Weekly Hit & Run Archive 2016 August 22-31

HBO FilmsDon't even think about bothering me between 9 P.M. and 11:30 P.M. tonight.

I'll be parked on my couch, staying up way too late watching HBO's great Sunday night lineup: The Night Of, Ballers, Vice Principals, and Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. These shows perfectly capture why the premium cable channel remains about the last redoubt of "appointment television" in a world of endlessly proliferating on-demand options. Years after shows such as Oz, Sex & the City, The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, Curb Your Enthusiasm, and other programs set new standards for TV, HBO still manages to produce politically, culturally, and sexually charged content that makes us want to drop whatever we're doing and watch on a network's schedule rather than our own.

The main reason for this is one of the least-appreciated: Because you pay for it, HBO is free to engage issues and perspectives that other cable channels shy away from out of fear of alienating advertisers, viewers, and government or industry buttinskies. No matter how racy or edgy, say, Comedy Central, FX, TBS, or Cartoon Network's Adult Swim can get (which is plenty, thank god), they're all still bounded by appeals to common decency if not necessarily appeals to the lowest common denominator. Something tells me that Mike Lindell, the ubiquitous-on-cable inventor of My Pillow, doesn't want his spots to be bookended by the profanity, nudity, and seriously adult situations Girls serves up on a regular basis. The broadcast networks might be freer than ever from governmental content regulation, but they still lag far behind even basic cable in terms of serving up shows that actually cater to adult sensibilities without flinching.

Charging a cover means that HBO's shows can use adult language and situations not simply to titillate but to reflect how we actually live, talk, and think in the 21st century—and whatever century Game of Thrones is set in. Real Time with Bill Maher sets the standard for political gabfests not simply because he routinely pulls in guests from all over the political spectrum but because you can freely curse on the show. Seriously, how can anybody with half a brain discuss the 2016 election without going full Tourette's sooner or later? (Disclosure: Matt Welch and I appear on the show.)

But HBO's expressive freedom consists of much more than blue language and nude scenes. Back in the 1980s, HBO's awful anthology show The Hitchhiker defined the appeal of premium cable. Each half-hour episode revolved around not just a terrible, Twilight Zone-style plot twist but a single strategically bared breast. Indeed, the real dramatic tension was when and to what ridiculous lengths the producers would go to provide a pretext for a flash of skin.

That was then. The police procedural The Night Of, which closes out its eight-episode season on Sunday, plumbs the intersection of race, class, and law with a grit and unsettling violence that is seen nowhere else on small screen. Starting off as a shaggy-dog story involving a Pakistani-American college kid boosting his father's cab and picking up a seeming dream girl, the first episode ends with a night of drug-fueled sex, murder, and arrests. As the plot unfolds, we navigate a world that is filled with overlapping and contradictory ethnic enmities, well-intentioned but blinkered law enforcement, and less and less moral clarity. Ballers is superficially a bawdy dramedy about a former football star turned financial manager (played by Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson) whose ambition is outstripped by his talents. True to its locker-room roots, there's more than a little rough talk but there's also a frank and compelling tension between typically white agents and black clients. It's also one of the few shows that talks frankly about making money and the power that flows directly from having gobs of it.

HBOVice Principals sprouts from the dark, twisted, and brutally funny mind of actor and writer Danny McBride, whose previous HBO series, Eastbound and Down, plunged to new depths of tastelessness and black humor. There is no one to root for in this tale of two idiotic school administrators who are endlessly thwarted in their attempts to advance their careers. It takes place in a moral universe where God is either dead or actively shitting on humanity, a comic version of Seneca's Thyestes, in which two brothers brutalize each other beyond description. I virtually never agree with the substance of John Oliver's soliloquies on the news of the week—his recent, ill-informed take on charter schools provides an example why—but he's always intellectually challenging in a way that extends his Daily Show roots into new and more complicated areas. In this, he's paralleling what Larry David's Curb Your Enthusiasm did with Seinfeld, spinning platinum from a show that was already solid gold.

None of this is to suggest that HBO, any more than its less-accomplished competitor, Showtime, is infallible (Vinyl, anyone?) or that it's series aren't open to criticism. But HBO uses its economic freedom from advertisers and its aesthetic and intellectual freedom from the FCC and cable-operator bureaucrats to produce TV for literate and literary viewers who want complex plots, relevant and highly charged themes, and adult situations (which is so much than mere nudity and sex scenes).

In an era where free speech is under attack on college campuses, in politics, and the workplace, HBO isn't afraid to crank out shows that warrant trigger warnings longer than your arm and to engage politics more directly than a Saudi Arabian Clinton Foundation donor. The result is programming that we're willing to pay extra for, build our Sunday nights around, and wake up on Mondays at 6.30 A.M totally sleep-deprived.

If only the rest of life was so bankable.

The Gary Johnson/Bill Weld Libertarian Party ticket has a new ad out that I first came across on Facebook.

It's a graphic-heavy, upbeat pitch that hits many of the candidates' stances on hot-button issues. It calls for keeping government "out of my bedroom and out of my pocketbook" and for being for immigration, marijuana legalization, and marriage equality. The ad also says that the United States will have an "invincible" military that will only be used for defensive purposes and that taxes need to be simpler and lower.

"This is a huge opportunity, don't you see?" Johnson, a former two-term governor of New Mexico, asks near the end.

Take a look below, on Facebook, or Twitter.

Fox News Sunday promoLibertarian Party presidential candidate Gary Johnson appeared on Fox News Sunday this morning and was interviewed by Chris Wallace on topics ranging from his attempt to reach 15 percent in the five national polls that will get him on the stage for the presidential debates to his views on ISIS to his pledge to cut 20 percent of federal spending in his first budget.

Johnson said that he's averaging 10 percent in the polls the Commission on Presidential Debates will be using to set the roster for its debates. That's up sharply from a few weeks back, he said, "So we're optimistic that we're going to actually get into the debates. We're spending money right now in many states. In five states right now, I'm at 16 percent. So I'm just really optimistic."

The former two-term governor of New Mexico said that if he doesn't get in the debates, its "game over" in terms of "winning the election." Johnson laid out a scenario in which he and his running mate, former Massachusetts Gov. Bill Weld, make it into the debates and create a situation in which the country rallies around them:

The object is to win outright. And it's not impossible that if we go into the presidential debates with the polarization of Clinton and Trump that we might actually run the table on all this. And I'm talking about me and Bill Weld, two former Republican governors re-elected in heavily Democrat states.... I don't think there's any arguing that we did make differences in our state being fiscally conservative, socially inclusive. I'll add to that, that we're really skeptical about intervening militarily to achieve regime change that I think has resulted in a less-safe world. So I think that we represent about 60 percent of Americans with that philosophical belief.

That is fanciful, to say the least, but then again, who would have thought that Donald Trump had a real shot at being the GOP nominee or that an independent socialist such as Bernie Sanders would give the anointed Democrat, Hillary Clinton, the run he gave her?

Wallace did a "lightning round" with Johnson on key issues because, as Wallace put it, "You say the key to your candidacy is if people sit down and compare you to Clinton and Trump on the issues, they're going to pick you."

Here's a summary of the Libertarian's responses:

International trade

JOHNSON: Free trade. Supporting [T]PP. It's a good thing. Free trade. The—more jobs... We're the only ones that support it.

Immigration

JOHNSON: Make it as easy as possible to come into this country and work. To be able to get a work visa. A work visa should entail a background check and a Social Security card. Don't build a wall across the border. These are hard-working individuals that are taking jobs that U.S. citizens don't want....[For illegals already here,] they could...get a work visa, as long as they've been law abiding. With regard to citizenship, there needs to be a pathway to citizenship.... That's part of comprehensive immigration reform that Bill Weld and I think we can bring Democrats and Republicans to the table over.

Spending

Johnson has repeatedly proposed cutting the federal budget by 20 percent in his first year and eliminating departments of education, commerce, and homeland security, among others.

WALLACE: You don't think any of those agencies do any good?

JOHNSON: Well, in the case of Education, in the case of Commerce, and there are some vital functions in these agencies, but do they require an entire agency? I don't think so. But Education, Commerce, Housing and Urban Development, Homeland Security. Why...is Homeland Security an agency unto itself? Shouldn't it be a part of the FBI? Those are the ones that I am advocating out of the chute.

Taxes

JOHNSON: If I could wave a magic wand, I would eliminate income tax, corporate tax. I would replace it with one federal consumption tax. I put up the fair tax as the template for how you accomplish one federal consumption tax. You're right about a consumption tax being regressive. The way that the fair tax deals with that is it issues everyone a "prebate" check of $200 a month that allows everyone to pay the consumption tax up to the point of the poverty level... Zero corporate tax, which you and I paid for, I maintain that that would create tens of millions of jobs and that it would also issue pink slips to 80 percent of Washington lobbyists.

