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Charles Krauthammer Goes "Hard Left" and Rants Against Domestic Drones: Or, Killing People Abroad is Okay, But Spying at Home is Wrong

Posted on May 16, 2012, 10:30PM | Lucy Steigerwald

America is currently in a bit of a freaking out over domestic drones phase. The mostly ignoring the murderous effects of drones overseas, even in countries like Pakistan and Yemen where America is still not technically at war, that bit continues.

A perfect example of the disconnect between something being okay when used on alleged enemies but an utter outrage when used against Americans is the recent comments by syndicated columnist Charles Krathaummer on America's rapidly approaching future of drone-filled skies. This by the way, noted Slate, keep coming closer:

On Monday, the FAA released new rules governing the use of surveillance drones (or unmanned aerial vehicles) by domestic public safety agencies, such as law enforcement and fire departments. Interested agencies can apply for expedited approval of drones weighing up to 25 pounds.  The drones may not fly higher than 400 feet and must be in sight of an operator at all times. They also cannot fly near airports.

Krauthammer, who has a pretty high tolerance for American intervention overseas (and occasionally waves away Congressional safeguards like the War Powers Act because to declare war properly is archaic)went down-right libertarian recently on the question of whether drones should be come a normal part of the skies, the horizen, and the purple mountains' majesty. Because dammit, war is different, but at home, well, Americans live there.

So Krathaummer went on Fox News this week and told Brett Baier:

I'm going to go hard left on you here, I'm going ACLU. I don't want regulations, I don't want restrictions, I want a ban on this. Drones are instruments of war. The Founders had a great aversion to any instruments of war, the use of the military inside even the United States. It didn't like standing armies, it has all kinds of statutes of using the army in the country.

To further lampshade the point, Krauthammer also said:

It ought to be used in Somalia, to hunt the bad guys, but not in America. I don't want to see it hovering over anybody's home. 

Somalia! There's the third in the trifecta of countries that get drone-attacks, but no declarations of war. 

Krauthammer went on to bemoan the fact that London has a terrifying amount of CCTV cameras and generally went on a bizarrely great (given his history) pro-privacy and pro-liberty rant. He also said he predicted "the first guy who uses a second amendment weapon to bring a drone down that's been hovering over his house will be a folk hero in this country." Though he was not "encouraging" it, Krauthammer added. 

Krauthammer was part of a larger panel, and it was an interesting one and in some ways was a libertarian's dream. The Daily Caller's man in charge, Tucker Carlson, also spoke out strongly in favor of privacy and an across-the-board ban of domestic drone use, as well as opposition to the militarization of police.

But there's still that fun-house quality of being all for freedoms and safeguards for Americans, but never mind these drones raining hellfire missiles from above upon people who live very far away indeed. 

Friend of and contributor to Reason, Andrew Napolitano also went on Fox News this week to talk drones. He, unsurprisingly said that warrant-less surveillance of Americans is illegal. Napolitano also echoed Krauthammer's sentiments that the response to an American shooting down a drone would be a folk hero status (this is possibly giving Americans too much credit). Napolitano at least managed to drop a disparaging comment about the illegal war in Libya before he linked rhetorical arms with Krathaummer and said he was quite right to be nervous and outraged (I don't think the two of them often agree on things).

It's nice that Krauthammer is on the side of this, with his righteous and sensible paranoia Even if, as Conor Friedersdorf pointed out, it's kind of horrific that to be opposed to this kind of thing is to be "hard-left". Still, Krauthammer's thesis needs no digging or inference to find; To spy on Americans without cause is a monstrous violation. To kill foreigners without even an official declaration of war is just the correct use of such a technology.

Meanwhile, a drone is credited with the December surveillance-gathering in Iraq that lead to Turkish airstrikes which killed 30 civilians. 

Reason on drones 

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Republicans Vitter, Murkowski Demand More Stimulus

Posted on May 16, 2012, 9:12PM | Tim Cavanaugh

TransCanada Corp. is reapplying for a federal permit to build the Keystone XL oil pipeline, and there are plenty of good conservative reasons to urge President Obama — who kiboshed Keystone in January — to allow it this time. Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) and Sen. David Vitter (R-Louisiana) manage to find none of them: 

The reasons for approving the pipeline are straightforward: It’s a shovel-ready project that’s great for our economy. It would bring oil from Canada to Gulf Coast refineries, and would pick up American oil produced in Montana, South Dakota and Nebraska along the way.

Keystone XL is exactly the type of world-class, private-sector infrastructure project that a nation mired in debt, deeply dependent on expensive foreign oil and desperate for jobs should embrace. Its construction would ensure a secure, long-term supply of oil from a close ally and provide well-paying jobs for thousands of Americans. 

Writing in the Washington Times, Murkowski and Vitter make no mention of free markets in energy or free trade, nor do they appear disposed to believe the state should avoid interfering in peaceful commerce between its citizens and those of other countries. There isn't even a to-be-sure in there noting the concerns of property owners whose lives and livelihoods stand in the way of the world-class transnational project.

Instead, Keystone XL is worth doing because it's a "shovel ready...infrastructure project" that would boost "our economy" and "provide well-paying jobs." Why not throw in a "multiplier effect" and a "summer of recovery" while you're at it? 

I recently changed my registration to Republican, so maybe I'm overly sensitive when my new GOP buddies talk like Democrats. Undoubtedly the party of constitutional principle and limited government can make real arguments for Obama to allow the project? Sure enough, Murkowski and Vitter have another big reason for supporting Keystone: Because if our government doesn't protect our economy, the Chinese will come and take it: 

At least two projects are now under way that will allow Canada to send more of its oil through alternative pipelines to ports on its west coast, where it can be shipped to markets in Asia.

