C.I. Whose Heroin Buy Led to a Deadly Houston Drug Raid Does Not Seem to Exist

The no-knock search warrant for the drug raid that killed a middle-aged couple in their Houston home on January 28 seems to have been based on a “controlled buy” that never happened by a confidential informant who does not exist. According to a February 8 search warrant affidavit obtained by KPRC, the NBC station in Houston, investigators looking into the raid at 7815 Harding Street, the home of Dennis Tuttle and Rhogena Nicholas, have been unable to identify the C.I. who supposedly bought heroin from Tuttle the day before.

Sgt. Richard Bass submitted the February 8 affidavit in support of a warrant to search a cellphone used by Steven Bryant, a narcotics officer who participated in the raid and who was suspended last week because of unanswered questions about the warrant for it, which was obtained by Gerald Goines, another narcotics officer. Bass says Bryant talked to Goines, who was shot during the raid and remains hospitalized, and relayed the name of the C.I., who denied making the purchase described in Goines’ affidavit.

Bryant went back to Goines and got the name of another C.I., who also denied participating in the controlled buy. Investigators eventually talked to all of the informants known to work with Goines, and “all denied making a buy for Goines from the Harding Street residence, and ever purchasing narcotics from Tuttle or Nicholas.”

If that transaction did not actually happen, it would explain why police found no heroin at the house, where the C.I. supposedly had seen many bags of it. No did they find the 9mm semi-automatic handgun that Goines said the C.I. also mentioned. Bass notes another inconsistency: While Goines’ affidavit says Bryant saw the brown powder purchased by the C.I. and recognized it as black-tar heroin, Bryant told Bass he did not see the heroin until he was asked to retrieve it from Goines’ car so it could be tested.

“Often when individuals communicate with their confidential informants,” Bass notes, “they will use their cellular devices to communicate via telephone call or text message.” Hence he hoped the contents of Bryant’s cellphone would help illuminate the circumstances that led to the deadly raid.

The story that is now emerging goes something like this. On January 8, a woman called the Houston Police Department to complain that her daughter was “doing drugs” inside the house at 7815 Harding Street. “Her daughter was in the house, and there were guns and heroin,” Police Chief Art Acevedo said at a press conference three days after the raid. “The informant stated she did not want to give any information because they were drug dealers and they would kill her.” But last week KTRK, the ABC station in Houston, reported, based on interviews with “sources close to the investigation,” that the “informant” was Nicholas’ mother, who was worried about her own daughter’s drug use. According to Acevedo, two patrol officers who went to the house in response to that call overheard a passer-by refer to it as “the dope house.”

Aside from that incident, the only evidence that Tuttle and Nicholas were drug dealers was the controlled buy reported by Goines, which now appears to have been invented. If so, it is easier to understand why neighbors who spoke to the press after the raid say they never saw any suspicious activity at the house, notwithstanding Acevedo’s claim that “the neighborhood thanked our officers” for the raid “because it was a drug house” and a “problem location.”

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Report from ‘Alienated America’: Podcast

“The American Dream is dead,” declared Donald Trump in 2015 when he announced he was running for president. “If I get elected president, I will bring it back bigger and better than ever before.”

One of the most interesting outcomes of the 2016 election is that about 10 percent of people who voted for Barack Obama ended up voting for Trump. Such switch voters, many of whom lived in rural parts of contested states in the Midwest, helped him eke out a victory. They voted for Obama in 2008 because they wanted change they could believe in. In 2016, they were still looking for change, this time from a New York billionaire.

In his new book Alienated America: Why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse, Timothy P. Carney does a deep dive on many of the places that voted first for Obama and then for Trump. It’s a powerful, provocative, and deeply reported look at a contemporary political and social landscape in which much of the traditional social fabric of marriage, family, and work has been worn away and replaced by distant, “overcentralized” bureaucrats and businesses.

