Category: reason

In response to a disastrous raid that killed a middle-aged couple and injured five officers on January 28, Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo announced yesterday that his department will stop routinely using “no knock” warrants for drug searches. “The no-knock warrants are going to go away like leaded gasoline in this city,” Acevedo said at a town hall meeting organized by the Greater Houston Coalition for Justice. “I’m 99.9 percent sure we won’t be using them. If for some reason there would be a specific case, that would come from my office.”

Acevedo had earlier indicated he was leaning in this direction. “After I’ve had four officers shot and two suspects killed,” he said at a press conference on Friday, “we’ll be tightening that up.” Avoiding the destruction of evidence is usually cited as a reason for police to crash into homes without warning. But “if somebody flushes all the evidence” because police have to knock and announce themselves, Acevedo observed, “you probably didn’t have all that much evidence in there to start with.”

In this case, police found no evidence of drug dealing, notwithstanding a search warrant affidavit describing many bags of heroin in the home the day before. It turned out the “controlled buy” that was the basis for the warrant never happened. But even if it had, the execution of the warrant would have been reckless. After undercover narcotics officers broke into the home of Dennis Tuttle and Rhogena Nicholas at 7815 Harding Street, one of them immediately killed the couple’s dog with a shotgun, setting off an exchange of fire in which Tuttle and Nicholas were both killed. Under the circumstances, it is plausible that Tuttle, who reportedly fired at police with a .357 Magnum revolver, did not know who the armed intruders were—a possibility that Acevedo implictly acknowledged by citing the raid as a reason to eschew no-knock drug raids.

If Acevedo follows through on his commitment to make no-knock warrants the exception rather than the rule, the new policy could help avoid situations like this—but only if police announce themselves in a way that gives occupants a realistic chance of answering the door. If cops say “police” a second or two before knocking the door down, it will not be much of an improvement. The point is to avoid the chaos and confusion that can have lethal results when armed men suddenly burst into a home.

Yesterday Acevedo also reiterated his intent to equip officers executing search warrants with body cameras so there is an independent record of the operation, which is especially important when the “suspects” are not around to dispute the official account. Acevedo’s views on this subject, like his opinion of no-knock warrants, have noticeably evolved in the last few weeks.

“We do not have cameras on us when we make these entries,” Acevedo matter-of-factly announced the day after the raid. At a press conference two days later, he attributed that situation not to policy but to a lack of funds. “The likelihood that we won’t land on ‘we’re going to have body-worn cameras’ is pretty slim for search warrants,” he said, “because most of the times we’re going to be doing the right things and we want to capture that.” Now he is saying police entering homes will soon have body cameras.

Video of the raid could have shed light on the question of whether Tuttle understood that the men who shot his dog and his wife were police officers. It also might have clarified details of the shootout. After the dog was killed, Acevedo has said, Tuttle fired a .357 Magnum revolver at the officer with the shotgun, who collapsed on a couch. When Nicholas moved to disarm the officer, his colleagues fatally shot her, and Tuttle returned fire, striking three other officers before he was killed. A fifth officer suffered a knee injury in the tumult.

Contrary to this account, the inventory of items seized from the house did not list a revolver or any other handgun, just two shotguns and two rifles. Was the revolver removed from the scene before the inventory? Did police somehow confuse a long gun with a revolver? Video surely would have helped resolve that issue.

That Tuttle managed to strike four police officers with a six-round revolver while under fire seems pretty improbable. Yet Acevedo reacted indignantly on the night of the raid when a reporter asked if any officers had been injured by “friendly fire.” He was less dismissive last Friday, saying “at this point, I don’t think there’s any indication of that, but we still have a lot of work to do.”

Acevedo has been a cop for more than three decades and surely is aware of the controversy over no-knock raids and the utility of body cameras in resolving disputes about the use of force. It should not have taken a deadly, flagrantly botched raid like this one for him to come around on these issues.

The slow march of straw bans across the country is starting to get some pushback in the form of proposed state preemption laws.