Chief among those markets is China, which Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper visited just days after Mr. Obama’s initial rejection of Keystone. There’s no question China wants oil - from Canada and anywhere else it can get it. China is already investing heavily in the Canadian energy sector and appears eager to take on the vast supply of Alberta oil that the Obama administration has rejected.

Canada is taking notice - and taking steps to ensure it can meet China’s growing appetite for energy. The latest budget introduced by Canada’s federal government would reduce both the amount of time it takes to complete environmental assessments and the number of reviewers. Mr. Harper and others in Canada’s government clearly recognize the potential for long-term economic prosperity that increased oil production can bring.

America is now in a race with China for Canada’s substantial energy resources. 

I have no hope for any of the Murkowskis, but Vitter voted against TARP and gets a grade of 85 percent (an uncharacterized B!) from Club for Growth. In the Senate, he's what passes for pro-market. The Washington Times isn't exactly the Democrat-controlled media. If there's any place to make the argument that Canadian oil sheikhs in their toques have a right to do business south of the border, this is it.

Instead, Vitter and Murkowski urge the president to approve Keystone for the jobs and the China-bashing. He's already got his union cronies telling him that. 

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Of Course Foreclosure Settlement Money Isn't Going to People With Foreclosures

Posted on May 16, 2012, 7:35PM | Scott Shackford

Foreclosed-upon homeowners who thought their state governments would deliver on promises to help victims of alleged foreclosure abuse may not get their bailout. As The New York Times reports, funds from the settlement between state attorneys general and five banks that the AGs claimed would deliver "as much as $25 billion in relief to distressed borrowers" are going elsewhere:

The settlement, reached in February after a year of talks and intervention by the Obama administration, was the second-largest in history involving the states, trailing the tobacco industry settlement, and represented the first large-scale commitment by banks to provide direct aid to borrowers.

As part of the settlement, the banks agreed to pay the states $2.5 billion, money intended to help homeowners and mitigate the effects of the foreclosure surge. …

Only 27 states have devoted all their funds from the banks to housing programs, according to a report by Enterprise Community Partners, a national affordable housing group. So far about 15 states have said they will use all or most of the money for other purposes.

Gov. Jerry Brown is proposing redirecting the $410 million California is expecting in his revised budget released this week. Where is the money going to?

• $41.1 million to the Unfair Competition Law Fund to offset costs of California Department of Justice programs
• $49.9 million the Department of Justice’s Public Rights and Law Enforcement programs for consumer fraud enforcement and litigation
• $8.2 million to the Department of Fair Employment and Housing to fight housing discrimination
• $198 million in debt service for housing programs passed by initiatives unrelated to the foreclosure crisis
• The rest will be rolled over to pay similar expenses in next year's budget

So Brown is proposing paying for the state’s own lawyers so they can sue more people in the future rather than the already extant victims of any sort of foreclosure abuse. How … nice for them. It’s like the outcome of a class action lawsuit.

But Brown lacks the nerve of Republican Georgia Governor Nathan Deal, who wants to use the $99 million as a slush development fund to lure new businesses to the state:

“The governor has decided to use the discretionary money for economic development,” said a spokesman for Nathan Deal, Georgia’s governor, a Republican. “He believes that the best way to prevent foreclosures amongst honest homeowners who have experienced hard times is to create jobs here in our state.”

Andy Schneggenburger, the executive director of the Atlanta Housing Association of Neighborhood-Based Developers, said the decision showed “a real lack of comprehension of the depths of the foreclosure problem.”

How could Deal's plan possibly go wrong?

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Union-Busting Scott Walker is Not a Job Killer After All

Posted on May 16, 2012, 6:17PM | Shikha Dalmia

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker is taking no chances in the union-instigated recall election he is facing in early June. He won more votes than all of the other Democratic candidates combined in the primary last week, prompting Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s Craig Gilbert to remark:

It’s just not normal in politics for a major incumbent with token opposition to generate turnout on a par with a heavily contested race in the other party. It was an unexpected turnout bomb, a demonstration of Walker’s greatest political asset, even greater than his considerable money advantage -- the ability to mobilize his base.

And after being in a statistical dead-heat for a while with Tom Barrett, his Democratic challenger, he has now opened a six-point lead. Still, one of the raps against Walker is that his attacks on public sector union collective bargaining rights had yielded no economic benefits for the state.

Walker had been arguing that controlling government spending by making it difficult for public unions to negotiate lavish wages and benefits would allow the state to control taxes and attract business. Wisconsin’s business taxes are among the worst in the country. And according to the Tax Foundation, in 2009 Wisconsin had the fourth-highest combined state and local tax burden in the country, with only New Jersey, New York, and Connecticut residents paying more, as Nick Gillespie pointed out.

But months after the union reforms, Wisconsin’s job situation had deteriorated. Walker had promised to create 250,000 during his campaign. Instead he lost 33,900 jobs in his first full year from December 2010 to December 2011 – many of them, incidentally, in the private sector. At least that’s what his opponents claimed.

But they turned out to be quite wrong.

Their job loss figures, it seems, were estimated from a sample of 3.5 percent of Wisconsin’s businesses. However, new numbers released by the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages which are based on an actual count of all state businesses found that far from losing jobs, Wisconsin gained 23,321 jobs. This is not great. But it is heck of a lot better than losing jobs. And it'll make Wisconsin’s unemployment rate – already about a point and a half less than the national average – even better.

It is unusual for a state to release these figures before they are vetted and blessed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Hence, Walker’s opponents, who have been accusing him of killing jobs, are now accusing him of – gasp! – playing politics. But just how foul is Walker’s move? This is what the Bureau told the Milwaukee Sentinel Journal via email: “No, BLS does not have any concerns. Wisconsin is free to publish its data as it wishes.”

