HIT & RUN BLOG

Results from the latest National Youth Tobacco Survey, released today by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, show that smoking continued to decline among teenagers last year even as vaping continued to rise. Needless to say, that is not what you would expect to see if electronic cigarettes were a gateway to the conventional kind, as critics of those products keep claiming. Those critics include the CDC itself, which issued a press release emphasizing that "current e-cigarette use among middle and high school students tripled from 2013 to 2014." The CDC highlights that point in the headline and the first sentence of the press release. In the fourth paragraph, it mentions in passing that "cigarette use declined among high school students and remained unchanged for middle school students."

Among high school students, 9.2 percent reported past-month cigarette use in 2014, down from 12.7 percent in 2013. Among middle school students, 2.5 percent reported past-month cigarette use, down from 2.9 percent in 2013. (The latter drop was not statistically significant, which is why the CDC says the rate "remained unchanged.") Meanwhile, the share of high school students who reported using e-cigarettes in the previous month rose from 4.5 percent in 2013 to 12.4 percent last year; among middle school students, the rate rose from 1.1 percent to 3.9 percent.

CDC

Between 2011 and 2014, past-month cigarette use fell from 15.8 percent to 9.2 percent among high school students, while past-month e-cigarette use rose from 1.5 percent to 13.4 percent. The trends were similar for middle school students: Past-month cigarette use fell from 4.3 percent to 2.5 percent, while past-month e-cigarette use rose from 0.6 percent to 3.9 percent.

CDC Director Tom Frieden's spin on these numbers is predictably negative:

We want parents to know that nicotine is dangerous for kids at any age, whether it’s an e-cigarette, hookah, cigarette or cigar. Adolescence is a critical time for brain development. Nicotine exposure at a young age may cause lasting harm to brain development, promote addiction, and lead to sustained tobacco use.

Never mind that there is no evidence in the CDC's own survey results to support the notion that vaping leads to smoking. If anything, these data suggest that e-cigarettes are displacing the real thing, which can only be a positive development from a "public health" perspective, give the enormous difference in the risks posed by the two kinds of niciotine delivery systems. The American Lung Association (ALA) suggests that the decline in smoking is "offset by the dramatic increase in use of e-cigarettes," which is scientifically absurd given the clear health advantages of vaping.

Part of the problem is that the CDC and the ALA, like the Food and Drug Administration, count e-cigarettes as "tobacco products," even though they contain no tobacco. These opponents of smoking also seem strangely oblivious to the lack of combustion. Yet these two factors make e-cigarettes dramatically different from smoked tobacco, to the point that it makes no sense to group them together. One might as well call nicotine gum and patches "tobacco products."

A BMJ study published yesterday casts further doubt on the concerns expressed by the CDC and the ALA. Looking at surveys of students in Wales, the researchers conclude that "e-cigarettes are unlikely to make a major direct contribution to adolescent nicotine addiction." E-cigarette use was more common among the Welsh students than conventional cigarette use (which is also true among American teenagers). But only 1.5 percent of 11-to-16-year-olds reported that they had used cigarettes at least once a month, and almost all of those regular vapers were also smokers. That pattern suggests that while experimentation with e-cigarettes is increasingly common, regular use remains rare and concentrated among people who already smoke. 

ReasonThere's no doubt that in the last eight months the issue of police violence has broken a barrier in the news cycle it had never broken before. Cases like the police killings of Ramarley Graham and Kelly Thomas may have been local stories that gained national attention and even protests, but the attention never lasted. The killing of Michael Brown, which the Department of Justice ruled justified, sustained national protests that led to subsequent protests over other police killings, like Eric Garner in New York City (which happened before Brown's but didn't get sustained attention until after), the recent killing of Walter Scott by Michael Slager in South Carolina, and Eric Harris by Robert Bates in Oklahoma.

While data on police killings is incomplete because it largely relies on self-reporting, the data that does exist suggest police killings are going up even as violent crimes and the killing of police officers is going down. More than 1,000 people were killed by police in 2014. The newfound sustained attention to the issue has produced a lot of commentary on the contours of the problems and on possible solutions. But while politicians as different as Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.) have commented on police violence issues, these haven't become "election issues" just yet. It's important that they do.

