HIT & RUN BLOG

x-ray delta one/Flickr

• Dozens of Nazi war criminals and concentration-camp guards were forced out of America yet still collected—or collect, present-tense—U.S. Social Security checks. 
• Anti-democracy critics in Hong Kong are convinced the U.S. is puppeteering the #OccupyCentral protest movement there. 
• Ebola watch is over for the 48 people who had contact with the first Dallas patient.
• Secretary of State John Kerry is trying to cheerlead more Asian countries into joining our ISIS war efforts. 
• Jay Leno received the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor at the Kennedy Center in D.C. Sunday night.
• HuffPost CliffNotes: 5 takeaways from Doug Henwood's Harper's takedown of Hillary Clinton.
• A new report finds the cities currently attracting the most college-educated millennials include Houston, Nashville, Denver, Austin, Portland, D.C., Buffalo, Baltimore, and Los Angeles.

The latest Reason-Rupe poll finds 70 percent of Americans favor legalizing over-the-counter birth control pills and patches without a doctor’s prescription, 26 percent oppose such a proposal, and 4 percent don’t know enough to say. There has been a slight uptick in support for OTC birth control, rising from 66 percent in May of 2013. Moreover, Reason-Rupe finds that women across income groups highly support legalizing OTC birth control at about the same rates.

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists have announced their support for such a proposal arguing it could improve contraceptive access and use and decrease unintended pregnancy rates. Republicans too have been pushing for this reform, with Democrats surprisingly reluctant.

Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal raised the idea in 2012 in his widely read Wall Street Journal op-ed:

“As an unapologetic pro-life Republican, I also believe that every adult (18 years old and over) who wants contraception should be able to purchase it. But anyone who has a religious objection to contraception should not be forced by government health-care edicts to purchase it for others. And parents who believe, as I do, that their teenage children shouldn't be involved with sex at all do not deserve ridicule.”

Planned Parenthood and some Democrats have pushed back, expressing concerns that legalizing OTC birth control would require women to pay for it, rather than have it paid for by their health insurance premiums. For instance, Rebecca Leber explained:

"For low-income women, cost can be what’s most prohibitive. Under the Affordable Care Act, the pill and other forms of contraception count as preventative care, which means insurance covers them completely—without any out-of-pocket expenses."

Planned Parenthood recently released an ad in North Carolina warning: “Just when insurance is finally covering the cost of prescription birth control, Thom Tillis [the Republican] says no—women should pay the $600 dollars a year…he’s turning the pill into yet another bill.” To be clear, Democrats are not necessarily opposed to legalizing OTC birth control, but rather they want to ensure women don’t have to pay for it.

Reason’s own Elizabeth Brown has countered:

"Affordability isn’t the only factor in making something accessible. Those championing the contraception mandate as a way to increase access assume everyone always has insurance coverage. What about undocumented women? Or those between jobs and temporarily uninsured? What about young women who can’t let their parents know they’re on the pill? Or domestic abuse victims who want to keep this information from their husbands? These are just a few of the situations in which a woman would find OTC pills much more accessible and affordable than the prescription-only kind, even if those prescription pills came with no co-pay."

Despite costs concerns, OTC birth control legalization receives strong support from women across income groups at roughly the same rates. Among women making less than $30,000 a year, 65 percent support legalization and 35 percent oppose. In the middle, women making between $30K-$60K a year support the proposal 70 to 29 percent. And again, among women making more than $60,000 a year, 67 percent support and 32 percent oppose legalizing OTC birth control.

Men too support legalization, 71 percent to 21 percent, similar to women, 68 to 30 percent.

In addition, support for legalization is high across race and ethnicity. Seventy-two percent of Caucasians, 73 percent of African-Americans, and 61 percent of Hispanics say OTC birth control should be legal.

Legalization has bi-partisan support as well. In fact, Republicans and Democrats support it at roughly the same level (65% and 69% respectively) with Independents even more in favor (74%).

Elite debate over the issue has trickled down to some degree, with libertarians (75%) and conservatives (71%) more in favor than liberals (64%) and communitarians (62%). (Political groups identified using the Reason-Rupe three-question screen).

Despite concerns over the cost of OTC birth control, strong majorities across income groups favor the proposal. For instance, 64 percent of Americans making less than $30,000 annually support legalization as do 69 percent of those making more than $100,000.