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Federal Judge Allows Class Action Challenging the NYPD's Stop-and-Frisk Program

Posted on May 16, 2012, 6:11PM | Jacob Sullum

Today a federal judge certified a class action lawsuit challenging the New York Police Department's "stop and frisk" program, which is on track to break last year's record for harassing people whom cops deem suspicious. Last year, the New York Civil Liberties Union reports, there were 685,724 stops, most of which involved pat-downs ostensibly aimed at discovering weapons. Nine out of 10 stops resulted in no arrest or summons, while 98 percent of the searches yielded no weapons (which Mayor Michael Bloomberg says just shows you how effective the program is). Eighty-seven percent of the people stopped were black or Latino.

In a 2008 lawsuit on behalf of four innocent New Yorkers who were detained, questioned, and (in three cases) searched by the NYPD, the Center for Constitutional Rights argues that police routinely stop people without the "reasonable suspicion" they are supposed to have under Terry v. Ohio, the 1968 Supreme Court decision on which the legal rationale for the program depends. The complaint says this practice violates the Fourth Amendment's ban on "unreasonable searches and sezures" and, because of the focus on racial minorities, the 14th Amendment's guarantee of equal protection.  

In allowing the lawsuit to proceed as a class action, U.S. District Judge Shira Scheindlin emphasized that "suspicionless stops should never occur." She castigated the cty for its "cavalier attitude towards the prospect of a 'widespread practice of suspicionless stops,'" which she said "displays a deeply troubling apathy towards New Yorkers' most fundamental constitutional rights." She said a class action, which could cover hundreds of thousands of people (since there have been millions of stops since 2004), is appropriate partly because "the vast majority of New Yorkers who are unlawfully stopped will never bring suit to vindicate their rights." If the plaintiffs can show that the department is "engaging in a widespread practice of unlawful stops," Scheindlin said, "an injunction seeking to curb that practice is not a 'judicial intrusion into a social institution' [as the city argued] but a vindication of the Constitution and an exercise of the courts' most important function: protecting individual rights in the face of the government's malfeasance." 

Last week Mayor Bloomberg defended the stop-and-frisk program, which he said is not about catching bad guys but about deterring them from carrying guns, in the same way that sobriety checkpoints are supposed to discourage people from driving while intoxicated. As I pointed out, that analogy to random traffic stops, which the Supreme Court has allowed in the special case of checkpoints aimed at catching drunk drivers but not for the sake of detecting crime in general, seemingly concedes the argument underlying this lawsuit: that police are stopping and frisking people without reasonable suspicion, which is clearly unconstitutional. Notably, the one named plaintiff in this case who was not frisked repeatedly told police he did not consent to a search, and his refusal was observed by several witnesses, whose presence apparently prompted the cops to move along. Nothing to see here.

Prevous coverage of stop and frisk here.

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Cathy Young on Liberal Intolerance and the Firing of Naomi Schaefer Riley

Posted on May 16, 2012, 6:00PM

There is much handwringing today, both from liberals and disaffected conservatives, about the deplorable intellectual climate on the right: blinkered ideology, disdain for facts, demonization of opponents. Sure enough, such behavior is depressingly common. But does the left behave differently when its sacred cows are being gored? For a stark reminder that "liberal intolerance" is real, writes Cathy Young, look at the brouhaha over Naomi Schaefer Riley's ejection from the Chronicle of Higher Education blog, Brainstorm, after she criticized the left-wing bias currently prevalent in black studies doctoral programs.

View this article.

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Can Mitt Romney Capitalize on Public Opposition to ObamaCare?

Posted on May 16, 2012, 5:17PM | Peter Suderman

A Washington Post poll released today asked respondents whether, overall, they have a “favorable or unfavorable impression of Mitt Romney’s proposal to repeal the federal law making changes in the the health care system.” Predictably, self-described Republicans reported highly favorable views and Democrats reported highly negative views. What was interesting was that while independents were somewhat more evenly divided, 47 percent responded that they held unfavorable views of Romney’s repeal proposal while just 33 percent responded favorably.

So does this mean that independents don’t want to see ObamaCare struck down? I doubt it, because the result doesn’t match other polls. But it could mean that independents won’t support Mitt Romney in repealing the law.

Much has been made of the health care overhaul’s unpopularity amongst independents, so if independents really had shifted to favor the law, that would be big news. But there’s not much reason to think that’s the case. Most polls have consistently shown that between 35 and 40 percent of independents support the law. The most recent edition of the Kaiser health tracking poll, a monthly survey of views on health policy, reported in April that just 39 percent of independents support the law. There are swings in support — in January, for example, only 30 percent of independents responded favorably, while in February and March 40 percent said they held positive opinions about the law. But in general, independent support for the law has remained stuck roughly in the high 30s since the summer of 2010.

More to the point, Kaiser’s April survey also shows that independents have no problem with seeing the law struck from the books entirely: 18 percent said they’d be enthusiastic about seeing the whole law struck down by the Supreme Court; 34 percent said they would be satisfied with that result, though not enthusiastic. That’s 52 percent of independents who would be basically pleased with seeing the entire law struck down, compared with just 42 percent who said they would be either disappointed or angry. This is not a group of people either generally supportive of the health law or broadly opposed to the possibility that it might be taken down.

So what gives? Obviously there’s no way to be sure, but the Post’s poll frames the question in a slightly odd way. Rather than ask about support for the law, or generalized support for repeal, it asks respondents for their impression of “Mitt Romney’s proposals to repeal the federal law making changes in the health care system.” My guess is that framing it as “Mitt Romney’s plan” makes it less appealing, especially since we already know that Romney is running slightly behind Obama in terms of overall approval on health care issues.

