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3 Reasons Why Conservatives Should Fight for Defense Spending Cuts

The Department of Defense will soon be ushering in a leader and all eyes are on Ashton Carter, a physicist nominated by President Obama to be the new Defense Secretary. With a new administration, will the Pentagon be able to come up with a new and reduced budget? Here are 3 reasons why conservatives should urge spending cuts for the Pentagon.

Initially published on Jan. 10, 2012. Original text below:

The Congressional Budget Office projects that if we keep spending the way we have been, federal debt held by the public will grow from around 60 percent of GDP to a whopping 82 percent of GDP over the next decade, with no end in sight. That's the sort of borrowing that can ruin a country's economy.

Conservative Republicans are happy to talk about cutting spending on the poor, education, and cowboy poetry readings, but they insist that spending on defense and homeland security be increased.

Given that spending on defense and homeland security accounts for a whopping 20 percent of the government's budget, that's a non-starter. As with every other legitimate function of government, we need to squeeze spending down to the lowest level possible that still gets the job done.

Here are three reasons conservatives -- and all other red-blooded Americans -- should cut defense spending now.

1. War is Over! Didn't we just win -- or at least end -- the war in Iraq? And aren't we winding down in Afghanistan? After World War II, Vietnam, and the end of the Cold War, military spending got cut, as it should have been.
More to the point, spending on the military and homeland security grew by 90 percent in inflation-adjusted dollars since 2000. If al Qaeda and most international terrorists groups have been largely vanquished, we should not just be bringing the troops home, but dollars too.
Unless, that is, conservatives want to seriously argue that nearly doubling outlays for the past decade haven't yielded results that would allow us to dial down defense spending.

2. What price safety? The United States already accounts for about 45 percent of the planet's military outlays -- more than the next 14 countries combined. Most of those countries are our allies as well, so we should be able to stay safe while reducing our military spending.

It's a conservative truism that government programs, even ones that are sanctioned by the constitution, tend to be bloated, inefficient, and incompetent. Surely that same logic applies to the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security. In fact, Republican Reps. John Mica and Paul Broun marked the 10th anniversary of the Transportation Security Administration with a report that concluded that after spending $56 billion in security measures, flying is no safer now than it was before the 9/11 attacks. 

If conservatives can't find wasteful spending and useless programs in defense and homeland security to cut, they've got bigger problems than terrorists to deal with.

3. Attacking the Military-Industrial Complex is a Republican Virtue -- And Good Politics. It was a Republican president -- the war hero Dwight Eisenhower -- who sounded the alarm about the military-industrial complex's insidious ability to grow and grow like a cancer on the American body politic. And right now, it's Democrats such as Defense Secretary Leon Panentta leading the cry for a blank check despite admitting that there are tons of duplicative programs in his department.

In his proposed 2011 budget, President Barack Obama actually calls for bigger spending on defense and homeland security than the Republicans do. Obama's recent announcement that he may trim some planned increases over the next decade doesn't change that.

Americans are rightly tired not just of dubious, inconclusive wars that have led to the death of thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of others. A growing number of us are tired of out-of-control spending by a Washington elite that is totally out of touch with everyday Americans.

If conservatives want to push forward on reducing spending on Medicaid and other domestic programs, they should show that they take their own limited government philosophy seriously by pushing for defense cuts between now and the 2012 elections.

About 3 minutes long.

For links to all data cited above, go to http://reason.com/blog/2012/01/10/3-r...
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Brian Doherty Highlights the 'Reason' 3D-Printed Gun

Eric MutchlerEric MutchlerAsked why the 3-D-printed metal gun he designed has the word REASON emblazoned on its slide, engineer Eric Mutchler says, "Who can argue with reason?"

Mutchler's gun—which was not, alas, named after this magazine—also has the preamble of the Declaration of Independence picked out on the front of the grip, points out Brian Doherty, as well as a unique trigger designed to look like its creator's initial, M.

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The Reason Gift Guide!

Our staff looks back at the books, movies, and music released—or in some cases rereleased—in 2014 and suggests a slew of gift ideas.

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What Reason TV Saw at the NYC Eric Garner Protest

Reason TV's original reporting on the New York City protests this week.

Originally published Dec. 3, 2014. Text below:

Protesters packed the streets of Midtown Manhattan tonight to protest today's announcement that a grand jury had declined to indict the NYPD officer who killed an unarmed man named Eric Garner last July by choking him with a nightstick after he resisted arrest.

The protest began at 4:30pm with a "die-in" staged at Grand Central Terminal, in which about 20 people lay down on the floor in the middle of the commuter hub. After about an hour had passed, the protesters rose to their feet changing, "I can't breathe," echoing the words of Eric Garner as he was asphyxiated.

The demonstration moved to Times Square, and then towards Rockefeller Center. The protesters blocked traffic and attempted to disrupt the annual Christmas tree lighting ceremony, but the NYPD kept them at bay by throwing up gates around the site.

Shot and edited by Jim Epstein. Approximately 2 minutes.

Baylen Linnekin: Who Can Save Us from the Farm Bill's False Savings?

FarmhouseWikimedia CommonsWhen the U.S. Senate voted in favor of passage of the 2014 Farm Bill in February, the buzz on Capitol Hill was that the bill would "save" taxpayers lots of money.

giddy press release put out by the Senate Agriculture Committee, hailing the passage of the Farm Bill as it awaited Pres. Barack Obama's rubber stamp signature, used some version of the word "save" at least eight times.

The Farm Bill "[s]aves $23 Billion.... save taxpayer money... finding savings... save taxpayers billions.... saves taxpayer dollars...." and so on.

But, as Baylen Linnekin writes, crop insurance subsidies in the Farm Bill could cost billions more than predicted.

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Tonight on The Independents: The Supremes! (As in Court.) Starring Damon Root, Judge Napolitano, Peter Suderman, and Timothy Sandefur!

Well? |||We have a totally sweet Red Meat Friday theme episode of The Independents waiting for you on your television boxes at 9 p.m. ET, 6 p.m. PT (with repeats three and five hours later) on the Fox Business Network. It's all about the Supreme Court, and who better to give us a tour of its secret quasi-libertarian history and futureshock than beloved Reason superhuman Damon Root, author of the splendiferous Overruled: The Long War for Control of the U.S. Supreme Court. Damon shall provide a précis of his penumbras, as a way of re-jiggering the dull-witted modern understandings of the truly meaningful divides on the High Court.

