Washington Monthly has put out its annual answer to the US News college rankings, even going so far as to launch a new blog devoted to the subject.

Steve Benen highlights some of the findings:

* Only one of the U.S. News top ten universities — Stanford — makes the Washington Monthly’s top ten, while high profile institutions such as Princeton, Duke and Penn fail to even crack Washington Monthly’s Top 25.

* Some of top universities on the Washington Monthly list, like South Carolina State (#6) and Jackson State (#22), are non-elite “red state” schools buried in the lowest tiers of the U.S. News list.

* While all the top twenty U.S. News universities are private, thirteen of the top twenty Washington Monthly universities are public.

* The University of California system grabs the top three slots-including number-one-ranked Berkley — even as the state of California is slashing higher education funding.

* Women’s liberal arts colleges score well in the Washington Monthly rankings, with Mount Holyoke, Smith, Bryn Mawr and Wellesley all in the Top 10. Historically black institutions, such as Spelman and Morehouse, also make strong showings.

Steve says that “We want people to use this information to change the way they think about colleges and universities, the first step toward changing the institutions themselves.” As such, they “rank schools based on what they are doing for the country — by improving social mobility, producing research, and promoting public service.”

As a graduate of non-elite “red state” schools, Jacksonville State and the University of Alabama, I’m all in favor of a ranking system that puts an emphasis on bang for the buck rather than institutional prestige.  But, as I’ve noted before, I’m not sure substituting one set of biases for another is that big a step forward.

While the U.S. News guide managed to transform the way we thought of college education a generation ago, I continue to be skeptical that Washington Monthly’s answer will do the same.  As many of my readers noted two years ago, when the rankings had Texas A&M as the best college in the country (it’s since dropped to 5th) how many of the magazine’s board and senior contributors are going to send their kids to College Station for school if Cambridge and New Haven are options?  For that matter, are their new hires going to be coming from South Carolina State instead of Harvard?

Continuing a long-running theme at his blog, Matt Yglesias laments that Senators from small states wield so much power.  The latest fuel is a NYT feature on six moderates who are supposedly the linchpins to putting together a bipartisan health care deal and who routinely hash out the details of same over snacks.

[V]ast power is being wielded by people who, in a democratic system of government, would have almost no power. We’re talking, after all, about Max Baucus of Montana, Kent Conrad of North Dakota, Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico, Susan Collins of Maine, Mike Enzi of Wyoming, and Chuck Grassley of Iowa. Collectively those six states contain about 2.74 percent of the population, less than New Jersey, or about one fifth the population of California.

There’s no doubt that the small states have disproportionate power in a system wherein all states get equal voting power.  Then again, that was the whole point (see: Compromise, Great).

Would we design the system this way if we were starting from scratch?  Probably not.  But it made good sense at a time when the several states were sovereign entities banded together for national defense and international commerce.

Does this make our system undemocratic?  Not any moreso than, say, the fact that five unelected people on the Supreme Court (about 0.00 percent of the population!) can overrule an act of the legislature.  Or that it requires a supermajority to amend the Constitution or ratify a treaty.

Matt is also frustrated that the above-mentioned six come from predominately rural states and therefore ignore the interests of urbanites.  But that’s just a function of self-selection in a particular instance.  It’s certainly conceivable that a group of Senators from larger states who happen to be on the fence on some other issue could dine together regularly and use their informal gatherings to work out their policy positions.

As has been widely publicized cash-strapped California has decided to temporize on its budget impasse by issuing IOU’s to creditors. This brings up an interesting question.

Article I Section 10 of the U. S. Constitution states:

No state shall enter into any treaty, alliance, or confederation; grant letters of marque and reprisal; coin money; emit bills of credit; make anything but gold and silver coin a tender in payment of debts; pass any bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law impairing the obligation of contracts, or grant any title of nobility.

California’s IOU’s sound very much like “bills of credit”. Regardless of the prudence of the state of California’s decision, is it violating the law?

Update

There’s another wrinkle in this story. There’s an SEC Staff Statement to the effect that the California IOU’s are securities under federal law and those who purchase them are protected by the anti-fraud provisions of federal security law:

The staff of the Securities and Exchange Commission has expressed its belief that California’s recently-issued IOUs are “securities” under federal securities law. As such, holders of these IOUs and those who may purchase them are protected by the provisions of the federal securities laws that prohibit fraud in the purchase or sale of securities.