For today’s Reason Podcast, I talk with Carney, commentary editor for the Washington Examiner, about the causes of social breakdown, the policies that can help struggling people, and the limits of any president’s power to revive the American dream.

Subscribe, rate, and review our podcast at iTunes. Listen at SoundCloud below:

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In a State of Emergency, the President Can Control Your Phone, TV, and Even Your Light Switches: New at Reason

December 11, 1941, is not nearly as memorable a date as the one that lives in infamy. But that Thursday after Pearl Harbor is still an important moment in American history, because it’s the day that Germany declared war on the United States and the U.S. immediately reciprocated. And it was on that date that President Franklin Roosevelt told his press secretary, Stephen T. Early, that the government should take over one of the national broadcast networks.

Early informed James L. Fly, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and director of the newly created Defense Communications Board (DCB), that Roosevelt had personally directed Fly to acquire a national broadcast network for the government. Both the FCC and the DCB were empowered by Section 606 of the 1934 Communications Act, which expressly gave the president full control over electronic transmissions in case of war or a national emergency.

Section 606 remains in effect today, and now that President Donald Trump is declaring yet another national emergency, it’s important to reconsider it, writes Michael Socolow for Reason.

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Bill Weld’s Strategy: Eviscerate Trump, Champion 1990s Policies, Stammer About Party Loyalty

Bill Weld, as expected, announced this morning in New Hampshire that he has launched an exploratory committee that will likely discover a desire to mount a primary challenge to President Donald Trump. You can watch Weld’s whole address at Saint Anselms College’s “Politics & Eggs” breakfast, plus some follow-up questions and answers, below:

The speech was a dry policy sandwich jammed between two juicy slabs of Trump-bashing. “I’m here because I think our country is in grave peril, and I cannot sit quietly on the sidelines any longer,” Weld began. And then, near the close: “I encourage those of you who are watching the current administration nervously but saying nothing to stand up and speak out when lines are crossed in dangerous ways. We cannot sit passively as our precious democracy slips quietly into darkness.”

If that pitch sounds eerily reminiscent of a Trump-era newspaper slogan, it’s no coincidence. Weld shares with his friends in the Acela-corridor journalism world a visceral sense of revulsion at the president’s boorish flouting of behavioral and policy norms. In an opening bill of particulars that wouldn’t look out of place on CNN or MSNBC, the former Massachusetts governor and 2016 Libertarian Party vice presidential nominee eviscerated the president for praising “despotic and authoritarian leaders abroad,” failing to adequately “call out and denounce appalling instances of racism,” and railing against “the very idea of the rule of law.” Then came the editorial board-pleasing kicker:

||| Weld 2020“He acts like a schoolyard bully, except of course when he’s around other bullies, like Mr. Putin,” Weld charged. “And then he turns ingratiating, all smiles, kicks the American press out of the Oval Office, and has his summit meeting with Mr. Putin with no news media present except TASS—the state organ in Russia. For what possible reason?” (Later, when asked to cite one particularly egregious and motivational Trump outrage, Weld repeated the anecdote.)

Sticking up for the American press corps has not, to put it mildly, been a winning strategy in modern Republican politics. Yet it could help earn Weld a lot of free media and non–Howard Schultzian goodwill, particularly during this man-bites-dog phase of being the only Republican candidate daring and/or foolish enough to take on Donald Trump.

Leaning into that potential role as Trump’s foil, Weld took evident delight this morning reiterating what he told the Manchester Union-Leader yesterday: “My favorite stat on this score is the last nine times a first-term president has sought reelection, the four who had a primary challenge lost, while the five who didn’t have a primary fight won another four-year term….I think 2020 could very well make it five to zero.” If it sounds strange for a political-primary sales pitch to include a gleeful reference to the party in question losing the general election, well, welcome to Weld’s odd world.

