Today, the Congressional Budget Office released what may be the penultimate cost estimate of ObamaCare. Or maybe it will be the 12th-to-the-last.  Whatever.

That document — unlike the CBO’s score of the Clinton health plan — includes no cost estimates of the legislation’s private-sector mandates.  As I have written previously, the private-sector mandates accounted for 60 percent of the cost of the Clinton plan.  The Obama plan is remarkably similar, which is probably why Democrats have systematically suppressed any such estimates this time around.

President Obama has implicitly acknowledged that the CBO estimates do not reflect the legislation’s full cost.  Yet it has now been 265 days since Congress saw the first version of the Obama health plan, and we’re still waiting for a full cost estimate.

And so, the ObamaCare Cost-Estimate Watch maintains its lonely vigil.  At least The New York Times is listening.

The draft national curricular standards released yesterday, as I wrote earlier, will in all likelihood do little or no educational good if adopted. They’ll either be ignored or, if hard to meet, dumbed-down.

That said, the really troubling question is not whether the standards will do any good, but whether they will do much harm.

The answer: Oh, they’ll do harm. They’ll move us one step closer to complete centralization of education, which portends many potentially bad things, from total special-interest domination to even more wasteful spending.

Perhaps the most concerning possibility is that complete centralization — meaning, federalization — will lead to nationwide conflict over what the schools should teach, much as we are seeing in Texas right now and witnessed in the 1990s, the last time Washington tried to push “voluntary” national standards. Back then national standards in several subjects were proposed, and a national firestorm was set off over what they did, and did not, contain.

The Common Core State Standards Initiative folks clearly learned from the nineties experience, assiduously avoiding even the appearance of mandating the reading of specific literary works and focusing instead on skills. (The draft standards include a lot of reading exemplars but don’t require knowledge of any specific literary pieces). As a result, the response so far seems much less heated than occurred in the nineties, though critiques of the proposed standards certainly do exist. Once control over language arts skills and mathematics is fully centralized, however, can we really expect specific content standards in literature and other subjects to be left entirely to states and districts?

It seems unlikely: Once Washington connects receipt of federal funding to performance on national standards for some subjects, it is very likely to expand into others. After all, aren’t science, history, and other topics as important as reading and math?

“Promoting” science is a huge favorite of federal politicians, so it’s certainly hard to imagine science — and the freighted questions about human origins and climate change that go with it — not becoming a target for nationalization. Similarly, since many public schooling advocates argue that we must have government schools to create good citizens, it’s hard to envision the controversy-laden subjects of history and civics not entering the sites of federal politicians.  And when they do, we can either expect the sparks to fly, or the standards that are set to be so milquetoast as to be meaningless.

Wait. Am I being overly alarmist about this, trying to start a trumped-up slippery-slope scare to undermine the current national standards push?

Nope. National standards supporters are already talking about targeting science and history. For instance, in the forward to International Lessons about National Standards, a recent report from the national-standards-loving Thomas B. Fordham Institute, it is written about the CCSSI:

Our authors would prefer for science to be included in this first round, and we’d like to get to history sooner rather than later.

And Fordham is not alone. Indeed, the CCSSI folks have already been talking about creating national science and social studies standards!

When should all kids learn evolution, if at all? How much Hispanic history should students know? How many Founding Fathers should high school grads be able to identify? What caused the Civil War? Is global warming a major threat? Are we a Christian nation? How these and numerous other bitterly contested questions will officially be answered will suddenly have to be duked out by every American, and the winners will get to dictate to the entire nation.

So the language arts and math standards revealed yesterday are, almost certainly, just the camel’s nose under the tent.  Unfortunately, that means the whole destructive beast isn’t far behind.

Can I send Time magazine the bill for the new crack in my desk and the splinters in my forehead? Because their latest excretion on the case of Colleen “Jihad Jane” LaRose and its relation to Patriot Act surveillance powers is absolutely maddening:

The Justice Department won’t say whether provisions of the Patriot Act were used to investigate and charge Colleen LaRose. But the FBI and U.S. prosecutors who charged the 46-year-old woman from Pennsburg, Pa., on Tuesday with conspiring with terrorists and pledging to commit murder in the name of jihad could well have used the Patriot Act’s fast access to her cell-phone records, hotel bills and rental-car contracts as they tracked her movements and contacts last year. But even if the law’s provisions weren’t directly used against her, the arrest of the woman who allegedly used the moniker “Jihad Jane” is a boost for the Patriot Act, Administration officials and Capitol Hill Democrats say. That’s because revelations of her alleged plot may give credibility to calls for even greater investigative powers for the FBI and law enforcement, including Republican proposals to expand certain surveillance techniques that are currently limited to targeting foreigners.

Sadly, this is practically a genre resorted to by lazy writers whenever a domestic terror investigation is making headlines. It consists of indulging in a lot of fuzzy speculation about how the Patriot Act might have been crucial—for all we know!—to a successful  investigation, even when every shred of available public evidence suggests otherwise.  My favorite exemplar of this genre comes from a Fox News piece penned by journalist-impersonator Cristina Corbin after the capture of some Brooklyn bomb plotters last spring, with the bold headline: “Patriot Act Likely Helped Thwart NYC Terror Plot, Security Experts Say.” The actual article contains nothing to justify the headline: It quotes some lawyers saying vague positive things about the Patriot Act, then tries to explain how the law expanded surveillance powers, but mostly botches the basic facts.  From what we know thanks to the work of real reporters,  the initial tip and the key evidence in that case came from a human infiltrator who steered the plotters to locations that had been physically bugged, not new Patriot tools.