California began issuing the IOUs (called “registered warrants” by California) on July 2 to certain individuals and entities, including citizens who were entitled to a tax refund or vendors who were entitled to payments. The IOUs are obligations of the State of California, are negotiable, and bear interest. The staff’s view that the IOUs are securities does not affect California’s right to issue or repay the IOUs.

In addition to the antifraud provisions of the federal securities laws, other parts of the federal securities laws also apply to the purchase and sale of the IOUs. Persons acting as intermediaries between buyers and sellers of the warrants may need to register as brokers, dealers or municipal securities dealers, or as alternative trading systems or national securities exchanges.

Broker-dealers, as well as any potential secondary markets, should be aware that the requirements of the securities laws and the rules of the Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board apply to the IOUs.

Finally, although the IOUs are labeled “registered warrants,” they are not registered with the SEC. There is no registration requirement that applies because the IOUs are municipal securities.

I interpret this as mostly affecting the secondary market and having little to do with the question I raised in the body of the post.

The image above is a fragment of a one shilling bill of credit issued by the North Carolina Colonial Assembly in 1754.

Kevin Drum links an LAT piece on the “charm” of Irvine, California, a “little planned community” that both conforms perfectly to Malvina Reynolds’ “Little Boxes” stereotype – with houses made out of ticky tacky that all look the same — and seems to make everyone who lives there feel safe and happy.   And, mostly, it is indeed quite charming.  But these passages strike me as a bit creepy, too:

On the street of two-story suburban homes, lined with jacarandas and palms and curbside recycling bins, a father and his 14-year-old son were arguing about water polo practice while he gave his other son a haircut in the garage.

Two police cars were on the scene within minutes.

Miller defused the situation with some gentle words to the father and son, smiling as he stood on the front lawn, looking more the part of mediator than hardened lawman.

The officer quickly typed the police code for “disturbance” in his patrol car’s computer: 415 over son not doing what dad wants. Verbal only. No crime.

[...]
Students who come to UC Irvine from urban areas are “blown away by the level of peaceableness that exists here,” said Currie, the criminology professor.

That is not to say serious crimes don’t occur.

But when that rare violent attack or homicide is recorded, the community is stunned and police react forcefully.

When a man walked into a home through an open garage on a recent afternoon, demanding cash from a woman at gunpoint, police dispatched more than 40 units, four police dogs and a helicopter before a suspect was collared. A neighboring grade school was put on lockdown.

It’s nice, I suppose, that crime levels are low enough for police to actually be in the business of prevention rather than post-hoc investigation.  But I’m not sure I want the cops to show up every time someone raises their voice.  Or to deploy helicopters and police dogs for muggings.

Matt Yglesias has discovered the facts that 1) each state gets two Senators and 2) some states are bigger than others, a condition that has obtained since the inception of our current system in 1789.  There was, as some may recall having read, this thing called the Great Compromise whereby delegates representing sovereign states under the extant Articles of Confederation agreed  they would have a bicameral legislature wherein one house represented people and another represented said states.  This compromise, incidentally, was a diminution of the power the smaller states had under said Articles.

Anyhoo, it has come to Matt’s attention and he’s none too happy about it:

The point is that this is an unfair and bizarre way to run things. If you consider that the mean state would contain two percent of the population, we have just 34 Senators representing the above-average states even though they collectively contain 69.15 percent of the population. The other 66 Senators represent about 30 percent of the people. If the Iranians were to succeed in overthrowing their theocracy and set about to write a new constitution, nobody in their right mind would recommend this system to them.

Probably not — but we might have been better off recommending something like that to the Iraqis.  Some form of strong federalism or even confederalism makes a lot of sense in cases where states are comprised of geographically bound subgroupings with a strong sense of separate identity and history of autonomy.

The problem in the United States is that our current system no longer reflects the reality on the ground.  Most of us are now highly mobile with no strong sense of place-related identity.  Most Californians or New Yorkers or Virginians probably just think of themselves as Americans and only incidentally as residents of their states. This is least true, however, in the less populated states, which tend to be comprised of residents with intergenerational roots and therefore much more provincial.

