John Stossel reprises Friday’s 20/20 report on TownHall today. He says it’s time to get rid of stop signs: Rolling through a stop sign in Michigan puts two points on your driving record. That hikes your car insurance premium. Fighting the ticket could cost even more. So to avoid the points and legal fees, most people plead guilty to a lesser offense: impeding traffic. The court sounds like an assembly line, ” … no points … $135 … ” Last year, the town made...

Nik Cubrilovic tells it like it is: Geeks and enthusiasts wearing Wordpress t-shirts, using laptops covered in Data Portability, Microformats and RSS stickers lined up enthusiastically on Friday to purchase a device that is completely proprietary, controlled and wrapped in DRM. The irony was lost on some as they ran home, docked their new devices into a proprietary media player and downloaded closed source applications wrapped in DRM. I am referring to the new iPhone – and the new Apple iPhone...

Douglas A. Blackmon, author of Slavery By Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II, is interviewed in Newsweek this week: Can you explain the concept of “neoslavery” and the “convict labor system”? Neoslavery is a term to describe a whole range of ways in which all across the Southern United States in the late 19th century and deep into the 20th century millions of African-Americans found themselves in a form of de facto slavery...

You may have missed it, but over the 4th of July YouTube received a court order to hand over user viewing data from its database — including usernames and IP addresses — to Viacom in the ongoing $1 billion lawsuit against the video sharing service. YouTube refused. Randy Picker at the University of Chicago Law Faculty Blog, and David Robinson at Freedom to Tinker considered the implications. Yesterday Google and Viacom reached an agreement. TechCrunch: The Google-Viacom showdown over...

If puberty happens in middle school, why shouldn’t we expect lgbt awareness would begin then too? From today’s WaPo, Owning His Gay Identity — at 15 Years Old; Youths Coming Out Sooner, but Protections Against Harassment Lag: Saro, who first said he liked boys to a classmate in sixth grade, is like many of today’s lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender youths who openly discuss their sexual orientation and identity with friends, and sometimes family, before entering high school....

Georgia’s 10th Congressional District is among the most conservative in the state. Just a year after being elected to fill the unexpired term of the late Rep. Charlie Norwood, freshman Paul Broun faces a challenge Tuesday from State Rep. Barry Fleming. The winner will take the House seat in November. Have they no shame? U.S. Rep. Paul Broun (R-Athens) is questioning the religious convictions of his opponent in the Republican primary for the 10th congressional district seat as the election on...

You may recall that I am an unabashed Dan Ariely fan (see, for example, here, here, here, and here). It’s only fair that I give equal time to his critics. A major piece by Alan Wolfe in TNR takes a quite skeptical look at the new economics and the pursuit of happiness: Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational [link] is the latest book by a behavioral economist to hit the jackpot. The reason for its popularity is not hard to discover. The experiments that it describes are as titillating as...

While bilingualism is grabbing some of the headlines, the topic of yesterday’s speech [CNN video] was bankruptcy. It was Obama’s first visit to Georgia since securing the nomination (and on the same day of some small buzz over a Zogby poll showing Obama beating McCain in the state 44 to 38 percent — with Barr taking the 6 percent difference). Elizabeth Warren explains that it is rare for a presidential candidate to raise the topic, but these candidates have history: [Obama] voted...

From a paper by Benjamin R. Barber, the Kekst Professor of Civil Society at the University of Maryland and a Distinguished Senior Fellow at Demos in New York City, presented at the Istanbul Seminars organized by Reset Dialogues on Civilizations in Istanbul last month: There is a powerful rhetoric around today that claims Islam – not just fundamentalist or Wahhabist or Salafist Islam, but Islam itself is a religion hostile to democracy… I want to offer six straightforward arguments, some historical,...

Did you realize this was a result of Stephen Colbert’s Green Screen Challenge? Other entries of note: Elvis,  Pulp Fiction, Star Trek. Here’s Stephen with some others (the brain in a vat is especially fun).

Conservative icon dies. Long live the Millennials: Today we celebrate the spirit of America, which always has been one of hope. It’s elusive this summer, with a war raging and the economy plunging, but there’s always one promising place to look: our kids. And in many ways, youths today embody more promise of a better tomorrow than we’ve seen in years. They’re voting and volunteering in record numbers. While the rallying cry of young baby boomers was “burn, baby, burn,”...

My nephew works at Starbucks. He tells me that Starbucks gossip got it right: Talk about a company that’s jerking around customers and employees! It makes the big store closings announcement, then leaves employees in the dark about whether they have jobs or not. On top of that, customers are wondering if their favorite Starbucks will remain open. (And all day, employees have to listen to: Is this store closing? Are you staying open?) WHAT STARBUCKS SHOULD HAVE DONE: Immediately release a list...

Whether you’re white, black, or anything else: It’s now cliche for white folks looking to justify their own paranoia and fears to invoke rowdy black kids on the train, with no parents, acting a fool. Word up, I hate it to. But my ability to see this threw a racial lens is undercut by one observable fact–white kids act a fool in full view of their parents. In the last three months, I’ve seen a white child hit his mother, tell her mother to shut up, and run up and down a subway...

