Month: August 2014

Courtesy of California
political reporter John Hrabe, California Assemblyman Ben Hueso, a
Democrat representing the San Diego area, was arrested in the wee
hours of the morning for allegedly driving under the influence.
This came just hours after voting for legislation that would force
more regulation on ride-sharing services like Lyft and Uber.

Hrabe notes:

Assembly Bill 612 by Assemblyman Adrin Nazarian, D-Van Nuys,
would require ride-sharing companies to abide by extensive new
regulations. Earlier this month, in an interview with the
San Jose Mercury News, Sidecar CEO Sunil Paul said that
the bill could mean the end of the industry that’s helped
minimize drunk driving.

Paul told the Mercury News that the bill was “a burdensome
approach that is backed by the taxicab lobby, really, to try and
shut us down. If it passes, it is a disaster — it would literally
spell the end of the ride-share industry.”

The Sacramento Bee
reports that Hueso was driving the wrong way down a one-way
road at 2:30 in the morning.

In July, The Washington Post analyzed data that showed
the
number of DUI arrests dropping after ride-sharing services were
introduced to cities like Philadelphia and San Francisco. It may be
too early to say there’s a direct relationship, but in the event
Hueso actually was driving under the influence, maybe his time in
the pokey might cause him to rethink whether making it harder for
people to find alternatives to driving themselves was a good
idea.

Among
the policies
that have been widely adopted in this country to deal with sex
offenders, two of the worst are residence restrictions, which are
not only ineffective but counterproductive, and civil commitment,
which allows the government to continue detaining offenders after
they serve their sentences by relabeling them patients. New
York has managed to combine these two themes by imposing
residence restrictions so onerous that sex offenders due to be
released from prison cannot find legal places to live. The
solution: keep them locked up.

Under New York’s Sexual Assault Reform Act, which took effect in
2005, level-three sex offenders and all sex offenders whose victims
were younger than 18 are prohibited from going within 1,000 feet of
a school or any other facility that mainly serves children. The
New York Times reports
that “lawyers who represent sex offenders have prepared a map
showing that nearly all of Manhattan is off limits.” That means sex
offenders not only are not allowed to live in Manhattan; they are
not even allowed to visit or pass through it, unless they can
somehow do so without running afoul of the 1,000-foot rule. Yet
somehow they were allowed to stay in Manhattan homeless shelters
until last February, when the Department of Corrections and
Community Supervision suddenly realized that was illegal. Under the
new policy, sex offenders are allowed to live only in the few
homeless shelters that comply with the 1,000-foot rule, although
I’m not sure how they manage to get to those locations without
coming impermissibly close to one school or another.

Due to the shortage of legal residences, the
Times reports, “dozens of sex offenders who have
satisfied their sentences in New York State are being held in
prison beyond their release dates.” Most of of those offenders
(about 70 out of 101) are New York City residents—or were. Now they
are residents of legal limbo, and “some have begun filing habeas
corpus petitions in court, demanding to be released and claiming
the state has no legal authority to hold them.”

In a
lawsuit filed last April, a sex offender who was ordered to
leave his Brooklyn home because it was too close to a school argues
that New York’s limits violate his rights to intrastate travel and
to free association (including association with his own
family). He also argues that the restrictions amount to ex post
facto punishment—a plausible claim given the complete
absence of evidence that such rules serve a legitimate
regulatory function.

As the Times notes, residence restrictions in some
jurisdictions have forced sex offenders to live in bizarre and
isolated places such as an encampment under
a bridgein Miami and 
a trailer in the parking lot of a prison on Long Island. That
sure looks a lot like punishment, and there is no reason to think
it protects public safety. If anything, this sort of banishment
makes recidivism more likely by sending the message that there is
no hope of living a normal life.

• Islamic State is really, really
  bad,
  says Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel. And airstrikes don’t
  seem to be up to the job of stopping the group. So you might want
  to get ready for Gulf War 3.
• Despite sketchy reports of an eye injury, Ferguson cop Darren
  Miller may not have been badly injured in a tussle with Michael
  Brown at all. Hospital reports apparently
  mention nothing worse than a little swelling.
• There’s more reason to dislike Obamacare’s much-maligned
  medical device tax. The IRS
  can’t figure out who is supposed to pay, and collections are
  running well behind expectations.
• Mykola Zelenec, an honorary consul for Lithuania in Ukraine,
  was reported by his country to have been
  murdered by Russian-backed separatists. And the U.S., EU, and
  NATO are really ticked
  over Russia’s casual attitude toward the international border. So,
  hang on tight…
• Texas Governor Rick Perry
  slapped back at Travis County DA Rosemary Lehmberg, who pursued
  an indictment against him after he threatened to veto her budget.
  “Thank God they stopped her before she killed someone,” he said of
  Lehmberg, who was convicted of drunk driving. Pistols at 20 paces,
  folks. We’ll buy tickets.
• With the continent’s economy staggering along, financial
  markets expect a
  new round of stimulus from the European Central Bank. Anybody
  have some Bitcoin lying around?

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A new Bloomberg article concludes that the
Affordable Care Act is losing its effectiveness as a political
issue for Republicans. So many Americans are “benefiting from the
law,” theorizes Heidi Przybyla, that political ads are simply not
doing the job anymore.