The Reason-Rupe national telephone poll, executed by Princeton Survey Research Associates International, conducted live interviews with 1004 adults on cell phones (503) and landlines (501) October 1-6, 2014. The poll’s margin of error is +/-3.8%. Full poll results can be found here including poll toplines (pdf)  and crosstabs (xls). 

Denver Police DepartmentLast week the Denver Police Department advised parents to be on the lookout for marijuana-infused candy that malicious strangers might try to pass off as ordinary Halloween treats. According to CNN, "Colorado parents have a new fear to factor in this Halloween: a very adult treat ending up in their kids' candy bags." Actually, says Jacob Sullum, this fear is not so new: Law enforcement officials have been stoking it for years, undeterred by the lack of evidence to back it up.

Wikimedia CommonsIt may be hard for young voters to believe that once upon a time, Bill Clinton was demonized as an incorrigible liberal who threatened the nation with military weakness, socialized health care and job-killing environmental rules—not to mention being a vile sexual predator. Republicans detested, vilified, and finally impeached him.

His wife was regarded as equally polarizing but even further to the left. Yet today, Democrats who would rather clean up after Ebola patients than appear with Obama are handcuffing themselves to the former president and first lady, writes Steve Chapman.

In Kentucky, the Lexington-Fayette Urban County Human Rights Commission ruled Hand On Originals violated the city's fairness ordinance when it refused to print t-shirts for the Lexington Pride Festival. The owners of Hand On said they declined the order because they are Christians and could not support the message of the shirts. But the commission ruled the firm discriminated against the Gay and Lesbians Services Organization of Lexington.

How To Thwart A Robot Apocalypse: Oxford Professor Nick Bostrom on the Dangers of Superintelligent Machines was shot by Todd Krainin and Joshua Swain. Edited by Swain. About 6.5 mins.

Original realease date was October 9, 2014 and the original writeup is below.

"If we one day develop machines with general intelligence that surpasses ours, they would be in a verypowerful position," says Nick Bostrom, Oxford professor and founding director of the Future of Humanity Institute.

Bostrom sat down with Reason science correspondent Ron Bailey to discuss his latest book,Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, in which he discusses the risks humanity will face when artificial intelligence (AI) is created. Bostorm worries that, once computer intelligence exceeds our own, machines will be beyond of our control and will seek to shape the future according to their own plan. If the AI's goals aren't properly set by designers, a superintelligent machine will see humans as a liability to completing its goals–leading to our annihilation. 

How do we avoid a robot apocalypse? Bostrom proposes two solutions: either limit the AI to only answering questions in a preset boundary or engineer the AI to include human preservation. "We have got to solve the control problem before we solve the AI problem," Bostrom explains. "The big challenge then is to reach into this huge space of possible mind decisions, motivation system designs, and try to pick out one of the very special ones that would be consistent with human survival and flourishing."

Until such time, Bostrom believes research into AI should be dramatically slowed, allowing humanity ample time to understand its own objectives. 

3 Reasons the U.S. MILITARY Should Not Be Fighting EBOLA was Produced by Amanda Winkler and co-written with Nick Gillespie, who narrates. Camera by Jim Epstein with Anthony L. Fisher. About 2 mins.

Original release date was October 14, 2014 and original write up is below.

President Obama is sending thousands of U.S. troops to West Africa to fight the deadly Ebola virus. Their mission will be to construct treatment centers and provide medical training to health-care workers in the local communities.

But is it really a good idea to send soldiers to provide this sort of aid?

Here are 3 reasons why militarizing humanitarian aid is a very bad idea:

1. Militarized Aid Erodes Humanitarian Principles

Humanitarian aid must be perceived as neutral and not driven by political or military objectives. Using the military in a humanitarian crisis works against that and potentially instigates further unrest.

Attacks against humanitarian personnel have been rising in the past decade precisely because of a perceived blurring of humanitarian, political, and military goals.

And our track record in Africa warrants such skepticism. In the past six years, the U.S. military has expanded its troop presense in Africa via humanitarian missions specifically designed to establish points of entry for future military missions.

Local communities face a hell of a bind: if they don't accept help from the military, they run the risk of missing out on much needed humanitarian aid. That erodes the trust needed to establish a working relationship between aid workers and local communities.

2. Militarized Aid is Ineffective in the Long Term

Militarized aid is often backed by huge budgets that are supposed to be spent quickly.

Indeed, the Department of Defense has already allocated $1 billion to fight Ebola.

