But this photo tells a different story.

If anyone racially profiled, it was the Harvard professor’s neighbor, who apparently called police and reported two black men breaking into Gates’ house. This is another lesson in why it’s important to get to know your neighbors!

The neighbor may have not called in the cops if Gates and his driver were white, but she/he may very well have still done so. Let’s imagine a different scenario: a robbery had taken place at Gates’ house, and the neighbor comes forward to say she saw it occurring but had figured the person breaking in was the owner locked out; I can imagine how she would have been ridiculed for thinking such a thing.

So it’s no surprise that if the neighbor didn’t know Gates lived there, she might have thought the men breaking down the front door were breaking into the house. This is true whether they were white or black.

So just the neighbor calling the police wasn’t inherently racist. I have relatives who always forget their keys, yet they’ve never had to break the door down to get in; they call someone who has a key or they find a hidden one. I’ve never seen a person breaking their own door down, have you?

Now we have the police. Depending on whose story you believe, the police officer was rude to Gates in his own house OR Gates refused to show identification to prove that he owned the house while accusing the officer (loudly) of being a racist. According to a third party, Barack Obama, the police officer “acted stupidly.” And yes, that was more of a detailed answer than he’s ever given on health reform.

But an aspect of this that hasn’t been reported in the media is that one of the officers that arrested Gates was black. You can see in this picture that as Henry Louis Gates is being led from his home in handcuffs, one of the officers standing in front of him is black (Gates is biracial himself, just as Obama is).

Gates hasn’t mentioned this at all, the media hasn’t mentioned it beyond publishing this picture. Isn’t that an important fact to get the whole picture of this story?

After watching Harold and Maude last night, I found a review that ran in Film Quarterly in 1972 and made me think twice about the movie I just saw: “Maude philosophizes continuously about living life to the fullest, about rebellion and noncomformity, about individualism and spontaneity. Her speeches are in fact a remarkable compendium of libertarian attitudes, ranging from antistatism down to the most personal and immediate independence. That Maude can get away with delivering lofty messages and still remain ‘in character’ is a triumph for the makers of this film. They have designed a character who is both a sympathetic human figure and a mouthpiece for precise cultural criticism. Maude’s social and private radicalism is so integral to her personality that it arouses none of the discomfort that is commonly experienced when a movie character expounds about ‘life.’”

Hmm, this must in fact be easily overlooked if I, Libertarian Girl, had not noticed this while watching Harold and Maude. Maude has some good ideas, but I had not thought of her as a libertarian soothsayer. While the Film Quarterly reviewer may have had an odd idea of what libertarianism is (in the next paragraph, the reviewer says Maude thinks all private property should be liberated from its owners), the misguided reviewer is not the only one who saw elements of libertarianism in the movie; Maude is described as a “social libertarian” by Brown University’s film journal, while law professor Butler Shaffer writes on LewRockwell.com about the value to libertarians of over-obedience, using the movie as an example. Shaffer writes about the scene in which Harold and Maude convince his military uncle that Harold is too eager to join the military and therefore gets out of being forced to join. One viewer believes Harold and Maude succeeds in portraying individualism in a way that Dead Poets Society doesn’t, but still wonders how Maude comes to her particular set of ethics with no framework.

There are some severe problems with these generalizations. Film Quarterly probably first called Maude a “libertarian” because she fits what many see as a “typical libertarian,” or the libertarian stereotype: someone who believes people should do what they want, with no rules, especially when it comes to themselves. Maude steals private property, steals public property, flouts traffic laws and endangers other drivers and pedestrians. She disrespects the families of the dead at funerals and graveside services by attending and striking up conversations during the ceremonies, laughing that death is no big deal, and dancing away with a yellow umbrella, then stealing cars afterwards. Sure, it’s a movie, but these are all things Maude did that may be acceptable in cinema but not in real life. They suited her and her life and goals and philosophy, but they didn’t suit others who were probably highly inconvenienced by them. It’s bad enough that your friend or family member may have died; it’s even worse if your car is stolen after the funeral.

Maude’s justification for stealing cars? “Well, if some people get upset because they feel they have a hold on some things, I’m merely acting as a gentle reminder, ‘Here today, gone tomorrow, so don’t get attached to things.’ With that in mind, I’m not against collecting stuff.” Her stuff, memorabilia she keeps in her house, is not “integral” to her, she says, so if someone took it from her she presumably wouldn’t suffer. Maude drives everywhere and conveniently chooses a new vehicle everywhere she goes. At the same time that she says cars mean too much to people, she’s using those cars all the time for her own transportation, which obviously means something to her. It works well for her purposes, but let’s imagine everyone was “liberated of their possessions” in this way. It wouldn’t really work out that well, would it? No one would want to be the sucker who buys cars that are stolen wherever they’re parked. This is the absolute dead opposite of libertarianism. Libertarianism is not selfishness disguised as altruism.

