Category: reason

California Cops Arrested a Teen Who Recorded Use of Force—Now He’s Getting Paid

Delano Police Department

Four California high schoolers will be paid settlements because the Delano Police Department (DPD) used excessive force on them while they were walking to school.

The incident occurred on April 11, 2019. It began when Pablo Simental, Edwin Ardon, Isaac Ruiz, and Isai Ruiz were walking through a residential neighborhood toward Wonderful College Prep Academy. The group was on its way to obtain prom tickets.

DPD officers Ruben Ozuna, Michael Strand, and Guadalupe Contreras allegedly veered toward the group with a patrol vehicle, questioned them, and arrested them for jaywalking. When the teens pulled out their cellphones to record the interaction, the officers attempted to take the phones by force.

Simental was jailed with his hands handcuffed behind his back for hours, yet he was never charged with a crime. Neither of the Ruizes was charged either. Ardon faced a single charge of jaywalking. The DPD acknowledged the use of force but cleared its officers of misconduct, maintaining that the boys refused to listen to orders to exit the roadway.

On Friday, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which filed a lawsuit on Simental’s behalf, announced that the city of Delano had approved a settlement with the teens.

A copy of the settlement requests that each teen receive between $30,000 and $35,000. And the city and police department will write a letter to the Kern County district attorney and Kern County Superior Court to dismiss Ardon’s jaywalking charge.

“Upon further review of this case, the DPD has determined that further prosecution of Mr. Ardon is not in the interest of justice in light of the circumstances of Mr. Ardon’s arrest and the nature of the charges filed against him,” the settlement reads.

The settlement also requires the DPD to update its training to prevent further arrests of citizens for exercising their First Amendment right to record police interactions.

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Barr’s Justice Department Prepares To End Trump’s Term With an Execution Spree

williambarr_1161x653

The Department of Justice has scheduled three more federal executions as America prepares for a new administration, two of them just days before President-elect Joe Biden will take office.

On Friday, Attorney General William Barr announced that the Bureau of Prisons will execute three more inmates currently on death row in December and January. The last execution is scheduled for January 15, just five days before Biden will be inaugurated to succeed President Donald Trump.

Assuming all currently scheduled federal executions take place, the Trump administration will have put a total of 13 inmates to death, all over the course of just seven months. No presidential administration in modern history has come anywhere close to executing this many inmates in such a short period. You’d have to go back to the 19th century to see anything like this.

Earlier in the month, a group of Democratic lawmakers who are opposed to the death penalty sent a letter to Barr trying to get him to stop executing prisoners. Biden (and the Democratic Party) both officially oppose the death penalty and had hoped for some sort of concessions for the incoming administration. That request clearly fell on deaf ears.

The three inmates added to the list of scheduled executions are Alfred Bourgeois, Cory Johnson, and Dustin John Higgs. Each of the men was convicted of particularly harsh crimes. Bourgeois was accused of abusing and beating his own 2-year-old daughter to death in 2002. Johnson and Higgs have both been convicted of multiple murders: seven for Johnson and three for Higgs. The DOJ has the details here.

The attorneys for all three men have put out statements decrying Barr’s decision to execute them. All three of the inmates claim intellectual disabilities. Johnson was tested with an IQ of 69 when he was a teenager, and according to his attorneys, he grew up in a residential facility after his mother abandoned him at age 13.

As for Higgs, he didn’t kill anybody, noted his attorney Sean Nolan. The actual shooter, Willis Mark Haynes, was sentenced to life in prison. Nolan said in a prepared statement, “Mr. Higgs was prosecuted on the unreliable theory that he ordered Mr. Haynes to kill the victims in his case. That theory was supported exclusively by the contested testimony of Victor Gloria, a cooperating co-defendant who received a substantial deal in exchange for his cooperation. Attorneys for Mr. Higgs argue that a federal death verdict should not rest on such flimsy testimony.”

On Thursday, death row inmate Orlando Hall was executed with little fanfare after the Supreme Court declined to stop it. Scheduling more men to die after it has become clear that Trump has lost the election but before the transition to Biden—who doesn’t want to execute them—is a pretty nasty way to end an administration.