This news is somewhat unexpected—and unpersuasive, argues David
Harsanyi. A Kaiser Family Foundation poll recently found that only
15 percent of Americans believe Obamacare has directly helped them,
whereas 28 percent say it has directly hurt them. And in places
like North Carolina, a quarter of political ads still
attack Obamacare specifically. This seems to suggest that it’s
still a comparatively “major issue,” Harsanyi writes.

View this article.

This has to be one of the
funniest higher education developments since the
announcement that Paul Krugman would be paid $225,000 to do
research at City University of New York’s income inequality
initiative: Former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm will teach a
course on job creation at the University of
California-Berkeley.

As the Mackinac Center
for Public Policy points out, Michigan lost roughly half a
million jobs during Granholm’s eight-year reign. Even so,
UC-Berkeley believes she is qualified to teach Public Policy 290:
“Creating Jobs through Better Government Policies for Innovation
and Education.”

She will cost the
university quite a pretty penny, too:

That is the only class Granholm will teach in the fall. In the
spring, she’s listed as contributing to another course in Public
Policy taught by another instructor. Granholm is listed as earning
$84,331 in 2013 at the college.

Granholm’s husband, Daniel Mulhern, is listed as earning
$180,000 in gross pay in 2013 and is schedule to teach one class in
the fall and two courses in the spring.

Granholm is not entirely, or even mostly, responsible for
Michigan’s high employment levels during the 2000s. But it would be
quite a stretch to say that her government growth policies had any
lasting positive effects. Granholm’s favorite tools for trying to
get Michigan’s engines running again were subsidies for
government-favored industries (like
Hollywood),
brutally high taxes on small business, green energy
boondoggles, and anything else she could find in the lefty
corporatist playbook.

Perhaps Granholm will surprise us all and begin her first
lecture with a candid confession that nothing she tried worked and
that the best method for the government to promote job growth is to
get out of the way. Only time will tell.

It does look like Granholm will at the very least be doubling
down on the necessity of environmental regulation for job creation,
though. According to The College Fix:

In addition to job growth, the course aims to assist politicians
with the rollout of new environmental protection rules.

“The class will coincide with the rollout of EPA rules regarding
CO2 emissions, wherein states must formulate state-specific plans
for cutting carbon pollution,” the guide states.
“The final state-based reports will be delivered to candidates and
office-holders of both political parties in each of the
states.”

In the meantime, I wonder if UC-Berkeley is looking for a former
Michigan politician to teach, say, “Ethics in Government” as well?
Because
Kwame Kilpatrick probably needs a job. (Maybe he could Skype
from federal prison.)

For this week’s movie review, I
took on the second Frank Miller/Robert Rodriguez adaptation of
Miller’s Sin City comics:

The comic’s cartoon nihilism works in short bursts, as a kind of
concise, witty send-up of old crime and detective
stories. But on screen, at feature length, it’s a drag —
a movie with no hope or happiness, just two-dimensional doom and
despair.

The whole thing is delivered in a hard-boiled style so inhuman
and over-the-top that it verges on parody: Tenderness is replaced
with lust, levity with comic ultraviolence. The
characters all speak obsessively of blood and sweat and night and
the pointlessness of everything, and after an hour or so, you start
to see they have a point, if only about the movie you’re
watching.

The dialogue is so insistently one-note, that when you leave the
theater, it’s tempting to start talking in the same sort of gritty
one-liners as the characters: It’s a movie that runs you over like
a semi-truck, with dialogue that explodes like broken glass in your
ears. After a while, you wonder what the point is. You
don’t watch this movie — you take 100 minutes to stare at the
void.

Read the whole review in The Washington Times.
 

My friend (and Reason contributor) Sonny Bunch at
The Washington Free Beacon
took the Miller-esque reviewing to a whole different level. His
review is worth your time, even if the movie isn’t. 

One of the things I didn’t bring up in the review
is how influential Frank Miller has been on the past decade or so
of dark-and-gritty revisionist genre movies. 

A lot of those movies, in particular the Christopher Nolan
Batman films, which are heavily influenced by Miller’s two classic
Batman books, The Dark
Knight Returns and Year One, are really quite
good. And even now, Miller’s older comics stand up pretty well,
especially TDKR and some of his work on
Daredevil.  

But later in his career, Miller just went off the rails.
He had one idea—to reimagine practically everything as a grim,
brooding, and often gruesome crime story—and he pushed it way too
far, without much in the way of variation. His All-Star Batman and Robin was
rightly ridiculed for reading like a parody of a grim, gritty Frank
Miller comic. And by the time Holy Terror, a book that features a
thinly-veiled stand-in for Batman exterminating jihadists in a
mosque, came it, it went past
ridiculous and into awful and offensive. 

So part of what the one-note noirish bleakness
of Sin City: A Dame to Kill For, which Miller
co-directed and which is often as literal a translation from screen
to page as you can possibly imagine, offers is a reminder of how
fundamentally silly the purest form of that vision is, especially
when you try to move it off the comics page and into the world of
live-action. The audience at the screening I was at cracked up more
and more as the movie went on, and not because it was supposed to
be funny. 

Check out Kurt Loder’s review
here.