Foreign policy

JOHNSON: I do believe that if you want to look at ISIS, that they are regionally contained.... A poll among active military personnel two weeks ago, who do they favor for president of the United States? Me. So what are they saying? What are—what they're saying is judicious use of the military. If we're attacked, we're going to attack back. But the fact that we involve ourselves in regime change has resulted in the unintended consequence of making things worse, not better, and nobody's standing up to this. Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, not intentional. They go in. They support the opposition in Libya and Syria. The oppositions aligned with ISIS. We arm the opposition. Now those arms are in ISIS' hands. This is the unintended consequence of our foreign policy.... [We're] going to continue to stay engaged in [battling ISIS], but there will be a void when that gets eliminated. We didn't even hear about ISIS until two years ago. This was al Qaeda until it became ISIS. And wipe out ISIS and it will be something else. Look, the biggest threat in the world right now is North Korea. We need to deal with the civil war in Syria. That's joining hands with Russia diplomatically to see that through. Biggest threat in the world, North Korea. We need to join arms—join hands with China to deal with that diplomatic...

Marijuana Policy (and heading up a company involved in certifying pot products)

JOHNSON: Marijuana products, which directly compete with legal prescription drugs on the medical front, don't kill anybody.... There needs to be research and development in this area that can't currently happen because marijuana is listed as a class one narcotic. As president of the United States, I would delist marijuana as a class one narcotic. This is going to be an issue that is left up to the states, just like alcohol. And then on the recreational side of this, Chris, I have always believed that legalizing marijuana will lead to less overall substance abuse because it's so much safer than everything else that's out this, starting with alcohol.

Wallace pushed Johnson on a number of answers—rightly, in my view. For instance, Johnson trotted out his regular line that he is not being elected dictator, so you need to take his policy preferences as hypothetical. To which Wallace answered:

WALLACE: When you say we're not going to be elected dictator, you're saying, don't take my policies seriously because they won't get through.

JOHNSON: Take them very seriously, but count on certainty that we're going to always support taxes going lower. We're going to always support being in business being easier. Rules and regulations not getting worse, getting better.

Johnson also pressed on another theme he hit heavily on Friday's Libertarian town hall on Fox Business' Stossel: That a Johnson/Weld administration would be in the best position to de-polarize Congress and force centrist-yet-libertarian solutions to pressing concerns such as immigration, entitlement reform, and foreign policy. Said Johnson:

Look, Hillary or Trump, isn't the polarization in Congress going to be greater than ever? Does anybody believe that anything is going to get better in Congress? Our pitch is the third alternative, which is a couple of libertarians in the middle, hiring a bipartisan administration. Everybody libertarian leaning. But I think you could make a case that that third scenario might work.

This last scenario, like the hopes of getting into the debates, is intriguing but seriously long-odds. Johnson was energetic in his appearance but seemed at moments unsure about his own positions (the governor stumbled when Wallace listed a series of government agencies and departments he said Johnson had pledged to cut and he seemed tentative in his knowledge of "ISIS-inspired" attacks in Europe). Wallace was right to call him out on the "I'm not being elected dictator" line, which seems a way to have things both ways: Here are my ideas but don't hold me to them.

If this is an election about changing things in a direction different from Donald Trump's mix of bullying nativsim and nationalism or Hillary Clinton's self-styled continuation of Barack Obama's policies, there's certainly room for a perspective that, as Johnson notes, roughly accords with large pluralities and majorities that support free trade, legal immigration (and a path to legalization for current illegals), broad reductions in federal government spending and regulations, and a foreign policy that is less adventurous. Johnson lays most or all of that out but also often misses opportunities to explain why and how these policies reflect a libertarian worldview that is particularly in synch with a 21st-century world.

If Johnson's success rests upon convincing sympathetic observers who aren't fully convinced that he's got the gravitas to be commander-in-chief and a force to be reckoned with on domestic policy, he still has a ways to go.

Full Fox News Sunday transcript here.

Here's an interview Reason TV with Johnson and Weld in July at FreedomFest, the largest annual gathering of libertarian-minded folks (for more on that, go here).

Mike Morbeck, FlickrColin Kaepernick, who plays quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers, refused to stand during the playing of the national anthem at a pre-season game. In case anyone missed his intent, Kaepernick clarified it after the game:

"I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color," Kaepernick told NFL Media in an exclusive interview after the game. "To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder."

Although it encourages players to do so, the NFL doesn't require them to stand during the playing of the anthem.

Kaepernick's protest has drawn a huge amount of online reaction, much of it flatly critical. Fellow football players have been more supportive, though hardly uncritical.

Former football player, Biggest Loser participant, and ESPN analyst Damien Woody tweeted:

This is what comes with a free society, unless ppl hate democracy

— Damien Woody (@damienwoody) August 27, 2016

Justin Pugh of the New York Giants tweeted:

I will be STANDING during the National Anthem tonight. Thank you to ALL (Gender,Race,Religion)that put your lives on the line for that flag

— Justin Pugh (@JustinPugh) August 27, 2016

As the legendary sportswriter and young-adult novelist Robert Lipsyte—he was among the first sports-beat scribes to write about characters such as Muhammad Ali and Billie Jean King as agents of social change—told Reason a few years back, sports isn't a respite from all the political, cultural, and economic battles of the everyday world. No, it's a prism through which to view, engage, and debate those very concerns. People who say that sports is not the place to talk about serious issues are trying to live in a fantasy world.

I've never felt comfortable during the playing of the national anthem during professional sporting events, simply because it strikes me as either an empty gesture or a forced ritual. Standing for the national anthem before a hockey or baseball tells us precisely nothing about anyone's patriotism or feelings toward the country, especially when it is forced.

Yet Kaepernick's gesture strikes me as a particularly weak display considering the apparent depth of his feelings on questions of police violence toward racial and ethnic minorities. I share many of his concerns about systemic racism stemming from policies such as the drug war, but his overly broad and condemnatory language strikes me as easy to dismiss, especially given the economic, legal, and culurals perks afforded to professional athletes. Given his slumping career, many people on social media are simply writing him off as a fading malconent. That sort of reaction—how dare you say anything critical of the system that made you rich and famous!—also strikes me as risible.

There's no doubt that athletes and other entertainers take professional risks when they speak out on politically charged topics. As Damien Woody suggests, they have every right to do. Where would we be without figures ranging from Jackie Robinson to Frank Sinatra to Eartha Kitt to Curt Flood to Charlton Heston to Woody Harrelson using their celebrity to raise concerns? Independent of whether we agree with them on any given concern, celebrities are often powerful and eloquent spokespeople for causes that are otherwise ignored by the public. More than a few have paid for being outspoken in lost opportunities, but some also become incredibly effective change agents (certainly Muhammad Ali and Billie Jean King were).

If Kaepernick's outrage at disproportionate police violence against blacks and minorities is as strong as it seems, I hope he becomes a more effective and thoughtful advocate for policy change.

What do you think? Is Kaepernick taking a bold stand for equal treatment under the law? Or a spoiled brat? And is America a uniquely awful country whose flag and anthem should not be respected during ceremonial activities? Answer in the comments.

Reason TV recently talked with former cop and state trooper Neill Franklin, who heads up Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP). Franklin says there is no question that law enforcement treats minorities and lower-class Americans differently than whites and the well-off. He says that police are being asked to do too many things for too many people and that we need a new model of policing that builds on local community ties. Take a look.

Library of CongressIn the decades before the outbreak of the U.S. Civil War, leading American socialists argued that the anti-slavery movement had its priorities all wrong. The true path to social reform, the socialists said, was the path of anti-capitalism. But the abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass would have none of that, notes Senior Editor Damon Root. As Douglass himself once put it, socialism was just "arrant nonsense."

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shelleylyn / CC BY-SAOn Monday, Politico reported that farm "lobbyists have been laboring for months" to try to secure tens of millions of dollars in federal aid for their members, who are struggling thanks to a combination of overproduction and low commodity prices.

Those who've been shaking cups in the nation's capital include lobbyists from the American Farm Bureau and the National Milk Producers Federation. The aid they've sought centers on increasing the amount of wheat present in shipments of foreign food aid, expanding loans to farmers, and getting more cash in the hands of dairy producers.

By Tuesday, aid for dairy farmers was already a done deal. All that vigorous cup-shaking had turned into $20 million in USDA purchases of surplus cheese. That's on top of the $11 million in additional support for dairy producers the USDA announced earlier this month. Baylen Linnekin explains more.

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Mike PenceEsquire magazine, God love/hate 'em, has located the real Rosetta Stone of the 2016 election: Mike Pence's law-school college-newspaper cartoons. They are, like 99 percent of all newspaper cartoons, less than good. "These once-forgotten doodles say a lot about the kind of student Pence was and the kind of politician he would become," the men's magazine claims. "The annoying kind."

Yeah, not quite, though points for digging 'em up, I guess. At least Red Eye w/ Tom Shillue, the Fox News humor/news program at 3 a.m., had the artistic generosity to narrate Pence's mediocre cartoons, and that alone is worth the attention for you insomniacs tonight. I will be on the panel discussing the finer points of Pence's penmanship, along with comedians Andrew Schulz and Sam Roberts, and defense lawyer Remi Spencer. We will also talk about rodeo clowns, Facebook non-privacy, and—strangely enough!—female urination. It's quite the program.