Maude, then, may not be very libertarian, but she is certainly good for a few laughs and does “privatize” dying trees located on the sidewalk in the city (which handily demonstrates not only her personality but that privatization is usually better for the environment).

Maude “doesn’t believe in” driver’s licenses, but that’s not necessarily libertarian, either, although it might be a commonly held idea out there that libertarians might believe this (i.e., terrible drivers like Maude could drive around with no problem because they just wouldn’t get licenses and would steal police officers’ motorcycles when caught) and could be a leftover from her Holocaust past, as this reviewer alludes to, though it’s more likely just a symptom of her zany personality than any principled personal stance. (An argument could be made that a concentration camp survivor might be less willing to kill themselves for no other reason than “it’s all downhill after you’re 80″ than a “normal” person would, too.)

The license scene does bring us possibly the most libertarian quote of the movie, in which Maude tells the police officer: “Don’t get officious, you’re not yourself when you’re officious. That is the curse of a government job.”

Harold and Maude is a good movie, but it’s not a libertarian movie. Maude is a good character, but she’s not very libertarian, though she has nice sentiments at times. Probably the most libertarian thing about the movie is its theme song, by Cat Stevens:

“Well, if you want to sing out, sing out
And if you want to be free, be free
‘Cause there’s a million things to be
You know that there are

And if you want to live high, live high
And if you want to live low, live low
‘Cause there’s a million ways to go
You know that there are.”

There is no doubt that Joe Biden is more articulate than Sarah Palin. However, almost nothing he says makes any actual sense.

Biden doesn’t know basic economics, history and doesn’t give a donkey’s arse about the Constitution. Biden misrepresents himself and what he stands for habitually: this is a guy who was all for invading Iraq if the UN had gone for it (and cheered Bush on with early invasion plans) and now pretends he’s Bush’s worst enemy and implies he was against it all along. This is the Joe Biden who created the completely unconstitutional position of the drug czar, which has spurred the growth of an agency which takes billions from those middle-class people Biden says he loves so much. It’s also put many of them in jail. This is the guy who may want to keep the vice-president’s office in the executive branch, but doesn’t care about expanding federal power over everything in your life under the auspices of “interstate commerce.”

As I always say, if you’re articulate and can speak well, you can get elected to office in this country even if you’re mentally insane, a habitual liar, a serial exaggerator or even a murderer. Voters simply go by what feels good to them at the moment, and a good speaker will fool them every time. Someone with real intellect and substance but no speaking ability won’t get out of the gate. Biden is a plagiarist, but it doesn’t matter because he’s “cool, calm and collected” after 30 years of taxpayer-funded practice, and his staffers can filter the facts on Wikipedia.

I also object to those who have stated that Gwen Ifill was perfectly objective despite her forthcoming Obama book. One of her first questions concerned whether “greedy lenders” or “risky homebuyers” contributed more to the subprime mortgage mess. That is a Hillary Clinton stump line if I’ve ever heard one. The home buyers who were buying houses way out of their leagues were also quite greedy in wanting to live in McMansions they couldn’t afford, and the lenders who were “trying to let people live the American Dream” (as Obama and Biden would put it) were also just being “risky.” That wasn’t the only completely partisan question she asked that night, although she did criticize Joe Biden at one point, a decision I’m sure came into play after she received so much criticism in the run-up to the debate. Another question talked about “debt-strapped mortageholders” and “some people have said that mortgageholders paid the price”– in other words, people who (like the Wall Street billionaires) made bad decisions and are now suffering for it who want other people who didn’t make those bad decisions to give them money.

Palin was excellent in her answer to that question, using a light touch to tell people that they need to learn lessons and not be taken advantage of again and pay attention to their parents’ admonitions to not live beyond their means. She also said that government needed to be more efficient, something Obama is big on but Biden didn’t mention this time around. Tax raises mean that jobs will be cut and the private economy will suffer as the public sector becomes more bloated and inefficient.

Biden’s mantra for the night was “John said, ‘Deregulate, deregulate.’” That alone is quite enough to turn someone away from voting for his ticket, as if deregulation is the problem and as if deregulation is a bad thing. Obama says the same thing, but not to this extent.

