Nick Gillespie is editor-in-chief of Reason.tv and Reason.com, which features the staff weblog, Hit & Run, named by Playboy, Washingtonian, and others as one of the best political blogs. Gillespie served as Reason magazine's editor-in-chief from 2000 to 2008. Under his direction, Reason won the 2005 Western Publications Association "Maggie" Award for Best Political Magazine. Gillespie originally joined Reason's staff in 1993 as an assistant editor and ascended to the top slot in 2000. In 2004, Gillespie edited the book Choice: The Best of Reason, an anthology of the magazine's best articles.
Gillespie's work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Post, Slate, Salon, Time.com, Marketplace, and numerous other publications. He was a regular contributor to the late, lamented satire site, Suck, where he wrote under the name Mr. Mxyzptlk. He is a frequent commentator on radio and television networks such as National Public Radio, CNBC, CNN, C-SPAN, Fox News Channel, and MSNBC. He has also worked as a reporter for several New Jersey newspapers and as an editor at several Manhattan-based music, movie, and teen magazines.
He is almost certainly the only journalist to have interviewed both Ozzy Osbourne and the 2002 Nobel laureate in economics, Vernon Smith. In 1996, Gillespie received his Ph.D. in English literature from the State University of New York at Buffalo. He also holds an M.A. in English with a concentration in creative writing from Temple University and a B.A. in English and Psychology from Rutgers University.
Gillespie, the father of two sons, lives in Washington, DC, and Oxford, Ohio.
Nick Gillespie
Reason.tv: Pork Party House! Where DC Insiders Go for Tax-Subsidized Fun
by Nick GillespieFirst Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-N.Y.) surrenders his chairmanship of the Ways and Means Committee amid an ethics investigation. Now Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) proposes an idea that she hopes will help her make good on her promise to help lead “the most ethical Congress in history”—a party-wide ban on earmarks. Will it happen? Don’t bet on it. Reason.tv’s “Pork Party House” helps explain why neither party can resist the pull of pork.
If you’re a politician, lobbyist, or insider and you’re in the mood to party, check out a Washington D.C. mansion called the Sewall-Belmont House. Party with senators and celebrities at thousand-dollar-a-plate fundraisers! You might even get to ride a mechanical bull! The Sewall-Belmont House hosts so many A-list events, you might be surprised to find out that your tax dollars help fund this hotspot for Washington insiders. “Over the last 10 years, the Sewall-Belmont House has gotten over $3.4 million in earmarks,” says Leslie Paige of Citizens Against Government Waste.
Reporters often highlight the most ridiculous examples, but politicians have learned how to make their pork projects sound uncontroversial, even appealing. Just say your project will help children, senior citizens, or—if you really want to slip under the radar—direct taxpayer dough to a museum.
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Reason.tv: 3 Reasons Obama’s High-Speed Rail Will Go Nowhere Fast
by Nick GillespieSupertrain 2010 = Supertrain 1979!
President Barack Obama has pledged $8 billion in tax dollars to build a national network of high-speed rail—trains that can carry passengers at speeds in excess of 150 MPH.
But the Supertrain fantasy was a mistake back in the 1970s, when it gave rise to one of the most expensive—and rotten—TV shows in history. And it’s just as much of a wreck in the 21st century for at least three reasons:
1. The lowball costs. CNN estimates that delivering on the plan could cost well over $500 billion and take decades to build, all while failing to cover much of the country at all. Internationally, only two high-speed rail lines have recouped their capital costs and all depend on huge subsidies to stay in operation.
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Reason.tv: Billionaires vs. Brooklyn’s Best Bar – Eminent Domain Abuse in the Boro of Churches and Gin Mills
by Nick GillespieFreddy’s in Brooklyn is a happening place that has been named one of the city’s best bars by the Village Voice, Esquire, and The New York Times.
Unfortunately, Freddy’s—and the surrounding neighborhood—is smack-dab in the footprint of the Atlantic Yards project, a multi-million-dollar, 22-acre development that is intended to create “an urban utopia” in the language of developer Bruce Ratner, and a new, publicly subsidized home to Ratner’s Nets, who currently play NBA basketball (if you can call it that) in New Jersey.