In both Florida and Colorado, legislators have introduced bills that would impose state-wide straw-on-request policies that ban food service businesses from issuing customers unsolicited straws, while also forbidding local governments from banning the plastic suckers outright.

For advocates of unbridled straw liberty, these policies are hardly ideal. Indeed, the country’s current anti-straw mania got kicked into high-gear in early 2018 when California legislators pushed (and eventually enacted) a straw-on-request law. The policy’s spread to more purple states in 2019 is a testament to the popular momentum behind the anti-straw movement.

That said, both Colorado and Florida’s straw-on-request bills also come with a number of exceptions that limit their impact. Both allow for self-serve straw dispensers in restaurants and unsolicited straws to be included in delivery and take-out orders. More importantly, these two bills also forbid local governments from piling on even more onerous restrictions on straws or other plastic utensils and containers, including outright bans and mandates that restaurants swap out their plastic fare for biodegradable alternatives.

Given that most of the straw banning energy is coming from local governments, the preemption of municipal action could do a lot to forestall future straw bans in those states. In Florida, where cities like St. Petersburg and Miami Beach have already passed straw bans of their own, a preemption bill could even restore some modicum of choice for consumers.

Preemption laws themselves are hardly new, and in fact have been used in a number of midwestern states, including Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, to overturn local bans on plastic bags—yesteryear’s chief environmental hazard. Wrapping these preemption policies with a lesser restriction on plastic straws is likely smart politics for industry groups with a vested interest in straws.

“If you were to allow 64 counties, 300 plus municipalities, the ability to dictate what products you can use, how you can use them, it’s going to be virtually impossible for someone who operates in multiple counties to understand what standard they’re operating under at any given time,” the Colorado Restaurant Association’s Nick Hoover told the Associated Press.

Florida’s Restaurant Association similarly urged its members to adopt a straw-on-request policy, but has so far stayed silent on Florida’s two straw preemption bills, both of which have been introduced by Republican members of the state Legislature.

The Plastics Industry Association—a trade association representing plastic manufacturers—has staked out a neutral stance on straw-on-request policies while opposing full-on bans.

Less compromising defenders of plastic straws may want to look to Utah, where Rep. Mike McKell (R–Spanish Fork) has introduced a bill that simply preempts local governments from banning straws, bags, or other plastic containers without including a straw-on-request mandate.

Still, the fact that conservative Republicans and restaurant lobbyists are willing to make their peace with straw-on-request policies outside of deep red Utah suggests that the days of laissez faire straw regulation are gone for good.

Public schools in 54 out of 55 counties in West Virginia shut down today, in anticipation of a statewide strike by teachers. The reason? Legislation that would, among other things, create a voucher system that could be used by special-needs children to pay for private school and allow for as many as seven charter schools. Charters are publicly funded schools that operate with more autonomy (and less funding per pupil) than traditional public schools. West Virginia doesn’t currently allow charters.

The pending legislation, whose final form hasn’t been hammered out, would also give teachers a 5 percent pay raise. In 2018, West Virginia teachers struck for higher pay, eventually getting a 5 percent salary hike and inspiring other walk-outs around the country. From NPR:

Details of the controversial bill have changed—sometimes dramatically—as it bounces between the two legislative chambers. At one point the Senate version of the bill would have allowed an unlimited number of charter schools. The House bill subsequently limited the number of charter schools to two and killed the voucher program; the Senate’s amended version permitted seven charter schools and reinstated vouchers for up to 1,000 students who have been bullied or have special needs.

In short, the specifics are in flux. But the state’s three teachers unions are watching carefully.

“They have made this bill so ugly in the Senate, and we’ve been told they have support in the House,” [Fred Albert, president of the American Federation of Teachers’ West Virginia chapter], told the Gazette Mail. “We feel that we have no other measure but to send the message that we’re following this hour by hour.”

And making sure that as few kids as possible have choice in education.

Read more here.

