfortunately, being bought by Washington — with no
meaningful achievement improvements to show for it — is
what states have been doing for decades, though never have they given
up their ability to set their own standards.
With that in mind, readers are reminded that on the day that the
final, proposed national standards are due to be released, we will be
having a debate at Cato that will get past all the bribery and sound bites,
and for once tackle the reality of national standards. What logic
concludes, political realism makes clear, and the research reveals about
national standards will be front and center, and national standards will
finally be given the no-holds-barred vetting that states and their citizens
deserve.
In his high school yearbook photo, President Barack Obama
sports a white leisure suit and a Travolta-esque collar whose
wingspan could put a bystander’s eye out. Hey, it was 1979.
Maybe that explains the rest of young Barry’s yearbook page,
with its “still life” featuring a pack of rolling papers and a
shout-out to the “Choom gang.” (“Chooming” is Hawaiian
slang for smoking pot.)
Survey data suggest some 100 million Americans have tried pot,
including political elites and drug war supporters Bill Clinton, Al Gore,
Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin. So the point here isn’t to play “gotcha”
by calling the president out on some harmless fun three decades ago. It’s
to ask why he isn’t doing more to change a policy that treats people
engaged in such activities as criminals.
As I note in the column,
in his new National Drug Control Strategy [.pdf], Obama
“firmly opposes the legalization of marijuana or any other
illicit drug” and boasts of his administration’s aggressive
approach to pot eradication. Watch your back, Choom Gang.

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Today’s Tabbloid PERSONAL NEWS FOR craig.kirchoff+webnews@gmail.com
This may present Obama with a serious moral dilemma if and when
California votes to legalize recreational use of marijuana this November.
(More here in this podcast).
FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
Props to Boehner [The Club for
Growth]
MAY 26, 2010 11:11A.M.
This is a great move by Boehner. Cao (La.), Henry Brown (S.C.), Don
Young (Alaska) and Ron Paul (Texas).
FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
Privacy as the Default Setting
[Cato at Liberty]
MAY 26, 2010 09:50A.M.
By Jim Harper
Before I can write a blog post, I must lift my hands to type.
I say so because the default setting in life is privacy. Staying in bed
maintains privacy pretty well.
Clay Shirky gives privacy a contrary treatment on the New York Times‘
Room for Debate blog. We are both discussants there of the question
whether the government should intervene to solve privacy issues with
Facebook.
Shirky, a teacher in the Interactive Telecommunications Program at
N.Y.U., writes:
There are two principal effects of the Internet on privacy. The
first is to shrink personal expression to a dichotomy: public
or private. Prior to the rise of digital social life, much of what
we said and did was in a public environment — on the street,
in a park, at a party — but was not actually public, in the
sense of being widely broadcast or persistently available.
This enormous swath of personal life, as we used to call it,
existed on a spectrum between public and private, and the
sheer inconvenience of collecting and collating theoretically
observable but practically unobserved actions was enough to
keep those actions out of the public sphere.
That spectrum has now collapsed — data is either public or
private, and the idea of personal utterances being observable
8
27 May 2010
but unobserved is becoming as quaint as an ice cream social.
“[I]t is keeping things private that requires effort,” he writes.
I think Shirky has inadvertently overstated the effects of the Internet on
privacy. The dynamics he describes are definitely in play, but they
exist almost exclusively in digital social life. For the rest of life, it’s still
the other way around. Privacy is easy. You can just stay in bed. Pursuing
publicity takes effort.
When you go out into the world, making effort to give publicity to
yourself in pursuit of your wants and needs, you must trade some
personal information for interaction, yes. That’s physics: photons and
sound waves doing what they do. Nobody considers this a privacy
problem because of our long experience with it and acculturation to it.
The online environment has similar information demands—when you go
online, giving publicity to yourself in pursuit of your wants and needs,
you must trade some personal information for interaction—but it
has different properties: information is easier to record. Again, though,
the rise of the Internet didn’t change privacy on the street, in parks, and
at parties, except in the still rare instance when someone is recording
and uploading information.
If we were to conduct all of life online, maybe it would be fair to say that
protecting privacy takes effort. But even as a digital denizen, the majority
of my experience—certainly the most important and valuable of it—is
offline, face-to-face interactions with friends and loved ones or time
alone.
Here, privacy is the default. Nobody knows my thoughts unless I tell
them. Almost never is anyone capturing the conversation in a digital
format. Rarely is anyone uploading images. Facebook isn’t hoovering up
the information. Doing these things would take effort that nobody is
expending.
The Internet didn’t foreclose the use of real space for the conduct of life
as Shirky implies by talking about offline living in the past tense. It
expanded our freedom by giving us another space—a new option to use
as we see fit. Declining to use that space is as normal, natural, and
necessary as eating breakfast (which is impossible to do online, by the
way). Maybe some of the digerati conduct their love-lives online, but this
should be a disqualification for discussing the social impact of the
medium for failure to understand how it fits into most people’s lives.
Privacy debates premised on the omnipresence of digital media are
interesting and fun, but I don’t think they’re grounded in people’s actual
experience of the world (exception!), and they tend to overstate the
significance of online privacy problems.
Today’s Tabbloid PERSONAL NEWS FOR craig.kirchoff+webnews@gmail.com 27 May 2010

FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS

FCC Broadband Use Your Law Deferment to

Reclassification, What it Means Work for Liberty! [Cato at
to You [Americans for Tax Liberty]
MAY 26, 2010 08:53A.M.
Reform]
MAY 26, 2010 09:25A.M. By Ilya Shapiro

Stratecast, a group of market experts focused on market strategy and
analysis defines just how wonderful in a detailed report on net
neutrality. Instead of reading through the 26 page report,...
FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
Club PAC Launches New Ad in
For almost a year now, Cato has been running a highly successful
deferred legal associate program. Talented recent law school grads have
come to work for us during the time that their law firms have “deferred”
their start dates (from a few months to a full year), with commensurate
stipends. Now that we’re reaching the end of law school graduation
season, I thought I’d put out another call for more such individuals. We
can always use the the extra brain, you can always use Cato on your
resume, and your firms can always use your getting substantive legal
experience — we all win!

Nevada Senate Race [The Club And so, the Cato Institute invites graduating (and recently graduated)
law students and others facing firm deferrals — or simply a period of
for Growth] unemployment – to apply to work at our Center for Constitutional
MAY 26, 2010 09:20A.M. Studies. This is an opportunity to assist projects ranging from Supreme
Court amicus briefs to policy papers to the Cato Supreme Court Review.
WASHINGTON S COMMITTEE. 202-955-5500. Start/end dates are flexible and there are openings immediately
available. Interested students and graduates should email a cover letter,
resume, transcript, and writing sample, along with any specific details of
their availability to Jonathan Blanks at jblanks@cato.org. Note again
FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS that this announcement is for a non-paying job: we’ll give you a
workspace, good experience, and an entree into the DC policy world,
Someone Needs to Say It [The but we will not help your financial bottom line. You don’t have to be a
deferred law firm associate per se, but you do have to be able to afford
Club for Growth] not being paid by us.
MAY 26, 2010 09:15A.M.
Please feel free to pass the above information to your friends and
I yield to no one my frustration with the tenor and policies of the Obama colleagues.
Administration There are too many valid criticisms to make of this
administration for us to indulge in phoney ones. For information on Cato’s programs for non-graduating students,
contact Joey Coon at jcoon@cato.org.

