Month: July 2016

As Democrats staged a convention to nominate Hillary Clinton as their presidential candidate, Republican rival Donald Trump offered some bizarre but revealing counterprogramming in the form of a week marked by lies, threats, outrages, reversals, hypocrisy, dubious associations, and broken promises.

On Wednesday morning, Trump’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort, confirmed what many have long suspected: that despite Trump’s promises over the last year or more to release his tax returns, he will become the first major party presidential candidate in four decades not to do so. Trump’s flimsy excuse—that he is currently under audit—is one that didn’t even stop Richard Nixon.

Later that morning, Trump held a press conference, where he appeared to invite a foreign power to intervene in the presidential election. “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” Trump said, referring to the emails from Clinton’s private email server that were not made public. “I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.” In a follow-up tweet, Trump repeated the invitation, but this time said the emails should be turned over to the F.B.I. The Clinton campaign accused Trump of encouraging “espionage.”

A day later, Trump said he was merely being “sarcastic,” but if so, his campaign aides didn’t know it when he first made the remarks. As The New York Times notes, immediately following his initial statement, aides made “statements [insisting] that Mr. Trump was urging Russia to return any purloined property to the F.B.I.”

At the same Wednesday press conference, Trump, who has repeatedly expressed admiration for Russian President Vladimir Putin, responded to questions about his personal ties to Russian president Vladimir Putin. “I have nothing to do with Putin,” he said. “I’ve never spoken to him. I don’t know anything about him other than he will respect me.”

But Trump has repeatedly claimed to have met Putin before, and has even said he got to know him. In a November debate, Trump said “I got to know him very well because we were both on 60 Minutes. We were stablemates, and we did very well that night.” And in 2014, as Mother Jones reported, Trump spoke at the National Press Club, where he said that he had recently been in Moscow, where he “spoke, indirectly and directly, with President Putin, who could not have been nicer, and we had a tremendous success.” Either Trump has met Putin, or he hasn’t; either way, he was lying on one of those occasions.

Wednesday evening, Trump participated in an Ask Me Anything on a Reddit forum devoted to his candidacy. Trump’s handful of responses shed no real light on how he might govern. (One questioner asked whether Trump was tired of winning. Trump responded that he wasn’t.)

But the venue revealed plenty. The particular subreddit that Trump chose to engage with has been described by Vice as having evolved from a conventional political discussion community to ” to an authoritarian one full of memes and in-jokes, far right talking points, coded racism, misogyny, homophobia, and Islamophobia, and a hypocritical ‘free speech’ rallying point.” As an article at Slate noted, the particular questioners to which Trump responded have records of overtly racist, homophobic, and generally unpleasant online rhetoric. This was the online community that Trump—a major party presidential candidate—chose to engage with.

In one of the answers Trump gave on Reddit, he touted his “detailed plan for H-1B reform to protect American workers.” Shortly afterwards, Buzzfeed reported that two of Trump’s clubs in Florida, including the Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, where he has held multiple campaign events, were seeking to hire 78 immigrants to fill jobs for housekeepers, cooks, and servers. (“Getting help in Palm Beach during the season is almost impossible,” Trump said last year.)

At the DNC, meanwhile, a wide array of speakers criticized Trump in fairly harsh terms. And at a Thursday rally, Trump responded to them too, without naming anyone in particular, saying that he would like to “hit a number of those speakers so hard, their heads would spin,” so that “they’d never recover.”

“I was going to hit one guy in particular, a very little guy,” Trump said as the crowd laughed. “I was going to hit this guy so hard his head would spin, he wouldn’t know what the hell happened.” Trump sometimes uses the word “hit” to refer to a rhetorical attack, but he has also seemed to encourage violence at his campaign rallies before.

This is how the Republican nominee for president spent the days after his nominating convention.

For any other major political candidate in memory, a week like this would amount to a bizarre, catastrophic, campaign-destroying spectacle. For Donald Trump, it’s just another week.

Last week, Ed Morrissey reminds us solemnly over at The Fiscal Times, the last maker of VCRs threw in the towel and stopped making the thing. “After nearly 60 years,” writes Morrissey (whose main gig is as a honcho at Hot Air), “and 40-plus years as a mass-produced consumer product, the last manufacturer could not ignore its obsolescence any longer, created by innovation and open-market principles.”

