Washington's economy growing

After all, that's what happens when you put a tax-raising business-killing Democrat in office, right?

Bonus quote:

But thanks to thousands of supporters throughout the state gathering hundreds of thousands of signatures for both I-900 and I-912, the voters are guaranteed two opportunities to send her a double-barreled message: WE REJECT YOUR ARROGANT, ANTI-TAXPAYER AGENDA....

Queen Christine and the Democrat-controlled Legislature pushed an agenda that did not even remotely resemble what they promised in the 2004 campaign. They thought they got away with it when they read the fawning newspaper editorials praising them for their "courage." But newspapers don't speak for us. Voters will speak for themselves in November. And it doesn't take a political genius to predict what they'll say.

Yes on performance audits, no on tax increases. Hey, one outta two ain't bad.

the efficacy of torture

Regarding torture (once more), Mark Olson claims,

I haven’t been convinced by Mr Kuznicki’s arguments that they never work, and I don’t think I’ve seen data to that effect from anyone who has access to the data and has done a careful study to verify that assumption or not. This is a matter which can surely be settled. The question is, why hasn’t it? There is the distinct possibility that the reason this hasn’t settled for the public is that the answer is the uncomfortable one, not the one that nice people in warm rooms wish it might be, not the one that voters would cheer.

The research is out there. It's just that Olson hasn't taken the time to find it. Consider a document that demands a much wider audience, "A Consequentialist Argument against Torture Interrogation of Terrorists. In language both banal and horrifying, Jean Arrigo addresses theories behind torture's efficacy to justify a particular course of action. If torture works, we don't yet have solid evidence to prove it.

Even under the Nazis, torture interrogation failed to break dozens of high state officials and military commanders involved in late-war plots to assassinate Hitler. According to Peter Hoffman’s History of the German Resistance: 1933-1945[27]:

Six months from the start of their investigations the Gestapo still had nothing like precise knowledge of the resistance movement.......This lack of information and knowledge is all the more astounding in that Himmler's men employed every means to extract confessions.... Moreover all forms of torture were used without hesitation....

Hoffman attributes the failure of the Gestapo to the “fortitude of their victims....”

A criminological analysis of 500 British court cases found that police interrogation of defendants contributed little to discovery and conviction. Rather, the study concluded that interrogation fulfilled certain psychological and administrative needs and that “police perceptions of reality dominate the criminal process.”[122]

Torture, Arrigo notes, simply isn't as effective as other methods.

Here I pass over a considerable literature pointing to the greater efficacy of noncoercive interrogation based on social skills: subtlety and finesse of interrogation,[34] sympathy with the subject,[35] appeal to the subject’s self interest,[36] and outright deceit and trickery.[37]...

Arrigo considers the obvious statistical fact that many, if not most, of the subjects will be useless, or worse--innocent.

What proportion of ignorant or innocent suspects are likely to be interrogated under torture? Modern crime statistics indicate that among suspects arrested and charged with serious crimes, one-half to three-quarters are not convicted, depending on the state of jurisdiction.[78] Under the proposed torture interrogation program, a detainee firmly believed to be involved in serious acts of terrorism will likely be tortured. The secrecy and urgency of terrorist cases certainly cannot improve the rate of accuracy over serious criminal convictions, for the counterterrorist program rejects normal judicial safeguards—the right not to testify against oneself, the right to legal counsel, habeas corpus, bail setting, public hearings, and so on. Moreover, in tracking terrorist operations it is customary to interrogate individuals just because they are acquainted with a person who has been detained, not because they are suspected of crimes.[79] So an error rate of one-half to three-quarters of torture interrogees would be a low estimate. For a long historical comparison, examination of court records for 625 cases of torture interrogation in France, from the 1500s through the mid-1700s, showed approximate rates of error—that is, no confession on the rack, under repeated drowning, crushing of joints, and the like—in 67% to 95% of cases, depending on the province.[80]

Arrigo considers the purported urgency that demands torture, and finds that the threat of societal backlash or instability caused by programs of torture is as destructive as the threat of civilian casualties; this, in Arrigo's final estimation, is reason to reconsider torture as an effective means of interrogation.

The moral error in reasoning from in the ticking bomb scenario arises from weighing the harm to the guilty terrorist against the harm to the prospective innocent victims. Instead, the harm to innocent terrorist victims should be weighed against the breakdown of key social institutions and the state-sponsored torture of many innocents. Stated most starkly, the damaging social consequences of a program of torture interrogation evolve from institutional dynamics that are independent of the original moral rationale.

