Month: September 2018

Kavanaugh, The Disgust Circuit, And The Limits Of “Nuts & Sluts”

Authored by Tom Luongo,

The Ragin’ Cajun, I believe, coined the phrase “Nuts and Sluts” to succinctly describe the tactic used by the elites I call The Davos Crowd to smear and destroy someone they’ve targeted.

Brett Kavanaugh is the latest victim of this technique.  But, there have been dozens of victims I can list from Gary Hart in the 1980’s to former IMF head Dominique Strauss-Kahn to Donald Trump.

“Nuts and Sluts” is easy to understand.  Simply accuse the person you want to destroy of being either crazy (the definition of which shifts with whatever is the political trigger issue of the day) or a sexual deviant.

This technique works because it triggers most people’s Disgust Circuit, a term created by Mark Schaller as part of what he calls the Behavioral Immune System and popularized by Johnathan Haidt.

The disgust circuit is easy to understand.

It is the limit at which behavior in others triggers our gut-level outrage and we recoil with disgust.

The reason “Nuts and Sluts” works so well on conservative candidates and voters is because, on average, conservatives have a much stronger disgust circuit than liberals and/or libertarians.

This is why it always seems to be that anyone who threatens the global order or the political system always turns out to have some horrible sexual deviance in their closet.

It’s why the only thing any of us remember about the infamous Trump Dossier is the image of Trump standing on a bed in a Moscow hotel room urinating on a hooker.

The technique is used to drive a wedge between Republican voters and lawmakers and make it easy for them to go along with whatever stupidity is brought forth by the press and the Democrats.

And don’t think for a second that, more often than not, GOP leadership isn’t in cahoots with the DNC on these take-downs.  Because they are.

But, here’s the problem.  As liberals and cultural Marxists break down the societal order, as they win skirmish after skirmish in the Culture War, and desensitize us to normalize ever more deviant behavior, the circumstances of a “Nuts and Sluts” accusation have to rise accordingly.

It’s behavioral heroin.  And the more tolerance we build up to it the more likely people are to see right through the lie.

It’s why Gary Hart simply had to be accused of having an affair in the 1980’s to scuttle his presidential aspirations but today Trump has to piss on a hooker.

And it’s why it was mild sexual harassment and a pubic hair on a Coke can for Clarence Thomas, but today, for Brett Kavanaugh, it has to be a gang-rape straight out of an 80’s frat party in a Brett Eaton Ellis book — whose books, by the way, are meant to be warnings not blueprints.

Trump has weathered both the Nuts side of the technique and the Sluts side.  And as he has done so The Resistance has become more and more outraged that it’s not working like it used to.

This is why they have to pay people to be outraged by Kavanaugh’s nomination.  They can’t muster up a critical mass of outrage while Trump is winning on many fronts.  Like it or not, the economy has improved.  It’s still not good, but it’s better and sentiment is higher.

So they have to pay people to protest Kavanaugh. And when that didn’t work, then the fear of his ascending to the Supreme Court and jeopardizing Roe v. Wade became acute, it doesn’t surprise me to see them pull out Christine Blasie Ford’s story to guide them through to the mid-term elections.

And that was a bridge too far for a lot of people.

The one who finally had enough of ‘Nuts and Sluts’ was, of all people, Lindsey Graham.  Graham is one of the most vile and venal people in D.C.  He is a war-mongering neoconservative-enabling praetorian of Imperial Washington’s status quo.

But even he has a disgust circuit and Brett Kavanaugh’s spirited defense of himself, shaming Diane Feinstein in the process, was enough for Graham to finally redeem himself for one brief moment.

When Lindsey Graham is the best defense we have against becoming a country ruled by men rather than laws, our society hangs by a thread.

It was important for Graham to do this.  It was a wake-up call to the ‘moderate’ GOP senators wavering on Kavanaugh.  Graham may be bucking for Senate Majority Leader or Attorney General, but whatever.  For four minutes his disgust was palpable.

The two men finally did what the ‘Right’ in this country have been screaming for for years.

Fight back.  Stop being reasonable.  Stop playing it safe.  Trump cannot do this by himself.