Hi Damon! |||You think your body's had enough of libertarian SCOTUS-analysis? THINK AGAIN, MORTAL. Beloved Senior Editor Peter Suderman, who will bring a very fine price where we're headed, breaks down Obamacare's upcoming judicial vulnerabilities, and participates in a super-competitive Supreme Court trivia contest. Timothy Sandefur, principal attorney of the Pacific Legal Foundation, talks about the fascinating Facebook/violence/free-speech case Elonis v. United States. And I dunno, maybe you've heard of Fox News Senior Judicial Analyst and Reason.com columnist Andrew Napolitano, author of the brand new Suicide Pact: The Radical Expansion of Presidential Powers and the Lethal Threat to American Liberty? Well, our favorite WHAT-PART-OF-THE-CONSTITUTIONist will be on to assess who is the most libertarian member of the Supreme Court.

Do you even deserve such a good show on cable television? Well, yes, because you have been donating early and often to Reason's annual Webathon, in which we are seeking an audacious $200,000 in tax-deductible contributions by the end of December 9. (Please donate right the hell now, etc.) Part of our essential value proposition is that we serve as your tribune, injecting libertarian arguments into all sorts of venues where they had been previously scarce. Watch tonight's show, and tell me how that's going.

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

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Rolling Stone’s Botched Account of a UVA Gang Rape Does a Disservice to Rape Victims

Wikimedia/UVAWikimedia/UVABy failing to make basic efforts to check the facts of its attention-grabbing story about an alleged gang rape at a University of Virginia fraternity house, Rolling Stone has done a tremendous disservice to rape victims.

Now, when victims tell their stories, and when journalists or advocates report on those stories or share them publicly in any way, those inclined to disbelief will have a prominent example of a shocking, horrific story that was reported as if true, and that was initially defended by its reporter and editor even when significant questions were raised about the strength of the reporting.

Reporter Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s piece, "A Rape on Campus: A Brutal Assault and Struggle for Justice at UVA," opens with a detailed, ugly account of the alleged gang rape of a young women named Jackie at a date function at UVA’s Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house in the fall of 2012. In the story, Jackie is lured into a dark room by her date, then pushed to the ground, through a glass table, and raped for hours by multiple men, including one who uses a glass bottle. The story is told without any journalistic distance. It’s presented not as what allegedly happened, but what did.

Since the story was published, the magazine repeatedly offered assurances that the story had been thoroughly reported and verified before publication. "Through our extensive reporting and fact-checking, we found Jackie to be entirely credible and courageous and we are proud to have given her disturbing story the attention it deserves," a statement sent to The Washington Post declared earlier this week. In response to a separate set of questions from another reporter at the Post, Erdely insisted that she found the story credible. "I think I did my due diligence in reporting this story; RS’s excellent editors, fact-checkers, and lawyers all agreed," she said in an email. Story editor Sean Woods also vouched for the story. 

What the follow-up investigation published by The Washington Post this afternoon makes clear is that very basic steps to corroborate details surrounding the central event in the story—the alleged gang rape of a young student named Jackie—were not taken at all. And in the course of defending the story against critics, Erdely and Woods were cagey and arguably misrepresented what they actually knew and had confirmed about the story's most prominent event.

Erdely, for example, told Slate that she had attempted to contact the accused. On a podcast with several of Slate’s editorial staffers, she was asked, "Did you try and call them? Was there any communication between you and them?" She responded, "Yeah, I reached out to them in multiple ways," and then said "they were kind of hard to get in touch with because their contact page was pretty outdated." Erdely was asked multiple questions about whether she contacted "the boys" and "the actual boys" involved, but responded only that she ended up speaking to two national figures involved in the fraternity. 

It's now clear that Erdely did not reach out to the individuals accused of perpetrating the attack. She agreed not to as part of a deal with Jackie. According to Rolling Stone’s own statement today, "We decided to honor her request not to contact the man she claimed orchestrated the attack on her nor any of the men she claimed participated in the attack for fear of retaliation against her."

Indeed, it appears that not only did Erdely not contact the accused, she did not know the full name of the alleged primary assailant. "Earlier this week," today's follow-up in the Post says, "Jackie revealed to friends for the first time the full name of her alleged attacker, a name she had never disclosed to anyone." Emphasis on never and anyone. Unless the Post’s follow-up report is mistaken, then that includes Erdely and the fact-checkers at Rolling Stone.

Yet that is not what Woods, the editor on Erdely’s story, said earlier this week. "We verified their existence," he said to the Post, indicating that the magazine had checked with Jackie’s friends. "I’m satisfied that these guys exist and are real. We knew who they were." If Jackie had truly never revealed the name of the attacker to anyone, then what Woods said cannot have been true.

In fact, according to the Post, the individual Jackie named this week isn’t even a member of Phi Kappa Psi, the fraternity at the center of the story. The Post appears to have been unable to definitively identify an individual who matches every one of the details Jackie gave in the story. 

Erdely also apparently failed to corroborate other basic details from Jackie’s story. Her Rolling Stone report says that the rape happened during fraternity rush, at a date event on September 28, 2012, and that the assailant who lured her into the room where she was raped worked as a lifeguard with Jackie on campus. Erdely did check that Jackie was a lifeguard. But no corroboration was provided for the other details, and an official statement from the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity this afternoon disputes all of them: There was no social function of any kind the weekend of September 28, 2012, rush—the frat's pledging period—takes place in the spring rather than the fall, and no Phi Kappa Psi member appears on the aquatic centers employee roster for 2012, the statement says.

These details cannot have been impossible to check; in the space of about a week, The Washington Post managed to investigate many of them. We don’t have a complete accounting of Erdely’s reporting methods, but what seems likely is that Erdely’s confirmations of Jackie's story came entirely from people who had heard Jackie tell the same story that she told to Erdely; essentially, the entire account originated from a single source.

But even Jackie’s friends in the sexual assault awareness advocacy community at UVA, people who have no interest in her story being untrue, have now "come to doubt her account," according to the Post’s follow-up today.