But don’t mistake Atlantic Yards as one more instance of the market-driven transformations for which New York is rightly famous. It’s actually the latest case of eminent domain abuse, where private property is seized by the state on dubious grounds and then immediately handed over to private interests for private gain.
In this case, the Empire State Development Corporation has designated the thriving area as blighted to facilitate the taking of privately owned houses and businesses without having to pay full market value. Ratner, whose partners in the venture include rapper Jay Z and the Russian billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov, stands to pocket hundreds of millions of dollars on the deal, all thanks to the brute force of the state.
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Reason.tv: Nanny of the Month for February 2010!
by Nick Gillespie
Last month’s nannies pulled a modern-day Footloose by banning singing, dancing and rapping at new bars and restaurants—in Snoop Dog’s home, no less!
But what about this month?
Check out who’s pulling the plug on electric bingo machines (sorry charity fundraisers) and who won’t let pet stores sell dogs and cats (seriously?).
But the Nanny of the Month goes to the heartland pol who’s waging a very real war on fake pot (A.K.A. spice, K2, genie, black mamba, bliss, dragon, Bombay Blue …)
Ladies and gentlemen, we present Reason.tv’s Nanny of the Month for February 2010: Kansas State Rep. Robert Olson!
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Reason.tv: Treat Me Like a Dog!: What human health care can learn from pet care
by Nick GillespieWhen it comes to health care, who gets treated better—man or man’s best friend? Of course, it’s hard to make an apples-to-apples comparison when you’re comparing four-legged patients to people, and there are many ways in which human care tops pet care. But pet owners told Reason.tv there are some ways where it would be a step up to be treated like a dog.
Pet owners like the convenience of animal care; they also like the client-focused atmosphere. “I think one of the things that human health care can learn from veterinary medicine is the client service side of things, the relationship side of things,” says Dr. Peter Weinstein, executive director of the Southern California Veterinary Medical Association. Various reasons explain why people often find animal care so pleasant, says Weinstein. One reason—animal care workers love what they do. Another reason—competition.
Weinstein notes that vets work hard to differentiate themselves from their competitors because “there are a large number of vet hospitals, many located very closely to one another.” And vets know even more competitors could emerge because less red tape makes it easier to open an animal hospital. Weinstein recalls opening his clinic, which offered everything from X-rays to operations: “I believe it was 12 weeks from the time I signed the lease to the time I saw my first client. Try doing that with human health care.”
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Reason.tv: Pot Wars–Battleground California
by Nick GillespieOver the past couple of years, the medical marijuana industry in Los Angeles has exploded. Estimates vary, but there may be as many as 800 dispensaries currently open for business in the city of angels. An ordinance recently passed by the LA city council, however, is about to change all that.
The new ordinance will force hundreds of dispensaries to close and all but a few to relocate. The goal was to bring clarity to the medical marijuana industry, but the only thing that’s clear is that the transition process will be difficult.
Especially now that the DEA has begun raiding dispensaries again, despite the promises made by the Obama administration to respect state laws legalizing medical marijuana.
While federal, state and local governments struggle to make sense of medical marijuana laws, an increasing number of Californians support a completely different approach: marijuana legalization. Nothing more than a pipe dream? Maybe. But consider this: 56 percent of Californians currently support pot legalization, the same proportion of Californians who voted for the Compassionate Use Act, which legalized medical marijuana, back in 1996.
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Reason.tv: Net Neutrality For Dummies or, Will The FCC Control The Internet?
by Nick GillespieAl Gore says that legislation ensuring “net neutrality” is “needed for the revitalization of American democracy.” Techno-vegan Moby says without it, the “egalitarian” Internet would disappear. Even Mallory from Family Ties, Justine Bateman, thinks “the freedom to access the site of any organization from Planned Parenthood to the Christian Coalition is going to end.”
But just what the hell is net neutrality—and is all that is good and holy about the Internet really imperiled if legislation guaranteeing it isn’t passed?