A Gallup poll released yesterday finds that, “More than 6 in 10 Republicans today are white conservatives, while most of the rest are whites with other ideological leanings; only 11% of Republicans are Hispanics, or are blacks or members of other races. By contrast, only 12% of Democrats are white conservatives, while about half are white moderates or liberals and a third are nonwhite.”

This is pretty stark but, as Nate Silver points out, “not exactly anything new.”

88 percent of George W. Bush’s voters in 2004, and 91 percent of them in 2000, were white. And nearly 98 percent of Ronald Reagan’s voters in 1980 were white as were 96 percent of Gerald Ford’s in 1976. The GOP is, in fact, slightly less white than it once was, as they do relatively better among Hispanics and Asians than among blacks (if still not particularly well), and Hispanics and Asians are starting to make up a larger fraction of the nonwhite (and overall) voting pool.

Silver continues,

The Democrats, however, are becoming less white at a much faster rate than the Republicans. Whereas 85 percent of their votes were from white voters in 1976, the number was just 60 percent last November. This is, of course, a helpful characteristic, since the nonwhite share of the electorate, just 11 percent in 1976 and 1980, represented more than a quarter of the turnout in November.

Consider this remarkable statistic. In 1980, 32 percent of the electorate consisted of white Democrats (or at least white Carter voters) — likewise, in 2008, 32 percent of the electorate consisted of white Obama voters. But whereas, in 1980, just 9 percent of the electorate were nonwhite Carter voters, 21 percent of the electorate were nonwhite Obama voters last year. Thus, Carter went down to a landslide defeat, whereas Obama defeated John McCain by a healthy margin.

He wonders if this isn’t the Southern Strategy coming home to roost.  One might counter that the Democrats have answered  with a racially and culturally divisive strategy of their own, which accounts for their declining percentage of the white vote concomitant with their gains among minorities.  But, from the standpoint of winning elections, that’s probably a smarter strategy.

It’s going to be increasingly difficult in the future for Republicans to win nationwide appealing only to whites.  The party has long written off black voters, who tend to vote as a bloc, but can’t afford to also write off Hispanics; together, they comprise more than a quarter of the population — and growing.

Eleven years ago this month, Atlantic Monthly published a brilliant essay by Christopher Caldwell entitled “The Southern Captivity of the GOP.” It detailed how the party went from the 1994 “Revolution” that swept up both Houses of Congress to getting crushed in the 1996 presidential election and was on its way to a midterm setback in 1998.  A big part of that was losing the Hispanics.

Democrats who had arrogantly assumed that standard-issue minority politics would easily pull Hispanics into the party fold were proved wrong throughout the 1980s. Hispanic voters turned out to be disproportionately entrepreneurial and disproportionately receptive to Republican family-values rhetoric, and gave the party roughly a third of their votes in the three presidential elections from 1980 to 1988. Leaving aside Puerto Ricans and Dominicans in New York, who do fit the Democrats’ minority paradigm, the Republicans were doing better with the Hispanic vote than might be expected.

But the Republicans in the 104th Congress tried to shore up their Texas and California right wings with hostile rhetoric on immigration. They passed legislation that sought to deprive not just illegal but also legal immigrants of federal benefits. (Newt Gingrich and other Republicans backpedaled in 1997, reversing some of the measures, but the damage was done.) And California’s Proposition 187, supported by Republican Governor Pete Wilson and aimed at denying benefits to illegal immigrants, brought angry Hispanics to the polls in unprecedented numbers. Clinton took 72 percent of the Hispanic vote nationwide, including 81 percent in Arizona and 75 percent in California; he took 78 percent of Hispanics under thirty. He nearly split the Hispanic vote even in Florida, where 97 percent of the Cuban population voted for Reagan in 1984.

Recall that, prior to Clinton’s win in 1992, California’s massive electoral vote block had been a “lock” for Republicans.  Since 1996, Republicans haven’t even bothered to contest it in presidential elections.  And Florida has gone from a pretty solid Republican state to an intense battleground.  Beyond that,

As southern control over the Republican agenda grows, the party alienates even conservative voters in other regions. The prevalence of right-to-work laws in southern states may be depriving Republicans of the socially conservative midwestern trade unionists whom they managed to split in the Reagan years, and sending Reagan Democrats back to their ancestral party in the process. Anti-government sentiment makes little sense in New England, where government, as even those who hate it will concede, is neither remote nor unresponsive.