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Barr’s Justice Department Prepares To End Trump’s Term With an Execution Spree

williambarr_1161x653

The Department of Justice has scheduled three more federal executions as America prepares for a new administration, two of them just days before President-elect Joe Biden will take office.

On Friday, Attorney General William Barr announced that the Bureau of Prisons will execute three more inmates currently on death row in December and January. The last execution is scheduled for January 15, just five days before Biden will be inaugurated to succeed President Donald Trump.

Assuming all currently scheduled federal executions take place, the Trump administration will have put a total of 13 inmates to death, all over the course of just seven months. No presidential administration in modern history has come anywhere close to executing this many inmates in such a short period. You’d have to go back to the 19th century to see anything like this.

Earlier in the month, a group of Democratic lawmakers who are opposed to the death penalty sent a letter to Barr trying to get him to stop executing prisoners. Biden (and the Democratic Party) both officially oppose the death penalty and had hoped for some sort of concessions for the incoming administration. That request clearly fell on deaf ears.

The three inmates added to the list of scheduled executions are Alfred Bourgeois, Cory Johnson, and Dustin John Higgs. Each of the men was convicted of particularly harsh crimes. Bourgeois was accused of abusing and beating his own 2-year-old daughter to death in 2002. Johnson and Higgs have both been convicted of multiple murders: seven for Johnson and three for Higgs. The DOJ has the details here.

The attorneys for all three men have put out statements decrying Barr’s decision to execute them. All three of the inmates claim intellectual disabilities. Johnson was tested with an IQ of 69 when he was a teenager, and according to his attorneys, he grew up in a residential facility after his mother abandoned him at age 13.

As for Higgs, he didn’t kill anybody, noted his attorney Sean Nolan. The actual shooter, Willis Mark Haynes, was sentenced to life in prison. Nolan said in a prepared statement, “Mr. Higgs was prosecuted on the unreliable theory that he ordered Mr. Haynes to kill the victims in his case. That theory was supported exclusively by the contested testimony of Victor Gloria, a cooperating co-defendant who received a substantial deal in exchange for his cooperation. Attorneys for Mr. Higgs argue that a federal death verdict should not rest on such flimsy testimony.”

On Thursday, death row inmate Orlando Hall was executed with little fanfare after the Supreme Court declined to stop it. Scheduling more men to die after it has become clear that Trump has lost the election but before the transition to Biden—who doesn’t want to execute them—is a pretty nasty way to end an administration.

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The History of Fabric Is the History of Civilization

Postrel-Noncoformists

The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World, a new book by former Reason editor in chief Virginia Postrel, is a rich, endlessly fascinating history of the remarkable luck, invention, and innovation that made our fabric-rich world possible.

The book aims to make the mundane miraculous. Consider cotton. Most of the cotton we grow today is descended in part from a plant species that evolved in Africa and somehow got over to what is now Peru, where it mixed with New World strains.

“The fact that we have cotton at all, that it exists anywhere, is amazing,” says Postrel. “It happened long before there were human beings, but much more recently than when the continents were together. So we don’t know. It could have gotten caught up in a hurricane. It could have floated on a piece of pumice. So it’s this random, very unlikely happening that had tremendous world-changing consequences.”

The story of textiles is rife with attempts at protectionism and prohibition. In 17th and 18th century Europe, countries banned the importation of super-soft, super-colorful cotton prints from India known as calicos because they threatened domestic producers of everything from lower-quality cotton fabric to luxury silks. “For 73 years, France treated calico the way the U.S. treats cocaine,” Postrel says. “There was this huge amount of smuggling, and they were constantly ratcheting up the penalties [so] that they got quite grotesque, at least for the major traffic.” Some of “the earliest writings of classical liberalism are in this context, people saying not only is this not working, but…it is unjust to be sentencing people to the galleys in order to protect silk makers’ profits.”

Postrel also documents how the Luddites, the 19th century English textile workers famous for smashing the power looms threatening to put them out of work, owed their jobs to an earlier technological breakthrough: the spinning machines that emerged in the late 1700s.

“If you go back to that earlier period, when spinning machines were introduced, the same thing happened,” she says. “They had their own period of rebelling against the new technologies and saying they’re putting people out at work.”