I was on Red Eye 10 days ago; watch below:

Johnson-Weld siteEarlier today, I talked with Libertarian Party presidential candidate Gary Johnson for about half an hour. Here's an edited version of my conversation with the former two-term Republican governor of New Mexico. The topics we covered include whether he supports carbon taxes and mandatory vaccines (no to both), agrees with Hillary Clinton's characterization of Donald Trump as racist (yes), and if he thinks there is any chance he will crack 15 percent in the national polls that will earn him a ticket to the presidential debates ("We're very optimistic").

Johnson, who ran for president on the LP ticket in 2012 and pulled more than 1 million votes, says that the response his campaign is getting this time around is a "transformation." He attributes this to an "appetite" voters have for a different approach to politics, one that combines liberal social views and conservative fiscal views. He is certainly the only presidential candidate who believes "taxes to me are like a death plague," blacks are systematically denied equal opportunities in America, minimum-wage laws punish low-skilled workers, and marijuana should be legalized.

"We are two former Republican governors who served in heavily Democratic states," Johnson told me while discussing the reaction to the way he and his running mate, former Massachusetts Gov. Bill Weld, mash-up positions normally associated with either the right or the left. "What that meant is that we pissed everybody off, and because we pissed everybody off, we both got re-elected by bigger margins. We pissed off the left, we pissed off the right, but really where we came down was right in the middle. Where we came down on was right where everybody is, right where the majority of people are at."—Nick Gillespie

NICK GILLESPIE: Earlier this week, you suggested you were in favor of a carbon tax or fee. Yesterday, at a rally in New Hampshire (video here), you said you were against it. What is your position on carbon taxes?

GARY JOHNSON: [A carbon tax] sounds good in theory, but it wouldn't work in practice. I never called it a tax. I called it a fee. As it was presented to me, this was the way to reduce carbon and actually reduce costs to reduce carbon. Under that premise—lower costs, better outcomes—you can always count on me to support that [sort of] notion. In theory it sounds good, but the reality is that it's really complex and it won't really accomplish that. So, no support for a carbon fee. I never raised one penny of tax as governor of New Mexico, not one cent in any area. Taxes to me are like a death plague.

GILLESPIE: You do believe that climate change is happening and that human activity adds to it. Does that mean it is an issue that should be addressed by government policy?

JOHNSON: Well, I'll agree with the first two, but I'm a skeptic that government policy can address this. The United States contributes 16 percent of the contribution of carbon in the world…

GILLESPIE: So you would be against the United States unilaterally making any kind of move that puts a huge economic disadvantage that also wouldn't really mitigate carbon?

JOHNSON: If there is any way we can address this issue without the loss of U.S. jobs, my ears are open.

GILLESPIE: Let's talk about vaccines. There are no federal laws mandating vaccines, and that's how it should be, as far as you're concerned.

JOHNSON: Yes.

GILLESPIE: Various states treat vaccines differently, and you're not wild about the range of individual choice and opt-out provisions, but you do believe it's a state-level decision—or certainly that it's not a federal-level decision.

JOHNSON: Right.

GILLESPIE: There are people who say vaccines cause autism [and other problems] or that vaccines don't work. Are you in that camp?

JOHNSON: No, I chose to have my children vaccinated. I understand all the concerns that some people have, but for me personally, I made a decision to have my children vaccinated. I want people to make decisions and I believe in [opt-outs]. With the exception of a few states, everyone has an opt-out. But I also want to say that, as president of the United States, if I am confronted with a zombie apocalypse that will happen unless the total herd is totally immunized, I will support [mandatory vaccinations].

GILLESPIE: Yesterday, Hillary Clinton gave a speech in which she explicitly said that Donald Trump was racist and that he has brought a racist presence into the Republican Party. A year ago, you told Reason something very similar. You said Trump's comments about Mexicans and his views on immigration were racist. Do you agree with Hillary Clinton that Donald Trump is a racist?

JOHNSON: Well, if it walks like a duck, if it talks like a duck, it's a duck.

GILLESPIE: As a former Republican governor, how does that make you feel about the current state of the GOP?

JOHNSON: It makes me feel like I think more than half of Republicans feel: This is not representative of Republicans.

GILLESPIE: Do you think the Republican Party is going to be permanently damaged by Donald Trump's candidacy?

JOHNSON: I do.

GILLESPIE: What do you think of his recent appeals to black voters? He's been saying to African Americans that the Democratic Party hasn't really helped them much. That everything in their lives has gotten worse under Barack Obama and that Hillary Clinton is not their champion. Do you agree with Trump that Democratic Party policies haven't really benefited the black community?

JOHNSON: I do. Both parties are engaged in pandering. The libertarian approach—equal opportunity—isn't that what you really want? But I'd argue that equal opportunity currently does not exist.

MORE »

The Gary Johnson campaign is planning to spend about a million on radio and digital billboards in seven targeted states, Politico reports.

The states are Colorado, Iowa, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah and Wisconsin. One of the radio ads is reported to say "if a Democrat is elected president, if a Republican is elected president, in four years we will still be at war, America will be four years deeper in debt, we will have four more years of rising taxes."

Another one of three will be targeted at Hispanics, and feature Juan Hernandez, former adviser to both U.S. Republicans George W. Bush and John McCain and Mexico's former leader Vicente Fox.

That ad will feature Hernandez saying:

"I've always considered myself a Republican, but this year I've decided to support Gary Johnson for president," Hernandez says. "As a Latino, I'm tired of the insults coming from [Donald] Trump, and I can no longer believe that this the promises of the left will be kept."
Hernandez goes on to highlight Johnson's immigration plan. "It's a reform that doesn't unrealistically talk about deporting 11 million people and doesn't separate families," he said. "Oh, and it doesn't build a wall."

I've reported earlier on viral videos and TV ads coming out of Johnson-supporting SuperPACs this week. The official campaign has not yet done TV. The campaign has raised more than $3 million in the month of August alone.

With Libertarians making more and more headlines these days, there is a noticeable uptick in people either trying to smother libertarianism before it grows any further, or to simply express some proactive curiosity about how all this l-stuff works. I spent a lot of time on the airwaves this past week responding to both genres of query, and some of those exchanges left a digital footprint.

First up is a bit Rand Corporation scaremongering about how legal pot is some kind of scam by rich, nonsmoking liberals to keep the poor in their place. This was treated with the derision it deserved on Monday's episode of the great Fox Business Network program Kennedy:

Next is the first half of a TWO-HOUR interview I did this morning with libertarian-leaning host Scott Barger on WRTA 1240 AM's Two Way Radio program, in which we mostly chewed on libertarianism writ large:

I was asked even more what-is-libertarianism/Reason questions live from the New York Stock Exchange one week ago by a new outfit called Cheddar TV, which has been described as "the CNBC for Millennials." You can watch that segment by starting a free trial at this link.

Later that day I talked about Gary Johnson, third parties, and my dirty hippie past on The Buck Sexton Show (yes, that's the same pornstar-named ex-CIA fella who joined the drunken revelry on The Fifth Column this week).

And what the hell, if we're being completist, here's a snippet of my conversation about the alt-right Tuesday with political journalist Michael Tracey, when I was guest-hosting on SiriusXM Insight channel 121's Tell Me Everything With John Fugelsang:

Record music and voice >>

U. FloridaZika virus infections caused by local mosquito bites has now spread to three Florida counties. So far there are only 43 cases. The disease could become much more widespread if the Sunshine State gets whacked by a tropical storm. The disease is chiefly transmitted via the Aedes aegypti mosquito, and as it happens there is a technology available that has been shown to reduce the populations of that vermin by more than 90 percent. You might think that folks menaced by Zika (or any other mosquito-borne disease) would embrace such a technology, but you would be wrong. Why?

Because the technology consists of male mosquitoes that are genetically modified to pass along a lethal gene to their progeny. Whisper the words "genetically modified" and some GMO-phobic folks flee into the night screaming something about protecting their precious bodily fluids - and so it has been in Key Haven, Florida.

Several years ago, the elected Mosquito Control Board of Key West invited Oxitec, the company that grows the Friendly Mosquitos™, to release them in the Key Haven section of Key West to see if they would reduce the population of mosquitoes then-spreading dengue fever. Some GMO-phobic residents managed to delay the plan by entangling it FDA redtape. However, the FDA regulators earlier this month finally issued a safety finding of "no significant impact," essentially greenlighting the release.

Now Florida Keys GMO-phobes are demanding that they get to vote on whether or not they can force their neighbors to endure a higher risk of being infected with the Zika virus. Well, since it's all democratic and so forth that means that no one is forcing anyone to do anything, right? The New York Times quotes Key Haven resident and GMO-phobe Ms. Jitka Olsak: "We are not going to be laboratory mice. Nature takes care of its own things."

Yeah, just like it did malaria, yellow fever, polio, smallpox, guinea worm ....

• Screenshot via Pokemon / YoutubeDonald Trump and Hillary Clinton are now fighting over which one of them is more of a bigot.
• Glenn Beck calls Trump "a dictator in the making."
• Good thing Hillary gave called out the alt-right, thereby giving its members the exact thing they want: attention.
• Fox News is apparently scrambling to keep rivals Megyn Kelly and Bill O'Reilly.
• Is the Pokemon Go craze over?

FmcclaeryA professor at the University of Iowa has a problem with its sports mascot, Herky the Hawk: he looks too angry, and if delicate students are exposed to images of a fake scowling bird, they might just kill themselves.

