Gender: Male
Status: In a Relationship
Age: 31
City: STATEN ISLAND
State: New York
Country: US
Signup Date:
03/16/06
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Blog Archive
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September 2, 2008 - Tuesday
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The New Professor Politico Show!
Category: Blogging
Go here for more in-depth and quirky commentary on politics, pop-culture and anything else that pops into the over-sized grape that is my brain.
1:18 AM
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April 19, 2007 - Thursday
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People Don't Stop Killers. People With Guns Do.
Current mood:  distressed
Category: News and Politics
This Op-edit piece was a real suprise. Especially coming from the Daily News.
People don't stop killers. People with guns do
By GLENN REYNOLDS
On Monday, as the news of the Virginia Tech shootings was unfolding, I went into my advanced constitutional law seminar to find one of my students upset. My student, Tara Wyllie, has a permit to carry a gun in Tennessee, but she isn't allowed to have a weapon on campus. That left her feeling unsafe. "Why couldn't we meet off campus today?" she asked.
Virginia Tech graduate student Bradford Wiles also has a permit to carry a gun, in Virginia. But on the day of the shootings, he would have been unarmed for the same reason: Like the University of Tennessee, where I teach, Virginia Tech bans guns on campus.
In The Roanoke Times last year - after another campus incident, when a dangerous escaped inmate was roaming the campus - Wiles wrote that, when his class was evacuated, "Of all of the emotions and thoughts that were running through my head that morning, the most overwhelming one was of helplessness. That feeling of helplessness has been difficult to reconcile because I knew I would have been safer with a proper means to defend myself."
Wiles reported that when he told a professor how he felt, the professor responded that she would have felt safer if he had had a gun, too.
What's more, she would have been safer. That's how I feel about my student (one of a few I know who have gun carry permits), as well. She's a responsible adult; I trust her not to use her gun improperly, and if something bad happened, I'd want her to be armed because I trust her to respond appropriately, making the rest of us safer.
Virginia Tech doesn't have that kind of trust in its students (or its faculty, for that matter). Neither does the University of Tennessee. Both think that by making their campuses "gun-free," they'll make people safer, when in fact they're only disarming the people who follow rules, law-abiding people who are no danger at all.
This merely ensures that the murderers have a free hand. If there were more responsible, armed people on campuses, mass murder would be harder.
In fact, some mass shootings have been stopped by armed citizens. Though press accounts downplayed it, the 2002 shooting at Appalachian Law School was stopped when a student retrieved a gun from his car and confronted the shooter. Likewise, Pearl, Miss., school shooter Luke Woodham was stopped when the school's vice principal took a .45 fromhis truck and ran to the scene. In February's Utah mall shooting, it was an off-duty police officer who happened to be on the scene and carrying a gun.
Police can't be everywhere, and as incidents from Columbine to Virginia Tech demonstrate, by the time they show up at a mass shooting, it's usually too late. On the other hand, one group of people is, by definition, always on the scene: the victims. Only if they're armed, they may wind up not being victims at all.
"Gun-free zones" are premised on a fantasy: That murderers will follow rules, and that people like my student, or Bradford Wiles, are a greater danger to those around them than crazed killers like Cho Seung-hui. That's an insult. Sometimes, it's a deadly one.
Reynolds is Beauchamp Brogan distinguished professor of law at the University of Tennessee. He is the author of the book "An Army of Davids" and blogs at instapundit.com.
3:55 AM
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April 3, 2007 - Tuesday
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Petty Wal-Mart, Rules Were Meant to Be Broken
Category: News and Politics
The NY Times is onto Wal-Mart and the company's "prickly… unforgiving" treatment of employees who, y'know, deliberately break the law.
Wal-Mart, renowned to outsiders for its elbows-out business tactics, is known internally for its bare-knuckled no-expense-spared investigations of employees who break its ironclad ethics rules.
Gee, whiz. It sounds almost like a cult!
Over the last five years, Wal-Mart has assembled a team of former officials from the CIA, FBI and Justice Department whose elaborate, at times globetrotting, investigations have led to the ouster of a high-profile board member who used company funds to buy hunting equipment, two senior advertising executives who took expensive gifts from a potential supplier and a computer technician who taped a reporter's telephone calls.
Yes, true, a few employees stole money, took bribes and broke the law — all obvious cries for help. But a faceless corporation has turned its back on them.