According to U.S. News & World Report, West Virginia ranks 45th among the states in K-12 education. West Virginia is one of just seven states that doesn’t allow charters.

Related: “What Really Drove Los Angeles Teachers To Go on Strike?”

The Supreme Court today ruled in favor of disgraced comedian Bill Cosby, who was facing a defamation lawsuit from one of his alleged rape victims.

Cosby, who was sentenced to three to 10 years behind bars after being convicted of a separate sexual assault, had been accused of defaming—via his attorney—Kathy McKee, a former actress and talk show host, who claims the comedian raped her in 1974. McKee told her story to the New York Daily News in 2014, around the time Cosby was facing other allegations of sexual misconduct. She said one of Cosby’s lawyers then sent a letter to the Daily News calling her allegation “wild” and wrongly suggesting that she, like some of Cosby’s other accusers, had a criminal record, according to Reuters.

Cosby’s legal team defending him in the defamation suit claimed that by going public with her story, McKee had become a public figure. The standard to establish defamation against a public official is much higher than that needed to prove a private individual was defamed. This is largely thanks to the Supreme Court’s 1964 ruling in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan. The Court essentially said that when public officials are claiming defamation, they must prove that the defendant acted with “actual malice,” meaning the defendant knew they were spreading falsehoods but did so anyway, or simply didn’t care to find out the truth either way. This was seen as a win for the First Amendment, as it meant that disgruntled government officials would not be able to easily win defamation suits against media outlets. The ruling was eventually expanded to cover public figures as well.

Lower courts sided with Cosby on this matter, and in January 2018, a federal appeals court denied to hear the case. McKee filed a writ of certiorari with the Supreme Court, only to be rejected again today.

The Court as a whole did not provide any reasoning behind its action (or lack thereof). However, Justice Clarence Thomas’ concurrence, which no other justice signed onto, is notable in that it criticizes the actual malice standard and calls on the Court to reexamine how libel cases are dealt with. “McKee asks us to review her classification as a limited purpose public figure. I agree with the Court’s decision not to take up that factbound question,” Thomas wrote. “I write to explain why, in an appropriate case, we should reconsider the precedents that require courts to ask it in the first place.”

Thomas’ concurrence seems to suggest that the Court was overreaching when it established the actual malice standard. “New York Times and the Court’s decisions extending it were policy-driven decisions masquerading as constitutional law,” he wrote. “Instead of simply applying the First Amendment as it was understood by the people who ratified it, the Court fashioned its own ‘federal rule[s]’ by balancing the ‘competing values at stake in defamation suits,'” he added, citing the 1974 ruling in Gertz v. Robert Welch, Inc.

“We should not continue to reflexively apply this policy-driven approach to the Constitution,” he said, instead suggesting that “we should carefully examine the original meaning of the First and Fourteenth Amendments. If the Constitution does not require public figures to satisfy an actual-malice standard in state-law defamation suits, then neither should we.”

Thomas went on to explain that prior to the ruling in New York Times v. Sullivan, libel cases were a question of common law. “The common law of libel at the time the First and Fourteenth Amendments were ratified did not require public figures to satisfy any kind of heightened liability standard as a condition of recovering damages,” he said. It was more so a question of whether the claims were true or not. “But where the publication was false, even if the defendant could show that no reputational injury occurred, the prevailing rule was that at least nominal damages were to be awarded,” he wrote. In colonial America, libel was largely prosecuted as a crime, and libel against public officials was seen as a worse offense than libel about private individuals,” Thomas said.

“We did not begin meddling in this area until 1964, nearly 175 years after the First Amendment was ratified,” Thomas concluded. “The States are perfectly capable of striking an acceptable balance between encouraging robust public discourse and providing a meaningful remedy for reputational harm. We should reconsider our jurisprudence in this area.”