Before we move into the meat of Morrissey’s column, let’s reflect briefly on just how great an invention the VCR was. If you’re old enough (say 40-plus), it radically transformed your cultural life by putting all sorts of movies, TV shows, and other stuff finally into your grasp. As I wrote nearly 20 years ago in a story about what I called cultural proliferation:

Omnipresent video rental stores give virtually everyone access to a film library that a few decades ago even a millionaire wouldn’t have been able to afford.

One gets a sense of this by considering the offerings of the typical Blockbuster store. Not only is Blockbuster the country’s biggest chain (with about 4,500 stores nationwide), it’s arguably one of the blandest and most restrictive in terms of aesthetic judgment. Blockbuster leans heavily toward the highly commercial fare alluded to in its name. And yet it’s still got a huge and generally impressive selection of films—the typical franchise rents between 7,000 and 10,000 titles—even as its family-oriented policy creates a niche for stores that carry edgier fare, including pornography. According to The New York Times, most Blockbuster franchises have at least two competitors within a couple of miles, suggesting that cultural markets are often not zero-sum games, in which growth for one vendor is loss for another—or, more important, for the consumer.

But VCRs do more than simply allow viewers to watch more TV or film. They profoundly alter the terms of production and consumption. On the production side, movie studios now make roughly as much money from video sales as they do from box office receipts. By providing an after-market, VCRs allow producers—whether large or small, major-studio or independent—to take more risks by giving them a second chance to recoup their investment (that’s one reason why there were 139 U.S.-produced independent films released in 1997, 100 more than a decade ago). Additionally, there’s a robust market for old TV shows, documentaries, and the like, as well as for direct-to-video materials, ranging from porn to children’s series starring the Olsen twins (themselves perhaps a form of porn).

On the consumption side, VCRs allow viewers to watch programs at their leisure, or to effectively watch several shows at once.

That was 1999. The VCR is dead and video-on-demand’s offering are infinitely more varied and available. More important, the tools by which we can all appropriate, reappropriate, and even misappropriate mass culture are on everyone’s cell phone and laptop (and just about everyone has one or both of those). Yesterday, I spoke with Robert Smigel, best-known as the creator of Triumph the Insult Comic Dog. Smigel’s earlier work involved taking found audio (say, of Larry King talking with H. Ross Perot on CNN) and then animating it so the context was hilariously and brutally inappropriate. Today virtually anyone can pull off a version of that (though rarely as funny or piercing). That’s not just good for laughs, it allows for something that Orwell and other dystopians could never quite grasp: Technology ultimately liberates the masses more than leaders. The audience, presumed to be dumb receivers of whatever messages were beamed into them by leaders, corporations, or whatever, has more power over media than ever before. The Frankfurt School of mass communications is dead, long live the oppositional and empowered audience to take media and transform it into whatever it wants.

The VCR was perhaps the first great, cheap machine that accelerated this process, as it allowed tape-dubbing culture to expand and explode in a way that almost impossible before. And of course its introduction was fought tooth and nail by the movie industry, who shortsightedly saw it as a threat to its existence (in fact, of course, it turned out to be a boon to Hollywood’s bottom line). Fanning hysteria about mass piracy and people refusing to leave the comfort of their living rooms to go to movie theaters, Jack Valenti, the longtime head of the MPAA, likened VCRs and blank video tapes to the Boston Strangler and used his political connections first to forestall the introducton of consumer versions and then to get a tax levied on blank tapes.

And now the VCR is dead—like the video store, too. Remember when Blockbuster was seen as a sinister monopoly that would soon use its market power to limit our selection and choice of videos in pursuit of its bottom line? Good times.

Morrissey’s Fiscal Times column is actually about “How iPhones and Uber cut the red tape and expanded the economy” and is absolutely essential reading after both the Republican and Democratic National Conventions, where speakers of both parties took for granted zero-sum economic thinking. Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump proceed from the assumption of a fixed pie of goods and services and thus their solutions to almost everything is about squeezing out better deals for America at the expense of other parties. This is not wrong in a small way but a spectacular way and it leads to policies that try to freeze innovation that seems to take things away from established interests. Both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are outspoken critics of Uber and other “sharing economy” services, claiming they exploit workers. Donald Trump is simply seemingly oblivious to any sort of economic activity that doesn’t take advantage of political connections. That’s not the sort of leadership we need in the 21st century.