Of course, while the GOP did lose seats in 1998, costing Gingrich his job, it rallied to win the presidency (although not the plurality of votes for president) in 2000 and again in 2008.   But it’s lost congressional seats in every single election since, losing its majority in both Houses in 2006 and becoming a decided minority in 2008.

Granting that there was a perfect storm working for the Democrats in 2008 — an unpopular Republican incumbent, an unexciting Republican ticket, two unpopular wars, a collapsing economy, and a charismatic Democratic candidate with a compelling backstory — the Republicans lost states that it had theretofore been thought theirs in perpetuity.

Demographics isn’t destiny and this trend therefore isn’t set in stone.  But the Republican Party will need to drastically change the inertia if it wishes to be other than a regional party in the coming years.

In a 6-1 decision, the California Supreme Court “upheld a voter-approved ban on same-sex marriage” but it “also decided that the estimated 18,000 gay couples who tied the knot before the law took effect will stay wed,” Lisa Leff reports for AP.

People wait in line for a decision from the California State Supreme Court on the legality of a voter-approved ban on same-sex unions, Tuesday, May 26, 2009, in San Francisco. (AP Photo/Paul Sakuma)

The 6-1 decision written by Chief Justice Ron George rejected an argument by gay rights activists that the ban revised the California Constitution’s equal protection clause to such a dramatic degree that it first needed the Legislature’s approval.

The court said the Californians have a right, through the ballot box, to change their constitution. “In a sense, petitioners’ and the attorney general’s complaint is that it is just too easy to amend the California Constitution through the initiative process. But it is not a proper function of this court to curtail that process; we are constitutionally bound to uphold it,” the ruling said.

[...]

The court said it is well-established legal principle that an amendment is not retroactive unless it is clear that the voters intended it to apply retroactively, and there was no such clear indication in Proposition 8.  That provided some relief for the 18,000 gay couples who married in the brief time same-sex marriage was legal last year but that wasn’t enough to dull the anger over the ruling that banned gay marriage.

My Twitter feed has spawned some good quips on the subject:

@anamariecox retweets  @TeresaKopec: “Odd: My marriage doesn’t feel any stronger than it did this morning. But I’m a lot more smug about it!”

@EdMorrissey: “CA Supremes get Solomonic in upholding Prop”

@mldemmons (Michael Demmons):  “Prayers of California gays answered! ‘No!’ says God.”

@La_Shawn (LaShawn Barber) retweets @Blogcritics “Cal Supreme Ct goes the “Missouri Compromise” route on same-sex marriage http://xrl.us/bet8mq”

More substantively, Eugene Volokh proclaims, “court’s reasoning is quite correct” and cites relevant passages from the decision. Gabriel Malor agrees that the judges split the decision exactly right according to the law and thus demonstrates that “Our laws and constitutions are not meaningless. And our courts are not so broken as people claim. The justice system works and works well most of the time.”

In a separate post, Volokh observes,

[T]t seems to me that the California Supreme Court’s cases (1) recognizing a right to same-sex marriage under the California Constitution, and (2) today, recognizing that Proposition 8 validly amended the Constitution and thus abrogated the right are excellent examples for any discussion — in class or otherwise — about popular sovereignty.

Three Justices reached a result different from the one that they had initially reached, based on their judgment that the people’s views prevail over the Justices’. And they rebutted (in my view persuasively, but in any event clearly and informatively) the arguments to the contrary, both arguments focused on the revision vs. amendment question and arguments focused on the people’s supposed legal inability to alter supposedly “fundamental” or “inalienable” rights. On the other side, there was able briefing to the contrary, plus Justice Moreno’s partial dissent (which I’ve only skimmed at this point, though I’ll read it later today). Put together, this seems to me a great case study of the recurring debates about popular sovereignty, constitutionalism, the role of courts, and more broadly the mixed majoritarian and antimajoritarian nature of American constitutions.

These issues are extraordinarily difficult and, as Malor notes, there’s nothing “activist” about judges honestly trying to ferret out where the lines are drawn.  There’s no bright line, obvious to a layman, distinguishing “revising” the constitution, and thus requiring a 2/3 supermajority, and merely “amending” it, which California allows to be achieved by majority plebiscite.  It’s something that requires lawyers and money (but thankfully, not guns) to sort out.