The pressure to spend massive amounts is often coupled with pressure to achieve short-term political goals.

That in turn translates into an ineffective use of funds. Accountability and follow-up are in short supply, too, meaning the same mistakes get repeated over and over.

3. Militarized Aid Diminishes the Supply of Civil Aid

Many politicians who support militarized aid claim that the military is the only institution capable of handling the humanitarian crisis at hand.

If this is true—and too often it is—this highlights the neglect of civilian-led programs that are more likely to get the job done.

By constantly relying on the military for humanitarian efforts, we're stifling efforts to grow civilian-led organizations that can handle the complicated logistics necessary to address large-scale humanitarian crises. 

Strawberry Cough: Biography of an Award-Winning Cannabis Strain was Produced by Paul Feine. About 6 mins.

Original release date was October 15, 2014 and original writeup is below.

Now that the end of marijuana prohibition is on the horizon, artisans who have spent their careers in a gray market are finally emerging from the shadows. This is a story about the Strawberry Cough cannabis strain and a few of the entrepreneurs who are trying to build a successful small business selling it.

Strawberry Cough is one of the most celebrated cannabis strains in the U.S. today. The strain has won multiple awards, including best flower in the U.S. at the 2013 High Times Cannabis Cup. Kyle Kushman, a master cannabis grower and former cultivation editor at High Times magazine, is the man who took the powerful sativa strain from its obscure origins in Connecticut and brought it to the masses. Today, if you're looking for authentic high-quality Strawberry Cough, your best bet is to go to the Buds & Roses Collective, where Kushman has teamed up with Aaron Justis and Tyler Wadleigh to provide top-shelf cannabis for medical marijuana patients in Los Angeles.

Many pot lovers worry that legalization will lead to big corporations flooding the market with cheap, low-quality marijuana and driving the artisans out of business. Like the craft brewers who are currently thriving in an industry dominated by big corporations, however, the guys at Buds & Roses aren't concerned. After all, in California there is no shortage of cannabis connoisseurs happy to pay a premium for a superior product.

Arnold Chao/Flickr

Before video games became the techno-panic of the day, nannying Republicans and Democrats insisted that TV turned kids' brains to mush and should be strictly regulated. But Reason has long celebrated the boob tube's liberating, transformative power—and defended every American's right to watch whatever he or she wants. Robby Soave takes a look at some of the best of Reason's TV coverage, from scrutinizing FEC regulation of satellite television in 1984 to explaining why Lost espouses a libertarian worldview and all kids should be forced to watch South Park.

leonardliggio.orgLeonard P. Liggio, 81, died Tuesday after a period of declining health. Sheldon Richman writes that he lost one of his favorite teachers this week, as did so many other libertarians, not to mention the freedom movement as a whole. Leonard was a major influence on Richman's worldview during the nearly 40 years he new him, and while he hadn't seen Leonard much in recent years, he has a hard time picturing the world — and the noble struggle for liberty — without him.

Originally posted Oct. 17, 2014. Text is below:

What’s worthy of a yearlong investigation involving 15 officers? Tracking down a serial killer? Busting a human trafficking ring? How about arresting ginseng diggers?

State officers in West Virginia proudly posed next to 190 pounds of the seized root, which is coveted in Asia for its purported healing qualities. Cops also came across $30,000 in cash, which was funneled into law enforcement coffers.

Eleven men were arrested for shoveling up out-of-season ginseng. First-time offenders face fines, and repeat offenders could spend up to six months behind bars.

In other West Virginia news, criminals wanted for child porn, sexual assault, andmalicious wounding are still at large.

1 minute, 48 seconds.

Follow the show on Twitter (@DontCops), and submit your nominees for next month.

"Don't Cops Have Better Things to Do?" is written and directed by Ted Balaker (@tedbalaker). Produced and edited by Matt Edwards (@MattChrisEd). Music byaudionautix.com and "The Contessa" is by Maurice and the Beejays (Magnatune Records).

To watch previous episodes, go here.

Comedy Central's South Park took a look at ride-sharing this week with Timmy's Handicar service, which includes a child's wagon carrying a table and chairs attached to Timmy's wheelchair. Timmy's business ends up threatening taxicab services in the Colorado town and sparks a Wacky Races type race between competing transportation choices.

"Nobody takes jobs away from us," says one cab driver in the show. "We need to speak to Mayor and tell him to shut down this illegitimate business."