Fight for what this country was supposed to stand for.

Because as Graham said, this is all about regaining power and they don’t care what damage they do to get it back.

The disgust circuit can kick in a number of different ways.  And Thursday it kicked in to finally call out what was actually happening on Capitol Hill.  This was The Swamp in all its glory.

And believe me millions were outraged by what they saw.

It will destroy what is left of the Democratic Party.  I told you back in June that Kanye West and Donald Trump had won the Battle of the Bulge in the Culture War.  Graham and Kavanuagh’s honest and brutal outrage at the unfairness of this process was snuffing out of that counter-attack.

The mid-terms will be a Red Tide with the bodies washing up on the shore the leadership of the DNC and the carpet-baggers standing behind them with billions in money to buy fake opposition.

The truth is easy to support.  Lies cost money. The more outrageous the lie the more expensive it gets to maintain it.

Because the majority of this country just became thoroughly disgusted with the Democrats.  And they will have no one to blame but themselves.

*  *  *

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US Retailers Warn Trade Wars Will Unleash “Unavoidable” Price Hikes Before Holidays

While it seems that trade disputes between the US, Mexico, and Canada are de-escalating, the trade conflict with China is not. President Trump ramped up the trade war on Monday as $200 billion in Chinese imports took effect. This is the third round of US tariffs on Chinese imports, a significant escalation of the conflict between the world’s two largest economies.

And caught in the middle of the crossfire are US retailers, who have spent a great deal of time on investor conference calls warning about imminent price hikes during the upcoming holiday season, which could send shock waves through the wallets of American consumers.

The chief executives from Walmart, Target, Gap Inc. and Best Buy, among others, have been some of the most vocal companies warning about “unavoidable” price hikes.

According to a letter from Robert Lighthizer, the US Trade Representative, tariffs on some $200 billion worth of Chinese imports took effect Monday. There are several hundred items on the list, including electronics, kitchenware, tools, and food. The taxes are set around 10 percent but will jump to 25 percent at the beginning of 2019.

The resulting margin compression will force retailers to either eat the cost of the tariffs or pass it along to consumers, right before the critical holiday season: “The new tariffs are bad news for the retail sector, especially as the latest round seems to extend the tax to a vast array of consumer goods,” GlobalData Retail Managing Director Neil Saunders said in comments emailed to Retail Dive.

“Many retailers will now be faced with a difficult choice of whether to pass the cost increases across to consumers or to take a hit on their margins. The exact response will vary from retailer to retailer but, both strategies are likely to be used.”

In a late cycle economic environment, tariffs are especially dangerous for retailers because it could exacerbate the effects of other rising costs, “including more spending on technology, elevated logistics costs, higher gas prices, and rising labor expenses. In short, additional tariffs are the last thing the retail sector wants,” according to Saunders.

The new duties are across a wide assortment of goods, from apparel to appliances, mainly covering consumer products. Retail Dive said some retailers are working with suppliers on how to respond to their impact, while others look to shift their manufacturing bases.

Reshifting supply chains takes time and are very costly. Some small and medium-sized companies could face financial hardship due to the disruptions.

“Of course, it’s also related to the ability of our vendors to observe the tariffs, and of course we are having negotiations, or over time, usually not in the short term but over time, to diversify the supply base,” Best Buy CEO Hubert Joly told investors last month, according to a conference call transcript. “So, it’s a complex undertaking.”

Before the holidays, low-margin consumer goods, price hikes are inevitable. “As we said many times, as a guest-focused retailer, we’re concerned about tariffs because they would increase prices on everyday products for American families,” Target CEO Brian Cornell said last month, according to a conference call transcript.

“In addition, a prolonged deterioration in global trade relationships could damage economic growth and vitality in the United States. Given these risks, we have been expressing our concerns to our leaders in Washington, both on our own and along with other retailers and trade association partners,” Cornell said.

Last week, Walmart sent a letter to the Office of the United States Trade Representative, warning that the trade war impact will soon lead to price hikes.

