Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?, by Patrick J. Buchanan, Thomas Dunne/St. Martin’s, 488 pages, $27.99

The Crusader: The Life and Tumultuous Times of Pat Buchanan, by Timothy Stanley, Thomas Dunne/St. Martin’s, 455 pages, $27.99

You’ve gotta love Pat Buchanan, the columnist-turned-candidate who told one reporter on the campaign trail in 1992 that many people take an instant dislike to him because “it saves time,” and gleefully posed in a black cowboy hat, proclaiming, “I’m the bad guy.” 

Unless you think Buchanan is a dangerous, hateful, racist monster, that is. The progressive watchdog group Color of Change certainly doesn’t love the guy. In January the advocacy organization demanded that MSNBC, the mostly left-leaning cable network where Buchanan had been a regular commentator for a decade, fire him. MSNBC president Phil Griffin complied, saying, “I don’t think the ideas…put forth [in Buchanan’s new book, Suicide of a Superpower] are appropriate for the national dialogue, much less on MSNBC.” After he was sacked, the former presidential candidate turned fighting Irishman, complaining in his syndicated column that MSNBC had given in to those who “brand as racists and anti-Semites any writer who dares to venture outside the narrow corral in which they seek to confine debate.” While “prattling about their love of dissent and devotion to the First Amendment,” he growled, “they seek systematically to silence and censor dissent.” 

As Oxford University historian Timothy Stanley explains in his insightful biography The Crusader: The Life and Tumultuous Times of Pat Buchanan, Pitchfork Pat is enough of a jolly polemical gut fighter to mostly laugh off insults and attacks. But when he feels punched by a friend, he gets hurt and punches right back.

Buchanan is the last of a dying breed of old-school right-wingers. Yet current American political culture owes an astonishing amount to this Irish Catholic son of D.C.’s Georgetown neighborhood, even as he fades into disgraced bestsellerdom. Notions such as the “silent majority,” liberal media bias, and the modern culture war all sprang, more or less fully formed, from the head of this former Nixon and Reagan aide, as did a Republican critique of “vulture capitalism.”

In fact, pretty much everything that constitutes modern-day Fox News can be traced to Buchanan, although Fox’s own fighting Irishman, Bill O’Reilly, is both less intellectual and less independent-minded than the prototype. Fox thoroughly embodies what Buchanan knew the right wing required back in the Nixon era. “They need a daily plateful of dissent, action, excitement and drama, which it is fair to say are not conservative long suits,” he wrote. How things have changed.

The 2012 presidential race also has Buchanan’s fingerprints all over it. Both Ron Paul and Rick Santorum carry variations on Buchananite themes. By digging deeply into the crusader’s three runs for president—in 1992 and 1996 as a Republican and in 2000 on a third-party ticket—Stanley sheds light on the bewildering patchwork of principle and personality driving 2012 Republican politics. And by highlighting the subtle, slow-motion ways in which Buchanan has shaped the party—and the ways he hasn’t—Stanley’s account offers hope for a more sensible GOP.

Pat Buchanan was Richard Nixon’s liaison to the conservative movement and Ronald Reagan’s second-term attempt to keep that movement mollified. In between, he played columnist and polemicist. After Reagan, the party shifted in ways Buchanan didn’t like, moving further away from his vision of a GOP that was populist, rugged, noninterventionist, and protectionist. So Buchanan in 1992 and 1996 ran radical insurgent primary campaigns for Republicans disgusted with their party’s leaders and mainstream, rooted largely in opposition to America’s overseas adventures. 

Less remembered is Buchanan’s 2000 run under the soiled flag of Ross Perot’s Reform Party, which brought his political career to an end with a paltry 0.4 percent of the national vote. Thanks to Palm Beach County’s notorious “butterfly ballot,” the coda of Buchanan’s political career was an odd cameo in the Florida vote-counting controversy that resulted in George W. Bush’s victory. Even Buchanan’s own staff admitted that the votes he received in that heavily Jewish area were mostly mistakes by people who meant to punch the chad next to Al Gore’s name, which happened to be adjacent to his. As Stanley mordantly puts it, “Few [campaigns] have ended so ignominiously—denying that its voters even existed.” 