Although South Park is a cartoon, some of the issues brought up in the episode are not that far off from issues ride-sharing services like Uber and Lyft have to deal with every day. Reason TV spoke with Lyft co-founder and president John Zimmer at the 2014 Atlantic City Lab conference in Los Angeles about a few of these issues earlier this month.

Originally published October 7, 2014, and text is below: 

"The dangerous thing is to have a patchwork set of regulations," says John Zimmer, co-founder and president of the ridesharing app Lyft.  "It can make it really difficult for a company to operate."

After starting the popular peer-to-peer transportation company in 2012, Lyft is now valued at $700 million dollars and present in over 60 cities across the U.S. Zimmer states that having services like Lyft is essential to city growth as it provides residents with affordable transportation and jobs. 

Lyft's popularity and success has made it a target for state regulators who are struggling to deal with the new sharing economy. Right after launch, the California Public Utilities Commission served Lyft—along with Uber and Sidecar—cease and desist letters and fined the company $20,000 over safety concerns. Though the company worked an agreement out with the state, it still faces similar opposition in others cities where they are disrupting entrenched businesses like taxi companies. 

"What we've realized is that there are many agencies at a state and local level and there are many interests and existing industries," says Zimmer, who sat down with Reason TV at the Atlantic CityLab conference in Los Angeles.  "So often when we work really hard to solve a problem with the state agency, then the legislature comes out with something that's being supported by trial lawyers or insurance companies or city attorneys have separate issues that they're concerned about. It's really challenging."

Though Zimmer states that the overlap of government agencies is a major problem in navigating regulatory hurdles, his solution is to create another agency that will encompass innovation and streamline the process similar to the Office of Civic Innovation established by San Francisco mayor Edwin Lee in 2012. 

But Zimmer adds: "I haven't seen yet a model within that innovation group where they start looking at regulations and they think forward five years, 10 years to think through 'how can we maintain the things that are important to us, but still allow for this type of innovation?'"

Produced by Alexis Garcia. Shot by Paul Detrick. Music by Podington Bear.

Jonathan Ernst/Reuters/NewscomThe company was called Aereo and its product was "a new species of antenna." "If you have this and you have Netflix, you absolutely have the ability to not have a standard cable subscription," Chet Kanojia, Aereo's founder and chief executive, told The New York Times when the company opened for business in early 2012.

That was the key selling point. It's also what placed Aereo on a collision course with federal copyright law. Aereo's opponents in that conflict would include not just the federal government but some of the most powerful names in media—ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, and Disney, to name a few of the players who promptly filed suit. Reason's Damon Root looks at how the Aereo saga arrived at the Supreme Court and what happened next. 

Original post from October 16, 2014. Text is below:

"There seems to be a sort of collective amnesia problem regarding the Iraq War," says Reason Foundation polling director Emily Ekins.

Ekins is referring to a question contained in the October 2014 Reason-Rupe poll, which found that 51 percent of Americans recall opposing the Iraq invasion in 2003. In reality, Pew found that most Americans—72 percent—supported the war at the time of the invasion. Ekins says its fairly common to find such discrepancies in public opinion polling. People tend to want to say they supported the winner and opposed the loser.

"And this tells us something about how Americans view the Iraq War," says Ekins.

Reason TV questioned a handful of passersby in Venice, California, to illustrate some Americans' attitudes toward the current military intervention against ISIS in Iraq and Syria. Here are some key findings from the October poll:

Air strikes are popular.

Some 66 percent of Americans favor airstrikes to combat ISIS in Iraq and Syria. This was a fairly consistent finding across age groups and partisans, with one glaring exception: Young people. Fifty-one percent of respondents younger than 30 oppose airstrikes.

Ground troops are unpopular.

Most Americans oppose sending ground troops to combat ISIS. Only 43 percent favor John McCain and Lindsey Graham's preferred solution.

Congress is shirking its duty when it comes to foreign policy in the minds of most Americans.

A whopping 78 percent of Americans believe Congress should return from recess to vote one way or another on an authorization for the use of military force against ISIS. Most people think Congress hasn't done so because its members don't want to put a vote on the official record. 

Americans are increasingly concerned about the potential unintended consequences of intervention.

Fifty-five percent of Americans oppose the United States arming Syrian rebels, and 78 percent believe there is a chance such weapons would eventually be used against the U.S.

"Americans are going to appreciate politicians who can demonstrate an ability to be deliberative, but also strong, in how they make foreign policy decisions," says Ekins.