The upshot here isn’t that independents suddenly don’t oppose ObamaCare. It’s that Mitt Romney may not be able to capitalize on longstanding opposition to the law by those who consider themselves independents.

Thanks to Scott Winship of Brookings for pointing out the Post’s survey question.

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Government Lawyer Concedes There's No Way To Escape the No-Fly List

Posted on May 16, 2012, 5:13PM | J.D. Tuccille

The American Civil Liberties Union is currently in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals representing a group of Americans and legal U.S. residents who believe they're on government watch lists, including the no-fly list, and want to find out why. Just as important, they want access to a means of getting off those lists. As it is, the goverment's redress procedures are a little opaque, including the warning, "Because the contents of the consolidated terrorist watchlist are derived from classified and sensitive law enforcement and intelligence information, the [Terrorist Screening Center] cannot confirm or deny whether an individual is on the watchlist." The ACLU is looking for something a tad more informative and effective to help people who'd like to know why federal officials won't let them onto airplanes and what they can do about it.

The ACLU blog reports this interesting exchange in the course of arguments this past Friday:

Chief Judge Alex Kozinski had a simple question for the government attorney: what would you do if you found yourself on the No Fly List? After some hemming and hawing, the attorney said that he would seek “redress” from the Department of Homeland Security – even though DHS does not place people on the No Fly list and has no authority to remove them (that’s the FBI’s job). Because, the lawyer conceded, DHS would not be able to confirm or deny whether he was on the list, he would then seek review in a federal appellate court. And what would the court be able to do?, asked Judge Kozinski. Not much, said the government lawyer. In fact, the lawyer would not even concede that a federal court possessed the authority to order someone removed from the No Fly List.

Invoking Kafka tends to draw the oh-so-jaded cliché police, but it seems appropriate enough here. As the ACLU's Ben Wizner notes, "The Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment doesn’t have very many words, but if those words are to retain their meaning, the Ninth Circuit will have to put a check on the government’s ability to blacklist its citizens without recourse."

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Tax Revolt Italian-Style, Ron Paul Urges Supporters To Play Nice, Marijuana Wins in Oregon AG Race: P.M. Links

Posted on May 16, 2012, 4:30PM | J.D. Tuccille

• Offices of Equitalia, Italy's version of the IRS, have been hit with attacks including firebombings. The government is considering deploying the army, which should certainly calm the opposition.
• His eye on the Republican National Convention, Ron Paul urges his supporters to rein-in their contempt for the GOP establishment. Manners, kids.
• With Greece floundering politically and economicallly, pundits have coined the amazingly awkward term "Grexit" to describe the country's anticipated departure from the eurozone. The Portuguese insist, no way, no how, will they be next.
• In the disciplinary hearing of Regina Tasca, a New Jersey police officer suspended for intervening in the beating two colleagues were giving an emotionally disturbed man, one of the cops she pulled away described her actions as "assault." Despite her ordeal, Tasca doesn't regret her good deed.
• The ACLU warned the State Department that firing Peter Van Buren, an employee suspended for criticizing reconstruction efforts in Iraq, would violate constitutional free-speech guarantees.
• SpaceX's unmanned Dragon capsule received final approval to dock with the International Space Station after its scheduled Saturday launch.
• Former Oregon Court of Appeals judge Ellen Rosenblum, a supporter of medical marijuana, won the Democratic primary race for attorney general of Oregon, in a race in which marijuana policy featured prominently.

Do you want hot links and other Reason goodies delivered to your inbox twice a day? Sign up here for Reason's morning and afternoon news updates.

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Ronald Bailey on Rule of Law in China

Posted on May 16, 2012, 4:30PM

The fall of a Communist princeling and the jailing of a blind pauper suggest that China remains a "natural state" arbitrarily ruled by an elite that plunders the wealth its citizens produce. Reason Science Correspondent Ronald Bailey finds not much hope that China is transitioning to an open society governed by the rule of law, making its future prospects dim.

View this article.

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Another Pot Poll Out Today: 65 Percent of New Hampshire Residents Support Legalizing Medical Marijuana

Posted on May 16, 2012, 3:42PM | Mike Riggs

Hot on the heels of MPP's poll showing national support for ending federal raids of medical marijuana businesses comes new data from Public Policy Polling, which finds that"65% of [New Hampshire] voters support legalizing medical marijuana, [with] 24% opposed. That includes more than 70% of Democrats and independents and even a plurality of GOP voters (46/43)."

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How Food Truck Regulations Strangle Small Businesses and Stifle Competition

Posted on May 16, 2012, 3:05PM | Damon W. Root

Writing at Crain’s Chicago Business, Beth Kregor of the Institute for Justice takes aim at Chicago’s burdensome laws regulating street food. As she notes:

Far from granting mobile food vendors an unfair advantage, Chicago's street food laws are the worst of any major city: outlawing preparation of food to order, operation before 10 a.m. or after 10 p.m., service within 200 feet of a restaurant and parking longer than two hours.

Kregor’s column was written response to an earlier piece by Chicago restaurant owner Glenn Keefer, who complained that “renegade” food trucks will cut into his and other restaurant owners’ profits, and therefore urged the city to adopt a strict licensing regime that would reduce the number of street food vendors in the name of preventing “unfair competition.” Kregor explains why the city should reject this bogus protectionist plan:

Contrary to Mr. Keefer's suggestions, mobile food entrepreneurs contribute to the economy like all small businesses do. They create jobs for themselves and their teams. They feed the local economy by contracting with suppliers. They pay sales taxes. And they test out new ideas that could grow into big businesses someday.

True, they do not pay real estate taxes on storefronts, but they also do not have storefronts. (Maybe it's unfair that downtown storefronts pay so much in taxes, but that is a reason to change tax policy, not to suppress creative new businesses that are not subject to those taxes.)

For more on the government crackdown on food trucks, see here.