As The Washington Post noted, President Trump has suggested that it should be easier to sue media outlets for defamation. as a result, Thomas’ concurrence has some people worried about the future of press freedom. “Since he was on the campaign trail, President Trump has complained about libel laws in the United States, and has argued that they should be rewritten,” University of Texas School of Law Professor Steve Vladeck told CNN, where he works as a Supreme Court analyst. “Justice Thomas’s opinion today concurring in the denial of certiorari is a roadmap to exactly that result.”

Here are three rules you should know about “Hate Speech” and the First Amendment:

Rule 1. The First Amendment protects all ideas–loving, hateful, or in between.

In the United States, “hate speech” is just a political label, like “un-American speech” or “rude speech.” Some people use the phrase broadly, some more narrowly–but there’s no legal definition, because there is no “hate speech” exception to the First Amendment.

Rule 2. Some speech is not protected by the First Amendment, but that’s true regardless of whether it’s bigoted or hateful.

For instance, threats of violence are constitutionally unprotected.

Rule 3. Hate crime laws are constitutional, so long as they punish violence or vandalism, not speech.

The law often punishes people more because of why they did what they did. Killing someone for money will get you a harsher punishment than killing them out of momentary anger. Likewise, firing an employee because of his race will get you a civil lawsuit; firing an employee for most other reasons won’t.

Written by Eugene Volokh, a First Amendment law professor at UCLA.
Produced and edited by Austin Bragg, who is not.

This is the second episode of Free Speech Rules, a video series on free speech and the law. Volokh is the co-founder of the Volokh Conspiracy, which is hosted at Reason.com.

This is not legal advice.
If this were legal advice, it would be followed by a bill.
Please use responsibly.

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President Donald Trump shot back today at the 16 states who have filed a lawsuit over his use of a national emergency declaration to obtain funds for a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border.

California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, who’s spearheading the suit, filed it yesterday in federal court. The states of Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, and Virginia are co-plaintiffs.

In a tweet this morning, Trump took particular aim at California, mocking the state over Gov. Gavin Newsom’s announcement last week that the scope of the state’s bullet train project would be widely reduced.

“As I predicted, 16 states, led mostly by Open Border Democrats and the Radical Left, have filed a lawsuit in, of course, the 9th Circuit!” Trump wrote. Trump’s displeasure with the Ninth Circuit stems from that federal appeals court’s liberal reputation. The lawsuit in question was actually filed in a trial court, the U.S. District Court for Northern District of California, though an appeal would likely be heard in the Ninth Circuit Court.

“California, the state that has wasted billions of dollars on their out of control Fast Train, with no hope of completion, seems in charge!” Trump added. In a follow-up post, he claimed that “the failed Fast Train project in California, where the cost overruns are becoming world record setting, is hundreds of times more expensive than the desperately needed Wall!”

Trump is right to criticize California’s bullet train boondoggle. The high-speed rail system, which would have connected San Francisco to Los Angeles, was originally supposed to cost $33 billion. As Reason‘s Scott Shackford noted last week, the estimated cost has since ballooned to $77 billion, and it likely would have exceeded $100 billion had the project been completed.

That’s considerably more expensive (though not “hundreds of times more so”) than Trump’s wall, at least when you consider the amount of money that’s currently being allocated toward the border barrier. Trump had demanded $5.7 billion in funding from Congress for the wall. When he only received $1.375 billion, he took executive action to get more. The administration’s reported plan is to take $600 million from the Treasury Department’s asset forfeiture fund, as well as $2.5 billion from the Department of Defense’s drug interdiction fund. Through the use of his national emergency declaration, Trump also plans to reallocate $3.5 billion from the Pentagon’s military construction budget.

Trump’s getting roughly $8 billion for his wall, though the barrier will end up costing much more. Reason‘s Eric Boehm has pointed out that construction alone could cost around $28 billion, while maintenance costs over the first decade could exceed $48 billion.

Becerra’s lawsuit, meanwhile, claims Trump has exhibited a “flagrant disregard of fundamental separation of powers principles engrained in the United States Constitution.”