Of course, it may well be that National Security Letters or other Patriot powers were invoked at some point in this investigation—the question is whether there’s any good reason to suspect they made an important difference. And that seems highly dubious. LaRose’s indictment cites the content of private communications, which probably would have been obtained using a boring old probable cause warrant—and the standard for that is far higher than for a traditional pen/trap order, which would have enabled them to be getting much faster access to more comprehensive cell records. Maybe earlier on, then, when they were compiling the evidence for those tools?  But as several reports on the investigation have noted, “Jihad Jane” was being tracked online by a groups of anti-jihadi amateurs some three years ago. As a member of one group writes sarcastically on the site Jawa Report, the “super sekrit” surveillance tool they used to keep abreast of LaRose’s increasingly disturbing activities was… Google. I’m going to go out on a limb and say the FBI could’ve handled this one with pre-Patriot authority, and a fortiori with Patriot authority restrained by some common-sense civil liberties safeguards.

What’s a little more unusual is to see this segue into the kind of argument we usually see in the wake of an intelligence failure, where the case is then seen as self-evidently justifying still more intrusive surveillance powers, in this case the expansion of the “lone wolf” authority currently applicable only to foreigners, allowing extraordinarily broad and secretive FISA surveillance to be conducted against people with no actual ties to a terror group or other “foreign power.” Yet as Time itself notes:

In fact, Justice Department terrorism experts are privately unimpressed by LaRose. Hers was not a particularly threatening plot, they say, and she was not using any of the more challenging counter-surveillance measures that more experienced jihadis, let alone foreign intelligence agents, use.

Which, of course, is a big part of the reason we have a separate system for dealing with agents of foreign powers: They are typically trained in counterintelligence tradecraft with access to resources and networks far beyond those of ordinary nuts. What possible support can LaRose’s case provide for the proposition that these industrial-strength tools should now be turned on American citizens?  They caught her—and without much trouble, by the looks of it. Sure, this domestic nut may have invoked to Islamist ideology rather than the commands of Sam the Dog or anti-Semitic conspiracy theories… but so what? She’s still one more moderately dangerous unhinged American in a country that has its fair share, and has been dealing with them pretty well under the auspices of Title III for a good while now.

According to Roll Call:

The Senate Parliamentarian has ruled that President Barack Obama must sign Congress’ original health care reform bill before the Senate can act on a companion reconciliation package, senior GOP sources said Thursday.

So…before you can amend a law, it has to be a law?  What a concept.

According to MSNBC, Democratic leaders have given up on trying to appease pro-life House Democrats:

House leaders have concluded they cannot change a divisive abortion provision in President Barack Obama’s health care bill and will try to pass the sweeping legislation without the support of ardent anti-abortion Democrats.A break on abortion would remove a major obstacle for Democratic leaders in the final throes of a yearlong effort to change health care in America. But it sets up a risky strategy of trying to round up enough Democrats to overcome, not appease, a small but possibly decisive group of Democratic lawmakers in the House…

Democratic Rep. Henry Waxman of California, chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee…predicted some of the anti-abortion lawmakers in the party will end up voting for the overhaul anyway.

Pro-life Democrats will vote for taxpayer-funded abortions?  Without even a fig leaf of a compromise?

Ezra Klein quotes the Congressional Budget Office’s latest cost estimate of the Senate health care bill when he writes:

“CBO expects that the legislation would generate a reduction in the federal budgetary commitment to health care during the decade following 2019,” which is to say that this bill will cover 30 million people but the cost controls will, within a decade or so, leave us spending less on health care than if we’d done nothing.  That’s a pretty good deal. But it’s not a very well-understood deal.

Indeed, because that’s not what the CBO said.

First, the CBO said the “federal budgetary commitment to health care” would rise by $210 billion between 2010 and 2019 under the Senate bill.  Then, after 2019, it would fall from that higher level.  And it could fall quite a bit before returning to its current level.

Second, the “federal budgetary commitment to health care” is a concept that includes federal spending on health care and the tax revenue that the federal government forgoes due to health-care-related tax breaks, the largest being the exclusion for employer-sponsored insurance premiums.  If Congress creates a new $1 trillion health care entitlement and finances it with deficit spending or an income-tax hike, the “federal budgetary commitment to health care” rises by $1 trillion.  But if Congress funds it by eliminating $1 trillion of health-care-related tax breaks, the “federal budgetary commitment to health care” would be unchanged, even though Congress just increased government spending by $1 trillion.  That’s what the Senate bill’s tax on high-cost health plans does: by revoking part of the tax break for employer-sponsored insurance, it makes the projected growth in the “federal budgetary commitment to health care” appear smaller than the actual growth of government.

Third, the usual caveats about the Senate bill’s Medicare cuts, which the CBO says are questionable and Medicare’s chief actuary calls “doubtful” and “unrealistic,” apply.  If those spending cuts don’t materialize, the “federal budgetary commitment to health care” will be higher than the CBO projects.