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41 Percent Say It's OK to Pay Organ Donors in Cash Money

Posted on May 16, 2012, 2:55PM | Katherine Mangu-Ward

At long last, Americans are warming up to the idea of a market for all of the spare kidneys, bone marrow, liver chunks, and other life-saving organs that walking, talking, still-alive humans have to offer. 

NPR asked 3,000 people what they thought about compensating live donors. A surprising 41 percent said they were OK with the idea of paying cash for organs.

As of today, there are 114,349 people on the donor waiting list, more than 50,000 of whom are waiting for kidneys. And there are an awful lot of people walking around with a perfectly good spare one. Like Associate Editor Mike Riggs, for instance.

And while compensating kidney and liver donors is still illegal in the United States, a U.S. District Court recently ruled that some types of bone marrow donors may be compensated in a manner similar to blood, egg, and sperm donors.

NPR's numbers echo finding from a March Reason-Rupe poll, which found that:

A majority of Americans (55%) favor allowing healthy people under medical supervision to sell their organs to patients who need them for transplants. 

As in the Reason-Rupe poll, NPR found that younger people were more comfortable with the idea of paying donors.

The breakdown of approval for the different kinds of compensation is particularly interesting.

If compensation took the form of credits for health care needs, about 60 percent of Americans would support it. Tax credits and tuition reimbursement were viewed favorably by 46 percent and 42 percent, respectively. Cash for organs was seen as OK by 41 percent of respondents.

Tax credits, which are essentially identical to cash, earn an extra 5 percent approval. Perhaps people feel more comfortable laundering payments through the government?

But when the compensation is in the form of health services, the approval number shoots way up, which seems bizarre. Wouldn't the result be to incentivize donations from people who otherwise lack a way to pay for necessary health care? One explanation may be that people prefer to think of transactions involving organs as gifts (donations, you might even say). As gifts, they are part of the gift economy, in which there is a great deal of deadweight loss, but also lots of social face-saving. (Think about the difference between offering a woman $100 after spending the night together or sending an expensive bouquet to her office the next day.) But when it comes to organ donation, the face-saving could come at a cost of life-saving.

For a great piece that makes the case for calling a sale a sale, check out this Reason story by Kerry Howley on her experience as an egg "donor."

Reason TV was on the kidney selling beat back in 2008:

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Three Reasons to Reject Federal Hate Crime Charges Against George Zimmerman

Posted on May 16, 2012, 2:19PM | Jacob Sullum

WFTV, the ABC affiliate in Orlando, reports that the FBI is looking for evidence to support federal hate crime charges against George Zimmerman for shooting Trayvon Martin on February 26. Three reasons it should stop:

1. There is very little evidence that Zimmerman hates black people, let alone that he shot Martin because he hates black people.

2. In the absence of a legal justification (such as self-defense), killing people should be a crime, but hating them because of their skin color should not be. By treating crimes more severely when they are motivated by bigotry, hate crime laws effectively punish people for their beliefs.

3. Federal hate crime laws are even worse, because they expose defendants to double jeopardy (although the courts deny this reality by calling it "dual sovereignty"). The federal investigation means that even if a Florida jury acquits Zimmerman of second-degree murder and manslaughter, he can be tried again for the same crime (killing Martin) under a different label (a possibility I noted two months ago).

Meanwhile, ABC reports that newly revealed medical evidence supports Zimmerman's self-defense claim:

A medical report compiled by the family physician of Trayvon Martin shooter George Zimmerman and obtained exclusively by ABC News found that Zimmerman was diagnosed with a "closed fracture" of his nose, a pair of black eyes, two lacerations to the back of his head and a minor back injury the day after he fatally shot Martin during an alleged altercation....

The record shows that Zimmerman also suffered bruising in the upper lip and cheek and lower back pain. The two lacerations on the back of his head, one of them nearly an inch long, the other about a quarter-inch long, were first revealed in photos obtained exclusively by ABC News last month.

These injuries, the very existence of which lawyers for Martin's family questioned, are consistent with Zimmerman's story, although hardly conclusive evidence that he is telling the truth about his fight with Martin. But if this evidence, together with everything else Zimmerman presents in his defense, persuades a jury to acquit him, the Justice Department reserves the right to try, try again. Should Zimmerman be convicted of murder as a federal hate crime, WFTV notes, "he could face the death penalty."

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Sheldon Richman Asks if Obama Is "Evolving" His Position on the War on Drugs

Posted on May 16, 2012, 1:30PM

Much is made of how President Obama’s position on same-sex marriage has “evolved” to an endorsement of legalization. One hopes his position on the atrocity called the “war on drugs” is evolving as well, writes Sheldon Richman. 

View this article.

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Another Exhibit Against Florida's Self-Defense Law Disintegrates

Posted on May 16, 2012, 1:05PM | Jacob Sullum

Two years ago, the Tampa Bay Times ran a story that has been widely cited since George Zimmerman's February 26 shooting of Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida. "Five years since Florida enacted 'stand-your-ground' law," the headline announced, "justifiable homicides are up." That trend in itself, of course, does not tell us whether the 2005 changes to Florida's self-defense law, which included eliminating the "duty to retreat" for people attacked in public places and beefing up the "castle doctine" for people facing intruders in their homes, were wise or misguided. In fact, if justifiable homicides had not increased, that would suggest the amendments had not affected the disposition of criminal cases, and one might reasonably wonder why it was necessary to change the law. But the Tampa Bay Times put a decidedly sinister spin on the increase in successful claims of self-defense, suggesting that the law had "cheapened human life," encouraging unnecessary escalations of violence and enabling people responsible for them to avoid punishment. Its leading example was a a September 2010 altercation at a Valrico park in which 69-year-old Trevor Dooley killed his 41-year-old neighbor David James by shooting him in the chest. Dooley had been charged with manslaughter, but the paper suggested he would avoid prosecution by arguing that he reasonably believed deadly force was necessary to prevent Dooley from killing or seriously injuring him. The final sentence said: "Whether he is punished for gunning down a father in front of his daughter in a park on a sunny Sunday afternoon will more than likely come down to what he says he was thinking in those few seconds before a man died."