Now, Olson may respond by attacking this evidence, as it is secondary, and perhaps oversimplifies the matter. But the larger point is that the information is accessible, and that these judgments can and must be made in its light. The burden of proof, as it always has, lands squarely on the shoulders of those who would promote, excuse, or rationalize immoral means to a moral end.

bad habits

Gaming triggers effects similar to drug addiction. No surprise there.

Heavy decaf drinkers (3-6 cups per diem) risk higher cholesterol levels.

Let the countdown to regulation begin.

I lost myself, I lost my self

Memory is the self. What happens when the self disappears in a drug-induced vapor? The TeacherRefPoet recounts.

I got the IV. 7:45 AM.

I followed the doctor's instruction of "Roll over on your left side, please." 7:46 AM.

I woke up on my couch. 2:10 PM.

In the interim, I actually said something quite sweet to my wife, received help getting dressed (again, from the wife), was told the results of the procedure, received instruction about my upcoming prescription, got a ride in a wheelchair to the car, rode home, talked to my wife about usage of the carpool lane, trudged into the house, fell asleep on the couch, answered the phone to give my wife my insurance card information, and then woke up and called my parents and sister.

I REMEMBER DOING NONE OF THE ABOVE PARAGRAPH.

The brain can run on autopilot--a fascinating and frightening experience, when awareness returns. Highway hypnosis is the perfect drug-free example of this brain state. Another is blindsight. Consciousness is modular, not unified; a series of perceptions, not an overarching narrative.

Check out The Illusion of Conscious Will by Daniel M. Wegner for more fascinating examples of the brain's ability to fool you into thinking the conscious you is the controlling you.

Conan, Walker, Haley Jo, and health

Someone is suffering from sleep deprivation.

Biking Beats Blogging

Virtual life out, real life in

JIM ANDERSON

CORRUGATED TIMES-DISPATCH

LEMONT, ILLINOIS -- A stunned nation reacted with hostility to a local blogger's announcement that he was too tired to both post and exercise, and that exercise would have to come first.

"I don’t have the energy to devote to a good blog essay and I really need to get a workout in," Mark Olson, owner of the small but provocative blog Pseudo-Polymath, wrote earlier this evening. "The bike wins. I’ll try to get up early and write something tomorrow morning."

Neighboring blogger Lucille Hermansen responded immediately with criticism. "Who does this Olson think he is? The rules are clear. Blog first, the rest will take care of itself." Hermansen, co-founder of Not an Addict, began IM'ing others to "flame" Olson with harassing emails.

International outcry followed shortly after. "American pundits are an example to the world," fumed Norwegian Lars Grundal, better known as A Guy With a Bløg. "If they start trading in their keyboards for kayaks, the revolution will be finished."

At a late-night press conference, Olson expressed his perplexity at the speed and tenacity of the response. "Holy cow. I mean, I just needed a break. A night. That's all. I've had a rough day." He threw a sweat-soaked towel at reporters and headed for the showers.

Five hours after the announcement, Pseudo-Polymath was trading at $7,409 per share, down five hundred points from the previous day.

while we're talking about torture

Upon reading this distressing NY Times op-ed, Julian Sanchez asks,

So: How many of the folks who howled with outrage that someone might compare our tactics with those of despotic communist regimes will exhibit it in the same measure toward those who made the comparison apt by deciding to model our interrogation tactics on those of despotic communist regimes?

Your thoughts, Mr. Olson?

they are coming for your children

You've been warned.

blurbs

For no good reason, I'm going to march down the blogroll and describe a few recent additions, trumpeting appropriately when praise is merited. These days, I'm too busy to blog well, but if I can send you to places you enjoy, at least you'll remember me fondly.


don't drink the koolaid
"It's All About Memes." And really, really well-drawn cartoons.

the lady miss queer wordy
My wife and I met her at a Reason conference; we were glad to meet an ex-pat Washingtonian from the Other Washington. When we told her how we got there, she declared us her "new favorite couple." She needs to blog more often.

*they call him... josh*
He's on a blog break, but he'll be back soon, dispensing snark as only a college student can.

wherever you go, there you are
Thanks to my brother, Biola folks are tenuously connected to decorabilia. (The connection would be strengthened if he'd ever add me to his blogroll.) The latest Biola addition transgresses all binary classifications.

