Why?

One reason is a decline in the number of states requiring the use of helmets. According to the National Transportation Safety Board, in 1975, 47 states required all motorcycle riders to wear helmets, but now only 20 do. […]

“We are the only industrialized country in the world where there is an organized effort to weaken or repeal motorcycle helmet laws,” [Insurance Institute for Highway Safety spokesman Russ] Rader said. “That definitely is a factor in the increasing deaths.”

At the Motorcycle Safety Foundation, which is financed by the manufacturers, Tim Buche, the president, said a person killed on a motorcycle was 2.5 times more likely to be under the influence of alcohol than a person killed in a car and three times more likely not to have a proper license.

“There’s risks in everything in life, but the risks can be addressed,” Mr. Buche said, by training, licensing, riding sober and wearing protective gear.

Motorcycle sales are down this year; they’re said to be considered a luxury in tough economic times. Harley-Davidson has cut back production and reduced its workforce.

Meanwhile scooters “are flying off the shelves.” We have gas prices to thank for that. Last month Slate had a handy guide to thrifty motorcycles and scooters.

The photo is of a 410-cubic inch V-twin, 11 foot long, 1,433 pound Gunbus. Wired’s Autopia has details.

One of the major hurdles which the Bob Barr campaign (along with any other third party candidates) must overcome is the sheer volume of footwork required to even get on the ballot in all fifty states and the District of Columbia. There are a dismaying number of hoops to jump through, none of which are required of the Republicans or Democrats. These can involve not only armies of boots on the ground, but daunting amounts of money.

Just for one example, an independent candidate running for president in 2008 would need to collect 867,134 signatures from voters in all 50 states in order to have their name on the ballot this November. How many signatures did Barack Obama and John McCain have to submit? Zero. While volunteers are great, you still need to pay some workers to get out on the streets and gather that much ink. All of this costs money.

Oklahoma has one of the highest bars to ballot access, and will likely be the one place where Barr’s name will not appear. They require among the highest numbers of signatures per capita, the financial costs are steep and they have one of the shorter runways to complete the process. (You needed to have all of your signatures submitted by July 15.)

To be fair, of course, we absolutely do need some barriers and minimum standards for every state or the ballot could quickly turn into a phone book. (And nobody wants to read a phone book, do they?) It has to take more than someone rolling out of bed one morning and saying, “I think I’ll run for President!” and making a call to a 1-800 number. But what about the third parties which have made their presence known over a period of decades and done all of this footwork in the past?

The Libertarian Party already has fixed ballot access in 26 states, and has consistently fielded candidates in every major election. Fundraising is a huge challenge for third parties as it is. Depleting their resources further each cycle in an effort to simply get on the ballot seems to feed into the perception that the two major parties have consistently passed legislation at the state level to make it increasingly difficult for anyone else to challenge the status quo.

Many of you have been speaking of the need for “change” during this election cycle. Here’s one change for you to consider. What say we open up the playing field a bit more for serious, third party contenders?

The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Chris Satullo had a column Sunday looking at Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s Nudge:

Been nudged lately?

You have, whether you know it or not.

If you’ve ever obeyed your computer’s invitation to install some software in the “standard (recommended)” mode, you’ve been nudged, in a helpful way. If you’re still paying for that magazine subscription you got in a “free trial” three years ago, you got nudged less benignly.

Unless you’re a creature of rare self-discipline, you get nudged all the time.

If Barack Obama becomes president, you will likely be nudged more often by the federal government, as his policy advisers seek ways to reach goals without new mandates or hard-and-fast bans.

Nudge now peppers wonkish conversation the way tipping point did a few years ago after Malcolm Gladwell published his famous book. At a recent Urban Institute panel on the future of retirement, every panelist mentioned something about “finding the right nudge” or “seeing a nudge opportunity.”

As with tipping point, this instant cliche comes from a book. Written by two witty guys from Chicago, economist Richard H. Thaler and legal scholar Cass R. Sunstein, it’s called Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness.

Sunstein is a good friend of Obama’s; both authors serve as informal policy advisers.