Off the stump, Buchanan went back to being an irascible public voice for his version of populism, writing books like The Death of the West (2001) and State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America (2006). He became a full-time tribalist of the sort that has no real place in respectable society. Since Suicide of a Superpower contains little that Buchanan has not already said, the only wonder is that it took so long for MSNBC to can him. But Stanley’s book is a history of a failed politician, not the story of a successful media figure. (Buchanan’s longtime partner on that pioneering left-vs.-right shout fest Crossfire, Michael Kinsley, is never mentioned, for instance.)

To fully understand the degree to which Buchananism is shaping the GOP today, you must know what he’s selling in Suicide, a sour notebook dump on his hoary themes that lacks any sign of the witty, human Pat. (How many different people need to be quoted saying they believe religion is necessary for a healthy culture? How many different nations’ declining native birthrates have to be charted?) Buchanan first lamented at length the fact that this country, along with the rest of the world, is getting less white and European more than a decade ago in Death of the West. He noted the pointless and ruinous expense of our overreaching foreign policy (another topic discussed at length here) in A Republic Not an Empire (1999).

Buchanan has added nothing but some newer numbers to the “death of the white West” stuff. As in his earlier book, his laments focus on nationality and ethnicity: He is outraged that the dominant culture of America has turned against his God and his preferred traditional behavior and morality. He is also unhappy that current trends in immigration and reproduction mean America will by the end of this century no longer be dominated by whites of European descent. Yet it is those same Americans of European descent who he thinks have already laid this once-great nation low by listening to European Marxists and having too many kids out of wedlock (or aborting them). 

Buchanan frequently equates this de-Europeanization of America with descending to “Third World” status. Since the Third World is generally defined by levels of wealth, amenities, and social or governmental stability, as opposed to ethnicity, the hidden premise—never baldly stated—is that no one of non-European descent could build, value, or maintain the ways of life that make America and Europe part of the First World. But everything Buchanan posits as wrong with America, aside from ethnic balance itself, has nothing to do with ethnic balance per se.

When he wrote Death of the West, Buchanan was still a third-party warrior speaking for the nation as a whole, but in Suicide he makes a more partisan political argument: The only way for the Republican Party to revive and ensure its continued fortunes—since it will never get the Hispanic and black votes—is to get even more of the white vote. Lots of tedious demographic data and vote percentages clog the book as he chases this questionable idea around. By the end even Buchanan admits his side has lost these fights over culture and race. He concedes that you “can’t go home again” and that “in the end there was nothing we could do” and that it will be more or less OK anyway (even if the rest of the country suffers the unspeakable fate of turning into Los Angeles). 

The “likelihood is far greater that this unhappy family is headed for an acrimonious coexistence,” he writes, which isn’t ideal but well short of civilizational collapse. Yet America, and the world, would be less acrimonious if people stopped advocating Buchananite tribalism. Buchanan tiptoes around the unpleasantness wafting from his own stances; at one point, he even claims that mixing too many cultures in one nation is dangerous precisely because it rouses ugly and possibly violent xenophobia. Really, Pat? A big problem with diversity is it brings out the worst in bigots?

Nowadays no one but Buchanan says things like this—in best-selling books, anyway. Buchanan makes sure you know that the likes of Jimmy Carter and even Bill Clinton once said things about race and culture that would be verboten today. Most people understand that mores about race have changed since, say, 1954. Buchanan reminds his readers that a lot has changed since 1992 as well. No GOP candidate on the trail today would ever dare to be that much of a Pitchfork Pat. Yet Buchanan’s shadow still falls heavily on the 2012 campaign trail, most prominently on Ron Paul and his opposite-side insurgent Rick Santorum.

In 1992 the paleoconservative crowd saw Buchanan and Paul as nearly interchangeable. Paul aborted a planned noninterventionist Republican run that year when Buchanan announced his, and he took a ceremonial role on Buchanan’s economic advisory committee. But the Ron Paul who rose to national prominence in 2007 has almost nothing in common with the GOP’s 1990s runner-up.