The rest of the blogroll is to your right, asking for your kind attention. Heed it.

debate weekend

The 35th annual Puyallup speech and debate tournament was long, exhausting, and fun. Christina took first in open oratory, gaining a state berth. Cortnei, Josh H., and August brought home speaker awards in Student Congress. And I grew exceedingly weary of the phrase "judicial activism," especially since at high speeds, it's tough to pronounce "judicial" without slobbering.

Final cheer: "It's a law dictionary. Because we're talking about the law!"

what we've come to expect from William A. Dembski

Another Update [ed. note: minor spelling error fixed]

I've moved this update to the top because Dembski is too amazing, too stupefying. Now, going beyond deleting others' comments, Dembski has deleted old posts on his blog, claiming they were a bit of "street theater."

In the posts in question--Shallit Yet Again and Shallit Yet Again - P.S.--Dembski engaged in speculation that was shot down by Ed Brayton (see below). Instead of admitting that he was factually in error, Dembski changed tactics, saying that they were some kind of game or joke, and tried to erase the evidence.

That is classic dishonesty. To call it "intellectual dishonesty" would be an insult to intellectuals.



(As an aside, Ed's other prediction is being fulfilled by Dembski's commentators.)


The Original Entry

I had to stop reading Dembski's blog, since it was bad for my blood pressure. Ed Brayton, though, kept slogging through the crap that Dembski flung about the Dover trial, and why Jeffrey Shallit never testified. Dembski had claimed that the ACLU withdrew Shallit because he was an "embarrassment." There was one small problem: this was wrong, obviously wrong, embarrassingly wrong.

Having posted that, I then placed the odds of Dembski actually admitting that he was wrong about this at being well beyond the "universal probability boundary" that he places at 1 x 10^150. A few people wanted to place one penny bets at those odds, but it appears I was right. Here is his latest post on the subject and he continues to get virtually everything wrong in this situation. And much to no one's surprise, he continues to refuse to admit he was wrong and tries to change the subject....

Read the whole thing--but only if you have an automatic external defibrillator handy.

Update: It gets worse.

an observation

You can wear a pocket protector. You can play Dungeons and Dragons. You can memorize and live by the maxims of Monty Python's The Search for the Holy Grail. But you haven't reached the pinnacle of nerditude until you're cited by a Lincoln-Douglas debater in a round.

(Yes, I'm talking to you, Timothy Sandefur.)

the wizard speaks

[A little over a week ago, I went to witness a Q and A session with Martin Teicher. What follows is a work in progress.]

Martin Teicher sits in the prongs of a horseshoe of conference tables, surrounded by twenty-nine high school students. An affable face rounded by a neatly-trimmed beard, tufts of gray hair atop a bald pate, thin-rimmed glasses with thick lenses. He fiddles with his lapel mike's battery pack as he answers students' questions and peppers them with his own, his Harvard accent betrayed every time he says "huge"--it comes out "yuge.

The students, members of an International Baccalaureate psychology class, have journeyed to the Vancouver Hilton to meet this well-known researcher and clinical psychiatrist. In this special session, Teicher goes without notes, without Powerpoint slides, without an agenda. His talk ranges from the academic to the personal and covers a slew of fascinating topics. Below are just the highlights from his two hour talk. I've tried to summarize accurately, and quote where appropriate. (As is my habit, I sit in the back, close to the only available outlet.)

The first question is about Freud, and it's surprisingly relevant, given Teicher's most recent research. According to Teicher, Freud was the first person to talk scientifically about the effects of abuse. He was "...enormously ahead of his time, and on to something important. But he got scared... and basically wound up saying that this couldn't have happened, this number of people couldn't have been molested." Freud's inability to accept the reality of child abuse had a lasting influence. For the next century psychiatry ignored it. When Teicher started investigating the neurological effects of abuse, he kept his data private for seven years, waiting for a receptive scientific community.

Later, in the most colorful and affecting part of the Q and A, Teicher explains his motivation for becoming a psychiatrist. "When I was a freshman in college, I had no clue about the difference between psychology and philosophy. I had no idea. My best grades were in chemistry, I wanted to be a chemistry major. But it was also 1969, the era of Woodstock, riots on campus, free love. I wanted to grow my hair really long and become a rock star. I spent most of my time playing guitar. Soon, it turned into sampling illegal substances. I witnessed this thing freshman year--this kid came in having taken some humongous dose of LSD. The stuff he said was absolutely fascinating. And that prompted my interest in psychopharmacology. I really screwed up the first two years of college... didn't have stellar grades."