No case better demonstrates the company's prowess — or, former employees say, its ruthlessness — than the exhaustive investigation of Julie Roehm and Sean Womack, two former top Wal-Mart marketing executives.
After Ms. Roehm sued Wal-Mart for wrongful termination, the company disclosed the results of the investigation last week in a detailed and at times salacious counter suit. Investigators obtained records that they said showed the two married executives had engaged in a sexual affair, accepted free meals from an advertising agency vying to win Wal-Mart's business and begun negotiating a deal to leave Wal-Mart to work for that agency.
Now if loyal, honest employees like Roehm and Womack can be fired, nobody's job is safe.
1:50 AM
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February 4, 2007 - Sunday
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How to Stage a Coup, American-Style
Current mood:  hopeful
Category: News and Politics
From an recent Time article:
How to Stage a Coup, American-Style
If Ron Helwig can join the revolution, then so can you. All you have to do is believe, as Helwig does, that the government has gone way too far in regulating your personal life, taxing your income and invading your privacy. And, of course, you have to move to New Hampshire.
That's exactly what the affable computer programmer from Minnesota did this year. He's a new member of the Free State Project, a group of like-minded libertarians from around the U.S. whose goal is to come together in the tiny New England state in sufficient numbers to create a libertarian showroom for the rest of the country.
The Free State idea was the brainchild five years ago of Jason Sorens, then a grad student in political science at Yale. Card-carrying libertarians make up just under 1% of voters around the country, a number that has made them achingly irrelevant in national politics. Sorens argued in online forums and later at political events that if 20,000 libertarians would move to the same small state, they would no longer be in the electoral wilderness. They could finally make a difference and show the rest of America what real liberty looks like--the kind where you don't have to wear seat belts or register your guns and nobody passes laws about what the neighbors can do in their bedroom.
By 2003 thousands had agreed in principle to make the move once a total of 20,000 had signed on. They settled on New Hampshire as their destination. The state's motto, after all, is LIVE FREE OR DIE, and its low taxes and high regard for minding your own damn business proved irresistible. Republican officials were delighted. "Come on up," Craig Benson, the Governor at the time, told them. "We'd love to have you."
At a recent Free State Project meet-and-greet in Deerfield thrown by Helwig and his two housemates, also Minnesotan émigrés, it was clear that 20,000 is an ambitious goal. No more than a few dozen movement members from around the state showed up for the beer and pizza. In all, fewer than 200 have moved to New Hampshire in the past three years. "Getting libertarians to do anything together is like herding cats," groused a partygoer.
It would be wrong to write off the Free Staters entirely, though. Those who have moved have been putting on a display of rambunctious, representative democracy. Some prefer civil disobedience and street demonstrations: one was recently arrested at a local IRS office handing out pamphlets that said, "Hitler had a revenue service too." Although the Free State Project doesn't endorse political candidates, some members have been making competitive runs for local office, including some staunch home-schooling advocates who have been elected to local school boards. With one state legislator for every 3,000 or so citizens (the best ratio of any state), New Hampshire has a proud tradition of hyper-representative government, but as in the rest of the country, many of its citizens are apathetic about politics. By simply showing up and speaking out at public meetings, the Free Staters are filling the participatory void. They helped block a statewide ban on smoking in bars and restaurants and joined forces with elements of the two main parties to pressure the statehouse to vote down a pilot program for a national ID card.
If the Republican establishment was expecting the movement to deliver loyal conservative voters, the libertarians--who want to lift controls on both guns and narcotics--are proving more complicated creatures. Cathleen Converse used to be a by-the-book conservative in South Carolina. But she says that the free-spending, prying Bush Administration sped up her defection from the G.O.P. and eventually brought her husband and her to the Free State Project. "As Republicans showed their true colors," she says, "we had to choose the side of liberty." She adds, "Back home, most of the people thought we were crazy. But here, when you talk about real freedom, people actually nod their heads."
Moving to New Hampshire has given Helwig a new faith in politics. "Democracy isn't really ruled by the majority," he says. "It's ruled by the vocal minority." With more Free Staters driving their U-Hauls north each month, the vocal minority may slowly be growing a little louder.