Biden did get one hit in when he said that he agreed with Palin’s tax raises on oil companies and McCain wanted to get them tax breaks. I give him props for that, but she got back at him when she said that Biden had offered to run on McCain’s ticket. She made the point that raising taxes on oil companies was good and set Biden up to hit his home run. Palin missed a chance to deliver a knockout when she talked about what she’d done in Wasilla, Alaska to improve it and Biden talked about how Wilmington, Delaware was hurting right now. She could’ve pointed out that she’d improved her hometown but after 30 years in Congress, he hadn’t done much to help his.

I am starting to finally buy into this “liberal media bias” thing. Here are two egregious examples from a quick search of the news.

According to The Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Biden provided “oodles of details, numbers and records in his answers” which “might win over intellects,” which ignores the fact that many of his “oodles of numbers and records” were completely wrong. Why would intellects fall for that, and why would intellects be any less into Palin’s arguing that people, for instance, should be smart enough next time not to fall for predatory lenders, rather than flocking for Biden’s argument that these mortgage-holders were too dumb to figure it out for themselves and therefore need to be “saved” by taxpayers?

The Baltimore Sun television critic believes it “is hard to imagine any rational human being not thinking Joe Biden delivered one of the most solid and winning debate performances in recent presidential history… the question is whether facts, reason and logic can win out on TV over attitude and image, which is what Palin’s performance was all about.” Hmm, so Biden is all facts, reason and logic while Palin is all image? I’m beginning to believe that there is a mainstream media liberal bias. Rather than even giving Palin credit for being tolerant of same-sex couples, he says she doesn’t know the Republican position on gays and that evengelicals must have fallen “right out of their seats” when they heard. What the hell?

Ways in which Biden stretched the truth (and ways in which they both did):

McCain did not say he was “surprised” by subprime mortgages last December.
McCain did not say he wants the health care deregulated, only that insurance should be allowed to be bought over state lines.
McCain did not vote the same way Obama did on the tax-raising vote– he didn’t vote at all.
McCain does not only want to give Exxon Mobil a tax cut, but he wants to cut the general business tax rate for all corporations.
Obama has said that he would consider meeting with Iran’s president without precondition; Biden claimed Obama had not said this. It’s not a bad thing, anyway.
We didn’t kick Hezbollah out of Lebanon, and neither did France. Nobody has.

“Frank Serpico – The first police officer not only in the history of the New York Police Department, but in the history of any police department in the whole United States, to step forward to report and subsequently testify openly about widespread, systematic cop corruption-payoffs amounting to millions of dollars.” — Peter Maas, author of the biography Serpico

For Serpico’s efforts, he was rewarded by his fellow police officers with the most difficult beat– the narcotics one– and shot in the face with some of his fellow police officers just standing by and refusing to help. Luckily, a civilian neighbor heard the gunshots and called for help. Serpico is a true American hero when it would have been much, much easier to just go along with the crowd. It was true then and it’s true now, people like this– especially in government– are rare.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that Serpico has a blog and writes in one of his latest posts:
“I would vote Republican if Ron Paul was running.
At least we would get to the truth.”

More than anyone, Serpico knows the truth when he sees it. This week is Sunshine Week, in which journalists focus attention on the importance of open public records and the laws protecting that freedom. Needless to say, open and honest government are completely necessary for a democracy to work. You can’t vote the bastards out if you don’t know what they’ve been up to.

I’ve heard many people this week say that government agencies that lose battles for open records should pay court costs if they lose. This would all be well and good if it was in fact the agencies’ fault. It’s usually not.

These cases almost always amount to one or two bureaucrats who are trying to protect themselves by using the taxpayers’ money to outspend and outlast citizen plaintiffs in these cases. I argue that not only do we need open records for democracy to work, we need individual accountability on the part of government employees. The taxpayers shouldn’t take the fall when some political appointee doesn’t want his emails to his mistress revealed publicly and wages battle in court for years. It’s that person’s fault, and it should be that person who pays, not you or me or anyone who had nothing to do with his own unprofessional behavior. Most of the time this involves public employees conducting personal business and affairs in government offices while being paid to do a government job, which is unacceptable and means they should be fired immediately anyway– isn’t it amazing that they’re not? Only the government would defend an employee’s right to have an affair and give preferential contracts during work.

We need open records because there are still a lot of 1970s-era NYC cops who have government jobs in all bureaus and agencies, at the federal, state and local level, and there are far, far too few Serpicos.