Police violence issues don't just encompass the police reforms that could limit the more egregious incidents of abuse—things like deploying body cameras or limiting union influence on police discipline—but the issues that create the space for the violence in the first place. Police first engaged Eric Garner, for example, after being explicitly ordered to crack down on the sale of loose, untaxed cigarettes. Afterward, New York City's mayor, Bill de Blasio, resisted attempts to connect strict enforcement of petty laws, which are disproportionately applied to poor, largely minority, communities, to the spate of police violence in the city last summer. He insisted police would continue to "strictly enforce" the petty laws because "the law is the law." Commitment to the law didn't stop de Blasio from operating New York as a sanctuary city because of the perceived injustice of immigration laws but did stop him from pulling police back from the kinds of interactions that inherently introduce violence—police authority backed by the use of force—to non-violent situations—things like selling loose cigarettes or possessing drugs.

U.S. SenateRepublican-turned-independent-turned-Democrat Lincoln Chafee may not have any hope of putting a dent in Hillary Clinton's inevitability. It's nevertheless still worth noting that the former Rhode Island senator and governor, the only Republican senator who voted against the use of force in Iraq following Sept. 11, declared on CNN unofficially that he really is going to be running for president. He is really, really hoping that one vote on Iraq is going to differentiate himself from Clinton:

Chafee, a former Republican and former senator, announced he was forming an exploratory committee last week. Chafee's been differentiating himself from fellow Democratic primary contenders by taking sharp jabs at Clinton, willing to be more critical than would-be challengers former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley or former Virginia Sen. Jim Webb over her vote in Congress to authorize the war in Iraq.

"That was a moment where the premise for going to Iraq was so false that there were weapons of mass destruction; she didn't do her homework. We live with the ramifications," Chafee told CNN's "State of the Union" over the weekend. "You may say that's 12 years ago — that's a big motivator for me running. If you show a lack of judgment, lack of doing homework then, what can we expect in the future?"

If you weren't told Chafee had been a Republican and just looked at all of his positions, you'd think he was a Democrat anyway (pro-choice, pro-gun control, pro-minimum wage increases, and eventually pro-Barack Obama). This was criticism he faced within his own party back when he was a senator. (David Weigel covered conservative efforts to oust Chafee in Reason back in 2007.)

Beyond his contrary position on the Iraq War, and his generally limp performance as a leader (he didn't even run for re-election as governor), he has done a few things worthy of note for Reason readers. He has lobbied the Drug Enforcement Agency to reclassify marijuana so that doctors could legally prescribe it as medication. Prior to election to governor he was opposed to Rhode Island providing $75 million in cronyist loan guarantees to the video game company founded by baseball celebrity Curt Schilling and did his best to shut the whole thing down once the project fell apart. And as governor he supported then-treasurer (and his successor as governor) Gina Raimondo in reforming the state's public employee pensions to make them solvent.

But so far there's no sign that any of these positions of the past are going to play any role in the Democratic primary, given the apparent lack of interest in restraining President Barack Obama's foreign interventionism by Democrats over the past six years. And ultimately, while Chafee may take positions friendly to libertarians in more situations than Clinton, that's a pretty low hurdle to jump over.

• Former Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chafee announced today he will be running for president as a Democrat. He prefers the medium salsa in his burritos and just a touch of sour cream.
• Damon Root noted this morning that Justice Antonin Scalia wrote Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s entry to Time’s “100 Most Influential People.” Also of interest, Hillary Clinton wrote Elizabeth Warren’s entry, and Rand Paul wrote up Charles and David Koch.
• Washington State’s auditor, Troy Kelly, has been indicted by a federal grand jury for filing false tax returns, possession of stolen property, and other crimes connected to a mortgage title service company he used to run.
• A Michigan auto repair shop owner says he will refuse service to openly gay people, so be sure not to engage in acts of sodomy in his waiting area.
• The real one-percenter is the federal government, which is hauling in more revenue than ever.
• But nobody is paying attention to any of the above anymore because this was just released:

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Captain Jake / VineA Burleson County, Texas, police officer allegedly played high-stakes Rock, Paper, Scissors with an underage girl caught drinking alcohol at a music festival, Chilifest.