Not everyone is happy about that. Last week Big Tent Democrat pointed to Glenn Greenwald quoting Ari Melber that Sunstein wasn’t interested in pursuing criminal conduct in the current Administration arguing we risk a retributive cycle of criminalizing public service. [LATER: Sunstein debates Greenwald on Democracy Now.]

As it happens, on that point, I may agree with Sunstein. But BTD goes on to explain that Sunstein has “[defended] the Bush Administration’s illegal actions and… preposterous claims for many years.” And, indeed, I agree with BTD’s criticism of Sunstein on Chief Justice John Roberts.

But in the end those positions do not rule him out in my book. He is a law professor! He talks and thinks and argues and acts like the legal minds I have known. I trust Obama to be the political animal we need to translate Sunstein’s insights — and hopefully filter out his clunkers — into positive social change.

Read the rest of this entry »

CNet calls it a long-shot bid for the geek vote:

Speaking [in Las Vegas] at a political conference on Friday, Barr focused almost exclusively on privacy and eavesdropping–and argued that both major parties are far too surveillance-happy. “Both of them will continue down the same track,” Barr said, noting that both McCain and Obama supported last week’s bill to immunize telecommunications companies that illegally opened their networks to government snoops.

Congress’ legislative rewrite of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is “not about surveilling Al Qaeda,” Barr said. “It’s about surveilling U.S. citizens in America.” He added, for good measure: “This administration is the most anti-privacy, the most anti-individual freedom, in our nation’s history, certainly in my lifetime.”

This is hardly a Bush-McCain species of Republican speaking. It underlines Barr’s appeal: If you’re a traditional conservative who disagrees with the big-government policies, the surveillance, the inflation, the deficit spending, and the unnecessary wars of the Bush administration, vote for me. I was one of you, once.

It might work. More precisely, it might work well enough–think a Republican equivalent of Ralph Nader–to make a difference in states that would have tilted toward McCain otherwise. It’s certainly a more attractive message than the Libertarians’ 2004 candidate, a telemarketer-turned-programmer, had to offer.

Barr has an arch-conservative voting record, but claims he’s an honest-to-goodness convert to the cause:

He said a long time ago that he regrets voting for the Patriot Act; he wants an Iraq withdrawal “without undue delay”; the head of the Marijuana Policy Project formally nominated Barr at the Libertarian convention; Barr even endorsed a Libertarian presidential candidate in 2004. He founded a group called the American Freedom Agenda that opposes the White House’s policies in the so-called war on terror, and his supporters note he embraced a wealth of privacy measures while in Congress (see our coverage from 2002). […]

Barr also likes to swipe at the Real ID Act, a law creating a federalized identity card that’s effectively on hold until December 31. “It was passed by the Congress not as a national ID, which it is in every way except a name,” he said. “It is a national ID for the first time in our nation’s history…If certain people were elected president it would not go into effect.”

During the Libertarian Party’s presidential debate in Denver, the candidates were asked what they’d do about Real ID and the Patriot Act. Barr’s reply was captured on video by C-SPAN: “Fear has become the driving force behind all public policy in our country…(For the Patriot Act), I’d drive a stake through its heart, shoot it, burn it, cut off its head, burn it again, and scatter its ashes to the four corners of the world.”

RELATED: Posted on Barr’s website, his appearance on CNN’s Newsroom addressing the spoiler question.

Er, if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck…

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 half a million dollars from such fines. Some drivers told us it “seems like a moneymaking scam.

I don’t know if that’s true, but when some angry motorists complained to Heather Catallo, reporter for Detroit’s ABC affiliate, she took her cameras out to see if the cops themselves stopped at the stop signs. Most didn’t.

Her expose caused a ruckus in town. The mayor hired a new police commissioner, who told me the cops might have been on emergency calls. “They don’t necessarily have to have their lights and sirens on,” Commissioner William Dwyer said.

I told him the tape showed police cars rolling through stop signs on the way back to the police station.