3:18 AM
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January 22, 2007 - Monday
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Three Things That Guarantee Individual Liberty
Category: Religion and Philosophy
1 Your beliefs and your actions are your responsibility alone.
2 Believe what you will, while striving to allow all to believe what they will.
3 Do what you will, while striving to allow all to do what they will.
1:25 AM
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January 21, 2007 - Sunday
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Bush vs. Habeas Corpus
Category: News and Politics
Sen. Arlen Specter: Now wait a minute, wait a minute. The Constitution says you can't take it away except in the case of invasion or rebellion. Doesn't that mean you have the right of habeas corpus?
AG Gonzales: I meant by that comment that the Constitution doesn't say that every individual in the United States or every citizen has or is assured the right of habeas corpus. It doesn't say that. It simply says that the right of habeas corpus shall not be suspended.
This was reported on the Daily Kos and Reason tipped Bureaucrash off to it. Why is habeas corpus important? From wikipedia:
A writ of habeas corpus is a court order addressed to a prison official (or other custodian) ordering that a prisoner be brought before the court for determination of whether that person is serving a lawful sentence and/or whether he or she should be released from custody. The writ of habeas corpus in common law countries is an important instrument for the safeguarding of individual freedom against arbitrary state action.
In other words, habeas corpus stops the government from throwing you in prison for no reason.
3:26 AM
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New Wave: The case for killing the FCC.
Current mood: HELL YEAH!!!
Category: HELL YEAH!!! News and Politics
The case for killing the FCC and selling off spectrum.By Jack Shafer
Posted Wednesday, Jan. 17, 2007, at 6:42 PM ET
Suppose Congress had established in the early 19th century a Federal Publications Commission to regulate the newspaper, magazine, and newsletter businesses. The supporters of the FPC would have argued that such regulation was necessary because paper-pulp-grade timber is a scarce resource, and this scarcity made it incumbent upon the government to determine not only who could enter the publications business but where. Hence, the FPC would issue publication licenses to the "best" applicants and deny the rest.
Whenever an aspiring publisher pointed out that timber wasn't scarce, that huge groves of trees in Canada and the western territories made it plentiful, and that he wanted to start a new publication based on this abundance, an FPC commissioner would talk him down. He'd explain that just because somebody had discovered additional timber didn't mean that the scarcity problem was over, it only meant that timber was relatively less scarce than before. He'd go on to say that the FPC needed to study how best to exploit this new timber before issuing new licenses.
Based on the notion of scarcity, the FPC would have evolved a power to prohibit licensees from using their paper for anything but publishing the kind of print product the FPC had authorized—no using that licensed paper to print party invitations or menus or handbills or facial tissue, the FPC would mandate.
And so on.
The absurd regulatory agency that I imagine here is only slightly more absurd than the Federal Communications Commission, which has exercised even greater control over the radio spectrum. Until the mid-1980s, broadcasters had to obey the "fairness doctrine," which required them to air opposing views whenever they aired a viewpoint on a controversial issue. Rather than tempt an FCC inquiry, most broadcasters simply avoided airing any controversial views.
Aside from bottling up debate, what the FCC really excelled at was postponing the creation of new technologies. It stalled the emergence of such feasible technologies as FM radio, pay TV, cell phones, satellite radio, and satellite TV, just to name a few. As Declan McCullagh wrote in 2004, if the FCC had been in charge of the Web, we'd still be waiting for its standards engineers to approve of the first Web browser.
Although today's FCC is nowhere near as controlling as earlier FCCs, it still treats the radio spectrum like a scarce resource that its bureaucrats must manage for the "public good," even though the government's scarcity argument has been a joke for half a century or longer. The almost uniformly accepted modern view is that information-carrying capacity of the airwaves isn't static, that capacity is a function of technology and design architecture that inventors and entrepreneurs throw at spectrum. To paraphrase this forward-thinking 1994 paper (PDF), the old ideas about spectrum capacity are out, and new ones about spectrum efficiency are in.
Almost everywhere you look, spectrum does more work (or is capable of doing more work) than ever before. For instance, digital TV compresses more programming in less spectrum than its analog cousin. As the processing chips behind digital broadcasting grow more powerful, spectrum efficiency will rise. Ever-more efficient fiber-optic cables have poached long-distance telephone traffic from microwave towers, and this has freed up spectrum in the microwave spectrum for new use by cell phone companies.
