Paul’s father, Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), is one of the very few Republicans pushing for the closure of Gitmo. The Rand Paul press release was pointed out to me by a supporter of the elder Paul, who’s furious that libertarian-minded donors are flocking to the younger Paul.

SuperFreakonomics and Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) (HarperCollins, WDCpix)

The early reviews for “SuperFreakonomics” have been harsh. The book, wrote Brad Johnson in The Guardian, is a “super freaking mess.” According to environmental journalist Joe Romm, it contains “many, many pieces of outright nonsense” and “major howlers.” In The New Republic, Brad Plumer attacked the book for “garden variety ignorance.” And all of those pans appeared before the book actually hit the shelves this week.

Image by: Matt Mahurin

Authors Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner didn’t face anything like this three years ago when they published “Freakonomics,” a surprise smash that sold 4 million copies. Unlike that book, which was based entirely on Levitt’s economic research from the University of Chicago, “SuperFreakonomics” is a guided tour of other peoples’ contrarian research and ideas. The final chapter deals with global warming, characterizing the beliefs of pessimistic environmentalists as “religious fervor,” and arguing that the climate change solutions proposed by Al Gore and many Democrats are ineffective and unworkable. It repeats claims that environmental journalists have debated or debunked for years. As a result, the authors are getting some early support from climate change skeptics who feel that attitudes toward their stances are getting brighter.

“It reminds me of what happened when Michael Crichton wrote ‘State of Fear,’” said Myron Ebell, director of energy and global warming policy at the libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute, which gets some of its funding from the energy industry. “The problem for the left is that there are still some people who don’t toe the party line who have megaphones. And anyone who has a megaphone, they’re going to go after.”

Ebell’s reference to “State of Fear” demonstrated just how meaningful “Freakonomics” could be to people who challenge conventional wisdom about climate change. The late author’s novel, published in 2004, cast as villains environmentalists and eco-terrorists who were perpetrating hoaxes to maintain their power. Coming after Crichton had made some well-publicized and much-maligned remarks skeptical of climate change science, the book was pilloried by environmentalists. It sold more than 1.5 million copies anyway.

In the years since, many climate change skeptics feel that the environmental movement has lost ground culturally and politically. A Pew Research poll released on Thursday found that the number of Americans who believed that man-made global warming was occurring, or that a hotter planet was a serious problem, had fallen precipitously. In April 2008, 71 percent of Americans said that global warming was happening, and 47 percent said it was man-made. In the new poll, only 57 percent of Americans said any global warming was happening, and 36 percent said it was man-made. Many skeptics are taking that poll as a sign that their message is getting through.

“There’s just so much … skepticism now,” said Matt Dempsey, a spokesman for Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), the ranking member of the Environmental and Public Works Committee and one of the most prominent skeptics of climate change in Washington. In making the case that Americans are growing more skeptical, Dempsey said, “the Pew poll is one data point. This book is another data point.”

Levitt and Dubner have engaged their critics in the environmental movement, accusing them of “smears” for suggesting that the climate change chapter of “SuperFreakonomics” makes them “global warming denialists.”

“I think anyone who actually reads that chapter will come away with a better fact-based understanding of the actual issues surrounding global warming,” Levitt told TWI. “That said, I also think that partisans love to cherry-pick, regardless of what side of the aisle they sit on.”

Indeed, the climate change skeptics who are excited about “SuperFreakonomics” and the environmentalists who are criticizing the book are focusing on some of the same material. The controversial chapter opens with ironic quotes from Newsweek and New York Times articles from the 1970s that published frightening, if slapdash, research about “global cooling.” That phony scare is a favorite of climate change skeptics, who have attempted to bring it back from obscurity in books and in films like the just-released “Not Evil Just Wrong.”

“The man who came up with that theory, Stephen Snyder, is now one of the people scaring everyone about global warming,” said Martin Hertzberg. The retired meteorologist, who lives in Colorado, has been skeptical of man-made global warming for decades. He has converted the liberal journalist Alexander Cockburn to the belief that, as Cockburn quoted him saying, “the greenhouse global warming theory has it ass backwards,” while getting into scraps with environmental journalists like George Monbiot.

“The idea of man-made global warming is fear-mongering and hysteria,” said Hertzberg. “There are a large number of know-nothing journalists and environmental lobbyists working hard on this, and they’re completely wrong. Al Gore is not a meteorologist. He knows nothing about science.”