ABC put cameras by stop signs in Warren, Mich., and in New York City and found that 72 percent of Michigan drivers and 82 percent of New Yorkers did not come to a complete stop. He points to John Staddon in this month’s Atlantic on why stop signs and speed limits endanger Americans:

For one thing, there’s the placement of the signs—off to the side of the road, often amid trees, parked cars, and other road signs; rarely right in front of the driver, where he or she should be looking.

Then there’s the sheer number of them. They sit at almost every intersection in most American neighborhoods. In some, every intersection seems to have a four-way stop. Stop signs are costly to drivers and bad for the environment: stop/start driving uses more gas, and vehicles pollute most when starting up from rest. More to the point, however, the overabundance of stop signs teaches drivers to be less observant of cross traffic and to exercise less judgment when driving—instead, they look for signs and drive according to what the signs tell them to do.

Stossel sticks to stop signs but Staddon moves on to “a more severe safety hazard” the speed limit:

A particularly vexing aspect of the U.S. policy is that speed limits seem to be enforced more when speeding is safe. As a colleague once pointed out, “An empty highway on a sunny day? You’re dead meat!” A more systematic effort to train drivers to ignore road conditions can hardly be imagined. By training drivers to drive according to the signs rather than their judgment in great conditions, the American system also subtly encourages them to rely on the signs rather than judgment in poor conditions, when merely following the signs would be dangerous.

In this Staddon is joined by University of Chicago Law Professor Lior Strahilevitz who took up the topic of traffic law a couple years ago and has found empirical studies documenting that when municipalities have budget woes, traffic fine collections increase. He has not found that when traffic safety measures are implemented fines plummet.

Staddon advocates virtually no traffic signs — any minimal instruction given can be painted on the road itself. He might like the scheme Strahilevitz has concocted and presented in his fascinating paper, “How’s My Driving?” for Everyone (and Everything?):

A few weeks ago, I was driving to the airport in Seattle. Traffic was flowing reasonably well on the freeway. Just two car lengths ahead of me, a driver in a pickup truck began swerving violently between the two leftmost lanes, nearly colliding with a minivan. The minivan blared its horns and the pickup driver proceeded to drive like a maniac for the next half mile or so, violently jerking his car from lane to lane, swerving unpredictably across multiple lanes, and forcing numerous drivers to brake suddenly and become agitated during an otherwise uneventful morning commute. The pickup driver then swerved for the exit ramp, and abruptly left the freeway.

This scenario — atrocious driving on the freeway by an anonymous motorist, observed by dozens of bystanders, yet sanctioned in no meaningful way — plays out thousands of times daily on American freeways. The police can’t be everywhere, we rarely know the people driving near us on the freeways, and this combination of rare surveillance and practical driver anonymity contributes substantially to aggressive driving. Largely as a result, vehicular collisions are the leading killer of Americans aged 15 to 29. I have just posted a brand new paper on SSRN (free download available here), that shows how the law can take much better advantage of the information that you and me obtain about our fellow motorists every day on the roads.

Existing programs reduce accidents between 20 and 53 percent. I was skeptical when I heard it described, but completely sold when I listened to his Chicago’s Best Ideas talk last January:

Before buying a product from an eBay seller, a prospective buyer is likely to examine the seller’s feedback score and peruse the comments of others who previously dealt with that merchant. A strong feedback score enables merchants to fetch more money for their products, and the fear of negative feedback helps keep the overwhelming majority of eBay sellers on their best behavior. Imagine if every driver on the roads had a similar sort of feedback score and these scores were made available to insurance companies. Would aggressive and unsafe behavior on our roadways be reduced? Could drivers and pedestrians do a better job of keeping the roadways safe than the police? Would the feedback be reliable enough? Yes, Yes, and Yes, says Professor Strahilevitz, who will elaborate on this idea and explore applications beyond the roadways.

Here a follow-up post from Strahilevitz with some interesting discussion of extending reputation and feedback systems beyond driving to bring big urban areas some small town qualities.

This piece of legislation — and what Congress has done to the fourth amendment—which protects the privacy of ordinary citizens from unreasonable invasion by the government —  matters. 