The result of $200 billion in new tariffs “will be to raise prices on consumers and tax American business and manufacturers,” Walmart said in the letter. “As the largest retailer in the United States and a major buyer of U.S. manufactured goods, we are very concerned about the impacts these tariffs would have on our business, our customers, our suppliers and the U.S. economy as a whole.”

In an interview last Thursday, Gap Inc. CEO Art Peck told Bloomberg’s Emily Chang, the company is watching the trade situation closely, but implications are not as great for Gap because apparel is not on the list. The company has spent years diversifying its manufacturing plants across many countries. But Peck said a jump in prices would eventually hit the consumer’s wallet as a result of President Trump’s trade wars.

So from now until the rest of the year, retailers will factor in about 10% tariffs. But when 2019 comes around, the tariffs are set to rise to 25%. “Should an agreement between China and the U.S. not be found before the New Year, retailers could well start 2019 on a gloomy note,” Saunders warned.

An all-out trade war between the US and China is emerging as the most plausible scenario for 2019 and beyond, a risk that could severely impact US retailers and the American consumer.

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Marty Feldstein Warns “Another Recession Looms…” And The Fed’s Out Of Ammo

Authored by Martin Feldstein, op-ed via The Wall Street Journal,

And unlike in the past, the Federal Reserve has little room to encourage growth by reducing rates…

Ten years after the Great Recession’s onset, another long, deep downturn may soon roil the U.S. economy. The high level of asset prices today mirrors the earlier trend in house prices that preceded the 2008 crash; both mispricings reflect long periods of very low real interest rates caused by Federal Reserve policy. Now that interest rates are rising, equity prices will fall, dragging down household wealth, consumer spending and economic activity.

During the five-year period before the last downturn, the Fed had decreased the federal-funds rate to as low as 1%. That drove down mortgage interest rates, causing home prices to rise faster than 10% a year. When the Fed raised rates after 2004, the housing-price bubble burst within two years.

As housing prices plummeted, homeowners with highly leveraged mortgages found themselves owing substantially more than their homes were worth. They defaulted in droves, causing lenders to foreclose on their properties. Sales of the foreclosed properties forced prices even lower, leading the national house-price index to decline 30% in three years.

Banks that held mortgages and mortgage-backed bonds saw their net worths decline sharply. A total of 140 U.S. banks failed in 2009, and those that survived were terrified by how much further the market might slide. To avoid risky bets, they shied away from lending to businesses and home buyers and refused to lend to other banks whose balance sheets were also declining.

The fall in home prices from 2006-09 cut household wealth by $6 trillion. Coinciding with a stock-market crash, the erased wealth caused consumer spending to drop sharply, pushing the economy into recession. The collapse of bank lending deepened the decline and slowed the recovery to a sluggish pace.

Fast forward to today.

Homes aren’t as overvalued as they were in 2006, so there’s little chance of an exact replay of the 2008 crisis. The principal risk now is that a stock-market slowdown could shrink consumer spending enough to push the economy into recession. Share prices are high today because long-term interest rates are extremely low. Today the interest rate on 10-year Treasury notes is less than 3%, meaning the inflation-adjusted yield on those bonds is close to zero. The hunt for higher yields drives investors toward equities—driving up share prices in the process.

But long-term rates are beginning to rise and are likely to increase substantially in the near future. Though the 3% yield on 10-year Treasurys is still low, it’s still twice as high as it was two years ago. It will be pushed higher as the Fed raises the short-term rate from today’s 2% to its projected 3.4% in 2020. Rising inflation will further increase the long-term interest rate as investors demand compensation for their loss of purchasing power. And as annual federal spending deficits explode over the coming decade, it will take ever-higher long-term interest rates to get bond buyers to absorb the debt. It wouldn’t be surprising to see the yield on 10-year Treasurys exceed 5%, with the resulting real yield rising from zero today to more than 2%.

As short- and long-term interest rates normalize, equity prices are also likely to return to historic price-to-earnings ratios. If the P/E ratio of the S&P 500 regresses to its historical average, 40% below today’s level, $10 trillion of household wealth would be wiped out. The past relationship between household wealth and consumer spending suggests such a decline would reduce annual spending by about $400 billion, shrinking gross domestic product by 2%. Add in the effects on business investment, and this spending crunch would push the economy into recession.