Levitt and Dubner do not challenge all of Gore’s arguments about climate change science. What they do challenge is the idea that man’s use of carbon is speeding along a major catastrophe, and that something like cap-and-trade could be the answer. “It’s illogical,” they write, “to believe in a carbon-induced warming apocalypse and believe that such an apocalypse can be averted simply by curtailing new carbon emissions.” Prominent skeptics told TWI that such an argument, from such high-placed experts is long overdue.

“They’re absolutely right,” said Patrick Michaels, a senior fellow in environmental studies at the libertarian Cato Institute. “Look at the numbers. If every nation that has obligations under the Kyoto Protocols adopted the restrictions of Waxman-Markey [cap-and-trade legislation], you’d see a 7 percent drop in warming by 2100, about 0.4 degrees Fahrenheit.”

Michaels, who has not read the book but is planning to pick it up, saluted Levitt and Dubner for tackling an issue that few popular economists touch. “It’s about time that people who do popular economics tell people the truth,” he said. “Fortunately, the planet is not warming.”

While Levitt and Dubner do not actually argue that the planet is not getting warmer, some skeptics are hopeful that the book could direct people to studies that suggest that. “I think it is very important to question the [environmentalist] true believers,” said Patrick Moore, an early member of Greenpeace. Now, as the chairman of Greenspirit Strategies, he does some work for energy companies and supports new nuclear power. “[It's important] as they display all the qualities of doomsday fanatics. There is ample reason to be skeptical, including the fact that the world has been warmer than today for most of the history of life, and the fact that CO2 has been much higher than today through most of the history of life.”

The controversial phrasing and criticism in “SuperFreakonomics” is in the book to make another point. Levitt and Dubner present research into geoengineering, a Gordian Knot solution to a warming planet that, for example, would replicate the effect that a massive eruption of volcano ash can have in making the planet cooler. It’s not a popular idea among some skeptics, who argue that bogus data is responsible for much of the global warming panic. One of those skeptics is Ross McKitrick, a professor at Canada’s University of Guelph whose research suggests that numbers suggesting a spike in global temperature are out of whack. He was hopeful that “SuperFreakonomics” could cut through the “groupthink and political correctness” and expose environmental journalists such as Joe Romm as dishonest activists who can’t accept criticism.

“He’s a former Clinton staffer who runs an attack blog funded by Soros money,” said McKitrick of Romm, whose ClimateProgress blog is a project of the Center for American Progress. “He’s only respected by people who approve of his inflammatory tactics and relentless politicization of the issue.”

Climate change skeptics are excited by the prospect of the general public reading Levitt and Dubner, but they’re expecting the authors to remain targets of an active and desperate green movement. “It will make people think and say, yeah, that’s right, it doesn’t make sense to do this,” said Ebell. “But that will just make the environmentalists even angrier.”

Phelim McAleer, the director of “Not Evil Just Wrong,” said his movie had begun to inspire protests and interruptions. His advice for the authors: Develop tough skin.

“Be prepared for it to get worse before it’s going to better,” said McEleer. “They don’t like questions, as Al Gore showed. Enviromentalist journalists are environmentalists, and they will always side with the environmental establishment. Don’t expect fairness from journalists.”

Supreme Court (WDCpix)

In announcing on Wednesday that it would review a case that asks whether individuals have a fundamental right to bear arms under the U.S. Constitution, the Supreme Court did more than just step into a heated debate over gun control. Although McDonald v. City of Chicago is on its face about Chicago’s ban on handguns, legal experts say it also raises a far broader question of constitutional interpretation that bears on how and whether the Constitution protects a wide range of rights from state infringement. A finding that the Second Amendment protects individuals’ right to own a gun could therefore have the unexpected outcome of also providing more solid ground for recognition of the right to abortion, to sexual privacy, to gay marriage, and to a wide variety of other rights that conservative justices on the court and “originalist” constitutional scholars have long opposed.

The issue in the Chicago case, as defined in the petition to the court, is “[w]hether the Second Amendment is incorporated into the Due Process Clause or the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment so as to be applicable to the States, thereby invalidating ordinances prohibiting possession of handguns in the home.”