Pediatrics Professor Resmiye Oral wrote to the athletic department to request that Herky be given a different expression. "Herky's angry, to say the least, faces conveying an invitation to aggressivity and even violence are not compatible with the verbal messages that we try to convey to and instill in our students and campus community," she wrote, according to The Iowa City Press-Citizen.

She later said that Herky's currenty expression is "against the nonviolent, all accepting, nondiscriminatory messages we are trying to convey through campus."

Here is Herky the Hawk.

To be absolutely clear: No students are actually expressing fear, depression, or a desire to hurt other people because they are triggered by Herky. Only one person thinks this might be a problem: Oral.

Credit: pumpkinmook / photo on flickrIt appears as though Australians will not be heading to the polls to decide whether the government should recognize marriages between same-sex partners after all. In this case, parties on the left are blocking the public vote, which had been organized as a sort of compromise by conservatives who are part of the country's ruling Coalition and would not legislatively approve same-sex marriage.

But supporters of same-sex marriage in Australia don't want a public vote, though polls show that Australians overwhelmingly support recognition. They object to the cost of having an election for this issue (remember: voting in Australia is mandatory), and gay marriage proponents also oppose having a public vote on a human rights issue. But not a vote by lawmakers who represent the public. Go figure. (Well, I suppose you can't launch a campaign to boot your neighbors out afterward if you don't like how they voted.)

But that path to a Parliament vote is equally complicated, and The West Australian wonders if it might actually take several years more than to legalize it via lawmakers. The issue here is that Australia's Parliament is fragmented across several parties, and most votes are strictly enforced along party lines. The same reason that Australia's Parliament can't get approval for a public vote on gay marriage is essentially the same reason why it hasn't been able to get through the Parliament itself. There hasn't been a strong enough coalition between different groups.

David Leyonhjelm, Australia's libertarian (technically Liberal Democrat) senator, had been trying to push for a same-sex marriage vote in the Parliament. Under the previous government (they've had a change in prime ministers and a new parliamentary election since then), the only way to have gotten gay marriage through the Parliament would have been for the ruling political parties to permit their members to vote their consciences rather than a party line. Attempts to make that happen in the government's ruling Coalition (center-to-right Liberals and Nationalists) failed, and the Coalition's official stance on same-sex marriage was in opposition. So members of those parties in the Parliament were expected to vote against it. Ao it has not been pushed to a vote in the Parliament yet.

The new Parliament keeps the same ruling coalition in charge, so there's a new push on Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull to get lawmakers to actually vote (and obviously vote "yes"). Read more here.

Richard W. Rodriguez/TNS/NewscomA Texas judge on Thursday struck down a state law prohibiting breweries from negotiating with distributors over where their beer can be sold.

Under the terms of the law ruled unconstitutional in district court this week, breweries were forbidden to sell their so-called "territorial rights." In other words, breweries were banned from accepting money from a distributor in exchange for giving that distributor the exclusive right to sell a certain beer in a certain area—essentially requiring most Texas breweries to give away those rights for free.

Texas, like many states, uses the so-called "three-tiered system" to govern the sale of alcohol. Distributors serve as middle men between breweries and retailers like bars and restaurants. The entire model is a hold-over from the tail end of the Prohibition era and basically serves to protect distributors' share of the market, even without additional rules like this one, which was passed in 2013 at the behest of—you guessed it—the distributors.

Brewers had opposed the law when it was passed, and three Texas breweries banded together to challenge the law in court. They argued that it required them to give away their territorial rights for free instead of allowing them to sell to the highest bidder.

District Judge Karin Crump agreed and struck down the law as a violation of the Texas state constitution's prohibition against laws that deprive individuals of their property without due process.

"This law took part of my business away from me and gave it to big distributors. Now I've got my business back," said Chip McElroy, owner of Austin-based Live Oak Brewing, in a statement. Live Oak was one of three plaintiffs in the case, along with Revolver Brewing of Fort Worth and Peticolas Brewing of Dallas. All three were represented by the Institute for Justice, a libertarian law firm that challenges overreaching governmental regulations.

Matt Miller, a senior attorney at IJ, said this week's ruling was "a victory for every Texas craft brewery and customers who love their beer."

The Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission offered no comment on the ruling. Spokesman Chris Porter said in an email the TABC was conferring with the Texas Attorney General's Office and had not yet decided whether to move forward with an appeal.

Breweries in Texas are allowed to self-distribute their products as long as they make less than 125,000 barrels of beer per year. Once they surpass that arbitrary threshold, state law requires that their sell their products to a distributor. Brewers are allowed to use a distributor if they produce less than 125,000 barrels per year, as McElroy's brewery did because they did not have workers or trucks to get their beer to other parts of the state.

McElroy previously contracted with a distributor in Houston and had plans to sell his beer in other parts of the state, but cancelled those plans after the new law took effect, he said in court documents.

Brewers are free to contract with different distributors in different parts of the state, but have to choose a single distributor for any given area. That's why territorial rights have value, since multiple distributors serving one city would have to bid against each other for the right to sell a given product. The 2013 law changed all that. By requiring breweries to give away territorial rights for free, distributors were no longer required to compete with each other on that point. Distributors pushed for the change because the recent explosion in craft breweries meant they had to buy territorial rights from an ever-growing number of new producers.

The law essentially took away part of brewers' property rights—"a very un-Texan thing to do," Michael Peticolas, owner of Peticolas Brewing, told the American Bar Association Journal in May.

There are 189 craft breweries in Texas, according to the Brewer's Association, a national trade group. They produced more than 1.1 million barrels of beer in 2015 and generated $3.7 billion for the Texas economy.

Thursday's ruling leaves Kentucky as the only state in the country with a similar law on the books.

Domino's Pizza Enterprises LimitedIn recent years, Amazon and Google have been researching drone technology to make package delivery more convenient for customers. Both companies have made progress in their efforts, even with the federal government standing in their way. Yet they may have been beaten by an unexpected competitor: a pizza company.

Domino's Pizza Enterprises Limited (which franchises the Domino's brand overseas) announced Thursday that it is launching the first commercial drone delivery service in the world. The company and American-based robot manufacturer Flirtey said they plan to begin offering pizza-delivery-by-drone at select New Zealand stores later this year.

"Domino's is all about providing customers with choice and making customer's lives easier," said Don Meij, Domino's Group CEO and managing director, in a statement. "Adding innovation such as drone deliveries means customers can experience cutting-edge technology and the convenience of having their Supreme pizza delivered via air to their door. This is the future."

Customers can already track their pizza's delivery thanks to a GPS locater in the delivery car's topper. Soon, some will be able to look up and see their order fly to them.

So why New Zealand? Well, the country's laws are friendlier toward drones. While there are some rules and regulations on the books, New Zealand Transport Minister Simon Bridges said in a statement the country continues to review its laws to "have the ideal environment to trial all forms of technology." This includes opening the door to both commercial and recreational drone use. "New Zealand has the most forward-thinking aviation regulations in the world," said Flirtey CEO Matt Sweeny in a statement.

In contrast, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has enacted extensive regulations limiting drone use. Some industry leaders have said the FAA should set standards for commercial traffic but otherwise stay out of the way.

The rules are already stifling the future of drones in America. Operators must be within the line of sight of the drone they are operating, according to the FAA, which limits how far a drone can go to deliver goods. Amazon, which wants to be able to make deliveries across far distances, went to the United Kingdom to conduct its research because that country has more relaxed regulations.

Domino's devices will fly autonomously, and will only work within a 1.5-kilometer range from participating stores. The franchise said it aims to eventually increase the radius to 10 kilometers. If the New Zealand trial is successful, the service may expand into markets in Europe and Asia.

Paul Wolfowitz was one of the most infamous hawks of the Bush II era, a deputy secretary of defense who pushed hard both for the Iraq War and, in general, for "democracy promotion" by military means. Now he may be joining the #HawksWithHer brigades.

Interviewed by Der Spiegel, Wolfowitz expresses alarm at Trump's alleged isolationism and confesses that he may vote for the Democrat:

Department of DefenseSPIEGEL: How would the world change if Trump became president?

Wolfowitz: We are already seeing a degree of instability in the world because Obama seems to have consciously wanted to step back. Trump is going to be "Obama squared," a more extreme version of the same thing....

SPIEGEL: Who are you going to vote for in November?

Wolfowitz: I wish there were somebody I could be comfortable voting for. I might have to vote for Hillary Clinton, even though I have big reservations about her.

To read the rest, go here. For more neoconservatives for Clinton, go here. For a reminder that Obama has not in fact "step[ped] back" from the world, go here.

Nancy Stone/TNS/NewscomRepublican Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner signed a package of criminal justice reform bills into law this week in a rare show of bipartisan cooperation with the Democrat-led state legislature, but one bill that didn't make the cut: legislation that would stop the state from suing inmates to recoup the cost of their incarceration.

Under Illinois law, as well as in 42 other states, corrections officials s can sue inmates to recover their room and board costs. Rauner vetoed a bill last Friday, narrowly passed by the legislature, that would have stopped the practice, which critics say is petty and vindictive, leaves prisoners destitute, and possibly costs more in the end than the revenue the lawsuits actually generate.