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NYPD Cop Shoots Unarmed Man, Texts Union Rep Instead of Calling for Help

Akai Gurley's daughter.FacebookRookie NYPD cop Peter Liang texted his union representative and was "incommunicado for more than six and a half minutes" as Akai Gurley, the unarmed man he shot in the stairwell of a Brooklyn housing project, lay dying.

Liang had been holding his gun in one hand and a flashlight in the other as he entered an unlit stairwell when he was startled by the noise of Gurley and his girlfriend, Melissa Butler, entering the stairwell one floor below. Liang claims his gun accidentally discharged, sending a ricocheting bullet into Gurley's chest.

The New York Daily News reports that in the crucial minutes following the shooting, Liang and his partner did not try to get medical attention for the grievously wounded man and could not be reached by either their commanding officer or the 911 dispatcher who fielded a call from a neighbor reporting gunshots. 

It gets worse. Sources told the Daily News that the text messages revealed the officers didn't know the exact address of the building they were in, and that "Deputy Inspector Miguel Iglesias, then the head officer of the local housing command, ordered them not to carry out such patrols, known as verticals." Iglesias added, "I want a presence on the street, in the courtyards—and if they go into the buildings they were just supposed to check out the lobby.”

After the shooting, Liang was described as "panicked" and "a crying mess," which is an understandable human reaction when you have just shot someone whose one false move was taking the stairs after growing impatient with waiting for a slow moving elevator. However, if Liang indeed texted his union representative rather than calling for help, that demonstrates a calculated awareness that he was in deep trouble and his first priority was saving himself.

The Daily News cites court insiders as saying "while the shooting may have been a mishap, the cops' subsequent conduct can amount to criminal liability." A lawyer for the Gurley family hopes the case is at least presented to a grand jury and as Reason's Brian Doherty noted, political pressure is mounting for Liang to be prosecuted. Brooklyn District Attorney Kenneth Thompson has promised "an immediate, fair and thorough investigation."

In the meantime, Liang remains on "modified duty," protected from even an internal affairs investigation unless the D.A. presses charges against him. In a post earlier today, Reason's Ed Krayewski wrote about how police unions, like all public sector unions, circle the wagons in a crisis even if it means defending bad employees:

They can be fired, but not always. Many police departments, including New York’s, have generous job protections for police officers. These privileges, masquerading as “due process,” protect bad cops. Defenders of public unions say it isn’t fair to fire a public employee merely for the appearance of impropriety, bias, or even corruption and criminality.

Serious police reform will require the cooperation of police unions, but Republicans generally refuse to take them on, lest they appear out of step with their "law and order" base, and many Democrats would rather avoid being seen as opponents of any public sector union. 

In a scathing piece on the police lobby at Vice, occasional Reason contributor Michael Tracey wrote:

What if their overriding mantras were something along the lines of "serve the community" instead of "get home from your shift alive"?

The only way to change this is through difficult, tedious governmental reform—not fancy speeches or racial sensitivity seminars—and the police lobby will ferociously oppose such efforts at every step.

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Gang Rape Story’s Credibility Blasted, Garner Grand Jury Denied Options, Supreme Court to Consider First Amendment and License Plates: P.M. Links

  • "Won't somebody think of the children? They're delicious!"Credit: coolmallu / photo on flickrSome of the information presented about the horrific gang rape described in Rolling Stone has been contradicted and the magazine is now acknowledging that there are discrepancies in the story it published.
  • The district attorney who brought the officer who killed Eric Garner in to the grand jury left off the possibility for the jury to indict the officer with reckless endangerment. They were only presented the options of manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide.
  • Everybody is resigning from The New Republic, unhappy with the Internet-jargon-spewing leadership that pushed out its top editors.
  • China’s former security chief has been arrested for corruption and expelled from the Communist Party.
  • The Supreme Court will hear a case considering whether the content or symbols on vanity license plates are protected by the First Amendment and cannot be censored because of concerns about offensiveness.
  • Drink up! Today is the anniversary of the end of the Prohibition. Just don’t smoke at the bar because it's illegal.

Reason's annual Webathon is underway! Your (tax-deductible!) gift will help Reason magazine, Reason.com, and Reason TV bring the case for "Free Minds and Free Markets" to bigger and bigger audiences. For giving levels and associated swag, go here now.

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David Harsanyi on How Stupid Laws Help Kill People

peterbryanjenkins/Flickrpeterbryanjenkins/FlickrIn the case of Eric Garner's death, police were enforcing a law that has nothing to do with violence—not in the short or long term. It exists to shield people from their own lawful habit. High cigarette taxes were cooked up, for the most part, to artificially inflate the price of a product politicians and voters dislike so that others would not be able to afford it. New York has by far the highest cigarette taxes—over 5 bucks a pack. Unsurprisingly, the policy has spurred a black market.  

The Garner case should remind us that government is force and that more government has predictable returns, argues David Harsanyi. If you believe cops are racists or generally out of control, why give them more opportunity?

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Most Transparent Administration Ever Begging to Stop Release of Senate Torture Report

Guys, you're just giving them another reason to never release the report.Credit: Fibonacci Blue / photo on flickrThe Senate Intelligence Committee's extremely long, extremely embattled effort to produce a report describing the methods and impact of the federal government's use of torture during the Iraq War is supposed to be reaching an end. Beltway rumors were that the part of the report intended for public review, a 600-page executive summary, was supposed to be released next week.

But that's not going to happen if the Obama administration has its way. Secretary of State John Kerry has been deployed to beg Sen Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) to continue delaying the report's release, despite the administration's official public support. The information comes from Josh Rogin at Bloomberg View:

Kerry was not going rogue -- his call came after an interagency process that decided the release of the report early next week, as Feinstein had been planning,  could complicate relationships with foreign countries at a sensitive time and posed an unacceptable risk to U.S. personnel and facilities abroad.  Kerry told Feinstein he still supports releasing the report, just not right now.

"What he raised was timing of report release, because a lot is going on in the world -- including parts of the world particularly implicated -- and wanting to make sure foreign policy implications were being appropriately factored into timing," an administration official told me.  "He had a responsibility to do so because this isn't just an intel issue -- it's a foreign policy issue."