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

The court’s decision to take the case and consider whether the Second Amendment might be “incorporated” – applicable to the states – by the “privileges or immunities clause” of the Fourteenth Amendment suggests that the court is open to reconsidering a long line of cases dating back to 1873 that read that clause narrowly and thereby restricted the ability of the Fourteenth Amendment to protect fundamental rights. Although the Supreme Court has acknowledged many rights under the Fourteenth Amendment since then, it has done so based on the more tenuous argument that they’re protected by the more limited “due process” clause, which says that the State shall not “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law”. Lawyers and judges have at times resorted to complicated legal gymnastics to make the argument that a newly-recognized right falls under “substantive due process.”

That argument has left those rights vulnerable to an increasingly aggressive attack by conservatives who claim judges are engaging in “judicial activism” by recognizing rights not specifically enumerated in the Constitution. The “privileges and immunities clause”, which states that “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States” has the potential to be read much more broadly.

The Privileges or Immunities Clause “was written to forbid state and local governments from trampling on the substantive fundamental rights of all Americans, thus securing the ‘unalienable rights’ to which the Declaration referred,” argues David Gans, Director of the Constitutional Accountability Center’s Human Rights, Civil Rights & Citizenship Program in a post at Balkinization.

Scholars from across the political spectrum appear to agree with him, and many joined in a brief submitted to the court in this case urging the justices to reverse the court’s longstanding precedent. In a “friend-of-the-court” brief drafted by the Constitutional Accountability Center, six constitutional law professors urged the Supreme Court to review the Chicago case and restore the original meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment, as protecting all “privileges and immunities” not enumerated in the Constitution.

“In discussing the fundamental rights of citizenship, the framers regularly included a long list of fundamental rights – such as the right of access to the courts, the right to freedom of movement, the right to bodily integrity, and the right to have a family and direct the upbringing of one’s children – that have no obvious textual basis in the Bill of Rights,” says the brief. “These were core rights of personal liberty and personal security that belong to ‘citizens of all free governments;’ it did not matter that they were not enumerated elsewhere in the Constitution.”

The libertarian Cato Institute and Institute for Justice similarly wrote in an amicus brief to the court: “the issue of the Second Amendment’s ‘incorporation’ implicates not only the right to keep and bear arms – important enough by itself – but the larger debate over the origin, nature, and extent of all our natural rights and how the Constitution protects them.”

While the language of the privileges and immunities clause seems clear, shortly after its adoption, in 1873, in a set of cases known as the Slaughterhouse Cases (affirming Louisiana’s right to regulate slaughterhouses), the Supreme Court narrowly read the Fourteenth Amendment to protect only “privileges or immunities” conferred by federal citizenship, not by state citizenship. It specifically did not limit the state’s police powers, the court ruled. The effect of that ruling was to gut the “privileges or immunities” clause, scholars have argued, and it’s led to serious questions and confusion over when and how states can regulate rights that are thought to be fundamental but are neither specifically conferred by the federal government nor mentioned in the constitution — often called “unenumerated” rights.

Whether the constitution protects such unenumerated rights remains one of the most hotly-debated matters of constitutional interpretation, and has sharply divided the conservative and liberal wings on the court. Justice Antonin Scalia, for example, has long criticized the notion that rights such as the right to an abortion or to privacy deserves protection by the U.S. Constitution. Although the Supreme Court has recognized some of these rights, based on its interpretation of the “due process clause” of the 14th Amendment, those cases have been increasingly attacked by the conservative members of the court, and by conservative scholars, as not being grounded in the original text of the Constitution.

“You have this assault on Roe [v. Wade] from the Right, claims of judicial activism from the right, saying judges shouldn’t be doing this,” explained Doug Kendall, President of the Constitutional Accountability Center. “There’s been an aggressive assault on the entire idea that there is incorporation and that judges should have a role in protecting liberties,” said Kendall, who organized the law professors’ submission of their amicus brief. “That’s fueled the conservative rise over the last 30 years in the courts.” In response, “there’s been a flowering of scholarship that goes back to the original debates and makes an overwhelming, compelling case for the proposition that the privileges or immunities clause was intended to protect a robust set of human and civil rights.”

Constitutional scholars ranging from Akhil Reed Amar, a liberal law professor at Yale Law School, to Randy Barnett, a conservative libertarian at Georgetown University Law School, have argued in books and articles that the “privileges or immunities clause” means what it says – that the states cannot infringe on a broad range of unenumerated civil rights of citizens. As the constitutional law professors write in their brief to the Supreme Court, “the Slaughterhouse cases read the Privileges or Immunities clause so narrowly as to essentially read it out of the Amendment,” but as Amar wrote in a 2001 Yale Law Review article the brief cites: “[v]irtually no serious modern scholar – left, right and center – thinks that this is a plausible reading of the Amendment.”