In med school, Teicher initially studied to become a pediatrician, interning in an intensive care unit. "I used to run out of the ICU crying. The only contact these preemies would have was poking and prodding... they would experience huge amounts of pain.... I really like little kids, working with them. But I couldn't inflict pain on someone who didn't understand why I was hurting them. In some ways that's why I went into psychiatry. Neurologists knew a lot, understood all this stuff, but didn't help people. Psychiatrists didn't know anything, but most of their patients got well."

Teicher has made waves in these later stages of his career by tackling controversial subjects. "I've been gunshy in the past about stirring up controversy, after the issues revolving around Prozac problems. My first grant [for childhood abuse] scored 499, one away from the lowest score. Two years later, it scored 102. I had too much in the first one, I had to tone it down a lot. That's part of science--it tends to be very conservative. They're very prone to say it's junk."

"This is good and bad--you have to fight really hard to change your field. The nice thing about doing science... it's often much more interesting than I could have possibly imagined. I tell people who want to work with me that I'm wrong 70-80% of the time."

Teicher's clinical practice drives his research. "I just happened to have three or four people in practice who became suicidal when taking medication. I had three patients who had abnormal EEGs, symptoms of temporal lobe epilepsy, etc. All had child abuse in common."

[more to come]

the ends justify the mean

Mark Olson sees the gray in the torture debate.

The point is that “cruel and unusual” and “torture” are terms which are very much culturally relative. In fact, what is cruel and unusual in the sheltered parts of the US may be ordinary existence in other parts of the world....One does not have to be an advocate of moral relativism to admit that there are cultural norms regarding comfort and how one defines unusual treatment....

This is moral calculus of the lowest common denominator, and a wholesale rejection of the purported moral role of this nation in its war on terror. Apparently "moral clarity" applies to all subjects except torture.

In a comment, Mark writes,

If the practices going on in those facilities is the standard and expected norm in that region and culture but is considered torture here, is it still torture? I don’t know the answer to that.

Change the moral term, and you'll see the amazing shift in perspective. The Bush Doctrine has been to spread freedom and liberty because they are universally good. Imagine Bush opining, "If jailing political dissidents is the standard and expected norm in that region and culture but is considered oppressive here, is it still oppressive?"

Mark also addresses the empirical argument against torture.

It has been also said of “torture” and more specifically using modern psychological techniques some of which involve varying degrees of discomfort never work. That they only can extract what the questioner or interrogator wishes to hear in the first place. This is well documented in modern fiction, but I have seen no references to studies claiming the same in any peer reviewed scientific literature. I think claims and counter-claims on that regard by almost everyone on this topic can be well compared with Medieval science. For neither side has fact or data or any basis in reality. Both are arguing from various principles which may or may not relate to reality. For while it seems certain that many times methods used in questioning of this sort certainly can fall into a trap of only being able extract information that the questioner wishes to divulge, it also seems likely that it might be more effective, e.g., The Quiller Memorandum.

First, there won't be any peer-reviewed studies of torture, given that researchers adhere to stringent ethical codes when dealing with human subjects. Second, as Mark points out in a comment, "...we haven’t done a very good job of understanding and documenting what is going on...." The Bush administration's secrecy regarding the matter, and the necessity of investigations by the ACLU into the treatment of detainees, only compounds our lack of necessary information. Last, the burden of proof is on those who justify torture as a means to an end. After all, if torture is justified by its ends, it'd damned well better work.

God to Pat Robertson: Shut up.

Ed and PZ are on it. Pat Robertson just can't remember the sage advice his mama told him--"Zip it, cretin"--and has to go on blabbering nonsense:

“I’d like to say to the good citizens of Dover. If there is a disaster in your area, don’t turn to God, you just rejected Him from your city. And don’t wonder why He hasn’t helped you when problems begin, if they begin. I’m not saying they will, but if they do, just remember, you just voted God out of your city. And if that’s the case, don’t ask for His help because he might not be there.”

Earlier today, responding to a complaint that Intelligent Design is rejected by the closed-minded, I wrote,

If ID is truly designer- (or designers-) neutral, its proponents need to adopt neutral language. Otherwise, they'll continue to have an uphill battle convincing non-Christians that ID isn't just creationism in disguise.