Most recessions are short and shallow, with an average of less than a year between the start of the downturn and the beginning of the recovery. That’s because the Fed usually responds to recessions by cutting the federal-funds rate substantially. But if one hits in the next few years, the Fed will not have enough room to cut rates, as the fed-funds rate is expected to rise to only 3% by 2020. There also won’t be much room for a major fiscal intervention. Federal deficits are expected to exceed $1 trillion annually in the coming years, and publicly held federal debt is predicted to rise from 75% of GDP to nearly 100% by the decade’s end.

This means a downturn brought on in the next few years by rising long-term interest rates would likely be deeper and longer than your average recession. Unfortunately, there’s nothing at this point that the Federal Reserve or any other government actor can do to prevent that from happening.

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Here’s What Congress Was Doing While You Were Watching the Kavanaugh Circus

While much attention was diverted by the political circus surrounding Judge Brett Kavanaugh on Thursday and Friday, Congress passed a massive spending bill and another round of tax cuts that will combine to blow an even bigger hole in the federal budget. Lawmakers also found time to pass a bill restricting Americans’ access to prescription painkillers, something that’s likely to force people who are dependent on or addicted to opioids (a distinction seemingly lost on legislators) to seek out more dangerous alternatives.

Let’s start with the spending: Friday’s passage of the House Republican’s so-called Tax Reform 2.0 proposal will likely get heavy rotation in campaign ads over the next five weeks, even though the bill faces an uncertain future in the Senate. The bill does several things, but the key part of the proposal is the permanent extension of the individual and corporate income tax rate cuts enacted last year. Those lower rates are set to expire after 2025—reverting to their previous levels—but Republicans have been aiming for a permanent extension since before the final votes were cast on last year’s tax bill.

If Republicans still cared about deficits, Tax Reform 2.0 would be a non-starter. Having last year’s tax cuts expire in the middle of the next decade was a maneuver (or a gimmick, if you prefer) designed to limit the impact of tax reform on future deficits and the national debt.

Unsurprisingly, then, extending those tax cuts will add to the deficit. According to an analysis by the Joint Committee on Taxation, a nonpartisan number-crunching agency within Congress, the bill will add $631 billion to the deficit over a decade. While the JCT says an extension of the tax cuts will cause the economy to grow by about 0.5 percent in the years immediately after 2025, additional revenue from that growth will cancel out a mere $86 billion of the tax cut’s impact on the deficit. Other analyses of the bill by the left-leaning Tax Policy Center and the right-leaning Tax Foundation make similar estimates about the long-term effect on revenue.

The bottom line? Even when accounting for increased economic growth, Tax Reform 2.0 comes with a price tag of more than $500 billion added to the deficit—an amount future taxpayers will have to cover.

The bill is not without its charms. A proposal to created so-called universal savings accounts would allow Americans to create tax-advantaged savings accounts where they could stash up to $5,000 annually without having to deal with all the restrictions and limitations that come with similarly structured 401(k) and IRA plans now. Encouraging savings—especially savings that are partially sheltered from the tax man—would be a positive step that helps families plan for the future.

But if you needed further evidence that Congress doesn’t give a damn about planning for the country’s future, look no further than the passage this week, in both houses, of a $853 billion spending bill. About $600 million of the spending is directed towards the Pentagon—boosting the military budget to levels not seen since the height of the Iraq War.

The bill is now on its way to President Donald Trump’s desk. He must sign it before October 1 to avoid a government shutdown, which might be complicated by the lack of funding for his border wall.

The spending bill has raised the ire of the few fiscally conservative Republicans who sit in Congress. Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.) encouraged Trump not to sign the bill and blasted his fellow lawmakers for being “far worse than the politicians they once derided.”

While the Kavanaugh hearings devolved into partisan acrimony, Congress was also serving up reminders of what happens when nearly everyone agrees. The Tax Reform 2.0 vote went mostly party line, but spending an obscene amount of money was, once again, a bipartisan affair in both the House and Senate.