But those concerns are not new, and Kerry's 11th-hour effort to secure a delay in the report's release places Feinstein in a difficult position: She must decide whether to set aside the administration's concerns and accept the risk, or scuttle the roll-out of the investigation she fought for years to preserve.

Remember, Feinstein will not be head of the intel committee for much longer. She's losing her leadership as of next week thanks to the results of the November election that will bring in a Republican Senate. Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) will be taking over as chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee and he's openly critical of Feinstein's hindsight-oriented leadership and is not a fan of transparency. If Feinstein agrees with the administration's request it could potentially result in the torture report's release being delayed for years. Or you know, forever, since there will never be a time where "foreign policy implications" will not be a factor in the release of a report about the United States torturing the citizens of other countries to get information.

Read more about the wrangling about the report from Rogin here and how the CIA engaged in illegal surveillance on Senate staffers while they were putting together the report here. And then think for a minute about the administration is trying to turn its own party's loss in the midterms as a way to be less transparent to the American people about what the government has done in their name.

UPDATE: According to a tweet from Shawna Thomas at NBC, the State Department is denying trying to delay the report's release.

Reason's annual Webathon is underway! Your (tax-deductible!) gift will help Reason magazine, Reason.com, and Reason TV bring the case for "Free Minds and Free Markets" to bigger and bigger audiences. For giving levels and associated swag, go here now.

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Trial of Kettle Falls Five for Growing Medical Marijuana Postponed

Americans for Safe AccessAmericans for Safe AccessThe federal trial of five medical marijuana users in Washington state, which had been scheduled to begin on Monday in Spokane, has been postponed until February 23 by the new judge assigned to the case. That gives Michael Ormsby, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Washington, some more time to reconsider his decision to prosecute patients who grew marijuana for their own use in compliance with state law, despite Justice Department guidance indicating that such cases are not a good use of federal resources. The prosecution is especially striking now that state-licensed businesses are openly growing and selling marijuana for recreational use in the very city where the trial is scheduled to be held.

The Kettle Falls Five—Larry Harvey, his wife, their son, their daughter-in-law, and a family friend—were caught growing marijuana in northeastern Washington by the Drug Enforcement Administration last year. Although the number of plants did not exceed Washington's limit for patients with doctor's recommendations and there does not seem to be any evidence that Harvey et al. were growing marijuana for profit, prosecutors argue that the total amount they produced was more than they needed to treat their symptoms. Ormsby's office brought charges that could send Harvey and his fellow defendants to federal prison for terms ranging from 10 years to life. 

More about the case here.

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How the Government Promotes Dangerous LSD Substitutes

CNNCNNA recent CNN story about the potentially deadly dangers of new synthetic drugs inadvertently calls attention to the government's role in promoting these novel compounds. In my latest Forbes column, I argue that imposing one ban after another drives constant innovation by underground chemists, resulting in drugs with unpredictable hazards. Here is how the piece starts:

This week CNN ran a report called "Deadly High: How Synthetic Drugs Are Killing Kids." The story highlights the threat posed by "deadly new drugs on America's streets designed to evade the law." In case you are not sure how you should react to this menace, correspondent Drew Griffin tells you. "That, to me, is scary," he remarks during a conversation with a federal prosecutor about an entreprenur who created an online business that supplied a synthetic psychedelic implicated in the 2012 deaths of two teenagers in Grand Forks, North Dakota.

Griffin is right that something scary is going on here. But it is not the inherent hazards of psychoactive substances so much as the way the government senselessly magnifies those hazards.

Read the whole thing.

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Rolling Stone Retracts Key Part of UVA Rape Story

UVAWikimedia CommonsVirtually all details of the horrific gang rape at a University of Virginia fraternity detailed in an engrossing Rolling Stone article last month are now either disputed our outright debunked. A terrific Washington Post investigation—which includes an interview with Jackie, the accuser—casts serious doubt on the narrative Jackie told to Sabrina Rubin Erdely, the author of the original Rolling Stone piece.

In light of these developments, Rolling Stone is no longer standing by its story. In a statement to readers, Managing Editor Will Dana wrote:

In the face of new information, there now appear to be discrepancies in Jackie's account, and we have come to the conclusion that our trust in her was misplaced. We were trying to be sensitive to the unfair shame and humiliation many women feel after a sexual assault and now regret the decision to not contact the alleged assaulters to get their account. We are taking this seriously and apologize to anyone who was affected by the story.

The "affected" parties include many at the University of Virginia. The college administration, which had assumed the allegations were true, responded to the story by suspending all fraternity activities and promising more vigorous policing of the campus's party scene.

But according to The Washington Post, Phi Kappa Psi, the fraternity that Jackie insisted hosted the party where she was raped on September 28th, 2012, will assert that no such event took place and that none of its members worked at the university's swimming pool that semester—a detail important to the story, since Jackie had claimed that her date to the party, a key perpetrator in the assault, was a co-lifeguard.

According to WaPost, Jackie's friends no longer believe that she was truthful about what happened to her:

A group of Jackie’s close friends, who are sex assault advocates at U-Va., said they believe something traumatic happened to Jackie but have come to doubt her account. They said details have changed over time, and they have not been able to verify key points of the story in recent days. A name of an alleged attacker that Jackie provided to them for the first time this week, for example, turned out to be similar to the name of a student who belongs to a different fraternity, and no one by that name has been a member of Phi Kappa Psi.

Reached by phone, that man, a U-Va. graduate, said Friday that he did work at the Aquatic Fitness Center and was familiar with Jackie’s name. He said, however, that he had never met Jackie in person and had never taken her on a date. He also confirmed that he was not a member of Phi Kappa Psi.

Emily Renda, a friend of Jackie's and survivor of sexual assault who was quoted in the initial story, now tells WaPost that she feels misled:

Renda said on Thursday that Jackie initially told her that she was attacked by five students at Phi Kappa Psi on Sept. 28, 2012. Renda said that she learned months later that Jackie had changed the number of attackers from five to seven.

“An advocate is not supposed to be an investigator, a judge or an adjudicator,” said Renda,a 2014 graduate who works for the university as a sexual violence awareness specialist. But as details emerge that cast doubt on Jackie’s account, Renda said, “I don’t even know what I believe at this point.”

