President Barack Obama has again threatened the Supreme Court over ObamaCare – this time indicating that if the Court does not rule his way, he will take his revenge on senior citizens by destroying Medicare.

That paragraph is followed by some purported evidence that “Medicare will face disruption and ‘Chaos’” if ObamaCare is overruled. Oh no! If the Supreme Court overturns a big socialist government health program, Obama is going to destroy another big socialist government health program!

Wouldn’t that be a 2-for-1? Shouldn’t anti-socialists be rejoicing?

I know, the GOP has had trouble meshing their newfound love for fiscal responsibility with their old support for the biggest government program for their biggest demographic (seniors), but I still think it’s funny when they make the irony so raw and obvious.

Ah, but it gets better! (You didn’t think I would mock this email if it only contained one bit of silliness, did you?) Farther on we read about the real scary future about Obama and the Supreme Court:

Obama appointed Kagan as a socialist stooge to subvert not only the Supreme Court, but also the Constitution. There is no time to waste. We cannot afford another day of Elena Kagan on the highest court of the land. Our liberty is at stake!

This is followed by purported “NEW EVIDENCE OF KAGAN’S LONG INTENT TO SUBVERT THE SUPREME COURT.” Interspersed between the paragraphs of evidence are literally eight all-caps links instructing readers to tell Congress to remove Kagan from the court.

So now we are supposed to be afraid of what Obama will do if the Supreme Court upholds the Constitution by defeating Obamacare, while simultaneously being scared that the Supreme Court will not uphold the Constitution because Obama’s “socialist stooge” is working to subvert it. Or, in other words, no matter what the Supreme Court does, be afraid!

By now, they’ve ruined their credibility (e.g. ethos) so much that I don’t need to take the time to figure out if their evidence (e.g. logos) is inaccurate or lacking context. Even if it is mostly accurate the conclusions don’t make sense. (See my post about Ethos vs. Logos.)

So, thanks AmeriPAC, for making conservatives look silly instead of focusing on real government abuses like the invasive TSA or our unsustainable spending path.

As @ObsoleteDogma paraphrased: “Regulatory uncertainty is bad. But default uncertainty is good.” Many also find it ironic that the Republicans are setting up for another showdown even as they are trying to undo the results of the last showdown. (The last deal set up some defense cuts, among other things, but Republicans are now trying to override them.) Others wonder why the GOP even pretends to really care about deficits since they raised a fuss about ”$535 mln Solyndra loan guarantee, but just voted to expand a $140B corporate welfare bank.”

The established economist view is that the US should not at all be restricting its borrowing as it tries to spend its way to a recovery that will get enough people off assistance programs and generate enough tax revenues to finally start worrying about the deficit later (nevermind that some of that spending just gets wasted). That’s why economist Justin Wolfers says “Boehner is nuts. The House Republicans are nuts. Congress is nuts. The idea of a debt ceiling is nuts. Nuts nuts nuts.”

But just because Boehner and his posse may be typical hypocritical politicians whose principles flow with the whims of lobbying desires and voter demands, that doesn’t mean that resisting a debt ceiling increase is “insane,” as the usually non-committal Tyler Cowen tweeted this morning.

The pundits and economists are worried that a drawn-out debt ceiling fight could cause a terrible financial collapse, or at least cause severe damage that is completely avoidable. But they seem to be missing the fact that deficit hawks are worried about a different future collapse if investors lose appetite for US Treasury bonds and the nation becomes insolvent.

If you believe, as many conservatives and libertarians do, that there’s a very high chance of a future collapse if we don’t begin to trim our deficit, and that such a collapse would be very bad, then it’s no longer “nuts” or “insane” to press for spending cuts on a debt ceiling deal (especially if you also don’t believe the Keynesians that the spending will help the economy grow faster to trim the deficit faster in the future.) In fact, resisting an easy debt ceiling increase is the only rational course of action if you believe that the following is true:

the probability of a collapse from a debt ceiling showdown * the cost of collapse from a debt ceiling showdown < the probability of a future collapse from insolvency * the cost of collapse from insolvency

Now that certainly may not be true. Maybe there’s not a large chance of future insolvency right now (although given the speed with which interest rates can rise, I’m skeptical at best that you can very certain it can’t be large). Maybe the costs of a debt ceiling showdown would be very high (although the last one didn’t seem to cause any harm, and despite the dire warnings that investors might lose confidence in Treasury bonds, their interest rates are still lower than they were before the showdown; all that hyperpartisan polarization hasn’t made us less attractive than teetering Europe).