Actually, no. As the same paper reported yesterday, a judge rejected Dooley's self-defense claim after a pretrial hearing, meaning he will be prosecuted for manslaughter. It is not hard to see why. Dooley and James, who was playing basketball at the park with his 8-year-old daughter, got into an argument after Dooley told a teenager he was breaking park rules by riding his skateboard on the basketball court and James intervened on the skateboarder's behalf. Here are details that emerged at the pretrial hearing, where Dooley had to show "by a preponderance of the evidence" that his use of force was justified:

Danielle James, now 10, said she remembers little about the shooting. She remembers Dooley saying he didn't want to fight. She doesn't remember seeing a gun, or hearing threats. What she remembers most was a gunshot.

In his own testimony in February, Dooley admitted shooting James. He said he had no choice, that James had a hand around his throat. "He was killing me," Dooley testified. "My finger was on the trigger. I shot."

But three witnesses, including the 14-year-old skateboarder Dooley was trying to shoo away, testified that Dooley first flashed a gun at James, then pulled it from his pants when James stepped toward him. They said they didn't see James choke Dooley. They said James tried to wrest the gun away.

Hillsborough Circuit Judge Ashley Moody concluded "there was no reasonable belief that deadly force was required." She found that "Mr. James was justified in grabbing [Dooley] because defendant had reached for and pulled out a gun to confront Mr. James." Although Dooley had a concealed carry permit and had a right to be in the park, she said, he broke the law by brandishing his gun without cause. If so, he was "engaged in an unlawful activity," meaning that under Florida's law he lost his right to stand his ground, which in any case does not seem relevant to his defense. If James really was strangling Dooley (which witnesses say they did not see), James did not have the option of safely retreating. Likewise in the Trayvon Martin case if we believe Zimmerman's account (a big if), since he says the teenager was on top of him, slamming his head on the pavement, when he fired his gun. Zimmerman also says he worried that Martin might grab his gun, but the Dooley case shows that even if Martin had done so, it could be viewed as an act of self-defense, depending on the circumstances.

One unsual aspect of Florida's law that does figure in both of these cases is the right to present a self-defense claim at a pretrial hearing (which the Florida Supreme Court ruled is necessary because the law says someone who uses force in self-defense "is immune from criminal prosecution"). That opportunity allows a defendant with a plausible story and strong evidence supporting it to avoid prosecution, on the theory that going through a trial is itself a kind of punishment and should not happen automatically. But since a defendant can get charges dismissed only by convicing a judge it is more likely than not that his use of force was justified (a burden Dooley clearly could not meet), this mechanism should not prevent any trials where the government has enough evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant's use of force was not justified. Since Dooley already has admitted he deliberately fired his gun and therefore cannot claim it was an accident, a defense attorney tells the Tampa Bay Times, his best option for raising reasonable doubt "is to create the impression in each juror's mind that the victim was an aggressor, that he made some kind of movement." Dooley may yet be acquitted, since at his trial the burden of proof will shift to the government and the standard of proof will be considerably higher. But these are basic elements of our criminal justice system, not innovations that Florida introduced in 2005.

To assess the impact of the 2005 revisions, of course, you have to look beyond one or two cases. There are other examples of self-defense claims that seem questionable (some of them cited by the Times), and maybe some people are getting away with murder (or assault) as a result of the changes. But in each case, you have to look at all the relevant details and ask whether the outcome really was affected by the new provisions and, if so, whether the fault lies in the law itself or in its application. (The case of Marissa Alexander, who last Friday received a 20-year mandatory minimum sentence for firing a warning shot to scare off her abusive husband, shows that misapplication of the law does not necessarily help defendants.) In Zimmerman's case, the local prosecutor did not think police had probable cause for an arrest, but six weeks later a special prosecutor decided they did, so either further investigation turned up more evidence or one of those prosecutors is wrong. It seems unlikely that Zimmerman will prevail at a pretrial hearing, but he probably has a better chance of being acquitted than Dooley does, since in Zimmerman's case there was physical evidence of a violent struggle preceding the shooting and there seems to be less eyewitness testimony contradicting his account. Whether or not Zimmerman is convicted, it is hard to see how the outcome can be attributed to unusual aspects of Florida's self-defense statute, even though the case is routinely presented as damning evidence of the law's tragic consequences. 

Previous coverage of the Trayvon Martin case here.

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No Joke: Stimulus Money Went to Study Erectile Dysfunction In Obese Men

Posted on May 16, 2012, 1:03PM | Nick Gillespie

Via Drudge comes news that we here at Reason saw coming years ago. Really. Just look below.

NBC's Bay Area affiliate reports that $250,000 in stimulus funds sent to University of California-San Francisco ended up lining the pockets of researchers looking into links between obesity and erectile dysfunction:

The University declined to provide an expert to talk with the NBC Investigative Unit about the erectile dysfunction grant. In a written statement provided they said in part, "Obesity related health issues currently cost $147 Billion per year in direct medical costs in the United States..... Health providers therefore continue to search for incentives to encourage people to live a healthier lifestyle, to benefit both indviduals and society.... Preliminary analysis indicates that is is feasible to enroll men in this type of research, they successfully lose the expected weight over a 12-week period, and they see an improvement in ED symptoms."

While UCSF played coy about the ED study, they did cop openly to getting over $1 million to figure out how to get more accurate responses while doing sex surveys.