KBTX.com reported that the officer planned to give the girl a citation if she lost the game. She won, so the officer moved on. In this short video, the surrounding crowd can be seen erupting into cheers.

Precinct Constable Dennis Gaas does not endorse such activities, and promised that the officers involved will not work security at Chilifest next year. It’s unclear whether they will suffer any other consequences. Their names were not reported.

Making someone win a game in order to avoid arrest is obviously cruel and inappropriate. But it also signals to me that even the police don’t treat underage drinking very seriously. If an infraction of the law is so minor that the cops are willing to leave the enforcement of it up to chance, there’s probably something wrong with that law.

Hat tip: The Huffington Post

Russell Berman at the Atlantic sums up the disgraceful punting of their constitutional responsibilities on the part of both Obama and Congress: he wages war against ISIS without their say-so, they don't care to be on record giving or withholding that say-so.

Excerpts:

 The White House, after a long delay, sent Congress a proposed authorization for the use of military forcein February. (The AUMF has become the modern-day equivalent of a declaration of war.) Never mind that the U.S. military had already been bombing ISIS targets in Iraq and Syria for half a year, nor that those airstrikes have continued throughout the two months that Congress has spent reviewing the three-page proposal.

In the last week, the top two Republican leaders in the House have confirmedthat Obama's war proposal is going nowhere, and lawmakers are in no hurry to pass an alternative...

The whole exercise has bordered on the absurd. A quick recap: The administration has argued all along that it doesn't actually need new authorization for the war, because the 2001 and 2003 resolutions that Congress passed—and never repealed—allow for military action against ISIS as a terrorist group that branched off from Al Qaeda in Iraq. Speaker John Boehner demanded for months that Obama submit a formal proposal, but when the White House finally did, he left it for dead.....

I guess Congress' attitude is, it's nice to be asked. But it's not nice to be on record as either being for the attacks if/when they go sour, or being against them next time an atrocity video out of ISIS hits the world. But they continue to let 2001 define an endless war against whoever anywhere.

Reason on the War Powers Act.

U.S. NavyThe F-35 may well be the last damned Top Gun opportunity the U.S. Navy offers—and not just because the Defense Department will be out of slack on its credit cards after they finish paying for the damned boondoggle. Yes, the F-35 is just a tad underperforming and overcosting. As David Axe noted for Reuters last year:

The Lockheed Martin-built F-35 — which can avoid sensor detection thanks to its special shape and coating — simply doesn’t work very well. The Pentagon has had to temporarily ground F-35s no fewer than 13 times since 2007, mostly due to problems with the plane’s Pratt & Whitney-made F135 engine, in particular, with the engines’ turbine blades.

This at a total cost currently running at about $1.5 trillion.

But the Navy is done with sticking the likes of Maverick and Goose into cockpits—it's placing its bet on robots! Yesterday, Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus told attendees at the Sea-Air-Space 2015 conference:

For example, as good as it is, and as much as we need it and look forward to having it in the fleet for many years, the F-35 should be, and almost certainly will be, the last manned strike fighter aircraft the Department of the Navy will ever buy or fly.

Never fear, we can have cost overruns and epic technology fail on drones, too.

But, and I ask this sincerely: Will drones ever bond over a game of beach volleyball? I think not. The Top Gun remake is going to suck. More.

I've blogged about this kind of cruel foolishness before, arresting or ticketing people for publicly feeding the homeless, out of cities like Dallas and Ft. Lauderdale.

This week MySanAntonio reports on a fully licensed food truck operator arrested   cited because  they used a vehicle other than their licensed one to give food away to hungry homeless in San Antonio's Maverick Park:

Chow Train Facebook

Joan Cheever, founder of the nonprofit mobile food truck known as the Chow Train, was cited last Tuesday by San Antonio police officers for feeding the homeless in Maverick Park.

Cheever has been serving restaurant-quality meals to the city's homeless population for the past 10 years, and has been profiled on Rachel Ray's cooking show for her charitable efforts.