Of course, if the court does decide to breathe new life into the privileges or immunities clause, it will ignite a new debate about what those rights are. But their defenders argue those rights are vast. The Ninth Amendment specifically says that “[t]he enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”  The privileges and immunities clause of the 14th Amendment, the constitutional scholars argue in their brief, “is the textual hook in the Fourteenth Amendment for protection of unenumerated fundamental rights, as well those substantive fundamental rights articulated in the Bill of Rights, including the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms.”

The law professors quote the 1866 report of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction, which interpreted the Privileges or Immunities Clause to “afford broad protections to substantive liberty, encompassing all ‘fundamental’ rights enjoyed by ‘citizens of all free Governments’: ‘protection by the government, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the right to acquire and possess property of every kind, and to pursue and obtain happiness and safety, subject nevertheless to such restraints as the Government may justly prescribe for the general good of the whole.’“

Because the Fourteenth Amendment was focused on giving newly freed slaves the rights of citizens, says Kendall, it focused on protecting “the rights of heart and home. Your ability to control your family, your children’s education, reproductive choice and sexual intimacy.”

Not that everyone agrees with that view. A group of legal historians, for instance, filed a brief with the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals in the McDonald case arguing that Congress’s intent in passing the Fourteenth Amendment was unclear. But until now, the Supreme Court has never agreed to hear a case that directly raised this issue.

Even if the court wants to find that the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms applies to the states, it might still sidestep the broader issue raised by this case and avoid overturning more than a hundred years’ worth of precedent. Liberals have invoked the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to argue for other fundamental rights, and the court could find the right to bear arms is similarly protected by the due process clause, rather than by the privileges and immunities clause. But even that would be a victory of sort for progressives, Kendall said.

“It would force Justice Scalia to utilize substantive due process” — an idea he has long criticized in the context of abortion and other controversial rights –  “to achieve the results he wants in the guns case,” said Kendall. “As long as the court finds incorporation” — that the Bill of Rights applies against the states — “it will provide a basis for undercutting Justice Scalia’s argument against it.”

For some conservatives, then, winning the right to carry a gun could turn out to by a Pyrrhic victory.

Here’s an interesting example. The Competitive Enterprise Institute, a libertarian think tank with funding from the energy industry, filed a Freedom of Information Act request for Treasury documents that suggested a cap-and-trade program would cost taxpayers more than the Obama administration claimed. Earlier today, CEI’s communications director Christine Hall needled Tapper via Twitter to report on the think tank’s findings.

“did u see the updated docs Treasury released late Friday?” wrote Hall. “~$300~ bil cap-n-tax costs, prev. redacted.”

Tapper fired back: “i wrote about it on sunday at my blog abcnews.blogs.com.”

Sure enough, Hall tweeted about the original report on Friday. Tapper wrote it up on Sunday in a story titled “A Secret Cap and Trade Tax of $1,761 Per Family?”, keying off Mitt Romney’s statement that the proposal would cost that much. In it, Tapper concluded that the figure itself was produced by sloppy math. It was “possible to see as false the assertions by Romney and other Republicans that the president has been hiding a $1,761 tax from the American people while also wondering if the Treasury Department is being as forthcoming and transparent as President Obama’s campaign promises would suggest.” He quoted CEI’s “Chris Holder” making the point. Hall tweeted to correct him: “@jaketapper – Horner. Chris Horner.”

Rand Paul and Peter Schiff (YouTube)

He’s had a sympathetic CNN interview, a Fox News radio hit, a write-up in U.S. News & World Report, stories from The Associated Press and stories in all the local papers. The first week of Rand Paul’s campaign for a U.S. Senate seat from Kentucky — he announced his bid Aug. 5 — has drawn the sort of coverage most first-time candidates wouldn’t dream of.

“I don’t think I could have scripted it better than it’s gone so far,” said Paul, speaking to TWI from his home in Bowling Green. “It helps being related to somebody famous. I don’t hide that fact. I also think that this will be one of the top two or three Senate races in the country, and people are going to keep on paying attention.”

