An excellent piece by Radley Balko on the murder of a man by authorities in Georgia:
The police were trailing Barrett at the time. But instead of apprehending her at the motel, they instead followed Ayers, the stranger they’d just seen give her a ride and hand her some cash.
Ayers then pulled into a nearby gas station to withdraw money from an ATM. Shortly after he got back into his car, a black Escalade tore into the parking lot. Three officers, all undercover, got out of the vehicle and pointed their guns at Ayers. The pastor, understandably, attempted to escape. As he pulled out of the station, Ayers grazed Officer Oxner with his car. Officer Billy Shane Harrison then opened fire, shooting Ayers in the stomach. (You can watch surveillance video of the altercation here.) Ayers continued to drive, fleeing the parking lot for about a thousand yards before eventually crashing his car. He died at the hospital.
Ayers’ last words to his family and medical staff were that he thought he was being robbed. The police found no illicit drugs in his car, and there was no trace of any illegal substance in his body.
If the story ended there, it would merely be enough to boil your blood. These officers jumped from an SUV waving their guns commando-style over a possible $50 drug transaction. Worse, the man they pounced upon wasn’t the target of their investigation.
The police claimed they announced themselves, but it isn’t difficult to see how Ayers—or anyone else—might have been confused in the commotion. It was a hot, late summer Georgia afternoon. Ayers likely had his windows up and his air conditioning on. The officers were undercover, dressed in shabby clothes and ski-mask caps. The badges they had hanging from their necks, seen in this photo, were far from conspicuous.
Read the whole thing. Ayers was a minister who was driving home one of his congregation (who happened to be a drug suspect), and the cops gunned him down in broad daylight.
If Reason would stick to stories like this, think how good they would be. Instead, we get nonsense about fish pedicures (not kidding), Matt Welch’s war on public employees who probably earn half of what he makes (but provide multiple times the benefit), and whatever steaming piles of bullshit the Koch brothers and the Freedomworks goons want McSuderman and Gillespie to push. Think how useful it would be to have an actual high-profile libertarian magazine pushing against the Obama administration on issues of detainment and other areas in which the Obama team is either moving too slowly or happy with the status quo.
Instead, we get just another outlet for the wingnut wurlitzer to play the same old tunes. But then again, you gotta pay the bills.
Bill Rutherford, Princeton Admissions
Balko really is the only worthwhile part of Reason. I do enjoy reading The Agitator, but will probably steer clear of both till the foaming at the mouth over HCR stops.
John Cole
@Bill Rutherford, Princeton Admissions: Jesse Walker is good from time to time, too.
NobodySpecial
Actually, they are bartering for the things they need. They get dough in exchange for blowjobs and rimjobs for the GOP.
Zifnab
Ok, let’s maybe step back off Obama for a minute here. This is a local police operation, run by local cops, in small town Georgia. These guys might, at the outside, get funding from the DEA. But they aren’t FBI, here. They’re maybe city or state cops.
Which brings me to the main point. That if you want serious drug policy changes, you’re going to have to go local first and foremost. All those stories about people getting recklessly tazed or falsely arrested or beaten – it’s inevitably the most local of law enforcement.
You need to be putting pressure on mayors, more than anyone, if you want to turn the tide on this kind of abuse. Then step it up to governors. But crying “Obama” at every incident of police brutality is just silly.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
The WOD isn’t a War on Drugs, it is a War on People (many of whom are American citizens). The drugs are just there to keep anybody from asking the awkward question: why are we at war against our own people? So long as our society refuses to ask that question, everbody outside the law enforcement and prison industrial complex is simply collateral damage. And a lot of the stupid and evil that has infected this country by way of the so-called conservative movement flows logically from that premise. Which means that no libertarian movement which remains allied to the larger conservative movement can go as far down this trail as they need to do to root out the real problem with the WOD. Too much else is at stake. You can’t be a libertarian and also be a movement conservative in this country – you have to choose. And not chosing, trying to have it both ways, is a choice also. Unfortunately it’s the wrong one.
John Cole
@Zifnab: Read this post again.
I’m not blaming Obama for what these goons did. I was talking about the larger point of how useful it would be to have them pushing back against the excesses of the Obama admin on other issues.