“Contrary to the will of Congress, the President has used the pretext of a manufactured ‘crisis’ of unlawful immigration to declare a national emergency and redirect federal dollars appropriated for drug interdiction, military construction, and law enforcement initiatives toward building a wall on the United States-Mexico border,” the suit reads. “This includes the diversion of funding that each of the Plaintiff States receive.” It also claims that “the construction of a wall along California’s and New Mexico’s southern borders will cause irreparable environmental damage to those States’ natural resources.”

So do the plaintiffs stand any chance? That remains to be seen. “It’s not a slam dunk for them,” Harvard law professor Mark Tushnet told The Wall Street Journal. “But there’s a decent chance they will ultimately prevail.”

Trump may have hurt his own cause during a press conference Friday in which he officially announced he was declaring a national emergency. “I could do the wall over a longer period of time. I didn’t need to do this. But I’d rather do it much faster,” he told NBC’s Peter Alexander.

Becerra’s suit seemed to allude to those comments. “By the President’s own admission, an emergency declaration is not necessary,” the suit reads, noting that Customs and Border Protection (CBP) “data show that unlawful entries are near 45-year lows” and that “the State Department recognizes there is a lack of credible evidence that terrorists are using the southern border to enter the United States.”

The fact that 16 states would sue the Trump administration over the national emergency declaration is not surprising. In his remarks Friday, Trump acknowledged his administration would likely be sued, but predicted that just as the Supreme Court upheld his travel ban, it will rule in his favor on this issue as well. “Sadly, we’ll be sued and sadly it will go through a process and happily we’ll win,” he said.

We’ll see if that’s the case. David Bier, an immigration policy analyst for the Cato Institute, told Reason last month: “My belief is that the president can get away with doing almost anything he wants in the name of national security.” That may be true. But only time will tell how the courts feel.

U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) took a careful but deliberate step towards the political center on Monday night by showing skepticism about progressive proposals like the Green New Deal and free college tuition for all, while pointing to the looming threat of America’s growing national debt as a major constraint on policymaking.

Her appearance on an hour-long town hall event hosted by CNN’s Don Lemon is likely to alienate her campaign from the ascendant left wing of the Democratic Party in some ways, but Klobuchar’s hesitance to support huge new entitlement programs will set her apart in a crowded field of 2020 presidential hopefuls in and is a welcome nod toward fiscal sanity. At the very least, it gives the impression that she has given serious thought to the important question of how to pay for the myriad promises that her fellow candidates have been making in the early primary season.

The most striking example of Klobuchar’s relatively disciplined stance came during a question posed by a college student, Griffin Sinclair-Wingate, who said he graduated from college in 2017 and pays more towards his student loans each month than his rent. He asked whether she would support free four-year college tuition for all, including for undocumented and formerly incarcerated individuals.

After a bit of meandering about wanting to make it easier for college grads to refinance their student loan debt and called for expanding eligibility for federal Pell grants, Klobuchar gave a straight answer.

“No, I am not for free four-year college for all,” Klobuchar said. “If I was a magic genie and could give that to everyone and we could afford it, I would…I’ve gotta tell the truth. We have a mountain of debt that the Trump administration keeps making worse and worse, and I don’t want to leave that on the shoulders of these kids too.”

During the 2016 campaign, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) estimated the cost of free college tuition for all to be about $75 billion annually. With the country facing a $22 trillion (and growing) national debt, it seems crazy to create a program with an annual price tag that large when the total student loan debt held by Americans is about $1.5 trillion. Sure, that’s a significant hit to many younger Americans, but Klobuchar’s well-taken point on Monday night is that today’s college kids won’t be helped by free tuition if they graduate into the early stages of a debt crisis.

Asked more directly about the national debt later in the program, Klobuchar showed some basic policy chops there as well. She called for raising the cap on payroll taxes that fund Social Security—right now, those taxes apply only to the first $128,400 earned annually—and reconsidering the 2016 corporate income tax cuts, though she stopped short of calling for a full repeal and a return to the previous rates. Those are neither revolutionary nor fully adequate solutions for the size of the problem, but they are certainly better than pretending it does not exist.