That doesn’t make the process any less frustrating, of course.  Gay marriage supporters are understandably angry that the Supremes didn’t rule their way while opponents are apoplectic that Prop 8 was left standing yet not made retroactive.  Alas, that’s where an honest reading of the law led 6 of the 7 judges.

Kevin Drum’s right that “it might soon be moot anyway.  Prop 8 passed by only a bare majority, and public sentiment is continuing to change.  An initiative to legalize gay marriage might well pass in 2010, and if it doesn’t it certainly will by 2012 or 2014 at the latest.”

Jon Henke Twitters: “The California referendum proves that what voters want to spend is not well-connected with what voters are willing to pay.”

Quite right.  Californian Kevin Drum takes as a given that his state is “broken” but sees no solution in sight.  While he’s in favor of Governor Schwarzenegger’s idea of a constitutional convention to fix some of the institutional flaws that has the Golden State in this mess, he notes that the same institutions likely preclude said convention from working:

[I]n order to even hold a constitutional convention, it has to be put on the ballot and approved by a majority of the electorate.  And how does the question get put on the ballot?  It has to be approved by two-thirds of the legislature.  But this is the problem we’re trying to solve in the first place: to pass a budget or raise taxes takes a two-thirds vote of the legislature, and Republicans have enough votes to stop that from happening.  Votes that they use regularly.  So why wouldn’t they also stand in the way of a constitutional convention whose main purpose would almost certainly be to remove the two-thirds requirements for passing a budget and raising taxes?

No reason, really.

George Will is one of the few elite outlyers on this one, calling the rejection of the various ballot measures designed to cope with the present economic crisis “sensible,” noting that each Proposition had rather serious flaws (Drum calls them “mostly gimmicks“).  Still, even Will concedes that,

California’s voters are complicit in their state’s collapse. They elect and reelect the legislators off whom public employees unions batten. Also, voters have promiscuously used their state’s plebiscitary devices to control and fatten the budget. In November, as the dark fiscal clouds lowered, they authorized $9.95 billion more in debt as a down payment on a perhaps $75 billion high-speed-rail project linking San Francisco and Los Angeles — a delight California cannot afford.

Matthew Shugart notes that, while the needed measures managed to garner a mere one third of the vote, “the stupid one” passed “with nearly three fourths of the vote.”  He suggests that furloughs — i.e., simply sending state employees home without pay — is a likely consequence.  Megan McArdle, meanwhile, thinks California may be “too big to fail” and get a federal bailout.

Update (Steve Verdon): Just thought it is worth pointing out that if California had limited its budget increases to inflation plus rate of population growth the state would either have a much, much smaller deficit or even a surplus. When people complain about not being able to raise taxes they ignore the spending side of the equation. The implicit assumption is that the spending is just fine and not out of control, and it most certainly is out of control. For example, take former Los Angeles Police Chief Benard Parks.¹ He currently collects a salary of about $179,000 as a member of the City Council. However Parks also collects about $265,000 from his pension for being the police chief. That is a total annual income of around $444,000, and pension plans are generally considered “off the table” when it comes to looking at balancing the budget.

The California problem is the problem in with government that has tremendous discretionary powers: there is little in the way to ensure the state behaves in a responsible manner. Add to the mix special interest groups and rent seeking and you have the potential for big problems. Yes it is in part the fault of the voters for going down this road. But at the same time there are politicians and special interest groups that have been sucking up vast amounts of money too.
_____
¹Yes, as the former LA Police Chief and member of the LA City Council those are all Los Angeles issues, not state issues. However, Los Angeles is very much a microcosm of what is wrong with the State. Los Angeles is running a deficit, with few options in terms of raising revenues. There are powerful unions that have tremendous influence with the City Council and the Mayor. Los Angeles problems can be laid primarily at the feet of unrestrained spending. Sound familiar? It should, that is California writ large.

Mitt Romney is busy selling off a few of many his mansions and plans to move to his family vacation home in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, Hotline reports.  He has also registered his PAC there.  This has some people guessing that Romney is contemplating another run for the presidency.