Bill Rutherford, Princeton Admissions
@Zifnab – I don’t think Cole intended to blame Obama for this. He’s just saying that Reason could invest their resources in going after Obama’s blind eye towards civil liberties abuse in general, rather than fellating the teabaggers and Instapundit.
flukebucket
I found Balko through Balloon-Juice and hang out over there from time to time.
As far as the preacher is concerned I can tell you from first hand knowledge that the local sentiment is “if he had not been hanging around with whores this would have never happened to him”.
County was 80/20 McCain.
His wife has filed a 5 million dollar lawsuit. His wife was pregnant at the time of the shooting and she has since had the child.
But mention the lawsuit and around here folks say, “taxes will go up if she wins the lawsuit!”
Only in Jawja!
General Egali Tarian Stuck
This time the steroidal cops gunned down a preacher, That ought to at least cause the mighty wingnut wurlitzer to sputter some. But the cops are safe and nothing will happen to them. We have seen this movie many times. It is the atmosphere created by our right wing SCOTUS giving license to security over restrained police work. And for that matter, extends to preventative warmaking over in what;s that place. Iraq
The overton window on law and order is in need of moving. A lot.
Lisa
Zinfab I think the gist was that if you want to go after Obama on something, go after him on the War on Drugs. Or torture. Or ridiculous wars. No, he did not start them, but he is definitely the man to shut that shit down with the right motivator. If it were more than just us dirty hippies saying “this culture of police-get-to-do-what-they-want is completely anti-American”, it would be pretty fucking effective. But unfortunately, the so called libertarians spend time getting their panties in a twist over transfat bans, fish pedicure regulations, and gun-nuttery bullshit.
Everyone with two brain cells to rub together agrees that the war on drugs is a bunch of fucking bullshit. It would be nice if the “freedom loving” (g)libertarians would maybe take time out of their outrage at possible foie gras bans and start thinking for real about civil liberties.
ericblair
The biggest thing I think Congress could do is crack down on civil asset forfeiture and mandate that any proceeds from seized assets go to general funds instead of right back to the cops. The whole system is totally corrupting and makes the cops just another gang working their territory. If you’re wondering why cops go nuts finding a little bag of blow and couldn’t give a shit if someone is beaten nearly to death, that’s why.
Paul in KY
Pretty pathetic. You see the picture of the badge & it looks like a medallion you might have worn with your Nehru jacket back in the day.
I hope Mr. Ayer’s widow takes them for millions (not that it will bring him back).
Didn’t check, but it wouldn’t surprise me if Mr. Ayers happened to be Black.
Cerberus
That’s because libertarianism is a facile philosophy mostly embraced by racist, sexist, homophobic assholes who want an easy method of seeming “smarter” and “better” than other people in order to justify their favored status by virtue of race, sex, and class.
I agree that it would be nice to see something akin to an ACLU magazine that did deep investigations and important news stories on violations of individual liberties, but a libertarian magazine sucks because of what libertarianism is.
You only see occasional glimpses of genuine empathy for the violations of the rights of the individual by government power because libertarians only occasionally care about such things and pretty much can only be brought to care when they suspect it might directly impact them (i.e. when it’s a white man shot up over drug charges).
In short, the poison drips from the top.
But yeah, a kick-ass ACLU journalism project would be awesome. There’s the ACLU blog but some sort of magazine devoted to civil liberties would be awesome.
Mnemosyne
@flukebucket:
Do the nominally Christian people who say that have even the slightest clue how stupid they sound when they complain about a preacher hanging around with lowlifes and whores?
I need to bring this story that Fred Clark retells up again just to remind myself that there are a few actual Christians out there and not just a bunch of “Christians” who have no idea what the guy whose teachings they purport to follow actually said.
Amanda Hugginkiss
@flukebucket
That depresses the hell out of me. I was raised in Georgia, went to college in the northwest corner of the state. Knowing evangelicals like I do, I would have thought they of all people would understand why a pastor would be witnessing to a drug addict. Instead, it’s just more of the “bad things happen to people who deserve it.” God damn.
Zifnab
@John Cole: Fair enough.