Those who defended the telecoms for breaking federal law at the request of the Bush administration kept talking about the telecoms’ subjection to  ‘the heavy hand of government.’  This was always spurious argument in the case of the telecoms, who had no more obligation than you or I to comply with an unlawful demand to break the law (none) and the same obligation as you or I would have to refuse to comply. And in fact, not all telecoms chose to go along with the demand.    

FISA, on the other hand, unleashes ‘the heavy hand of government’ against ordinary citizens.

Read the rest of this entry »

As a follow up to Patrick’s previous post, I thought I’d post the graphical representation of the Political Compass scores of the first ten people to respond to Patrick’s post. As I explained in my response to Patrick’s post, I personally feel that Political Compass is a highly subjective tool that suffers from a number of limitations and that the results are somewhat misleading. However, what numerical data we’ve obtained might as well be displayed in graphical form.

For purposes of space, I’ve abbreviated each members name to just the first three letters/numbers. Should more people reply to Patrick’s post (or my own), I’ll be sure to update the graphic above.

UPDATE: The original graphic has been altered to incorporate additional scores obtained since this article was posted.

Over recent weeks there have been several posts which have gotten into the debate over what moderate or liberal or conservative truly mean. As several people correctly pointed out there is a natural tendency for people to assume that mainstream means their own viewpoint.

I myself have fallen into the trap before and so to test myself for real I have gone to several of the political ideology tests on the web to find out where I really stand. I thought it might be fun for the rest of you to do the same.

One of the best sites I have found is Political Compass. This site looks at political ideology both from an economic viewpoint and also from the aspect of government and authority. It assigns you scores ranging from -10 to + 10 for each viewpoint and shows you where you stand.

In terms of interpretation of the scale I’d say that scores from 0 to 2.5 in either direction place you in the category of moderate, scores from 2.5 to 7.5 in either direction place you in some form of mainstream liberal/conservative and anything beyond 7.5 puts you in the extreme category (since by definition of the scale -10 or +10 are as far over as you can get and include folks like Hitler/Stalin/etc). It is an international quiz so you are able to compare yourself to people around the world.

If course most of the questions are subject to interpretation and so if you take the test 3 or 4 times in a week you are likely to get slightly different scores each time. But it seems that there is a fairly small range to your scores.

The second test is Vote Match and is geared more to US politics. You answer a series of questions and it matches you to Presidential candidates or members of the Senate. Again, there is a degree of interpretation but it is also a fun quiz.

So take the tests and post your scores.

Just to start the ball rolling, when I took the Compass test I ended up with a small range of scores but my economic results tended to be in the 1-3 range while my authority result ranged in the 0 to -2 range. So in all cases I ended up as a moderate but with a slight left tilt on authority and a slight right tilt on economics.

In the Match quiz I looked to Senate members (there is a choice to show your top and bottom 10 Senate matches) and interestingly ended up with an equal match of GOP and Dems in my top 10 but mostly GOP in the bottom. My best matches tended to be Evan Bayh, Arlen Specter and the like.

So chime on in folks.

The Times of London looked at Nudge by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein last weekend in a piece titled politicians are devouring the work of academics who explain why the carrot beats the stick.

The research shows that while people claim social norms are the weakest of influences on them, the evidence indicates they are among the strongest. It’s good to see the pols picking up on that:

Most of us are not robots or Vulcans. Though sane, rational beings, we often behave illogically… In making decisions we often suffer from inertia, preferring the status quo to the unknown new. We are also poor at judging risk, probability and our own capabilities. According to Nudge, written by two American academics, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, 90% of drivers think they are better than the average – a mathematical impossibility.

And, most important, we are strongly influenced by those around us, even though we may think we are not. Nudge gives the example of an experiment in which people are shown a number of lines and asked to identify the two that are the same length. The answer is clear, and on their own, people make the right choice. However, if participants are told that a majority before them have made another choice, in many cases they will give the same wrong answer.

These experiments have been replicated around the world. Sunstein and Thaler propose we use this understanding to build what they a call “choice architecture” which can be a powerful tool for positive social change.