I guess my main point is that there’s a lot of uncertainty regarding the costs of limiting (or threatening to limit) the US government’s borrowing now as well as the costs of the US being forced to limit its borrowing sometime in the future, and your bias about government plays a big role in your assumptions about the the probabilities and costs which lead to your opinion about whether another debt ceiling showdown is “nuts” or necessary. As someone biased towards the latter, I’m almost looking forward to it.

2. NPR has 50 years of government spending in one graph. It doesn’t show the growth in government spending, and they try to say with a straight face that a change of 18% to 24% of GDP is “roughly” the same, but it is very interesting to see the proportions. I didn’t know, or had forgotten, how much defense has dropped as a percentage of spending since the Cold War – even though that’s largely just because other things like Medicare and Medicaid have grown so much. Also interesting that the share of interest is smaller than it was 20 years ago and about the same as it was 50 years ago, due to interest rates dropping so much. I wonder how long they will stay low, and what will happen if interest rates rise along with the projected growths in Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid…

3. The Economist argues that the election encourages America to feel worse about itself than it needs to: “People tend to think in black and white. America is either in decline or it is ordained to be for ever the world’s greatest nation. Government is either paralysed or it is running amok, stifling liberty and enterprise and snuffing out the American dream.”

4. If you want to get down and dirty with a nerdy analysis of Mitt Romney’s positions based primarily on his many Republican debate performances, check out Expected Optimism’s detailed posts (see the first paragraph for links to other categories).

5. A Russian satellite has taken the most detailed single picture of Earth yet with this 121-megapixel shot. I’ve always been amazed at how completely uninhabited the Earth looks from daytime at these distances. Contrast this with a night shot, and I’m awed both by how much mankind is affecting this planet, and how little.

6. Random funny Internet pic of the day. (Future of Ron Paul’s Campaign edition)

In 2010, West Virginia received a “$126 million federal stimulus grant to expand high-speed Internet” across the state. They decided to spend about $24 million buying fancy Cicso routers for schools and libraries that cost $22,000 each. These high-end routers were built to serve college campuses handling hundreds or thousands of computers, but many of them are being put in small rural buildings with less than five computers – even some that have “just one computer terminal.”

A Cisco representative told the local paper that the model is “overkill” for most schools and libraries (quite an understatement), recommending a smaller router costing $487. West Virginia Homeland Security Chief (yes, they are involved in this) said they bought the same router model for everyone because “a student in a school of 200 students should have the same opportunity as a student in a school with 2,000 student.”

Apparently this state official thinks cheaper routers hold less opportunity per student. By that logic, they should also be putting in thousands of parking spaces around these tiny schools. After all, don’t want to limit the opportunity to park. Better build ten-lane roads to get to every school in the state. After all, they might need it one day. Better build a room full of ovens to cook pizzas every day. After all… well, you get the point.

Some have tried to defend this decision by saying that this leaves room to handle uncertain future bandwidth needs as technology increases and communities expand in size. But I’m not convinced; if the small buildings ever actually need the power of a large business router in ten years, then the larger buildings will surely need something way bigger, yet the state doesn’t seem to care about leaving them that much breathing room. Besides, a lot of those communities probably won’t need anything that huge in the next decade, and by the time they do, the $500 routers of the future might be able to handle them anyway.

No, this was just a classic case of the government pouring out money so fast that it sloshed around and got wasted. And the more I learn, the worse it gets. The money wasn’t even supposed to be used to buy routers in the first place. “The grant was not an equipment grant. It was to build fiber.” And over 300 of the routers are still sitting in boxes, having already wasted two years of their five-year warranties. Ars Technica has links to more stories and details, including a frustrating tangential list of expensive TSA equipment also sitting in storage.