So, too, was the passage of the Support for Patients and Communities Act, a much-touted bipartisan effort to address the opioid crisis in the most congressional of ways: by throwing money and more prohibition at the problem.

The final version of the bill, which passed the House 393-8 on Friday and now heads to the Senate, will spend about $8 billion on state-run opioid treatment centers and research into non-opioid pain killers. It also beefed up border security in the name of stopping the importation of illicitly manufactured fentanyl and other lab-made drugs.

But the bill may unintentionally increase demand for fentanyl and other drugs used by opioid addicts who can’t get a legal fix. Several provisions in the proposal would restrict access to prescription painkillers; other aspects of the legislation would increase penalties for drug manufacturers and doctors deemed to have over-sold and over-prescribed opioids.

As J.J. Rich, a policy analyst for the Reason Foundation (which publishes this blog) notes in the November issue of Reason, previous crackdowns on prescription drugs have actually made the opioid crisis worse.

“It’s clear that the black market has claimed the economy ceded by restrictions on the legal market,” Rich notes, citing Data from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health show that pain reliever abuse rates have been flat since 2002. “When government restricts access to something people want, it drives demand to the black market. In this case, as opioids have become increasingly difficult to obtain legally in the last decade, users have switched to “diverted” prescription medications and illicit alternatives, including heroin. And just as Prohibition pushed bootleggers to switch from beer to potent bathtub gin, traffickers are increasingly adulterating their narcotics with potent synthetic opioids such as sufentanil—a substance that can be up to 500 times stronger than morphine.”

Have a great weekend!

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America’s Costliest Stealth Fighter Crashes In South Carolina

crashed close to Marine Corps Air Station Beaufort in Beaufort, South Carolina — marking the first-ever crash of the costly stealth aircraft, which will become the main fighter aircraft for the Marine Corps, Air Force and Navy.” data-reactid=”23″ type=”text”>A mere day after the Department of Defense touted its first ever combat engagement in Afghanistan, the multi-billion dollar in development and cutting edge Marine F-35B stealth fighter has now experienced another first — one has crashed near a Marine base in Beaufort, South Carolina. 

“A 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing F-35B belonging to Marine Fighter Attack Training Squadron 501 (VMFAT-501) stationed at Marine Corps Air Station Beaufort crashed in the vicinity of Beaufort, South Carolina at approximately 11:45 a.m. (EST), today,” said a statement from the 2nd Marine Air Wing.

First photo to emerge near the crash site via local news affiliates. 

“The U.S. Marine pilot safely ejected from the single-seat aircraft and is currently being evaluated by medical personnel,” said the statement. “There were no civilian injuries. Marines from MCAS Beaufort are working with local authorities currently conducting standard mishap operations to secure the crash site and ensure the safety of all personnel in the surrounding area.”

The jet was reportedly on a training mission and appears to have gone down over a forested area, as early photos show black smoke rising over a tree line in a rural area. 

The Beaufort County Sheriff’s Office has closed off the area, and an investigation is underway. 

Previously the Beaufort County Sheriff’s Office confirmed that a Marine Corps aircraft had crashed in a rural part of Beaufort County. “The Marine Corps confirmed that it was one of theirs,” a sheriff’s office spokesman told ABC News.

F-35B joint strike fighter file photo

The Pentagon has long planned to make the joint strike fighter the main combat aircraft for the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps; and the DoD previously announced plans to purchased more the 2,600.

The version of the F-35B that the Marine Corps uses has the ability to take off and land vertically, however, the Marine Corps said Friday’s crash did not occur while attempting either. 

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MAGA Hat and Colin Kaepernick Shirt Make Kanye West a One-Man Bridge Across Our Political Chasm

|||Twitter/@andycohnKanye West is no stranger to eliciting suprise and confusion. His latest play: pairing a Donald Trump MAGA hat with a Colin Kaepernick sweatshirt.

Trump and former 49ers quarterback Kaepernick go together like oil and water. Trump has, on several different occasions now, criticized Kaepernick’s protesting police brutality during the “The Star Spangled Banner.”