Fourth, Medicare’s chief actuary also contradicts Klein’s claim that the Senate bill would “leave us spending less on health care than if we’d done nothing.”  The actuary estimated that national health expenditures would rise by $234 billion under the Senate bill.

And really, Klein’s claim is a little silly.  Even President Obama admits, “You can’t structure a bill where suddenly 30 million people have coverage and it costs nothing.”

Jay makes a number of good points in his blog post on the subject, but particularly effective is his likening of “voluntary” education standards to “voluntary” state speed limits tied to federal highway funding.

When someone takes your money and will only give any of it back if you do as he says, are your actions really voluntary? That’s what the Obama administration and other “voluntary” standards advocates are proposing.

More soon on the folly of imposing a single set of age-based education standards on the entire nation. Stay tuned.

Although public schools are usually the biggest item in state and local budgets, spending figures provided by public school officials and reported in the media often leave out major costs of education, and understate what is actually spent.

In a new study, Cato’s Adam B. Schaeffer reviews district budgets and state records for the nation’s five largest metro areas and the District of Columbia. Schaeffer finds that, on average, per-pupil spending in these areas is 44 percent higher than officially reported.

In this new video, Schaeffer explains the whole thing in under three minutes:

From my op-ed in The Daily Caller:

ObamaCare would dramatically expand government control over health care.

Each new power ObamaCare creates would be targeted by special interests looking for special favors, and held for ransom by politicians seeking a slice of the pie.

ObamaCare would guarantee that crucial decisions affecting your medical care would be made by the same people, through the same process that created the Cornhusker Kickback, for as far as the eye can see.

When ObamaCare supporters, like Kaiser Family Foundation president Drew Altman, claim that “voters are rejecting the process more than the substance” of the legislation, they’re missing the point.

When government grows, corruption grows.  When voters reject these corrupt side deals, they are rejecting the substance of ObamaCare.

If Obama is serious about fighting corruption, he should invite C-SPAN to into every meeting he holds with members of Congress.

Then we’ll see whether he’s lobbying House members based on the Senate bill’s merits, or promising House members judgeships or ambassadorships in exchange for their votes.

What’s going on behind those closed doors, anyway?  Aren’t you just a little bit curious?

Or does corruption only happen when Billy Tauzin is in the room?

• Greece, here we come…. Congressional Budget Office estimates budget deficits will average nearly $1 trillion per year for the next decade.

• Matt Drudge re-titles a Cato op-ed: “Mob Tactics Used to Push Healthcare Through.”

• Daniel Griswold: “On trade, as on so much else, the populists have it wrong again. Free trade and globalization are great blessings to families across America.“

• Could Dennis Kucinich bring both sides of the aisle  together to end the war in Afghanistan?

• Podcast: “Seventies Redux?” featuring John Samples, author of the forthcoming book The Struggle to Limit Government.

There seems to be a real trend in Washington to declare support for a bill now, but actually have the bill exist later. It’s been most obvious in the health care marathon, where often purely notional pieces of legislation have been boisterously celebrated or bemoaned for months. It’s also the case with the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act, which may or may not be tacked on to health-care reconcilation because supporters don’t, you know, want to actually debate the thing. Currently, there is no Senate version of SAFRA, and it’s unclear what changes would need to be made to the House version to make it reconcilable.

So why are so many people willing to take big chances on legislation that only exists in the fertile minds of congresspeople? As this Inside Higher Ed article on community colleges illustrates, it’s often because they want taxpayer money — $12 billion is the community colleges’ hoped for windfall – no matter what:

Sensing the urgency of the moment on Capitol Hill, many community college advocates believe that budget reconciliation is the most likely route for passage of the AGI this year. They argue that time is of the essence for those community college trustees and presidents visiting town for the summit to lobby their representatives and senators without focusing on quibbles over the bill.

“I know there’s a lot of discussion for many of you [about] what’s in the program,” said Jee Hang Lee, ACCT director of public policy. “‘What’s in the final program for SAFRA? What’s in the final program for AGI? What is it going to look like?’ What we’ve heard is that, for the most part, the House and Senate staffs and the White House have something in place. I don’t know what it looks like. I don’t know many people who do know what it looks like. But they have a broad agreement on the structure of these programs, so that’s nice to know that they have because that means it’ll likely get funded.”

Still, he advised visiting trustees and presidents to be direct in their support for the bill and wait until later to work out potential kinks in its specific provisions.

“My point is that you just need to press hard to get this money and get it passed, and we can work out some of the details, I guess, later, I guess through the negotiated rule-making period,” Lee said.

Hmm. And I guess money grabs like these explain a good bit of why the national debt is now approaching $12.6 trillion.

Compromise is catnip in Washington, D.C. That’s my best guess at why Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) would endorse New York Senator Chuck Schumer’s (D) widely reviled plan to create a mandatory biometric national ID system.

Schumer’s national ID plans have no more definition today than when he wrote about them in his 2007 campaign manifesto Postitively American. Among the thin gruel of that book is a two-page lump displaying more ignorance than understanding of how identity systems work and fail. Schumer doesn’t know the difference between an identifier—a characteristic used to distinguish or group people—and an identification card or system, which does the entire task of proving a person’s previously fixed identity. (My thin gruel on the topic is the book Identity Crisis: How Identification is Overused and Misunderstood.)