In his hilarious post Monday noting that the American Family Association’s OneNewsNow website auto-replaces the word “gay” with the word “homosexual” — which led to some blogger fun when a sprinter named Tyson Gay won the 100 meters at the U.S. Olympic track and field trials — Jazz asks: Is the word “homosexual” somehow perceived to be more pejorative than “gay” these days? The answer, Jazz, is YES! There is a linguistic battle going on. And in my circles...

I guess that makes us a niche read here at TMV! Henry Farrell comments on a new paper he, Eric Lawrence, and John Sides just finished (available at SSRN — they’d like you to download from there if you’re signed up, pdf here if not): First – blog readers seem to exhibit strong homophily. That is to say, they overwhelmingly choose blogs that are written by people who are roughly in accordance with their political views. Left wingers read left wing blogs, right wingers read right...

From the perspective of citizenship, one indisputable good that came of the Democratic primary season was how wonderfully it engaged the electorate. To any pundit or pollster who dares tell me that the ultimate outcome was exactly as they predicted, my reply is that the first right and responsibility of citizenship is the vote. Had the Founding Fathers intended a democracy based on polling, surely they could have (far more easily) set that up! Tom Schaller’s column in the NYTimes yesterday...

NYTimes: A decision by Georgia legislators to relax the state’s gun laws has led to a dispute over whether people can legally carry concealed firearms in the nation’s busiest airport, Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International. A Georgia gun rights group filed a lawsuit in Federal District Court in Atlanta on Tuesday after airport officials said they would continue to enforce a ban on concealed weapons in the terminal despite the changes to the state law. The changes, which were approved by the...

Following up on yesterday’s post about the Georgia Supreme Court considering proportionality in a sex offender case, there were some hopeful signs in the courtroom yesterday. Significantly, the court was asked to consider its ruling that freed Genarlow Wilson last year: The request was unusual in that it was made by both the prosecutor who wants the life sentence upheld as well as the public defender who contends the sentence is cruel and unusual punishment. At issue is a mandatory life sentence...

Tom Schaller’s by the numbers analysis always wreaks of often elicits southern bashing to me. (Who wrote that headline?) He repeats it again today on the OpEd page of the NYTimes: Two pervasive and persistent myths about racial voting in the modern South are behind the notion that Mr. Obama might win in places like Georgia, North Carolina and Mississippi. The first myth is that African-American turnout in the South is low. Black voters are actually well represented in the Southern electorate:...

The Supreme Court looked at death penalty as deterrent arguments before ruling to reaffirm its constitutionality in Baze v. Rees this term. The opinion [pdf] cited research by both Cass R. Sunstein (arguing that the data points to deterrence) and Justin Wolfers (no deterrence). Justin Wolfers: As two of the supposed flag bearers for the competing views cited by the court, Sunstein and I thought it worth poring over the data to see what we agree on. It turns out there’s a lot of agreement between...

The AJC: The judge had only one option when he sentenced Cedric Bradshaw: life in prison.  Bradshaw had not committed murder, rape or armed robbery.  His offense was failing to properly register as a convicted sex offender for a second time — even though he had repeatedly tried to follow the law…. On Monday, the state’s highest court will consider whether the law is unconstitutional on grounds it is cruel and unusual punishment. No other state calls for a life sentence for failing...

Knowing that it hasn’t got the slightest chance of passage, I completely ignored the introduction of a marriage protection amendment in the U.S. Senate this week. Now of course this is old news to all of you, but it only hit me just now that two of the principal sponsors are a far-right Republican who hired prostitutes and another far-right Republican who was arrested for soliciting gay sex in an airport men’s room. I couldn’t let it pass without posting. What kind of gay blogger would...

As lgbt pride marches step off in big cities across the country, it’s important to note what takes place at some of the smaller ones.Central Pennsylvania was a focal point in the Democratic primary for its white working class voters. Those same voters are made uncomfortable by gays on the march.While this year marks the 38th pride march in San Francisco and New York, it will be only the third time that gays march in Pennsylvania’s state capital, Harrisburg. When marchers there were greeted...

As lesbian and gay people are streaming into cities across America — Anchorage, Chicago, Columbus, Houston, Minneapolis/St. Paul, NYC, San Francisco, Seattle, St. Louis, Wichita — for what are billed as Gay Pride events, what Pat Boone sees is an invasion coming to hijack his America!!!WorldNetDaily: It’s been tried before, in a variety of ways. Starting with the time of our American Revolution…and continuing through the War of 1812, the Mexican army attack on the Alamo,...

Next year is my ten year “anniversary” with my spousal equivalent — though we’ve always had to wonder, anniversary of what??? In our case we chose the date that made the difference. (There’s also the question of which finger to wear the ring on — by wearing it on the traditional wedding finger am I trying to pass as a married straight man in this rural Georgia town?)We’re thinking maybe to celebrate that decade we’ll pack up a dozen of our best friends...