Watch the full video above, or click below for downloadable versions. And subscribe to Reason TV's YouTube channel for daily content like this.

leonardliggio.orgThis week Leonard P. Liggio, 81, died after a period of declining health. Since the early 1950s, Liggio was a scholar and activist for individual liberty, the free-market order, and the voluntary network of social cooperation we call civil society. In his long career, Leonard was associated with the Volker Fund (a pioneering classical-liberal organization), the Institute for Humane Studies, Liberty Fund, the Cato Institute, and finally, the Atlas Network. He studied with Ludwig von Mises and a long list of eminent historians. 

"Like many libertarians of my generation and beyond, I learned so much from him," writes Sheldon Richman. "Leonard was a major influence on my worldview during the nearly 40 years I knew him. While I had not seen him much in recent years, I have a hard time picturing the world—and the noble struggle for liberty—without him." 

CheeseEarlier this week, Vermont released a draft of the regulations it proposes to adopt in order to enforce the state's mandatory GMO-labeling law.

"The nine pages of rules released Wednesday lay out everything from definitions of 'food' and 'genetic engineering' to the required disclosures on packaging that will read 'Produced with Genetic Engineering,'" notes an Associated Press piece on the proposed regulations.

The proposed rules themselves are interesting enough—but then so are the numerous exceptions built into them.

Unsurprisingly, many of them appear to have Vermont farmers and dairy interests in mind.

The real costs might be borne by Vermont's farmers, writes Baylen Linnekin. The requirements in the proposed rules that sellers affirm that any products sold without a GMO label are free from GMOs via a sworn statement may prove daunting.

"I don’t want to say our cheese is non-GMO if I can’t prove it," said Angela Miller of Vermont's Consider Bardwell Farm, a small, sustainable producer, in comments to the Guardian earlier this year.

Janet Reitman produced a blockbuster piece of close-focus reporting on some people from and around Lima, Ohio who have had some hard times, made some bad choices, used welfare, complained about others using welfare, and had kids, and for some reason framed it as being about the "Tea Party"'s dire effects on America.

The Tea Party hook, in the story's title and cover headline ("Where the Tea Party Rules"), comes strictly from the fact that Lima's congressman, Republican Jim Jordan, is by her telling a serious Tea Party small government ideologue. (One of Ohio's senators, Sherrod Brown, is a Democrat.)

As Reitman writes of Jordan, he has a record of:

opposing virtually any government-spending proposal: the TARP stimulus package, the auto bailout, the repeal of the Bush tax cuts, raising the debt ceiling, even emergency aid to the victims of Hurricane Sandy. He has voted to defund the Affordable Care Act 52 times.

She lays out some of the overarching facts about Lima. Average home price $39,000, 34 percent of citizens below the poverty line with an average household income in Lima of $28,000 (much lower than $53,000 national average) and an unemployment rate of 6 percent (pretty much the national average).

She explains that state-level budget balancing has left cities with less money for services, though the overarching sadness of crummy towns with opportunities drying up is not easily solvable by slightly richer city governments, nor does she try to claim it is.

Reitman does find, and tell, a handful of stories of people disappointed in their income, mortgages, or job prospects. They are well told enough, and a bit depressing. If you wanted to scan them for times when maybe it was choices and not just malign fate (and certainly not their congressman's record of failed votes) that made things harder on her subjects, you could do that.

Turns out leaving your six-figure oil industry job for reasons of scruples to teach college chemistry might leave you less well off later on than you want to be. And while you can retrain yourself for new careers, like in wind turbines, if you get a good job in that field out of state but then leave it rather than relocate your family, you might end up working a maintenance job. Turns out if you run a "specialty wine and beer shop" in this desolate sad wasteland, some customers might make you feel uncomfortable for being Democrats by things they say.

Lots of women have kids young, even though abortion is theoretically legal though hard to get in this state. The uncharitable might get the sneaky feeling that Reitman is sorta implying some of Lima's current infant class would have been better off never having been born.

An unredacted excerpt:

Most of the young middle- and working-class women I meet in Lima had children very young, many before they were 18; Allen County has one of the highest teen pregnancy rates in Ohio. And yet, Ohio has been at the forefront of recent attacks on reproductive rights. The state has some of the most restrictive abortion laws in the country, and its most recent budget placed $1.4 million in funding for Planned Parenthood at risk, while allocating money to Christian-based ''crisis pregnancy centers.'' Lima's one family-planning clinic offering limited abortion services recently closed down; today, a search for abortion clinics in Lima will turn up a pro-life organization called Heartbeat of Lima. Though the county health department offers free birth control, a woman wanting an abortion must travel more than an hour to Toledo, to a clinic that, thanks to restrictions that have closed almost half of Ohio's abortion clinics in the past year, may soon be forced to shut its doors. ''People don't talk about abortion in Lima,'' says Carissa.

