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Sheldon Richman on MSNBC’s Pro-Government Fairy Tales
It’s easy to be amused by the unceasing economic
and political malarkey that flows from the pundits at MSNBC. Many
of these gems come during its promos, which, as viewers of the
network know very well, promote not its programs but all-pervasive
government. In his latest column, Sheldon Richman rebuts the
fallacies featured in two recent promos, one starring Rachel
Maddow, the other starring Lawrence O’Donnell.
Reason Writers Around Town: Shikha Dalmia on the Borderline Tyranny of the Left and Right
If there was ever any doubt that the totalitarian temptation identified by economist and Nobel laureate F.A. Hayek in his brilliant tract, “The Road to Serfdom,” is alive and well, even in this sweet land of liberty, two current crusades of the left and the right ought to put it to rest, noted Reason Foundation Senior Analyst Shikha Dalmia in her column at The Daily last week.
Hayek’s genius was to recognize that eliminating feudalism and monarchy didn’t mean that the West had eliminated the danger of tyranny. Modern-day central planners restricting the peaceful, voluntary activity of individuals in the name of achieving some grand collectivist end open up new dangers. Since their plans inevitably leave individuals worse off, people find ever-new ways to circumvent them.
But the government doesn’t take its failure as a sign that there might be something wrong with its ends — that perhaps they are out of sync with the normal aspirations of people. Rather, it blames the failure on an insufficient use of force. Thus an initial round of coercion inevitably spawns subsequent, even harsher rounds, putting the country on Hayek’s “road to serfdom.”
It is exactly this logic that’s unfolding in the right’s crusade to get rid of illegal Mexican labor in the name of national sovereignty — and the left’s crusade to redistribute wealth in the name of social justice.
Read the whole thing here and enjoy Memorial Day!
Watch "Advancing Age," Award-Winning Comic Short by ReasonTV's Meredith Bragg
Showcasing the talents of ReasonTV managing editor Meredith Bragg and his brother Austin Bragg (currently back working at the Cato Institute after a stint with Reason as well), this short film "Advancing Age" won top honors at The 48 Hour Film Festival held recently in Washington, DC in the "thriller/suspense" category. For more info on the contest, where teams rush to produce a complete short project from conception to execution in just two days, go here.
And for more work by the Bragg brothers (and their talented co-conspirators), check out their YouTube channel for The Big Honkin' now (channel contains full run of cult favorite Defenders of Stan and much more).
Baylen Linnekin on Organic Food and Anti-Social Behavior
Do organic consumers shop exclusively at the jerk
store? It sometimes seems that way, especially as self-described
foodies increasingly treat the act of grocery shopping as a
political statement. In his latest column, Baylen Linnekin of the
nonprofit Keep Food Legal reviews a new academic paper titled
“Wholesome Foods and Wholesome Morals?” which looks at whether
people exposed to organic food marketing are so self-satisfied that
they are less likely to express empathy toward others.
John Yoo: The Real Thing to Worry About With Drones is Their Use by Private Citizens
If you start reading too many
libertarian or just generally government-skeptical writings,
sometimes you begin to forget that the world is full of people who
are more nervous about private citizens doing something than they
are government doing it. Former Bush Attorney and pro-torture
advocate
John Yoo is, unsurprisingly, one of those
private-citizens-make-me-nervous kind of guys.
Over at The Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf notes that Yoo correctly identifies that a brave new world of every tabloid from Gawker to TMZ having a drone, and one where parents can creep on their children all day long (or, more than they do already) will be bizarre and maybe bad. But Yoo also wrote this:
So more important than worrying about whether the NYPD or DHS uses drones, are what rules our society will choose to govern and constrain the private use of drones. It may ultimately be difficult to control; as drone technology allows for smaller and cheaper drones, the government will have less and less ability to regulate them.
No. That is not what is more important.
Writes Friedersdorf:
Yoo has got it exactly wrong: the rules governing NYPD and DHS drone use are of vital importance, regardless of what's happening in the world of private drones, because coordinated government spying is more problematic than spying by parents or celebrity gawkers.
Yoo ought to understand why that is so. He's the sort of complacent lawyer that power-hungry leaders rely upon when they want to torture or spy without warrants or extrajudicially kill in secret. The monopoly on force that the state enjoys, the tremendous power wielded by its functionaries, the incentives to target political enemies, and the frequency with which abuses occur are all reasons why restraining official use of this technology ought to be an urgent priority. There's also the reality that, whatever the future brings, government use of drones is now much more common.
And, the Huffington Post noted recently that the age of drone lobbyist is upon us as well. This will of course involve a depressing collusion of government and private sector industries. No doubt government will benefit and the private sector will be too cozy with government, what with the estimated 23,000 jobs that drone tech will add by 2025.
So yes, the day is definitely coming where TMZ will get their scoops from some 14-pound creeping drone. Weird privacy problems will come up. So will the potential for dangerous crashes (not that government-drones are immune to such things.)
But in this land of the militarized drug war, where the Fourth Amendment cannot keep up with the existence of smartphones, or airplanes, it's hilarious to think that the occasional creepy neighbor or pushy tabloid with a drone will be the real problem. Especially when a few police departments are already hoping to arm their drones with tear gas and rubber bullets.
It doesn't need to be said, except that the existence of people like Yoo demands that it be said, but Yoo is completely wrong. The longer that drones are only in the hands of cops and the government, the more regulations that we have on private usage, and the longer we will have to wait for the TacoCopter to move from theoretical start-up to sweet reality.