I just don’t think it’s useful to put pressure on the POTUS when it’s a lower profile issue (at least compared to the big three: Finance / Health Care / Immigration). If Reason really wanted to roll up it’s sleeves and do some good work, it would be better served by singling out state AGs that condone this kind of crap, city Police Chiefs that give bad cops a pass, state legislatures that continue to fund bad anti-drug programs, and judges that have a bad record upholding existing limitations on sloppy cops and legislators.
State law enforcement is way outside the reach of federal policy. At best, Obama can threaten funding against departments in states already notorious for flipping feds the bird.
Going to the federal level on this simply leaves you barking up the wrong tree.
Xenos
He sounds pretty Christ-like to me.
Lisa
@ericblair
Word.
Whispers
Fish pedicures?
But fish don’t have feet.
JR
Balko’s moderating a panel discussion tonight at 7 at Georgetown Law on the Cameron Todd Willingham execution. Craig Beyler is the featured panelist. There should be a live webcast at http://www.law.georgetown.edu/webcast
Mattminus
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ
“why are we at war against our own people?”
Because their skin is brown, that’s why.
El Cid
If he wasn’t doing anything wrong than he wouldn’t have been where ever disguised agents happened to be waving guns around. Clearly he brought this on himself by not knowing where not to be.
edmund dantes
@Zifnab: Actually Obama, the DOJ, and Congress could play a huge in helping to stop the War on Drugs. Much of the hardware, training, and financing of the WoD flows from the federal teat.
It’s why you see podunk towns of less than 5000 people buying HumVees, Armored Cars, and starting SWAT teams. It gets them federal drug money.
Civil asset forfeiture needs to seriously reformed along with several other WoD deals. Also the WoD is one of the greatest drain on Civil liberties (until the War on Terror came along). You can trace a lot of the gutting of the 4th amendment to the WoD.
The funny thing, in response to someone else’s comment about this time they shot a preacher, the time they shot a 76 or 96 ( I don’t remember the exact age Kathyrn Johnston was the name or something like that) grandmother on her front lawn and then planted drugs on her to cover up the botched raid didn’t do anything to move the needle in Georgia or anywhere else. If you read Radley’s website, you’ll see there are a multitude of horrible situations that just get swept under the rug or if you read the comment sections on some of the articles in the newspapers, you can see the blame the victim the cop’s are heroes out in full force.
RSA
I agree. But hardcore libertarians tend to think big, in my experience. “We’ll start by eliminating income tax and dismantling the federal government…”
Ogami Itto
When did wingnuts stop loving whores?!
Radley Balko
Thanks for the link, John. But your childish attacks on Reason are really getting old.
So it would be great if a libertarian magazine were “pushing against the Obama administration on issues of detainment and other areas in which the Obama team is either moving too slowly or happy with the status quo”? Have you used the Reason search engine lately? I can assure you that we’ve covered Gitmo, detainment, and civil liberties pretty thoroughly. More thoroughly, in fact, than many liberal magazines. Pretty sure I haven’t heard a single liberal commentator lament the way Obama has sold out on criminal justice issues.
These posts you put up attacking the magazine seem to consist of, “Reason doesn’t seem to have anything up today about civil liberties, therefore, they’re just a bunch of GOP shills.” Actually, it’s even more amusing than that. It’s, “Except for this article by Radley Balko on the front page, Reason hasn’t published anything else today on civil liberties.”
If memory serves, it wasn’t long ago that you criticized Reason for doing exactly what you say in this post that you want the magazine to do. You chided us for attacking Obama for his timidness on the drug war, because, you argued, taking any sort of drug war stand wasn’t politically feasible, so it was unrealistic for us to ask as much.
Sorry if you don’t happen to feel that economic freedom is particularly important. But support for economic freedom is about half of what makes one a libertarian. Your criticism of Reason seems to be that it isn’t a liberal magazine. Guess what? It isn’t. And has never claimed to be.
Seems like you want Reason to leave Obama alone on civil liberties because, you know, he can’t do everything. But you have nothing but venom when we attack him on economic issues, because, of course, then we’re just the stereotypical “Republicans who smoke pot.” The logical progression from both of those arguments is that in your opinion, Reason, a libertarian magazine, should just suck it up and support everything Obama does.