“All the national employment ID card will do is make forgery harder,” says Schumer.

No, that’s not all it would do: It would also subject every employment decision to the federal government’s approval. It would make surveillance of law-abiding citizens easier. It would allow the government to control access to health care. It would facilitate gun control. It would cost $100 billion dollars or more. It would draw bribery and corruption into the Social Security Administration. It would promote the development of sophisticated biometric identity fraud. How long should I go on?

Senator Graham’s take is equally simple: “We’ve all got Social Security cards,” he said to the Wall Street Journal. “They’re just easily tampered with. Make them tamper-proof. That’s all I’m saying.”

No, Senator, that’s not all you’re saying. You’re saying that native-born American citizens should be herded into Social Security Administration offices by the millions so they can have their biometrics collected in federal government databases. You’re saying that you’d like a system where working, traveling, going to the doctor, and using a credit card all depend on whether you can show your national ID. You’re saying that bigger government is the solution, not smaller government.

The point for these senators, of course, is not the substance. It’s the thrill they experience as nominal ideological opponents finding that they can agree on something, securing a potential breakthrough on the difficult immigration issue.

They’re only ”nominal” ideological opponents, though. Chuck Schumer has always been a big government guy—and long a supporter of having a national ID, despite the lessons of history. Lindsey Graham is not really his ideological opponent. Typical of politicians with years in Washington D.C., Graham is steadily migrating toward the big-government ideology that unites federal politicians and bureaucrats against the people.

The President has announced a government crackdown on Medicare and Medicaid fraud. The effort appears to be an attempt to make it easier for Americans to swallow the health care “reform” he’s trying to shove down their throats. As House Republican leader John Boehner correctly asked, “Why can’t we crack down on fraud without a big-government takeover of health care?”

As I’ve noted before, improper payments made by Medicare and Medicaid is may well be $50 billion more than the already appalling $100 billion annual figure the president cited. Administrative efforts to rein in fraud and abuse are welcome, but they won’t solve the huge and fundamental inefficiencies of these programs. Because the law requires government health care programs to quickly get payments out the door, Uncle Sam will always be engaged in a costly game of “pay and chase.”

The broader problem is that government programs aren’t subject to market discipline. Policymakers and administrators have little incentive to be frugal because they face few or no negative consequences when playing with other people’s money.

Most of us have noticed how good private companies can be at reducing fraud. I recently received a call about questionable charges on my Discover credit card. After quizzing me on a list of purchases made with my card in the past 24 hours, it became clear that someone had gotten control of my account. Discover immediately closed the account, opened an investigation, and removed me from any liability for the fraudulent charges.

What amazed me is that I only had about $300 worth of charges on my card. It’s not a big account and thus not a big money maker for Discover. Yet, within 24 hours of a string of suspicious charges, the company was right on top of it before I even realized anything nefarious was going on. Private markets don’t always work this well, but government programs almost never do.

Noting that premium increases, such as Anthem’s proposed 39-percent hike in California, have caused individuals and employers to purchase less coverage, Kaiser Family Foundation president Drew Altman writes:

Rising health care costs and insurance company practices are leading not just to more expensive premiums, but to skimpier, less comprehensive coverage as well; slowly redefining what we have known as health insurance. To be sure, some economists argue that this is precisely what should happen…But this is not likely how regular people see it. Appropriate cost sharing is one thing, but we may be reaching the point in the individual market where the policies many people have simply cannot be considered meaningful coverage.

Of course, this is the whole idea behind President Obama’s proposed tax on high-cost health plans: higher prices will cause people to purchase less coverage, which will temper health care spending.

But whether Altman is correct depends on what the meaning of “meaningful” is.  When individuals pare back the amount of insurance they purchase, they are revealing what they consider to be meaningful coverage.  (The same is true when employers opt for less-comprehensive coverage, though employers’ revealed preferences are obviously a poor proxy for what their workers value.)

If Altman thinks the coverage that individuals are choosing “cannot be considered meaningful coverage” (note the passive voice), he is implicitly stating that individuals are not the best judges of their own welfare.  And the only way to devise an alternative definition of meaningful coverage is through the political process.

It is difficult to argue that the political process does a better job of selecting meaningful coverage.  That process forces many consumers to purchase coverage that they don’t find meaningful (e.g., chiropractic, acupuncture, circumcision), that they find offensive (e.g., abortion, contraception, in-vitro fertilization), or for treatments that are downright harmful (e.g., high-dose chemotherapy combined with autologous bone-marrow transplant for late-stage breast cancer).

Letting consumers reveal their preferences is possibly the worst way to define “meaningful coverage.”  Except for all the others.

Three days ago I reported that draft, grade-by-grade, national curricular standards would soon be released by the Common Core State Standards Initiative. Yesterday, they were. (If you want to get a sense for what the proposed standards are follow the link to them. Don’t bother with the appendices, though, unless you really want to get into the weeds.)

Naturally, in the coming days lots of people will be offering heaps of commentary about what the standards do or do not contain. That’s not my main concern (though reading through the English standards I am dubious that mastery of them could be easily or consistently assessed). You see, the content of the standards is largely irrelevant because the main problem isn’t what the standards are, but standardization itself.