“This feels like a betrayal of good advocacy if this is not true,” Renda said. “We teach people to believe the victims. We know there are false reports but those are extraordinarily low.”

There is much more of this in the full Post story.

In light of all this new information, it's impossible to say what exactly happened to Jackie. But it's clear that her story, as told to Erdely, is false. Not slightly false, or partly false, but false. And if Rolling Stone had done its job, the magazine might well have determined that before such a journalistic catastrophe unfolded.

Read my previous report on the UVA situation—one of the earliest stories to express skepticism of Rolling Stone—here.

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Some Information from Garner Grand Jury; Cop Needed to Know There Was "Substantial Risk" of Killing Garner

The New York Law Journal reports today about some small bits of info that have been issued regarding the normally-totally-secret grand jury process in the murder of Eric Garner.

While limited, what's revealed hints as to how any sentient human could not have thought there was at least a possible crime worth a real trial involved in Garner's death after being choked and smashed to the ground by a bunch of police officers  for no reason other than not meekly complying to unjust demands:

Acting Staten Island Supreme Court Justice Stephen Rooney revealed that grand jurors heard from 50 witnesses, weighed 60 exhibits, including four videos, and were instructed on legal principles including an officer's use of physical force....

The Legal Aid Society, which had represented Garner in a number of charged minor offenses prior to his death in July, is filing a motion to unseal the entirety of the grand jury proceedings.....

[Officer Daniel] Pataleo's lawyer and police union officials argued that the grand jury got it right, saying that the officer used an authorized takedown move—not a banned chokehold—against a man who was resisting arrest. And they said Garner's poor health was the main cause of his death.

To find Pantaleo criminally negligent, the grand jury would have had to determine he knew there was a "substantial risk" that Garner would die.

I'm guessing that that point—that the officer must actually have believed or understood that what he was doing was likely to kill Garner—was the sticking point for the grand jury (presuming it wasn't just pure "we aren't going to indict a cop"), though that standard shouldn't excuse people from legal liability for their actions directly causing a death.

This seems especially so when those actions involve physical assault amid direct warnings from the attacked that you are causing them trouble breathing. (And remember victims: try to have the composure as you are dying to say "I am having severe trouble breathing because of what you are doing to me" instead of "I can't breathe.")

A federal investigation is also ongoing, but:

Still, federal civil rights cases against police officers are exceedingly rare.

In the past two decades, only a few such cases have reached trial in New York—most notably the one involving Abner Louima, who was sodomized with a broom handle in a police station in 1997. Several other high-profile cases didn't come together, largely because federal prosecutors must meet a high standard of proof in showing that police deliberately deprived victims of their civil rights through excessive force, said Alan Vinegrad, who handled the Louima case as a federal prosecutor...

But Pantaleo's attorney, Stuart London, expressed confidence on Thursday that his client won't face federal prosecution.

"There's very specific guidelines that are not met in this case," London said. "This is a regular street encounter. It doesn't fall into the parameters."...

The New York Police Department is doing an internal investigation that could lead to administrative charges against Pantaleo, who remains on desk duty.....

The Association of Legal Aid Attorneys/UAW Local 2325—a union comprised of more than 1,000 Legal Aid Society attorneys—said it joined the "cries of outrage, grief and anger" but was not surprised. "As the primary public defender for New Yorkers, we witness daily the outrageous deference shown to police officers by the prosecutors' offices in cases of fabricated evidence, brutality and disregard of our clients' constitutional rights."

Judge Rooney's complete statement about the Garner case grand jury investigation.

Reason's annual Webathon is underway! Your (tax-deductible!) gift will help Reason magazine, Reason.com, and Reason TV bring the case for "Free Minds and Free Markets" to bigger and bigger audiences. For giving levels and associated swag, go here now. 

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Of Course Racism Was a Factor in Eric Garner’s Death; Identifying It Isn't a Solution

Eric GarnerscreencapSome on the left are aghast that libertarians, but especially that conservatives are disturbed by the grand jury decision not to indict Danny Pantaleo, the New York City cop who placed Eric Garner in a fatal chokehold. And they’re upset that those libertarians and conservative are pointing to New York City’s laws against selling loose, untaxed cigarettes as a contributing factor. In their narrative, Eric Garner’s death is attributable exclusively to a racist cop who used excessive force. And in fact, Pantaleo has multiple complaints of racial bias against him. And he certainly used excessive force. But if Pantaleo is a racist, more training won’t make him not a racist. Despite the best efforts of professional diversity and sensitivity trainers, racism and hatred are not something a five-, 10-, or even 40-hour course will rid a heart of. The idea that the right training can change a racist cop s delirious.

Is there a way to get rid of racist cops? They can be fired, but not always. Many police departments, including New York’s, have generous job protections for police officers. These privileges, masquerading as “due process,” protect bad cops. Defenders of public unions say it isn’t fair to fire a public employee merely for the appearance of impropriety, bias, or even corruption and criminality. But is it fair to expose an untold number of people to a potential violent offender because he managed to get on the public payroll and access the privileges that come with it? Take the example of alleged sexual predator Thomas Tolstoy, returned to the Philadelphia Police Department even though the police chief doesn't want him because prosecutors couldn't make the charges stick. Union protections keep these kind of risky people on the street in uniform.

What about a more diverse police force? Even Slate has debunked this as any kind of solution to police brutality. “Just because an officer is black,” wrote Jamelle Bouie, “doesn't mean he’s less likely to use violence against black citizens.” Some numbers from ProPublica to enforce that:

Black officers account for a little more than 10 percent of all [reported] fatal police shootings. Of those they kill, though, 78 percent were black.

White officers, given their great numbers in so many of the country's police departments, are well represented in all categories of police killings. White officers killed 91 percent of the whites who died at the hands of police. And they were responsible for 68 percent of the people of color killed. Those people of color represented 46 percent of all those killed by white officers.

Garner’s death, and others like his, aren’t counted even in the inadequate counts of police shootings, because it wasn’t a shooting.

