Philip Giraldi, who usually writes about the seemier side of foreign relations, has an interesting post up about speeding laws — and how safety has nothing to do with them.

Let it be known up front that I routinely warn other drivers about police speed traps by flashing my lights.  Back in my youth it New Jersey it would have been considered unchivalrous to do otherwise.  I will continue to engage in the practice as long as I drive.  I suspect that there is a philosophical issue underlying my desire to play cat and mouse with the police.  Some regard the police as stalwart men in blue who do no wrong and who uphold civic virtue.  Having worked in an intelligence agency, somewhat akin to police work, I have a different viewpoint.  Cops are guys holding down a job who do what they are told to do.  They are not necessarily heroes or martyrs.  If the local county is revenue shy and can work out some ingenious ways to fine the citizenry to raise money they will do so and the police will be tasked to pull in more miscreants and whack them with heavy fines.  It is my responsibility to deny the state my earnings, so I will do what I have to do to avoid that possibility. …

Which comes back to the central issue of state intrusion in people’s lives.  Passing a law prohibiting flashing lights on a car is clearly designed to make it easier for police to catch people, whether or not they are behaving recklessly.  It denies the people the right to have some pushback in a system which is heavily weighted against the individual. [Bold mine-R]

The comments are also worth reading, including this one:

My own home town is a notorious speed trap. Speed limits were lowered on our main thoroughfare until the desired number of enforcement actions (revenue) were produced. Shameless, obvious and loathed by the locals, this practice continues because no one is willing to appear in favor of speeding. And God help the politician who runs afoul of the Mothers Against Drunken Driving!

Two great pieces in Sunday’s New York Times:

1.) The Brightest Are Not Always the Best: Frank Rich looks at Obama’s economic appointees with a suspicious eye, and for good reason.

As Barack Obama rolls out his cabinet, “the best and the brightest” has become the accolade du jour from Democrats (Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri), Republicans (Senator John Warner of Virginia) and the press (George Stephanopoulos). Few seem to recall that the phrase, in its original coinage, was meant to strike a sardonic, not a flattering, note …

Lawrence Summers, the new top economic adviser, was the youngest tenured professor in Harvard’s history and is famous for never letting anyone forget his brilliance. It was his highhanded disregard for his own colleagues, not his impolitic remarks about gender and science, that forced him out of Harvard’s presidency in four years. Timothy Geithner, the nominee for Treasury secretary, is the boy wonder president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. He comes with none of Summers’s personal baggage, but his sparkling résumé is missing one crucial asset: experience outside academe and government, in the real world of business and finance. Postgraduate finishing school at Kissinger & Associates doesn’t count.

Summers and Geithner are both protégés of another master of the universe, Robert Rubin. His appearance in the photo op for Obama-transition economic advisers three days after the election was, to put it mildly, disconcerting. Ever since his acclaimed service as Treasury secretary in the Clinton administration, Rubin has labored as a senior adviser and director at Citigroup, now being bailed out by taxpayers to the potential tune of some $300 billion. Somehow the all-seeing Rubin didn’t notice the toxic mortgage-derivatives on Citi’s books until it was too late. The Citi may never sleep, but he snored.

Geithner was no less tardy in discovering the reckless, wholesale gambling that went on in Wall Street’s big casinos, all of which cratered while at least nominally under his regulatory watch. That a Hydra-headed banking monster like Citigroup came to be in the first place was a direct byproduct of deregulation championed by Rubin and Summers in Clinton’s Treasury Department (where Geithner also served). The New Deal reform they helped repeal, the Glass-Steagall Act, had been enacted in 1933 in part because Citigroup’s ancestor, National City Bank, had imploded after repackaging bad loans as toxic securities in the go-go 1920s.

Well, nobody’s perfect. Given that John McCain’s economic team was headlined by Carly Fiorina and Joe the Plumber, the country would be dodging a fiscal bullet even if Obama had picked Suze Orman. But I keep wondering why the honeymoon hagiography about the best and the brightest has been so over the top.

(more…)

1.) Best essay by a washed-up celebrity: Dick Cavett of “The Dick Cavett Show” writes an occasional online column at the New York Times, and his take on Sarah Palin’s post-election stardom and her butchering of the English language is really, really great:

Now something has gone wrong with all three television sets. They will get only Sarah Palin.

I can play a kind of Alaskan roulette. Any random channel clicked on by the remote brings up that eager face, with its continuing assaults on the English Lang.

There she is with Larry and Matt and just about everyone else but Dr. Phil (so far). If she is not yet on “Judge Judy,” I suspect it can’t be for lack of trying. …

What on earth are our underpaid teachers, laboring in the vineyards of education, supposed to tell students about the following sentence, committed by the serial syntax-killer from Wasilla High and gleaned by my colleague Maureen Dowd for preservation for those who ask, “How was it she talked?”

My concern has been the atrocities there in Darfur and the relevance to me with that issue as we spoke about Africa and some of the countries there that were kind of the people succumbing to the dictators and the corruption of some collapsed governments on the continent, the relevance was Alaska’s investment in Darfur with some of our permanent fund dollars.

And, she concluded, “never, ever did I talk about, well, gee, is it a country or a continent, I just don’t know about this issue.”

It’s admittedly a rare gift to produce a paragraph in which whole clumps of words could be removed without noticeably affecting the sense, if any.