Apparently they'll have to muzzle Pat Robertson, too.

tossed salad in space

(an update)

Adding a new line of evidence for panspermia, the hypothesis that life on Earth was seeded by interstellar matter, lichens can survive two weeks in the harsh conditions of space.

Once in Earth orbit, the lid of the container opened and the samples were exposed to the space environment for nearly 15 days before the lid resealed and the capsule returned to Earth.

The lichens were subjected to the vacuum of space and to temperatures ranging from -20°C on the night side of the Earth, to 20°C on the sunlit side. They were also exposed to glaring ultraviolet radiation of the Sun.

“To our big surprise, everything went fine after the flight,” says Rene Demets, ESA’s project scientist for the Foton project. “The lichens were in exactly the same shape as before flight.”

But can they survive two weeks in a house full of washed-up celebrities? Now that's an experiment worth funding.

though this be madness, yet there is method in 't

It's the latest Skeptics' Circle, and it's Shakespearean. Huzzah!

from the department of overblown rhetoric

The original has been slightly modified. But only slightly. To get the full effect, put on a tweed jacket with elbow patches, smoke a corncob pipe, and, speaking through your nose, read the essay aloud. Chortle, chuckle, or slobber at appropriate points (you'll know 'em when you read 'em). Then go back and read its progenitor and have a good laugh.



VHS is killing 8 MM - what will it do to the book?

The start of a cultural revolution is often imperceptible, and there is one taking place right now on your living-room shelves. In between the tattered paperbacks and last year's birthday cards a new format is demanding space, pushing at the party walls of categoric hierarchies. Video Home System has invaded our homes and the cultural consequences are going to be considerable.

The intrusion has occurred in the past year or so, without fuss or fanfare. I hardly noticed its effect on my own habits until a New York friend with an Adams-to-Zemlinsky opera collection and more cassette versions of the Brahms concertos than is probably healthy mentioned the other day that he is building a VHS library of must-have movies. So, I realised, was I -- one by one, and somewhat haphazardly until the pre-Christmas flood of gift sets established an addiction.

The complete works of Ingmar Bergman and Francois Truffaut are about to go on sale and no self-respecting cineaste will walk by without feeling a tug at the purse strings. To have and to hold every film that guided your artistic and emotional maturation, through adolescence and beyond, is something many will find irresistible. Kurosawa, Hitchcock, Tarkovsky and the Ealing comedies are equally on offer. What was formerly part of a romanticised past, glimpsed infrequently on late-night TV, has become urgently present (perhaps the perfect present). The eternally elusive turns up in plastic boxes.

What this means, in cultural terms, is that film now takes its place beside literature, music and visual imagery as an art that can be owned and bookmarked. Where once you had to visit a cinema or spool through half a mile of clunky film in order to access a seminal scene in an essential movie, you now fast forward to it on VHS as quickly as finding a name in the index of an artist biography.

I no longer need to conjure up in the mind's eye the sight of Jean Moreau toppling off a bicycle in Jules et Jim or Liv Ullman playing Chopin in Autumn Sonata. Using the pause button that is standard on most VHSs, a frozen frame is but a fingertip away and what was once an ethereal impression is resolved by immediate evidence. Did she fall off? Now we know. How did she play? Not badly at all.

Film has become fact on VHS. It has left the cinema and joined us for drinks, an emancipatory moment for the last of the great western art forms. Books and music have always furnished our rooms, but to have film as a point of home reference, like Oxford English Dictionary and the complete works of Shakespeare, signals a revolution in cultural reception and, inevitably, creation.

It will, for instance, make it that much harder for Hollywood to remake its own milestones when half the world has the originals to hand for instant comparison. The Manchurian Candidate (1962), with its dream cast of Frank Sinatra, Laurence Harvey and Janet Leigh was unlikely to be bettered by Jonathan Demme's 2004 reshoot with Denzel Washington, Liev Schreiber and Meryl Streep. But if anyone had foreseen that the original on VHS would be around in the public hands, Demme's studio would never have raised the finance, let alone the enthusiasm, for an otiose update. With VHS to hand as a mass medium, directors will have to be more careful about cliches. Some, like Titanic's James Cameron, are so involved in shaping a definitive VHS version of past works that they have given up making new movies. Among the haughtier auteurs, VHS is the route to self-obsession.