As I’ve blathered about on numerous occasions, it makes little sense to expect all kids to master all the same things at the same rates. All kids are different – they have different talents, desires, and abilities — and to impose one, “best” progression on them is simply illogical.

Another problem with imposing a single standard nationwide — and yes, this will be imposed, unless states suddenly decide they don’t like getting their citizen’s tax dollars back from Uncle Sam – is that it prevents competition between curricula. And that, in turn, kills innovation, the lifeblood of progress. So unless these standards have achieved perfection — and I’m pretty sure they haven’t — it’s a very dangerous thing to make them the end-all and be-all.

Finally, no matter how brilliant the draft standards, there is no reason to believe that they will drive meaningful educational improvement. Government schools will still be government schools, and the people employed by them will still have very little incentive to push kids to excellence, and every incentive to game the system to make the standards toothless. And no one yet has offered a decent proposal, other than school-choice supporters, for getting around that very inconvenient, public-schooling truth.

All of these problems help to explain why there is no convincing empirical evidence that national standards drive superior educational outcomes. Unfortunately, most national-standards advocates will talk themselves blue in the face about what’s in the standards, but avoid at all costs the question of whether standardization makes sense in the first place.

What does it say that the American polity has consistently rejected a wholesale government takeover of health care for 100 years?

What does it say that public opinion has been consistently against the Democrats’ health care takeover since July 2009?

What does it say that Democrats are having this much difficulty enacting their health care legislation despite unified Democratic rule?  Despite large supermajorities in both chambers of Congress, including a once-filibuster-proof Senate majority (see more below)?  Despite an opportunistic change in Massachusetts law that provided that crucial 60th vote at a crucial moment?  Despite a popular and charismatic president?

What does it say that 38 House Democrats voted against the president’s health plan?

What does it say that Massachusetts voters elected, to fill the term of Ted Kennedy, a Republican who ran against the health care legislation that Kennedy helped to shape?

What does it say that the only thing bipartisan about that legislation is the opposition to it?

What does it say that 39 senators voted to declare that legislation’s centerpiece unconstitutional?

What does it say that health care researchers — a fairly left-wing lot — think the Senate bill is unconstitutional?

What does it say that the demands of pro-life and pro-choice House Democrats, each of which hold enough votes to determine the fate of this legislation, are irreconcilable?

What does it say that House Democrats are actually contemplating a legislative strategy that would deem the Senate bill to have passed the House — without the House ever actually voting on it?

Given that ours is a system of government where ambition is made to counteract ambition, what does it mean that the only way to pass this legislation is for the House to trust that the Senate will keep the House’s interests at heart?

I recently appeared on the Patt Morrison Show in southern California opposite Paul Helmke of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence in a segment that begs the question of what gun control laws will look like if the Supreme Court incorporates the Second Amendment with the McDonald v. Chicago case. The audio of the program is here, but the issue merits a more detailed discussion than I could get into on the radio.

The litigation over the boundaries of the Second Amendment in the District of Columbia previews the kinds of gun laws that will face court scrutiny.

First, certain restrictions on the purchase of firearms will likely be overturned. California maintains a “safe gun roster” of handguns that manufacturers have successfully submitted for safety testing. Following the Heller decision, the District adopted California’s roster. The roster is very specific, and handgun models are certified “safe” right down to the color. The District rejected applications to register two-tone guns, discontinued models, and guns not on the California roster. Three plaintiffs filed suit, alleging that this policy violated constitutional protections against irrational administrative regulations. The District relented, expanding its roster to include the “safe handguns” listings for Maryland and Massachusetts.

California courts are likely to reach similar conclusions. The Calguns Foundation has a plaintiff who wants to register a Glock handgun. The state has certified the right-handed but not the ambidextrous version, and the Calguns plaintiff was born without a right arm below the elbow. This compelling case, along with others parallel to the DC plaintiffs, will force California to open up its roster.

Second, jurisdictions will be forced to allow some form of handgun carry, either open or concealed. Outright bans on concealed carry cited in cases from the mid-1800’s come from a time when it was assumed that only brigands carried handguns concealed, and it was an unquestioned right of the people to carry arms openly wherever they went. States and localities will not be able to delete the right to bear arms from the right to keep and bear arms.

My colleague Tom Palmer is currently litigating this issue in the District of Columbia (complaint here), and states will have to confront the plain text of the Second Amendment and clear historical recognition of a right to be armed outside the home.

California allows open carry as long as the handgun is unloaded, but Los Angeles and other jurisdictions in the state refuse to issue concealed handgun permits. California will probably opt for concealed carry when push comes to shove. Public views have shifted to an “out of sight, out of mind” mentality, and concealed carry is the rule in most states. A California police officer recently put a comment up on Facebook that proposes intimidating open carriers with violence. “Haha, we had one guy last week try to do it! He got proned out and reminded where he was at and that turds will jack him for his gun in a heartbeat!” Turds indeed.

This brings us back to the Starbucks controversy that prompted the radio segment. Gun control proponents asked Starbucks to ban firearms from their coffee shops, and gun rights activists asked that they continue their current policy of following the law of the jurisdiction where each franchise is located.