Image by: Matt Mahurin

The “famous person” who’s gotten the press interested in Paul’s campaign is his father, Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), whose gadfly libertarian-themed campaign for the 2008 Republican nomination garnered $35 million in campaign contributions won him more than one million votes, and elevated his critiques of the welfare state and the post-Bretton Woods monetary system from late-night speeches on C-SPAN to regular appearances on cable news. One year after Paul bowed out of the 2008 presidential race, his network of supporters, without having to waste their time on the impossible goal of winning a presidential nomination, are picking smaller targets. By showing up at town halls, they’re getting more attention as health care critics than they did as supporters of a quixotic White House candidate.

And they’re backing candidates like Rand Paul, whose quest for a Senate seat, in a conservative state, with a now-established political brand, is more plausible. On Aug. 20, thousands of people — 1,700 have already committed — are being encouraged to donate to the younger Paul’s campaign in a “moneybomb” modeled after the single-day events that raised $5 million and $6 million for his father during the 2008 campaign. On Aug. 7, Connecticut investor Peter Schiff, a libertarian who manages Euro Pacific Capital, who advised Paul in his presidential bid, and has never run for office, raised $350,000 with a similar, web-driven campaign, pushing his total since launching an exploratory committee to $800,000. The effort got a boost from the Texas congressman himself, who told the members of his massive e-mail list that “our country needs Peter Schiff in Washington,” and that they could “go to www.Schiffathon.com right now and make a contribution.” The day that Rand Paul launched his campaign with a New York fundraiser, both candidates appeared on the Fox Business Channel; hours later, Schiff stopped by the fundraiser to make a donation.

“People got to know Rand during his father’s campaign,” explained Trevor Lyman, a web programmer who helped launch the Ron Paul campaign moneybombs and is working on the August 20 effort. “Peter Schiff and Rand Paul are both capable of attracting national media attention, and people think we have a chance to win in both races.”

The support of Ron Paul’s army for these two candidates puts Republicans in a potentially difficult spot. Kentucky, where Sen. Jim Bunning (R-Ky.) is retiring, and Connecticut, where Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) is dogged by ethics scandals, are seen as must-hold and must-win seats for the GOP, respectively. The party has favored candidates in both races, both of whom have held elective office — Secretary of State Trey Grayson in Kentucky, and former congressman Rob Simmons in Connecticut. So far, Grayson has raised more than $600,000 for his campaign, and Simmons has raised $754,000. Both candidates face the likely possibility of spending heavily to defeat libertarian-leaning candidates before they can go on to their general elections.

Some Republicans are dismissive of the Paul-backed Senate candidates. “Yes, Schiff is going to raise a ton of money, just like Ron Paul,” said one Connecticut Republican strategist. “He has a cultish following based on one video of him, like a broken clock, saying something gloomy about the economy that was later proven right. But how many of the people who’ll give him money live in Connecticut?”

The same criticism came from Roy Occhiogrosso, a Democratic consultant. “He has one claim to fame, that he said some things that happened to come true,” said Occhiogrosso. “That doesn’t make a U.S. senator.”

The video in question is a YouTube clip titled “Peter Schiff was right!” which went online days before the 2008 election and has clocked nearly 1.5 million views. The video spliced together clips of Schiff pessimistically talking about “sky-high real estate prices coming back to earth,” and predicting that “most of the profits people have in real estate are going to vanish,” recorded during the height of the housing boom. Andrew Schiff, the candidate’s brother and his media manager until an official campaign decision comes “in about two weeks,” argued that the video, and all of his brother’s economic commentary, is just proof that he’s closer to the Republican base than the party’s leadership.

“Peter wants to make the race about economics,” said Schiff. “The issues that he talked about then are going get a lot of lip service from the other Republicans in the race. They’ll say they agree with him, but they’re not as ‘extreme.’ Most Republicans talk a good game, and then they get into office and spend like Democrats.”

Early polling has not shown any support for Schiff, who would have to get through a state party convention and a primary open to independent voters to claim the Republican nomination. Rand Paul, who has closer political ties to Kentucky that Schiff does in Connecticut — Paul founded an anti-tax group, Kentucky Taxpayers United, in 1994 — is seen as more likely to drive the debate in his state’s primary, and more likely to upset the party’s preferred candidate. Jesse Benton, who is doubling as a spokesman for Ron and Rand Paul, suggested that Grayson had the weaker Republican credentials in the race, because as a college student in 1996 he’d been a delegate for President Bill Clinton.

“There are a lot of Kentuckyans who voted for Bill Clinton twice and then turned around and voted for George W. Bush and John McCain,” said Scott Jennings, a Kentucky Republican strategist. “As long as Grayson’s core message is lower taxes, limited government, opposition to cap and trade, opposition to the Democrats’ health care reform; as long as he jibes with the GOP primary voting bloc he’ll be fine.”