But it is in public hands that VHS will make an impact, and one that is beyond present calculation. Television will be the first to suffer. Why zap through 139 brain-rot channels when you have just bought Some Like it Hot at Woolworths and can play it without adverts, programme trails and other network interpolations. Beside frenetic TV directors who change camera angles 20 times a minute, the long, cool takes of Billy Wilder, Fellini and John Ford make a sweeter ending to the working day. TV will have to change its ways.

And then there are the half-hidden extras. After seeing Ushpizin, a gripping Israeli drama of born-again orthodox zealots on selective international release, I cued in a VHS documentary on the making of the film. It revealed that the lead actor, Shalom Rand, had given up his movie career to embrace a life of ritual observance - only to decide to film his new world through the unsentimental eyes of a sceptical director who had once been his mentor. Their dialogue on the special-edition VHS adds a third dimension to an already memorable film, an edgy negotiation of polar outlooks.

The reason for such add-ons is to persuade people who have seen the film to pay again for the memory. But their inclusion makes VHS something more than a replica of film. The array of interviews, deleted scenes and sundry curiosities endow the VHS with what amounts to the critical apparatus that would accompany a modern edition of a literary classic of Gibbon's Decline and Fall, for instance, equipped (as one would expect) with scholarly preface, textual footnotes, celebrity commendations and comprehensive bibliography for further reading.

These fillers distance the VHS from the original film in much the same way as an audio disc is removed from live music. Recording may replicate a moment in art, but it also exists as an artform in its own right, with a history and archive that are quite separate from musical evolution. In much the same way, VHS is not just takeaway film. It is a genre that both presents film and describes it, content and context together, a bilateralism in tune with post-modern philosophies. Over the next year or so, VHS will come to be recognised as a stand-alone genre as VHS collections form an essential part of a civilised household.

VHS won't replace the printed book which has withstood more serious threats in the past half-millennium. But it will accelerate the obsolescence of the audio-only cassette, which cannot compete much longer in an image-centred culture. The video game, the Walkman and other new-tech marvels will challenge for precedence as entertainment carriers, but none can rival VHS for instant access and archival use. VHS has got the movies bang to rights and gives them equal status with music and printed arts. It is the medium of the Noughties, the remaking of our memories.

the soul, object of their concern: redux

Tonight the Mormons came. I had been expecting them.

Once, a while ago, I sat quietly when they knocked until they left. (They are the only ones who knock so boisterously.) But tonight I opened the door, squinted, leaned in uncomfortably close, tried to read their nametags with contactless eyes.

"This is brother Carson, and I'm brother Neuhaus," said the dapper lad on the right. Hand extended, cold handshake. Names matched tags. Good so far.

"Ah," I said. I had nothing more eloquent available.

"We're new in the neighborhood, just wondering if other brothers have visited before."

"I can't remember," I said. It was three-quarters true.

Briefest of pauses.

"Well, thanks, nice to meet you, good night."

Dismay. "Maybe we could help take the trash out?" Because you're obviously weak and infirm? Because we're scraping for an excuse to chill in your kitchen, so we can talk about Joe Smith and Moroni and golden tablets?

"Uh, no thanks, not really. In fact, you won't need to visit anymore."

I couldn't quite see if their faces registered dejection or disappointment, because the door closed too fast.

Legislators Bummed

Actually have to do their jobs

JIM ANDERSON

CORRUGATED TIMES-DISPATCH

OLYMPIA -- As I-330 and I-336 crashed and burned Tuesday, legislators across the state let out a collective groan.

"Crap," said Senator Mary Margaret Haugen (D). "I was hoping the people would choose one of the solutions, or maybe both. This insurance stuff is complicated."

Haugen, like many other Senators, has been taking it easy since the Senate adjourned in April. Back then, water rights and estate taxes were more pressing concerns than the tangled root mass of medical malpractice lawsuits.

"It's all so confusing," Haugen added, standing thirty feet outside the Capitol, smoking. "Tort reform, jury award caps, fee caps. It would take me days, maybe weeks to familiarize myself with the issue. Who has that kind of time?"

Other senators were cautiously optimistic. "I... like... working...," said Senator Brad Benson (R), member of the Health and Long-Term Care committee. "I really do... I think."

"There goes my plan to telecommute," said a dejected Representative Tom Campbell (R). "I had a laptop installed near the hot tub. It was gonna be great."