Other examples of spectrum efficiency: Low-power broadcasts of all sorts allow the reuse of spectrum, as everyone who uses a Wi-Fi router at work or home or listens to a low-power FM radio station knows. New technologies that share spectrum without interfering with existing licensed users exist (see this short piece about Northpoint Technology). In this bit of advocacy, an industry group gee-whizzes about the spectrum efficiencies promised by cognitive radios, smart antennas, ultrawide-band devices, mesh networks, WiMax, software-defined radios, and other real-world technology. The spectrum-bounty possibilities are so colossal that some members of the "media reform" movement even subscribe to them. The Prometheus Radio Project, best known for promoting low-power FM radio, accepts one estimate that spectrum capacity may increase 100,000-fold in coming years.
If the spectrum cow can give that much milk, why do we need regulators to ration the airwaves as parsimoniously as they do? Former FCC Chief Economist Thomas W. Hazlett accuses (PDF) the FCC of overprotecting existing spectrum users at the expense of aspiring new users. The commission generally delays making decisions about new spectrum allocations, and these delays cost the new entrants money. Hazlett eloquently catalogs the rope-a-doping offenses committed against spectrum aspirants by the FCC and the existing airwave industries in this paper (PDF).
A classic example of FCC overprotection was the subject of my column yesterday: The FCC issued rules in 2000 that limited the number of potential lower-power FM stations to 2,300 when, according to Hazlett's calculations (PDF), the dial could accommodate 98,000 under the existing interference rules. (Congress overruled the FCC and passed a law that essentially limited the number of LPFM stations to about 1,300 and locked them out of the top 50 urban markets.)
Technology alone can't bring the spectrum feast to entrepreneurs and consumers. More capitalism—not less—charts the path to abundance. Hazlett and others, going back to economist Ronald H. Coase in 1959, have advocated the establishment of spectrum property rights and would leave it to the market to reallocate the airwaves to the highest bidders. Such a price system would tend to encourage the further expansion of spectrum capacity.
Owners would be allowed to repurpose the spectrum they owned—using, say, AM radio frequencies to carry pictures—as long as they didn't interfere with the spectrum of others. Companies in control of spectrum would even be free to subdivide their frequencies and rent it out to customers by the minute for the broadcast and reception of data.
If that last example sounds too weird for words, think of it this way: You rent a chunk of subdivided spectrum every time you make or take a cell phone call.
******
The best sustained argument for the abolishment of the FCC can be found in Peter Huber's Law and Disorder in Cyberspace, which can be picked up for a song on Amazon. The piece you just read draws heavily from Huber, so I'm a little embarrassed I don't actually quote him anywhere. For the abolishment of Jack Shafer, send e-mail detailing your request to the Shafer regulators at.. slate.pressbox@gmail.com. They'll get back to you in a couple of years. (E-mail may be quoted by name unless the writer stipulates otherwise. Permanent disclosure: Slate is owned by the Washington Post Co.)
3:15 AM
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Jumping the Loan Shark
Current mood: duh!!
Category: duh!! News and Politics
reasononline
Jumping the Loan Shark
If college is a good investment, why should the government subsidize it?
Jacob Sullum | January 17, 2007
The Democrats' eagerness to cut interest rates on student loans reflects a time-honored Washington maxim: If it's good, it should be subsidized. In this case, as in most others, the truth is just the opposite: If it's good, there's no need to subsidize it.
According to U.S. Census data, the average college graduate earns about $1 million more over his lifetime than the average high school graduate. That's a pretty good payoff for the investment in tuition, whether the money is borrowed at the rate promised by the Democrats (3.4 percent), at the current government-subsidized rate (6.8 percent), or even at the market rate (now ranging between 7 percent and 11 percent).
Advocates of increased aid worry that the average college student carries a debt of almost $18,000 when he graduates. But owing the cost of a Hyundai Sonata for a loan that yields an extra $20,000 or so in earnings every year does not seem like a bad deal. It's certainly a better investment than the Hyundai.
Aid supporters also note that the cost of attending college has been rising faster than the rate of inflation for the last two decades. Yet easy money at taxpayers' expense fuels this escalation. Basic economic theory tells us that boosting the demand for a product or service, which is what government loans and grants effectively do, tends to raise its price.