She's just sayin',perhaps, but it's kind of a weird way to lead into your completely disinterested discussion of the availability of abortion in grim Lima.

You will learn the basics of the politics of these people she profiles struggling through hard times, and they will be neither surprising nor interesting, except maybe for the woman who wrote in "Mickey Mouse" for president, or the "What's the Matter with Kansas?" 33-year old "aspiring writer who blogs in verse and writes reviews for a small culture website, -TheCultDen.com, [and] has spent much of his adult life in the service industry" (currently working a tech support call center), carless and spending half his meager income on child support.

He calls himself an anarchist disgusted with politics and:

he insists the system is being manipulated. His divorced father worked sporadically during McKenzie's childhood, and since 2009 he has received disability, which McKenzie thinks he doesn't need. ''I love my father, he is one of my best friends, but he is lazy. He gets disability, food stamps, and he has a plasma TV with all the HD channels.'' Several of McKenzie's relatives are also on disability, which he blames on the welfare system itself. ''They've all been ushered through the process of how to get it, and so they take advantage. It's become the American dream to get everything for free without having to do a lot of work.''

Reportorially, despite some diligent work in painting its sad picture, this is the kind of story that troubles to repeat that a "Lima Democrat" referred to the way state Republicans gerrymandered the state to lock the Democrats into only four statewide House seats as leading to a district that ''kind of looks like a deformed salamander."

Wikimedia CommonsRemember when Los Angeles Unified Schools spent $1 billion trying to buy iPads for every kid in the district—and then, when that became a fiasco, considered even more expensive options?

Well, Steve Lopez of the Los Angeles Times reported this week that some LA schools don't even have math textbooks for all grades:

With the conversion to Common Core standards, L.A. Unified purchased new math books for eighth grade, but not for sixth or seventh. The reason was lack of funding.

"We're left to fend for ourselves," said Kravets, who, like other math teachers has scoured the Internet for materials and made copies for students.

"We're chained to the copy machines," said Larry Rubin, another Palms Middle School math teacher. Rubin said he spends more than an hour on lesson plans in the evening and as much as 45 minutes at the copy machine the next day.

Talk about putting the cart before the horse. Superintendent John Deasy had money to burn on boondoggle after boondoggle, but couldn't be bothered to make sure that the classrooms he oversees are minimally equipped for basic instruction? Lopez takes him to task for this and other mistakes, including a failed tracking system that caused some students to never receive class assignments:

And by the way, what's L.A. Unified Supt. John Deasy doing on a tour of South Korea when he should be on a tour of Jefferson with a clipboard and a bullhorn, directing student traffic while a fix is made, and finally taking the blame for rolling out the ill-fated system despite warnings that it wasn't ready?

Deasy just announced his retirement; hopefully his successor will dare to dream a little smaller, albeit more competently.

Incidentally, the situation at Palms Middle School is an indictment of Common Core as well. The new standards rearrange the levels at which students learn certain concepts, and the approach requires entirely new teaching methods and materials. It's not possible to half-and-half it between the old way and the Common Core way: This will generate both gaps and overlaps in a child's education—as well as massive confusion. I would like to see the kids put through that experience try to pass one of the rigorous Core-required standardized tests.

Schools have to be fully Core-aligned, or stick with what they already got. But given the significant cost of being Core-aligned, this reality can be a major problem, as Palms Middle School's case illustrates. Of course, it's possible for administrators to navigate such difficulties with more finesse than Deasy evidently did.

Friday episodes of The Independents (Fox Business Network, 9 p.m. ET, 6 p.m. PT, with re-airs three and five hours later) are organized around a theme, and tonight's is "I'm Skeptical" (pictured). It's all about modern-day (and occasionally historical) skepticism, and how it might be applied to such disparate topics as Ebola, voting, ISIS, global warming, organic foods, vaccines, and so on. Joining to discuss are:

* Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic magazine (read about him and stuff by him in the Reason archive).

* Beloved Reason Managing Editor Katherine Mangu-Ward (read her Reason archive here).