Really, Yoo, sometimes it's as simple as, which institution may legally kill people? The answer is government. But considering how much the man trusts presidents, nothing about this is a surprise.
Let's let one of the co-founders of TacoCopter sum it up:
"Current U.S. FAA regulations prevent ... using UAVs [Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, like drones] for commercial purposes at the moment," Simpson said over Gchat. "Honestly I think it's not totally unreasonable to regulate something as potentially dangerous as having flying robots slinging tacos over people's heads ... [O]n the other hand, it's a little bit ironic that that's the case in a country where you can be killed by drone with no judicial review."
Reason on drones.
Reason Writers on The Alyona Show: Lucy Steigerwald on the 15-Year-Old Intel Science Fair Winner, Schools Tracking Students with RFID Chips, and The Japanese Artist Who Cooked His Genitals
Associate Editor Lucy Steigerwald discusses the 15-year-old who won the Intel Science Fair, schools tracking students with RFID chips in their IDs, the Japanese artist who cooked his own genitals, and the phenomenon of "trayvonning" on The Alyona Show's "Happy Hour." Airdate: May 25, 2012.
About 7.30 minutes.
Ron Paul Roundup: Paulites Cement Control in Nevada, More on Progress in Minnesota, Fed Audit Bill Up for Vote, and More
The non-Paul factions continue to flee the now largely Paulite official Republican Party in Nevada, the Las Vegas Review Journal reports:
Hours after the top two leaders of the Clark County Republican Party resigned, Ron Paul supporters took complete control.
They changed the locks at party headquarters and announced Thursday they could now focus on electing "genuine" conservatives, leaving infighting behind.
The sudden departure of Chairman Dave Gibbs, Vice Chairman Woody Stroupe and several others completed a purge of establishment GOP officials since Paul backers took over the executive board by sweeping elections at the Clark County Republican Convention this year.
The old guard are forming their own Romneyite "shadow party":
The moves also marked a permanent election year split in the GOP at the county and state levels, with Gibbs and Stroupe both saying they would join forces with "Team Nevada."
The Team Nevada organization is run by the Republican National Committee to help elect presumptive GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney and other Republicans. The RNC plans to run its campaign ground game money through Team Nevada to bypass the Clark County GOP and Nevada Republican Party.
The official Party is still doing the business of a political party:
Cindy Lake, the county party secretary and a Paul supporter, was elected acting chair. In a statement, she said the new leaders would focus on electing Republicans who share their values. Paul promotes smaller government, less spending and taxes and more personal freedoms, for example.
"After months of turbulence and instability following the Executive Board elections held at the Clark County Republican Convention, the CCRP Executive Board is now able to concentrate on the task of developing a consistent, accessible message that will allow the Party to take a large role in electing genuine conservative candidates to office," Lake said. "The CCRP Executive Board is looking forward to working together with Republicans across Clark County towards increasing Republican registration, building a strong, robust party, and achieving electoral success in the November elections."
22 of 28 delegates from Nevada to the national convention are expressed Paul supporters, but they are bound by state rules to mostly vote for Romney based on his majority in the state's caucus.
*Paul's latest Fed audit bill heading for House vote.
*One poll: 93 percent have a favorable opinion of Ron Paul.
*Profile of John Ramsey, moneybags behind the latest Paulite SuperPAC Liberty for All, which spent quite a bit on Thomas Massie's primary victory in Kentucky Tuesday.
*Paulites angry at Massachusetts decision to not count provisional ballots from April caucus meetings that could have sent more Paul-leaning delegates to Tampa.
*The Weekly Standard takes a close look at Paul's clean win of control of the delegation in Minnesota. Highlights:
Marianne Stebbins, Paul’s 2012 Minnesota campaign chair and one of the national delegates selected in St. Cloud, is the brains behind the Ron Paul revolution in the Minnesota GOP....
There’s a larger purpose to the “liberty” crowd’s fight. Though they won't have a chance to get concessions by threatening to block Romney's nomination at the August convention, Stebbins and company are looking long-term at remaking the Republican party, state by state, in Paul’s image. Paulites in Minnesota, like those in Iowa, Nevada, and Kentucky, are now in control of their party’s rules and platform. They’ll be recruiting candidates for local, state, and federal offices, too....
Stebbins predicts the Paul delegates won’t cause a fracas in Tampa. “The people who were elected as national delegates are a little more refined,” she says. “I don’t think you’re going to see any disruptions at the national convention.”
My new book, Ron Paul's Revolution: The Man and the Movement He Inspired.
Cross posted at dedicated blog/site for Ron Paul's Revolution.
Q and A With California House Candidate Christopher David, a "Ron Paul Republican"
Christopher David, a candidate for Henry Waxman's federal House seat in California's 33rd District, who I interviewed for my book Ron Paul’s Revolution: The Man and the Movement He Inspired, tells me he came into the Ron Paul world in 2007 from the left, attracted to the only candidate speaking a believable antiwar message. At antiwar rallies during the Bush years, he recalls, he was “surrounded by lefties holding signs for every left cause under the sun, which got me thinking I guess I was a leftist; I didn’t see anyone else vocally opposing the warmongering of the Bush administration.” David figured early in the last race he’d vote Obama; he couldn’t vote Kerry in ’04, thinking him just “Bush lite.”