I would like to think that this is just an isolated story of inadvertent mismanagement, and that most of the government’s hundreds of billions of dollars of stimulus were spent very carefully and efficiently. But I’m pretty doubtful. When you give someone the incentive to spend lots of money on fancy stuff they don’t need, they will usually end up spending lots of money on fancy stuff they don’t need.

At least we have the Internet to learn about these abuses. Of course, I’m sure I could learn even more about them if only I was surfing with a $22,000 Cisco 3945…

Mourdock is pro-government enough to disappoint libertarians, but he wants to abolish several federal departments and was backed by the Tea Party. He tried to paint Lugar as an out-of-touch liberal, noting, for example, that Lugar voted to raise the debt ceiling fifteen times.

In a way, this was unfair to Lugar, because raising the debt ceiling was one of those things that pretty much everybody in Congress has done for decades; there’s nothing especially “liberal” about it. But in a way, that’s also the point - Lugar was deeply embedded in the “status quo” that got us where we are today. (Don’t get me started on his lobbying connections.) Apparently this Washington insider thought he could represent the state for the rest of his life when he didn’t even own a home in Indiana anymore.

Now the media wasted no time lamenting Lugar’s loss and bemoaning how terribly extreme the Republican party is becoming. NPR said he was a “legend undone by his greatest strength” and that he lost because “his friendship with Obama… in the cauldron of hyperpartisanship, was most vividly turned against him by his own party.” CNN said Republican voters were “punishing him for the qualities he considered assets: seniority, expertise in foreign policy and a penchant for bipartisan cooperation.” And those weren’t even the opinion pieces. Ezra Klein said Lugar’s loss shows how much Republicans are to blame for polarization in Congress.

It is true that Lugar is the latest in a growing list of long-serving Republican Senators to be ousted for not being “conservative” enough, from Mike Castle in Delaware to Bob Bennett in Utah to Olympia Snowe in Maine. It is true that, as Lugar said in his concession speech, Republicans are increasingly unable to show “any nuance in policy on climate change” and “are now expected to take pledges against any tax increases.” It is true that we seem to be losing Republicans who are willing to compromise and engage in bipartisanship. (Their latest attempt to avoid defense cuts is rather, er, indefensible.)

But all of this lamenting about the increasing polarization of politics seems to me to be missing an important point: Bipartisanship is not always a good thing!

Sure, it’s good when opposing sides make concessions in their ideologies to solve a common problem. “I and my supporters want to cut spending to reduce the deficit, you and your supporters want to raise taxes on the rich to reduce it, let’s try to find a solution that best represents the needs and wants of all Americans instead of pretending that my supporters represent them all.” And it does sadden me that, for instance, many Republicans seem completely unwilling to give any ground on issues like this.

But too often “bipartisanship” has just been an excuse for big-government politicians from both parties to increase the power and scope of government while assigning unaffordable benefits to their supporters and lobbyists and kicking the can of hard choices down the road. As Tim Carney tweeted, “Bipartisanship: PATRIOT Act, Iraq War, TARP, Sugar program, ethanol subsidies, spending a lot of money.” Democrats and Republicans have worked together to give us the TSA and the NDAA. They almost gave us SOPA and they still might give us CISPA. There’s nothing moderate about all that – that’s just the corrupt establishment doing what it does best.

Sure, maybe Dick Lugar played an important role in nuclear treaties a few decades ago, but like most long-serving Senators, he’s been pretty indistinguishable from both the Bush and Obama administration on foreign policy in the last decade with their drone strikes and warrantless wiretapping and other assaults on civil liberties.

Sometimes “getting things done” in Congress means compromising to reach a common ground. All too often, though, “getting things done” just means Republicans and Democrats agreeing together to expand the scope and power of government. There’s a fuzzy line between being “moderate” and just being part of the establishment. Polarization may be throwing the baby out with the bathwater, but let’s not lose sight of how much bad bathwater we’ve had lately.

