Freakonomics authors Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt discover the not insubstantial impact that actress Jane Fonda has had on the United States’ continued reliance on coal and other fossil fuels rather than clean and cheap nuclear energy.
Of course, Larry Ribstein has been writing about this phenomenom for years.

Daniel Drezner has an interesting recent observation about Rudy Giuliani’s presidential bid:

Take this for what you will:
Over the past month, I’ve had at least two dozen conversations with various people about Rudy Giuliani’s presidential campaign. A lot of these people are Democrats, but there were a healthy number of Republicans and independents as well. These are all smart observers of politics who generally do not make knee-jerk assessments. The one common denominator was that, at some point, all of these people had lived in the New York City area while Rudy was mayor.
What is astonishing is that, despite the fact that this collection of individuals would likely disagree about pretty much everything, there was an airtight conensus about one and only one point:

A Giuliani presidency would be an unmitigated disaster for the United States.
That is all.

UPDATE: Commenters have reasonably asked the “why?” question. For some answers from New Yorkers, click here and here.

Here is my contribution on why Giuliani should not be elected president.

Has the mainstream media sentenced the Lord of Regulation to sensitivity training?

The pastor of the local church that my family and I attend has used the pulpit from time to time to advocate political positions and certain politicians, which I have always viewed as a dubious practice. I was reminded of my pastor’s sermons as I read this Cathy Young/ReasonOnline article on the questionable cultural legacy of the late Jerry Falwell:

Though the movement Falwell helped launch was unable to enact much of its agenda into law, there is no question that it transformed the American political landscape. Even the battles it hasnít won, such as the effort to teach ìintelligent designî in schools on a par with evolution, are still battles it was able to force on its opponents.
More broadly, it helped create a climate in which the language of politics is saturated with references to God, a political culture in which a major political magazine (Newsweek) can ask a presidential candidate (Howard Dean) whether he believes in Jesus Christ as the son of God and the path to eternal life.
Despite these political inroads, Falwellís brand of religious conservatism has suffered losses in the culture wars. Feminism, its radical excesses mostly discarded, has become firmly integrated into Americaís cultural mainstream. (Even, apparently, in Falwellís own family: His daughter is a surgeon.) Acceptance of gays is now at a level that would have been unthinkable in 1980. Sexual content in mainstream entertainment has steadily increased, and adults-only material is more available than ever thanks to new technologies. While divorce rates have dropped somewhat, so have marriage rates; in much of America, sex between single adults is widely accepted as a social norm.

Along those same lines, this CNN article reports on a Kentucky church’s “Court Watch” program in which volunteers attend court hearings to monitor how judges are handling drug-related cases. It’s clear that the members of the church group are not interested in facilitating leniency in sentencing in such cases.
Several years ago, while sweating a jury in a civil case at the courthouse, I attended the daily initial appearance docket call in the juvenile criminal court next door. It was a heartbreaking experience and prompted me to begin doing pro bono work in the local juvenile criminal justice system. Since then, I’ve attended numerous such initial appearance dockets in the juvenile criminal justice system. I have never seen a member of any Christian organization attending one of those dockets.

This New York Times article reports on one of the expensive consequences of the increasing criminalization of everything — already overcrowded state prisons looking to export inmates:

Chronic prison overcrowding has corrections officials in Hawaii and at least seven other states looking increasingly across state lines for scarce prison beds, usually in prisons run by private companies. Facing a court mandate, California last week transferred 40 inmates to Mississippi and has plans for at least 8,000 to be sent out of state.
The long-distance arrangements account for a small fraction of the countryís total prison population ó about 10,000 inmates, federal officials estimate ó but corrections officials in states with the most crowded prisons say the numbers are growing. One private prison company that houses inmates both in-state and out of state, the Corrections Corporation of America, announced last year that it would spend $213 million on construction and renovation projects for 5,000 prisoners by next year. [. . .]
But while the out-of-state transfers are helping states that have been unwilling, or too slow, to build enough prisons of their own, they have also raised concerns among some corrections officials about excessive prisoner churn, consistency among the private vendors and safety in some prisons.
Moving inmates from prison to prison disrupts training and rehabilitation programs and puts stress on tenuous family bonds, corrections officials say, making it more difficult to break the cycle of inmates committing new crimes after their release. Several recidivism studies have found that convicts who keep in touch with family members through visits and phone privileges are less likely to violate their parole or commit new offenses. There have been no studies that focused specifically on out-of-state placements.

See related earlier posts here and here. By the way, if you are interested in understanding the main reason why we are dealing with this seemingly endless cycle of criminalization and imprisonment, then check out the clever minute and a half video below for the answer:

Scott Henson, the Texas blogger-expert on prison overcrowding, has more here.
Update: Has America become the Incarceration Nation?

Democratic Party presidential candidate John Edwards has been a frequent topic on this blog, but it’s rare that his special style of demagoguery is captured as succiently as in this video of a bit over a minute. I don’t know what’s more disturbing — Edwards’ rantings, the audience’s unquestioning acceptance of them, or the fact that the Edwards campaign is promoting the video as an example of Edwards’ charm.