Another solution to racist policing is to ratchet up police targeting of white people. From an interview last year with Councilman Andy King, a Bronx Democrat who represents the district where Ramarley Graham was shot in his grandmother’s house after being pursed by cops over a small amount of weed and who participated in rallies in support of Graham, an excerpt:

Reason: If the NYPD were to counteract accusations of racial profiling by targeting more young white males suspected of making illegal drug purchases, would that lend their activities in the community more credence?

King: If the scale is equal, of course. Because they’re doing something wrong… for us to act like there’s no drug use in the white community, we’re fooling ourselves. There’s coke heads on Wall Street. In communities of color we’re constantly hearing about the mistakes, but you never hear about crime in the white communities, with police saying oops. So why do we have it now and always in communities of color? It’s unfair to target just young men of color.

None of what King said would have prevented the death of Ramarley Graham. So would it be unfair to say that for King it’s appearances that matter more than lives?

Focusing on the issue of overcriminalization as a route to alleviating police brutality is not a race-blind tactic. The laws that spark interactions like the one between police and Eric Garner disproportionately affect the poor and minorities, both in their substance (rich white people can afford a hefty cigarette tax, say, and have front yards for their grills) and in their enforcement (a white person dressed the “right” way is more likely to get away with selling loose cigarettes because they don’t conform to cops’ biases of what a loose cigarette dealer looks like). Nanny state laws—laws with no victims that are instead about correcting behavior—are especially burdensome on poor and marginalized communities, and come from a long history of white supremacy and the idea that poor people, especially poor black people, are too stupid to be the masters of their own lives.

At the end of the day, it’s impossible to say for certain if Danny Pantaleo is a racist. Only he knows that. But it’s possible to say for certain that if his supervisors hadn’t ordered him and other plainclothes officers to patrol Staten Island for loose cigarette dealers then Eric Garner, a man known to the police as a loose cigarette dealer, wouldn’t have been approached by cops and eventually placed in a fatal chokehold.

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Did North Korea Hack Sony Pictures’ Corporate Computer Network?

Sony Pictures EntertainmentSony Pictures EntertainmentA massive computer hack took down the entire computer network of Sony Pictures Entertainment, one of the world’s biggest movie companies, last week, forcing employees to ditch their computers for pen, paper, and phones.

Several upcoming films produced by the studio have already been released online in high quality, along with reams of corporate data, including salary information, social security numbers for thousands of employees, and anonymized complaints about the company’s movies from its own employees, who, it seems, really don’t like Adam Sandler films.

Who’s behind this massive digital intrusion? Initial reports suggest that the culprit could be North Korea, and that the hack could be retaliation for Sony’s upcoming movie The Interview, which stars Seth Rogen and James Franco as journalists secretly tasked with assassinating North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un. North Korea, which has complained loudly about the movie, has issued a denial that it is responsible for the attack. But it remains a “principal suspect,” though not the only one, according to Reuters, which reports that the tools used in the hack closely resembled tools previously used by North Korea to attack South Korea.

This is one of the largest—maybe the single largest—corporate hacks in history, at least that we know about, and if it’s true that North Korea is involved, then it represents a disturbing new precedent in international cyber-squabbling. (Judge for yourself if that represents an acceptable use of the prefix “cyber.”) At the same time, though, I think it would also suggest the pathetic smallness of North Korea—expending resources to attack a movie studio because it felt insulted by the plot of a James Franco comedy. That’s not exactly the sign of a confident, big-league player on the international scene. I don’t mean to diminish the effect this attack has had on Sony; for the studio, it’s borderline catastrophic. But if North Korea really is behind this, then it also highlights how petty and fragile the nation’s sense of itself really is. 

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Ronald Bailey Asks How Low Can Oil Prices Go?

Pro FrackingpolhudsonThe price of oil in global markets has plunged by nearly 40 percent over the past six months. As a result, the price of a gallon of regular gasoline in the U.S. has dropped from an average of $3.68 in June to $2.74 this week. In June, the U.S. Energy Information Administration had projected that a gallon of gas would average $3.48 per gallon this month. Reason Science Correspondent Ronald Bailey asks, "What happened, and where might oil prices go in the next two to five years?"

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Now Hillary Clinton Cares About Criminal Justice Reform

Ready for Hillary/InstagramReady for Hillary/Instagram

In what MSNBC is calling "her strongest comments yet this year on criminal justice", former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton weighed in on the Eric Garner and Michael Brown cases Thursday, calling for grappling with "hard truths" and restoring "balance" to a criminal justice system rife with "unnecessary incarceration". 

I'll pause for a moment to let you roll your eyes.

Clinton's laments ring a little false, considering her history on criminal justice issues. Here's Clinton in 1994:

We need more police, we need more and tougher prison sentences for repeat offenders. The three strikes and you’re out for violent offenders has to be part of the plan. We need more prisons to keep violent offenders for as long as it takes to keep them off the streets.

As First Lady, Clinton lobbied for her husband's crime bill, which (among other things) encouraged states to enact harsher sentencing statutes and expanded the list of crimes subject to the federal death penalty. In 2001, Clinton co-sponsored a bill to provide more funding and stricter sentencing for hate crimes. In her 2006 book It Takes a Village, Clinton praised stricter punishments for people charged with sex crimes.

In 2007, she voted to reinstate $1.15 billion in funding for the COPS Program, a police funding initiative launched by the crime bill. Clinton also co-sponsored the COPS Improvements Act of 2007, which amended existing grants for community policing programs to hire more officers on anti-terror and homeland security duties, hire more school-based police officers, and create "school-based partnerships between local law enforcement agencies and local school systems to combat crime, gangs, drug activities, and other problems facing elementary and secondary schools". (We've seen how well that last bit works out.) 

Obviously, people's policy prescriptions can evolve. Clinton's had 20 years of watching tough-on-crime policies play out, and at least she's able to admit that mistakes were made. In 2007, Clinton told the Iowa Brown & Black Presidential Forum that the results of the crime bill "have been an unacceptable increase in incarceration across the board" that needs to be addressed:

At the time, there were reasons why the Congress wanted to push through a certain set of penalties and increase prison construction and there was a lot of support for that across a lot of communities. It’s hard to remember now but the crime rate in the early 1990s was very high. But we’ve got to take stock now of the consequences, so that’s why I want to have a thorough review of all of the penalties, of all the kinds of sentencing, and more importantly start having more diversion and having more second chance programs.