The book also upends some contemporary myths, such as the claim that commercial production of hemp for clothing was a casualty of the war on drugs. “Hemp historically was a very coarse kind of fabric for poor people who didn’t have an alternative,” says Postrel. “It was replaced by cotton for good reasons. Cotton was also affordable, but it was soft and washable and just a much better fabric.”

“Human beings live in history and we inherit the legacies, positive and negative, of that history,” says Postrel, whose previous books include The Power of Glamour, The Substance of Style, and The Future and Its Enemies. Discussing the large themes of her work she says, “All you can do is start from where you are and try to do better from where you are.”

Listen to the full podcast interview here.

Narrated by Nick Gillespie. Edited by Isaac Reese.

Music: “Thoughts,” by ANBR

Photos: World History Archive/Newscom; The Print Collector Heritage Images/Newsroom; The “Réale” returning to port, Med/CC BY-SA 3.0; Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture/CC0; Battle of Grand Port, Rama/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 2.0 FR; Fine Art Images Heritage Images/Newscom; Seton, M., Müller, R., Zahirovic, S., Gaina, C., Torsvik, T., Shephard, G., Talsma, A., Gurnis, M., Turner, M., Maus, S., and Chandler, M., 2012, Global continental and ocean basin reconstructions since 200 Ma: Earth-Science Reviews, v. 113, no. 3-4, p. 212-270

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The History of Fabric Is the History of Civilization

Postrel-Noncoformists

The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World, a new book by former Reason editor in chief Virginia Postrel, is a rich, endlessly fascinating history of the remarkable luck, invention, and innovation that made our fabric-rich world possible.

The book aims to make the mundane miraculous. Consider cotton. Most of the cotton we grow today is descended in part from a plant species that evolved in Africa and somehow got over to what is now Peru, where it mixed with New World strains.

“The fact that we have cotton at all, that it exists anywhere, is amazing,” says Postrel. “It happened long before there were human beings, but much more recently than when the continents were together. So we don’t know. It could have gotten caught up in a hurricane. It could have floated on a piece of pumice. So it’s this random, very unlikely happening that had tremendous world-changing consequences.”

The story of textiles is rife with attempts at protectionism and prohibition. In 17th and 18th century Europe, countries banned the importation of super-soft, super-colorful cotton prints from India known as calicos because they threatened domestic producers of everything from lower-quality cotton fabric to luxury silks. “For 73 years, France treated calico the way the U.S. treats cocaine,” Postrel says. “There was this huge amount of smuggling, and they were constantly ratcheting up the penalties [so] that they got quite grotesque, at least for the major traffic.” Some of “the earliest writings of classical liberalism are in this context, people saying not only is this not working, but…it is unjust to be sentencing people to the galleys in order to protect silk makers’ profits.”

Postrel also documents how the Luddites, the 19th century English textile workers famous for smashing the power looms threatening to put them out of work, owed their jobs to an earlier technological breakthrough: the spinning machines that emerged in the late 1700s.

“If you go back to that earlier period, when spinning machines were introduced, the same thing happened,” she says. “They had their own period of rebelling against the new technologies and saying they’re putting people out at work.”

The book also upends some contemporary myths, such as the claim that commercial production of hemp for clothing was a casualty of the war on drugs. “Hemp historically was a very coarse kind of fabric for poor people who didn’t have an alternative,” says Postrel. “It was replaced by cotton for good reasons. Cotton was also affordable, but it was soft and washable and just a much better fabric.”

“Human beings live in history and we inherit the legacies, positive and negative, of that history,” says Postrel, whose previous books include The Power of Glamour, The Substance of Style, and The Future and Its Enemies. Discussing the large themes of her work she says, “All you can do is start from where you are and try to do better from where you are.”

Listen to the full podcast interview here.

Narrated by Nick Gillespie. Edited by Isaac Reese.

Music: “Thoughts,” by ANBR

Photos: World History Archive/Newscom; The Print Collector Heritage Images/Newsroom; The “Réale” returning to port, Med/CC BY-SA 3.0; Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture/CC0; Battle of Grand Port, Rama/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 2.0 FR; Fine Art Images Heritage Images/Newscom; Seton, M., Müller, R., Zahirovic, S., Gaina, C., Torsvik, T., Shephard, G., Talsma, A., Gurnis, M., Turner, M., Maus, S., and Chandler, M., 2012, Global continental and ocean basin reconstructions since 200 Ma: Earth-Science Reviews, v. 113, no. 3-4, p. 212-270

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Was Sidney Powell’s Conspiracy Theory Too Crazy Even for Donald Trump?

Sidney-Powell-press-conference-11-19-20-YouTube

If you have been watching Sidney Powell on TV recently, you might surmise that her sudden departure from the Trump campaign’s legal team reflects skepticism about her increasingly outlandish conspiracy theories. But with the possible exception of Powell’s claim that Dominion Voting Systems bribed Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, both Republicans, as part of the scheme that supposedly enabled Joe Biden to steal the election, the president and his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, have eagerly embraced her story of switched votes and fabricated ballots.

Here is how Giuliani introduced Powell, who was presented as a member of the “elite strike force team…working on behalf of the President and the campaign,” during the bizarre press conference he held last week:

Now I’m going to ask Sidney Powell to describe to you what we can describe about another totally outrageous situation. I don’t think most Americans know that our ballots get calculated, many of them, outside the United States and are completely open to hacking, completely open to change, and it’s being done by a company that specializes in voter fraud. I’ll let Sidney describe that to you.

Powell then spun a tale involving deceased Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez; billionaire Democrat George Soros; Lord Malloch-Brown, whom she described as “Mr. Soros’ number two person in the U.K.”; the Clinton Foundation; “the massive influence of communist money through Venezuela, Cuba, and likely China in the interference with our elections”; and election software designed to facilitate cheating via “an algorithm that probably ran all over the country to take a certain percentage of votes from President Trump and flip them to President Biden.” By Powell’s account, “we might never have uncovered [this scheme] had the votes for President Trump not been so overwhelming in so many of these states that it broke the algorithm that had been plugged into the system, and that’s what caused them to have to shut down in the states they shut down in.”

Because of that unanticipated problem, Powell said, Democrats resorted to a secondary plan involving “mail-in ballots, many of which they had actually fabricated, some [of which] were on pristine paper with identically matching perfect circle dots for Mr. Biden.” But for these machinations, she averred, it would be clear that “President Trump won by a landslide.”

Powell’s story dovetailed with Giuliani’s unsubstantiated claim that “thousands and thousands” of fraudulent Biden ballots arrived in the middle of the night at the TCF Center in Detroit, where they supposedly were needed to assure that the former vice president carried Michigan. “This corresponds to our statistical evidence that shows incredible spikes in the vote counts at particular times and that corresponds to eyewitness testimony of numerous people who have come forward and said they saw the ballots come in the back door at that time,” she said.

While taking questions from reporters, Giuliani reinforced Powell’s credibility, saying, “Sidney was giving you information that come[s] from affidavits from other people that are given under oath.” He said mysterious shipments of ballots marked for Biden “happened just around the time that the Dominion or Smartmatic people called a halt to the election,” and there was “a very big spike in the vote count at exactly that time,” “so what we’re telling you is supported by evidence.” Democrats “really cheated in two respects,” he said. They “cheated with the machines,” and they used “the absentee ballot process and the mail-in ballot process in order to cheat.”

Giuliani credulously accepted Powell’s byzantine conspiracy theory and suggested that reporters were remiss in refusing to do so: “You couldn’t possibly believe that the company counting our vote, with control over our vote, is owned by two Venezuelans who were allies of Chavez, are present allies of [Venezuelan President Nicolas] Maduro, with a company whose chairman is a close associate and business partner of George Soros, the biggest donor to the Democrat Party, the biggest donor to antifa, and the biggest donor of Black Lives Matter. My goodness, what do we have to do to get you to give our people the truth?”

So when Giuliani, joined by Jenna Ellis, the Trump campaign’s senior legal adviser, announced yesterday that Powell “is not a member of the Trump Legal Team,” it was not because he rejects wild accusations about machine-facilitated fraud. To the contrary, those accusations are part of the story Giuliani himself has been telling.