Tags: Sunshine Week, open records, open records laws, Frank Serpico, Ron Paul, honest government

Many people describe Tucker Carlson as a libertarian or a conservative-libertarian, so it’s important to see what he was bringing to the table– he’s going to be used to represent us. He seems to hold many libertarian views, but many that are not (he thought that the 82nd Airborne soldiers who said our Iraq policy was not succeeding in a New York Times op-ed had lost their “moral authority,” for instance). Overall, he may not be the best promoter of libertarianism, considering the reactions he garners from people: he’s called “a petulant little child,” some think he’s a racist or fascist or that he is giving libertarians a bad name with his bullying or that he’s not conservative enough for various reasons. However, he did feature Libertarians on his show and bring up some libertarian ideas and arguments that are not usually brought up in the mainstream media. In that way, it’s quite unfortunate that MSNBC has cancelled his show.

Overall, I have mixed feelings about Tucker. At first he won my heart by always hosting Ron Paul on his show, but then he had to go and ruin it all by so so oddly bringing in a Nevada brothel owner to a Ron Paul press conference in order to sex up his New Republic article on Congressman Paul. It wasn’t just weird (why would a married man just happen to be friends with a Nevada brothel owner and his “bunnies”?), it did nothing to help the principled candidate that Carlson said he’d vote for (and voted for in 1988). Ron Paul finished 2nd in the Nevada caucus, after Mitt Romney. Whether he was hurt or helped by brothel owner Dennis Hof’s endorsement, I’m not sure, but Romney always did have the advantage over the good doctor in Nevada since so many Mormons live there (it’s right next to Utah). In any case, I didn’t appreciate Tucker’s introduction of the Moonlite Bunny Ranch into Ron Paul’s campaign, nor how the media approached the issue– implying that Ron Paul had directly asked for Hof’s endorsement, which is ludicrous.

Tucker will be replaced by the quite boooring David Gregory.

Anyway, I’ll end with a few gems from Tucker Carlson (courtesy of Steven Latimer).

“I’m utterly opposed to abortion, which I think is horrible and cruel. I think affirmative action is wrong. I’d like to slow immigration pretty dramatically. I hate all nanny state regulations, such as seat belt laws and smoking bans. I’m not for big government. I think the U.S. ought to hesitate before intervening abroad. I think these are conservative impulses. So by my criteria, Bush isn’t much of a conservative.”

“I’m just for marriage generally. I’m for people making a lifelong commitment. Do you know what I mean? I’m not against gay marriage, actually, and I’m the most right-wing person I know… Marriage has been a great thing for me, and I think it’s a really civilizing force, and I think it would be a civilizing force for gay people too.”

UPDATE: Yesterday, Tucker said of Eliot Spitzer:

“If you’re against Eliot Spitzer– and to me his career has been shameful– this is not the way to get him… Spitzer’s true sins, in my view, are the ones that he commits in public, crushing other people for the sake of his political career, for instance… To see the press, a group which has unconventional personal lives… getting all high-handed that a grown man went to a prostitute is nauseating… So he’s a hypocrite, unlike the rest of us.. the way he hauled his political enemies into court… A lot of us are like him, frankly … I’m not, but I’m just saying… there’s something unattractive about public self-righteousness.. whre were they when Spitzer was crushing his enemies using public tax dollars? They cheered him on like some kind of Robin Hood, now just because he goes to a hooker they’re going to be getting all high handed on him… I’ve thought Eliot Spitzer is a deeply sleazy person… I just think this is one of the least sleazy things he’s done.”

I agree with Tucker Carlson completely. For me, the issue is not that Spitzer went to prostitutes, it’s that he prosecuted other people for that, while acting like he was superior to them. It’s abuse of power in the worst way– and how too many politicians act. Has any politician who wanted legalization of drugs (and been demonized for it by a political opponent) ever actually been caught with drugs? Has any politician who advocated legalization of prostitution (and who most certainly would have been demonized for that position) ever actually been caught with a prostitute? Of course not, the ones who are doing those things are going to be the hard-liners against it in their day jobs.

What’s even worse is that a bad politician can’t be brought down for his or her actual policies, only incidental sex scandals. Bill Clinton did much worse things in office than anything he ever did with Monica Lewinsky, and by the same token, Eliot Spitzer should have a lot more to be ashamed of than his time with prostitutes. The public should also demand better from politicians. It’s sickening, and it’s why I’m a libertarian.