Network neutrality is necessary, say its supporters, to make certain that all data on the Internet is treated equally and to protect users from information discrimination on the part of Internet service providers who will slow down or even block access to certain sites.
Reason.tv’s Michael C. Moynihan takes a skeptical look at the growing push for net neutrality legislation and asks Peter Suderman, a Reason associate editor who is closely following proposals on the topic, why Moby and Mallory want the Federal Communication Commission, of all agencies, to regulate the Internet.
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Reason.tv: Dramatic Olbermann vs. Dramatic Chipmunk or, Premature Obit for the Capt. Queeg of cable news
by Nick GillespieNo one is more self-dramatizing on cable news than male hysteric, unsolicited janitor of Cooperstown, and Countdown host Keith Olbermann, who includes more special effects during his Castro-length “Special Comment” segments than Mikhail Kalatozov did in I Am Cuba (one cinematically exemplary rant remains Commandante O’s multi-camera denouncement of Hillary Clinton during the 2008 campaign).
When Olbermann is not ripping “tea-baggers” (get it, har har har) or slagging honest reporters such as Miami Herald TV critic and Reason contributing editor Glenn Garvin (who committed the unpardonable crime of reporting that Olbermann donned a Bill O’Reilly mask and did Nazi salutes in front of a room full of TV critics), he is courageously taking a stand in favor of English-only at schools, judging Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News as “worse than Al Qaeda,” and extolling Sen. All Aboard Amtrak, Joe Biden, who embodies the Holy Trinity of Olbermannia: “passion, detail and eloquence.”
Countdown—it’s like Rupert Pupkin finally did get a talk show that could broadcast far past the paneled walls of Mom’s basement and reach most of the neighborhood—is must-see TV, as riveting as a nail gun powered by nuclear energy on steroids, the sort of can’t-turn-away-from-car-wreck-like commentary usually associated with CNN hosts who have actually been in car wrecks (like this guy and this one).
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Reason.tv: Will The Feds Ban Your Pain Meds?
by Nick GillespieWhat if you were injured and developed severe pain that wouldn’t go away? Would your government let you take the kind of pain medication you need? If federal officials follow the recommendation of a Food and Drug Administration panel, many of the most effective prescription painkillers—including Vicodin, Percocet, and countless generics—would be banned.
Scott Gardner says that kind of a move would be “intensely cruel.”
“I took Vicodin for three years,” says Gardner. “I needed it. It got me through a very tough period of my life.” The tough period began after a cycling accident shattered the left side of his body. After eight surgeries and countless hours of physical therapy, Gardner’s once active life is now filled with limitations. He suffers from chronic pain that prevents him from sleeping more than a few hours at a time, and yet his pain today is nothing compared to the agonizing days and months following his accident.
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Discussing Citizens United, Free Speech, Congressional Corruption, and More With Bill Moyers and Larry Lessig
by Nick GillespieOn Friday, I appeared on Bill Moyers Journal with Harvard law prof and cyberspace theorist Lawrence Lessig to discuss the whys and wherefores of the Citizens United Supreme Court ruling. From the show’s writeup:
The Supreme Court’s January 2010 decision of the Citizen’s United v. Federal Election Commission on campaign finance regulations has caused a stir around the political spectrum. A poll from Angus Reid Public Opinion found that 65 percent of people surveyed disagreed with the Supreme Court’s decision — 67 percent of Democrats, 63 percent of Republicans, and 72 percent of independents.
Libertarian journalist Nick Gillespie says all that worry is misplaced in a much-watched video “Three Reasons Not to Sweat Citizens United.” “If you want to get bent out of shape about something, direct your ire at a massive and constantly growing government that has its hands in virtually every aspect of economic and social life in America,” Says Gillespie.
Harvard legal scholar Lawrence Lessig disagrees, viewing the ruling as a another step in the takeover of democracy by big money. In an article for THE NATION entitled “How to Get Our Democracy Back: If You Want Change, You Have to Change Congress,” Lessig calls for a constitutional convention to make public financing of campaigns the law of the land, “What both sides must come to see is that the reform of neither is possible until we solve our first problem first — the dependency of the Fundraising Congress.”