In a 2005 Cato Institute paper, Hillsdale College political scientist Gary Wolfram reviewed the relevant studies and concluded "there is a good deal of evidence suggesting that federal financial assistance has the unintended consequence of increasing tuition for all students." One study found public and private four-year colleges increased net tuition (taking internal aid into account) by 68 cents and 60 cents, respectively, for each additional dollar in Pell Grants. Another study found private colleges raised net tuition by 72 cents for each additional dollar of federal loan aid.
Different types of schools respond differently to increases in subsidies, and price hikes can take several forms, including cuts in state funding and internal aid as well as increases in the official tuition. But the general effect is pretty clear: When someone else is paying part of the tab, consumers do not worry as much about the cost, so the cost tends to be higher. This phenomenon creates a vicious circle in which subsidies push up prices, leading to demands for increased subsidies, which push up prices again.
Although subsidizing college degrees no doubt has produced more of them, this effect has not been as dramatic as is commonly assumed. "The large majority of the rise in higher education participation in America occurred before there was a major federal financial involvement," economist Richard Vedder noted in a December speech at the Heritage Foundation.
To the extent that rising subsidies since the 1970s have encouraged people to enter college who otherwise would not have, that is not necessarily a good thing. Citing low completion rates, Vedder argues that "we probably have over-invested in higher education," attracting marginal students who never graduate.
Which makes sense, since anyone who can finish college and reap the typically large returns from doing so should be able to finance tuition through market-rate loans, private aid, or some combination of the two. The nonfederal market, which already accounts for a rising share of student loans, could be augmented by human capital contracts, under which students agree to pay a percentage of their future earnings in exchange for tuition money.
First suggested by the economist Milton Friedman half a century ago, such contracts reduce risks for lenders, especially when combined and sold as shares in an investment fund. They help borrowers with no collateral tap the added income they expect to earn with a college degree.
Given these alternatives, government aid is necessary only when the investment in college tuition is not economically viable. It makes sense only when it doesn't.
3:10 AM
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TV meteorologist disputes human role in global warming
Current mood:  impressed
Category: News and Politics
TV meteorologist disputes human role in global warming
Saturday, January 20, 2007
BOB CARLTON News staff writer James Spann is used to covering storms.
Not being in the middle of one.
But the ABC 33/40 meteorologist finds himself at the center of the global-warming controversy after the Internet site The Drudge Report posted a link to comments Spann made on his weather blog Thursday night.
"Everything kind of exploded," Spann said Friday. "Writing stuff like that is something I always do, but when Drudge links to it, it just brings the world to you all of a sudden."
All that controversy is over a cyber-disagreement Spann has with a climate scientist from The Weather Channel.
In essence, Spann does not believe that human activity is contributing to global warming and contends that "billions of dollars of grant money is flowing into the pockets of those on the man-made global warming bandwagon." Spann received so much traffic on his site that it was temporarily shut down Thursday night, he said.
"We have never been shut down with traffic before," he said. "During tornado outbreaks and hurricanes, we've been close, but we've never had a total shutdown or crash like this. It's kind of unprecedented."
Then the FOX News Network called and asked him to appear on "Hannity & Colmes." And CNN Headline News, which wanted to book him for "Glenn Beck." Spann said he is scheduled to appear on both of those shows Monday night.
What pressed all of those hot buttons was Spann's response to comments made by the Weather Channel's Heidi Cullen on a blog she posted Dec. 21.
On that post, titled "Junk Controversy, Not Junk Science," Cullen supported the theory that increases in levels of gases, particularly carbon dioxide, in the atmosphere have led to global warming, and she challenged meteorologists who say it is the result of cyclical weather patterns.
"If a meteorologist can't speak to the fundamental science of climate change, then maybe the (American Meteorological Society) shouldn't give them a Seal of Approval," Cullen wrote.
Spann fired off his response in a blog he posted before his 6 p.m. weather forecast Thursday on ABC 33/40. It was picked up by The Drudge Report three hours later.
"Well, well," Spann wrote on his blog. "Some `climate expert' on `The Weather Channel' wants to take away AMS certification from those of us who believe the recent `global warming' is a natural process. So much for `tolerance,' huh?
"I have been in operational meteorology since 1978, and I know dozens and dozens of broadcast meteorologists all over the country. ... I do not know of a single TV meteorologist who buys into the man-made global-warming hype. I know there are a few out there, but I can't find them."