More here.

Read "How Stimulus Fails" for more reasons not to fund shovel-ready projects. Or any other projects.

Back in February 2009, Reason.tv advertised for Stimulis, the perfect drug for economies with performance issues:

Needless to say, I missed Katherine Mangu-Ward's original post on exactly the same story with exactly the same video. Read her better commentary here.

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Will President Obama Commute Clarence Aaron’s Sentence?

Posted on May 16, 2012, 12:54PM | Ed Krayewski

Pro Publica’s investigative piece revealing everything that went wrong in the processing of Clarence Aaron’s pardon application at the tail-end of the Bush Administration has brought some renewed attention to both Aaron’s case and the Office of the Pardon Attorney that handles such requests.

Clarence Aaron is serving life in prison on drug-related charges despite not being involved in their purchase or distribution. Though the U.S. Attorney and the District Judge both recommended Aaron’s sentence be commuted, that recommendation never got to President Bush, having been lost along the way by the pardon attorney, Ronald Rodgers.

The San Francisco Chronicle’s “token conservative” columnist Debra Saunders, who’s been advocating for clemency for Clarence Aaron for nearly a decade, called on President Obama to pardon Aaron yesterday:

Barack Obama has a decision to make. The president has the power to pardon when the criminal justice system overreaches. The court put away a first-time nonviolent offender for life with no chance of parole, but because the feds do not want to admit they made a mistake, Rodgers and his ilk have been willing to let a young man rot in prison for the rest of his life. The only question is: Will the president let him get away with it?

While Ronald Rodgers is still on the job as pardon attorney, there’s no requirement that the president’s pardon be approved by the pardon attorney’s office first.  The ability to pardon is a Constitutional power afforded solely to the president. Unlike, say, his power to wage war (at least theoretically necessitating a Congressional declaration of war first) or his power to negotiate treaties (which need to be ratified by the Senate), the president’s power to pardon is unchecked by any other branch and rests in his hands alone.

Moreover, from ProPublica:

President Obama's former White House counsel Gregory B. Craig said the president could issue an executive order eliminating the pardon office. "We cannot improve or strengthen the exercise of this power without taking it out of the Department of Justice," Craig said.

And unlike, say, the executive order to shut down Guantanamo, an executive order eliminating the pardon office couldn’t be subverted by an unwilling Congress, because it doesn’t require additional funding or Congressional authorization.

As for the public pressure that might be necessary to get the president to act, petitions to commute Clarence Aaron’s sentence on the White House’s petition site as well as on Change.org are not doing so well yet.

As Jacob Sullum noted about the Clarence Aaron case and presidential pardons earlier this week, while President Bush granted one in a thousand commutations, President Obama has commuted fewer than one in 5,000 sentences, freeing exactly one person from jail and continuing the trend of modern presidents underutilizing their power to pardon while seeking more power almost everywhere else.

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Reason Writers on The Alyona Show: Lucy Steigerwald on George Lucas vs. Rich Neighbors, Lysol-Spraying Moms, and Cellphone Confiscations at Obama Fundraisers

Posted on May 16, 2012, 12:50PM

Associate Editor Lucy Steigerwald discusses moms spraying Lysol on dancing teens, George Lucas building low income housing, and the Obama campaign confiscating donors' cell phones on the Alyona Show's Happy Hour. Airdate: May 15, 2012.

6.34 minutes.

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Obama Bio-bombs Presidential History on White House Website

Posted on May 16, 2012, 12:24PM | Scott Shackford

The administration that brought you the worst Mother’s Day card since that one from Futurama has been finding all sorts of interesting ways to campaign through the White House’s website. In a move that is somehow both unbelievably arrogant but also completely pointless, congratulatory statements of President Barack Obama’s accomplishments have appeared in the biographies of other presidents.

Rory Cooper of the Heritage Foundation tweeted his discovery of the edits, which were then picked up by Seth Mandel at Commentary Magazine. At the bottom of the biographies of many of the presidents of the 20th Century, a “Did You Know?” bullet point attempts to tie that president to Obama’s accomplishments in office.

From Calvin Coolidge:

From Franklin Delano Roosevelt:

From Ronald Reagan (!!!):

The additions have, of course, led to a parody Tumblr featuring Obama photobombing history.

What, if anything, is the White House trying to accomplish here? Does anybody even go to the White House website to look up presidential biographies? Who is the target of this campaign? Kids whose schools won’t let them use Wikipedia to write their history papers?

The biographies of the past presidents are from “The Presidents of the United States,” written by Michael Beschloss and Hugh Sidey for the nonprofit White House Historical Association. Unfortunately, nobody was answering the phones at the association’s office, so we don’t know how they might feel about the Obama administration’s self-serving additions.

And before anybody asks: No, James Buchanan’s bio has not been amended to praise Obama’s recent designation as the first gay president. At least not yet.

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Rand Paul Endorses Kentucky's Thomas Massie

Posted on May 16, 2012, 12:24PM | Mike Riggs

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) has endorsed congressional candidate Thomas Massie, "the next Rand Paul." Reason profiled Massie, an MIT graduate, libertarian, and executive judge from North Kentucky, earlier this year.  

See Paul's video endorsement below: 

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Reason TV: Outraged Fullerton citizens react to Kelly Thomas beating tape

Posted on May 16, 2012, 12:02PM | Paul Detrick

The May 15 city council meeting in Fullerton, California was packed with outraged citizens ready to voice reactions to newly released security camera footage showing police brutally beating Kelly Thomas to death at a bus depot. Thomas was a 37-year-old schizophrenic drifter who died after a July, 2011 altercation with six police officers in which he was tasered, beat with batons, and hit repeatedly in the face.