As you might guess, we didn’t agree on much, but it was a spirited and civil conversation well worth having. A full transcript is available, along with video of the segment and links to related materials, by clicking on the image below.
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Reason.tv: 3 Reasons Not to Sweat Citizens United
by Nick GillespieNo recent Supreme Court ruling have evoked more liberal fury than Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, a campaign-finance case involving government censorship of a political documentary called Hillary: The Movie. The Federal Election Commission prevented the anti-Hillary Clinton film from being shown on television just before the 2008 Democratic primaries, a decision that was upheld by lower courts. Siding with The First Amendment, the Court struck down laws regulating independent political advertising by for-profit and non-profit corporations before an election even as they reaffirmed rules about disclosure and disclosures for ads and against direct corporate giving to candidates.
Critics fear that corporations will now overwhelm the political marketplace with commercials and advertisements that will program citizens to vote for whatever agenda “the corprations” want at a given moment.
MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann railed against the decision, calling it “a Supreme Court-sanctioned murder of what little democracy is left in this democracy” and comparing it to the notorious Dred Scott decision, which ruled that had no rights under the Constitution. His fellow corporate media host at MSNBC, Rachel Maddow, exclaimed, “If you are a regular person who has ever made a campaign donation before, forget about ever having to do that again. What’s the point?”
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Reason.tv: Obama’s Doublethink Doubletalk (SOTU Remix)
by Nick GillespieGeorge Orwell defined doublethink as “the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.
When it comes to war, spending, and more, President Barack Obama’s 2010 State of the Union address showed that doublethink is alive and well in Washington, D.C.
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Reason.tv’s Nanny of the Month for Jan. 2010 (Are you outraged Snoop Dogg?)
by Nick Gillespie
Past Reason.tv Nannies of The Month have included New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg (anti-salt, smoking, trans fat, you name it), a New York state senator who wanted to ban fish pedicures, and a Phoenix pol who banned churches from feeding the hungry on their own property.
So who is the first Nanny of The Month of this brand-new, sparking decade? Well, it’s NOT Brownsville, Texas, for banning plastic shopping bags. And it’s NOT Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R-Calif.) for terminating trans fat in the Golden State.
But it IS a town council somewhere in California that banned something natural and pure. And it does involved the great rapper Snoop Dogg (though not in the way you might think).
Click through to find out. Approximately one minute.
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Reason.tv: Celebrating Obama’s Surprising Jobs Program Successes
by Nick GillespieThe president has increased opportunities in at least three different fields.
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Reason.tv: Virginia is For (Liquor) Lovers!
by Nick GillespieHe’s also the new Republican governor of Virginia and is taking aim at the commonwealth’s oppressive and inefficient state-owned liquor monopoly. More than a dozen states still completely control the sales and distribution of all distilled spirits.
The result? Higher payrolls for state governments (state-workers are public-sector employees after all) and rotten selection and service for customers (state-sanctioned monopolies tend to diminish the shopping experience).
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Che Guevara’s History: First Time as Tragedy, Second Time as Greeting Cards
by Nick GillespieHow resilient is the ghost of Ernesto “Che” Guevara, the Argentine-born Marxist revolutionary who ably assisted the Castro brothers’ sadly successful mission to turn Cuba into an island hellhole? His legend survives even a lackluster, long-winded biopic released in 2008 and now just out on DVD.
More important, Che’s legend survives the facts of his own life. Born in 1928 and gunned down in 1967 by drunken Bolivian soldiers, Che rarely missed an opportunity to make life miserable for those who opposed him. During the fight against the Batista regime, Che ordered the summary executions of dozens of real and suspected enemies, becoming the very thing he said revolutionaries must be: a “cold-blooded killing machine.” As a leader in post-Revolution Cuba, Che became known as the “butcher of La Cabaña” prison, where he oversaw hundreds of murders of political prisoners and “counter-revolutionaries.”