Mindfullness of the nation’s precarious longterm fiscal standing seems to inform Klobuchar’s skepticism towards other top Democratic initiatives too. While supporting Medicare for All as “something we can look to in the future,” Klobuchar said Monday that her preference would be to build on the Affordable Care Act by creating a new public option plan within Medicaid that individuals and families could buy into, either as a replacement for, or in addition to, the state-level insurance exchanges.

On the Green New Deal, Klobuchar said some of the plan’s goals were more aspirational than realistic—intended to “get this debate going,” she said. “Do I think we can cross every ‘T’ and dot every ‘I’ in 10 years? Actually, I think that would be very difficult to do.”

That’s not the full embrace that many other Democratic contenders have given it, but in this instance Klobuchar doesn’t come off looking as good. If she’s skeptical the Green New Deal can accomplish its goals—and there’s plenty of reasons to be skeptical—then why support such a massive expansion of government spending and the disruption of several whole industries in the name of merely continuing the debate over climate change?

By no means did Klobuchar come out of Monday’s townhall looking like a fiscal conservative. The vision she outlined for a Klobuchar administration would almost surely see greater government spending on health care, education, and infrastructure. She called for new government programs to combat climate change and the opioid epidemic. She said the long-term debt crisis can be solved without making any major changes to Social Security.

Still, in this Democratic primary there was plenty that set Klobuchar apart. Whether that’s a good thing for her remains to be seen. Despite a massive edge in money and establishment support, Hillary Clinton struggled to win in 2016 as Democratic voters fell for Sanders’ pie in the sky plans for free everything. This time around, the left lane of the Democratic primary seems more crowded—and that was before Sanders officially joined the circus on Tuesday morning. Meanwhile, with former Vice President Joe Biden still on the sidelines, there is no obvious frontrunner in the centrist category. There’s no longer any doubt that’s where Klobuchar is aiming.

President Donald Trump has declared “that a national emergency exists at the southern border of the United States” just because neither house of Congress, under either major political party, has been impressed with his demands for funding for a border wall. But this isn’t an unheard of abuse of presidential authority, points out J.D. Tuccille.

Emergency declarations by tantrum-throwing wannabe American monarchs play a large and dangerous role in U.S. politics.

In continuing that unpleasant tradition, Trump’s action is less of a break from the past than a risky step toward a dictatorial future.

View this article.

Nancy Rommelmann is a pro-choice, aqua-haired, middle-aged liberal living in Portland, Oregon. She probably disagrees with Nicholas Sandmann on every major issue. But they have something in common. In the last month they have both endured what is fast becoming an American ritual: our 15 minutes of hate.

Sandmann’s crime was a smirk while wearing a MAGA hat. Rommelmann’s was a YouTube series she launched in December with another journalist, in which they discussed the excesses of the #MeToo movement. This and the show’s name, #MeNeither, inspired an ex-employee of her husband’s coffee company to send an email to staff, characterizing the series as “vile, dangerous and extremely misguided” and adding that it “throws into question the safety of Ristretto Roasters as a workplace.”

The former employee also sent an email to the media. Within days, a quarter of the Ristretto staff quit and the company lost major accounts.

If you do not think this can happen to you, you have not been paying attention. Rommelmann offers a guide for how to survive it.

View this article.

“Together, you and I and our 2016 campaign began the political revolution,” said Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) in a Tuesday morning email blast. “Now, it is time to complete that revolution and implement the vision that we fought for.”

Welcome to the Sanders 2020 presidential campaign.

Already, most of the prominent Democratic candidates have been campaigning far to the left of most Democrats in recent elections or their own former selves. A large part of this can be attributed to Sanders’ success in 2016 and the momentum for democratic socialism that it ushered in.

Sanders’ entry into the campaign could cause some of them to pull back, or to go further left, to stand out. So far, Sen. Jonie Ernst has been the only one making an appeal for the unclaimed middle ground.