Cpl. Jay Cicinelli will face charges of involuntary manslaughter and excessive force, while officer Manuel Ramos will face charges of involuntary manslaughter and second-degree murder. 

At the city council meeting, Ron Thomas, Kelly Thomas's father, called for the arrest and termination of another officer involved with the incident, officer Joe Wolfe, whom he says also murdered his son.

It was announced at the meeting that Kelly Thomas's mother would accept a settlement from the City of Fullerton totaling $1 million.

Written and produced by Paul Detrick.

Approximately 3:13 minutes.

Go to Reason.tv for HD, iPod and audio versions of this video and subscribe to Reason.tv's Youtube channel to receive automatic notification when new material goes live. 

For more Reason coverage of the Kelly Thomas case, go here.

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David Harsanyi on Why JPMorgan Proves We Don't Need More Regulation

Posted on May 16, 2012, 12:00PM

When JPMorgan Chase & Co. suffers about $2 billion in losses, everyone in Washington seems quite excited about the political possibilities. The $2 billion hasn't sunk JPMorgan (and with $127 billion in equity, it hasn't come close), but if this kind of thing constitutes a national emergency, writes David Harsanyi, we should have better sense than to allow folks who squander $2 billion on their lunch breaks to concoct the solution.

View this article.

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Did Too Big To Fail Help Make JPMorgan’s $2 Billion Loss Possible?

Posted on May 16, 2012, 11:14AM | Peter Suderman

Reuters financial columnist Felix Salmon offers some useful speculation about how JPMorgan Chase’s $2 billion loss might have happened, and argues that too-big-to-fail was part of the story.

[Ina] Drew’s Chief Investment Office [at JPM]  quadrupled in size between 2006 and 2011, reaching $356 billion in total, and it’s easy to see how that happened. On the one hand, it was incredibly profitable, with the London team alone, which oversaw some $200 billion, making $5 billion of profit in 2010, more than 25% of JP Morgan’s net income for the year. At the same time JP Morgan accumulated enormous new deposits in the wake of the financial crisis, both by acquiring banks and by attracting big new clients wanting the safety of a too-big-to-fail bank. Historically, JP Morgan has served big corporations by lending them money, but nowadays, as the cash balances on corporate balance sheets get ever more enormous, the main thing these companies want from JP Morgan is a simple checking account — one where they can be sure that their money is safe.

With lots of deposits coming in, and little corporate demand for loans, it was easy for all that money to find its way to the Chief Investment Office, which could take any amount of liabilities (deposits are liabilities, for a bank) and turn them into assets generating billions of dollars in profits.

...Taking a much bigger-picture view, however, what was really going on here was that JP Morgan had hundreds of billions of dollars in excess deposits, thanks to its too-big-to-fail status. And rather than lending out that money and boosting the economy, Jamie Dimon decided to simply play with it in financial markets, just as a hedge fund would.

Obviously the trades didn’t work out, and probably should have been managed better. But the implicit subsidy granted to some of the biggest financial institutions by too-big-to-fail status helped make JPMorgan's huge loss possible.

Salmon is quite critical of Dimon and suggests that in the end JPMorgan was behaving badly, making deals that it shouldn’t have been making by chasing house profits rather than focusing strictly on hedging risk exposure, which is the primary job of the CIO. In theory, the “Volcker rule” would prevent big banks from pursuing proprietary trading —using client money make trades that create profit for the bank—while allowing banks to take reasonable steps to manage risk exposure through hedges. Indeed, as drafts of the Volcker rule progressed, they actually became more expansive in terms of how much leeway they gave financial institutions to hedge various risks.

And that’s important, because as Noah Millman argues, it can be extremely difficult to draw a clear line between hedging risk and trading for profit. Millman’s explanation is complex enough that it needs to be read in full, but the broader picture is that, as always, writing rules and regulations to prevent the supposedly bad stuff and only the bad stuff isn’t nearly as easy as a lot of folks in Washington seem to think.

It’s common enough to hear advocates of financial regulation say that all we really need to do is put the “right rules” in place, but when you spend time looking at the underlying details of the transactions up for review, it’s not always obvious what the “right rules” are, which is why much of what Congress passed in Dodd-Frank was sort of TBA regulation that called for a lot of studies and instructed regulators to do something but left it to the regulators to figure out exactly what that something should be. If it were obvious which rules could be followed to avoid only the transactions that result in headline-grabbing multibillion-dollar losses, financial institutions with money on the line probably would have put those rules in place. 

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Obama Struggles, Sort Of, In the Arkansas Primary

Posted on May 16, 2012, 10:49AM | Jesse Walker

First Barack Obama encountered some unexpected opposition in the Oklahoma primary, with 18 percent of the vote going to anti-abortion crusader Randall Terry and 14 percent to perennial gadfly candidate Jim Rogers. Then Louisiana gave nearly 12 percent of its vote to John Wolfe, a Chattanooga lawyer challenging the president from the left (*), though the party is trying to deny Wolfe the delegates he is due. Then West Virginia Democrats awarded 41 percent of their ballots -- that's 41, not 14 -- to Keith Judd, a self-described "Rastafarian-Christian" who says he is a former member of the "Federation of Super Heroes" and who is currently serving time in a federal penitentiary in Texas. Now a survey in one of Arkansas' four congressional districts shows the president polling just seven points ahead of Wolfe, 45 percent to 38.

That's a district, and not (as I initially, overexcitedly read it) the whole state. And it doesn't really have anything to do with Wolfe's platform: Randall Terry aside, all these candidates are basically getting votes for Generic Other Guy. But if Wolfe wins the district, he'll deserve his golden asterisk in the presidential history books. Though if I had my druthers, the victory would go to Vermin Supreme.

(* The economic left, anyway: Apparently he's to the president's right on gay marriage.)

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