Sorry, but that’s not really what we do.
Reason was just as hard on Bush, on both spending and civil liberties. And during the Bush years, the magazine got the same criticism from the John Coles of the right.
By the way, if you’ve read the news lately, public sector employees make quite a bit more money than their private sector counterparts. The discrepancy grows substantially wider when you factor in benefits. Most of the professional libertarians you read or see on TV could make significantly more money in the private sector than they do working for a non-profit. In all humility, I could double my salary as a private sector flack. I’ve had offers. The cliched, ad hominem, “I got mine” characterization of libertarianism is really tedious. People who work in the libertarian movement do so because they’re idealogues, just like those who work in the progressive and conservative movements. (And incidentally, corporations give far, far more money to progressive organizations than they do to free market organizations.) I can assure you, none of us is getting rich espousing libertarian ideas.
And you can criticize us all you want for covering the coming catastrophe that is the public pension system. When the first dozen states have to default in order to cover double-dipping bureaucrats with six-figure pensions, don’t say we didn’t warn you.
If you have actual, substantive criticisms of articles you see in Reason, have at it. But these ad hominem attacks criticizing how the magazine is funded, blithely dismissing the entire staff as secret Republicans, and finding secret agendas based on what we don’t write about (and in most cases when you’ve raised this point, we actually have covered those topics) is really beneath you.
flukebucket
Amen brother.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
@Radley Balko: Reason is a wingnut rag, no more no less. Cole was trying to give you some cred, but you insist on defending the POS Koch funded glibertarian GOP light worthless Reason Magazine.
Maude
@Radley Balko:
You need to find a pulpit.
Your comment is poorly written. It is unclear what point or points you are trying to make.
The boredom factor is 100%.
It’s one thing to argue a point with John Cole, but you need to write better to get your point across.
You sound like a child who didn’t get his own way with someone at school and he’s gonna tell.
Cole is a much better thinker and writer.
And we like him.
bootsy
Radley Balko: The “economic freedom” that the already rich already have is not being oppressed by making them pay taxes to make health care affordable for all.
Having them pay for the advantages they have is just fairness and creating a fair playing field, which is what you useless ‘libertarians’ always claim to be about.
And public sector employees making more than their private counterparts, do you mean janitors who make $10/hour instead of $7? Because that’s what the survey said. In fact, the higher up public employees earn significantly less than private employees.
I love the “economic freedom” that results from allowing CEOs to control their boards and pay themselves 10,000 x what their lowest employees make, all while bankrupting the company.
Parole Officer Burke
Good times, good times.
Zifnab
@Radley Balko:
Wow, then you haven’t been paying attention. Read a little FDL or DKos and you see it on a regular basis.
I can link you here:
http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2010/03/22/the-prisoner-shellgame/
Obama Admin Continues Prisoner Shell Game to Avoid Scrutiny on Detainees
and that was with all of two minutes of searching.
Seriously, you need a reading lesson. John isn’t complaining about the lack of civil liberties articles nearly as much as he complains about digging through all the chaff – the health care bill demagoguery, the anti-stimulus number shuffling, and the constant Republican propaganda parade – to find those singular kernals of grain.
You’ve got so much column space to work with and you waste it in droves, making false claims and shilling for a dishonest party.
liberal
@Radley Balko:
Bullshit. Most so-called libertarians support economic slavery, not economic freedom. They’re a bunch of crypto-feudalists.
liberal
@bootsy:
True, but you’re not putting the point well.
The big lie is that the wealthy arrived at those privileges fairly, when in fact most of that wealth was obtained by collecting economic rent, i.e., unfairly.
Brien Jackson
I’ll consider taking libertarians seriously when they stop claiming to be fans of Thomas Paine.
liberal
@Radley Balko:
That’s just lame nonsense. Most of that money is going to organizations that “do good works,” not advocacy organizations. Just because those organizations can be labeled progressive doesn’t mean they’re progressive in the sense you intend.
Xenos
@Radley Balko:
If you have not heard it, then you are not listening very carefully. You won’t find professional Liberal Pundits who have been given corporate media platforms doing much lamenting, but surely you are sophisticated enough to know that they are not representative of liberals generally.
