Month: November 2010

Garret Epps highlights the "irony that makes [Schwarzenegger], a figure who owes his present eminence to his performance as a naked murderous robot–the new symbol of censorship" in Schwarzenegger v. Entertainment Merchants Association. Epps also examines the slippery slope of banning certain content from children:

California's proposed exception is not based just on some alleged special harmful quality about video games, but on the idea that government, if it chooses, may limit all offensive violence to "protect minors' physical and psychological welfare, as well as their ethical and moral development." If the Court creates the exception California seeks, another state might make it a crime to sell a Terminator video to minors–or, for that matter, a copy of The Iliad–the most violent book I have ever read.

More than two dozen entertainment and media companies, moral-reform groups, and civil liberties organizations have filed amicus briefs in this case. By far the coolest is from the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. That brief reminds the Court of an episode I am just old enough to remember–the systematic government destruction of the vibrant postwar comic-book industry.

A flamboyant psychiatrist named Frederic Wertham wrote a book, The Seduction of the Innocent, that blamed America's "juvenile delinquency" problem on comic books like EC's Weird Science, Crime SuspenStories, and The Vault of Horror. The resulting legal backlash wreaked havoc in the industry; it took until the 1980s for the comics world to recover. These days, graphic novels like Art Spiegelman's Maus, or Watchmen by Alan Moore, Dave Higgins, and John Gibbons, are justly considered major narrative works of the twentieth century. And comic book historians utter the names Weird Science and Vault of Horror with reverence and sorrow.

The Terminator franchise has inspired dozens of comics and graphic novels, in fact.

Will Wilkinson explains why it sometimes seems as though all language relating to liberty has been ceded to the right:

…the contemporary left is an uneasy fusion of technocratic progressive and liberal-democratic conviction… The progressive technocrat's attitude toward liberty is: "Trust us. You're better off without so much of it." The more the left is inclined to stick up for this sort of "activist government" as a progressive, humanitarian force, the less it is inclined to couch its arguments in terms of liberty. And that's just honest. More honest, I would add, than social conservatives who in one breath praise liberty and in the next demand the state imposition of their favourite flavour of morality.

Peter Beinart wishes the left would talk more about liberty:

The Obama administration has barely tried to argue that activist government can make people more free—by, for instance, guaranteeing their health care coverage and thus freeing them to leave a dead end job. In America today, as at past moments in our history, there’s a profound debate underway not just about how to right our economy but about the relationship between capitalism and freedom. Pretending it’s not a real debate is a great way for the left to lose.

I would think there's a way to talk about this without all this tedious right-left stuff. Take a gas tax: is that really a big government coup? If we removed most tax deductions, lowered rates and added a gas tax, would that be right or left? And yet it would make us all freer, I think, by relieving us of an insanely complex tax code, empowering citizens to have easier scrutiny of government, and nudging us toward an economy where the market us encouraged to innovate clean energy. Ditto universal access to private healthcare. Of course, this helps liberalize the job market. And even Hayek approved of core social insurance against fate.

Quinnipiac University, Hamden, Connecticut, 5.30 pm

Ezra Klein wonders:

Politicians of both parties are risk-averse, and the likeliest outcome is that this fight is effectively tabled – particularly if, as predicted, Democrats hold the Senate. Republicans might mount a mostly symbolic vote on repealing the bill, and they could make a show of holding up appropriations in exchange for some smaller compromises on provisions that Democrats won't fight to the death over.

But Republicans are more likely to try to persuade their base to take the longer view and see this battle as one that will really be decided in 2012. Then, they believe, Republicans will have a shot a the White House – anda president whose pen will be on their side.

But what are they going to do if they don't cut spending or repeal health reform? Do they think the tea-parrty supporters will be happy to see them twiddling their thumbs and subpoenaing the janitors for two whole years? If people think Obama oversold in his campaign …

The man we were debating only recently was the inspiration for the knifing of a member of parliament in Britain. John Burns on the terror suspect’s allegedly growing threat to innocent Western lives:

Increasingly, Mr. Awlaki is being depicted by Western intelligence officials as a threat on the scale of Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri. Mr. Awlaki was the only militant leader singled out this week in the first public speech ever made by a head of Britain’s MI6. Sir John Sawers, the current MI6 chief, described “reading, every day, intelligence reports describing the plotting of terrorists who are bent on maiming and murdering people in this country,” and cited Mr. Awlaki and Yemen as increasingly dangerous. “From his remote base in Yemen,” he said, Mr. Awlaki “broadcasts propaganda and terrorist instruction in fluent English, over the Internet.” Mr. Gohel, the terrorism analyst, said the importance of Mr. Awlaki and the Yemen-based Qaeda group he leads rested on the fact that they operate independently from the leadership of the main branch of Al Qaeda, with their own membership, cell structure and finances.

“I’ve been saying for the past year that al-Awlaki is the most dangerous ideologue in the world,” Mr. Gohel said. “Unlike bin Laden and al-Zawahiri, he doesn’t need subtitles on his videos to indoctrinate and influence young people in the West.” Because he was born and raised in the United States, and lived for two years in Britain, Mr. Awlaki “understands the Western mindset — he has a better grip than bin Laden and Zawahiri when it comes to plotting terrorist attacks,” he said.

In his Internet harangues, Mr. Awlaki thrives in showing off his familiarity with Western culture, citing from Dickens and Shakespeare, among others. “Jihad is becoming as American as apple pie and as British as afternoon tea,” he said in one of his addresses this year.

Ezra Klein celebrates a rare victory of policy over politics.

A reader writes:

How appropriate that Nintendo is celebrating its 25th anniversary just days before the Supreme Court hears a First Amendment case concerning video games.  Similar laws have been struck down by numerous lower courts, but this is the first time the Supreme Court will deal with the issue.

While the primary issue is whether violent content may be restricted from minors by the government, it's also the first time the Court will address whether video games are an expressive medium entitled to full First Amendment protections – same as movies, music, and blog posts.  And according to most legal authorities, they almost certainly will be ruled to have such protections.  We've come a long way from Mario rescuing the Princess.

SCOTUSblog's Lyle Denniston last week posted a great primer on Schwarzenegger v. Entertainment Merchants Association, the opening arguments of which start today. Elie Mystal rails against the nannyism of such laws:

[T]hey insert the federal government into roles that are best left to parents and their own strategies for raising their children. My mother didn’t like me playing with guns, so I never had fake guns, all my G.I. Joe’s were stripped of their weapons before they got to me, and I mostly played sports video games growing up — I had to beg and get straight A’s forever to get a copy of Contra (and you wonder why I used to get my ass kicked). That was my mom’s choice, other parents thought differently.

It turns out that perfect spelling of Murkowski will not be necessary in Alaska: just a clear determination of voter intent. You remember Florida, don't you?

Weigel presents three scenarios for tomorrow's spin. Here's what he titles "the nightmare" for Democrats:

In a pure wave election, voters generally pull the lever for the winning party all the way down the ballot, in the races they know less about. This is one reason why Virginia's Ken Cuccinelli easily won the 2009 race for attorney general despite editorial boards warning about his conservative activism. And this is why many budding Democratic stars— California attorney general candidate Kamala Harris, New York attorney general candidate Eric Schneiderman, Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray—could go down.

Few people have paid much attention to the Republicans who would replace them, or what they would do.

Cuccinelli has the answer: A new class of Republican attorneys general can take dead aim at the Obama administration's federal mandates, and a new class of Republican secretaries of state can raise the barriers to voting and voting registration, challenging early voting and same-day registration reforms that have been good for Democrats.

In other words, are Democrats about to lose one election? Or are they about to lose elections for years to come?