Tags: Tucker Carlson, MSNBC, Tucker Carlson canceled, Ron Paul, Eliot Spitzer

I have seen some discussion, but of course not from mainstream news outlets, of what actually could have helped prevent these murders. Sure, helping young people by mentoring them and tutoring them could play a role down the line not to become cold-blooded killers, but the only immediate defense that these girls could have had against their killers would have been a gun of their own.

Let me explain.

Thankfully, pictures of Eve’s alleged killer have been released. The suspect in question seems to not only have taken her car but also seems to have actually driven through an ATM and used her bank card while driving the car (this hasn’t yet been confirmed, but you can clearly tell that the car in question is in fact a Toyota Highlander, like the one Carson owned). In the fifth comment seen on this website, “SteveDinMD” comes up with a plausible scenario for what probably happened to Eve Carson.

At first I figured that the killer must simply be an idiot who had killed Eve and then gone to an ATM without her PIN number, or he had figured that her PIN number would be the same as her birthday as it so often is and taken a chance. However, it makes much more sense that she was in fact in the car with him while he went to the ATM, he was perhaps successful, and she tried to escape later, upon which time he shot her as she ran. This explains why blood was found on both sides of the road and possibly why she was shot in the head at close range– the killer could have hobbled her first, then shot her in the head to make sure that she couldn’t testify against him for the carjacking. The area in which her body was found was a secluded street off the main drag which, if followed, leads to Durham, which makes sense considering the buzz that this is the work of a Durham gang member as other shootings in Chapel Hill are.

If it is in fact true that she was carjacked and forced to go to the bank before being shot as she escaped, this is a perfect scenario in which a gun– even one kept in the glove compartment of the car and not actually on herself– could have helped her survive what turned into a kill-or-be-killed situation.

It is true that some rare victims are able to wrestle away an attacker’s gun in a life-or-death situation and shoot or kill him then– however, that’s never a sure thing and it’s best to know what your line of defense will be ahead of time.

Let’s take a look at some recent examples for scenarios in which innocent victims luckily were armed when an armed robber/carjacker attempted to attack them.

“When a Louisiana woman injured during an attempted carjacking retrieved her revolver from under the seat, the would-be car thief fled.”

“Investigators told Eyewitness News the would-be robber [in Houston] had the tables turned on him when the person he was trying to rob pulled out his own gun and shot the man.”

“The elder Jauregui, who was a police officer in Cuba before the Castro regime, reportedly told police he felt forced to fire because he believed his son’s life was in danger.”

Florentino Jauregui was called the “kindest, sweetest gentleman in the neighborhood” by a neighbor. In that vein, he didn’t want to have to use deadly force, but he had to when his son’s life was being threatened by a madman with a gun, and he did the ultimate “kindest, sweetest” thing when he came to his son’s rescue.

While cases like this do happen, unfortunately too few victims out there are armed and ready when their attackers come. After a gunman attempted to carjack 71-year-old Bobbie Gray, her son Keith came out of the house and shot the attacker. Gray’s husband had some words of warning for future carjackers.

“Marshall Gray, Bobbie’s husband and Keith’s father, warned others to be cautious.

‘Pass the word on,’ he said. ‘You never know the next person you’re going to carjack may have a gun bigger than yours in their car.’”

It’s highly unlikely that any one person will ever be in a situation where his or her life is threatened by a robber or carjacker or mass murderer (despite what the media says). However, there just aren’t enough people who are armed when the odds work against them and they do get attacked. Carjackers don’t yet seem to be afraid of people fighting back because it hasn’t happened on a mass scale. They have a gun, so they figure that they’re invincible. The more people who take matters into their own hands and fight back, the more people will be afraid to commit these sorts of crimes even if they do have a gun.

As shown in the first example above by the Louisiana woman who merely had to show her gun to the carjacker for him to run away, the mere presence of a gun can end the crime right then and there. No shots even need to be fired.

It’s probably also no surprise that young women are targeted for these “economic crimes of opportunity.” There is probably no demographic that is less likely to be armed for protection. Why is that? Maybe it’s not “feminine” or “attractive” or cool or liberal (an important consideration in a town like Chapel Hill) to carry around a gun. Maybe it’s not considered safe. Maybe you’re afraid people will think you’re weird. I have a concealed carry license myself, and I don’t carry around a gun for some of these reasons, so I can’t act like it’s amazing that no one else my age does. However, there is nothing cooler than saving your own life or saving someone else’s, as this “hero teacher” found out.