Klobuchar seems willing to say one word that often goes unspoken by presidential candidates: No. From Medicare for all to the Green New Deal to free college, she’s resisted the urge to pander as she tests the balance between pragmatism and purity. #KlobucharTownHall

— Jeff Zeleny (@jeffzeleny) February 19, 2019

Meanwhile, Sen. Elizabeth Warren is rolling out a plan for a massive new entitlement program:

Elizabeth Warren is about to unveil a universal child care plan…

• It’s free for families

• Families above that pay 0-7% of income on child care

• Nobody pays >7%, however many kids they have

• Financed by wealth taxhttps://t.co/v7oCPtiVLf

— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) February 19, 2019

(What’s a “wealth tax,” you ask? More here.)

Asked about his age, Sanders told Vermont Public Radio that “we have got to look at candidates, you know, not by the color of their skin, not by their sexual orientation or their gender and not by their age. I mean, I think we have got to try to move us toward a non-discriminatory society which looks at people based on their abilities, based on what they stand for.” Here’s Sanders’ video announcement:

FREE MINDS

“It’s not accurate to say, ‘This sort of thing almost always turns out to be a hoax,’ and it’s also not accurate to say, ‘This sort of thing almost never turns out to be a hoax.'” National Review’s Jim Geraghty addresses actor Jussie Smollett’s alleged hate crime, which police now suspect he faked. “The way we measure hate crimes is imperfect; more police agencies are collecting data and providing it to the FBI than in the past, making year-to-year comparisons,” he notes.

Nearly 1,000 police agencies started providing data to the FBI in 2017 who weren’t in 2016. Last year many news organizations reported hate crimes “increased by 17 percent” but we don’t know how much of that represents the crimes occurring more frequently or simply more extensive data collection.

Still, many progressives are convinced that that we’ve seen a huge spike in hate crimes since Donald Trump was elected. Of course, many conservatives see similarly delusional spikes in immigrant crime, notes Geraghty. And on both sides, people are willing to go to extreme lengths to validate people’s fears.

FREE MARKETS

Promising response to Tumblr prohibition. “With Tumblr’s strict adult-content ban, which began a slow rollout in December, kinky bloggers fled the site–searching for, and trying to build, new communities,” points out Fast Company.

One of the fastest growing of these sites is relative newcomer newTumbl, which has gained about 40,000 blogs since it launched on December 31. True to its name, the site closely resembles Tumblr–at least the NSFW parts that are now banned. But newTumble is also promising ways for posters to earn money for original content–what may be a growing trend.

QUICK HITS

• “Thirty-five percent of Americans name the government, poor leadership or politicians as the greatest problem facing the U.S.,” reports Gallup. “This is the highest percentage Gallup has recorded for this concern.” (Cheers!)
• RIP Karl Lagerfield.

this note from Karl Lagerfeld for Dazed’s 25th birthday is lovely –
‘Freedom – the greatest luxury’
What’s your ultimate fantasy? – ‘I nearly realised them all’ pic.twitter.com/ptBHH5eXbl

— Anna Cafolla (@AnnaCafolla) February 19, 2019

• Houston police say they will stop serving no-knock warrants. (Read Jacob Sullum on the most recent tragedy they spawned there.)
• Stockton, California, is testing a basic income program.
• The governor of Wisconsin just proposed decriminalizing possession and legalizing medical marijuana, while recreational marijuana legalization is moving forward in New Jersey.
• A civil liberties win in Alabama:

On Monday, Judge Watkins ruled that Alabama’s branding of registered sex offenders’ identification cards is a form of compelled speech prohibited by the First Amendment. “The branded-ID requirement compels speech,” he writes, “and it is not the least res… https://t.co/kcpG7xN1sA pic.twitter.com/m7y2i6COXn

— The NAPD (@NAPD2013) February 15, 2019

• Are you ready for the embryo adoption debate?