And that’s why I’m still a little optimistic about the future of this Congress. (Orrin Hatch is another pre-Star-Wars senator from Utah facing his first primary challenge in decades; we’ll learn next month if he follows Lugar.) Yes, we’re losing moderates – but we’re losing the establishment, too. The loss of Lugar and potentially others may make it harder for Congress to work out a deal to stop tax rates and payroll taxes and other things from reverting to their previous levels in 2013, but maybe that’s actually a silver lining. “Bipartisanship” is the reason we need to work out a deal in the first place; no bipartisanship means no more “agreements” that just kick the can down the road.

Take the current battle over student loan rates that are set to go up in July. The Republican House wants to pay for it by taking money from health care. The Democratic Senate wants to pay for it with some kind of business tax loophole. If we had more bipartisan moderates, maybe they could meet somewhere in the middle. Maybe they still will. But if they don’t, then, well, the government over-subsidization of higher education gets a little weakened.

(I know I’m biased, but I don’t think an extra $1,000/year on these borrowers is that much of a crisis. There’s a place for government helping create educated citizens but we’ve been inadvertently fueling a bubble for far too long now. Maybe education costs would actually start to come down if government stopped loaning whatever money colleges charged at interest rates no private loaner would touch.)

It was bipartisanship that brought us all these budget tricks and bloated departments and other unsightly things in the first place! Maybe a lack of bipartisanship will help bring them to an end…

For example, when Obama signed the NDAA a few months ago, he dramatically increased the oops cost of being mistaken for a terrorist.

Oops! You’re not really a terrorist! But now you’re locked up forever with no charge or trial!

From my understanding of the law, this could literally happen to any American citizen, but to the best of my knowledge, it’s no more than a hypothetical fear thus far. However, for many years many Americans have been charged with a lower oops cost of being mistaken for a terrorist: having trouble getting on a plane.

It’s called the “No Fly List.” Technically, there are three lists – the No Fly List, the Selectee List, and the Terrorist Watchlist, and they may have hundreds of thousands of people on them, or perhaps only 10,000 or so at the most serious level. Created after 9/11 and maintained by the lovable TSA, these lists regularly ensnare innocent Americans, subjecting them to additional screening and questioning and sometimes preventing them from boarding a plane altogether.

Kiernan O’Dwyer has been flagged dozens of times, despite repeated promises that he would be taken off the list. The 2007 article says “about 15,000 people per week apply for redress… Soon, TSA’s no-fly list will be pared of names erroneously included, officials said.” But two years later, little had changed, as there were still “about one million names on the combined government watch list for airline travelers,” though “even the government admits that most of those people shouldn’t be on the list.” A woman with the common name of Ana Garcia has missed flights due to problems checking in and printing boarding passes. You can refer to the Wiki article for stories of many other false positives. (And we just learned about an 18-month-old baby that somehow got on the list.)

Oops! You’re not really a terrorist! But now you can’t get on an airplane!

It’s not just the TSA that subjects random Americans to oops costs. Last month, the Supreme Court ruled that “officials may strip-search people arrested for any offense, however minor, before admitting them to jails,” refusing to “second-guess the judgments of correctional officials.” The whole reason the case came before the Supreme Court was that Albert Florence had been mistakenly arrested and then strip-searched.

Oops! You weren’t supposed to be arrested! But now officers get to see you naked!

Just last week, we heard the outrageous story of a 24-year-old arrested by the Drug Enforcement Agency and apparently forgotten about for five days. The details are still emerging, and the man arguably made some poor decisions that led to his initial arrest, but nothing excuses the DEA accidentally leaving him locked in a small cell with no food or water.

Oops! You weren’t supposed to still be imprisoned! But now you have to drink your own urine to survive!

Unlike the earlier examples, that incident didn’t really stem from some new power the government has recently acquired. It’s an extremely rare accident that will hopefully never happen again, but it should still give you pause that this kind of thing is even possible. As if the creation of new oops costs wasn’t bad enough, how many old oops costs are hiding in the myriad of government bureaucracy, just waiting for another terrible accident to happen? (See Eric’s recent Classical Values post for other infuriating examples of the DEA’s “collateral damage”.)