Buchanan made the National Endowment for the Arts the centerpiece of his 1992 Southern campaign; Paul mocks his fellow Republicans for going after such easy and inexpensive targets when bigger issues of empire and monetary policy loom. Buchanan announced that he intended to “chase the purveyors of sex and violence back beneath the rocks whence they came.” Ron Paul is willing to let anyone enjoy whatever entertainment he chooses. Buchanan said, “We are going to put back into its rightful place the true God of the Bible.” Ron Paul is too reticent to even discuss his own Protestant religion out loud, much less impose it as president. Buchanan in 1992 was the first presidential candidate to call for a border wall; now they all do except Paul, who condemned the proposal as essentially un-American in several primary debates. 

Where the two men still overlap is in their committed noninterventionism, which suggests a lot about where the GOP cutting edge might be. Like Paul, Buchanan in 1992 dominated the independent and Democratic crossover vote. Both had campaigns powered by true believers and openly delighted in how much the establishment hated them. 

Right now, Paul’s people seem to be maneuvering for what Buchanan squeezed out of the Bush team in 1992: a prominent speaking slot, televised, at the Republican National Convention. It’s less of a prize now than it once was, and not just because of 24-hour cable political chatter. Buchanan was channeling the secret heart of the Republican rank and file with his notorious declaration of a culture war. Paul, if he gets a similar chance, will be speaking a largely alien truth to establishment GOP power. A Paul convention speech probably won’t shape the tone of the general election in nearly the same way.

That Ron Paul has been able to claim similar political space and similar voter loyalty—although Buchanan racked up more total votes, higher percentages, and four actual state wins in 1996—is a positive sign for where the future of the GOP might lie. That’s because, in ways Buchanan himself muddies with his race talk and protectionism, a big part of the GOP’s present is notably Buchananesque. 

Take Rick Santorum. (Please!) His candidacy is an almost eerily pure instantiation of Buchanan’s culture war speech: angry at elites who think the typical GOP voter is an idiot, obsessed with private sexual behavior, tough on immigration, and openly contemptuous of the notion that government should just leave people alone. Santorum rejects Buchanan’s foreign policy, of course, and trade issues don’t move American politics the way they could in the 1990s, despite occasional jabs at China for manipulating its currency (read: selling us goods too cheaply) from both union Democrats and foreigner-baiting Republicans. 

Buchanan’s style is also reflected in the Tea Party, especially its “peasants with pitchforks” feel. Sarah Palin—who sported a “Buchanan for President” button when she met him while mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, in 2000, though she later denied being an acolyte—was very much a Buchananite in her populist appeal. Santorum lacks that joyously ferocious Buchanan combativeness, which Palin shares. Santorum is this cycle’s warm-milk substitute for the bracing whisky of Mama Grizzly. The Buchananisms all around us suggest there may be real cultural and political payoff in running the kind of insurgent campaign he excelled at, even if you fail at first.

Buchanan was never much of a Goldwater guy. In spirit, despite the theological differences, he was a harbinger of the evangelical New Right that arose after Nixon, which Stanley aptly sums up as representing “a subtle shift in conservative priorities, from the pursuit of total liberty to the pursuit of righteousness.” This is where Rick Santorum has planted his flag: Every victory he wins is a victory for the Moral Majority/Christian Coalition brand of Republicanism. But this emphasis may not be a wise one: More and more, American attitudes and actions are moving away from those traditional values, particularly on Santorum’s pet issues of marriage and sex.

Richard Nixon knew something his staff street fighter didn’t. “The American people were not as conservative as Buchanan thought,” Stanley writes. That was true then, and it will only get truer, as Buchanan himself glumly recognizes today. The fate of Rick Santorum as a GOP candidate is likely to vividly illustrate the ways voters are moving away from Buchanan.

You can’t save America with religion and birthrates. The dismal debt and imperial overreach Buchanan still harps on can be halted, not by a party of angry tribalist traditionalists but by a party of libertarians willing to meaningfully rethink government’s size and purpose. 

The real significance of campaigns often remain veiled for decades. Reagan’s 1980 campaign was the final flower of Barry Goldwater’s 1964 run, for instance. But maybe Santorum 2012 can be read as the realization of Buchanan 1996. If that pattern holds, the Ron Paul tendency would be positioned to win over the GOP sometime in 2028. Let’s hope the country can hold on until then.

Senior Editor Brian Doherty is the author of Radicals for Capitalism (PublicAffairs) and Ron Paul's Revolution: The Man and the Movement He Inspired (Broadside).