“No doubt in my mind that they are doing the necessary maintenance to keep their network in New Hampshire together,” noted veteran Granite State GOP operative Mike Dennehy, who was a senior adviser to McCain’s 2008 campaign.

Establishing residency in NH could raise expectations for Romney’s performance in the state’s 2012 primary, but the state is also flush with important contests in the upcoming 2010 midterm elections, where Romney could lend a hand. First and foremost for Republicans, NH will host a critical Senate race to replace retiring Sen. Judd Gregg (R). At this point in the cycle, Democratic Rep. Paul Hodes is the only announced candidate, and with recent trends in the state, the seat is a top target for Democratic pick up. What’s more, Romney’s Wolfeboro home is in the 1st Congressional District, represented by Democratic Rep. Carol Shea-Porter, who is likely to face a strong Republican challenge by Manchester Mayor Frank Guinta. In both races Romney’s help–and even his vote–could matter.

At the same time, a case could be made for Romney to establish residency in CA [he already has a mansion in San Diego] instead. Romney’s loss to McCain in the Golden State on Super Tuesday last year was the death knell for his candidacy, given the state’s large share of delegates. Former eBay CEO Meg Whitman is a strong GOP contender for the open gubernatorial contest to replace outgoing Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R), while Democrats barrel toward a competitive primary. Whitman originally endorsed Romney and assisted him in his primary campaign before he ended his bid, and former Romney campaign staffers are flocking to Whitman’s effort. And former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, a top McCain surrogate, is looking seriously at a challenge to Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA).

To the extent that the Republican nomination goes to the candidate whose “turn” it is, Romney is well positioned. Technically, Mike Huckabee finished slightly ahead of him in the 2008 delegate count, but only as a function of shamelessly campaigning for months after he was mathematically eliminated, whereas Romney had the good grace to bow out at CPAC once the writing was on the wall.

Romney’s relatively moderate but the political advantage of setting up shop in California would be negligible; no Republican is going to beat Obama there in 2012.  The power of New Hampshire in the nominating process, on the other hand, is as obvious as it is ridiculous.

Some loosely related threads seen on memeorandum this morning:

• California’s Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger allows as to how he could conceivably endorse a Democrat as his successor — while insisting that he will himself remain a Republican

• Texas Republican Congressman Joe Barton likened the Bowl Championship Series, which determines college football’s top division’s national championship, to Communism.

• Red State’s Erick Erickson repeatedly Twitters that retiring Supreme Court Justice David Souter is a child molester who also enjoys the occasional goat. (I could not find independent corroboration of this via Google.)

• Right Wing News’ John Hawkins takes to the pixels of Pajamas Media to argue that conservatives are hamstrung by being too civil and should be more like the Democrats

A reader sends along a recent Survey USA poll question:

The city of Berkeley is considering a law that would require all homes to be audited to be sure they meet strict energy standards in the city’s plan to fight global warming. This would mean new double-paned windows, attic insulation, a new white roof that reflects heat, a forced-air furnace and high-efficiency appliances. Do you think this law is a good idea? Or a bad idea?

The survey, asked of 500 Berkeley, California adults, had a plurality of 46 percent Yes responses, 44 percent No, and 10 percent Not sure.  Indeed, 46 percent of self-identified Republicans and 40 percent of self-identified conservatives responded Yes.

Oy.

Image source

Taegan Goddard passes along a Tulchin Research poll showing that Jerry Brown is the overwhelming favorite to get the Democratic nomination for California governor.

Granted, the primary is more than a year away.  Still, this is rather amusing.  The first time Brown got elected governor, I was in grade school and he was a 37-year-old swinging bachelor who famously dated Linda Ronstadt.

Neither Margaret Thatcher nor Ronald Reagan had yet ascended to power.

Now, I’m older than he was then, Ronstadt’s 62 and Brown is 71.

No word if he’ll campaign in a DeLorean.

Tim Sandefur passes along this from Shaun Martin:

You’re sitting in your car, minding your own business, in the parking lot of a motel. A cop sees you and starts questioning you, and you even consent to a patdown search and a search of your car, which finds nothing. What’s the reasonable suspicion? Nothing. But you go along with it to be cooperative.