The call-ins to the radio show expressed a willingness to boycott Starbucks if it keeps its “follow the law” policy, but that’s a rationale to boycott gas stations, grocery stores, and restaurants across the nation. If self-defense scares you that much, the best advice is to stay home. Or venture out and be a good victim.

Callers also expressed concerns about off-duty cops brandishing guns while intoxicated, and this is something we should take seriously. As I’ve said before, no magical powers accrue to a sworn officer. That’s a great case for barring everyone from carrying and drinking in public, law enforcement officers included. Federal law does this – the Law Enforcement Officers Safety Act allows current and retired law enforcement officers to carry concealed nationwide but requires that they not be under the influence while doing so. The same can’t be said for some state laws that make law enforcement officers a higher class of citizens than everyone else. Virginia allows retired law enforcement officers from any jurisdiction to imbibe while armed, but citizens with concealed handgun permits must transition from concealed carry to open carry when entering an establishment that serves alcohol for on-premises consumption. Better to treat permit holders and officers alike, and allow carry in restaurants but bar alcohol consumption while armed.

It’s unclear what the patchwork of gun laws across the nation will look like in ten years, but Eugene Volokh gives a framework for analysis in this article. Cato held an event the day before oral argument of the McDonald case, and our brief is available here. Ilya Shapiro and Josh Blackman discussed the application of the Privileges or Immunities Clause in this excellent article, and provided some post-argument commentary.

In my policy analysis “Attack of the Utility Monsters,” I wrote that one problem with hate speech laws is that the longer they stay on the books, the more they can encourage outrage over increasingly petty offenses. Here’s a story from the United Kingdom I’d certainly have included if I were writing that paper today:

A ten-year-old boy from Weston Super Mare has been put on a school “hate register” after he allegedly made a homophobic insult in the playground.

Peter Drury, a pupil of Ashcombe Primary School, is believed to have called one of his friends a “gay boy,” according to his mother.

The boy’s mum says she was called into her son’s school to be told by head teacher that another mother had heard him using homophobic language.

She claims she was told the incident would be registered and his file monitored while he was at the school.

“He doesn’t even understand about the birds and the bees, so how can he be homophobic?”

Schools are reportedly being given advice that offensive comments made by children as young as five should be recorded and kept on record until the pupil leaves secondary school.

Kids can be incredibly cruel, in both word and deed. But if we were to put every child who ever said something hurtful on a “hate register,” just how many kids would we have to register? All of them? What good would that do us?

In what can only be described as a cheap partisan attack masquerading as patriotic chest-thumping, House Republicans this morning issued a statement opposing Ohio Representative Dennis Kucinich’s resolution for the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan because… [drum roll please] the Republicans strongly support the troops in Afghanistan.

In a statement of Republican policy forwarded to GOP politicians and their staffers, the House Republican Leadership and the House Committees on Foreign Affairs and Armed Services Republicans write, ”Since the President’s speech, more United States Armed Forces have been deployed to the Afghanistan theatre in support of the implementation of our nation’s counterinsurgency strategy.  Many of them leave behind family and friends for the second, third, and fourth time.  They have been engaged in the largest offensive since the beginning of the war there, and they have done a magnificent job.  House Republicans are mindful these troops and their families will be watching this debate and remain committed to working towards swift and clean action when the resources impacting their military readiness, operational needs, and family support is debated and passed this spring.”

The GOP has got to stop hiding behind the troops. As I mention in a recent article, our brave servicemen and women are being deployed to prop up a regime Washington doesn’t trust, for goals our president can’t define. Sadly, the war not only provides a potent recruiting tool for militants, but it’s clear that it does little to appreciably protect America. As aptly demonstrated by the Christmas Day crotch bomber, the old argument of “We fight them there so we don’t have to fight them here” is complete and utter hogwash.

When Rep. Collin Peterson (D- Minn. and Chairman of the House Agriculture Committee) pronounces that a farm program is too generous, you know you’ve crossed a line.

But that’s what happened recently after Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark), Senate Agriculture Committee Chairwoman and — oh, hey, how about that? — facing a tough re-election battle in November proposed an extra $1.1 billion in emergency farm aid be added to a jobs/tax/unemployment/kitchen sink bill going through the Senate this week. These extra handouts would flow despite the fact that the 2008 farm bill contained ”reforms” (the so-called ”permanent disaster” program) ostensibly to put an end to politically-motivated ad hoc emergency aid of just the type that Senator Lincoln is pushing now.

For those who can stomach it, this excellent article by Dan Morgan, one of the nation’s best agriculture journalists, contains plenty of background information.

Last week, after Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) said that holders of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s debt shouldn’t be expected to be treated the same as holders of U.S. government debt, the U.S. Treasury took the “unusual” step of reiterating its commitment to back Fannie and Freddie’s debt.

If ever there was case against allowing a few hundred men and women to micromanage the economy, this is it.

Fannie and Freddie, which are under government control, are being used to help prop up the ailing housing market. If investors think there’s a chance Uncle Sam won’t back the mortgage giants’ debt, mortgage interest rates could rise and demand for housing dampen. Therefore, Frank’s comments caused a bit of a stir. However, with the government bailing out anything that walks or crawls, investors apparently weren’t too concerned with Frank’s comments as the spread between Treasury and Fannie bonds barely budged.