Morrissey writes:

An entire generation only understands “long distance charges” as an ancient relic. Telephone companies have to compete for service at the local level. The smartphone most of us carry wasn’t even a dream at the time of the divestment in 1984. But even before all that took place, AT&T itself notes that consumers woke up the next day in a free market “to discover that its telephones worked just as they had the day before.”

The smartphone itself figures into a new technological challenge to an existing, protectionist market – taxis. Thanks to the proliferation of both smartphones and GPS services, new services like Uber and Lyft have emerged, blending social-media technology and the demand for hired transportation into brand-new choices for consumers….

A former taxi driver himself, Morrissey sympathizes with the plight of hacks who have to hustle more than before in places such as New York City. But he says,

The important point to note, though, is that the market itself grew over the last five years since Uber and Lyft entered the Big Apple. “In April, taxis and ride-sharing services together provided nearly 614,000 trips per day to people in New York City,” Newman reports from the Morgan Stanley study. “That’s 25 percent more than five years ago.” Furthermore, most Uber and Lyft drivers work part-time to supplement their income. “So thousands of people still driving a cab feel the job is lucrative enough to do it full-time.”…

Time and time again, we have discovered that reducing regulation and intervention in markets and allowing providers to innovate increases consumer choice, lowers cost, and expands markets. Local governments may belatedly learn this when it comes to taxis – and we can only hope that the federal government will figure it out soon when it comes to health insurance, energy, and any number of other over-regulated markets.

Sing it, Brother Ed, sing it. 

Technological innovation, combined with wise public policy that reduces regulatory costs and lowers barriers to entry, is absolutely the path to an expanding economy and more opportunities and higher standards of living. Yet we live in a weird moment in which the leaders (and increasingly, the rank and file) of both major parties refuse to believe in growth as a possibility. Instead, they posit protectionist trade barriers as a way to “secure” current job levels and they talk about punishing American employers who move jobs overseas or seek better deals that result in lower costs for customers. Like Sens. Bob Casey, Jr. and Sherrod Brown at the DNC, they bitch and moan that employers have forsaken the Rust Belt for cheaper, better places domestically and abroad to make stuff. They are arguing over crumbs left behind rather than thinking about how to move into the future. 

After pulling over the aptly named Daniel Rushing for failing to make a complete stop as he left the parking lot of a 7-11 in Orlando and driving 12 miles an hour above the speed limit, Cpl. Shelby Riggs-Hopkins “observed in plain view a rock-like substance on the floor board where his feet were.” The eagle-eyed, street-savvy cop later recalled that she “recognized, through my eleven years of training and experience as a law enforcement officer, the substance to be some sort of narcotic.” The suspect “stated that the substance is sugar from a Krispy Kreme Donut that he ate,” but Riggs-Hopkins knew better: Two field tests of the “rock-like substance” gave “a positive indication for the presence of amphetamines.”

Rushing was handcuffed, arrested, and taken to the county jail, where he was strip-searched, and locked up for 10 hours before being released on $2,500 bail. Three days later, after a lab test found no illegal substance in the evidence recovered by Riggs-Hopkins, the charges against Rushing were dropped. The lab test was not specific enough to identify which brand of donut the glaze came from, so we’ll just have to take Rushing’s word that it was indeed a Krispy Kreme.

“I kept telling them, ‘That’s…glaze from a doughnut,” Rushing said in a recent interview with the Orlando Sentinel. “They tried to say it was crack cocaine at first. Then they said, ‘No, it’s meth, crystal meth.'” While the story sounds funny from a distance, Rushing was not laughing then, and he isn’t now. He plans to sue the Orlando Police Department for arbitrarily depriving him of his liberty. “I got arrested for no reason at all,” he said. “It feels scary when you haven’t done anything wrong and get arrested.…It’s just a terrible feeling.”

Riggs-Hopkins was surveilling the 7-11 in response to “citizen complaints about drug activity” and thought it was suspicious that Rushing, who was giving a lift to a friend who worked at the convenience store, left without buying anything, in the company of a “black female employee of the 7-11.” So in addition to the faux expertise of overconfident drug warriors, this episode illustrates the dangers posed by pretextual traffic stops, which are often followed by searches. Like many innocent people, Rushing agreed to let the cops search his car, and they found another nugget of glaze/meth. “I didn’t have anything to hide,” Rushing explained. Or so he thought. He did not understand the incriminating power of innocuous substances combined with faulty field tests. “I’ll never let anyone search my car again,” he told the Sentinel.