Trump likewise had not heretofore sought to distance himself from Powell. Earlier this month, he described her as one of the “wonderful lawyers” on a “great team” that was “spearheading the legal effort to defend OUR RIGHT to FREE and FAIR ELECTIONS!” Trump has echoed Powell’s suspicions about Dominion machines, her claim that he actually won by “a LANDSLIDE,” and her charge that the company was responsible for deleting a massive number of votes for him.

So why did Trump finally decide to disavow Powell? Citing unnamed “advisers,” The New York Times reports that Trump “has been agitated about Mr. Giuliani and Ms. Powell for a few days.” Evidently the president was put off by “how Ms. Powell had sounded” (nervous) and by “the black rivulets of liquid” that “dripped down Mr. Giuliani’s face” (apparently as his sweat mingled with hair dye), not to mention “how long the appearance had stretched on” (about an hour and a half).

The Washington Post, citing “two advisers to Trump, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations,” says “the president disliked the coverage Powell was receiving from Fox News host Tucker Carlson and others,” and “several allies had reached out to say she had gone too far.” Carlson, who generally has been receptive to Republican claims of election fraud, recently complained that Powell had repeatedly declined to supply evidence that would back up her charges.

The advisers interviewed by the Post also said Powell “fought with Giuliani and others in recent days.” But if Powell argued with Giuliani, it seems unlikely that the cause was her Dominion conspiracy theory, which he publicly embraced even after it was repeatedly debunked.

“She was too crazy even for the president,” an unnamed “campaign official” told the Post. If so, it is obviously not because Trump is unwilling to endorse self-flattering claims that are blatantly at odds with reality. Maybe Powell’s story just became too abstruse for him to follow or too complicated for him to summarize in a tweet.

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Was Sidney Powell’s Conspiracy Theory Too Crazy Even for Donald Trump?

Sidney-Powell-press-conference-11-19-20-YouTube

If you have been watching Sidney Powell on TV recently, you might surmise that her sudden departure from the Trump campaign’s legal team reflects skepticism about her increasingly outlandish conspiracy theories. But with the possible exception of Powell’s claim that Dominion Voting Systems bribed Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, both Republicans, as part of the scheme that supposedly enabled Joe Biden to steal the election, the president and his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, have eagerly embraced her story of switched votes and fabricated ballots.

Here is how Giuliani introduced Powell, who was presented as a member of the “elite strike force team…working on behalf of the President and the campaign,” during the bizarre press conference he held last week:

Now I’m going to ask Sidney Powell to describe to you what we can describe about another totally outrageous situation. I don’t think most Americans know that our ballots get calculated, many of them, outside the United States and are completely open to hacking, completely open to change, and it’s being done by a company that specializes in voter fraud. I’ll let Sidney describe that to you.

Powell then spun a tale involving deceased Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez; billionaire Democrat George Soros; Lord Malloch-Brown, whom she described as “Mr. Soros’ number two person in the U.K.”; the Clinton Foundation; “the massive influence of communist money through Venezuela, Cuba, and likely China in the interference with our elections”; and election software designed to facilitate cheating via “an algorithm that probably ran all over the country to take a certain percentage of votes from President Trump and flip them to President Biden.” By Powell’s account, “we might never have uncovered [this scheme] had the votes for President Trump not been so overwhelming in so many of these states that it broke the algorithm that had been plugged into the system, and that’s what caused them to have to shut down in the states they shut down in.”

Because of that unanticipated problem, Powell said, Democrats resorted to a secondary plan involving “mail-in ballots, many of which they had actually fabricated, some [of which] were on pristine paper with identically matching perfect circle dots for Mr. Biden.” But for these machinations, she averred, it would be clear that “President Trump won by a landslide.”

Powell’s story dovetailed with Giuliani’s unsubstantiated claim that “thousands and thousands” of fraudulent Biden ballots arrived in the middle of the night at the TCF Center in Detroit, where they supposedly were needed to assure that the former vice president carried Michigan. “This corresponds to our statistical evidence that shows incredible spikes in the vote counts at particular times and that corresponds to eyewitness testimony of numerous people who have come forward and said they saw the ballots come in the back door at that time,” she said.