As I noted a couple weeks ago, the Treasury is in no hurry to add Fannie and Freddie’s debt and mortgage-backed securities to the budget ($1.6 trillion and $5 trillion respectively). Congress certainly isn’t interested in raising the debt ceiling to make room. And as Arnold Kling points out, putting Fannie and Freddie on the government’s books would actually force the government to do something about the doddering duo.

All of which points to what an unfunny joke budgeting is in Washington. Take a look at what current OMB director Peter Orszag had to say about the issue when he was head of the Congressional Budget Office:

Given the steps announced by the Treasury Department and the Federal Housing Finance Agency on September 7, it is CBO’s view that the operations of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac should be directly incorporated into the federal budget. The GSEs’ revenue would be treated as federal revenue and their expenditures as federal outlays, with appropriate adjustments for the manner in which credit transactions (like a mortgage guarantee) are reflected in the federal budget.

Note that Orszag wrote that statement less than two years ago. And since then, the bond between the government and the mortgage giants has only gotten tighter.

The same people that say Fannie and Freddie shouldn’t be on the government’s books are often the same people who once dismissed concerns that the two companies were headed toward financial ruin. In 2002, Orszag co-authored a paper at Fannie’s behest that concluded that “the probability of default by the GSEs is extremely small.”

Another one of those persons, Congressman Frank, has his fingerprints all over the housing meltdown. In 2003, a defiant Frank stated that “These two entities – Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac – are not facing any kind of financial crisis.” Frank couldn’t have been more wrong. Yet there he remains perched on his House Committee on Financial Services chairman’s seat, his every utterance so important that they can move interest rates.

Bill O’Reilly teases an interview with John Stossel this way:

Should Americans be able to use their body for any purpose? John Stossel says yes and joins us to explain!

And Bill O’Reilly says no! No to legal prostitution, no to polygamy, no even to legal markets for vitally needed organs. Check it out:

More Stossel videos on personal freedom here. Cato research on organ markets here. And don’t forget to watch John Stossel every Thursday night at 8 on the Fox Business Network.

Diane Ravitch is a leading education historian. Her work in that field is characteristically thorough and well-researched, and her books The Troubled Crusade and The Great School Wars, in particular, made significant contributions to our understanding of U.S. education history.

On the presumption that Ravitch is as much an expert on policy as she is on history, her latest book, recounting her change of heart on certain policy questions, has garnered enormous media attention. I suggest, with all due respect, that this presumption is a mistake. Unlike her thorough and rigorous historical writing, Ravitch’s policy opinions were never grounded in a systematic and comprehensive review of the relevant evidence. They should never have been given credence in the first place.

Consider Ravitch’s 1995 book National Standards in American Education, which endorsed the policy. When I was reviewing evidence on education standards for a chapter in my 1999 book Market Education, Ravitch’s book was still the preeminent source on the subject. After her historical work, it was a disappointment. Quoting Ravitch (p. 25), I wrote the following:

The most common claim made in support of government curricula is that: “Standards can improve academic achievement by clearly defining what is to be taught and what kind of performance is expected.” Unless readers are willing to accept this claim on faith, they can safely ignore it, because there is no compelling evidence that it is true. In her book National Standards in American Education, respected education historian and government standards advocate Diane Ravitch discusses many arguments pro and con, but does not demonstrate that government curriculum guidelines raise student achievement.

So far as I know, Ravitch never conducted a systematic review of the empirical evidence for national standards. Nor has she ever systematically and comprehensively reviewed the research comparing different kinds of public and private schools systems. She is not an authority on these matters.

If I’m mistaken on this point, I would appreciate a reference to any such works. If not, the media and policymakers would do well to stop according her opinions in these areas a weight they do not merit.

I’ve seen plenty of stories and gotten a fair number of calls from reporters about the national broadband plan. They generally want to get some insight from down in the weeds of the communications world. What do you think of this part? What do you think of that?

But I’m keeping my eye on the ball: This is another industrial-policy boondoggle. It’s a government spending program, created by the so-called “Recovery Act,” that will distort the communications marketplace, and it comes at the cost to taxpayers of having their resources taken from them and handed out to the firms that are best equipped to lobby for government succor.

I don’t care which community gets 1-gigabit connections. The money to pay for it should have been left with the American people to spend as they choose—on 1-gigabit connections if they choose. The debt overhang produced by all this spending makes us worse off, not better off, and the shiny bauble of hi-def, two-way video doesn’t change that.

The Federal Communications Commission should be shuttered. That’s the gist of what I have to say about the “National Broadband Plan.”

Washington is consumed once more with the problem of terrorism, driven by the dual pressures of an unsuccessful terrorist attack on commercial aviation and upcoming elections that give politicians an incentive to speak in terms of war. We are again treated to the ridiculous argument that a terrorist attack is either an act of war or a criminal violation but never both. Senators McCain and Lieberman recently proposed a bill that mandates military detention for domestic terror suspects instead of civilian criminal justice proceedings — an approach that sidelines half of our domestic counterterrorism tools.

The Enemy Belligerent, Interrogation, Detention, and Prosecution Act of 2010 would use military detention to incapacitate suspected terrorists. Choosing military detention over prosecution takes criminal justice tools off the table, including prosecuting terrorists for the instrumentalities of terrorism — assembling bombs, financing, and all of the illegal activities associated with attacking the system.