“Telling people what others are doing does tend to have an effect,” [Wes Schultz of California State University] said. “But there are instances where it can boomerang – if you are using less energy than your neighbours, say by making a sacrifice by not running your air-conditioning, you can feel like a sucker.” The result: your energy consumption goes up, not down, to meet the norm. The same has been found in studies of student drinking. Told how much the norm is, some students drank less, but others started to drink more.

Schultz’s solution was to add a little nudge. Some of the participants in his study had a smiley face added to their bill if they used less energy than the norm and a sad face if they used more. The results were startling. Among the participants receiving the emoticon, the boomerang effect completely disappeared. High users reduced their consumption by even more and low users kept their own down.

Sunstein is an occasional, informal adviser to the Obama campaign. Some are not at all pleased about that. While I do not agree with Sunstein on everything, I’m thrilled that he will be among those advising Obama.

I became familiar with him in the early 1990s for his work on the First Amendment, which I assume grew out of his clerking for Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. That he’s rumored to be engaged to Samantha Power and a potential Obama Supreme Court pick only makes the story better.

Parenthetically…

Just as we are now seeing progressives learn the lessons of GOPAC, I expect that we will soon flip the doctrine of original intent right back on those conservatives who have so successfully used it to mask their social agenda. Sunstein will be invaluable in that effort.

See, for example, this excerpt from a 2005 Fresh Air interview, on the history behind the 14th Amendment and our color-blind Consitution. He will be similarly devastating on the 1st and 2nd Amendment, among others.

Stephen asks Libertarian presidential candidate Bob Barr if he’s afraid the government will make him register his mustache.

And here’s a little something to look forward to from Stephen’s fans: John McCain’s Green Screen Challenge. It will be interesting to see if this turns into anything like some of the previous greenscreen challenges.

I’ve been watching for the fun mashups of the three speeches from the other night that are bound to come. If someone spots a good one, please point me to it.

AP:

The Libertarian Party on Sunday picked former Republican Rep. Bob Barr to be its presidential candidate after six rounds of balloting.

Barr beat research scientist Mary Ruwart, who was the party’s presidential nominee in 1983 and vice presidential candidate in 1992, by a vote of 324-276 on the final ballot.

Barr endorsed Wayne Allyn Root, who was eliminated in the fifth round, to be his vice-presidential nominee.

David Weigel @ Reason Magazine has been live blogging all day and summarizes here.

Said Barr, celebrate tonight:

…because I’m sure we’ll all leave here with the strongest ticket in the history of the Libertarian Party… Then I want everybody to remember we have only 163 days to win this election. Do not wait one single day.

I’ve got a junior reporter down on the Libertarian National Convention floor today. Rachel Hawkridge, is a Libertarian activist and delegate from the state of Washington to the Convention being held in Denver over five days.

She phoned in to me just a few minutes ago to say the front runners in the race for nomination to run for POTUS have now been tallied in the first ‘tokens’ vote. The people with the highest votes will now be placed into major debates tomorrow… to be followed by delegates’ final vote for who will become the Libertarian Candidate for POTUS.

The candidates thought to be in hottest contention for the final nomination are:

Senator Mike Gravel from Alaska, 78 years old, who also ran on the Democratic ticket to be nominated for 2008 President. Senator Gravel, is revered by many for long ago reading into the congressional record, non-stop- the entirety of the Pentagon Papers which Nixon was trying to suppress. He believes in “direct democracy” wherein sovereign authority is kept by the citizens to govern themselves, rather than “representative democracy” with an elected representative who works and lives at arms’ length from the people. He’s a Unitarian Universalist

Representative Bob Barr, age 59, a Republican from Georgia, and a Methodist who entered office when Newt Gingrich’s Republican Majority (first time R majority in forty years) was going sweep clean and bring a new day, but Barr was turned out of office by a huge margin eventually. Since, he now has helped to found an organization called Patriots to Restore Checks and Balances, a bipartisan group wanting to eliminate clauses of the Patriot Act that could wrongfully penalize innocent citizens. He is also recently involved with the ACLU.