9
Today’s Tabbloid PERSONAL NEWS FOR craig.kirchoff+webnews@gmail.com
FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
Update on the Arizona
Immigration Issue [Cato at
Liberty]
MAY 26, 2010 08:51A.M.
By Ilya Shapiro
Since I provided my legal analysis of the new Arizona immigration law,
I’ve become aware of a few interesting developments in that regard.
First, it seems that I wasn’t working off the latest version of the bill —
which I should add is awfully hard to find. Indeed, perhaps we should
excuse Attorney General Eric Holder and Secretary of Homeland
Security Janet Napolitano for not having read it; both the Arizona
Senate’s website for SB 1070, and the Arizona House’s website for the
amending legislation, HB 2162, list several different versions under their
“Bill Versions” tabs that do not match the bills in the other. As someone
who typically plays in the federal sandbox, if someone can direct me to a
verified true copy of the final operative bill, as signed and amended, my
colleagues and I – indeed the entire policy community – would be
grateful.
In any case, I’m please to announce that the (seemingly) final amended
version I’m now working from has improved an already constitutional
bill by further safeguarding civil liberties. Most notably, the ”may I see
your papers?” provision was changed to read that law enforcement
officials shall make a “reasonable attempt . . . when practicable, to
determine the immigration status” only after having made a “lawful
stop, detention, or arrest . . . in the enforcement of any other
law or ordinance . . . where suspicion exists that the [detained] person
is an alien and is unlawfully present in the United States” (amended text
in bold). This establishes a higher predicate standard for police to initiate
contact with any person to whom this law will be applied. In other words,
there has to be an independent reason for the stop or detention before
the police can ask to see proof of immigration status.
The amended bill also prohibits any consideration of “race, color or
national origin” in enforcing the new law in any manner that runs afoul
of either the U.S. or Arizona constitutions. Moreover, the legislature
clarified that the determination of an alien’s immigration status would
only be performed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the
Border Patrol, or a “law enforcement officer who is authorized [to do so]
by the federal government.”
All of these changes unquestionably improved the civil rights provisions
of the law and should further protect it from successful legal challenge —
again without saying anything about the law’s policy wisdom.
Second, while some analysts have argued that Arizona’s law might be
preempted by federal law — although the leading case, De Canas v. Bica,
424 U.S. 351, which is 34 years old and predates more recent
10
27 May 2010
immigration reforms, is not favorable to that position — Roger Pilon
alerted me to a 2005 case (unanimous in the judgment, less so in the
reasoning), Muehler v. Mena, 544 U.S. 93, that shows that Arizona’s law
doesn’t go as far as the Constitution might allow. In Mena, the police
detained the inhabitants of a house whice they were searching pursuant
to a lawful search warrant. While most of the officers performed the
search, others questioned one detainee about her immigration status
without any reasonable suspicious that she committed any crime —
and certainly without having any reasonable suspicion that she was an
illegal alien. The Supreme Court, in an opinion by Chief Justice
Rehnquist, upheld this line of questioning. Part of the reasoning was that
the “may I see your papers?” bit did not prolong the detention in any way
— the search was still ongoing — but this is at least some indication that
the Constitution allows immigration-related questioning without even
the reasonable suspicion required by Arizona.
Third, apparently the head of ICE, John Morton, said his agency will not
process illegal immigrants referred to them by Arizona officials. Morton
apparently doesn’t think that laws like Arizona’s “are the solution.” Well,
we at Cato certainly agree that Arizona’s law will not solve a problem that
demands a comprehensive federal solution, but that doesn’t mean
federal officials can simply decline to perform their duties under the law
as it exists. What Morton proposes is akin to state “nullification” of duly
enacted federal law — except worse, because his agency’s job is to
enforce that very law. If Morton feels that strongly about our
immigration laws, he should either resign or, while complying with his
duties, testify before Congress about the law’s defects and lobby his boss,
President Obama, to push reform.
Fourth and finally, President Obama is deploying 1,200 National Guard
troops to the border and requesting $500 million more for border
security. With due respect to Arizona Senators John McCain and Jon
Kyl, who want even more troops and money, this approach is neither
here nor there. (And it echoes Obama’s split-the-baby decision on
Afghanistan, not willing to go for a whole-hog escalation but also not
willing to rethink the overall policy.) Half-measures won’t do it here, Mr.
President (and Congress). If you lack the heart (or have too much of a
brain) for a full wall-and-militarization of our southern border — and
perhaps mass rounding up and deportation of 12 million people — it’s
time for a fundamental reorganization of the immigration system.
U.S. immigration (non-)policy is nonsensical and unworkable. We’re
beyond the point of perestroika; it’s time for regime change.