West donned this outfit on a trip to the office of music magazine The FADER. He apparently designed the Keapernick sweatshirt himself.

West previously caused a great deal of confusion among his fans when he said, just after the election, that he would have voted for Trump. After a series of meetings with the president and tweets about his love and support, West told late night host Jimmy Kimmel that his support was less about policy and more about being “fearless enough to break the fucking simulation.”

“It took me a year and a half to have the confidence to stand up and put on the [Make America Great Again] hat, no matter what the consequences were,” he said. “And what it represented to me is not about policies, because I’m not a politician like that, but it represented overcoming fear and doing what you felt no matter what anyone said.” Following one of West’s recent expressions of support, Chance the Rapper, himself the son of a prominent Democratic Party figure, tweeted that black people didn’t have to be Democrats.

Pairing Trump’s hat with a sweater that likely would incense Trump and many of his supporters suggests West himself is trying to break said simulation. And while his support for Trump makes him a minority among blacks in the U.S., there are likely quite a few Trump voters who support holding police accountable, even if they don’t like how Kaepernick has chosen to raise the issue. Cornell’s Roper Center for Public Opinion Research reports that 86 percent of whites and 92 percent of blacks support the idea of independent prosecutors investigating police who kill unarmed people, and that equal numbers of both whites and blacks support a right to record police, as well as requiring police to wear audio and visual recording equipment on the job. The divergence in sentiment captured by West’s outfit concerns the extent of the problem and whose most hurt by it.

West is crossing the divide like a culture-war version of Nik Wallenda.

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CBS Receives Subpoena Over Moonves Sexual Misconduct Allegations, “Culture Concerns”

The long arm of the #MeToo movement is knocking on CBS’ door.

In an 8-K filing released late on Friday, CBS announced that it has received subpoenas tied to its probe into reports of alleged sexual misconduct of former Chairman and CEO, Les Moonves, and concerns about the working environment at the company.

The company said that that as it had announced previously on August 1, it hired two law firms to investigate allegations about Moonves as well as into CBS News and “cultural issues at all levels of CBS. This investigation is ongoing.”

It also revealed that it had received subpoenas from the New York County District Attorney’s Office and the New York City Commission on Human Rights “regarding the subject matter of this investigation and related matters,” and that the New York Attorney General’s office has requested information as well.

In early September, CBS announced that former CEO Les Moonves was departing as part of a settlement with National Amusements, members of the Board of Directors of CBS and related parties, but the catalyst were allegations of sexual misconduct from six women, as reported by Ronan Farrow in the New Yorker.

Moonves and CBS would donate $20 million to one or more organizations that support the #MeToo movement and equality for women in the workplace. In retrospect, he may have wanted to throw in a million or two for the NY DA’s office.

The full 8-K filing is below:

 As announced on August 1, 2018, the Board of Directors of CBS Corporation (“CBS” or the “Company”) has retained two law firms to conduct a full investigation of the allegations in recent press reports about CBS’s former Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, CBS News and cultural issues at all levels of CBS. This investigation is ongoing.

The Company has received subpoenas from the New York County District Attorney’s Office and the New York City Commission on Human Rights regarding the subject matter of this investigation and related matters. The New York State Attorney General’s Office has also requested information about these matters. The Company may receive additional related regulatory and investigative inquiries from these and other entities in the future.

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1 In 4 Baltimore Hospital Admissions Are Babies Addicted To Opioids

With a bag of heroine now cheaper than a pack of cigarettes, America’s opioid epidemic shows no signs of slowing down.

However, even more worrying is this condition is now spreading to the youngest, as Axios reports, every 15 minutes, a baby is born addicted to opioids. 

As the following Axios report details, in Baltimore, doctors at Mt. Washington Pediatric Hospital say babies born with Neonatal Abstinence Syndrome – a set of conditions caused by withdrawal from exposure to drugs – now account for 25% of the hospital’s admissions.

Nationally, the number of babies born with the syndrome has increased by over 400 percent since 2004. For Baltimore Health Commissioner Dr. Leana Wen, the community must first recognize addiction as a disease to address the larger trend of the opioid epidemic.