Rauner returned the bill to the legislature with suggested alterations. Rauner's version would add a threshold amount of money necessary to pursue a lawsuit, which he says would protect poor inmates while preserving the state's ability to go after others with significant assets.

"While I agree that this power should be used sparingly and judiciously, there are circumstances when it is warranted," Rauner said in a veto statement, citing serial killer John Wayne Gacy, who was sued by Illinois in 1993 to recover $141,000 in proceeds from the sales of Gacy's paintings while behind bars.

The Chicago Tribune reported late last year on one such inmate lawsuit involving Johnny Melton. While in prison, Melton received a roughly $30,000 settlement from lawsuit over his mother's death, which he hoped to use to rebuild his life when he got out of prison. Here's what "sparingly and judiciously" looks like in practice in the state of Illinois:

But before he was released, after 15 months in prison for a drug conviction, the Illinois Department of Corrections sued Melton and won nearly $20,000 to cover the cost of his incarceration. When Melton was paroled earlier this year, he was forced to go to a homeless shelter, then was taken in by a cousin. He got food stamps. When he died in June, according to his family, he was destitute.

"He didn't have a dime," said one of Melton's sisters, Denise Melton, of Chicago. "We had to scuffle up money to cremate him."

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'Holy Hell'Holy Hell, a documentary about a creepily eccentric spiritual community led by an extra from Rosemary's Baby, is aberrantly fascinating and more than a bit unsettling. Buddhafield, as the group is called, has left a trail of disillusioned followers with broken hearts and busted bank accounts in its churning wake.

One of them is Will Allen, the writer and director of Holy Hell, which has been kicking around the festival circuit this year and gets its first mass exposure September 1 on CNN. Allen spent 22 years as Buddhafield's house videographer and propagandist before breaking away in 2007, taking with him countless hours of revealing footage. Television critic Glenn Garvin explains more.

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The Gary Johnson-supporting SuperPAC AlternativePAC has launched a new project, called "Balanced Rebellion."

Via their site and using Facebook, they link a voter who would like to vote Libertarian from a specific state who says they would feel obligated to vote Hillary Clinton if they had no other choice to another voter who says they'd feel obligated to vote Trump in that situation.

This is intended to solve the problem of the would-be third party voter who fears their vote would enable the candidate they most hate to win. You know, the old "A vote for a third party is a vote for whatever candidate you most hate."

As Matt Kibbe, who runs the PAC, explained in a phone interview this morning, you will actually be informed of the existence of this specific other voter, but just a first name to protect the other users' privacy.

The site and idea are explained in a long-form comedic video starring "Dead Abe Lincoln." The 5-minute ad attacks Trump as your drunk racist Uncle and Clinton as a corrupt pol trying to "make millions on political favors." If America is Gotham City, then Clinton is the Mob and Trump the Joker. Johnson then is Batman.

Dead Abe then explains some of Gary Johnson's good qualities, such as being a popular GOP governor in a Democratic state who managed to cut taxes, who wants to end wars, and not spy on you. It tries to stress that even if you don't believe in all Johnson's policies, you still might be able to see he's a better presidential choice than Clinton and Trump.

The video is the creation of the Harmon Brothers, profiled last month in the Washington Post for being the famous makers of rulebreaking longform web-based ads, whose initial rep is based on "turning gross into gold" (they invented the "pooping Unicorn" for the Squatty Potty product).

"Taboo products, if we believe in them, are our specialty," Jeffrey Harmon, one of the four Mormon brothers who run the agency, told the Post.

Jeffrey Harmon says in an emailed statement via Kibbe that "Early indicators suggest this Balanced Rebellion ad is as viral as the mega viral fiberfix ad we released last week."

AdWeek on that fiberfix ad, which got 3 million Facebook views in a day with no paid push.

The Harmon Bros. "dead Abe Lincoln" video for Balanced Rebellion:

BBCThe real divide in politics pits the people who think government looks like The West Wing against the people who think it looks like Yes, Minister. The soaring principles of The West Wing did sometimes turn up in Yes, Minister (and its sequel, Yes, Prime Minister), but by the end of each half-hour they had usually been buried in a committee or snuffed out in a seedy bargain. The result may not have been an inspiring vision of good government, but it was one of the wittiest TV shows of the 1980s; this week, sadly, saw the death of Antony Jay, the British broadcaster who co-created and co-wrote it.

Jay was a man of the right; his writing partner, Jonathan Lynn, hailed from the left. They nonetheless worked well together, perhaps because the specific policies that popped up on their two shows barely mattered. Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister aired their share of topical jokes, and sometimes they expressed explicit political preferences (usually but not always libertarian-leaning). But the heart of both programs wasn't any particular policy agenda. It was the underlying mechanics of government: the ways a bureaucracy perpetuates itself and the places a reform can go to die.

The setup was simple: A somewhat well-meaning but basically spineless politician takes command of the Department of Administrative Affairs, and the department does everything it can to keep him from changing anything. (Yes, Prime Minister kept the basic formula in place, but now he had the entire British government to deal with.) Early in the first show's run, the viewer is primed to sympathize with the minister and to cheer his occasional reformist victories, but with time he comes to represent a different sort of social malady—a man willing to do virtually anything for votes and publicity, just as the bureaucrats he locks horns with are willing to do virtually anything to maintain the status quo. The two shows' 38 episodes, which ran from 1980 to 1988, sometimes feel like a public-choice textbook in sitcom form, with characters happy to spell out the venal rationales for everything they do.

That may sound didactic, and I suppose it was; with another cast the shows might not have worked at all. (A recent attempt to revive the franchise with new actors was a bust.) Fortunately, Jay and Lynn had a terrific cast, particularly Paul Eddington as the bumbling minister and Nigel Hawthorne as his Machiavellian sparring partner from the civil service. Hawthorne could make the most didactic dialogue into something musical, and Eddington's facial expressions alone could be as funny as the shows' sharpest lines. The two actors had perfect chemistry, even if their characters didn't.

Below you'll find "The Challenge," a Yes, Minister episode that originally aired in November 1982. It's solid throughout, but I picked it because it includes one of my favorite scenes in the series, in which Hawthorne explains to Eddington the real reason Britain has nuclear weapons. You should watch the whole thing, but if you just want to see that exchange, it runs from the 11:35 mark to about 12:30. It's not just a funny moment in itself, but a setup for the funniest moment of all, which comes shortly after 15:30:

(For past installments of the Friday A/V Club, go here.)

Dreamstime/Aaron PriestMaine's Republican Governor Paul LePage — once described by Politico as "America's Craziest Governor" — added to his impressive repertoire of saying vulgar and bigoted things in a completely unhinged manner when he left a voicemail for Maine State Rep. Drew Gattine (D) yesterday.

LePage — who earlier this year created a stir when he lamented that he believed heroin dealers with names like "D-Money, Smoothie, Shift" were coming to his state from "Connecticut and New York" and "half the time they impregnate a young, white girl before they leave" — objected to a reporter's insinuation that Gattine had called him a racist. But, according to the Portland Press Herald, the reporter did not say explicitly that Gattine had called LePage a racist. That didn't stop LePage from leaving in a huff, telling reporters "you make me so sick."

Shortly thereafter, LePage left a 34-second message on Gattine's voicemail, which can be heard in its entirety on the Portland Press Herald's site:

Mr. Gattine, this is Governor Paul Richard LePage. I would like to talk to you about your comments about my being a racist, you c**ksucker. I want to talk to you. I want you to prove that I'm a racist. I've spent my life helping black people and you little son-of-a-bitch, socialist c**ksucker. You … I need you to, just friggin. I want you to record this and make it public because I am after you. Thank you.

LePage reportedly later told reporters about the message and that he hoped Gattine made it public. The Press Herald then filed a Freedom of Access Act request for the audio, which Gattine turned over later that night (if only all public information access requests to the government were fulfilled with such expedience!).

The governor also told reporters, "I wish it were 1825" because he and Gattine "would have a duel, that's how angry I am." LePage added, "I would not put my gun in the air, I guarantee you, I would not be (Alexander) Hamilton. I would point it right between his eyes, because he is a snot-nosed little runt and he has not done a damn thing since he's been in this Legislature to help move the state forward."

In addition to his race-baiting drug hysteria from earlier this year, LePage has publicly advocated for public executions by guillotine of drug traffickers and quarantining healthy nurses who have returned from performing vital charity medical work in Ebola-stricken parts of Africa.

LePage also joked about "blowing up" the Press Herald's building while playing with a fighter jet simulator, and shortly after taking office in 2011 told the NAACP "to kiss my butt" when the organization made an issue of him skipping Martin Luther King Day events around the state. LePage noted that he has a black adopted son, and defended his decision by saying the NAACP is a "special interest" and "I'm not going to be held hostage by special interests."

quinn.anyaYou would think University of Chicago Dean of Students John Ellison had written something truly incendiary, given the response from the left. The New Republic's Jeet Heer called Ellison's letter a "perverse document." Slate's L.V. Anderson branded it "very odd," while suggesting that the university is further marginalizing students who already feel marginalized.