How about the government’s right to invade houses? Eric at Classical Values does a good job keeping up with these kinds of dangerous mistakes. In March, law enforcement officials broke into the home of toast-eating 76-year-old Fred Skinner and put him in handcuffs until they noticed a piece of mail on the table and learned they were at the wrong house. The officers “left without an apology or information about how Skinner might get reimbursed for the damage,” though they did eventually give him money to fix his porch and front doors.

At least Mr. Skinner got his porch back. A few weeks ago, an Austin officer showed up at the wrong address to investigate a domestic disturbance and ended up shooting and killing the family’s dog.

Oops! We weren’t supposed to come to your house! But now your front door is broken, you’re in handcuffs, and your dog is dead!

Oops costs cannot be completely eliminated. Government actions are carried out by people, and people make mistakes. What we can do, however, is notice the costs of these mistakes when they happen (especially when they seem to increase) and work to minimize them as much as possible. (This is why many oppose the death penalty; we could never punish anyone if we were too scared of making any mistakes, but death is the ultimate oops cost.)

We should also factor in the oops cost before lending support to giving the government some new power. It is not enough to merely look at the pros and cons of the power doing what it is supposed to do; we must also consider the potential cost of the power being misapplied, because as long as there are people involved, at some point there will be mistakes.

What is most amazing, however, is that this movie is breaking records in a way that bucks the latest trend of movies becoming increasingly front-loaded. Die-hard fans storm the theater at the beginning but then quickly die off as movies compete both directly with online piracy and all the new streaming options and indirectly with all the other forms of entertainment that exist these days.

For example, the last Harry Potter movie shattered the opening midnight record by over 40%, grossing $43.5 million compared to the $30.1 million by Eclipse, the previous Twilight movie. But that midnight was almost half of its opening day haul of $91 million. This was also a record, but only about 25% higher than New Moon‘s old $72.7 million (New Moon still had the record because the front-loaded Eclipse broke its midnight record but failed to beat its total day record). Potter’s opening day was over half of the movie’s weekend haul of $169 million. This was also a record, but less than 7% higher than the previous Dark Knight record of $158.4 million. (Dark Knight still had the record because the front-loaded Eclipse and New Moon both beat Dark Knight’s opening day yet failed to break its opening weekend record.) In the second weekend, the last Harry Potter movie dropped to only $47 million, which was less than the second-last Harry Potter movie which was less than two earlier Harry Potter movies, which were all way behind Dark Knight‘s $75 million second-week haul. (But even Dark Knight had an earlier case of frontloading; despite years of ticket price inflation, Titanic is still king of the eighth weekend.) Movies are increasingly breaking early records but falling far behind in the later ones.

But The Avengers movie was not like any of these recent blockbusters. Its midnight total came in at an eighth-place $18.7 million. This was impressive, but far behind three Potter and three Twilight movies, and even less than the seventh-place $19.7 million scored by the Hunger Games a couple months ago. But by the time the day was over, The Avengers had soared to second place, behind the last Potter movie by just a few million dollars. And by the time the weekend was over, it had rocketed into first place by over 20%! I won’t be surprised if the final tally is even higher than the $200 million estimate (UPDATE: Yep, the numbers came in past $207 million.)

Sometimes the increased speed of word-of-mouth with social media hurts movies, especially if they are bad, as the people who see it first can discourage their friends of seeing it later. But I think word-of-mouth is helping The Avengers movie, as pretty much every critic and friend seems to be agreeing that it’s the best superhero movie ever made in the history of mankind. That’s why, in an age when movies break midnight records but don’t even break the day record, or break the day record but don’t even break the weekend record, in an age where the fall-off is so steep that movies have to beat the midnight record by 40% just to squeeze past the opening weekend record, The Avengers could make less than half of the opening midnight record, barely miss the opening day record, and then shatter the opening weekend record by over $30 million!

The movie industry had shown signs of floundering in recent years, but with the huge successes of Hunger Games and Avengers, and with Dark Knight Rises and The Hobbit still to come – among others – it looks like 2012 will be a pretty good year. The industry will continue to struggle with impatient pirates and patient homeowners with surround-sound big-screen living rooms. It will continue to churn out low-risk sequels and remakes and may eventually run out of people who are willing to pay double digit dollars to see superheroes and explosions. But for now, at least, it looks like they will have plenty of money to keep trying to shut down the Internet…

Jury nullification is an important tool that has been used by everyday American citizens against an unjust government for hundreds of years. It’s a tool we still have today, though efforts have been made to hide its existence, and we may need it now more than ever. The good news is it can’t be taken away; we just have to know how to use it when the opportunity arises.