Another consideration is that guns are banned on the UNC campus. If you’re going off and on to campus, you’d be breaking the law if you had a gun for part of that time, and if you’re a law-abiding citizen you don’t want to break laws and therefore won’t have a gun. However, when has a would-be killer ever decided to turn back when they see the sign that says “Gun-Free Zone”? No, in fact, they know that they’re definitely going to have a lot of unarmed victims to do with what they will. After previous school shootings, some UNC students had pointed this out. Hopefully, some UNC students will also see the wisdom here. Arizona may pass a law allowing concealed weapons on campus after Eve’s shooting.

“But that’s what we have the police for.”

When Eve Carson was killed, the Chapel Hill police were not patrolling the residential neighborhoods where her body was found. The police do their best, but more often than not, they simply are not going to come to your rescue in time. They try to do their best to prevent crime, and they’ll certainly find your body after you’ve been killed and also do their best to try to investigate your murder, but odds are they will not be there to rescue you if you find yourself in this situation. In fact, one of these very police officers now investigating Eve’s murder told me that he wished all civilians would be trained for concealed carry. The police officers know that concealed carry saves lives; it’s time for the public to know this, too.

“The answer to gun violence isn’t more guns.”

Really? Well, what do the police do in response to gun violence, stand there and stare down the bad guys? The kids at Virginia Tech had one option when they were attacked: pretend they were dead. That was their best defense. Their ONLY defense. That’s completely unacceptable.

“If every student is armed, more students will be killed.”

First of all, not every student will be armed, just those who want to be and are trained and licensed for concealed carry (and pass an FBI background check). That means they have to know how to hit a target and attend a gun safety course and be mentally sound. In the 40 states that have concealed carry laws, a lot of innocent people have had their lives saved, and I have not heard of any cases where innocent people were killed due to someone, for instance, waving their gun wildly around or other such nonsense. It would not happen. Even a small percentage of college students being armed could serve as a large deterrent to potential attackers– all it takes is one person with a gun to stop a shooting in progress.

Why would this work?

We know it would work because it has worked. The heroism of the Israeli seminary student who stopped the gunman at his seminary the other day (along with the gunman’s 500 rounds of live ammo) has pretty much been ignored in the American media, but he saved people’s lives by being a trained individual with a gun at the scene of what in America would be a “gun-free zone.”

I listed, above, just a few of the many carjackings that were stopped in their tracks after a victim fought back with a gun. Here is a list of some of the mass shootings that have been stopped by a law-abiding citizen who saved the day by carrying a gun.

• Appalachian Law School shooting in January 2002

• The Utah mall shooting in 2007

• Colorado New Life Church shooting was stopped due to the presence of an armed volunteer security guard who fought back (saving up to 100 lives, according to her pastor). The gunman had 1,000 rounds of ammunition, and 700 people were in the church at the time.

• The Israeli seminary shooting in March 2008

“The heroism of an armed Israeli seminary student halfway across the world sends a message that we needn’t submit to murder in victim disarmament zones. That’s why his actions are getting such short shrift from America’s press. It’s a story they are loathe to report because it affirms a philosophy of self-reliance that they despise.”

Sure, no one wants to have to use a gun to protect themselves. No one wants or asks to be attacked, either. Don’t blame me for saying that people can protect themselves, blame these lunatics who see fit to murder people on campus.

Tags: carjacking, concealed carry, Eve Carson, gun-free zones, Lauren Burk, Yitzhak Dadon, gun, gun control, CCW, Gun Advocacy, Heroes, Jeanne Assam, Self Defense, Shootings, Women and Guns

The specific findings, as summarized by the UNC Journalism blog, were:

Media Overemphasize Cost to Consumer: The broadcast networks mentioned costs to consumers or drug company revenues 11 times more often than they mentioned drug development costs.

Networks Leave Companies Unnoticed: Only 22 percent of the stories even named the company that developed the drug or drugs featured in the story.

What Development Costs?: A mere 2 percent of stories dealt with the cost of developing drugs, and even those costs were downplayed by industry skeptics.

Special Treatment for Left-Wing Causes: Nineteen stories focused on drugs that were popular liberal causes such as the morning-after pill or HPV vaccine Gardasil. The networks didn’t apply the same scrutiny to those drugs and their makers as they did to others.

I’m not really a fan of pharmaceutical companies in general due to their extremely annoying ads (although that’s really more of an issue with the people who respond to the commercials and ads, which encourages their endless rotation; the companies are simply doing what gets results). However, it’s a basic tenet of Journalism 101 to not completely ignore a company directly involved in a story– and the fact that drug development costs were universally forgotten isn’t surprising, I guess, but that doesn’t make it any less outrageous.