* Amateur historian and professional hair model Michael Malice (read his great 2013 Reason feature "My Week in North Korea").

* TV's Andy Levy, whose real name is apparently "Andrew."

It is a lively and entertaining news program that I recommend consuming audio-visually.

Follow The Independents on Facebook at facebook.com/IndependentsFBN, follow on Twitter @ independentsFBN, and click on this page for more video of past segments.

Courtesy of Photography Is Not a Crime (PINAC) comes this horrible video below of what appears to show a police officer from Cleburne, Texas, shooting at a couple of stray dogs who are standing around wagging their tails and not engaging in aggressive behavior:

The police have confirmed that the video is what it looks like, but as is typical, the department is reflexively defending the officer while promising to investigate:

"The City is obviously concerned about the video showing an officer shooting a dog. As is often the case, the short video does not tell the whole story. The officer was responding to a 911 call for assistance. Three dogs had pinned some residents in a vehicle. One dog was secured without incident before the shooting. The officer was attempting to secure the other dogs until animal control arrived when one dog became aggressive.

The City of Cleburne takes the safety of our residents, their pets, and our officers seriously. This incident is currently under review. The review will include interviews with witnesses and review of department policies. Once the review is concluded, any actions that may be warranted will be handled swiftly and appropriately.

PINAC is pushing for a release of the full body-cam video, as this is only a short segment. PINAC also has a video from this same police department showing an officer Tazing a guy at a stop for an alleged hit-and-run incident for having the nerve to ask why he was being arrested.

Scroonshot from Taxi DriverThe battle against app-based ride sharing has taken an unusual turn, with an Australian limo driver attempting to place an UberX driver under citizen’s arrest. The man at the center of the affair is Russel Howarth, a Sydney–based limo driver who has begun a one-man vigilante campaign against UberX, despite using Uber to arrange his own passenger bookings.

Howarth has created a website and Twitter account, @ArrestingUber, to protest the existence of UberX, a lower-cost service that was introduced in Sydney in April. He claims that UberX drivers are operating outside the law and decided on Thursday to take enforcement into his own hands.

Gizmodo Australia reports:

Police told us this afternoon that at approximately 4pm AEDT, a man made a booking through a car sharing service, and during the travel accused the driver of being unlicensed while also driving an unregistered vehicle.

Police added that after the accusation was made, the passenger requested to be taken to Newtown Police Station. Upon arrival the passenger requested that the driver accompany him inside.

The UberX driver was promptly released after checks revealed he was properly licensed and was diving a registered vehicle. But police were less than pleased with Howarth’s vigilantism, as he quickly discovered:

"[When I went to the station today] the police advised me I had no right to perform a citizen’s arrest. They then threatened to arrest me if I didn’t drop the action…"

Uber has dismissed the event as a "publicity stunt." However, this Travis Bickle wannabe has stated that he intends to continue harassing UberX drivers as they attempt to make an honest living for themselves and their families:

"I’m going to continue to arrest UberX drivers until the Government gets serious about regulations…It isn’t a stunt. This is just a warm-up. I will be doing this every day."

Perhaps if he put as much effort into serving his customers, he wouldn’t feel the need to act out crime fighting fantasies. Then again, this is a reminder of how far people will go to protect their monopoly privileges.

• CNNRon Klain, the man who once failed to contain the spread of Vice President Joe Biden and former Vice President Al Gore, is going to be put in charge of containing the spread of the Ebola virus.
• A judge has struck down Arizona’s ban on gay marriage recognition and the state’s attorney general says he’s not going to fight it.
• Nigeria has reportedly declared a ceasefire with the Boko Haram terrorist group. But previous reports of ceasefires have proven to be untrue, so maybe not. Releasing all those kidnapped schoolgirls (remember them?) may be part of the deal.
• Because Gina Raimondo, Democratic candidate for governor of Rhode Island, pushed through huge reforms of the state’s public employee pensions, unions are throwing support behind the Republican opponents. Her lieutenant governor pick, Dan McKee, is also a supporter of charter schools.
• You’ll be able to spend your hard-earned bucks on all sorts of regrettable purchases at hundreds of thousands of stores beginning Monday with just your iPhone as the new Apple Pay service launches.
• Amazon launched its grocery delivery service in New York City today, but only to the hipsters in Brooklyn. They must have given up on the beehives and rooftop veggie gardens.