So what is jury nullification, anyway? Jury nullification occurs when a defendant is clearly guilty of breaking a law, but the jurors render a verdict of “not guilty” because they believe the law is unjust and that the defendant does not deserve punishment. At first glance that may sound a little sketchy, but the tactic has a long and rich history.

In Britain in the 1600′s, William Penn (who later founded Pennyslvania) was “charged with preaching Quakerism to an unlawful assembly,” but local jurors voted to acquit. The judge retaliated by imprisoning and starving the jurors, but eventually a chief justice ruled that “jurors could not be punished for their verdicts.”

In colonial America in the 1700′s, John Peter Zenger was charged with libel against the New York governor when it was a crime to criticize public officials. “Despite the fact that Zenger clearly printed the alleged libels… the jury nonetheless returned a verdict of ‘Not Guilty’.”

Jury nullification survived America’s transition to a federal government. The Constitution’s Fifth Amendment protects the acquitted from being tried again (this is known as the “Double Jeopardy” clause). Jurors cannot be asked to explain their verdict and cannot be punished for it; thus, if a jury decides to acquit despite overwhelming evidence, there is nothing anyone can do about it.

That sounds a little dangerous, but let’s look at how jury nullification has been used throughout U.S. history. One of the famous early examples of overreach by the American government was John Adams’s Alien and Sedition Acts, which, among other things, gave the President authority to “apprehend and deport” citizens whose home countries were at war with the U.S. (this allowed Japanese internment during World War II), and blocked freedom of speech by making it ”a crime to publish ‘false, scandalous, and malicious writing’ against the government or certain officials.” (This was conveniently used to prosecute political opponents of the Federalists who made the law, but not to prosecute their supporters. Political corruption is nothing new.) But “in the early 1800s, nullification was practiced in cases brought under the Alien and Sedition Act.”

Decades later, when the issue was slavery was flaring up, various fugitive laws were passed which required northerners to return escaped slaves to the south. Many in the north resisted, and many jurors acquitted defendants who assisted escaped slaves even though they had technically broken the law. (The Jerry Rescue is a fascinating little moment in U.S. history.)

Finally, “in the Prohibition Era of the 1930s, many juries practiced nullification in prosecutions brought against individuals accused of violating alcohol control laws.” It is said that “jury nullification in liquor-law trials was a major contributing factor in ending alcohol prohibition.”

Understandably, the government isn’t too excited about citizens being able to nullify its laws, and efforts have been made to discourage and hide this useful tool. “As time went on fewer incidences of jury-veto actions occurred as the courts began concealing jurors’ rights from American citizens and falsely instructing them that they may consider only the facts as admitted by the court.” Yet “the Supreme Court has since repeatedly upheld the doctrine of nullification,” despite also making it easier to hide it. “A 1969 Fourth Circuit decision, U.S. v. Moylan, affirmed the right of jury nullification, but also upheld the power of the court to refuse to permit an instruction to the jury to this effect.”

But judges aren’t the only ones who don’t like jury nullification. Many oppose it with good intentions, believing it’s dangerous to invite citizens to take the law into their own hands. They say citizens aren’t expected to be qualified to judge the merits of complicated law, just whether or not someone broke it, and that nullification encourages laws to be inconsistently applied. They usually point to the primary historical example of this tool being used for bad: After slavery ended, racist whites in the South frequently acquitted other whites of blatant crimes against blacks. This critic concludes that it’s better to challenge unjust law “at the ballot box, not in the jury room.”