Despite statements like that on the campaign trail, however, Clinton did not introduce or rally behind any legislation to this effect during her remaining U.S. Senate tenure.

Maybe I'm reading too much into that support comment, but it seems telling. In 1994, tough-on-crime was popular, and the Clintons obliged. Now that sentencing reform and reducing prison populations is all the rage, well... here's Clinton at the Massachusetts Conference for Women in Boston yesterday: 

Each of us has to grapple with some hard truths about race and justice in America. Because despite all the progress we’ve made together, African Americans, most particularly African-American men, are still more likely to be stopped and searched by police, charged with crimes, and sentenced to longer prison terms.

(...) The United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population, yet we have almost 25 percent of the world’s total prison population. Now, that is not because Americans are more violent or criminal than others around the world; in fact that is far from the facts. But it is because we have allowed our criminal justice system to get out of balance. And I personally hope that these tragedies give us the opportunity to come together as a nation to find our balance again.

This was the first time Clinton has spoken following the recent findings of grand juries not to indict an NYPD officer in the chokehold death of Garner or to indict Ferguson officer Darren Wilson for the fatal shooting of Brown. She told the audience she's supports a Justice Department investigation into these deaths and President Obama's task force on policing. 

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U.S. Birth Rate Hits All Time Low - Total Fertility Rate Nearly At All Time Low

U.S. Fertility Rate TrendCNNThe National Center for Health Statistics is reporting that the U.S. birth rate hit an all-time low in 2013. The agency reports that there were 3.93 million births in the United States in 2013, down less than 1% from 2012 and 9% from the recent 2007 high. The New York Times further reported...

...the general fertility rate in the United States — the average number of babies women from 15 to 44 bear over their lifetime — dropped to a record low last year, to 1.86 babies, well below the 2.1 needed for a stable population. For every 1,000 women ages 15 to 44, there were 62.5 births in 2013, compared with 63 the previous year.

The Times cites experts who suggest that the decline in births stems in large measure from post-Great Recession economic concerns.

In fact, the only years in which that the U.S. general fertility rate was lower than 1.86 occurred during the 1970s when the rate fell to 1.74 births in 1976. It is notable that the 1970s were also a time of considerable economic disarray. Analysts cited by the Times suggest that the fertilty rate will bounce back once the economic situation improves just as it did when the memories of Jimmy Carter began fading away.

I would suggest that there are good reasons to doubt that prognostication, not least of which is the strong correlation between higher percentages of educated women and lower overall fertility. For example, American women today earn around 60 percent of all college degrees. As the Bureau of Labor Statistics notes by 27 years of age, 32 percent of women had received a bachelor's degree, compared with 24 percent of men.

The Census Bureau reported in 2011 that college-educated women delayed childbearing but did catch up a bit in their 30s. In its report, the NCHS similarly observed that birth rates had dropped to record lows in 2013 among women under age 30 and rose for most age groups 30 and over. From the Bureau:

In 2000, women 25 to 34 with at least a bachelor's degree had fewer total children and were less likely to have ever given birth compared with women who had less than a high school education. Women with less than a high school education had three times as many births as women with at least a bachelor's degree. Eighty-three percent of women 25 to 34 with less than a high school education had given birth at twice the percentage recorded by women with at least a bachelor's degree (42 percent).      

By 2010, the education level of these women — now 10 years older — made less of a difference in their total number of children than it did in 2000. Women 35 to 44 (corresponding with the 25 to 34 age group in 2000) with at least a bachelor's degree had 1.7 births, while women who had less than a high school education had 2.5 births. Eighty-eight percent of women 35 to 44 with less than a high school education had a birth compared with 76 percent of women with at least a bachelor's degree.

Nevertheless, the Bureau noted that women with college degrees are still having fewer children overall by the end of their childbearing years. Consequently, I doubt that the U.S. total fertility rate will ever again rise above the replacement rate of 2.1 children.

See also Reason TV's excellent interview with filmmaker Jessica Yu in which she explains why she concluded that overpopulation is a myth in her documentary Misconception:

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"…And a War in the Middle East"

Eric Garner protest@kianiprestige/TwitterThe United States has been in international news lately. Last week much of the world’s media focused on the grand jury announcement in Ferguson, Missouri. Foreign reporters already in U.S. police news mode then picked up the grand jury announcement over the death of Eric Garner in New York City.

None of this, of course, is new. Cops in the U.S. have been killing hundreds of Americans of every race each year, in incidents ranging from good shots to murder. In just the month before the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson captured the mainstream media’s attention, cops in Ohio shot a man holding a fake gun in the fake gun aisle of Walmart and a cop in Georgia shot a 17-year-old in the chest after he opened the door for her holding a Wii controller, which is white.

While the attention to Ferguson helped the Eric Garner grand jury receive a level of media attention the second Ramarley Graham grand jury never did, it’s still no guarantee of wider attention to incidents of police killings. The killing of Rumain Brisbon earlier this week over a bottle of prescription pills has yet to enter the national or international news cycle and is unlikely to.

But the U.S. is in international news for another reason, too, if not in domestic news, for the continuing campaign against ISIS. The U.S. conducted at least 25 more air strikes in Syria in the last week, strikes Syria’s Bashar Assad has dismissed as unserious. King Abdullah of Jordan, one of the members of the U.S.-led coalition against ISIS called the struggle “our third world war.” France is now conducting what’s described as “major” raids in Iraq.

Amid all this, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who has also been a leading national voice on police issues, is forcing a vote on the war (in all but name) with ISIS, by threatening to attach a declaration of war to a world drinking water bill being considered in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, drawing the ire of Sen. John “not an angry bird” McCain (R-Az.), who said it was an example of why Congress shouldn’t bother with lame duck sessions. Congress, of course, has failed to act as a check on the president’s war-making powers both in the regular and lame duck sessions of Congress held during Barack Obama’s presidency. He’s the fourth consecutive president to commit U.S. military force to Iraq, and the first not to bother getting any kind of OK from Congress at all. And so war in the Middle East just doesn’t cut it as news anymore.