While taking questions from reporters, Giuliani reinforced Powell’s credibility, saying, “Sidney was giving you information that come[s] from affidavits from other people that are given under oath.” He said mysterious shipments of ballots marked for Biden “happened just around the time that the Dominion or Smartmatic people called a halt to the election,” and there was “a very big spike in the vote count at exactly that time,” “so what we’re telling you is supported by evidence.” Democrats “really cheated in two respects,” he said. They “cheated with the machines,” and they used “the absentee ballot process and the mail-in ballot process in order to cheat.”

Giuliani credulously accepted Powell’s byzantine conspiracy theory and suggested that reporters were remiss in refusing to do so: “You couldn’t possibly believe that the company counting our vote, with control over our vote, is owned by two Venezuelans who were allies of Chavez, are present allies of [Venezuelan President Nicolas] Maduro, with a company whose chairman is a close associate and business partner of George Soros, the biggest donor to the Democrat Party, the biggest donor to antifa, and the biggest donor of Black Lives Matter. My goodness, what do we have to do to get you to give our people the truth?”

So when Giuliani, joined by Jenna Ellis, the Trump campaign’s senior legal adviser, announced yesterday that Powell “is not a member of the Trump Legal Team,” it was not because he rejects wild accusations about machine-facilitated fraud. To the contrary, those accusations are part of the story Giuliani himself has been telling.

Trump likewise had not heretofore sought to distance himself from Powell. Earlier this month, he described her as one of the “wonderful lawyers” on a “great team” that was “spearheading the legal effort to defend OUR RIGHT to FREE and FAIR ELECTIONS!” Trump has echoed Powell’s doubts about Dominion machines, her claim that he actually won by “a LANDSLIDE,” and her charge that the company was responsible for deleting a massive number of votes for him.

So why did Trump finally decide to disavow Powell? Citing unnamed “advisers,” The New York Times reports that Trump “has been agitated about Mr. Giuliani and Ms. Powell for a few days.” Evidently the president was put off by “how Ms. Powell had sounded” (nervous) and by “the black rivulets of liquid” that “dripped down Mr. Giuliani’s face” (apparently as his sweat mingled with hair dye), not to mention “how long the appearance had stretched on” (about an hour and a half).

The Washington Post, citing “two advisers to Trump, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations,” says “the president disliked the coverage Powell was receiving from Fox News host Tucker Carlson and others and that several allies had reached out to say she had gone too far.” Carlson, who generally has been receptive to Republican claims of election fraud, recently complained that Powell had repeatedly declined to supply evidence that would back up her charges.

The advisers interviewed by the Post also said Powell “fought with Giuliani and others in recent days.” But if Powell argued with Giuliani, it seems unlikely that the cause was her Dominion conspiracy theory, which he publicly embraced even after it was repeatedly debunked.

“She was too crazy even for the president,” an unnamed “campaign official” told the Post. If so, it is obviously not because Trump is unwilling to endorse self-flattering claims that are blatantly at odds with reality. Maybe Powell’s story just became too abstruse for him to follow or too complicated for him to summarize in a tweet.

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News You Can Use: Buy a Pulse Oximeter in Case You Catch Covid

A few weeks ago, I tested positive for Covid. After a few days of really bad symptoms (fever, chills, etc.), I felt reasonably good. I had no trouble breathing. But I had read months ago that one reason Covid patients were dying is that some people whose breathing felt fine were actually quite short on oxygen due to Covid-related pneumonia, but they didn’t know it. By the time they got to the hospital because it started to affect their breathing, the pneumonia was severe, they had extremely low oxygen levels and their prospects were poor. So I bought a cheap pulse oximeter in case I caught Covid.

Even though my symptoms seemed to be resolving, my blood oxygen levels were gradually decreasing. By nine days after symptoms started, my readings were 91-93 (95 and up is fine, under 94 needs to be monitored closely, under 90 is dangerous). So my physician brother-in-law sent me to the emergency room to be checked. They did a chest x-ray and CT scan and found substantial pneumonia in my lungs. Five days in the hospital later, after treatment with remdesivir, steroids, and some supplemental oxygen, I was ready to be discharged with a take-home oxygen tank, and after the first day or two at home my oxygen levels were back over 95. (I’m feeling pretty good at this point except I still get winded easily.)