When he became the effective czar of the Cuban economy and attempted to create a “new man and woman,” or workers fueled by revolutionary ideals rather than conventional workplace incentives, his plans failed catastrophically and helped make Cuba the economic basket case it remains to this day. Along the way, Che did more than his share to help ban rock and jazz music as “imperialist” forms of expression. Such actions mark Che less as the youthful idealist portrayed in the acclaimed film version of his own Motorcycle Diaries and more as a repressive, murderous thug, a Caribbean version of the Taliban.
By the mid-1960s, Che left Cuba to export armed revolution to Africa and South America, all without success. If his violent death at 39 secured his romantic martyrdom to a cause that now thankfully flourishes only in Cuba and North Korea, it is his iconic, beret-bedecked image from a 1960 photo that persists everywhere in popular culture, from Mike Tyson’s torso (the boxer sports a tattoo of Mao along with Che) to beer and booze labels to belt buckles to the T-shirts worn around the world. Despite Che’s pronounced contempt for rock music, Carlos Santana wore a Che T-shirt during a performance at the 2005 Academy Awards ceremony. Other invocations of the Che image, such as the image above from a greeting card line that features a dog as Che, suggest unconscious (or at least unknowing) parody.
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Obamanomics: Crony Capitalism Disguised as Progressive Reforms
by Nick GillespieIn his new book Obamanomics: How Barack Obama is Bankrupting You and Enriching His Wall Street Friends, Corporate Lobbyists, and Union Bosses, Timothy P. Carney explains that Barack Obama’s “progressive” rhetoric masks good old-fashioned crony capitalism, in which the favored few and politcally well-connected get all sorts of benefits paid for with public dollars. Whether the area is Wall Street, health care reform, union organizing, or K Street lobbying, the same pattern is everywhere: using the government’s power to distribute goodies and rig markets.
A columnist at the Washington Examiner and a non-partisan reporter, Carney also lays into the Republican Party for its massive contribution to the problem when it wielded power. Carney provides a game plan to take the country back and restore truly free markets that will benefit everyone.
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Three Reasons Why Obama and The Dems Are in Big, Big Trouble.
by Nick GillespieOver at Reason.com, my colleague Matt Welch and I list three basic reasons why the Dems are in big, big trouble. And one reason why they’re not:
Martha Coakley’s resounding defeat in the Massachusetts Senate race is hardly the sort of anniversary gift President Barack Obama could have predicted. Yet there it was, wrapped in a bow and plopped on his doorstep like a flaming bag of dog poo to mark the end of his first year in office.
Among other things, Scott Brown’s upset victory means that Obama, who flew up to the Bay State to campaign for the deservedly doomed Coakley in the race’s twilight, is zero for three when it comes to high-profile two-minute drills for beloved causes (remember getting Chicago the Olympics and putting together a global carbon deal at the U.N climate conference in Copenhagen?).
There are at least three basic reasons, plain as the nose on your face, that the Democrats and Obama are in trouble for the near future:
1. Health care reform is not popular. An ABC News/Washington Post poll published on January 19 has 51 percent against current congressional plans and just 44 percent in favor, numbers that haven’t moved in a month. Other polls show even greater percentages oppose the plan, with all the trend lines over the past year working heavily against the Democrats.
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Reason.tv: Real World DC (Health Care Remix)
by Nick GillespieComing this winter to C-SPAN:
The true story… of 535 politicians…picked to live in two houses…work together and their lives taped…to find out what happens…when Congress stops being polite…and starts secret, detailed negotiations on a sweeping, transformative health care reform bill…This is the real Real World DC.
Featuring Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Charles Rangel, Robert Byrd, Barney Frank, Max Baucus…and billions of taxpayer dollars.
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Reason.tv: We’re The TSA And You Can Count On Us!
by Nick GillespieWe’re the Transportation Security Administration. We’re working hard to make sure you enjoy a safe flight. And while we cannot apprehend every terrorist, you can count on us to do what we’re trained to do whenever there’s a security breach–overreact to tiny threats.
Overreact to tiny threats; ignore the big ones. That’s what we do, and we do it better than anyone.
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