The Chicago appellate judge you don’t want to face in your free-speech appeal. Seventh Circuit judge and prolific author Richard Posner stunned a roomful of ardent libertarians with his after-dinner remarks at a March 28 Cato Institute meeting at the Ritz-Carlton: “Civil liberties have an accordion-like structure, expanding and contracting according to the degree of safety….As perceptions of danger change, the scope of civil liberties must change.”
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“More is spent per patient on AIDS than on any other disease, though it does not even currently rank among the top 15 causes of death in the United States,” complains Citizens Against Government Waste in a February 14 paper (“AIDS Programs: An Epidemic of Waste”). “In 1996, NIH [the National Institutes of Health] spent an average of $1,160 for every heart disease death, $4,700 for every cancer death, and a whopping $43,000 for every AIDS death.” In the last 20 years 462,766 Americans have died of AIDS. “During that same period, 14 million Americans–30 times more–have died of heart disease.”
The continuing tragedy of the tight state budget. “Illinois is one of only a few states that subsidizes each county and state fair’s [tractor] pull prize money,” writes Nancy Nixon in Illinois Country Living (April), a magazine of rural electric cooperatives. (The sport is not for those short of cash. According to Nixon, it’s easy to spend $10,000 to get even a garden tractor ready to compete in a tractor pull.) “For the past several years, Illinois has paid out expense money plus two-thirds of the prize money awarded at most pulls. The state’s shaky budget could endanger the subsidy for the 2002 pulls.”