What was in the letter? Here's the most controversial paragraph, once again:

Our commitment to academic freedom means that we do not support so-called "trigger warnings," we do not cancel invited speakers because their topics might prove controversial, and we do not condone the creation of intellectual "safe spaces" where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own.

The fact that such a declaration is outrageous to left-leaning thinkers shows just how polarized the national discussion about the campus climate has become. Many people on the right feel a need to berate teenagers for being delicate snowflakes and fragile crybabies every time a student does something stupid. At the same time, the left insults students, too: by treating them as if they are delicate snowflakes and fragile crybabies who need protection from every conceivably hurtful word. Slate's L.V. Anderson is a perfect example of this:

By deriding "safe spaces" and "trigger warnings" before students arrive on campus, the University of Chicago is inadvertently sending a message that certain students—the ones who have never been traumatized, and the ones who have historically felt welcome on college campuses (i.e., white men)—are more welcome than others, and that students who feel marginalized are unlikely to have their claims taken seriously. Adults who decry "the coddling of the American mind" will likely celebrate U. Chicago's preemptive strike against political correctness, but students who have experienced violence, LGBTQ students, and students of color likely will not.

I'm sure Anderson means well, but this kind of thinking is offensive in its own right. Who's to say that students who have experienced violence, LGBTQ students, and students of color are super duper extra sensitive? For my part, I would expect victims of violence to be tougher and thicker-skinned than the average teenager, because they have experienced trauma—not the trauma of hearing something they mildly disagree with, but actual trauma.

New York Magazine's Jesse Singal makes a more reasonable criticism of the letter's rejection of trigger warnings:

Trigger warnings, to the extent we have data on their prevalence, appear to be a ghost of an issue on most campuses, and at root they're just content warnings anyway. The university, as a body, doesn't "support" an English professor giving students a quick heads-up that there's a difficult rape scene ahead? In a similar vein, what does it mean to say the university doesn't "condone intellectual 'safe spaces'"? Obviously, the university "condones" Christian students' ability to set up times and places where atheists won't harangue them, or for LGBT students to set up a place where conservative Christians won't harangue them. That's all a "safe space" is in the classical sense of the word. So there's definitely a bit of pandering in this language — the letter is throwing up a flag for people who are concerned about political correctness on campus, saying, This isn't that sort of school.

For what it's worth, Singal goes on to say nice things about the letter, overall. And I agree with him that such a strident condemnation of trigger warnings is a bit over the top if taken at face value. Ellison's actual point, I suspect, was to inform students that they shouldn't expect trigger warnings in the classroom—that they should steel themselves for a kind of education that is occasionally uncomfortable.

Chicago President Robert Zimmer doubles down on my interpretation of Ellison's vision in his Wall Street Journal op-ed today. Zimmer writes:

Universities cannot be viewed as a sanctuary for comfort but rather as a crucible for confronting ideas and thereby learning to make informed judgments in complex environments. Having one's assumptions challenged and experiencing the discomfort that sometimes accompanies this process are intrinsic parts of an excellent education. Only then will students develop the skills necessary to build their own futures and contribute to society.

Is Zimmer appealing to people who hate political correctness? Sure. But we desperately need university leaders to make more of these pronouncements from time to time, because there are plenty of activist students, anti-speech professors, and just-doing-my-job bureaucrats at the university who are eagerly attempting to move the Overton Window away from uncomfortable learning. Take this response to the Ellison letter, from a sociologist who sarcastically points out that if college is supposed to be "harrowing," we make it more dangerous by getting rid of smoke detectors: "'We think college should be a harrowing trial-by-fire. A true phoenix rises from the ashes, so we don't have 'smoke detectors' or 'alarms.'"

This is the fundamental mistake of the anti-speech left: conflating physical safety with emotional safety. Of course the university is obligated to protect its students from actual harm. It is not obligated to protect them from emotional turmoil, because such an obligation would be both impossible to meet—different people are bothered by different things—and counterproductive to the university's educational mission.

At the same time, we shouldn't be naïve about the University of Chicago's actual record on free speech. Tyler Kissinger, formerly the president of UC's student government, responded to Ellison's letter by accusing the university of "refusing to submit itself to the same sort of 'critical inquiry' it champions." He writes that the administration is more obsessed with safe spaces than the students, and frequently walls itself off from criticism by failing to meet with students and address their concerns.

Kissinger's objections are a reminder that while angry leftist students are often the ones demanding changes that threaten free expression on campus, it is the administration that enforces these changes. Often, universities do this to protect their own reputations: to quash forms of expression that they find embarrassing or problematic from a PR perspective.

The challenge for enemies of political correctness on campus is to persuade students that they actually lose power when they pressure the administration to crack down on unpopular speech—that by undermining First Amendment principles, students injure their own ability to organize, thereby undercutting their activism. If liberal students got what they wanted and enshrined trigger warnings, safe spaces, and speech codes on campus, they would be shooting themselves in the foot.

It's precisely because university administrations often cannot be trusted to promote free expression that the Ellison letter is such an encouraging development.

Yanlev/Dreamstime"Science, the pride of modernity, our one source of objective knowledge, is in deep trouble." So begins "Saving Science," an incisive and deeply disturbing essay by Daniel Sarewitz at The New Atlantis. As evidence, Sarewitz, a professor at Arizona State University's School for Future Innovation and Society, points to reams of mistaken or simply useless research findings that have been generated over the past decades.

Some alarmed researchers refer to this situation as the "reproducibility crisis," but Sarewitz convincingly argues that they are not getting to the real source of the rot. The problem starts with the notion, propounded in the MIT technologist Vannevar Bush's famous 1945 report Science: The Endless Frontier, that scientific progress "results from the free play of free intellects, working on subjects of their own choice, in the manner dictated by their curiosity for exploration of the unknown." Sarewitz calls this a "beautiful lie." Why is it a lie? Read the article and find out.

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ReasonA couple of weeks ago in this space I pushed back against assertions by FiveThirtyEight number-cruncher Harry Enten that Gary Johnson's polls have been "trending downwards," indicating that "voters may be moving away from third-party options." Well, today Enten is back with an interesting piece headlined "Gary Johnson Isn't Fading."

While noting what we have been warning you about here for years—third-party candidates typically see their crest of polling support halved by Election Day, according to Gallup—Enten explains that Johnson's numbers have so far not followed this pattern. In fact, the Libertarian may have already weathered the most difficult part of the calendar: "Most third-party candidates didn't lose that much support between late summer and Election Day," Enten writes. "Besides John Anderson in 1980, no candidate ended up finishing more than 3 percentage points below where they were polling in late August. The average drop-off is about 2 percentage points."

So how does Johnson's 9 percent stack up at this point in the campaign against other third-party candidates since World War II? According to numbers compiled by Enten here, fourth place, behind Ross Perot in 1992 (20 percent then, finished at 19), George Wallace in '68 (17/14), and Anderson in '80 (14/7). He's just a tick above Perot in '96 (8/8), behind which nobody comes close (sorry, Libertarians!). Because of his staying power, FiveThirtyEight has adjusted its predictions for Johnson's final vote upward, to 7.1 percent.

But what about the debates, I hear you ask. Well, while #TeamGov and its supporters are touting this new Qunnipiac poll showing 62 percent of Americans think the Libertarian should be in next month's televised showdown, that and a glass of water will get you a drink. As Enten notes, Johnson may not be fading, but he's also not particularly rising, either, and there's a whole lotta real estate between 9 and the required 15 percent. The L.P. ticket did reach a new high this week in the Quinnipiac poll (10 percent, up from 8 percent in June), and tied previous highs in polls by NBC News/Survey Monkey (11 percent), Rasmussen Reports (9 percent), and Reuters/Ipsos (7 percent), but at this advanced date, ties go to the loser.

Looking for a glimmer of hope? Here's one intriguing gap in the numerical record. Of the Commission on Presidential Debates' determinative Big Five polls, in which Johnson has been averaging 10 percent instead of 9, none of them have produced results in the last three weeks. Beginning any minute now, we should have a much clearer idea whether the Libertarians are rising in the polls that actually matter.

American Shakespeare Center/Lindsey WaltersGiven the prominence of nationalist populism in this presidential election, the rock opera Bloody, Bloody Andrew Jackson is an appropriate artistic rendition of that notion. As it happens, my wife and I had the pleasure of seeing the American Shakespeare Center's high-energy production of the musical recently at the Blackfriars Playhouse in Staunton, Virginia. The show runs through November. We were quite amused by the fact that during the pre-show festivities the actors issued frequent warnings to the audience that the show is filled with f-bombs and other salty language. They weren't lying.

Here's how ASC characterizes the show:

A president for the people, by the people -- that's who Andrew Jackson believes he is. Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson careens through the life and career of the charismatic and controversial seventh president, complete with rock anthems, power ballads, and wily politicians. This unswerving look at American history (sort of) and one of its most infamous presidents will keep you singing along on the edge of your seat.