Then he saw Ron Paul’s famous moment (the moment at the start of Ron Paul’s Revolution) at the May 2007 South Carolina GOP presidential debate, speaking intelligently and passionately about blowback and 9/11 and not backing down when Rudy Giuliani bullied him about it. “It was the first time ever I heard any elected official use the term “blowback” and know what they talking about,” David says. “It was amazing to me, and the fact on that it was a Republican doing it was just shocking. That got me looking into Ron Paul, because I knew that took courage for him. Getting familiar with Paul and his philosophy, within two months I was the card-carrying libertarian spouting Rothbard to anyone who would listen.” He was part of the army of youth campaigning for Paul in the blistering cold leading up to the 2008 Iowa caucus.
David went on to live for a while in the Free State of New Hampshire “in a house with seven other Free Staters in the middle of the woods with a firing range in the backyard” and to work with the Paulite youth group Young Americans for Liberty (where he tried to launch a national “Year of Youth” campaign to encourage young people to not just help other candidates but to run themselves, advice he’s now following) and launched the Paulite new media site Revolutimes and moved out to Los Angeles, from which he is running for Henry Waxman’s House seat in the 33rd district as a Republican. (Among his competitors are Libertarian Steve Collett and Democrat Bruce Margolin, famous for his work as a defense attorney in pot cases.)
Reason: Tell us about yourself.
Christopher David: I am a 25-year-old entrepreneur and activist running for the U.S. House in California’s 33rd congressional district, which spans the coast of Los Angeles from Malibu to Palos Verdes and includes Beverly Hills. A number of factors brought me to run, one of the biggest is that I believe there are too few advocates in Washington for the kind of real systemic transformative change that I think voters really want, and despite an array of very flawed candidates they have been trying to send that message that they are looking for something completely different. We saw that in 2008 with Barack Obama and the beginning of the Ron Paul movement, saw it more in 2010 with the Tea Party and I think we will see it even more this year. I think the action this year will be with the liberty leaning candidates, candidates inspired by Ron Paul.
It’s completely obvious if you look at Romney and Obama that there is a huge absence of excitement, excitement that only really Ron Paul is channeling, and so I think Ron Paul will go out with a bang at the Tampa convention. This will be a year of Ron Paul passing the baton not to any one person but to a whole movement. The great strength of the Ron Paul movement has been its very decentralization and though it’s obvious Rand Paul will probably be a candidate in 2016 for president, you’re going to see an explosion of people inspired by Ron Paul entering.
Ted Stevens' Prosecutors Punished for Withholding Evidence
Yesterday the Justice Department
announced that it has suspended two prosecutors who sat on
evidence they were legally obligated to share with the lawyers
representing Ted Stevens, the Alaska Republican who was convicted
of failing to report gifts right before losing his 2008 bid for a
seventh term in the U.S. Senate. The following April, the
government withdrew
all of the charges against Stevens (who died
in a plane crash four months later), citing the withheld evidence,
which included notes from an interview with a prosecution witness
that undercut the government's claims about the value of renovation
work on Stevens' home in Alaska—the alleged gift at the center
of the case. While a special investigator appointed by the
federal judge who oversaw the Stevens case concluded that the
prosecutors at fault, Joseph W. Bottini and James A. Goeke,
"intentionally withheld and concealed" evidence, the Justice
Department's report on the matter attributes their failures to
"reckless professional misconduct." They were suspended for 40 and
15 days, respectively, without pay.
Light as those penalties may seem, they are a welcome reminder that defendants have a due process right to evidence that is "material either to guilt or to punishment." Although that has been the law of the land for half a century, prosecutors often seem to forget, and they rarely face consequences for that failure, aside from overturned convictions.
Another positive outcome from the Stevens fiasco: Two months ago, Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) introduced the Fairness in Disclosure of Evidence Act, which would require federal prosecutors to share evidence "that may reasonably appear to be favorable to the defendant...without delay after arraignment and before the entry of any guilty plea." Evidence comes to light after then must be shared "as soon as is reasonably practicable." If the prosecution fails to do so, the remedies include "postponement or adjournment of the proceedings," "exclusion or limitation of testimony or evidence," "ordering a new trial," and "dismissal with or without prejudice." If the failure is due to "negligence, recklessness, or knowing conduct," the court may order the government to cover the defendant's legal expenses. Murkowski explained the motivation for the bill this way:
What happened in the trial of Senator Stevens is unfortunately not an isolated incident, but most American do not have the wherewithal that he did to push back against prosecutorial misconduct. While I do believe most federal prosecutors are adhering to the law, it's clear the rules in place are not preventing "hide the ball" prosecutions in cases across the country. There are a few prosecutors out there willing to put a finger on the scales of justice to get more convictions—and this bill seeks to stop that. Justice should be blind, not blindly ignored.
Schumer Shocked Over Push-Back on Ex-Pat Bill, Etan Patz Suspect Arrested, UK Goes on Spending Binge: P.M. Links
Senator Charles Schumer is
appalled —
appalled, he says — that anybody would compare his proposed
legislative plan to fleece anybody who wants to leave the country
to a similar law enacted decades ago and wielded by a famously
nasty regime.- The case that haunted the headlines in 1979 may finally be solved. Pedro Hernandez, a former convenience-store clerk, was arrested and charged with murdering Etan Patz.
- Gary Johnson's so-far Internet-only "Peace is Cheaper" advertisement is "red meat" intended to reach antiwar activists and fiscal hawks alike. See it here.
- Curt Schilling's 38 Studios is the latest government-favored, taxpayer-subsidized company to go belly-up amidst the stink of fail. The video-game outfit was lured to Rhode Island in by a $75-million loan guarantee from the state.
- Berkeley, California, Police Chief Michael Meehan assures critics that he would send ten cops to retrieve anybody's iPhone, just like he did for his son.
- Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe's tolerator-in-chief, says there's no place in his country for homosexuals. Left unspoken is that there's not much place in the country for anybody else, either.
- UK government spending hit record levels, despite an official policy of "austerity." With the country's recession worse than anticipated, economists describe the binge as "unsustainable."
- The SpaceX Dragon private spacecraft dropped by the International Space Station for a cup of coffee and a chat. Well ... Something like that, anyway. It was historic.
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Brian Doherty on Why Ron Paul Is the Best Hope for Progressives
As the presidential field has shaped up to a
certain Obama vs. Romney in the major parties, the desire for a
challenger championing either the serious right or the serious
progressive left grows. And Ron Paul—though he continues to deny
any third party plans and his political machine has clearly hitched
itself to the GOP for now—is strangely a viable candidate for
either role, should he choose to accept it.
As Senior Editor Brian Doherty observes, Paul is in many ways the rightest of right wingers, with his desire to kill the income tax, end government interference in medical care, and get to a balanced budget in three years with no tax hikes. Yet despite Paul’s impeccable Tea Party credentials on tax and spending issues, he would be a more appealing choice to progressives dissatisfied with President Obama. Even while running for the GOP presidential nod, Ron Paul has presented a political vision in many respects to the left of the Democratic Party.
But What Does Every Black Celebrity in America Think About Gay Marriage?
Just as the appearance of a
black presenter at the Academy Awards prompts the camera to track
down the most famous black celebrity in the audience (Will Smith,
Samuel L. Jackson or Halle Berry), President Barack Obama’s
declaration of support for gay marriage has prompted the media to
seek out quotes from some black household names in America.
Jay-Z approved of Obama’s evolution in a CNN interview. Smith gave gay marriage a thumbs up while promoting Men in Black III in Germany (just don’t try to kiss him). Other rappers like T.I. and 50 Cent have given their support with a “it doesn’t affect me so why should I care” slant, though in 50 Cent’s case, he’s terribly concerned about gay guys wanting to “grab your little buns” on the elevator and thinks straight guys need a support group for that. The Root even has a slide show of black notables who support gay marriage.
Samuel L. Jackson had already declared his support and participated in activism against Proposition 8 in California in 2008. Then after Proposition 8 passed, blacks were blamed for voting in favor of banning gay marriage in higher numbers than other races, though after the numbers were analyzed, blacks only voted in favor of Prop. 8 in numbers six percent higher than the rest of the population. Given that blacks make up only six percent of California’s population, it seems a bit of a reach to blame it on them, but the narrative has stuck (well, them and the Mormons).
The argument over blame was strange and a little telling. I was left wondering what the 42 percent of the blacks who voted against Prop. 8 felt about being blamed for its passage anyway. But that has always been a problem with collective or tribal politics – the voting booth makes a mockery of it. Looking at blacks or gays as a monolithic group has always been profoundly stupid, and a barrier to actual engagement between individuals within these groups, and yet it continues.
Homicide Isn't Prosecutable When You're a Federal Agent
An old joke about committing murders is that "the first is expensive, the rest are free." They can only execute you once, after all. But if they can't even prosecute you, let alone execute you ... Well, then, killings are all pretty much on the house, aren't they? And that seems to be the case with Cole Dotson, who won't be prosecuted for killing three women and injuring two children, because he was on the job at the time as an agent with Immigrations and Customs Enforcement when he decided to play bumper cars at an intersection in Imperial County.
According to the The San Diego Union-Tribune:
U.S. District Judge Anthony Battaglia said long-standing federal law gives immunity from state prosecution to federal law enforcement officers accused of crimes committed in the course of their duties.
That means Cole Dotson, a special agent with Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, will no longer face three counts of gross vehicular manslaughter brought by the Imperial County district attorney.
On December 29, 2009, Dotson was apparently a laggard member of a surveillance team following a suspected meth smuggler. While trying to catch up with his buddies, he drove "his government car at speeds of more than 100 mph, according to the California Highway Patrol. When he went through the stop sign, his speed was estimated at 80 mph. Though the car had lights and sirens, they were not on."
Stop signs are there to modulate the flow of traffic, and people expect that drivers coming from other directions might actually pause, however briefly. When you blow through them doing 80, you tend to do things like piling into vans containing women and children. Killed in the crash were Sandra Garcia, who was driving, along with Maria Nieto and Patricia Reyes. Two children were injured.
The federal government forked over $11 million to the families of the victims in February — an indication that Dotson's actions were not universally considered praiseworthy. Another such indication was the attempted prosecution by Imperial County officials, who said federal agents get immunity only if their actions are "necessary and proper" to their duties, and that Dotson's didn't qualify.
Battaglia disagreed. While he said that Dotson’s actions were negligent, he said making the agent face criminal charges would have a “chilling effect” on all federal law enforcement officers who are in emergency situations.
The most famous such assertion of federal immunity in recent memory is that of Lon Horiuchi, the FBI shooter who ultimately skated away from an attempt by Idaho officials to hold him to account for his lethal conduct at Ruby Ridge only after the case bounced back and forth between courts before being dropped by a newly elected prosecutor.
Spurred by the Horiuchi case, the Yale Law Journal looked for the limits of federal immunity in 2003. Authors Seth P. Waxman and Trevor W. Morrison concluded that there was surprisingly little clear guidance to go on, but that:
[O]nce we are confident that the federal government is competent to act in a certain area, federalism properly imposes few judicially enforceable barriers to that action. Rather, we generally defer to Congress’s judgment about how best to reconcile overlapping federal and state power in areas where both are legitimately exercised. ... [T]he role of federalism in this area properly becomes quite modest. Rather, the governing constitutional rule is simply that of the Supremacy Clause itself, under which federal law is supreme and the only real question is how the federal government has chosen to express that supremacy.
How the federal government has chosen to express that supremacy? Well, Horiuchi was never prosecuted at the federal level, and Dotson still works for ICE, in an administrative capacity, with no hint of a federal prosecution in the wind.
With the federal government involving itself in ever-more aspects of American life, it might be a good time to look around really carefully at stop signs. Or anywhere else. (HT jasno)
Ray Kelly Outlines Measures to Curtail the Illegal Police Stops He Says Are Not Occurring
Last week, after a federal judge certified
a class action challenging the NYPD's stop-and-frisk program,
Police Commissioner Ray Kelly
outlined measures he is taking to curtail the unlawful
stops that he says are not occurring. In a
letter to City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, Kelly said "we
have republished the Department order that specifically prohibits
racial profiling." That's good, because Kelly's cops seem to have
lost their copies. Last year, the New York Civil Liberties Union
(NYCLU)
reports, 87 percent of the people stopped, questioned, and
(most of the time) frisked for nonexistent weapons were black or
Latino. Kelly says that's because police are focusing their efforts
on high-crime neighborhoods that are disproportionately black and
Latino. But as NYCLU Executive Director Donna Lieberman
notes in today's New York Daily News, that explanation
does not quite fit the facts:
Though they make up only 4.7% of the city’s population, black and Latino males between the ages of 14 and 24 accounted for 41.6% of stops in 2011. The number of stops of young black men exceeded the city’s entire population of young black men.
The commissioner contends that this happens only because officers go where the crime is. But last year, large percentages of blacks and Latinos were also stopped in overwhelmingly white neighborhoods like Greenwich Village, where 77% of people stopped were black or Latino.
The racially disproportionate impact of the stops is especially troubling because the supposedly suspicious people detained by police are innocent nine times out of 10: Only 10 percent of stops result in an arrest or summons. The hit rate for pat-downs is even less impressive: Only 2 percent find weapons of any kind. Although taking guns off the street is one of the most commonly cited justifications for the stop-and-frisk program, Lieberman notes that "guns are recovered in less than 0.2% of stops—an astonishingly low yield rate for such an intrusive, humiliating and often unlawful tactic." Kelly nevertheless claims the program has saved thousands of lives during the last decade by reducing violent crime, an assertion that Lieberman calls "demonstrably false." She notes that homicides were already falling in New York before Kelly launched the stop-and-frisk program in 2003 and that since then they have declined more quickly in other big cities.
The program's meager results also raise constitutional issues. Under the 1968 Supreme Court decision in Terry v. Ohio, a stop must be based on "reasonable suspicion" that someone has committed, is committing, or is about to commit a crime, while a frisk is justified only when there is reasonable suspicion that he is armed.How reasonable is a suspicion that is wrong nine times out of 10, let alone 98 times out of 100? These numbers strongly suggest that police routinely ignore the "reasonable suspicion" requirement (as Mayor Michael Bloomberg has implicitly conceded).
But don't worry: Kelly says the department plans to remind police officers of their constitutional duties. It has a new training curriculum that "provides personnel with an additional level of clarity in determining when and how to conduct a lawful stop." It has approved the script for "the fifth and final part in our series of training videos regarding street encounters." Kelly also plans to keep a closer eye on the stop-and-frisk "report worksheets" that cops fill out for each encounter, which indicate the supposed basis for reasonable suspicion. The most popular excuse: "furtive movement." Finally, in an effort to improve community relations, which tend to be undermined by a decade-long program of hassling and searching innocent people with dark skin, the NYPD is encouraging officers to hand out "informational cards" durings stops that "provide a written description of the legal authority for such stops and a list of common reasons individuals are stopped by the police." Here is the short version of the text on the cards: "WHY WE ARE FUCKING WITH YOU: Because we can."
Robert Zubrin: Radical Environmentalists and Other Merchants of Despair
"We have never been in danger of running out of resources," says Dr. Robert Zubrin, "but we have encountered considerable dangers from people who say we are running out of resources and who say that human activities need to be constrained."
In his latest book, Merchants of Despair: Radical Environmentalists, Criminal Pseudo-Scientists, and the Fatal Cult of Antihumanism, Zubrin documents the history of dystopian environmentalism, from economic impairment inflicted by current global warming policies to the Malthusian concern over population growth. "Just think how much poorer we would be today if the world would have had half as many people in the 19th century as it actually did. You can get rid of Thomas Edison or Louis Pasteur, take your pick."
Zubrin sat down with Reason Magazine editor in chief Matt Welch to discuss his book, the difference between practical and ideological environmentalism, and how U.S. foreign aid policy encourages population control.
Runs about 9.30 minutes
Produced by Meredith Bragg. Camera by Meredith Bragg and Josh Swain.
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Is It Even Possible to Lower Property Assessments "Improperly"?
A strange political scandal in
Los Angeles raises a tough question about real estate and
taxes.
L.A. County District Attorney Steve Cooley is investigating corruption in the office of County Assessor John Noguez. There is some reason to believe that Noguez has made the most of his power to decide how much property owners must pay in taxes.
Earlier this week, former Noguez underling Scott Schenter was arrested up in Oregon on charges of falsifying documents and unlawfully lowering property values. According to the L.A. Times’ Ruben Vives and Jack Dolan, Schenter is accused of “improperly slashing the value on more than 100 Westside” properties, resulting in a tax break of “$172 million for multimillion-dollar homes and businesses.” Property owners reportedly contributed to Noguez’ campaign in payment for the reduced assessments.
Schenter left office in January 2011 after a supervisor got wind of his alleged activities. In the intervening time he spilled the beans to Vives and Dolan, which had the immediate effect of expanding the story to include a local consultant named Ramin Salari who, again allegedly, acted as a middleman/fixer for property owners seeking relief on their tax bills. Schenter also may have incriminated himself with this loose talk, though I have no idea whether his statements to the paper had any impact on his own case. Most recently, Schenter relocated to the Beaver State and was, at age 49, living back in his dad’s house when he was arrested.
Noguez has his own
saga, including credible reports of threats and physical
harassment against opponents during a 2007 mayoral race in the
suburb of Huntington Park. These threats apparently resulted from
questions about
whether the then-mayor’s real name was John Noguez. It may be
Juan Rodriguez or Juan Noguez or Dick Whitman.
The grownup thing might be to say “Hey, even Jesus hung out with corrupt tax collectors,” and leave it at that. But it’s illustrative of how far from a free market real estate has wandered that you have to bribe public officials to get a lower assessment in a county where 30 percent of all mortgages are underwater. It’s true that the West Side, where Noguez’ office is said to have done much of its business, has less negative equity than other parts of L.A. County. But this interactive map from the L.A. Times (a fine national newspaper), shows Santa Monica’s beachfront zip code with 20 percent negative equity, Brentwood with 11 percent, Malibu with 16 percent and Marina del Rey with 21 percent.
Here in the land of the million-dollar starter home and the half-million-dollar teardown, in an era that has given us the deathless phrase “repenetrated bottom,” the idea that real estate can only go up remains so stubborn that we don’t even have language to describe the decline. Predictably, local pols are agitating for re-assessments, and I'm guessing they don't expect those assessments to be lower than Schenter's.
Nationwide, housing will mark its sixth straight year of deflation next month. Yet to this day you only get in trouble if you say a house has lost value. If you pretend the price is still inflated, nobody will bother you.
Well, You Wonder Why I Always Dress in Black...
So we
have a
new Men in Black movie? I've always resented this
series. It's not that I object in principle to taking a
fantastically creepy piece of American folklore and reducing it to
a string of jokes. It's just that if you're going to do that, the
jokes had better make me laugh, and most of the gags in the first
two MiB flicks fell far short of that. Alex Trebek and
Jesse Ventura were far funnier with just a fraction of the
screentime when they played Men in Black in "Jose
Chung's From Outer Space," and they managed to
preserve the eerie weirdness of the legend in the process.
Thankfully, Fortean folklorists are still collecting tales of sinister black-clad beings, and these tend to be much more entertaining than Hollywood's contributions to the genre. As an antidote to what I suspect will be another dull movie, here is an encounter with the Men that purportedly happened in 1955. Not only is it creepy, but there's a goofiness to its creepiness; when the alleged contactee reports his "impression" that one of the Men "was wearing a mask (the elastic band of which I distinctly remember seeing amidst the kinky, red, close-cropped hair of his head)," there's a hint of deadpan humor in the horror -- not surprisingly, since the tale almost certainly began as a prank. A good Men in Black story is both funny and frightening, as though someone crossed the Cthulhu mythos with a slapstick comedy; it suggests a world plagued by conspiracies that will never make sense to human minds because the forces behind them are not human themselves. I'd love to see a Men in Black movie like that. I strongly doubt that one is opening this weekend.
Ryan Ekvall and M.D. Kittle on the Wisconsin Recall Election and Milwaukee’s Crime Stats Controversy
The combatants in Wisconsin's historic
gubernatorial recall election brought the heat on the campaign
trail Thursday, after a newspaper story about the Milwaukee Police
Department improperly identifying hundreds of violent crimes. As
Ryan Ekvall and M.D. Kittle report, Gov. Scott Walker’s campaign
shifted the spotlight on Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett after a
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel investigation found that, since
2009, the city's police department misreported more than 500
incidents to the FBI as lesser offenses.
Why Is Banning Private Anti-Gay Discrimination Less Controversial Than Insisting on Equal Treatment by the Government?
Damon Root's
post about the Defense of Marriage Act's legal troubles in
California highlights a puzzling aspect of the debate about gay
rights. He notes that the Supreme Court, which may soon
decide whether states are constitutionally required to treat
gay and straight couples equally, already has said that states may
not prevent local governments from adopting bans on private
discrimination against gay people. In the 1996 case
Romer v. Evans, the Court overturned a voter-approved
amendment to the Colorado constitution that prohibited such
anti-discrimination laws at the state or local level. In a majority
opinion by Justice Anthony Kennedy, the Court reasoned that because
the amendment "seems inexplicable by anything but animus toward the
class that it affects," it "lacks a rational relationship to
legitimate state interests," meaning it failed even the highly
deferential "rational basis" test used in equal protection cases
that do not involve a fundamental right or a "suspect class" such
as race. Although the Court did not quite say that states
must ban private discrimination against gay people,
it did say they cannot preclude such legislation. But 16 years
later, with Kennedy still the swing vote, it is entirely possible
the Court, confronted by the equal protection challenge to
California's Proposition 8, will allow states themselves to
continue discriminating against gay people when it comes to
recognizing marriages.
This combination of positions is not at all unusual. Mitt Romney, who promised during his unsuccessful 1994 run for the U.S. Senate to be more gay-friendly than Ted Kennedy, supports banning anti-gay employment discrimination. In other words, if a nosy fundamentalist with a dry cleaning store refuses to hire anyone he considers a sinner, including non-celibate homosexuals, Romney says he must be forced to act against his own deeply held religious beliefs. Yet if a gay couple applies to the government for a marriage license, Romney insists that they should be turned away, going so far as to endorse a constitutional amendment that would prevent any state from taking a more evenhanded approach. Polling data likewise show that Americans are much more willing to compel nondiscriminatory treatment of gay people by employers and landlords than to insist that the government stop discriminating based on sexual orientation. In a 2008 Newsweek survey, 87 percent of respondents supported "equal rights for gays and lesbians in terms of job opportunities," and 82 percent endorsed "equal rights for gays and lesbians in terms of housing." Yet only 39 percent favored "legally sanctioned gay and lesbian marriages."
These opinions seem completely backward to me. Contrary to what Kennedy said in Romer, anti-gay bigotry is not the only reason why people might think that individuals should be free to discriminate based on sexual orientation. Bans on private discrimination impinge on religious liberty, property rights, freedom of contract, freedom of association, and freedom of speech—rights we should not sacrifice simply because we disapprove of the way some people exercise them. By contrast, government discrimination based on sexual orientation should not be tolerated, because the government has an obligation to treat all citizens equally under the law. Why are people more willing to accept bans on private discrimination, which violate liberty, than a ban on government discrimination, which would enhance liberty? Probably because they conflate civil marriage, the legal arrangement recognized by the government, with "the sacred institution of marriage" upheld by religious tradition. Opponents of gay marriage fear they and their religious communities will be compelled to accept homosexual unions that are anathema to them. But this is all the more reason to insist on the freedom of individuals and private organizations to discriminate while demanding neutrality from the government.
I discussed the crucial difference between private and public discrimination against homosexuals in a 2009 column.
“This is an issue of obfuscation, lies and mistrust in the food system,” admit anti-biotech crop activists.
Sadly, the headline is really
what anti-biotech crop activists are actually trying to achieve in
their campaign against modern biotech crops, not what they say they
are doing. The New York Times today
quotes Stonyfield Farms CEO and organic yogurt purveyor Gary
Hirshberg as saying, "This is an issue of transparency, truth and
trust in the food system." What he and other anti-biotech crop
activists are trying to do is convince consumers that something is
wrong with foods made using ingredients from biotech crops. Their
nefarious plan is to get state and federal government agencies to
mandate labels on such foods, e.g., "Warning: May Contain GMOs
(Genetically Modified Organisms.)"
The Times identifies anti-biotech vandals, e.g., one Cynthia LaPier, who go around sneaking their own hand-made labels on foods in grocery stores. So what's wrong with labeling foods in this way? This is where the obfuscation, lies and mistrust being peddled by anti-biotechies come into play. In the United States regulators only require labels on foods that provide either nutritional or safety information. In the case of foods made using ingredients from biotech crops, neither applies. Every independent scientific panel that has ever evaluated biotech crops finds that the currently available varieties are nutritionally indistinguishable from conventional crops and that they pose no health risks to human beings. No nutritional differences and no risks mean no labels.
By the way, organic labels are entirely voluntary and are basically used as a marketing technique to extract extra money from unwitting consumers.
However, anti-biotech activists and, dare one add, organic crop and food production competitors know that some signficant portion Americans would innocently mistake required labels on foods made using biotech crops as some kind of safety warning and thus steer clear of them. Because they want to encourage this mistake in consumers, the goal of anti-biotech and organic foods activists can be reasonably characterized as profitably promoting obfuscation, lies, and mistrust.
In the future some biotech crops will provide improved nutrition, e.g., soy beans improved to supply additional health-promoting omega-3 fatty acids, at which time foods using these ingredients will be usefully labeled with this nutritional information.
In a comprehensive review of the scientific literature and of the claims made by the organic foods lobby, Rutgers University food scientist Joseph Rosen concluded [PDF]:
Organic food proponents do more than act as unreliable sources of information; they actually cause harm. ... Any members of the media who rely on organic food proponents for information without checking the facts are complicit in defrauding their readers. And any consumers who buy organic food because they believe that it contains more healthful nutrients than conventional food are wasting their money.
It's clear that the organic lobby promotes disinformation to sell its products. It's about time that consumers and reporters wake up to that fact.
J.D. Tuccille Sounds Off About Cops Tracking Your License Plate
You can never get too much of a good thing, of course. And that good thing is me sharing my insights about new license plate recognition toys that let law-enforcement agents at the federal, state and local level track your movements by positioning cameras along the side of the road that photograph, identify and record your license plates. I wrote about the creepy-licious phenomenon a few days ago, and yesterday I appeared on RT to have my say.
D.A. Suspends Grand Jury Investigations of Police Shootings in Albuquerque; No Shooting Ever Ruled Unjustified
The district attorney in Albuquerque will be suspending the practice of sending police shootings to grand juries to determine that they were justified, the Albuquerque Journal reports.
There were 24 cop shootings since 2010; 17 were fatal. While cop shootings will no longer be handled by a grand jury, there are nine cop shootings still pending with the D.A.’s office, including one by a cop who listed his job description on Facebook as “human waste disposal.”
The Journal on what the D.A. (who’s up for re-election!) might do next:
“I think what we have done in the past has a lot of integrity, but times are changing,” [Kari] Brandenburg [the District Attorney] said in an interview. “More transparency is always a good thing, and I am going to do what I said I would do and look for alternatives.”
Brandenburg said a preferable alternative would be to take each police shooting case before a judge in a preliminary court hearing. But that option would require charging each officer with a crime, she said.
“Ethically, we just can’t charge someone with a crime if we don’t believe a crime has been committed,” she said. “So if we were to try and go that route, we would have to have a rule change.”
Other options include appointing a special prosecutor for each case, which Brandenburg dismisses as too expensive, or forming a “review board” composed of citizens, attorneys, judges and law enforcement officials.
Brandenburg’s opponent in the upcoming Democratic primary race for the DA’s Office, public defender Jennifer Romero, has joined critics in denouncing the practice.
Brandenburg, who is seeking a fourth four-year term, has said the special grand jury process provides a second set of unbiased eyes to look at the work prosecutors in her office have done to determine whether police shootings are justified.
Reason-Rupe: Wisconsinites Favor Increasing Public Union Retirement Contributions to Address Budget Deficit
The latest Reason-Rupe poll of 708 Wisconsin adults on landline and cell phones suggests Wisconsin voters favor reforming public employee unions, over raising taxes and cutting education and health care spending, to address the state budget deficit.
When Governor Scott Walker took office in 2011, the state faced a projected $3.2 billion deficit. The approach Walker took to close the budget gap included reducing state spending on public employees. To do so required government workers to contribute more toward their own health care and retirement benefits. However, this also effectively served as a pay cut for many public employees.
The Reason-Rupe poll asked Wisconsinites how the state should raise funds to pay government employee retirement benefits if the state did not have enough money to fund these benefits.
72 percent oppose “increasing sales, income, or property taxes” to help fund government worker retirement benefits, 25 percent favor.
75 percent oppose “cutting spending on government programs, such as education and health care” to help fund public employee retirement benefits, 23 percent favor.
49 percent oppose and 46 percent favor “reducing public employee benefits.”
However, 74 percent favor “requiring public employees to contribute more toward their own pensions and health care,” and 24 percent oppose.
The poll followed by asking “if the state and local government had to reduce spending, which of the following areas would you reduce spending on first?” The plurality of Wisconsinites (38 percent) chose reducing spending on “pensions and benefits for public employees” followed by “prisons and courts” (29 percent).
These results suggest that when tough trade-offs have to be made to fund public employee retirement benefits, the public favors requiring public employees to contribute more over raising taxes, or cutting spending on education and health care.
Full poll results can be found here and cross tabs here.
ORC International conducted fieldwork for the poll, May 14th-18th 2012 of both mobile and landline phones, 708 Wisconsin adults, margin of error +/- 3.7%. Likely Wisconsin voters (609, MOE +/-4%) include registered respondents who said they are absolutely certain to vote or very likely to vote in the June 5th recall election for governor.
Emily Ekins is the director of polling for Reason Foundation where she leads the Reason-Rupe public opinion research project, launched in 2011. Follow her on Twitter @emilyekins.
Barack Obama Punishes People for Getting High; It Used to Be, He Punished Them for Not Getting High Enough
As Nick Gillespie noted below, President Barack Obama was a serious pot smoker in his younger days back when it was legal. We know more about this golden age of abandon thanks to David Maraniss' new book, Barack Obama: The Story. BuzzFeed has put together a list of a young Obama's pot techniques and habits. Perhaps the most striking, considering Obama's current role as chief drug warrior? He used to punish people for not getting high enough:
When you were with Barry and his pals, if you exhaled precious pakalolo (Hawaiian slang for marijuana, meaning "numbing tobacco") instead of absorbing it fully into your lungs, you were assessed a penalty and your turn was skipped the next time the joint came around. "Wasting good bud smoke was not tolerated," explained one member of the Choom Gang, Tom Topolinski, the Chinese-looking kid with a Polish name who answered to Topo.
Reason Writers at the Movies: Peter Suderman Reviews Men in Black III
Writing in The Washington
Times, Senior Editor Peter Suderman reviews the sci-fi action
comedy Men in Black III:
Men in Black 3” marks the third weekend this month that Earth has been invaded by aliens — following “The Avengers” and “Battleship” — thus making failed extraterrestrial takeovers an official journalistic trend. It’s as if Earth was recently ranked at the top of this year’s list of must-invade interstellar hotspots by “Galactic Conqueror” magazine.
The good news is that Will Smith is on hand to respond. As one of Hollywood’s most practiced defenders against alien threats — in “Independence Day” as well as two previous “Men in Black” films — he’s demonstrated his effectiveness and reliability in situations that require swift action to repel space invaders in about two hours, give or take. You hire Mr. Smith because you know he can get the job done.
Which is exactly what he does here, no more, no less. “Men in Black 3” is an exercise in competence — amiable, enjoyable and entirely forgettable.
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