Which is 90% of the reason that being a professional Libertarian is indistinguishable from being a lickspittle for the Koch brothers.
You take part of your compensation in the form of prestige from being associated with influential think tanks with plutocratic sponsors. This is essentially a tax-free payoff that pays back in spades when you want to publish a book or trade up to a cushier sinecure. You are, and always have been, a private sector flack.
liberal
@Brien Jackson:
Heh. Well, we certainly know most of them haven’t read Agrarian Justice.
Zifnab
@liberal: No no. It’s like how conservatives are more generous than their liberal peers because they donate more money to
the “Catholic Priest Defense Fund”churches and charities.AhabTRuler
Mr. Balko has seen in the news that Gov’t. employees make more than private sector, but he has forgotten that there are lies, damned lies, and statistics. Since Mr. Balko is too intellegent to take a stastical argument from a news source w/o interrogating the underlying data, I have to assume that he is being willfully ignorant for political ends, i.e. just another hack.
Mojotron
Pretty sure I haven’t heard a single liberal commentator lament the way Obama has sold out on criminal justice issues.
Most people don’t flaunt their ignorance so proudly. I know you’re familiar with Glenn Greenwald, and he’s just one of many who have taken Obama to task on that subject.
NobodySpecial
Wow, Radley Balko himself comes and pitches a hissy.
He should have just invoked the LIbertarian Motto.
“I got mine, fuck you.”
El Cid
I would like to note that I have always found a more consistent defense of civil liberties on the actual left than I ever have seen in the much-too-praised ‘libertarian’ right.
I have even more greatly appreciated those who actually give a damn about the tens of millions of 3rd world residents who are made to suffer so that the U.S. establishment can continue to guarantee a consumer’s market for illegal narcotics.
Colombia, the largest recipient of U.S. ‘aid’ in the hemisphere, has over 3 million internally displaced refugees, driven off lands mostly by drugs producers, rich landholders, and conservative narco-paramilitaries and no one gives much of a shit outside sternly worded letters and bureaucratically re-routed aid, because, hey, the cities are more secure and the army will keep attacking the narco-guerrillas in concert with their buddies in the narco-paramilitaries for however many decades longer we want to help pay for it.
The transformation of Mexico into a similar narco-paramilitary state is a gigantic cost we are shoving onto average Mexicans in order to continue our utterly failed (given stated goals, successful given actual goals) policies of repression of users and targeting a few major traffickers.
I certainly appreciate the perspective of U.S. individuals who should not be criminalized for possessing or ingesting recreational drugs. And the profitable prison industry also thanks us for our continued subsidies via drug ‘war’ policies.
I learned more about these subjects from foreign press, human rights groups, and the U.S.’ left than I have from any other sources.
Credit where it’s due all around.
John Cole
Radley- I read Reason far more than is good for my health, and but for you and Jesse Walker, it would be completely unreadable.
Oh never mind. I see Reason now has up a bloggingheads with Ann Althouse and Matt Welch running cover for the lunatic protestors (AGAIN) and talking about Mickey Kaus. I rest my case.
ericblair
@Mnemosyne: Do the nominally Christian people who say that have even the slightest clue how stupid they sound when they complain about a preacher hanging around with lowlifes and whores?
They’re exactly the people who stood around and cheered when whatshisname got nailed to a tree a couple thousand years ago.
If they actually stopped waving that book they love in everyone’s faces and actually started reading it they might be in for a bit of a shock.
James K. Polk, Esq.
Oh noes, we give public sector employees HEALTH CARE and PENSION. SOCILIAMAISM!
Zifnab
@James K. Polk, Esq.: I remember when they paid teachers an absolutely abysmal salary. It was one of the least lucrative professions.
That was… what? Yesterday?
I think the joke was that garbage collectors made more than teachers. But that can’t be right. Garbage collection has largely been outsourced to private companies.