Over the years, police officers have passed by and waved as she fed homeless people, but last Tuesday night four bike-patrol officers stopped in the park and gave Cheever a ticket that carries a potential fine of $2,000. Cheever has a food permit for her mobile truck, but she was cited for transporting and serving the food from a vehicle other than that truck.

Cheever wants to use the argument that had been successful for Don Hart in Dallas: that the citation violates a state-level religious freedom act. I hope she wins, though its too narrow a victory for the freedom to dogood for your fellow man.

Ahron de Leeuw/Flickr

The U.S. government has charged into another civil war in the Middle East. The Obama administration is assisting Saudi Arabia in its bombing of Yemen, creating—in concert with the Saudi embargo—a humanitarian catastrophe in the Middle East’s poorest country. Civilians are dying, and what infrastructure the country has is being destroyed.

Why? Secretary of State John Kerry says the United States won’t "stand by while the region is destabilized." But Kerry must know that bombing is a terrible way to prevent destabilization, Sheldon Richman writes. Kerry isn’t stupid—but that means he’s a liar and a demagogue. Note that he says "the region," not "Yemen." Why would a civil war in Yemen affect the whole region? Because according to the official narrative, Yemen is under siege by agents of Iran, the Houthis. 

Iran today serves the same purpose the Soviet Union, or the International Communist Conspiracy, served from the end of World War II until the collapse of the Soviet empire, argues RIchman. Iran is the all-purpose arch enemy on which virtually any evil can be blamed. 

Tekhnika–MolodezhiHere's a damned interesting story in Nautilus about the Soviets and the cyberneticists. When Norbert Wiener first conceived of cybernetics, Slava Gerovitch writes, the initial official reaction in the USSR was to blast the concept, with propagandists who had never even read Wiener attacking his ideas in steadily more hysterical terms. (One writer derided "semanticists-cannibals" who think "a larger part of humanity must be exterminated.") This posed a problem for the country's technologists, who understood that they couldn't keep up with the West's advances in computing if they ignored cybernetics.

So they had to tread delicately:

One had to avoid using any suspicious cybernetic terms. Even the phrase "logical operations" was risky, because it might be interpreted as implying that machines could think. Instead of "computer memory," researchers used the more neutral, technical term, "storage." "Information" was replaced by "data," and "information theory" by the convoluted expression "the statistical theory of electrical signal transmission with noise." A joke about Stalin's henchman, Beria, who was responsible for the nuclear weapons program, became popular. Beria comes to his boss and asks permission to use the notorious field of cybernetics for military purposes. Stalin puffs on his pipe and says, "Okay, but just please make sure the other Politburo members don't find out."

After Stalin's death, the situation started to reverse itself, and by the '60s cybernetics was a trendy topic in Moscow. The Communists became convinced that it could help them overcome the knowledge problems that always dog central planners—and the CIA, watching from Washington, agreed:

News 24Anti-immigrant violence in South Africa, via CNN:

Thousands of people have sought refuge in temporary shelters in South Africa after mobs with machetes attacked immigrants in the city of Durban, leaving at least five people dead, an aid group said Thursday.

Heavily armed police have scrambled to stop clashes this week after local residents accused immigrants from other African nations of taking their jobs.

The president of South Africa, Jacob Zuma, insists that despite the violence, not the first against immigrants seen in the country in recent years, South Africans are not "generally xenophobic." He blamed the violence on "criminal elements" that "take advantage of the concerns of citizens to sow mayhem and destruction."  Zuma, a member of the African National Congress that has been the ruling party in South Africa since democratic elections began in 1994, said he was sympathetic to those concerns. Via The Mail & Guardian:

"These include complaints about illegal and undocumented immigrants in the country, the increase in the number of shops or small businesses that have been taken over by foreign nationals and also perceptions that foreign nationals commit or perpetrate crime. We wish to emphasise that while some foreign nationals have been arrested for various crimes, it is misleading and wrong to label or regard all foreign nationals as being involved in crime in the country," said Zuma. 