I’m not convinced by these arguments. Like most tools, it can be used for good or bad, but I don’t think southern racists were actually practicing jury nullification; they were just being racist. They weren’t saying, “Hey, I don’t think murder and rape should be crimes, so I’m gonna vote ‘not guilty’”; they undoubtedly would have convicted blacks for the same crimes against whites. So I think it’s unreasonable to say we shouldn’t acquit against laws we think are unjust because racists will always acquit against laws they don’t think are unjust! “The problem with the all-white juries… was not in jury nullification, but in jury selection.” Reforms since then should prevent those problems today, giving better representation and guarding against selecting biased jurors.

It sounds better to challenge the law “at the ballot box,” but sometimes that it simply not a reasonable solution, and as it seems with Prohibition, sometimes jury nullification itself can play a strong role in getting the law changed at the ballot box. Besides, I don’t think I could in good conscience convict my neighbor of a terrible law and then start a petition to get the law changed.

I’m also not convinced by suggestions that nullification encourages a descent into anarchy. From a philosophical view, the average citizen doesn’t have any incentive to use this tactic to acquit local defendants guilty of uncontroversial things like murder or rape. More importantly, from a historical view, this tool was widely understood and encouraged for much of our history without leading to anarchy. Sure, it feels a little postmodern since we all have our own concepts of what counts as an “unjust” law, but it has generally only been used against the really big, bad ones: Alien and Sedition Acts. Fugitive slave laws. Prohibition. Jury nullification doesn’t encourage disrespect for the rule of law. Indeed, is unjust laws themselves that are the greater cause for disrespect of the law, as people who don’t think something should be illegal start wondering why they should follow all the other laws too.

The tool of jury nullification is not well-known these days, but we definitely still need it. It’s a power we have always had that cannot be taken away from us. Many proponents of jury nullification are thinking about the unwinnable drug war that’s draining our budgets and clogging our prisons with non-violent offenders, but there are many other real and potential applications of this tool (For instance, what if the government ever does criminalize youth farm work?).

Any of us citizens may called to serve jury duty. If you end up in a case with a law that you consider unjust, it is both legal and moral for you to render “not guilty” even if the person clearly broke the law, and even if the judge tells you to only look at the facts. You hold this power in your hands; you just have to know how to wield it. And now you do.

Let’s start with the latest outrageous assault stories which have, sadly, ceased to be surprising:

1. Jacob Wisnik, 10-year-old with a diabetes pump, set off the alarms and was subjected to a private prodding of his genital area.

2. Dina Frank, 7-year-old with cerebral palsy, was subjected to “aggressive” screening that involved being sent back through security after being previously approved, causing the family to miss their flight.

3. Isabella Brademeyer, 4-year-old, was forced to undergo a patdown after hugging her grandmother during a security screening.

4. Atlantic author Jeffrey Goldberg’s 79-year-old mother-in-law was asked if she was wearing a sanitary napkin after the scanner detected an “anomaly” in her “crotch area.” To avoid a patdown, she went through the scanner again, and this time the scanner mysteriously detected nothing.

5. Omar Petti and Madge Woodward, respectively 95 and 85 years old, were subjected to extreme pat-downs and lost $300 during a recent TSA screening.

Despite the complete lack of terrorist activity tied to children or the elderly, they are continually being harassed by the TSA, especially those with disabilities. But it’s not just the old and the young who were bothered by the TSA last month. Congressman Francisco Canseco had to go through a patdown that he said “hurt my privates.” We can only hope that he will share his experience with his colleagues in Congress.

When you are at the airport, the TSA has complete authority over you. If they say your child needs a patdown, you must allow them to touch your child all over – regardless of what you’ve taught them about strangers. If they tell you to take something off, you have to take it off. They can ask you any questions they want. They can view unsettling images of you through a scanner, and if they don’t like what they see, they can make you go through it again or go through a patdown with no regard to any disabilities you have and any embarrassment or pain they might cause you. And even when you’ve finally gotten past the whole thing, they can make you go back and endure it all over again.

But Wait, There’s More…

Last month, we also learned about TSA screeners who have been arrested and charged with accepting bribes to let drugs get through the checkpoints. (As if it wasn’t corrupt enough that Department of Homeland Security head Michael Chertoff had a connection to the scanner company Rapiscan – you can’t make this stuff up – or that the TSA blocked TSA-hating security expert Bruce Schneier from testifying against them.)