In any case, the opening number - Populism Yea Yea - put me immediately in mind of Donald Trump's electoral shenanigans. The song begins with feelings of rejection, but then:

But it's the early 19th century
And we're gonna take this country back
From people like us who
Don't just think about things
People who make things happen
Sometimes with guns
Sometimes with speeches too
And also other things

Refrain: Populism, Yea Yea
This is the age of Jackson

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Mauro Grigollo/Westend61 GmbH/NewscomThe iPhone security breach that prompted the latest Apple software update is not about encryption, but it's still very important for Western government officials who want to meddle with tech security standards in service of their own national security agendas to pay attention.

Apple just released a new security update for iPhone and iPad users because of what recently happened to Ahmed Mansoor, a human rights advocate and promoter of a free press and democracy in the United Arab Emirates. Mansoor was sent a link in a text from an unknown source that said it would show him information about torture within UAE's prisons. This was lie, which he fortunately did not fall for. The link would have actually installed spyware within his phone that would have allowed hackers to snoop on Mansoor and even remotely activate the phone's camera.

Mansoor has been targeted before, and fortunately for him (and all Apple users), he knew who to turn to in order to investigate the malware. Citizen Lab figured out the nature and purpose of the malware, which has been traced back to a secretive Israeli-based firm. This makes things a bit, well, as the Associated Press diplomatically describes it, awkward:

The apparent discovery of Israeli-made spyware being used to target a dissident in the United Arab Emirates raises awkward questions for both countries. The use of Israeli technology to police its own citizens is an uncomfortable strategy for an Arab country with no formal diplomatic ties to the Jewish state. And Israeli complicity in a cyberattack on an Arab dissident would seem to run counter to the country's self-description as a bastion of democracy in the Middle East.

The Associated Press sent a journalist to the Israeli company's headquarters only to find they had recently moved. They have not been able to get authorities from either Israel or UAE to respond. They best they were able to get from the company, NSO Group, was a bland statement that its mission was to provide "authorized governments with technology that helps them combat terror and crime."

That's the kind of statement that should send off warning sirens and alarm bells in the minds of government officials here in the United States and Europe. That's the same kind of motivation lawmakers and investigators claim in calls for tech companies provide them ways to bypass encryption or security of their devices or programs.

At the same time that Mansoor was trying to fend off government-sponsored hacking targeting him because of his human rights advocacy, leaders within France and Germany are calling on the European Union to adopt a law that requires app makers to provide government officials the tools to bypass encryption for the purpose of … helping them combat terror and crime.

Fortunately European human rights and data protection experts are loudly pointing out what a terrible plan this is. There are politicians who still believe that somehow tech companies can create some sort of magical key that only the "right" people can use. This is clearly an absurd contention, but even if it were true, the United Arab Emirates, which has a terrible record of imprisoning its critics, apparently counts as the "right" people.

Gage Skidmore/Flickr/Wikimedia CommonsThe advocacy group Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA) is hosting its first ever presidential forum on September 7, which will "focus exclusively on issues the next president will have to confront as Commander-in-Chief," according to IAVA's website.

The hour-long event, which will be broadcast on NBC and MSNBC is not a debate, but rather a town hall-style event featuring the two major party candidates — Republican nominee Donald Trump and Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton — who will not be sharing the stage but will instead "take questions on national security, military affairs and veterans issues" from NBC moderators in front of a New York City audience comprised mostly of military veterans.

Notably absent from the forum is the presidential candidate far less likely than Trump or Clinton to create more combat veterans, Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson, which is almost certainly how the Trump and Clinton campaigns would prefer it.

Including Johnson in the forum would present an undeniable foreign policy alternative to the major party candidates, who at their recent respective political conventions did their best to outdo each other on selling the virtues of how hawkish their administrations would be. Trump and Clinton would be forced to explain to an audience loaded with service-people who have suffered through repeatedly failed military interventions why they — and not the non-interventionist Johnson — truly have their best interests at heart.

A recent unscientific poll of over 3,000 active military members conducted by Doctrine Man found Johnson trouncing the two "serious" candidates, with Johnson polling at 38.7 percent, Trump coming in at 30.9 percent, with Clinton bringing up the rear with 14.1 percent, according to The Hill.

It also appears that the military, much like the rest of the American voting populace, is completely turned off by both major party candidates. A recent Military Times poll of 2,000 active service-people found 61 percent stating they were "dissatisfied or strongly dissatisfied" with the idea of Trump as president. For Clinton, the level of dissatisfaction jumps to 82 percent. That same poll indicated that 13 percent of those polled intended to vote for Johnson in November.

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UberIt's crazy to ride/drive in a car that you need to take control over only when it's about to crash. You may reading a map; talking on the phone; even have drifted off a bit, lulled into a dangerous complacency by the fact that the semi-automated car works just fine in most situations. Then the klaxon rings telling you to take over RIGHT NOW. Of course, you haven't been paying attention, so it will take at least a few vital seconds for you to figure out why your car's computer has panicked and summoned you to take the wheel. Good luck with that!

Yet, that is just the future that a lot of automakers seem to be aiming for as they inch toward full self-driving capability. A nice article in the Washington Post describes this fork in the road toward the self-driving car future. Some manufacturers like Audi will keep adding features that allow for mostly hands-free (but not attention-free) driving on, say, limited access highways. On the other hand, Ford, teaming up with Google, aims for fully autonmous vehicles. Initially their vehicles will operate within specified areas, such as, ride hailing services in cities, but eventually they will safely roam free on America's roads and streets.

With regard to the imperative of full automation, in my July article, "Will Politicians Block Our Driverless Future?," I reported:

[University of Texas engineer Kara] Kockelman argues that semi-autonomous vehicles, or what NHTSA calls "limited self-driving automation," present a big safety problem. With these so-called Level 3 vehicles, drivers cede full control to the car for the most part but must be ready at all times to take over if something untoward occurs. The problem is that such semi-autonomous cars travel along safely 99 percent of the time, allowing the attention of their bored drivers to falter. In an August 2015 study NHTSA reported that depending on the on-board alert, it took some drivers as long as 17 seconds to regain manual control of the semi-autonomous car. "The radical change to full automation is important," argues Kockelman. "Level 3 is too dangerous. We have to jump over that to Level 4 full automation, and most manufacturers don't want to do that. They want protection; they want baby steps; they want special corridors; they won't get that."

Consequently the first law of the robocar revolution, according to [former Google consultant Brad] Templeton, is "that you don't change the infrastructure." Whatever functionality is needed to drive safely should be on board each individual vehicle. "Just tell the software people that this is the road you have to drive on and let them figure it out," Templeton says. "Everything you must do is in software or you lose." Some self-driving shuttles confined to specific areas—airports, pedestrian malls, college campuses—will be deployed, but they are not the future of this technology.

In other news, Uber announced that it will begin deploying a fleet of 100 self-driving Volvos on the streets of Pittsburgh next month. While the cars will drive themselves, each car will have a "chaperone" to make sure that all goes smoothly and an engineer to record what is going on. As Bloomsberg reports:

In Pittsburgh, customers will request cars the normal way, via Uber's app, and will be paired with a driverless car at random. Trips will be free for the time being, rather than the standard local rate of $1.05 per mile. In the long run, [Uber CEO] Kalanick says, prices will fall so low that the per-mile cost of travel, even for long trips in rural areas, will be cheaper in a driverless Uber than in a private car. "That could be seen as a threat," says Volvo Cars CEO Hakan Samuelsson. "We see it as an opportunity."

In the meantime, the MIT startup NuTonomy has just launched the first ever public test of ride-hailed fully self-driving cars in Singapore. And like Uber's Pittsburgh Project, NuTonomy's cars will, for the time-being, have an engineer onboard to monitor and take over driving if necessary.

These are steps in the right direction. As far as I am concerned, the self-driving future can't happen too soon.

6th CircuitYesterday a federal appeals court ruled that retroactive application of Michigan's Sex Offender Registration Act (SORA) violates the Constitution's ban on ex post facto laws. In doing so, the court offered a scathing assessment that suggests such laws make little sense even when they're constitutional.

Responding to a challenge brought by five men and one woman who committed sex offenses before the state legislature expanded SORA's requirements, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit concludes that the added provisions, although framed as civil regulations, are mainly punitive in their effects. That distinction between regulation and punishment is crucial because the Supreme Court has long read the Ex Post Facto Clause as applying only to the latter. In the 2003 case Smith v. Doe, the Court upheld Alaska's sex offender registry, ruling that any costs it imposed were incidental to its regulatory function. According to the Court, a law should be deemed punitive only if the legislature intended to impose punishment or if the law is "'so punitive either in purpose or effect as to negate [the State's] intention' to deem it 'civil.'" In concluding that Michigan's law goes so far beyond Alaska's that it meets the latter test, the 6th Circuit rightly questions the rationality and effectiveness of sex offender registration and the restrictions associated with it.

"What began in 1994 as a non-public registry maintained solely for law enforcement use...has grown into a byzantine code governing in minute detail the lives of the state's sex offenders," the court notes. Among other things, the Michigan legislature in 2006 barred registrants from living, working, or "loitering" within 1,000 feet of a school, a rule that effectively banishes sex offenders from large swaths of densely populated cities such as Grand Rapids (see map). "Sex Offenders are forced to tailor much of their lives around these school zones, and, as the record demonstrates, they often have great difficulty in finding a place where they may legally live or work," the court says. "Some jobs that require traveling from jobsite to jobsite are rendered basically unavailable since work will surely take place within a school zone at some point....These restrictions have also kept those Plaintiffs who have children (or grandchildren) from watching them participate in school plays or on school sports teams, and they have kept Plaintiffs from visiting public playgrounds with their children for fear of 'loitering.'"

In 2011 legislators compounded the registry's stigma by dividing sex offenders into three tiers that supposedly correspond to the danger they currently pose but are actually based entirely on the statutory provision they violated. That classification system, which does not include any individualized assessments, can be very misleading. All of the plaintiffs in this case qualified for Tier III, supposedly the most dangerous category. Yet one of them was convicted at age 18 of having consensual sex with his 14-year-old girlfriend, while another was convicted of "a non-sexual kidnapping offense arising out of a 1990 robbery of a McDonald's." Although neither is a rapist or child molester, they face the same requirements, including lifetime registration that will forever brand them as equally loathsome and threatening.

The 2011 amendments also included a requirement that registrants notify authorities "immediately" and in person when they move, change their names, buy or borrow a car, enroll in school, start a new job, switch to a new email address, or plan to travel for more than seven days. Failure to comply is punishable by fines and prison terms as long as 10 years.

The 6th Circuit observes that "SORA resembles, in some respects at least, the ancient punishment of banishment" as well as "traditional shaming punishments" and parole or probation. It notes that the restraints imposed by the law are "greater than those imposed by the Alaska statute by an order of magnitude" and "relate only tenuously to legitimate, non-punitive purposes."

Although SORA's restrictions are based on the assumption that sex offenders have especially high recidivism rates, the court says, there is little evidence to support that premise. Michigan presented no data on recidivism rates among the state's sex offenders (a telling omission), and research published by the Justice Department indicates that sex offenders "are actually less likely to recidivate than other sorts of criminals." Furthermore, the evidence suggests "offense-based public registration has, at best, no impact on recidivism"; in fact, laws like SORA may "actually increase the risk of recidivism, probably because they exacerbate risk factors for recidivism by making it hard for registrants to get and keep a job, find housing, and reintegrate into their communities." As for the rule excluding sex offenders from the vicinity of schools, "nothing the parties have pointed to in the record suggests that the residential restrictions have any beneficial effect on recidivism rates."

The appeals court emphasizes the mismatch between SORA's burdens and its benefits:

While the statute's efficacy is at best unclear, its negative effects are plain on the law's face....SORA puts significant restrictions on where registrants can live, work, and "loiter," but the parties point to no evidence in the record that the difficulties the statute imposes on registrants are counterbalanced by any positive effects. Indeed, Michigan has never analyzed recidivism rates despite having the data to do so. The requirement that registrants make frequent, in-person appearances before law enforcement, moreover, appears to have no relationship to public safety at all. The punitive effects of these blanket restrictions thus far exceed even a generous assessment of their salutary effects.

That harsh but justified assessment is obviously relevant not just to the constitutional question of whether retroactive application of such restrictions violates the Ex Post Facto Clause but also to the policy question of whether laws like SORA are fair or reasonable.

Artur Widak/Sipa USA/NewscomOn Friday, France's highest administrative court ruled that French leaders may not ban burkinis, the full-coverage swimming garments favored by Muslim women, from public beaches.

The French Council of State ruling related specifically to the town of Villeneuve-Loubet, but it should also block bans passed by dozens of French towns and cities recently amid alleged concerns about terrorism.

For more on the burkini bans—and the flawed logic backing them—see Reason's previous coverage:

• The Bare Truth About Burkinis: Women can decide for themselves how much to expose and why.
• Non-Religous Fundamentalists: Secular and socially-liberal Americans are blasting the French burkini bans. Yet when it comes to spreading "tolerance" here, will we get the message?
• The Loophole That Allows French Bans on Veils, Head Scarves, and (Probably) Burkinis: Freedom of religion is supposedly guaranteed by the European Convention on Human Rights, but there are many exceptions.
• France's Burkini Ban is the Ridiculous Yet Totally Predictable Result of Legislating Morality: The French government has long tried to mandate correct thinking and secularism by curbing free expression.

French court suspends burkini ban in Villeneuve-Loubet after challenge pic.twitter.com/XuRA4HsBun

— AFP news agency (@AFP) August 26, 2016

Does Libertarian Party presidential nominee Gary Johnson support a carbon tax, a specific levy on fossil fuels that produce greenhouse gases and contribute to climate change? As Ronald Bailey noted here a few days ago, the answer seemed to be yes. In a CNBC interview, Johnson

suggested that a carbon tax might be a "very libertarian proposal" to address the open access commons problem of climate change. Johnson is tentative, saying that he is "open" to considering a carbon tax. He specifically notes that a carbon tax would be a simple comprehensive way to replace all sorts of clunky expensive top-down centralized regulations and subsidies that aim to limit carbon dioxide emissions.

In a rally yesterday in Concord, New Hampshire, Johnson explicitly distances himself from a carbon tax. He also reiterates his position that vaccines (presumably for childhood diseases) are effective but should not be mandatory absent a large-scale pandemic or disease outbreak.

This footage is a trimmed YouTube video from a rally captured by WMUR (for footage of the entire event, go here).

If any of you heard me say I support a carbon tax...Look, I haven't raised a penny of taxes in my politicial career and neither has Bill [Weld]. We were looking at—I was looking at—what I heard was a carbon fee which from a free-market standpoint would actually address the issue and cost less. I have determined that, you know what, it's a great theory but I don't think it can work, and I've worked my way through that.

And I support a person's right to choose, so when it comes to vaccinations we should be able to make the decision whether we want to vaccinate our kids or not. I choose to vaccinate my kid and you never say never. Look, in the case of a zombie apocalypse taking over the United States, and there is a vaccine for that, as president of the United States, you might find me mandating that vaccine.

In April 2014, Reason magazine hosted a libertarian debate on whether vaccines, including MMR and other child-related vaccines, should be mandatory. Read that here.

Hat tips: Erick Sturrock and Mark Bozeck

Updated: The Johnson campaign sends this "definitive statement" on vaccinations:

Today, there are no federal laws mandating vaccinations, and that is as it should be. No adult should be required by the government to inject anything into his or her body.

Each of the 50 states has varying vaccination requirements for children, consistent with their responsibilities for public education and providing a safe environment for students who are required to attend school under state law. Likewise, each of the 50 states has varying opportunities for parents to seek exemptions from vaccination requirements for legitimate reasons of personal belief. That, too, is as it should be.

And while I personally believe some states' 'opt-out' provisions are not adequate in terms of personal freedom, those laws and requirements are appropriately beyond the scope of the federal government—including the President.

Clearly, if and when a major outbreak of a communicable disease occurs that crosses state lines or sweeps the nation, then appropriate levels of government have an obligation to act—and act rapidly. As President, it would be irresponsible to rule out scientifically and medically sound responses to such an emergency.

Government has a responsibility to help keep our children and our communities safe. At the same time, government has a responsibility to preserve individual freedom. Vaccination policies must respect both of those responsibilities. I personally believe in vaccinations, and my children were vaccinated. But it is not for me to impose that belief on others.

Stuck in Customs/flickrSan Francisco lawmakers want to put the squeeze on tech companies.

Steven Greenhut writes:

No metropolitan area is more closely identified with the burgeoning high-tech economy than the Bay Area. Yet in June, three of the city's 11 supervisors proposed a 1.5-percent payroll tax that would be imposed specifically on technology companies that earn $1 million in gross receipts.

This "tech tax" was designed to raise money to battle the city's homeless problem. But the economic rationale was epitomized in a statement by the bill's author, Supervisor Eric Mar: "The rapid tech boom in our city and region threatens our city's ability to thrive and prosper," he said, in a Guardian report. "Five years after the boom, it's time for San Francisco to ask the tech companies to pay their fair share."

Earlier this month, the measure that would have placed the tax proposal on a citywide ballot was defeated in committee. Enough San Francisco legislators apparently understand an idea that goes back to Aesop's day: Strangling a golden goose is a quick route to poverty. But this won't be the last San Franciscans will hear about such a tax increase, nor is it the only example of increasing hostility by city officials and local activists to the tech industry.

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• Australian Science Media Center"You're the racist!" "No, you are!" "I know you are, but what am I?" [Election news this week in a nutshell.] Here's the latest Instagram ad from the Trump campaign.
• The battle between classified-ad site Backpage.com and the U.S. Senate is escalating.
• "Robot babies not effective birth control, Australian study finds."
• The Department of Education has banned ITT Technical Institutes from accepting new students who are using federal financial aid.
• Parents are rebelling against schools trying to educate their children.
• One cup of coffee, or six? Scientists have discovered a gene variant that could explain your coffee habit.

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

Screen Gems"A group of friends break into the house of a wealthy blind man, thinking they'll get away with the perfect heist. They're wrong."

That bare-bones IMDb synopsis of Don't Breathe is blandly accurate. But it doesn't suggest the qualities that elevate the picture above a standard generic shock exercise. The "wealthy blind man," for example, played by Stephen Lang, is more than just a lurching menace—he's a sadly conflicted human being. And there's a wonderfully sick plot twist, writes Kurt Loder.

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