2.) Most astute analysis of the potential auto bailout: Many times in past months, I’ve directed your gaze to the wise words of Pat Buchanan, former Nixon speechwriter, Reagan adviser and fringe presidential candidate. There are plenty of places I part ways with him, but the man’s political instincts are usually keen — this post about “conservatives” and their strange opposition to a meager $25 million to bail out our auto industry is worthwhile reading, even if (like me) you aren’t sure you agree with it:

Understandably, Republicans are seething.

When Hank Paulson demanded $700 billion to haul away the trash in the dumpsters of JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs — assuring us we could hold a garage sale of the junk — they rebelled. They acted as the nation, by 100 to one, demanded. They killed the Wall Street bailout.

The Dow quickly sank another 1,000 points, and, charged with criminal irresponsibility by the elites, the GOP buckled, reversed itself, rescued the bailout — and was wiped out on Nov. 4.

Now we hear from Paulson that the $700 billion Congress voted will not, after all, be used to buy up all that rotten paper on the books of the big banks. Some banks are using the cash to buy other banks.

So Republicans are right to be enraged. They are victims of the biggest bait-and-switch in political history. But they are now about to do something terminally stupid. With GM, Ford, and Chrysler teetering on the brink, they are turning a cold stone face to Detroit …

And to let the auto industry die is to write America out of much of the economic future of the planet. [Bolds mine-R]

Go read the whole thing. You’ll be a little smarter afterward.

3.) Funniest totally lame YouTube thing I just found: Thanks, Nick, for pointing me to this:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8J6S6mDyNvY[/youtube]

It may be hoity-toity, and it may be one of those magazines that graces more coffee tables than actual readers. But it’s got great longform journalism (a dying breed, indeed), and two of this month’s pieces on Obama are worth noting:

1.) “The Joshua Generation”: This in-depth piece from reporter David Remnick looks at how Obama used race to his advantage — and downplayed it as well — en route to the White House, and looks at what the victory ultimately means for black Americans in the 21st century. It’s not an altogether shiny, happy tale, but it’s informative for anyone interested in the racial, social and political divides in this country.

2.) “Battle Plans”: Ryan Lizza gives us an overarching view of how Obama’s advisers used an adept understanding of the nation’s political tide, as well as a cool-headed approach to usually white-hot presidential politics, to help Obama to victory.

All this from the same magazine that gave us the unforgettable cover above, in the name of satire.

Best piece of investigative journalism: Jeffrey Goldberg’s article on airport security in the forthcoming issue of The Atlantic. The reporter spends many hours in many airports across the country — acting strange on purpose, carrying all sorts of forbidden items (nail-clippers, weapons, alcohol, giant Hezbollah flag), using fake boarding passes (nope, he didn’t actually have tickets either!) and at one point even wearing an “Osama bin Laden, Hero of Islam” teacher through the screening.

A forged boarding pass, printed with a consumer laptop and consumer inkjet printer. This one got Mr. Goldberg in "elite" first class.

I could have ripped up these counterfeit boarding passes in the privacy of a toilet stall, but I chose not to, partly because this was the renowned Senator Larry Craig Memorial Wide-Stance Bathroom, and since the commencement of the Global War on Terror this particular bathroom has been patrolled by security officials trying to protect it from gay sex, and partly because I wanted to see whether my fellow passengers would report me to the TSA for acting suspiciously in a public bathroom. No one did, thus thwarting, yet again, my plans to get arrested, or at least be the recipient of a thorough sweating by the FBI, for dubious behavior in a large American airport. …

(B)ecause I have a fair amount of experience reporting on terrorists, and because terrorist groups produce large quantities of branded knickknacks, I’ve amassed an inspiring collection of al-Qaeda T-shirts, Islamic Jihad flags, Hezbollah videotapes, and inflatable Yasir Arafat dolls (really). All these things I’ve carried with me through airports across the country. I’ve also carried, at various times: pocketknives, matches from hotels in Beirut and Peshawar, dust masks, lengths of rope, cigarette lighters, nail clippers, eight-ounce tubes of toothpaste (in my front pocket), bottles of Fiji Water (which is foreign), and, of course, box cutters. I was selected for secondary screening four times—out of dozens of passages through security checkpoints—during this extended experiment. At one screening, I was relieved of a pair of nail clippers; during another, a can of shaving cream.

He never once missed his flight.

Anyway, it’s a definite must-read and a shocking look at how $7 billion taxpayer dollars have been used on what Goldberg calls “security theater.”

Best new web presence: The Daily Beast, a blend of news aggregator (i.e. it has lots of links to actual news and commentary sites), blog hub and high society. The design is great, the bloggers are varied and terrific (if a bit elite), and “The Big Story” feature is particularly nice, giving five or six widely different angles on a particular story of the day. You really should check it out.

Best podcast: “It’s All Politics” from National Public Radio. Hosts Ron Elving and Ken Rudin go over a week’s worth of presidential politics with wit, whimsy, astute analysis and just a bit of cynicism. It’s free, click here to get it.

Worst new TV show: Fox’s “Hole in the Wall.” The preview looked sort of funny, which compelled me to look it up on Hulu during a lull here at work. The contestants, hosts and audience are all WAY too excited about the stupid task that’s going on here: Namely, people trying to contort themselves to fit through (you guessed it!) holes in a wall. This further strengthens my urge to come up with some pitches for TV shows — if this thing can make it on the air, anything can. Click here to watch; it’s a great test of the human will to see how far you can get before turning if off. I made it almost 7 whole minutes!