From our June issue, Senior Editor Brian Doherty reviews Pat Buchanan’s new book Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?, and Oxford historian Timothy Stanley’s new biography, The Crusader: The Life and Tumultuous Times of Pat Buchanan. As Doherty observes, Buchanan is the last of a dying breed of old-school right-wingers. Yet current American political culture owes an astonishing amount to this Irish Catholic son of D.C.’s Georgetown neighborhood, even as he fades into disgraced bestsellerdom. Notions such as the “silent majority,” liberal media bias, and the modern culture war all sprang, more or less fully formed, from the head of this former Nixon and Reagan aide, as did a Republican critique of “vulture capitalism.”

View this article.

No, tuna-dolphin is not a hybrid fish, but the subject of a long-standing trade dispute between Mexico and the United States arising from a 1990 U.S. law setting out requirements for a “dolphin safe” label for tuna products imported or sold in the U.S.  Because Mexican tuna fishermen use different methods for catching tuna than allowed under the labeling requirements, Mexico’s tuna imports to the U.S. have been limited.  Mexico challenged that law with the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2008, resulting in a Dispute Panel’s mixed decision in 2011.  In an important decision regarding Mexico’s appeal, an Appellate Body, on May 16, 2012, reversed several of the Dispute Panel’s 2011 findings. In particular, it found that the labeling requirements unfairly restrict Mexico’s tuna trade:

The Appellate Body reasoned, first, that, by excluding most Mexican tuna products from access to the “dolphin-safe” label while granting access to most US tuna products and tuna products from other countries, the measure modifies the conditions of competition in the US market to the detriment of Mexican tuna products.

The U.S. labeling requirements don’t allow tuna to be caught with purse seine nets.  However, Mexico had claimed that their fishing techniques met international requirements, which don’t exclude using those nets.  In its decision the WTO noted that it wasn’t convinced that other tuna fishing techniques in other waters resulted in less risk to dolphins and found that:

[T]he measure at issue is not even-handed in the manner in which it addresses the risks to dolphins arising from different fishing techniques in different areas of the ocean.

While this particular dispute rose in October 2008, tuna-dolphin issues between Mexico and the U.S. extend back to 1991 under the WTO’s predecessor, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which brought to the fore issues relating to international trade and the environment. In that decision, GATT gave credence to the acceptability of extra-territorial trade restrictions, particularly when included in multilateral agreements.

This decision is a critical one in the debate over the use of non-tariff barriers to protect domestic industries or to advance environmental goals.  (See a 1996 CEI issue brief on how environmental issues were already being used to justify trade restrictions.)

Massachusetts Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren's claim to Cherokee nation ancestry seems to be collapsing for lack of evidence. 

The New England Historical Genealogical Society this week announced that it could find no documentation to back up Harvard law professor Warren's claim, which appears to have been based on family legend rather than actual research.

Breitbart.com and Legal Insurrection, meanwhile, have been doing oppo research and have made some intriguing claims that Warren's distant ancestor was in fact not an Indian but an Indian killer. 

And yesterday, self-described Cherokee genealogist Twila Barnes penned an open letter demanding that Warren tell the truth about her ancestry: 

This is starting to make us question your ability as a legal mind! And that makes us question whether you really got your job at Harvard on your own merits or whether you climbed on the backs of the Cherokee people in order to further your career.

So, Ms. Warren, you see, it is not just your opponent who has questions. We Cherokees have questions too and those questions have yet to be answered by you. You see, for us Cherokees, this is not political. This is about the truth. 

You have claimed something you had no right to claim -- our history and our heritage and our identity. Those things belong to us, and us alone. These are not things we choose to embrace when they benefit us and then cast aside when we no longer need them, but that is what you seem to have done by "checking a box" for several years and then no longer "checking" it more recently, when apparently you no longer needed it. 

Of course, you say you only "checked the box" in an attempt to meet others like you, but that doesn't make sense. If one is claiming to be Cherokee and wants to meet other Cherokees, they don't "check a box" on a job application or in a directory for their profession! They go to where Cherokees are.

You are from Oklahoma!

Note that Barnes appears to have a pretty fiery reputation in the genealogy/blog universe (which of course doesn't disqualify her factual claims).

As for Warren, she has been downplaying the matter lately, and in recent years she does not appear to have been using minority status for professional purposes. Nevertheless she allowed herself to be described in the past as a Native American and the fact that Harvard had her listed as a minority professor indicates she did get some career bang out of being a fake Indian. 