But as drug-related deaths continue to increase, the future remains uncertain.

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North Carolina Woman Won’t Be Punished for Sheltering Pets During Florence

Prosecutors have dropped all charges against Tammie Hedges, the North Carolina woman who sheltered local pets during Hurricane Florence.

Hedges is the executive director of Crazy’s Claws N’ Paws, a volunteer-based nonprofit that takes in neglected or injured animals and finds them permanent homes. Though Crazy’s isn’t a licensed animal shelter, the organization is currently “renovating a shelter site,” Hedges told Reason last week.

With many residents in Wayne County, North Carolina, evacuating the area, Hedges realized the site was the perfect pet for pets to take refuge. She ended up taking in 27 animals—17 cats and 10 dogs.

Things went south several days later. Hedges says the county’s animal services manager demanded she turn the pets over willingly or he’d get a warrant. Hedges complied, but that didn’t stop them from arrested her days later. The Wayne County District Attorney’s Office officially charged her with 12 counts of “misdemeanor practice/attempt veterinary medicine without a license” and one count of “solicitation of a Schedule 4 controlled substance,” according to a county press release.

Hedges told the Goldsboro News-Argus that most of the charges were a result of her administering amoxicillin, which is used to treat bacterial infections, to some of the animals. She also allegedly solicited a donation of the painkiller tramadol.

Hedges’ story quickly went viral. Not only was it covered by several national media outlets, but a petition demanding she not be punished garnered more than 33,000 signatures. America seemed to be on her side.

On Tuesday night, the county announced that prosecutors had “dismissed” the charges. A statement from District Attorney Matthew Delbridge suggests that it was bad publicity and nothing else that prompted him to give up on the case.

“A passion for and the love of animals is laudable but does not excuse unnecessarily putting their health at risk when other, safer resources are available,” Delbridge said. He went on to accuse Hedges of “taking advantage of a dire situation to solicit money and opioid narcotics from our generous and well intentioned citizens.”

It’s good that Hedges won’t be treated like a criminal for helping pets. But Delbridge’s statement doesn’t address the larger problem: She never should have gotten in trouble in the first place.

It’s not like she stole anyone’s animals. People voluntarily put them in her care during an emergency situation. And she appears to have taken good care of the pets. Not only were they given free medical care, but volunteers played with them, walked them, and cleaned up after them. Local volunteers are, in fact, often the people best equipped to save animals during disasters. A sensible system would recognize that, not charge the good Samaritans with crimes.

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‘We Are Always on the Verge of Chaos,’ Says PJ O’Rourke: New at Reason

For the last 45 years, no writer has taken a bigger blowtorch to the sacred cows of American life than libertarian humorist P.J. O’Rourke.

As a writer at National Lampoon in the 1970s, he co-authored best-selling parodies of high school yearbooks and Sunday newspapers. For Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, and other publications, O’Rourke traveled to war zones and other disaster areas, chronicling the folly of military and economic intervention. In 1991, he came out with Parliament of Whores, which explained why politicians should be the last people to have any power. Subtitled “A Lone Humorist Attempts to Explain the Entire U.S. Government,” this international bestseller probably minted more libertarians than any book since Free to Choose or Atlas Shrugged. More recently, O’Rourke published a critical history of his own Baby Boomer generation and How The Hell Did This Happen?, a richly reported account of Donald Trump’s unexpected 2016 presidential victory.

O’Rourke’s new book, None of My Business, explains “why he’s not rich and neither are you.” It’s partly the result of hanging out with wealthy money managers and businessmen and what they’ve taught him over the years about creating meaning and value in an ever richer and crazier world. It covers everything from social media to learning how to drink in war zones to why the Chinese may be more American than U.S. citizens. He also explains why even though he doesn’t understand or like a lot of things about modern technology, he doesn’t fear Amazon or Google, especially compared to people who are calling for Socialism 2.0.

I sat down with O’Rourke to talk about all that, the good and bad of Donald Trump, and why being an “old white man” just isn’t what it used to be (and why he’s OK with that).

Click here for full text and downloadable versions.

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