The distinction between illegal and undocumented may have to do with those who came into the country illegally and those with papers, of which South Africa has many, that have expired. A number for the population of illegal or undocumented immigrants in South Africa is hard to come by. Government statistics say 1 million. In a 2009 report the police service quoted "various estimates" of six to eight million. South Africa's immigration policies prohibit "undesirable persons," such as those who "are likely to become a public charge" and fugitives from justice. Most of the illegal or undocumented immigrants in South Africa come from Zimbabwe, where Robert Mugabe has ground the country's economy down to nothing.

If you needed more proof that the old paradigm of unwavering bipartisan support for Israel is now in the rearview mirror, take a look at the results of this Bloomberg Politics poll on American attitudes regarding Middle East foreign policy. Flickr/Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs

While it should come as no surprise that Republicans are less optimistic than Democrats about the tentative multilateral nuclear deal recently agreed to with Iran, the fact that 2/3 of Republican respondents said that they would "support Israel's interests even when they diverge from America's" shows just how partisan an issue Israel has become after a half-century of nearly universal bipartisan support for the Jewish state.

I recently wrote that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's controversial address to Congress, perceived by many Democrats as a slap to President Obama, would likely signal a sea change in reflexive support for Israel by both parties in Congress. However, the shocking takeaway from the Bloomberg poll is that Republicans, by a substantial margin, would put a foreign country's interests ahead of their own. 

Calling it "further erosion of the old mantra that politics stops at the water's edge," Bloomberg reports:

Religion appears to play an important role in shaping the numbers. Born-again Christians are more likely than overall poll respondents, 58 percent to 35 percent, to back Israel regardless of U.S. interests. Americans with no religious affiliation were the least likely to feel this way, at 26 percent. Ideological identification also has a strong connection: 62 percent of self-identified conservatives say supporting Israel is key, while that drops to 35 percent among moderates.

Essentially, the hardest-core Christians and conservatives have such reverence for the Jews of the Holy Land and such absolute distrust in President Obama (according to Bloomberg, "Republicans say they feel more sympathetic to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu than to their own president, 67 percent to 16 percent), they would actually support policies against their own national interest.

Too soon to tell if this means we'll be seeing 2016 bumper stickers for GOP candidates emblazoned with "Their Country, Right or Wrong!"

U.S. Marshals Service/FlickrThe appalling story of Eric Harris' death at the hands of Tulsa County cops continues to get worse. Harris was fatally shot earlier this month by Reserve Deputy Robert Bates, a volunteer officer who says he mistook his handgun for a Taser. Now sources say that Bates, 73, received no firearm or field training before being assigned to the county's Violent Crimes Task Force and that supervisors actually falsified records to make it appear Bates had received the state-required training. 

Sources within the Tulsa County Sheriff's Office told Tulsa World that they were instructed to give Bates credit for field training he never received and firearms certifications he didn't have when he applied as an advanced reserve deputy in 2007.  

At least three of reserve deputy Robert Bates’ supervisors were transferred after refusing to sign off on his state-required training, multiple sources speaking on condition of anonymity told the World.

[...] Additionally, Sheriff Stanley Glanz told a Tulsa radio station this week that Bates had been certified to use three weapons, including a revolver he fired at Harris. However, Glanz said the Sheriff’s Office has not been able to find the paperwork on those certifications.

No wonder a police investigator was quick to portray Bates shooting Harris as a totally understandable mix-up. But despite the police sergeant's sunny review, prosecutors have charged Bates with second-degree manslaughter for Harris' death. Video from the April 2 incident shows Harris—who was unarmed—pinned down on the ground by other deputies when Bates fired. After Harris complained that he couldn't breathe, one deputy can be heard telling him, "fuck your breath." 

The Sheriff’s Office told Tulsa World that claims about falsified training records were untrue. It also said it will conduct an internal review of the reserve deputy program that Bates and about 100 others take part in. 

When not playing a police officer, Bates is an insurance executive. He was also manager of Sheriff Glanz's 2012 re-election campaign and has purchased five vehicles for the Violent Crimes Task Force.   

In a statement, Bates said he had been trained in Dallas and Arizona and had been on "at least 100" missions with Tulsa County officers. On April 1 he contacted the office to ask if there were any pending operations he could help with and was assigned to a mission taking place the next day, in which undercover officers were buying a gun from Harris. Prior to being sent out, Bates was informed that Harris was a dangerous, "bad son of a bitch" with gang affiliations. 