I'm not sure how serious any of this is. Claiming that you're part Cherokee at first blush strikes me as about equal to calling yourself "The Colonel" — a relatively innocuous piece of American braggadocio. But Barnes' complaint is a reminder that such a seemingly harmless fib is an insult to people whose ancestors didn't find Harvard waiting at the end of the trail of tears. 

I dislike those Ancestry.com commercials because the stories are fiction but they use real historical images — among them a picture of William J. Burns, the great detective who caught the union thugs behind the 1910 bombing of the L.A. Times. But the narrative in those ads has some truth to it: Most of us are surprised when we put away family lore and dig into our ancestors' actual histories. I know I was saddened to find that the Civil War heroes regularly referenced in my own family were in fact not direct ancestors, and that they were Protestants to boot. 

In Warren's case the shifty family history sets up a stark contrast with the incumbent in the race — Republican Sen. Scott Brown, who gets forgiven a lot of his rotten RINO legislative record thanks to his willingness to let it all hang out. It's also weirdly like President Obama's editing himself into presidential history. These folks seek positions of power unlike any others on earth, and you would expect even their vices to be grand. But they're not. In the unsettled ids of our titans, you'll find only the most vain, petty kinds of sneakiness. 

Related: Mount Vernon, Ohio's own Paul Lynde does a guest spot on F-Troop: 

A Utah high school is learning the hard way that the government is serious about nudging students away from food it doesn't want them to consume. Davis High School in the Salt Lake City area is having to fork over a whopping $15,000 in fines to the Feds because it accidentally sold soda through a vending machine during lunch.

Federal law requires the school to turn off its soda machines during the lunch period, which is 47 minutes a day. And Davis High school did turn off the machines in the lunch room. However, the school didn't realize that there was another machine in the school bookstore that wasn't being turned off. And when the food police realized it, the school was hit with a $0.75 fine per student for the duration of the offense. 

And this is especially unfair because all the evidence suggests that soda and snack bans in schools don't work. As the Washington Post and many others have reported:

Jennifer Van Hook and Claire Altman looked at a sample of 20,000 students who began kindergarten in 1998, and checked in on their height and weight in fifth and eighth grade. They couldn't find any significant link between higher obesity rates and schools that allowed vending machines selling snacks and soda. "The results suggest that the sale of competitive foods [which compete with traditional school foods, such as soda and snacks] in school is unassociated with weight gain among middle school children," they write.

Policies that limit the availability of candy bars, chips and soda have become popular in recent years; 23 states place some kind of restriction on what foods can be sold in schools. Why does this study find that such policies don't necessarily reduce childhood obesity? A lot of factors could be at play. Students that don't have access to soda in schools tend to increase their consumption of sugary drinks at home, a 2011 study in the Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine found.

In addition, it turns out that like everyone else school kids are good at developing black markets when soda and snacks are banned. As this article explains: LA school district lunch program spawns thriving junk food black market. 

Donna Summer -- a singer who dabbled in many genres but left her biggest mark on disco -- has died of cancer at age 63. I don't have much to say about her that Alice Echols didn't already write in her great book Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture, so I'll just point you to Echols' Donna Summer section: It starts right here, and it touches on topics ranging from Deep Throat to Operation PUSH, from Eurodisco to born-again Christianity. For the full experience, read it while listening to this:

Last month I discussed a front-page story by New Yorks Times science writer Gina Kolata debunking the notion that poor people eat poorly (and too much) because they live in poor neighborhoods with poor access to healthy food, a.k.a. "food deserts." Katherine Mangu-Ward noticed that on the very same day this article appeared, Times blogger David Bornstein was suggesting ways to make food deserts bloom. The headline on her post: "Food Deserts Are Not Real. Also, We Can Fix Them." Bornstein responded by backing away from the notion that food deserts, assuming they exist, have much to do with the (historically astonishing) inverse correlation between income and weight in 21st-century America. But in the process he endorsed another myth: that poor people eat poorly because they can't afford healthy food. Beginning with the acute insight that "the dominant constraint in the lives of low-income people is lack of money," Bornstein suggested that thriftiness is a major cause of obesity:

From 1985 to 2000, the prices of fresh fruits and vegetables rose 40 percent while prices of fats and soft drinks decreased by about 15 and 25 percent, respectively, noted Arielle E. Traub, a Senior Systems Analyst at the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation in a report she wrote for the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Researchers have found that energy-dense foods (those that contain the most calories per gram, which is to say sweets and starchy foods) — are far less expensive than low-energy and nutritious foods like fruits and vegetables. In fact, measured on a per-calorie basis, they are one tenth the price. 

Hmm. "On a per-calorie basis"? Since junk food is dense in calories by definition, that measure pretty much guarantees it will come out looking like a bargain. A study released yesterday by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Economic Research Service (ERS) takes a different approach, looking at price per edible gram and price per average portion as well as price per calorie. By those first two measures, it finds, "grains, vegetables, fruit, and dairy foods are less expensive than most protein foods and foods high in saturated fat, added sugars, and/or sodium." And despite all the talk about how expensive fruits and vegetables are, an earlier ERS study, based on 2008 data, found that "an adult on a 2,000-calorie diet could satisfy recommendations for vegetable and fruit consumption in the 2010 Dietary Guidelines for Americans (amounts and variety) at an average price of $2 to $2.50 per day, or approximately 50 cents per edible cup equivalent." The authors of the new ERS study note that total calories are a misleading measure of bang for your buck:

When making food choices, consumers may need to consider the entire cost of their diets. Cheap food that provides few nutrients may actually be "expensive" for the consumer from a nutritional economy perspective, whereas a food with a higher retail price that provides large amounts of nutrients may actually be quite cheap. Consumers should also consider the total daily cost—which is likely the one metric that will have the most relevance to consumers trying to control their food budgets. 

The lead author of the study cited by Bornstein, University of Washington epidemiologist Adam Drewnowski, defends the per-calorie method, telling the Associated Press, "Some of these calories are in fact empty calories, so from the standpoint of nutrition they are not terrific. But the empty calories keep you from being hungry, and this is why people buy them, especially lower-income people." Yet a 2007 New York Times story about Drenowski's study paraphrases him as saying that "it's easier to overeat junk food," partly because "eaters often must consume a greater volume in order to feel satisfied." Andrea Carlson, a co-author of the ERS study, tells A.P., "Using price per calorie doesn't tell you how much food you're going to get or how full you are going to feel." For instance, A.P. adds, "eating a chocolate glazed donut with 240 calories might not satiate you but a banana with 105 calories just might." If it's just a matter of feeling full, cheap, high-fiber foods such as beans, bananas, peas, sweet potatoes, brown rice, and whole-grain bread, pasta, or cereal look like a better deal than a bag of Doritos or a candy bar. And if it's all about cheap calories, shouldn't people be sucking down buckets of lard and bags of sugar?  

Explaining his calorie-centric view of food choices, Drenowski says (in A.P.'s paraphrase) "there is no government recommendation for how many pounds of food an American should eat each day, but there are federal guidelines that suggest a 2,000-calorie diet." So people who are fat because they routinely overeat and who show no interest in any other part of the government's nutritional recommendations are determined to hit that 2,000-calorie target at the lowest possible price? A visit to the grocery store will not reveal shoppers calculating prices on a per-calorie basis. Any calorie calculation will be working in the opposite direction, as weight-conscious consumers try to minimize their intake per serving and food manufacturers advertise the relatively low calorie content of their products—a puzzling phenomenon if consumers measure value by calories per dollar.

Obviously, not all shoppers are trying to minimize calories, but that doesn't mean they are trying to maximize them. Different consumers have different values, tastes, and preferences, and some would rather eat the calorie-dense foods they enjoy than forgo that pleasure for the sake of better health in the long run. Is that really so hard to comprehend?

Although price matters, a diet that complies with the government's guidelines is readily affordable—a fact that even the eager food nanny Mark Bittman recognizes. Bittman conceded in a New York Times column last fall that "it isn't cheaper to eat highly processed food," saying people who claim "junk food is cheaper than real food" are "just plain wrong." True, that was just two months after Bittman advocated government subsidies for dried legumes, one of the cheapest foods on the planet, in the name of "making healthy food more affordable." But if a fussie foodie like Bittman can see the reality that is on display every day at the local Walmart, there may be hope for public health researchers who insist that people prefer French fries and ice cream because they're cheap.