If I had stayed home, would my symptoms have resolved themselves? Likely, especially given that the evidence that remdesivir really helps much if at all is sketchy. But it’s also possible that without my handy pulse oximeter, my pneumonia would have continued to progress and I would have still wound up in the hospital later, in much worse shape.

All of which is a long way of suggesting that you buy a pulse oximeter and have it handy in case you get Covid. Why the CDC and state and local public health officials having been beating this drum since the Spring, I don’t know…

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News You Can Use: Buy a Pulse Oximeter in Case You Catch Covid

A few weeks ago, I tested positive for Covid. After a few days of really bad symptoms (fever, chills, etc.), I felt reasonably good. I had no trouble breathing. But I had read months ago that one reason Covid patients were dying is that some people whose breathing felt fine were actually quite short on oxygen due to Covid-related pneumonia, but they didn’t know it. By the time they got to the hospital because it started to affect their breathing, the pneumonia was severe, they had extremely low oxygen levels and their prospects were poor. So I bought a cheap pulse oximeter in case I caught Covid.

Even though my symptoms seemed to be resolving, my blood oxygen levels were gradually decreasing. By nine days after symptoms started, my readings were 91-93 (95 and up is fine, under 94 needs to be monitored closely, under 90 is dangerous). So my physician brother-in-law sent me to the emergency room to be checked. They did a chest x-ray and CT scan and found substantial pneumonia in my lungs. Five days in the hospital later, after treatment with remdesivir, steroids, and some supplemental oxygen, I was ready to be discharged with a take-home oxygen tank, and after the first day or two at home my oxygen levels were back over 95. (I’m feeling pretty good at this point except I still get winded easily.)

If I had stayed home, would my symptoms have resolved themselves? Likely, especially given that the evidence that remdesivir really helps much if at all is sketchy. But it’s also possible that without my handy pulse oximeter, my pneumonia would have continued to progress and I would have still wound up in the hospital later, in much worse shape.

All of which is a long way of suggesting that you buy a pulse oximeter and have it handy in case you get Covid. Why the CDC and state and local public health officials having been beating this drum since the Spring, I don’t know…

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If Joe Biden Is Serious About Criminal Justice Reform, He Won’t Pick Merrick Garland for Attorney General

rtrlseven957011

President-elect Joe Biden is reportedly considering federal Judge Merrick Garland to serve as the attorney general in his administration. According to reporting by NPR, “two people closely following the process” say that Garland is a contender for the role in the Biden White House.

Garland, a long-serving judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, was President Barack Obama’s 2016 pick to replace the late Justice Antonin Scalia on the U.S. Supreme Court. But Garland’s SCOTUS nomination was totally stonewalled by the Republican-controlled Senate, which refused to even hold hearings. As a result, President Donald Trump was later able to fill the vacancy by nominating Neil Gorsuch.

Plenty of Democrats would no doubt enjoy the idea of Biden trolling the GOP by sending Garland back to Capitol Hill for another high-profile Senate confirmation showdown.

But the idea of Garland serving as attorney general is also likely to trouble many criminal justice reform advocates. That is because Garland has the sort of judicial record that police and prosecutors are quite happy to see. As I noted in a 2016 column:

While Garland is undoubtedly a legal liberal, his record reflects a version of legal liberalism that tends to line up in favor of broad judicial deference to law enforcement and wartime executive power.

In the area of criminal law, for example, Garland’s votes have frequently come down on the side of prosecutors and police. In 2010, when Garland was reported to be under consideration to replace retiring Justice John Paul Stevens, SCOTUSblog founder Tom Goldstein observed that “Judge Garland rarely votes in favor of criminal defendants’ appeals of their convictions.”

On the presidential campaign trail, Biden made certain efforts to distance himself from his regrettable record as an inveterate drug warrior and law enforcement booster. If Biden would like to demonstrate his seriousness about turning over a new leaf on criminal justice issues, picking Merrick Garland for the top law enforcement position in his administration might not be the best way to do it.

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