The former Barack Obama and John Kasich supporter’s slippery loyalty to political parties generated his most awkward moments, both inside and outside the New Bedford Village Inn. “That’s a poser, that’s an issue; people are entitled to take that into account,” he said, haltingly, when asked in a post-event press gaggle about backing out of his pledge of lifetime loyalty to the Libertarian Party. “It’s just, stakes have gotten higher since then.” The first two questions after his speech had to do with his 32-month fling inside the Libertarian Party; Weld just sidestepped the second to tout his record as a Republican governor.

“Weld is the same ex-Republican who deserted Massachusetts for New York; who endorsed President Barack Obama over Senator John McCain for President; who renounced the GOP for the Libertarian Party; who ran against the Trump-Pence Republican ticket in 2016, while cozying up to Democrat Hillary Clinton,” a gleeful Massachusetts GOP Chair Jim Lyons shot out today in a press release. “After abandoning Republicans, Democrats, and Libertarians, Weld demands that faithful Republicans consider him as their standard bearer. Even Benedict Arnold switched allegiances less often!”

But what of Weld’s substantive policy ideas? There, his rap called to mind the 1990s generation of moderate conservative reformers from which he sprang. There was talk of a 19 percent flat tax, Social Security opt-outs, health savings accounts, free trade agreements, job retraining, putting social services out to private bids, letting health care consumers cross state lines, encouraging school choice, abolishing the Department of Education, and so on. The main new 21st century wrinkles to these Mitch Daniels/Steve Forbes–style prescriptions were nods toward criminal justice reform and the legalization of cannabis-related pain relievers.

||| Matt WelchLike Howard Schultz but unlike virtually all other modern Republicans and Democrats, Weld called for “bold action now” on the “completely crazy” national debt, “before it’s too late.” Here he took a rare swipe at progressives: “Unfortunately, especially in the left wing of the Democratic Party, socialism seems to have replaced any notion of spending restraint,” he said. “We need the opposite of socialism. In the federal budget, the two most important tasks are to cut spending and to cut taxes, and cutting spending comes first.”

Weld also broke with Democrat/media tendencies in calling for the end of the “death tax” and for a reduction of the capital gains tax to 10 percent. He surely will alienate some Republicans, on the other hand, with his desire to get back into the Paris Climate Accord and deliver on “the pressing need to act on climate.” (“It’s not a stretch to say that if climate change is not addressed, our coastlines and those of all other countries will, over time, be obliterated by storm surge and the melting of the polar ice cap. Yet climate skeptics claim that they aren’t concerned!”) And he’s aligned more with Trump than the establishment when it comes to opposing “regime change in foreign countries at the whim of the U.S. government, even in the absence of any substantial threat to the United States.”

But it isn’t on a policy level where Weld is ultimately aiming to connect. The point of his run is as a wake-up call for GOP voters to admit that in their hearts they know Trump is wrong. “Republicans in Washington, many of them, exhibit all the symptoms of Stockholm Syndrome, identifying with their captor,” he charged. “The truth is that we’ve wasted an enormous amount of time by humoring this president, indulging him and his narcissism, and his compulsive, irrational behaviors….The situation is not yet hopeless, but we do need a mid-course correction. We don’t need six more years of the antics we have seen.”

Where to from now? Weld says that he’ll make it official after testing the waters, unless he receives “a virtually unanimous Who-do-you-think-you’re-kidding?” There are New Hampshire appearances scheduled for February 26 and March 4, and even though he has a natural home-field advantage in the northeast, he swears that any real primary run would be a “national campaign.”

“In every country,” his remarks concluded, “there comes a time when patriotic men and women must stand up and speak out to protect their own individual rights and the overall health of the nation. In our country, this is such a time.” Or so Bill Weld is banking on.

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The Enemy Within Will Scratch Your Spy Show Itch: New at Reason

'The Enemy Within'With The Americans gone and but a single reason remaining for Homeland, the field is clear for another spy show. And we just may have a contender with NBC’s curiously under-publicized The Enemy Within, a steely tale of a hunt for a mole in the CIA.