The fact is that these drugs are incredibly expensive to bring to market (due not just to R&D costs, but to the FDA’s byzantine requirements as well), and until that’s rectified, the billions a company spent to create and test a drug shouldn’t be completely ignored in news coverage.

I’m reminded of the exchange between John McCain and Mitt Romney that took place at one of the Republican debates in January:

MCCAIN: … have sued the pharmaceutical companies because of overcharging of millions of dollars of Medicaid costs to their patients.

MCCAIN: How could that happen? How could pharmaceutical companies be able to cover up the cost to the point where nobody knows? Why shouldn’t we be able to reimport drugs from Canada?

It’s because of the power of the pharmaceutical companies. We should have pharmaceutical companies competing to take care of our Medicare and Medicaid patients.

ROMNEY: OK, don’t leave me. Don’t send the pharmaceutical companies into the big bad guys.

MCCAIN: Well, they are.

ROMNEY: No, actually they’re trying to create products to make us well and make us better, and they’re doing the work of the free market.

And are there excesses? I’m sure there are, and we should go after excesses. But they’re an important industry to this country.

But let me note something else, and that is the market will work. And the reason health care isn’t working like a market right now is you have 47 million people that are saying, “I’m not going to play. I’m just going to get free care paid for by everybody else.” That doesn’t work.

Number two, the buyer doesn’t have information about what the cost or quality is, or different choices they could have. If you take the government out of it to a much greater extent, you’d get it to work like a market and it will rein in cost.

Romney lost a lot of people who were watching this debate with me when he became so outraged at the mere thought of blaming something on the pharmaceutical companies or making them into the “big bad guys.” He actually didn’t just lose the home audience, he horrified them. He was correct that we get lifesaving drugs from the pharma companies, but Romney isn’t right when he says that Big Pharma is beyond reproach– a key aspect of a free society is that we can criticize companies that bring us life-saving products if we want to, whether our criticism is justified or not (and someone can criticize us for doing that, and we can criticize them for criticizing us, and so on).

It was more Romney’s attitude that was misguided rather than his words, though, because his follow-up was dead-on: if the free market was at work, Big Pharma wouldn’t be able to be the “big bad guys” and they would be “competing to take care of our Medicare and Medicaid patients,” because those patients would be part of the free market (which they now are not) and because other pharma companies would have a chance to get their drugs passed by the FDA (as of now, small guys like Cortex Pharmaceuticals don’t have a hope in hell of that happening because they can’t work the system of the FDA).

Romney just didn’t take it far enough. It’s not just that uninsured people may show up at the emergency room and expect treatment when they need it, it’s also a huge problem that 40% of health care costs in the United States are paid by the government. When government gets involved, prices go up and quality goes down. Why wouldn’t the pharmaceutical companies try to overcharge the government? Everyone else does and gets away with it, and the government is usually very willing to part with its non-hard-earned money. While McCain is so worried about American taxpayers being ripped off by corporations, let’s ask him about the various cases of massive fraud conducted by private contractors in Iraq. Since he wants us to stay in Iraq for 100 more years, we might as well start fixing the snafus now, right?

Tags: prescription drugs, drugs in the media, prescription drugs media, drug industry media, John McCain Big Pharma, John McCain drug companies, John McCain pharmaceutical companies, Mitt Romney Big Pharma, Mitt Romney drug companies, Mitt Romney pharmaceutical companies

“It will be a close race, and the purple states are the states that will really be targeted. The mood of the country right now is pretty frustrated. I think we have a frustrated electorate. People don’t really like the partisanship. There’s a kind of toxic atmosphere about politics. I think the blogs feed on that. I think the intemperate nature of blogs and the lack of accountability have had an overall toxic influence on our elections. People are cynical, and these blogs are cynical and mean on all sides. So I don’t think that’s good, and I hope that at least even if you disagree with the mainstream media, there is a sense of integrity and honesty and standards. There are journalistic standards that blogs don’t have. We have a frustrated, toxic atmosphere right now.”

I think the “toxic atmosphere” of politics has more to do with the actions and policies of various politicians than with blogs. People know more what their elected officials are getting up to without having to rely on the “objective” media. Needless to say, I maintain the highest of journalistic standards on this blog at all times and take offense to Senator Hutchinson’s comments… Vote for Ron Paul!