As the Wisconsin State Journal reports:

WEA Trust, the not-for-profit insurer that covered about two-thirds of Wisconsin school districts last year, has seen its revenue decline almost $70 million after the state gave districts more freedom to switch insurers. . . .

The data, from 52 school districts that changed health insurance carriers, show total savings of more than $30 million. Walker said the savings are good news for taxpayers, and also free dollars for teacher wages and classroom development.

And even those districts that did not switch health insurance plans are now getting a more competitive deal:

However, other districts said even with the increased freedom to switch, they preferred to stay with WEA Trust. They said the insurer offered them a competitive price along with the secondary benefit of strong customer service.

One example is the School District of La Crosse, which insures about 1,000 people. Its premiums actually went down 3 percent last year.

See you then!

Now that the new NDAA is out, the White House has released a series of objections to the bill.  This is by no means comprehensive, but I've got a few comments on both.

Title X, Subtitle D, Sections 1032 & 1033

This is a weird one.  1033 says that nothing in the last NDAA "shall be construed to deny the availability of the writ of habeas corpus," even though that was pretty much what everyone construed.  But that comes right after 1032, which quotes the clause in the Constitution about suspending habeas corpus (so, you can suspend it, but you're not?  Is that what you're trying to say?)...and then follows that with a quote about how habeas corpus is really, really important.  

Better legal scholars than I (read that as: real legal scholars) agree that this is kinda weird.

It's worth noting that the text says that the NDAA shouldn't be construed as denying habeas corpus "in a court ordained or established by or under Article III of the Constitution" -- but the September 11 terrorist trial, for instance, is occurring in a military tribunal which does not fall under Article III.  This means that, in practice, the NDAA 2013 is saying, "If we indefinitely detain you, you should hope that we try you in a civilian court, because you'll have rights there.  But if, as we've done with other terror suspects, we opt for a military tribunal, tough luck."

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Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., has a status update for Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin: Stop attempting to dodge your taxes by renouncing your U.S. citizenship or never come to back to the U.S. again….

At a news conference this morning, Sens. Schumer and Bob Casey, D-Pa., will unveil the “Ex-PATRIOT” – “Expatriation Prevention by Abolishing Tax-Related Incentives for Offshore Tenancy”….

The senators will call Saverin’s move an “outrage” and will outline their plan to re-impose taxes on expatriates like Saverin even after they flee the United States and take up residence in a foreign country. Their proposal would also impose a mandatory 30 percent tax on the capital gains of anybody who renounces their U.S. citizenship.

The plan would bar individuals like Saverin from ever reentering the United States again.

As Peter Schiff said on the radio with me today, among other things this legislation will encourage the wealthy contemplating leaving to leave right away, before increasingly draconian restrictions like these and others to come are imposed.

Read “Senators to Unveil the ‘Ex-Patriot Act’ to Respond to Facebook’s Saverin’s Tax ‘Scheme.’”

No protracted war can fail to endanger the freedom of a democratic country. . . . War does not always give over democratic communities to military government, but it must invariably and immeasurably increase the powers of civil government; it must almost compulsorily concentrate the direction of all men and the management of all things in the hands of the administration. If it does not lead to despotism by sudden violence, it prepares men for it more gently by their habits. All those who seek to destroy the liberties of a democratic nation ought to know that war is the surest and the shortest means to accomplish it. This is the first axiom of the science.

This quote is so relevant for the present situation.  The U.S. has been engaged in multiple protracted wars for a decade, and now there is talk of war with Iran. Having a strong military force is very important, but we should defend ourselves by having a strong national defense not a provocative offense stationed all over the world.  Setting aside the disastrous effect that war has on the economy, the even worse effect is the change that must occur in government. Tocqueville says it best, “No protracted war can fail to endanger the freedom."

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When my wife was a liberal, she complained that libertarian reasoning is coldhearted. Since markets produce winners and losers—and many losers did nothing wrong—market competition is cruel. It must seem so. President Obama used the word “fair” in his last State of the Union address nine times.

We are imprinted to prefer a world that is “fair.” Our close relatives the chimpanzees freak out when one chimp gets more than his fair share, so zookeepers are careful about food portions. Chimps are hardwired to get angry when they think they’ve been cheated—and so are we.