Follow us on Facebook and Twitter, and don’t forget to sign up for Reason’s daily updates for more content.

wfulawschool/FlickrMega-author John Grisham was recently interviewed by The Telegraph's Peter Foster, and the topic turned to overincarceration in America. Grisham—best known for producing the paperbacks your dad reads on vacation and every plucky-young-lawyer-rights-wrong movie of the past two decades (The Firm, A Time to Kill, The Pelican Brief...)—has a history of advocacy on this front, and the whole conversation would be pretty unremarkable had Grisham not veered into talking about sex crimes and child pornography. 

"We have prisons now filled with guys my age. Sixty-year-old white men in prison who've never harmed anybody, would never touch a child," he said in an exclusive interview to promote his latest novel Gray Mountain which is published next week. "But they got online one night and started surfing around, probably had too much to drink or whatever, and pushed the wrong buttons, went too far and got into child porn."

Grisham goes on to talk of a "good buddy from law school" who went to prison for three years after downloading porn featuring 16-year-olds*: 

"His drinking was out of control, and he went to a website. It was labelled 'sixteen year old wannabee hookers or something like that'. ... He shouldn't ’a done it. It was stupid, but it wasn't 10-year-old boys. He didn't touch anything. And God, a week later there was a knock on the door: 'FBI!' and it was sting set up by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to catch people—sex offenders—and he went to prison for three years."

You can probably guess how the online progressivesphere reacted.

Now granted, Grisham's assessment of the problem here comes across a bit like someone's drunk uncle at a wedding conversation you don't want to be in. "Grisham certainly could have chosen his words better," as Radley Balko wrote in a wonderful analysis of this Grishamgate at The Washington Post. "But he isn’t wrong, and the invective he’s receiving right now is both misinformed and wildly over the top. There are Twitter users calling him a pervert, or for his home to be raided by the FBI."

FURY (Sony Pictures Entertainment)Reviews have been somewhat mixed so far, but I thought there was a lot to appreciate in Fury. From my review in today's Washington Times:

‘Fury” is one of the most violent, brutal, nightmarish movies you’ll see all year. It is a movie about carnage and killing, chaos and madness, blood and dirt, and the will to kill. It’s a war movie, one of the most intense I’ve ever seen, and, for the most part, it’s a rather good one, even though it’s not always easy to watch.

“Fury” is set aboard a tank at the tail end of World War II. The Allies are pushing through Germany, taking town after town, frequently hitting fierce resistance, despite the seeming inevitability of the outcome.

Despite its World War II setting and its fetish for visual accuracy, the movie is not much of a history lesson. Instead, it’s a violent, often nihilistic meditation on the nature of war and the drive to continue fighting and killing to the bitter end.

This is probably not quite the Oscar-contender that the filmmakers hoped, but it's a strong, intense quasi-revisionist look back at World War II. I say "quasi-revisionist" because, while it certainly plays as an attempt to undercut the case for WWII as "the good war," it doesn't go all the way. The movie rejects the idea that there's something honorable or noble about war, but it seems uncertain about whether or not it's sometimes necessary, and, in the end, it suggests that war can ultimately provide...well, not meaning, exactly, but a kind of release. 

Earlier this year, the Los Angeles Police Department and Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department refused to release data about what license plates police cameras had captured on the grounds that every single car seen is under investigation. All of them. And a judge bought that argument.

Now, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the ACLU of Southern California are looking to the California Court of Appeal for a dose of sanity (yes, that strikes me as a Hail Mary pass, too) and a ruling that the public has a right to know how many people's movements are being monitored by the police, whether deliberately or through incidental data gathering.

That information can hit the creepy level very quickly, as the Minneapolis Star-Tribune discovered two years ago. After press inquiries, the police revealed a list of dates and places a reporter's car had been, and even the routes followed by the city's mayor.

I'm guessing it was that second point that spurred Minnesota legislation to limit access to license plate data, as well as how long it can be held.

Boston police stopped using license plate scanners entirely after they inadvertently data-dumped tracking information on 68,000 vehicles to the Boston Globe. The incident revealed that the cops weren't actually putting the data to good use (they kept recording the same stolen vehicles without following up) and were perhaps less than ideal stewards of sensitive material.

Who knows? Maybe LA cops are better than their colleagues elsewhere at using and protecting the information they gather on people's movements.

Heh.

Patrick Hannaford noted yesterday that some police departments are getting squirrelly about revealing what license plate data they've gathered.