Tags: Kay Bailey Hutchinson, Senator Hutchinson, Kay Bailey Hutchinson Texas Monthly, Kay Bailey Hutchinson Governor

Sometimes you have to ignore what you said the day before about celebrities and take a time-out from politics, because some things are just too sad…

I hate the way you talk to me, and the way you cut your hair.
I hate the way you drive my car.
I hate it when you stare.
I hate your big dumb combat boots, and the way you read my mind.
I hate you so much it makes me sick; it even makes me rhyme.
I hate the way you’re always right.
I hate it when you lie.
I hate it when you make me laugh, even worse when you make me cry.
I hate it when you’re not around, and the fact that you didn’t call.
But mostly I hate the way I don’t hate you.
Not even close, not even a little bit, not even at all.

Tags: Heath Ledger

On Saturday, I attended the 2008 North Carolina Science Blogging Conference at the Sigma Xi headquarters. I met some cool people, attended some sessions on blogging, and had a great time. A lasting contribution of the conference may be a blogger’s code of ethics.

My group included a student from Rutgers, and many other students were also in attendance, along with 20 of the ScienceBlogs.com bloggers, research scientists, academics, and journalists from MSNBC, NPR, and Wired.

Perhaps the most interesting panel of the day was the “Framing Science” panel hosted by Chris Mooney (writer of The Republican War on Science) and his co-blogger Sheril Kirshenbaum, who talked about Science Debate 2008 and how to “frame” science to bring it to a wider audience. Their presentation was preceded by one from graduate student Jennifer Jacquet, who used Britney Spears as a lynchpin for her argument that the corporate media does not feature science, but NPR, PBS, The New York Times and The Guardian do. She seemed to be calling for some type of government regulation or ownership of media.

I agree with Rick McPherson that this should have brought in the “chicken or the egg” question (“Does the media give the people what they want to see, or does it force them to watch this drivel, when they’d actually rather be watching nature shows?”), and I tried to steer the conversation in that direction by asking why, if we’re talking about the evolutionary research of Stephen Pinker or E.O Wilson (which had been referred to by Mooney), were we ignoring their basic findings that people are social creatures, prefer looking at pictures of people to doing other types of activities, and that may just be how the state of things is going to be, wrought by evolutionary biology? In other words, are we going to force people to like science?

Jacquet replied, “Do we force children to brush their teeth?” Someone in the audience responded, [paraphrased] “We can’t use this cod-liver oil approach to science. That’s simply not going to work.” A jolly fine discussion ensued.

Many people in the audience seemed to dislike the corporate media. I wonder how many pay for a cable subscription each month or click on websites that talk about Britney Spears. I don’t do either of those things.

My point was easily proven in the next presentation, given by Jennifer Oulette of Cocktail Party Physics, when she got the best reaction and most laughs of anything in her presentation by displaying a picture of the TV character Monk. I recognized this Monk guy as a television character, but recognition ended there, and I’d never seen the show. Unlike me, it seemed that almost everyone in this audience (despite being against the “corporate media”) seemed very familiar with this show. I have vague recall of reading something about it, and yes, it’s probably a good show… but that doesn’t change the fact that showing a picture of the corporate media’s creation, Monk, got more of an immediate reaction than anything our very interesting and able physics presenter said about blogging. In the same way that “the public” may prefer a blonde lip-syncer to science, science bloggers may just prefer the TV character Monk to a presentation on science blogging. How’s that for ironic?

Brian Switek (also of Rutgers) disagrees that the public just isn’t interested in science and that scientists may have a communication problem. Personally, I liked Kirshenbaum’s approach to the question the best– all six-year-olds love science and can’t get enough of dinosaurs, but along the way something happens, and they just don’t get into it anymore. We have to take an approach to science that makes it relevant and interesting for everyone.

In the end, the best part was undoubtedly the free science swag…. books, journals, gadgets (I have reading material for ages now!) Second place goes to the “Framing Science” panel of Mooney and Kirshenbaum and the discussion it generated regarding Science Debate 2008 and a few other topics. Then “Cocktail Party Physics.” Finally, the discussions from earlier in the day, which followed the “unconference” format and didn’t really entertain me as much as the later moderated discussions– too many people would seize the opportunity to talk and run with it, never shutting up and not remaining on topic. I guess that’s what you get at a bloggers’ conference.

On an interesting note, Ryan Somma points out that not a single person at the conference smoked. Hmm. Perhaps scientists are smarter than the general public at large! Care to see a scientific study done on it?

Videos of the proceedings are available here.

Update: At least one person predicts that The New York Times will be bought by the ultimate in evil corporations… Google.

Tags: scienceblogging.com, NC Science Blogging 2008, Science Debate 2008, Science, Google New York Times