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Listen Up, Liberals: Make Everything Illegal, Create More Eric Garners

LeviathanWikimedia CommonsIn comparison to the Michael Brown shooting, the death of Eric Garner—and the similar decision not to indict the cop who killed him—has drawn outrage from across the political spectrum. Many conservatives, including Breitbart's John Nolte, The Federalist's Sean Davis, and The Daily Caller's Matt Lewis, agreed with anti-police-brutality libertarians and liberals that Garner's killer should have faced charges. The consensus is that the video evidence definitively established wrongdoing on the part of the officer (unlike the Brown case, which relied on conflicting eyewitness testimony).

But because that's no fun, right and left had to find some way to tear each other apart over this. And so the contention—made by some libertarians and conservatives—that punitive cigarette taxes are a contributing factor in Garner's death has driven many on the left into a fit of rage.

Some background on that contention, courtesy Reason's J.D. Tuccille:

Here we have Garner, a guy allegedly selling loosies—single cigarettes—which are a perfectly legal product. Why is he supposedly selling loosies? Because New York officials inflict on their long-suffering subjects the highest cigarette tax in the country at at $4.35 per pack, plus another $1.50 levied in the city itself. It's not a popular tax, with smuggled smokes making up 60.9 percent of the market. So the powers that be unleash the cops to enhance revenue by tracking down shipments of smuggled cigarettes and, on occasion, putting the occasional small-time street vendor in an illegal chokehold.

On his show last night, Jon Stewart mocked Sen. Rand Paul for making that point. When asked about Garner's death, Paul said: "Some politician put a tax of $5.85 on cigarettes, so they have driven cigarettes underground by making them so expensive, but then some politician also had to direct the police to say, hey, we want you arresting people for selling a loose cigarette."

Stewart's response: "What the fuck are you talking about?"

BuzzFeed's Adam Serwer also criticized the point (though more kindly), in a Twitter argument with Reason's Scott Shackford. "I think 'it's the cigarette tax' is comforting because then we don't have to deal with the racism, which we know isn't getting fixed easily," wrote Serwer.

Media Matters was as nasty as could have been expected, publishing an email update on the matter under the vindictive headline: "Right-Wing Media Parrot Rand Paul's Absurd Assertion That Cigarette Taxes Are To Blame For Eric Garner's Death."

And the most eloquent critic of the cigarette argument, The New Republic's Danny Vinik, wrote:

In other words, Eric Garner is not dead because New York City imposes high cigarette taxes. He’s dead because a cop put him in a chokehold, in violation of NYPD rules, and held his head against ground. To their credit, conservatives have widely denounced the grand jury’s decision. If they want to argue against cigarette taxes, though, they should make that full argument—including that the law can cause violent confrontations between police and civilians. But pointing to Garner’s death as evidence that those taxes are bad policy isn't meaningful. 

Look, police brutality has many underlying causes. One of them is undoubtedly racism; black people are disproportionately arrested and imprisoned. An encounter between a cop and a civilian is more likely to be unpleasant if the civilian is black. In fact, it's more likely to occur in the first place if the civilian is black, because many cops racially profile suspects.

Another cause is the police incentive structure. Police have far more legal protections than non-police. They can get away with so much more. Indeed, while the cop who killed Garner evaded indictment, a civilian who recorded the incident on his phone was indicted on a separate weapons charge.  It's difficult—often impossible—to punish police for bad behavior, which gives the bad apples free rein to abuse people.

You know what's also a cause? Overcriminalization. And that one is on you, supporters of the regulatory super state. When a million things are highly regulated or outright illegal—from cigarettes to sodas of a certain size, unlicensed lemonade stands, raw milk, alcohol (for teens), marijuana, food trucks, taxicab alternatives, and even fishing supplies (in schools)—the unrestrained, often racist police force has a million reasons to pick on people. Punitive cigarette taxes, which disproportionately fall on the backs of the poorest of the poor, contribute to police brutality in the exact same way that the war on drugs does. Liberals readily admit the latter; why is the former any different?

If you want all these things to be illegal, you must want—by the very definition of the word illegal—the police to force people not to have them. Government is a gang of thugs who are paid to push us around. It's their job.

A well-meaning liberal who doesn't want people to smoke but also doesn't want the government to kill them for doing so has plenty of other options, by the way. There are countless organizations and products dedicated to helping people quit cigarettes voluntarily.

But anybody who wants it to be a matter of law must accept that resistance will be met with fines, prison, and death. As Bloomberg View columnist and law professor Stephen L. Carter put it:

It’s not just cigarette tax laws that can lead to the death of those the police seek to arrest. It’s every law. Libertarians argue that we have far too many laws, and the Garner case offers evidence that they’re right.

There are many painful lessons to be drawn from the Garner tragedy, but one of them, sadly, is the same as the advice I give my students on the first day of classes: Don’t ever fight to make something illegal unless you’re willing to risk the lives of your fellow citizens to get your way.

Any subsequent conversation about ending police brutality should include strategies to combat racism, reforming the criminal justice system and police incentive structure... and taming the maniacal leviathan that is the modern regulatory state.

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Is the Vice Presidency Irrelevant?

Just what does the vice president do and why does it matter? Acclaimed political journalist and author Jules Witcover explores these questions in his new book, The American Vice Presidency: From Irrelevance to Power. He discusses how the roles and responsibilities of the vice president have shifted and expanded over the years. No longer expected to just preside over the Senate, modern vice presidents have, according to Witcover, gained more power through political maneuvering and manipulation. 

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Steven Greenhut on Whether Concealed Carry is a Right or a Privilege

Foter.comFoter.comThe federal courts would never uphold a law requiring people to show “good cause” before they could speak in public or march in a parade. It would be a violation of our First Amendment rights. Yet, writes Steven Greenhut, an ongoing court battle examines whether similar rules regarding the carrying of firearms is an equally outrageous violation of the Second Amendment. The case started in 2008 in San Diego County, when Edward Peruta and other gun owners challenged San Diego County’s process for issuing concealed-carry permits. 

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Ask Reason's Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch Anything on Reddit, Right the Hell Now!

Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch will be live at Reddit in 15 minutes, answering all your burning questions in a AMA for the next couple of hours. Go here to submit questions now. 

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