Democrats aren’t so sure that a more ideologically conservative campaign would help Grayson in the long run. Some hope that a well-funded Paul campaign, even if it didn’t upset Grayson, would weaken the nominee in the general election. “You’re going to see Grayson trying to get to the right of Rand Paul, and I don’t think he can do that,” said Mark Guilfoyle, a Kentucky Democratic strategist. “That’s a nightmare scenario for them. Whoever comes out of the primary is going to be very, very far to the right. I wouldn’t say Rand Paul would be easier to beat — either situation is going to be good for us.”

Back at home, making the first real hiring decisions of the campaign, Rand Paul dismissed all of that, and dismissed the idea that support from out-of-state members of Ron Paul’s army will hurt him as “jealousy” from the party elite. “There’s a disconnect between primary voters and the party’s leadership,” said the younger Paul. “I don’t think Trey Grayson has a clue as to what that disconnect is. We hear that there are people who control the reins of power, and that they’ve got the party workers locked up, but I see so many new friends and faces wherever we go. We’re peeling them off in droves.”

I am not a libertarian. If you are, you’re welcome to vote for me and build this party, but we’re not going to build this party around libertarian ideas.

After the speech a volunteer from Paul’s Campaign for Liberty asked Gov. Mark Sanford (R-S.C.) about it, and he weighed in against Graham.

There was almost a pejorative comment a moment ago. Sen. Graham spoke and said “I’m not a libertarian,” whatever, whatever, as if that’s an evil word. Liberty is the hallmark of the American experiment … People say, you know, “Mark, you’re kind of libertarian,” you know, and they say it as if it’s an evil word, like you’re a communist or something. I’m like: Throw me in that briar patch … I’ve been accused of being a libertarian and I wear it as a badge of honor.

–

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Yes, as a congressman Sanford opposed the U.S. intervention in Kosovo under a Democratic president; Gary Johnson opposed a Republican president’s war upon Iraq. Sanford reluctantly endorsed McCain in 2008; Johnson emphatically endorsed Ron Paul. Sanford has potential on civil liberties; Johnson, like Paul, has the guts to call for the legalization of marijuana and an end to the drug war.

As this issue went to press, Governor Johnson told me that he was keeping his options open for 2012. Keep an eye out for him, will you?

Objectively speaking, Johnson has a more engaging, TV-friendly personality than Ron Paul, and he’s not as dour as Bob Barr, the 2008 Libertarian Party candidate.

His avowed pot smoking would probably rule him out with the GOP base, but I see a potential problem for Mark Sanford in bringing Ron Paul voters over to his side. Just a potential problem, though. For most Paul supporters, hanging tough on the stimulus in 2009 will be more meaningful than hanging tough on legal marijuana in 2003, as Johnson did.

After Snipes had a falling out with his investment adviser in the late ’90s, a friend referred him to a tax denier named Eddie Kahn, whose firm, American Rights Litigators, advised clients to use the so-called 861 argument — which claims (erroneously) that Section 861 of the Internal Revenue Code holds that only income earned outside the country is taxable. Working with Kahn, Snipes did not file tax returns between 1999 and 2004; he also applied for about $7 million in refunds for the years in which he did file. Snipes began recommending Kahn to his own friends and employees, at one point inviting Kahn to his California home to give a seminar on the 861 argument. When Snipes, Kahn and an American Rights Litigators accountant named Doug Rosile were charged with multiple tax felonies in 2006, there was talk of a joint defense; some tax deniers believed that Snipes would emerge as a new spokesman for the tax-honesty movement.

He still might!

I will be voting for Scott Murphy on Tuesday. While we disagree on some important issues, I find him to be a man of honor, a good family man and successful businessman. Unlike Tedisco, he actually lives in the District. And, unlike Mr. Tedisco, I view Scott’s business success as a virtue, not a vice.

I urge my supporters and all those who believe in open and free elections to show their disgust at the tactics of the Republican political machine to win at all costs. Please join me in voting for Scott Murphy on Tuesday.

This isn’t bad news for Murphy, who is leading Tedisco while Sundwall picks up 2 percent in the polls, but it’s hard to tell where Sundwall’s voters will go. He was winning 2 percent of Republicans, Democrats, and Independents—no one knows how they’ll break between Tedisco and Murphy.