Cullen, who was not available for comment Friday afternoon, has since posted a follow-up blog item in which she wrote that she did not want to stifle the debate over global warming.
"I've read all your comments saying I want to silence meteorologists who are skeptical of the science of global warming," she wrote. "That is not true. ...
"Many of you have accused me and The Weather Channel of taking a political position on global warming. That is not our intention."
300 and counting:
As of late Friday afternoon, Spann reported more than 300 responses to his comments on his blog, which can be found at www.jamesspann.com.
About 80 percent of those supported what he wrote, Spann said. Of the opposing 20 percent, some were "as nasty as when I have to cut off `General Hospital' for a tornado warning."
Among those posts:
"Stand your ground, James. That's why your `whole team,' however many of us there are, love you. How ridiculous to want to revoke something that you have EARNED."
"Way to go, James! I always thought you were a man of character, and this proves it once again."
"Taking away AMS certification may be a little severe, but on the other hand, clearly anyone who refuses to believe that humans have any affect on the weather is no one anyone should listen to about anything."
"James, the only reason to watch TWC (The Weather Channel) is to see if Jim Cantore will finally get taken out by a sheet of wind-borne corrugated metal. Count me as a scientist who believes that global warming is caused by hot air in Congress and overheated printing presses at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing."
Spann said he just wants "an open marketplace of ideas" about global warming and would like to engage in a debate on the subject with Cullen.
"She suggested that anybody that didn't agree with her, that our AMS certification should be taken away," Spann said. "That was my biggest problem with it.
"I welcome opposing viewpoints," he added. "The only way I can learn is by reading what other people think and believe, but I just don't think pride and arrogance has a place in science."
Third-party view:
NBC 13 meteorologist Jerry Tracey was unaware Friday afternoon of the battle of the blogs between Cullen and Spann. But he said there was not enough evidence yet to support or dismiss the claim that humanity is to blame for global warming.
"Yes, it's an important topic, and yes, we need to learn more about it," Tracey said. "But no, we do not yet know enough to say definitely that there is a significant impact toward global warming occurring because of man-made activities.
"Last weekend was so warm here and people tried to explain that based on global warning," he said. "There's just nothing to that. It was warm because of the weather pattern."
3:06 AM
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December 10, 2006 - Sunday
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Media Shows Irrational Hysteria on Global Warming
Category: News and Politics
"The Public Has Been Vastly Misinformed," NCPA's Deming Tells Senate Committee
WASHINGTON, Dec. 6 /U.S. Newswire/ -- David Deming, an associate professor at the University of Oklahoma and an adjunct scholar with the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA), testified this morning at a special hearing of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. The hearing examined climate change and the media. Bellow are excerpts from his prepared remarks.
"In 1995, I published a short paper in the academic journal Science. In that study, I reviewed how borehole temperature data recorded a warming of about one degree Celsius in North America over the last 100 to 150 years. The week the article appeared, I was contacted by a reporter for National Public Radio. He offered to interview me, but only if I would state that the warming was due to human activity. When I refused to do so, he hung up on me.
"I had another interesting experience around the time my paper in Science was published. I received an astonishing email from a major researcher in the area of climate change. He said, "We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period." "The Medieval Warm Period (MWP) was a time of unusually warm weather that began around 1000 AD and persisted until a cold period known as the "Little Ice Age" took hold in the 14th century. ... The existence of the MWP had been recognized in the scientific literature for decades. But now it was a major embarrassment to those maintaining that the 20th century warming was truly anomalous. It had to be "gotten rid of."
"In 1999, Michael Mann and his colleagues published a reconstruction of past temperature in which the MWP simply vanished. This unique estimate became known as the "hockey stick," because of the shape of the temperature graph. "Normally in science, when you have a novel result that appears to overturn previous work, you have to demonstrate why the earlier work was wrong. But the work of Mann and his colleagues was initially accepted uncritically, even though it contradicted the results of more than 100 previous studies. Other researchers have since reaffirmed that the Medieval Warm Period was both warm and global in its extent.
"There is an overwhelming bias today in the media regarding the issue of global warming. In the past two years, this bias has bloomed into an irrational hysteria. Every natural disaster that occurs is now linked with global warming, no matter how tenuous or impossible the connection. As a result, the public has become vastly misinformed."
11:51 PM
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