Dr. Mary Ruwart, 59, is a Libertarian activist with a Ph.D., in biophysics. With F. Kendall and L. Louw, Dr. Ruwart is the author of Healing Our World in the Time of Aggression and Short Answers to the Tough Questions. She has a large number of supporters from her 30 years of libertarian activism. Amongst other human concerns, she advocates that people ought to be able to choose how they die and when, if confronted with grievous illnesses. Her sister was a person who engaged Dr. Jack Kevorkian’s aid. Ruwart spent 19 years as a pharmaceutical research scientist for Upjohn Pharmaceuticals and has written extensively on the subjects of government regulation of the drug industry. She holds three patents for life-giving procedures.

Mr. Wayne Allen Root, soon to be 48 years old, is Jewish, and a millionaire Las Vegas odds maker. He runs a media corporation, also has penned books, and some say, he seeks to “finish the job that Ron Paul started.” He is a self-described S.O.B. (son of a butcher), who plans, amongst other things, to eliminate the Department of Education, and “end all federal income taxes immediately and move all of them to the state level… The Founding Fathers never envisioned a government that could take away 50 percent of the money we make…” He graduated from Columbia in the same class as Barack Obama, and he and his wife home school their children.

The Denver Post today speculates that Bob Bar can win the Libertarian nomination “ for his fame.” Meaning, his profile in the nation is higher than other candidates here today. But, my girl-reporter on the Convention floor today says some of the reaction to Bob Barr is very much otherwise:

“Many delegates are walking around with big buttons that feature a rainbow, with Bob Barr’s name over it, and over his name a huge red circle and slash…”

“ There is a large GLBT contingent in the Libertarian party,” says Miss Hawkridge, and “Bob Barr was the author of the ‘only man-woman marriage allowed’ bill.” In additional to issues for GLBT regarding marriage, for Libertarians, the intrusion of ‘church’ into state, is anathema.

Also, according to Hawkridge, a significant number of the delegates remember Barr as one of the most conservative and loud members of the Federal Congress.

Barr not only wrote and sponsored the Defense of Marriage act, but also voted for the Patriot Act; proposed the Pentagon ban a religious group from practice in the military: Wicca; and advocated complete federal prohibition of medical marijuana—succeeding in this last with his “Barr Amendment”– which also forbid any future law that would decrease penalties for marijuana use.

Hawkridge says it is clear that Barr has had some kind of change of mind that led him from being a Republican to being a Libertarian.

That changeover occured after he, with high moral indignation, plowed into impeaching then President Clinton, but had secretly enabled his own wife to have an abortion while also supporting anti-abortion measures in Congress (outed by Larry Flynt)…

But Hawkridge says that most poignant, today, when speaking with Barr this morning, he could not look Hawkridge in the eye.

“He spoke to me, but kept looking at the floor… he couldn’t look at me, just kept saying in answer to my deeper questions, that he was misled about the Patriot Act, that he was lied to about the Patriot Act, and that ‘we were not told the truth about the Patriot Act.’”

The Denver Post reports that Dr. Ruwart, who has been a Libertarian since the 1980s, said the strongest candidates are herself, Barr, Gravel and Root. She is the only one of them who isn’t a Johnny-come-lately, she said.

“They [suddenly appearing-out-of-nowhere Libertarian-converts who want to run as candidate for POTUS] are kind of like the newly converted wanting to go preach from the pulpit,” she said.

Bob Barr may be the most recognizable, although I’d say it’s Senator Gravel who has passion to ‘make things better’ –similar to Barr’s– but with genuine charm and casting his nets to help far more broadly… and Gravel has a whole set of street creds ‘for the people,’ not just some for ’some very few of the people.’

And as for Dr. Ruwart, she sounds like one heck of a strong woman who keeps being point woman… and who herself, can’t and won’t, be Barred.

—————
CODA
Disclosure: Rachel Hawkridge is a young ‘daughter of spirit,’ a sharp observer/ straight talker. I’ve known her and her gallant engineer husband Gene for over ten years. They are Libertarian activists and Convention delegates from Kenmore, Washington.

Errata: A sentence, “John McCain won that race.”, was inadvertantly placed in this article. It has been removed. It belongs to another article entirely. Sorry. The error is mine.