Bill Rutherford, Princeton Admissions
“I haven’t seen a beating like that since someone put a banana down my pants and let a monkey loose”
-Cousin Eddie
b-psycho
Publicgovernment employees make more money because of their relatively unchallenged unions. I’d be all for private sector labor having such power, in fact I’d prefer they had it instead ofpublicgovernment employees.Comrade Dread
True to a point. However, there are Federal laws and programs in place that provide incentives to local cops to pursue these types of ‘crimes’. Pressuring the administration to end those would be a worthwhile way of pushing back against the drug war.
I’m sure a lot of local cops couldn’t give a **** about marijuana and would rather be investigating more serious crimes, but their department wants the Federal dollars, surplus military equipment, and such, so they’re forced to play ball.
Bill Rutherford, Princeton Admissions
Also,
Oh really? Did I miss all the anti-Medicare prescription drug bill rallies you were pimping? What about the trillions we’ve poured and are pouring into Iraq? Any rallies against those?
b-psycho
@liberal: Sadly. Having to explain such distinctions is getting old…
bootsy
@Liberal: Yeah, you’re right, I’m not so great at really dissecting the lie at the heart of the whole ‘libertarian’ thang. Just irritated that this Balko tries to redefine “institutional advantage from the time of slavery til now” into “freedom.”
“I mean, who needs insurance when your daddy could just put away 50k in case you get sick? Surely if you’re working at minimum wage you could afford to save that much!”
There have been versions of this Goldwater bullshit forever:
“Surely you’re going to Vietnam because you want to, right? It’s not like there’s anyone who can’t afford college and can’t get a deferment!”
geg6
@Radley Balko:
Although I think you are (well, after today, make that “were”) one of the best and most reasonable people at Reason, your magazine gives a megaphone to the worst of the right wing garbage. And, to be even more honest, your whole philosophy is nothing but the reasoning of a 14-year-old spoiled rotten boy who has never had to function in a real world. I, and no thinking person I know, take seriously anything your philosophy or compatriots have to say about anything. Libertarianism is only for those who are developmentally and emotionally retarded. I explored it seriously at one time in my life on the recommendation of a friend. And what I found was stupid, insipid, and simplistic, with the simple underlying message of “I got mine; fuck you” revealing itself to not be a cliche but the actual message.
But John actually takes you seriously and often praises you. So go ahead. Piss on him all you like for criticizing you and your shitty magazine. As usual, idiots like you do nothing but shoot yourselves in the foot.
Bob K
This story unfolds uglier the more you click into it. Why couldn’t I have just taken the “Blue Pill”? Clicked away to a nice happy story about ACORN UNICORNS?
The police officer who killed Ayers wasn’t even authorized to be carrying a gun or a badge.
Then, on her way back to her motel room, Barrett claims she saw Jonathan Ayers drive by. “I stopped “J” and asked to borrow $20 and took it right to the office,” explains Barrett.
But, Barrett claims this wasn’t the first time she saw Ayers. “I used to deal with him, not on a drug-level. I don’t even think he does drugs,” tells Barrett.
“Okay, how did you use to deal with him,” asked Special Agent Mike Ayers with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. “Sex,” relied Barrett.
Barrett claims that she had met Ayers in 2005 at a local bar in Toccoa. She told investigators that she would met him about once a month.
“It wasn’t always sexual. The last thing he said to me was ‘You don’t owe me anything,'” claims Barrett.
Barrett told investigators that she didn’t talk to Jonathan Ayers before seeing him that day. But his phone record shows that he called her about 20 times within a four and a half hour time frame.
This testimony persuaded the grand jury not to indict the officers who killed Ayers. The pastor may have fled the police, the grand jury concluded, because he feared his reputation would be ruined if his relationship with Barrett were exposed.
Sounds like a good enough reason to give a trigger happy yahoo a get out of jail free card to me.
someguy
Radley, you shouldn’t try to bring the heat around here, where the commenters are both smarter, and more committed to individual rights than you are.
Rathskeller
@Whispers: Never read Reason, never likely to, but fish pedicures were recently banned in a few states. You stick your feet in a little bath, filled with tiny fish that dig eating dead skin. They zoom all over your feet, rapidly cleaning cleaning them. Obviously not for everyone.