But just when you thought things couldn’t get any worse, we also heard an Obama administration official declare that “the war on terror is over.” Woohoo! That means we can finally start scaling back the TSA and shut this whole thing down, right?

Wrong.

It used to be that only American flyers had to play TSA roulette. Remember last year when they started showing up at the interstate? Well, it’s still getting worse. Last month we learned more about the TSA mission creep that has them creating random checkpoints at buses, trains, tunnels, and more, despite the complete lack of credible threats regarding any other modes of transportation. But, hey, the agency exists, and they have money, so why not start harassing Americans all over!

Nevermind that since 9/11 the only wannabe-terrorists who made it to the airport slipped past the TSA and were stopped by passengers. Nevermind that the “nude” body scanners have been proven less useful than metal detectors, as this damning video shows just how easy it is to get things past them. Nope, the TSA gets to keep doing what they’re doing, forcing Americans to do whatever they choose regarding whatever forms of transportation they feel like getting involved in. I think we need to start pressuring Congress to stop this dangerous executive overreach they created eleven years ago. (I feel like “End the TSA” could be a much more effective and successful campaign for libertarians and anti-government types than “End the Fed.”)

If you want to keep up with more of the crazy things the TSA is doing, I suggest checking out TSA Out Of Our Pants or subscribing to /r/tsa.

Was Obama trying to lose the rural vote? Heaven forbid children have the opportunity to learn responsibility and work ethic – they might learn they can get by without the federal government guiding their every step! Maybe the government doesn’t want kids helping out on the farm because that’s not taxable! What kind of country are we living in where parents increasingly allow their children to do irresponsible things while the government is actively clamping down on responsible options?

Well, there was the usual bit of conservative exaggeration. The regulation “would not apply to children working on farms owned by their parents” – though that did little to console conservatives from the threat of the increasingly nitpicky government nanny (what about a grandparent’s farm? an uncle’s? a neighbor’s?). Supposedly the department was just “updating” the list of tasks that children under 16 could not do, like handling pesticides, timber, and tobacco, but critics claimed that the broad 85-page proposal would have banned “almost all types of power-driven equipment,” including “battery powered screwdrivers,” along with eliminating participation in 4-H and FFA projects.

And what was the rationale for updating this regulation? What’s always the reason for letting the government wield unlimited power regarding anything to do with children? SAFETY! PROTECT THE CHILDREN! The Labor Department says “agricultural work accounts for 75 percent of the job-related fatalities for workers under 16.”

That sounds pretty bad, but how many kids under 16 have jobs at all these days? And how many of those jobs are likely to involve fatalities? Is it even surprising that 75% of those job-related fatalities would be in agricultural work? The relevant statistic here is not what percentage of these tragedies come from farms – the government can’t eliminate all risk – but how many tragedies there are to begin with, and whether things are getting better or worse.

Between 1995 and 2000, “farm-related” fatalities among youths under 16 came in at 469, or less than 100 per year, and – unless I’m reading the data wrong – only about 14% of those fatalities were work-related. So we’re talking maybe a dozen children a year? Furthermore, the Agriculture Department says that “farm accidents among youth fell nearly 40 percent between 2001 and 2009.” I haven’t found any exact up-to-date data, so please prove me wrong if you do, but the number of American children under 16 who die every year from working on farms may literally be in the single digits.

Certainly, that’s still tragic. But is it enough of a crisis that the federal government needs to get involved? Like I said in my post about the dangers of exotic animals, in a country of 300,000,000 people, where 125 people die every day in traffic accidents, I’m just not convinced that this is something the government needs to be worrying about. If the danger of farm equipment is great enough to get the federal government involved, we should also be banning kids from cars and bathtubs.

Children have been allowed to do these tasks throughout all of American history, with no real outcry that it’s especially dangerous, and after becoming almost twice as safe just in the last decade, probably the safest it’s ever been, now the government decides it needs to make the list more restrictive?

It’s almost like these departments sit around and dream up new regulations that no one wants or needs so they can continue to justify their enormous budgets and their very existence. Thankfully we have enough press and speech freedoms to at least win small battles like this one. I wonder what they’ll think up next…