A near-perfect mixture of the chess-piece intricacy of The Good Shepherd and the loony bang-bang of the Mission: Impossible movies, Enemy is a classic infinity-of-mirrors counterintelligence drama—and in more ways than one.

Not only do the molehunters have to think backwards as they chase a virtuoso of deception, but they can’t even trust their top strategist. Erica Shepherd (played by Jennifer Carpenter, the fabulously foul-mouthed younger sister in Dexter) is one of the most despised traitors in modern American history, confined to a supermax prison after giving away the identities of several CIA operatives with terminal results.

She’s been brought back to work only because she’s the greatest expert on a Russian intelligence officer named Tal, the same one who recruited her to kill her own colleagues in return for inducements she won’t reveal. Television critic Glenn Garvin takes a closer look.

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Hyperlink Taxes? Meme Bans? E.U. Pushes Forward with Massively Terrible Copyright Regulations

Minion memeHyperlink licenses? Legally forbidden memes? That’s what may be coming.

A European Union plan to update copyright protection laws for the internet era is getting even more oppressive, and the recently released iteration of the European Copyright Directive has supporters of free speech seeing red.

There’s a possibility that online platforms will have to seek out a license (and possibly pay) simply to show snippets of content when linking to pieces at news sites—and that any online platform that lets users upload their own content will have to impose filters (and again, possibly, pay a lot of money) that will block copyrighted content from being posted.

We’ve been noting what’s been going on with Article 11 (the link tax) and Article 13 (the upload filter) since last summer. It looked as though resistance to the massive breadth of the regulations might lead to some reforms. (Article 13 might be so broad that it bars people from posting memes that include copyrighted images.) But Julia Reda, a member of the E.U. Parliament and member of the German Pirate Party, warns that they’ve actually made it even worse.

In an article posted on her site this week, Reda says that under Article 11 as it is currently written, “Reproducing more than ‘single words or very short extracts’ of news stories will require a license. That will likely cover many of the snippets commonly shown alongside links today in order to give you an idea of what they lead to. We will have to wait and see how courts interpret what ‘very short’ means in practice—until then, hyperlinking (with snippets) will be mired in legal uncertainty.” There are no exceptions to this rule, and there’s no opt-out process for media outlets to proactively declare they’re OK with people excerpting their works.

This is being pushed by large publishers, who have apparently decided to blame their financial woes on news aggregators, rather than the disruption to their dominance as an advertising platform. Google has warned that Article 11 will not accomplish what these publishers think it will, and that the end result will be to make it harder for consumers to find quality news stories online. Google has experimented with producing news search pages that are compliant with Article 11, which essentially means linking to media outlets without including anything that identifies the content on the other end. Last week Kent Walker, the company’s senior vice president of global affairs, warned the law will result in massive traffic losses to media sites.

But it will probably hurt small and new, emerging publishers more than it hurts the entrenched outlets, and that probably suits those bigger folks just fine.

Meanwhile, Article 13 may be disastrous enough to just wreck everything. Cory Doctorow, writing at the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s websote, notes that the new version of Article 13 requires any online platform or service that has been around for more than three years or earns more than $11 million a year to make sure no user posts anything that infringes any copyrights. Period.

This aggressively proactive demand will require that platforms put into place upload filters—which are both very expensive and prone to mistakes—to check anything people post against databases of copyrighted works. If a court determines that a platform isn’t trying hard enough to stop such uploads, the platform can be held financially liable.

As Doctorow notes, only the biggest of tech companies can afford these filters. (And even they struggle to actually keep copyrighted content off their sites. Indeed, it’s not always clear who all the copyright holders even are.) The extremely predictable outcome of such a broad law will be massive amounts of censorship by websites worried about the potential financial implications of failing to catch copyrighted material. Nobody wants to get fined by some E.U. court because one of your Minion memes offended some lawyers over at Universal Pictures. Even a dating site could be held responsible if someone posts a copyrighted photo.

Needless to say, this all has enormous implications for the right to speak. We’ve already seen people (particularly businesses) use copyright claims to try to scare online platforms into deleting content that critiques them. This is just absolutely ripe for abuse.

These regulations could still be killed. While resistance from enough member states could block it, Reda predicts that the most likely way of stopping these terrible regulations will be at a full vote by the E.U. Parliament in either March or April. She and the Electronic Frontier Foundation are calling on constituents in the member countries to contact their members of th E.U. Parliament.

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U.S. Citizens Sue Border Patrol Agent Who Detained Them for Speaking Spanish

“So it is illegal to speak Spanish in Montana?” Ana Suda asked Border Patrol Agent Paul O’Neal after he detained her and her friend Mimi Hernandez at a convenience store in Havre, a small town near the border with Canada, on a Wednesday evening last May. “Well, ma’am,” O’Neal replied, “it’s not illegal. It’s just very unheard of up here.” And that, to his mind, provided reasonable suspicion that the two women, both U.S. citizens and Havre residents, were in the country illegally, justifying a 40-minute detention while he investigated their immigration status.

O’Neal was wrong about that, according to a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union yesterday. “There was no legitimate reason for Agent O’Neal and other CBP [Customs and Border Protection] agents to detain Ms. Suda and Ms. Hernandez,” the complaint says. “Speaking Spanish does not establish reasonable suspicion justifying a stop and detention, much less probable cause for an arrest.” The ACLU is asking for compensatory and punitive damages as well as an injunction barring CBP from “stopping and/or detaining individuals on the basis of race, accent, and/or speaking Spanish, except where the seizure is based on a specific and reliable suspect description matching such characteristics.”

Suda and Hernandez, certified nurse assistants who work at the Northern Montana Care Center, were not suspects until O’Neal, who is assigned to CBP’s Havre office, heard them speaking Spanish at the Town Pump convenience store, where they had stopped to pick up eggs and milk after exercising together at a local gym. When Hernandez greeted him in English, O’Neal, who was wearing his uniform and carrying a gun, commented on her accent and asked her and Suda where they were born. “Are you serious?” Suda said, according to her account. “Dead serious,” O’Neal replied. So they answered him: El Paso, Texas, Suda said. El Centro, California, Hernandez said. O’Neal asked for identification, and the women handed over their Montana driver’s licenses.

Although Montana requires applicants for driver’s licenses to provide “proof of authorized presence,” such as a birth certificate or a passport, O’Neal was not satisfied. He kept Suda and Hernandez detained in the store’s parking lot for another half an hour or so while he checked on outstanding warrants, called a supervisor, and waited for him to arrive.

In a cellphone video that Suda and Hernandez shot outside the store, one of them asks O’Neal, “Can you tell us in the video, please, why you ask us for our IDs?” His reply does not leave him much legal wiggle room: “Ma’am, the reason I asked you for your ID is because I came up in here and saw that you guys are speaking Spanish, which is very unheard of up here….It has to do with you guys speaking Spanish in the store in a state where it’s predominantly English-speaking.”

According to the complaint, Suda asked O’Neal’s supervisor whether she and Hernandez would have been detained if they had been speaking French. “No, we don’t do that,” the supervisor replied. The ACLU argues that O’Neal used the women’s language and accents as proxies for race, thereby violating the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection as well as the Fourth Amendment’s ban on unreasonable seizures.

In 2006 the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, which includes Montana, ruled that Border Patrol agents in Havre violated the Fourth Amendment when they detained six Latino men at a high school football game based on their “appearance as a work crew,” their proximity to the border, and their inability to speak English. While those factors were relevant in establishing reasonable suspicion, the appeals court said, they did not suffice to meet that threshold. It pretty clearly follows that speaking Spanish as well as English, as Suda and Hernandez do, cannot establish reasonable suspicion.