Filmmaker Michael Moore took this notion about fairness to its intuitive conclusion during an interview with Laura Flanders of GRITtv, saying of rich people’s fortunes: “That’s not theirs! That’s a national resource! That’s ours!” As is typical, Moore was confused or disingenuous. In our corporatist economy, some fortunes are indeed made illegitimately though political means. The privileges that produce those fortunes should be abolished. But contrary to Moore, incomes are not “national resources.” If he’s concerned with illegitimate fortunes, he should favor freeing markets.

Fairness is related to justice, the recognition of people’s rights to their own lives.

A free market will create big differences in wealth. That wealth disparity is simply a byproduct of freedom—vastly diverse individuals competing to serve consumers will arrive at vastly diverse outcomes.

That disparity is not unfair—if it results from free exchange.

As I show in my new book, No, They Can’t: Why Government Fails—But Individuals Succeed, the free market (which, sadly, America doesn’t have) is fair. It also produces better outcomes. Even “losers” do pretty well.

A more astute observer than Moore might show how unfair government intervention is. Licenses, taxes, regulations and corporate subsidies make it harder for the average worker to start his own business, to go from being a “little guy” to being an independent owner of means of production. Most new businesses fail, but running your own business is the best route to prosperity and—surveys suggest—happiness, too.

I once opened a dinky business called “The Stossel Store” in Delaware, hawking hats, books and other goodies on the street. It was hard to open this store. I chose Delaware because it’s supposedly the state that makes that easiest—but “easiest” didn’t mean “easy.” I still required help from Fox’s lawyers to get the permits, and the process took more than a week. In my hometown, New York City, it would have taken much longer.

By contrast, in Hong Kong, I started a business in one day. Hong Kong’s limited government makes it easy for people to try things, and that has allowed poor people to prosper. Regular people benefit most from economic freedom.

What makes it hard for people to embrace markets is that anti-market zealots, with their talk of Americans pulling together to take care of one another, remind us of the coziness of village life. Instinct tells us that’s where we’ll find trust—and fairness.

But our intuition fools us when it leads us to think that government models that institutionalize what resembles village life must be good. Assuming that government can foster togetherness better than our own voluntary associations, businesses and private charities leads to coziness of the bad kind: back-room dealings between the well-connected and government.

If we’re going to have a large-scale, modern society, we need relatively simple rules that respect individual rights and that can be applied to all sorts of new situations without having to put global commerce on hold until the hypothetical village elders come up with a plan.

Since most human beings still lived as farmers two centuries ago, the idea of stranger-filled cosmopolitan life outside the small, close-knit village is still novel. It was only around the 18th and 19th centuries that the ideas we now think of as classical liberalism, libertarianism, anarchism and laissez faire began to be articulated. As Westerners became accustomed to living without the rule of kings, aristocrats and village elders, they began, for the first time since the dawn of writing, to imagine living ungoverned lives.

Sure, it’s scary, but surrendering your fate to politicians and bureaucrats is a lot scarier.

John Stossel (read his Reason archive) is the host of Stossel, which airs Thursdays on the FOX Business Network at 9 pm ET and is rebroadcast on Saturdays and Sundays at 9pm & midnight ET. Go here for more info.

What makes it hard for people to embrace markets is that anti-market zealots, with their talk of Americans pulling together to take care of one another, remind us of the coziness of village life. Instinct tells us that’s where we’ll find trust, writes John Stossel, and fairness.

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Libertarian columnist Ron Hart in the OC Register:

Those consumed with denying gays the right to marry are relics of the past. They are like AM radio stations that still play music. You know they exist, but you wonder why – and who listens.

I am not sure why the GOP-ers think that, but for their vigilance, everyone in America might run off and get all gay-married. The GOP needs a big tent; who better to decorate it than gays?

The anti-gay article of "faith" is so ingrained that now Romney and Marco Rubio, or whatever Republican Romney picks for a running mate, are boxed into a corner and will have to be against gay marriage. That's such a shame – they would make such a cute couple.

Whole thing here.

Especially in light of Thaddeus Russell's provocative anti-all-marriage piece from yesterday, the operative notion here, I think, is marriage equality, or the idea that if the state's gonna be in the marriage biz, it should treat all of us equally.

Reason on this.