The states that have banned this did so on sanitary grounds — you clearly can’t dump bleach or whatever in those little pools between customers. I presume Reason objected on libertarian grounds, that is, they think private industry should be allowed to do whatever they want.
Seanly
Why does it have to be a libertarian magazine? Wouldn’t any good progressive push for those very same items you mentioned? And without all the Randian supermen BS libertarian.
Just because I am a quasi-soc1alist doesn’t mean that I think every Democrat or Obama decision is carved in stone & the most wonderful decision ever. I am against waste & corruption as well as back room & sweetheart deals – those aren’t Republican or Tea Party or libertarian ideals. I am for helping my fellow human beings – live is hard, hard, hard and many of us will need a helping hand at some point. No one has pulled themselves up without some direct or indirect help.
Silver
I actually sort of a feel for a guy like Balko. Same position a guy like TNC is in. He’s really great in his niche, but he’s working at a place where complete fucking retards run around making absurd statements like…I dunno, Sarah Palin on a meth binge, maybe?
But he’s gotta work there, so it’s tough to call them out in print as total fucking loons.
MM
@Radley Balko:
Your magazine has taken to pushing Ann Althouse and Glenn Reynolds. It’s become the Libertarian version of Tiger Beat, intellectually speaking.
cleek
i never understood this obsessive, narrow, panicky focus on “economic freedom”. it’s almost religious.
guess that’s why i’m not a libertarian.
Don
I can assure you that we’ve covered Gitmo, detainment, and civil liberties pretty thoroughly. More thoroughly, in fact, than many liberal magazines. Pretty sure I haven’t heard a single liberal commentator lament the way Obama has sold out on criminal justice issues.
You must be joking. Does Glenn Greenwald write about anything ELSE?
Michael
Lets be honest, Radley.
Being libertarian anymore is about using the imagery of Strapping Young Bucks and Cadillac driving welfare moms getting their hands into the taxpayer till in order to drive the somewhat more sane votes into the hands of your bestest buddies in the entire world, the Dominionist Feudalist Racialist right.
You’re nothing but a shill for the bedroom cops, and quit pretending that you aren’t – it insults longtime observers of libertarian action and rhetoric.
The days of respecting Reason are long gone. It is a fucking joke, and y’all have been willingly co-opted by the nastiest combination of people on earth – neo-Nazis and theocrats. After all, only a libertarian is psychotic enough to that the greatest evil committed on earth was telling Southerners that they had to let their local black populace vote and participate in the economic life of their own communities.
Soak long in your ignominy – you earned it.
Michael
Don’t want none o’ them negroze on that thar Woolworth lunch counter. Or strapping young bucks gettin’ no T-Bone steaks.
cleek
@Michael:
i dunno … i have friends who are hard-core libertarians, and they don’t seem racist to me.
D-Chance.
TPM pulls a Cavuto.
Hey, they’re just asking…
silentbeep
@Radley Balko:
Sigh. Radley you are one of the few reasons why Reason is worth reading. More often than not you are right on when talking about civil liberties and the amazing reporting you have done re: the abusive practices of some police departments like the above story.
When it comes to civil liberties, this is an area where there is actual agreement, more often than not, between liberals and libertarians. Julian Sanchez wrote for The Nation not so long ago talking about the sorry-ass state of civil liberties under Obama. Ever heard of Glenn Greenwald?
As far as economic freedom goes, many liberals are capitalists and see the benefits of a market economy (liberal does not equal socialist). For example, you must’ve caught Yglesias’ post with his pro-capitalist spin on wal-mart called “competition is good” (nick gillispie highlighted it on reason.com) However, unlike libertarians, liberals tend to value the market like an adult -they will question it, and criticize it, they are not four years old where they need to worship capitalism as some quasi-parent figure.
Liberals usually are not going to put market interests above basic human decency, kindness, community and in the words of Obama “neighborliness.”
I feel a bit torn myself. I consider myself a liberal with a pretty strong libertarian streak, but when i have to read stuff like your response to John, I am reminded again why I will never quite leave my liberal roots.
mai naem
I am reading this thread. Radley, dude, you kind of brought a knife when you should have brought a gun. Haven’t read Reason since I got out of college and, like, had to have a real job and deal with real life issues. Grow up.