Suda says the incident and the publicity surrounding it have made life in Havre uncomfortable. “After the video of the stop was picked up by the news,” she writes on the ACLU’s blog, “Mimi and my families have been harassed repeatedly for speaking out. We received hateful messages from people across the country, but the worst was what happened in our own town, a place I considered home. At his high school, a teacher asked Mimi’s son whether he had brought his ID to class. My 8-year-old daughter is scared to speak Spanish and has started responding to me in English when I ask her questions….I’ve had people yell at me in restaurants and bars, saying that I am ‘an illegal.'”

Suda concedes that she could have avoided this backlash if she had kept quiet about the encounter with O’Neal. “Maybe life would have gone back to normal,” she says, “but then I think about my kids. I want them to not only be proud of being bilingual, but I also want them to know that they live in a country where people can’t just be stopped and interrogated based on how they look and sound.”

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Trump Wants To Raid an Asset Forfeiture Black-Box Fund To Build His Border Wall

President Donald Trump’s plan to build a wall along the southern U.S. border will partially rely on the Treasury Department’s asset forfeiture fund, according to news reports, but that money comes from a secretive fund potentially rife with civil rights abuses.

Among other sources, the Trump administration reportedly plans to use $600 million from the Treasury Department’s Asset Forfeiture Fund, which holds revenues from asset seizures by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and agencies under the Department of Homeland Security, such as Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Since 2014, ICE and CBP have seized more than $4 billion worth of property that was allegedly used in crimes, according to government records obtained by Splinter. Among the seized assets were human remains. The Treasury Department’s forfeiture fund had a balance of $2.2 billion as of fiscal year 2017.

But it’s unclear how many of those cases were criminal forfeitures, in which the property was forfeited after the federal government obtained a criminal conviction against a defendant; and how many were civil forfeitures, wherein the government seized property on the mere suspicion that it was connected to criminal activity.

Unlike the Justice Department, which makes its asset forfeiture database available to the public, the Treasury Department has stonewalled public records requests for its database. In 2016, the Institute for Justice, a libertarian-leaning public interest law firm, filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Treasury Department and CBP to obtain their forfeiture databases.

“The federal government is actively trying to conceal detailed information about where this money comes from,” says Robert McNamara, a senior attorney at the Institute for Justice. “We have sought it through Freedom of Information Act requests. They have refused to turn it over, and we’re in active litigation trying to get our hands on information about where this money comes from.”

“The problem with these civil forfeiture cases is the problem with civil forfeiture, which is that it involves taking property without requiring the government to actually prove beyond a reasonable doubt that someone is a criminal,” McNamara continues. “Exactly what sources and what individuals this money comes from is obscure, and it’s obscure because that’s the way the federal government wants it to be.”

One such example is the case of Kentucky farmer Geraldo Serrano, whose 2014 Ford F-250 pickup truck was seized by CBP agents after they found five stray bullets in it. CBP attempted to forfeit Serrano’s truck under the dubious suspicion that he was involved with international arms smuggling. Serrano, backed by the Institute for Justice, had to fight for two years to get his truck returned, even though he was never charged with a crime.

CBP regularly seizes large amounts of cash at airports, even when there is no evidence of criminal activity. An Albanian immigrant, Rustem Kazazi, who became a U.S. citizen in 2011, sued CBP last year after he was stripped searched and had $58,000 in cash seized from him at a Cleveland airport. Kazazi says he was traveling back to Albania to possibly buy property and converted his savings to cash. CBP claims they suspected Kazazi was involved in drug trafficking or money laundering.

However, the agency failed to file a claim against Kazazi’s money within the 90-day deadline, and then failed to return his money after the deadline passed. Last June, the U.S. government agreed to return nearly all of the cash, although Kazazi says it seized $770 more than it claimed.

Civil asset forfeiture has been roundly criticized by civil liberties groups and a wide, bipartisan swath of lawmakers at both the federal and state level because of abuses just like these. More than half of all U.S. states have passed some form of asset forfeiture reform over the last decade in response to similar cases.

A 2017 report by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) found that, between 2012 and 2014, the IRS seized more than $17 million from innocent business owners using obscure anti-money laundering rules and civil asset forfeiture. The inspector general found money seized and forfeited by the IRS was legally obtained in 91 percent of a sample of 278 structuring investigations it reviewed. As Reason reported:

The investigation was launched in 2014, when media investigations and several lawsuits by the Institute for Justice, a libertarian-leaning public interest law firm, highlighted the cases business owners who had their life savings seized by the IRS for violating anti-“structuring” rules.

The rules are intended to stop money launderers from evading federal banking regulations by making small cash deposits under $10,000, but IRS agents ruthlessly pursued cases against small business owners when there was no other evidence or indication of criminal activity. For example, The New York Times profiled the case of Carol Hinders, an Iowa woman runs a small, cash-only Mexican restaurant. In 2013, two IRS agents showed up at Hinder’s door and told her the agency was seizing $33,000 from her bank account for structuring violations. She was never accused of a crime.

In response to public outrage, the IRS announced in 2014 it was changing its asset forfeiture policies to only pursue cases where there is other evidence of criminal activity.

The IRS has previously released some limited data on structuring cases to the Institute for Justice, which leads them to believe the Treasury Department is intentionally stonewalling them.

“We know that they have this information, and we know that they can give it up, but they don’t want to give us the entire database,” says Jennifer McDonald, a senior research analyst at the Institute for Justice, “which leads us to believe that there is something they don’t want us to know about these funds.”

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A Presidential Tweet Can’t Stop the TVA from Shuttering Two Coal-Fired Generation Plants

TrumpCoalMichaelBrochsteinZumaPressNewscomWhen President Donald Trump heard this week that the Tennesee Valley Authority’s board of directors was preparing to vote on closing down two aging coal-fired electricity generation plants, he tweeted: “Coal is an important part of our electricity generation mix and @TVAnews should give serious consideration to all factors before voting to close viable power plants, like Paradise #3 in Kentucky!”

As it happens, that plant gets most of its coal from Murray Energy, whose CEO Robert Murray is a Trump supporter, according to Bloomberg News. His company donated $1 million to a political action committee that supported Trump-friendly candidates in the 2018 election. That could just be a coincidence.

Meanwhile, Sen. Micth McConnell (R–Ky.) released a video urging the TVA to keep the Paradise plant open. In the video, McConnell urges the board to consider the hundreds of jobs that depend on the plants and to delay its vote until two additional members have been appointed. He also notes, “In the Senate I championed efforts to end President Obama’s War on Coal.”

But the real war on coal is being fought in the marketplace, where coal for electricity generation is being outcompeted by abundant and cheap supplies of fracked natural gas. A 2017 National Bureau of Economic Research study calculated that the “declining price of natural gas relative to coal, on an energy-adjusted basis, explains 92 percent of the decline in coal production.”

The Energy Information Administration (EIA) reported in December that U.S. coal consumption in 2018 was expected to be the lowest in 39 years. This largely because power generators have been shifting to natural gas and renewable energy sources.

CoalConsumptionEIA

As a consequence, the EIA noted, “In 2007, coal-fired capacity in the United States totaled 313 gigawatts (GW) across 1,470 generators. By the end of 2017, 529 of those generators, with a total capacity of 55 GW, had retired. So far in 2018, 11 GW of coal-fired generating capacity has retired through September, and another 3 GW are expected to retire in the final three months of the year.”

ElectricitySources

The TVA’s chief financial officer, John M. Thomas III, has said that closing the two plants would save ratepayers $320 million without affecting the reliability and resilience of the agency’s fleet. In addition, both plants would require about $1.3 billion in capital investments to keep them operating. And even if two Trump toadies had already appointed to the board, the 6–3 vote would still have shuttered both the Paradise and Bull Run plants.

So the plants are closing, despite the president’s tweeting. So far, the Trump administration’s economically insane proposals to subsidize his cronies in the coal industry have been successfully opposed.

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Alita: Battle Angel Is A Movie About Our Post-Human Future—and Proof It’s Already Here

Alita: Battle Angel works a casual post-humanism into nearly every facet of its world. The film, a mega-budget adaptation of a popular manga series by filmmakers Robert Rodriguez and James Cameron, is set in a far-future post-war society where cyborgs are so common as to be unremarkable: People have robot arms, robot legs, and even, like the title character, full-fledgd robot bodies. Sometimes their robotic add-ons look like high-end limb replacements, but often they appear more like industrial machinery grafted on to the human form. It’s a movie that raises the question, why drive a lift when you can be one?

There’s a low-level market logic to this post-human landscape: The owners of these parts pay for upgrades and maintenance, and, because they are worth something, thieves occasionally try to steal the most valuable parts. When the movie opens, we see one mostly roboticized worker, more dirt-mover than man, paying for some limb repairs with a bag of fresh oranges. Adam Smith long ago noted that humans have a “propensity to truck, barter, and trade.” Alita assumes this holds true even when the human in question looks like an actual truck.

The various modifications are employed to facilitate heavy work, to play games, and, rather frequently, to fight (this is, after all, an action movie). At times the movie suggests these people are being exploited by various economic and political forces, but it never seems to pine for a return to a purely organic way of living. It does not embrace a post-human future so much as accept its usefulness and inevitability.

Alas, the movie itself could use some upgrades. Although Alita fills the screen with delightfully zany sci-fi ideas and imagery, the script, by Cameron and Laeta Kalogridis, is composed largely of expository treacle punctuated by dull hero’s journey pablum.

The supporting cast speaks mostly in monologues designed to explain bits of backstory to Alita, a cyborg head found in a trash pile and given a new life and body by the kindly Dr. Ido (Christopher Waltz, who mostly seems to wonder what he’s doing in this movie). Alita, who wakes up in her new body with no memory of her past, tends to respond by affirming her power and identity—”this is who I am” and so on and so forth. But she’s written as such a blank that all we really end up knowing about her, aside from some sci-fi backstory about how she became so powerful, is that she’s the sort of person who says “this is who I am” a lot.

The screenplay’s expository tendencies are compounded by its habit of on-the-nose naming: The story is set in Iron City, an urban industrial zone dominated by something called the Factory, which is, well, you can probably guess. Iron City exists in the shadow of Zalem, the last of the great “sky cities” (you’ll never guess what these are), the rest of which fell to Earth hundreds of years earlier, in an event known as, er, “The Fall.” The most popular sport is called Motorball, a mechanized game involving motors and balls, and the city has no law but is patrolled by ruthless mercenaries called Hunter-Killers. The name is self-explanatory, but the script offers potted dialogue to explain it anyway.

The overall effect is that Alita feels less like a movie and more like a lavishly rendered Wikipedia entry—a competent but joyless summary of fictional lore and plot details designed to tell you what the movie is about rather than help you come to understand it. It might have been better as a silent film with accompanying footnotes.

Indeed, the visuals are often breathtaking, particularly when it comes to Alita herself, who is rendered as a doll-like creature with unnaturally large and expressive eyes, as are common in Japanese manga. As played by Rosa Salazar, with a heavy assist from the movie’s special effects team, Alita is a marvel of big-budget moviemaking, a largely successful attempt to cross the uncanny valley by situating a character squarely within it. With the help of motion capture, which converts an actor’s movements into computer animation, Salazar is a kind of virtual cyborg herself—a human performer upgraded by computer-generated enhancements. She has been modified for her professional advancement and our entertainment, to astounding and occasionally unnerving results. The movie has no soul, but at times it almost convinced me she does.

As a story designed to engage the heart and mind, Alita: Battle Angel is less human than human. Yet as a demonstration of Hollywood’s technical prowess, it advances its own sci-fi premise: The post-human future is already here.

from Hit & Run http://bit.ly/2TYDSXq
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