Things change, however, when the officer says that he’s going to pull down your pants. You demur to the request, which does you no good, as the police promptly put you into a control hold. They put you near their police car, surround you a tiny bit, and in front of anyone who happens to be looking, (1) pull down your pants to your knees and, (2) pull the elastic of your underwear forward so they can see your genitals. And then reach on in to grab whatever they might find.

The Court of Appeal holds that such a search is entirely “reasonable” in scope and effect. [PDF]

Based on the facts in that description, this is indeed an outrage.  Sandefur terms it “the death of the Fourth Amendment (continued).”  Again, based on the quoted text, I’d agree.

Then I actually clicked the link and skimmed the opinion in People v. Anthony Craig Smith.  It turns out that Smith was on parole for previous drug crimes and the court ruled, not unreasonably, that such status came with “reduced expectation of privacy.”  After all, Smith is still serving a sentence for a crime for which he was convicted in a court of law and his freedom is conditional on his good behavior.

Smith was not behaving good.  He was in a known high crime area, sitting in a car outside a hotel room window through which police observed another fellow trying to gain entry.  Learning that he was on parole and having a strong hunch that Smith had contraband in his drawers [Would Alan Greenspan consider that a good sign for the economy?] he conducted the search and found “a large bag the size of a baseball” which “contained 12 smaller baggies of heroin, cocaine, and methamphetamine.”

Now, IANAL.  But I’m pretty sure that keeping such content in one’s drawers is frowned upon, especially if one is on parole for drug crimes.

What prompted Officer Greenberg to suspect that contraband was located there, I’m not sure.  But according to the hyperlinked opinion above, which itself contains numerous citations, California law does not require a reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing if the officer is aware — as Greenberg was — that the searchee is a parolee and therefore “subject to a search condition.”

Were Smith a free citizen of the Republic, this would have been an outrage.  For a convicted criminal on conditional release, not so much.

Photo by Flickr user mjar81, used under Creative Commons license.

The attempt by California to tax sweet malt liquors as spirits in order to extract higher tax revenues under the guise of protecting minors from themselves isn’t working out so well.

Substance-abuse foes cheered last year when state officials cracked down on sweet, sometimes fizzy, intoxicating drinks such as Mike’s Hard Lemonade that — save for their alcohol content — bear a remarkable resemblance to soda pop.

The sugary beverages had long been taxed as flavored beers. But state authorities reclassified them as liquor, raising the levies on a six-pack by a factor of 16 to match the rate consumers pay on vodka, rum and other distilled spirits. The move was supposed to generate $38 million in annual revenue for the state.

Now the numbers are in: The state has collected about $9,000 since the new tax rate kicked in Oct. 1. Some officials and activists suspect fraud.

Beverage makers admit they aren’t paying the new taxes. They say they don’t have to because they have reformulated the drinks — more than 6,000 varieties — to transform them into simple beers by limiting the amount of distilled spirits they contain.   They won’t explain how. The formulas, they say, are trade secrets. And beverage-industry officials and federal regulators say there are no tests to determine how much distilled spirits the drinks contain.

Kevin Drum is amused by this, as am I.   He’s mostly tickled by the “brazenness” of the companies while my joy is derived from making the lawmakers look silly.  Such is the nature of bipartisan consensus.

As an aside, I always presumed Zima and Mike’s were aimed at chicks, not kids.

Photo by Flickr user faeryboots, used under Creative Commons license.

A recent study seems to confirm a point that Dave Schuler has been making repeatedly for months:  the housing bubble is a narrowly targeted geographic phenomenon:

Via  Andrew Sullivan [Yes, him again. -ed.], who summarizes, “66 percent of potential housing value losses in 2008 and subsequent years may be in California, with another 21 percent in Florida, Nevada and Arizona, for a total of 87 percent of national declines.”

Now, to be clear, this doesn’t mean that housing prices aren’t a problem elsewhere.  I live in Virginia, which is one of the states least impacted — indeed, in the DC suburbs of Northern Virginia, which are even better off — and houses here, including mine, have still had a significant correction in price over the past 18 months or so.

But this does seem to reinforce Dave’s point that a national solution to a regional problem could be counterproductive.  As with Homeland Security, where states vie to distribute monies allocated to defend against terrorist attacks without much regard to the localized risk of actually being attacked by terrorists, we’re likely to see federal relief money poorly targeted.