Auxiliary officer programs like the one Bates took part in are common around the country, reports the Wall Street Journal, with "thousands of reserve officers ... carrying badges and guns but often lacking the qualifications or experience of their full-time counterparts." [Update: A commenter points out that Kid Rock is now a reserve officer in Michigan.]

Some reserve officers are volunteers, while others pay the city or county for the privilege of playing police. Some receive extensive training while in other places, like Louisiana, only firearm certification (no training) is required. "You can’t even cut hair or work on plumbing in someone’s house without the proper training," Caddo Parish Sheriff Steve Prator pointed out in the Journal. "Yet you can ride around and stop people and make life-and-death decisions and not be trained at all."  

Once upon a time New York City's builders blithely turned spectacular monuments into dust. Henry James complained about Manhattan’s "restless renewals," but in the old days nostalgia was for writers and poets. Developers were preoccupied with building the future. 

This ethos of creative destruction allowed New York to become the world’s preeminent city. And then on April 19, 1965, which is fifty years ago this Sunday, Mayor Robert F. Wagner signed the Landmarks Preservation Act. The law made it illegal to destroy any structure that the city’s planning elite deem too important not to save. Today almost a third of the buildings in Manhattan, and more than 33,000 structures citywide, may as well be encased in a life-sized historical diorama. 

To illustrate the damage done by this law, let’s imagine that the Landmarks Act had been passed not in 1965, but in 1865, when the spire of Trinity Church still towered over Lower Manhattan. Modern New York wouldn’t exist.

CNNIn an upcoming CNN special about marijuana, Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) urges his colleagues in Congress to "stop the pot hypocrisy." What is the nature of this hypocrisy? Booker elaborates:

We now have had three presidents that have admitted to smoking marijuana. People that are in public office all throughout the Senate have said, hey, I've smoked marijuana recreationally.

How much of a hypocrite do you have to be to say that I broke American laws using pot as a recreational thing [but] I'm not going to support this idea that as a medicine for severely sick people, that they [should] be able to access this drug?

It is not necessarily inconsistent for someone who smoked pot in high school or college to question marijuana's medical utility. It is not even necessarily inconsistent for such a person to support criminal punishment of cannabis consumption, assuming he views his youthful "experimentation" as a terrible, reckless mistake that can be deterred by the threat of penalties. What Booker means, I think, is that former pot smokers in Congress did not think consuming cannabis was a big deal back then and still do not think it is a big deal. They nevertheless support laws that criminalize cannabis consumers, even those who use the drug to relieve symptoms of debilitating illnesses. The hypocrisy lies in the contradiction between their private beliefs and their public positions, not in their current disapproval of something they did when they were younger.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.)—who joined Booker in sponsoring the CARERS Act, which would legalize medical marijuana in states that allow it—presumably had something similar in mind when he charged former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush with hypocrisy after the fellow presidential contender admitted that "I drank alcohol and I smoked marijuana when I was at Andover," calling it "pretty common." Here is how Paul responded in an interview with The Hill:

You would think he'd have a little more understanding then....He was even opposed to medical marijuana. This is a guy who now admits he smoked marijuana, but he wants to put people in jail who do.

I think that's the real hypocrisy, is that people on our side, which include a lot of people who made mistakes growing up, admit their mistakes but now still want to put people in jail for that. Had he been caught at Andover, he'd have never been governor, he'd probably never have a chance to run for the presidency.

The point is not just that Jeb Bush would have been unhappy to be caught with pot as a teenager, or that the disciplinary and legal consequences could have derailed his political career before it began. It's that Bush still thinks such an outcome would have been unjust and therefore should concede it is equally unjust to treat current cannabis consumers like criminals, especially when they are patients using marijuana for medical purposes.

Which brings us to Barack Obama, who also appears in the CNN special. According to The Daily Caller's Jonah Bennett, Obama "state his full support of medical marijuana." But judging from the quote Bennett presents, that is not quite accurate. Here is how Obama responds when CNN medical correspondent Sanjay Gupta asks whether he supports the CARERS Act: