HIT & RUN BLOG

White HouseAs delicious as it is to watch White House minion Jay Carney squirm under questioning about the targeting of journalists, and to hear that tax agency apparatchik Lois Lerner will take the Fifth when called before a congressional committee investigating improper scrutiny of conservative groups by the IRS, it's important to remember that the problem lies in the existence of the power that's being abused, not just in the individuals doing the abusing. To punish Justice Department officials, IRS agents, or even the Obama administration might bring an end to the current round of scandals, but it will inevitably leave us repeating some version of this exercise in a few years, at best. The end goal should be to strip politicians and government officials of the power to punish journalists and political opponents — not to make sure that Republicans get their (next) turn.

Last week, the most excellent journalist and scrutinizer of creatures governmental, James Bovard, had a piece in the Wall Street Journal outlining the Internal Revenue Service's long history of dirty tricks on behalf of whoever is in power. Wrote he:

Many Republicans are enraged over revelations in recent days that the Internal Revenue Service targeted conservative nonprofit groups with a campaign of audits and harassment. But of all the troubles now dogging the Obama administration—including the Benghazi fiasco and the Justice Department's snooping on the Associated Press—the IRS episode, however alarming, is also the least surprising. As David Burnham noted in "A Law Unto Itself: The IRS and the Abuse of Power" (1990), "In almost every administration since the IRS's inception the information and power of the tax agency have been mobilized for explicitly political purposes."

Bovard sketches how "President Franklin Roosevelt used the IRS to harass newspaper publishers who were opposed to the New Deal" and "Kennedy ... used the IRS to strong-arm companies into complying with "voluntary" price controls. Steel executives who defied the administration were singled out for audits." He points out that the "IRS was ... given Nixon's enemies list to, in the words of White House counsel John Dean, 'use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies.'"

We discovered in the 1990s, Bovard points out, that not just presidents, but members of Congress, had used the IRS to target political enemies for audits.

Likewise, the Justice Department's surveillance of Associated Press reporters and Fox News correspondent James Rosen was no isolated incident. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation points out, media screams may have been raised when professional journalists found themselves on the receiving end of security-state tactics, but the government has been wielding such secretive and intrusive power against the general public for years. Write Cindy Cohn and Trevor Timm for EFF:

The AP detailed in its letter to the Justice Department how its privacy was grossly invaded even though the government accessed only the call records of its reporters and not the content of their conversations. We completely agree. Unfortunately, this isn’t just a problem in the AP investigation. Law enforcement agencies routinely demand and receive this information about ordinary Americans over long periods of time without any court involvement whatsoever, much less a full warrant.

The magic phrase "national security" is often invoked to justify these transgressions — often in transparently convenient ways (Attorney General Holder claimed the AP had put "lives at risk" with the story that sparked the scrutiny, even though John Brennan had said there was no such risk.) But intrusive surveillance is increasingly wielded in routine criminal investigations with no appeal to a supposedly higher purpose that trumps constitutional protections.

It's a joy watching government officials dodge questions, insist on blissful ignorance of the world's evils and invoke their right against self-incrimination. Such great theater. But, at the end of the day, disposing of those officials without doing anything else just clears the way for a new crop of power-abusers and useful drones effectively identical to the last batch, though with a slightly different list of targets for mistreatment.

We should get rid of the abusers sure, if only to remind the next batch that there can be consequences. But it's much more important to get rid of the agencies and powers that are inevitably abused, year after year, so that we don't have to act surprised, yet again, that we can't trust government officials to use power with restraint.

"Tea Party Flash Mob!" is the latest offering from Reason TV. Click above to watch now or click below for full links and text.

Lois Lerner may be pleading the Fifth to avoid providing Congressional testimony about the targeting of conservative and Tea Party nonprofits by the IRS, but the Treasury Department’s inspector general will be following up his previous audit with another review. Politico reports:

The IRS inspector general is wading into the central question posed by the agency’s descent into scandal: How closely should political activities at nonprofit groups be scrutinized?

The evolving debacle gripping the agency — which centers on IRS employees unfairly targeting conservative groups seeking nonprofit status — has clouded that question. But Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration J. Russell George told a Senate panel today it’s an issue he plans to dive into.

The inspector general’s office “will be conducting a review of the IRS’s oversight of the level of campaign intervention by 501(c)(4)s shortly,” George told the Senate Finance Committee.

Democratic senators still argue that the problem is the difference between whether the groups are “primarily” engaging in charitable or informational activities versus “exclusively” engaging in them.

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screen capAn investigation into how the dispatcher who answered Amanda Berry’s 911 call handled her has been underway since earlier this month, after public outrage over perceived insensitivity to Berry, who had just escaped a house in which she was held captive for nearly a decade, and for not staying on the line with her until police arrived. There’s renewed interest in the investigation after an allegation the dispatcher also called her a “fucking bitch” at the end. According to WKYC:

A social media comment triggered media interest and got the city to have the police audio technician dissect it sound by sound.

Forensic Specialist Tom Ciula listened to the controversial 1.1 seconds that conclude the call.

And he concluded that two-word obscenity some heard -- one word starting with f, the second with a b -- is not there.

Authorities say the broader investigation into the call (which you can hear here) is still ongoing. Charles Ramsey, who helped rescue Berry, also seemed to get a little frustrated with how long it was taking the 911 dispatcher who responded to him to just send a police car over already (listen here).

h/t Sarcasmic for the story and Warty for audio of the Ramsey call

Credit: Italo-Europeo/wikimediaThe British House of Commons has voted to allow same-sex marriage in England and Wales. The Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill now heads to the House of Lords, where Prime Minister David Cameron hopes it will be voted on soon.

Getting the bill through the House of Commons was only the latest battle Cameron has fought against his party’s grassroots and some of its backbench Members of Parliament. Of the 305 Conservative MPs 136 voted against the bill, which received strong support from the Liberal Democrats and the Labour Party.

The vote in the House of Commons comes shortly after the French legalized gay marriage, a move that caused protests and a suicide.

While passage of The Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill will be a welcome relief to David Cameron he needs to find a way to navigate his way to the next general election without alienating his party’s grassroots. While 54 percent of the British public support allowing same-sex couples to marry only 45 percent of Conservatives do. In the United Kingdom Independence Party, which has been another recent thorn in David Cameron’s side, only 38 percent of members support for same-sex marriage.

A YouGov poll released today shows that Labour, the Conservative Party’s main opposition, is polling eight percent ahead of the Conservatives. If Cameron wants to have a shot at still being Prime Minister after the next general election he has the unenviable task of getting the economy back to an acceptable state while trying to appease eurosceptics and those in the Conservative Party who object to social legislation like The Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill. Doing so may involve getting better at communicating to Conservative Party activists, who were recently characterized by one of Cameron’s senior allies as “mad, swivel-eyed loons.”

• Wizard of Oz, MGMIn a sign that some IRS officials actually have heard of the Constitution, Lois Lerner, the head of the tax agency's exempt organizations division, plans to take the Fifth when appearing before a congressional committee investigating targeted scrutiny of conservative groups.
• The outgoing head of the IRS admits that trying to slip news of the IRS's politicized practices out via a planted question was "an incredibly bad idea."
• Jay Carney is still not so forthcoming as he gets grilled about the Obama administration's ongoing campaign against journalists. It's gotta suck to be him.
• A French historian protested his country's approval of gay marriage by ... shooting himself in Notre Dame cathedral? Ummm ...
• The current toll from the Oklahoma tornadoes stands at 24 dead and 237 injured. Obviously, as rescuers dig through rubble, the numbers are subject to revision.
• NASA is looking into 3D-printing food, a technology already under development by a private research firm.
• New York's capo di tutti capi Governor Andrew Cuomo threatened to remove county sheriffs from their posts if they opposed his favored gun control legislation. So much for that — the sherifffs' association is supporting a legal challenge to the laws.

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The decentralized private digital currency Bitcoin has had a busy few months, writes Brian Doherty. It has grown from an obsession of tech-geek libertarians to a staple of financial news and a subject of great interest to government officials.

Last week, an account associated with the prominent Japan-based Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox was seized by the Department of Homeland Security essentially because the government claims that Mt. Gox was legally required to register as a “money transmitting business.” Is this the beginning of the end of anonymity for Bitcoin?

Campus ProgressDuring the 2012 election, the Democratic PAC American Bridge attacked Mitt Romney and other prominent Republicans every time one of them attended a "high-dollar fundraiser" or revealed close ties to Wall Street. Yet there was one group that American Bridge never attacked: Bain Capital. 

Why? Because, as Ben Smith and Evan McMorris-Santoro revealed today, Bain Capital executives were bankrolling American Bridge:

[I]n January, as Romney’s nomination — and the line of attack — became clear, American Bridge’s top fundraiser took a stand. In a series of meetings through the first half of 2012, several people close to the group confirmed, fundraiser Mary Pat Bonner demanded that the group avoid any public attacks on Bain. That’s because, two sources said, two top Bain executives are key contributors to the network of organizations maintained by Brock and Bonner, which includes Media Matters and American Bridge. And some familiar with the group’s work say it deliberately pulled public punches against Bain — though not against Romney — through much of the year.

“Anything that was discussed doing publicly in regard to Bain, even if it were just a quote piling on, was either shot down immediately, or there was a question, ‘Could Mary Pat be OK with this?’ And the answer was always no,” said one person privy to the group’s internal conversations. The group’s political staffers were “unhappy” about the conflict — but accepted it and tried to work around it, the source said.

May is shaping up to be a bad month for nonprofit groups run by David Brock. Last week, a few of his allies on the left raked him over the coals after the advocacy arm of Media Matters for America published a memo defending the Justice Department's crusade against the Associated Press. Today, BuzzFeed drops the hammer with their story about Bain. Being called out as a hypocrite is so embarrassing!

But Brock et al. may actually be the lesser of the two "dark money" offenders to be unmasked today. The other is the Center for American Progress, which is up to its neck in corporate cash, reports The Nation's Ken Silverstein:

"3 More Reasons to Fear the IRS," by Nick Gillespie and Meredith Bragg, is the newest Reason TV video. Click above to watch now or click below to go to full article page, featuring links, resources, text, and more videos.

About 1.30 minutes long.

Antiwar.comThrough wars popular and not so much, Antiwar.com has made the case from a libertarian perspective for peaceful relations and against imperialist policies since 1995. Two years ago, the group's leadership discovered they'd attracted the federal government's interest — long before — when a reader shared with them FBI documents (PDF) retrieved with a FOIA request. Now, as noted at Reason 24/7, tired of asking nicely, Antiwar.com is suing to find out just what the feds have on them.

From Antiwar.com:

The suit was filed on Tuesday at the United States District Court, Northern District of California, San Francisco Division. Both Garris and Raimondo live and work in the San Francisco Bay area.

According to the suit, the ACLU has made several futile attempts to obtain the FBI files since a reader alerted Garris and Raimondo to this lengthy FBI memo in 2011. The details in question begin at page 62 of the heavily redacted 94-page document. It’s clear from these documents, the suit alleges, that the FBI has files on Garris and Raimondo, and at one point the FBI agent writing the April 30, 2004 memo on Antiwar.com recommends further monitoring of the website in the form of opening a “preliminary investigation …to determine if [redaction] are engaging in, or have engaged in, activities which constitute a threat to national security.”

“On one hand it seemed almost funny that we would be considered a threat to national security, but it’s very scary, because what we are engaging in is free speech, and free speech by ordinary citizens and journalists is now being considered a threat to national security and they don’t have to prove it because the government has the ability to suppress information and not disclose any of their activities – as witnessed with what is going on now at the AP and other things,” said Garris.

“The government’s attitude is they want to know all, but they want the public to know as little as possible.”

The lawsuit isn't just a matter of curiosity, or even of principled outrage at government snoopiness. In an echo of the "chilling effect" that journalists have discussed in the wake of the secret federal subpoena of Associated Press records, and the ongoing investigation of Fox News correspondent James Rosen, Antiwar.com reports that it has lost donors who fear attracting government attention. In the age of curiously targeted IRS interest, it's no surprise that, without making any formal moves, the government is capable of effectively punishing critical voices simply by letting it be known that they're subject to scrutiny.

Tomorrow, Georgetown University's John Hasnas will be speaking live from ReasonTV's LA Headquarters about the failures of "market-failure" arguments so often used by bureaucrats to justify government regulation. He will be going in-depth on why the internal regulatory mechanisms of free markets prove to be far more powerful than anything that politicians can attempt, and he wants to answer your challenges and questions LIVE online! So ask away and tune in to Reason.com tomorrow, May 22, at 4pm eastern, 1pm pacific. 

Photo credit: screenpunk / Foter.com / CC BY-NCAt the beginning of the year, labor groups began to publicly grumble about the potential implications of Obamacare on union members. As written, the law will cause headaches for unions that provide health coverage to members via multiemployer plans. Currently, those plans cover about 26 million people.

Last month, a 22,000-member, D.C. based union—the United Union of Roofers, Waterproofers, and Allied Workers, which supported Obama in the 2012 campaign—became the first labor group to publicly call for full repeal of the president’s health care law. So far, they’re still the only union to call for full repeal of the law. But since then, other, larger labor groups have become increasingly outspoken in their concerns about the law.

The Hill reports today that several unions are warning “that unless there are changes, the results could be catastrophic” for big labor. One of those is the 1.3 million member United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, which the article describes as “very worried about how the reform law will affect its members’ healthcare plans.”

Worried enough, in fact, that the head of the union is calling out President Obama for making misleading statements about the health law’s impact:

In a new op-ed published in The Hill, UFCW President Joe Hansen homed in on the president’s speech at the 2009 AFL-CIO convention. Obama at the time said union members could keep their insurance under the law, but Hansen writes “that the president’s statement to labor in 2009 is simply not true for millions of workers.”

Republicans have long attacked Obama’s promise that “nothing in this plan will require you to change your coverage or your doctor.” But the fact that unions are now noting it as well is a clear sign that supporters of the law are growing anxious about the law’s implementation.  

I doubt the White House meant to make life difficult for unions with the health care law. But that's why these sorts of side effects are referred to as "unintended consequences." 

Read more on the specifics reasons why unions are concerned about Obamacare here.

Reason 24/7Apple CEO Tim Cook was hauled before a Senate subcommittee targeting “tax avoidance,” of which Apple was accused by Michigan Senator Carl Levin (D), the subcommittee chair.

From the LA Times:

Apple Inc. Chief Executive Tim Cook strongly defended the company's tax practices Tuesday at a Senate hearing highlighting the technology giant's use of Irish subsidiaries to shelter billions of dollars in income from U.S. taxes.

"We pay all the taxes we owe — every single dollar," Cook told the Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.

"We not only comply with the laws but we comply with the spirit of the laws," he said. "We don't depend on tax gimmicks."

Cook said the tax code "has not kept up with the digital age" and restricts the free movement of capital in comparison to the codes of other countries. He called for a "dramatic simplification of the corporate tax code," including lower tax rates and a "reasonable tax on foreign earnings."

Cook says Apple’s proud to be an American company. Levin was also among the Senate Democrats who pressed the IRS to investigative conservative tax-exempt group, for which it is now under scrutiny.

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As a political philosophy, libertarianism stresses concepts such as self-ownership, voluntary consent, and non-agression. In many areas of human activity, the application of such ideas seems relatively straightforward. In others, reaching clarity is far more difficult.

On Tuesday, May 21, from 2pm to 3pm in Washington, D.C., Reason will host a discussion tackling one of the most controversial and debated issues of the day: abortion. Among self-identified libertarians, there's a wide variety of positions, ranging from support for all forms of abortions to the prohibition of the same.

"Libertarian Perspectives on Abortion" will be moderated by me and the participants include:

• Katherine Mangu-Ward, Reason magazine's managing editor
• Mollie Hemingway, editor of Ricochet and a contributor to Christianity Today
• Ronald Bailey, Reason's science correspondent

The topics discussed will include

• When does human life - and when do rights - begin?
• What's the role of science - and religion - in setting abortion policy?
• Is there a role for the state in prohibiting, regulating, and providing abortion?

A fast-paced 30-minute discussion will be followed by audience Q&A.

Attendance is free but due to limited seating, an RSVP is required.

This event will also be livestreamed online by Reason TV.

Details:

What: Libertarian Perspectives on Abortion: A Reason discussion.

When: Tuesday, May, 21, 2pm to 3pm.

Where: Reason's DC HQ, 1747 Connecticut Avenue NW (near S Street, Dupont Circle stop on Red Line Metro)

RSVP: events@reason.com

U.S. SenateTalk about cashing in on tragedy. Some Connecticut politicians look at the graves of the children murdered by Adam Lanza at the Sandy Hook Elementary School and they see ... not tragedy, but rather an opportunity for extorting money from the American people. That money, to be surrendered as compensation for "wrong" legislative votes by lawmakers with whom they disagree, is to pay costs voluntarily assumed by local officials to build a new school — an expense not generally seen as a responsibility of national taxpayers.

It's understandable why Newtown officials chose to tear down Sandy Hook Elementary School and rebuild on the site. I might argue that keeping and reclaiming the school does a better job of eliminating Lanza's legacy than does leveling the site and constructing a new building, but that's a choice for locals to make. And there's no doubt that the old school has some dark associations in the wake of the crime. Newtown officials and residents apparently beleive that they're better served by a new facility.

But that's a decision with a price tag. Local officials want to commit to that project; that's their decision, and if they can persuade others to contribute funds for the purpose, that's a step they've chosen for putting the whole, dark incident in the past. But Connecticut officials including  Senators Chris Murphy and Richard Blumenthal want the federal government to pay the bill. As the Hartford Courant points out, if the feds pick up the tab, "it would mark the first time federal money was used for school construction. Traditionally, federal education funds are used for programming, not buildings; no federal dollars were used to rebuild Columbine High School following the mass shooting there."

Why should taxpayers in Arizona and Oregon pay for a school in Connecticut? According to Murphy and Blumenthal, because legislation they favored was debated and defeated in Congress, they're owed money for the bulding of that school. Says Sen. Chris Murphy:

“This bill enables my colleagues to put their money where their mouths have been,” Blumenthal said in a statement. “For those of my colleagues …[who] failed to vote for common sense gun violence prevention measures in March, this bill gives them the opportunity to make a down payment — not a full payment — but a down payment on their obligation to respond adequately to the Sandy Hook horror.”

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (that's him pictured) agrees:

Added Blumenthal: "It's no substitute for the 'no' votes that were cast but it is at least...a step in the right direction and it shows they are keeping faith with the promises they made."

So ... Never mind that Connecticut passed exactly the sort of restrictive gun control laws that Senators Murphy and Blumenthal favor; the fact that Congress rejected such legislation amidst extensive discussion of practical, constitutional and philosophical issues is taken to impose a moral obligation to surrender money as some sort of purchase of absolution.

It's not unusual for politicians to simply assume the unquestionable moral rectitude of their positions and the matching bankruptcy of their opponents. After all, if they weren't arrogant and even a bit monstrous they wouldn't be in a profession that exists to threaten people with fines and prison for refusing to bend to their will. But this is the first time I've seen a price put on voting the "wrong" way.

The latest Reason-Rupe poll finds President Obama enjoys a 50 percent approval rating, 7 points higher than his 43 percent disapproval. However, this isn’t much different from a similar time period in President George W. Bush’s presidency. In May 2005, the year after his re-election, Bush’s approval rating hovered around 48 percent. Also in May 2005, the NBC/WSJ poll found 52 percent of Americans said the country was headed in the wrong direction. Today, slightly more, 57 percent say America is headed in the wrong direction, 34 percent say the country is headed in the right direction. Slightly more Americans approve of the president’s handling of the economy, 47 disapprove and 45 percent approve. Americans continue to overwhelmingly disapprove of Congress (75 percent) while 16 percent approve.

While a majority of women approve of President Obama’s job performance (52 to 40 percent), men are evenly divided at 47 percent. However, when taking into account race and ethnicity, 78 percent of non-white women approve of the President compared to 40 percent of white women. On the President’s handling of the economy, 65 percent of non-white women approve of Obama, compared to 31 percent of white women. This indicates the gender gap on presidential approval is instead more highly correlated with race rather than gender. Sixty-two percent of young Americans under 35 approve of the President, compared to 44 percent of their older peers. Taking race and ethnicity into account, a majority a both young white (52 percent) and non-white (73 percent) Americans approve of the president. In sum, age and race tend to correlate more strongly than gender with presidential approval.

Self-identified liberals (56 percent) and Democrats (52 percent) are among the few groups in which a majority says the country is going in the right direction. In contrast, 77 percent of non-partisan Independents say the country is going in the wrong direction, as well as 79 percent of Republicans. Interestingly, despite significantly higher unemployment rates among younger Americans, they are more likely (42 percent) than older Americans (30 percent) to say the country is headed in the right direction. A majority of Americans in the Midwest (62 percent), South (61 percent), and Northeast (54 percent) say the country is headed in the wrong direction, but Americans in the West are evenly divided with 49 to 44 percent.

Nationwide telephone poll conducted May 9-13 2013 interviewed 1003 adults on both mobile (503) and landline (500) phones, with a margin of error +/- 3.7%. Columns may not add up to 100% due to rounding. Full poll results found here. Full methodology can be found here. Demographics and detailed tables are available here.

Smokershighlife FlickrLast time we heard from Robert L. DuPont, a principal partner in the drug-testing management company Bensinger, DuPont & Associates’, he was instructing the Department of Justice to stop Colorado and Washington state from implementing tax-and-regulate policies for recreational marijuana.

Earlier this month DuPont took his self-interested anti-pot oratory to a new level, arguing in the San Diego Union-Tribune that mandatory drug testing would've prevented Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, allegedly a heavy pot smoker, from helping his brother bomb the Boston Marathon:

While Jahar’s marijuana use did not directly make him a terrorist, it closed the door to his dreams of being an engineer or physician and it opened the door to his suicidal violence. A report recently released by the Institute for Behavior and Health, a nonprofit drug policy organization, shows that heavy marijuana use is associated with failing grades and dropping out of school. It is entirely plausible that the loss of Jahar Tsarnaev’s dream of success in college set the stage for his descent into the dead end of terrorism. 

What if Jahar had been required to take drug tests to obtain and maintain a driver’s license? Might he have changed his behavior if faced with real and immediate certain consequences for his drug use? What about the tens of thousands of kids nationwide who are caught in similar drug-induced downward spirals? New technologies make minimally intrusive drug testing part of a practical approach to preventing and identifying drug problems early. Can our society afford to ignore the measures that are available to encourage young people to find positive drug-free directions for their lives?

The dramatic need to confront drug and alcohol use in college and high school is one useful lesson to take from this otherwise tragic story of failed lives in the midst of opportunity, a lesson that may help overcome the denial about the connection between substance use and academic failure and dropout that is all-but-universal in education circles today.

It's amazing what one would have to overlook to see marijuana as the culprit in the Boston Marathon Bombing; namely, that both Tamarlan and Dzhokhar indicated that America's incursions into the Middle East and Central Asia played a big part in their decision. "When you attack one Muslim," Dzhokhar wrote, in a note left on the boat where he hid, "you attack all Muslims." 

That's not the only fact left out of DuPont's op-ed. The U-T fails to tell us (even in the bio line!) that DuPont runs a company that sells drug-testing services, and that the nonprofit Institute for Behavior and Health--of which DuPont is president--exists mostly to provide scientific support for the services offered by Bensinger, DuPont & Associates’.

H/T Drugwarrant.com

Credit: Gage Skidmore/wikimediaThe Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations has accused Apple of being "among America's largest tax avoiders," with Subcommittee Chairman Sen. Levin (D-MI) saying that the multinational electronics giant avoided paying $9 billion in tax in 2012.  

Thankfully, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) was on hand to criticize his colleagues for admonishing a corporation that he described as “one of America’s greatest success stories.”

From Business Insider:

Kentucky Senator Rand Paul went on a great rant during today's Senate subcommittee hearing on Apple's offshore tax practices, slamming his Congressional colleagues for even holding the hearing in the first place.

"Frankly, I'm offended by the tone and tenor of this hearing," Paul said, laying into those who take issue with Apple's tax policies.

"I'm offended by the spectacle of dragging in executives from an American company that is not doing anything illegal," he added. "If anyone should be on trial, it should be Congress."

A video of Paul’s comments is below:

Credit: SteveRhodes / Foter.com / CC BY-NDYou may be appalled about IRS inquisitions for Tea Party groups and dragnet subpoenas for investigative reporters, but what's really outrageous, according to some commentators, is that a couple of Republicans recently dared to use the "I-word"—"impeachment." Whether or not Obama’s recent scandal eruptions constitute an “impeachable moment,” something has surely gone wrong with our constitutional culture, writes Gene Healy, when opinion leaders treat the very invocation of the "I-word" as akin to screaming obscenities in a church. If anything, we’ve had too few impeachments in American history, not too many.

Tuesday fun link: that time Karl Hess and Robert Anton Wilson got high onstage at a Libertarian Party convention and talked for two and a half hours.

The setting is Seattle in 1987. Topics covered include government informants, running guns to Cuba, the surveillance arm of Playboy magazine, phone phreaking, Iran-contra, Ayn Rand, Groucho Marx, intellectual property, the New Age movement, barbecue potato chips, ghostwriting for a mafioso, and Barry Goldwater's tolerant thoughts about marijuana, among many other subjects.

[Via Tom Jackson.]

ReasonAccording to government sources the Obama administration is planning to give the Pentagon control of some of the CIA’s drone operations. Although the plan is for the Pentagon to eventually take control of drone strikes in Pakistan they will continue to be the CIA’s responsibility for the time-being, which will allow the Obama administration to maintain deniability.

The Obama administration hopes that the move will make the use of drones more transparent as it will open up the program to Congressional oversight. While the Obama administration might think that the change in controls is a step towards transparency the fact is that any change in drone policy that does not include a change in how drone strikes in Pakistan are carried out signals only a small change in attitude towards transparency, especially given the secrecy that surrounds drone strikes carried out in Pakistan.

From Reuters:

President Barack Obama's administration has decided to give the Pentagon control of some drone operations against terrorism suspects overseas that are currently run by the CIA, several U.S. government sources said on Monday.

Obama has pledged more transparency on controversial counterterrorism programs, and giving the Pentagon the responsibility for part of the drone program could open it to greater congressional oversight.

Watch Reason TV’s video on the drone program below:

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City of San DiegoJury nullification doesn’t typically get much attention outside of libertarian circles, but San Diego Bob Filner is looking to change that. He held a press conference yesterday to encourage potential jury members to reject federal charges against Ronnie Chang of San Marcos, who was arrested by feds in 2009 for operating a medical marijuana dispensary, legal under state law. NBC San Diego reports:

"This is way overdoing it when local laws, state laws allow compassionate use of medical marijuana,” Filner told reporters at the downtown U.S. District Court complex Monday. “Someone should not be going through this stage of prosecution for trying to help people to have access to medical marijuana."

The case is scheduled for trial in the fall. There’s also some strong evidence the federal government knows how badly it’s losing this war:

On Monday’s docket were prosecutors’ arguments that Chang's attorney, Michael McCabe, violated a judicial order against discussing the case in public by giving a videotaped interview to medical marijuana activists that was posted YouTube. It has since attracted a little more than 500 views.

McCabe told Judge Michael Anello that he'd request that San Diego Americans for Safe Access, the video’s producer and YouTube account holder, take down the video.

That seemed to satisfy the judge and Asst. U.S. Attorney Paul Starita, at least for the moment.

According to San Diego’s Fox news station, though, the prosecution is wanting to suppress a lot more than just Chang speaking out:

Prosecutors also wanted all material regarding the case removed from the internet and social networks.  A federal judge did not enforce the gag order, but instead McCabe agreed to the stipulation that he would not “try” the case in front of the press.  Prosecutors also back down from the request of removing material from the internet. (Emphasis added)

Our latest Reason-Rupe poll (pdf) shows that only 6 percent of Americans think somebody should go to jail for possessing small amounts of marijuana and 52 percent think the federal government should be forbidden from prosecuting people for marijuana possession in states where it has been legalized.

(Dual hat tips to Deified and Jasno Spam for the e-mailed links)

So how is France's lurch to the left working out since the election last year of Socialist Party President François Gérard Georges Nicolas Hollande? Well, as readers of Reason's great 24-7 newsfeed know, French unemployment last month reached an all-time high, and Hollande has responded to his plummeting poll numbers and protests from the left by proposing new taxes on business, calling for the eradication of tax havens and threatening rule by decree.

What happens when you punish citizens (sometimes taxing households more than 100 percent of their income) for the sin of their government spending too much money? Time magazine's Vivienne Walt has the answer: "Stymied by Socialist Policies, the French Start to Quit France." Excerpt:

Charles-Marie Jottras, president of Paris's biggest luxury-real-estate company Daniel Feau, estimates that during the past year his company has sold hundreds of homes of wealthy families leaving France, driven out by what he calls "a very bad atmosphere." Jottras says the departure of wealthy clients is reminiscent of the early 1980s, when the previous Socialist President François Mitterrand was in power. The difference this time, he says, is that "it used to be just rich people who left, not business people." [...]

In fact, the sense that the world beyond France might hold a lot more promise for French people than home does has so intensified that in recent months two weekly magazines, L'Express and Le Figaro — both fiercely conservative critics of the Socialist government — featured the same cover headline: "Why they are leaving France." L'Express added the subtitle: "It's not just the rich!" as though the editors were amazed that regular folk would opt to try their luck elsewhere and forgo cherished French benefits like minimum five weeks' annual paid leave, decent public health care and free schooling. The magazines cite the 300,000 French estimated to be living in London, and the 200,000 French residents of Belgium, a 25% rise since 2010, according to Le Figaro. Each magazine interviews young go-getters who've upped sticks for New York City, Dubai, Shanghai and elsewhere for better pay, more-rapid promotion and a chance to make their mark — things that those profiled say are all-but impossible under a sclerotic French system. Alexandre Perrot, 30, featured in Le Figaro, moved to New York City a year ago and works for a business-intelligence company, is quoted as saying that France's system "does not value or stimulate active youth."

I live in an old Italian part of Brooklyn long famous for its pizzerias, mafia, and Old World seniors sitting on benches and stoops kibbitzing about the neighborhood, and yet the foreign language you hear most on the streets is French. They may not all be economic refugees, but they tend to be far more dynamic than your average fonctionnaire. France is working on maybe its second consecutive Lost Generation of young people fed up with scleroris. Quelle honte.

Credit: Image191: DreamstimeA major new study published in Nature Geoscience reports that future global warming is likely to be significantly less than many climate model projections have suggested. The authors cannot be characterized by opponents as climate change "deniers." Using recent data from the continued slowdown in global temperature increases, the researchers estimated new equilibrium climate sensitivity and transient climate response numbers.

As Phys.org explains:

The sensitivity of our planet to a doubling of the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration can be expressed using two different measures. One measure, the transient climate response, describes the immediate, short-term warming. This figure is the one that really matters to policy makers. The other measure, the equilibrium climate sensitivity, describes the long-term commitment once the climate system has come into balance with the enhanced level of greenhouse gases.

The new Nature Geoscience study found:

The most likely value of equilibrium climate sensitivity based on the energy budget of the most recent decade is 2.0 °C, with a 5–95% confidence interval of 1.2–3.9 °C. ...

The best estimate of TCR based on observations of the most recent decade is 1.3 °C (0.9–2.0 °C).

The U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has consistently held to a higher estimate of climate sensitivity of between 2 to 4.5 degrees Celsius with a best estimate of 3 degrees. In other words, the new best estimate  reported in Nature Geoscience is a full degree lower than the IPCC's.

The new study is something of a triumph for statistician Nic Lewis (who is a co-author) whose methods to estimate climate sensitivity were used in this new study. In a Journal of Climate study earlier this year Lewis calculated climate sensitivity at between 1 and 3 degrees Celsius. For those interested in delving deeper into the numbers, see Lewis' post at Watts Up With That.

Given this lower estimate, the popular science magazine New Scientist characterizes the new findings as "a second chance to save the climate" by which it means that the most draconian efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels will likely not be necessary to keep the eventual average in increase in global temperature under the 2 degrees Celsius threshold. 

With regard to the transient temperature increase, Rational Optimist (and Reason contributor) Matt Ridley, is, well, somewhat more optimistic. He observes:

The most likely estimate is 1.3C. Even if we reach doubled carbon dioxide in just 50 years, we can expect the world to be about two-thirds of a degree warmer than it is now, maybe a bit more if other greenhouse gases increase too. That is to say, up until my teenage children reach retirement age, they will have experienced further warming at about the same rate as I have experienced since I was at school.

At this rate, it will be the last decades of this century before global warming does net harm. As the economist Bjørn Lomborg recently summarised the economic consensus: “Economic models show that the overall impact of a moderate warming (1-2C) will be beneficial [so] global warming is a net benefit now and will likely stay so till about 2070.”

The new calculations are signficantly below earlier figures reported by the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. As Climatologist James Annan from the JAMSTEC Yokohama Institute for Earth Sciences in Yokohama, Japan notes:

• White HouseA new CNN poll shows President Obama’s approval rating holding steady at 53 percent despite a torrent of scandals in recent weeks.
• The White House chief of staff apparently decided not to let Obama know about the inspector general’s investigation of IRS targeting.
• Michelle Obama “joked” in a commencement speech that she could talk about Barack Obama’s failures all afternoon.
• Fleet week in New York’s canceled due to sequester. Fiscal concerns didn’t stop the U.S. from conducting more than 200 refueling missions in support of the French intervention in Mali this year, however.
• The city of Baltimore denies holding meetings on speed cameras in secret and other misdeeds.
• Nigeria says its military captured about 200 suspected members of Boko Haram .
• The former Guatemalan dictator Efrain Montt’s conviction for genocide was overturned by the country’s highest court.
• Ray Manzarek of The Doors died at age 74.

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