Although Rushing learned a valuable lesson from this episode, it is doubtful that police did. Even after years of stories like this one, cops either do not know or do not care that the tests on which they rely to arrest people for drug offenses routinely react to legal substances as if they were contraband. 

A few days before the Sentinel ran its story about Rushing’s pending lawsuit, officials in Hugo, Colorado, rescinded warnings that residents should not drink the local tap water because it was contaminated by THC. As in Rushing’s case, multiple field tests of Hugo water supposedly showed it was psychoactive. Denver’s CBS affiliate reports that the Colorado Bureau of Investigation “ultimately determined there was no THC in the town’s water after six of 10 tests were said to be false positives.”

A California appeals court ruled Monday that the Orange County District Attorney’s Office’s tactic of repeatedly disqualifying a judge who exposed prosecutorial misconduct from cses is an “extraordinary abuse” of state law, but still legal.

The California Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the OCDA operated within the law when it repeatedly had Superior Court Judge Thomas Goethals removed from cases because of perceived bias—a retaliatory tactic known as “papering” a judge—but said the state supreme court precedent it was bound by should be revisited.

“As courts work to keep doors open and to provide timely and meaningful access to justice to the public, the extraordinary abuse of [judicial disqualification] is a barrier to justice and its cost to a court should be reconsidered,” Justice Kathleen O’Leary wrote in the majority opinion.

Prosecutors from the OCDA first began allegedly papering Goethals in 2014, when he was presiding over the capital murder case of Scott Dekraai. In several lengthy motions that Goethals allowed to move forward, the public defender in the case revealed that the OCDA and Orange County Sheriff’s Department had been operating a secret jailhouse informant program. In 2015, Goethals removed the entire OCDA from the case, finding that two sheriff’s deputies had either lied or intentionally withheld evidence from the court.

As the appeals court noted in its Monday ruling, Goethals had only been disqualified from a murder trial once in the three years prior. However, in the 18 months after the Dekraai case blew up, Goethals was disqualified from 46 out of 49 murder cases he was assigned.

In a concurring opinion, Justice Richard Aronson said “the district attorney engaged in blanket papering of Judge Goethals and did so to retaliate and punish a widely respected and experienced jurist the district attorney previously accepted on a routine basis.”

The OCDA brought the appeal after another superior court judge denied its challenge to remove Goethals from a case, arguing the repeated disqualifications were retaliatory and significantly increasing the caseload of other courts.

In a statement released Monday, Orange County District Attorney Tony Rackauckas said that, while he agrees with the ruling, he “maintains that there has never been ‘blanket papering’ of any judicial officer. Any exercise of preemptory challenge made by any member of the OCDA has been the individual prosecutor’s decision to do what is in the best interest of the People, public safety, and crime victims.”

The fallout from the Dekraai case has led to sentences being overturned or vacated, or charges being dropped, in nearly a dozen other cases so far. Scott Sanders, the public defender in the Dekraai case, says the OCDA and sheriff’s department operated the jailhouse informant database for decades, and it could have tainted numerous other cases.

“The idea that a prosecutor’s office has in essence elected to punish a judge for calling out its misconduct is profoundly concerning—so much so that a court was willing to suggest the law should be changed,” Laura Fernandez, a Yale reserach scholar who studies prosecutorial misconduct, said. “When prosecutors engage in these kinds of extraordinarily abusive tactics, it undermines the integrity of the criminal justice system as a whole.”

The California Public Employees’ Retirement System isn’t doing well even though the markets are.

Steven Greenhut writes:

On July 18, the largest state investment fund announced a piddling 0.61 percent rate of return in its latest 12-month period. The system is significantly underfunded. CalPERS blames a bad year in the markets. Defenders of the status quo suggest all is well–the rebounding market will correct itself and fix the mess.

State Sen. John Moorlach (R-Costa Mesa) notes that the Dow Jones, the fixed-income market and the real estate market have been at all-time highs: “Now we’re in Peter Pan territory. ‘You’ve just got to believe’… the stock market will rise more than 7.5 percent per year. You’ve just got to believe that interest rates will stay at zero indefinitely. You’ve just got to believe that real estate prices will continue to rise.”

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