We’ve been down this road before, and domestic military detention in lieu of criminal prosecution has not worked as advertised.

Take the case of Ali Saleh Mohamed Kahlah al-Marri. After the 9/11 attacks, the FBI arrested al-Marri, an exchange student at Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois. The government alleged that al-Marri met with Osama Bin Laden, was working with senior al Qaeda organizers, had a more-than-casual interest in poisons, and was told by his handlers to be in America before September 11th or to forget about executing his mission here.

Terrorism, even when it can be viewed as an act of war perpetrated by a sleeper agent such as al-Marri, inherently breaks laws. Al-Marri arrived in the United States with a suitcase full of credit card numbers and set up a false business entity and bank accounts to finance his mission.

The government produced a seven-count indictment that, if proven, would have put al-Marri away for a long time. The charges included fraudulent use of a false identity (five or fifteen years, depending on the amount of money involved), three counts of bank fraud (thirty years each for a total of 90 years), making false statements to FBI investigators (ten years), and credit card fraud (ten years). This amounts to a maximum sentence of 115 or 125 years in federal prison. Subsequent sentence enhancers for committing these crimes in support of an act of international terrorism make the same indictment worth up to 146 years today.

That’s an impressive prison stretch, but it wasn’t too late for the government to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

Before al-Marri’s trial, the government removed him to military custody and asked that the charges against him be dismissed with prejudice (meaning that they cannot be re-filed upon his release). He remained in a naval brig in South Carolina as lawyers fought over his continued detention without trial. No military commission was ever planned for al-Marri. This was a power play to establish the precedent that terrorism suspects could be held indefinitely without trial, and the government asserted at oral argument before the 4th Circuit that the process al-Marri received is what any American citizen would receive.

The Supreme Court agreed to review his case, prompting the Obama administration to move al-Marri back to the civilian criminal justice system in early 2009. The government re-indicted al-Marri on two counts of material support of terrorism (maximum sentence of thirty years). He pleaded guilty to one count and received eight years. The judge was barred from officially giving credit for time served in military custody, but a fifteen-year sentence minus six years and change for being in military custody is what he received.

The al-Marri case was not a success. He should have been locked up for the rest of his life, but cramming a set of civilian crimes into a case for military detention failed to protect national security and provide justice.

The McCain-Lieberman proposal would have pushed al-Marri’s trial into a military commission. As they stand now, our military commissions have jurisdiction over material support of terrorism but not the panoply of federal statutes that allow prosecution of the instrumentalities of terrorism. The Founders allowed Congress to punish war crimes –- “Offenses against the Law of Nations” –- and bank fraud does not fit the bill. Congress could add a catch-all provision to the commissions’ statute, but do we really want military officers sitting in judgment of domestic financial crimes?

Many terrorist acts are simultaneously acts of war and criminal violations, and applying one legal paradigm to the exclusion of the other makes for good politics but terrible policy. The United States should continue to use its criminal justice tools. Conservatives have been railing for years about limits on the Executive during wartime; passing this bill would certainly tie the Executive’s hands. If you can get 146 years, take it. We can defeat al Qaeda both on the battlefield and in the courtroom.

As I blogged last week, the Supreme Court didn’t seem amenable to Privileges or Immunities Clause arguments in last week’s gun rights case, McDonald v. Chicago.  This is unfortunate because the alternative, extending the right to keep and bear arms via the Due Process Clause, continues a long-time deviation from constitutional text, history, and structure, and reinforces the idea that judges enforce only those rights they deem “fundamental” (whatever that means).

It was especially disconcerting to see Justice Antonin Scalia, the standard-bearer for originalism, give up on his own preferred method of interpretation — and for the sole reason that it was intellectually “easier” to use the “substantive due process” doctrine.

Josh Blackman and I have an op-ed in the Washington Examiner pointing out Scalia’s hypocrisy.  Here’s a choice excerpt:

Without the Privileges or Immunities Clause … the Court must continue extending the un-originalist version of substantive due process to protect the right to keep and bear arms. To give original meaning to the Second Amendment, it must ignore the original meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment!

Yet this is the line Scalia took last week: Instead of accepting the plain meaning of the Privileges or Immunities Clause—which uncontrovertibly protects the right to keep and bear arms—the justice chose a route that avoids disturbing a 140-year-old precedent rejected by legal scholars of all ideological stripes.

In 2008, Scalia wrote, “It is no easy task to wean the public, the professoriate, and (especially) the judiciary away from [living constitutionalism,] a seductive and judge-empowering philosophy.” But at the arguments in McDonald, he argued that while the Privileges or Immunities Clause “is the darling of the professoriate,” he would prefer to follow substantive due process, in which he has now “acquiesced,” “as much as [he] think[s it is] wrong.”

Put simply, if the opinion Scalia writes or joins matches his performance last week, he can no longer be described as an originalist (faint-hearted or otherwise).  A liberty-seeking world turns its weary eyes to Justice Clarence Thomas — who has expressed an openness to reviving the constitutional order the Fourteenth Amendment was designed to create — to convince his wayward colleague that the way to interpret legal text is to look to its original public meaning.

Read the whole thing.