Category: reason

Administrators at the University of Kansas took down a controversial work of art—an American flag covered in black ink—after the state’s Republican governor and secretary of state demanded action.

“The disrespectful display of a desecrated American flag on the KU campus is absolutely unacceptable,” said Gov. Jeff Colyer in a statement. “Men and women have fought and died for that flag and to use it in this manner is beyond disrespectful. I spoke to leadership to demand that it be taken down immediately.”

The flag is meant to symbolize “a deeply polarized country,” according to the artist, Josephine Meckseper. Now it represents the speed with which craven university administrations bow to the easily offended. In a statement, KU Chancellor David Girod said:

There has been much discussion today about a public art exhibit on our campus featuring an artist’s depiction of an American flag. Our Spencer Museum, along with other institutions nationally, have participated in this year-long series of exhibits intended to foster difficult conversations.

Over the course of the day, the conversation around this display has generated public safety concerns for our campus community. While we want to foster difficult dialogue, we cannot allow that dialogue to put our people or property in harm’s way.

We have begun the process of relocating the exhibit to the Spencer Museum of Art, where we can continue the important conversation it has generated.

That’s right: the university invoked public safety as an excuse to remove a work of art that offended conservatives.

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education has called on KU to reverse course. KU “should take a strong stand for the First Amendment,” FIRE’s Peter Bonilla said. “By doing so, KU would stand apart from the numerous institutions that have censored artistic expression—a troubling trend documented in our just-released report, ‘One Man’s Vulgarity,’ drawn from FIRE’s many years fighting against art censorship on campus.”

An explosive new report reveals that the Nashville Metro Public Health Department exposed the personal information of thousands of people diagnosed with HIV and AIDS

The Tennessean reports that Metro Health keeps a database of those diagnosed with HIV and AIDS in the middle Tennessee region. The information comes from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Enhanced HIV/AIDS Reporting System (eHARS), which explains that the information is used to assist “health departments with reporting, data management, analysis, and transfer of data to CDC.” Like the national database, the Tennessee list contains sensitive information about each patient, including “social security numbers, birthdays, addresses, lab results and some of the intimate secrets of private lives.” Only three government scientists were authorized to see that information, and only to work on a project related to an HIV grant program. But thanks to a mistake made by a person managing the database, access was granted to more than 500 health department employees.

The information sat on a shared government server for nine months. While officials do not believe that the database was ever breached, they’ve run into a secondary issue. An auditing feature that would be able to track server activity was found to be inactive. Had someone taken it upon themselves to open the files and copy sensitive patient information, they would have been able to do so without alerting officials or leaving a trail. This information suggests that while public officials don’t think the database was ever misused, they actually can’t know if that’s true.

The error was discovered two months ago by Metro Health officials. Metro Health spokesperson Brian Todd explained to the Tennessean how the information made its way to the shared server:

The data was initially moved to a server folder reserved for the Ryan White Program, an HIV grant program, then moved again a day or two later to another server folder that was accessible to all Metro Health employees. The data stayed in this folder until it was discovered by an employee in April.

“To our knowledge, only the employee who moved the file to the public folder inappropriately accessed the file, simply by moving it,” Todd said in an email. “Her intent was to provide access to an epidemiologist within the department to analyze the data, but that epidemiologist never opened the file. So the personal information in the database was, to our knowledge, never inappropriately accessed.”

An investigation was conducted upon discovery, but no actions were taken against any of the employees, including Pam Sylakowski, director of the Ryan White Program and the employee behind the incident. A new server was reportedly created with tighter security and the incident was used as a teaching moment.

Thunder Kellie Hampton, an HIV advocate with Street Works, tells the Tennessean that the breach will discourage many from being tested out of fear for their private information. “I think the gut reaction for many people when they find out about this is ‘I don’t want to get tested. I don’t want my information out there,'” she explained.

The first time New Hampshire State Rep. Sherman Packard (R–Rockingham) heard of the car-sharing startup Turo, it was from a lobbyist.

Enterprise Rent-A-Car, Packard says, has a “huge footprint in my community. So they called me up and said, ‘Hey, let’s be fair about this.'”

To the Enterprise lobbyists, being fair meant forcing Turo—which is basically Airbnb, but for your car—to pay a 9 percent tax, the same one the state charges on hotel rooms, meals, and other tourist expenses, including rental cars. (New Hampshire has no general sales tax.)

The appeal to fairness worked. In January, Packard introduced a bill in the state legislature that would tax and regulate businesses like Turo as if they were rental car companies. Enterprise and its lobbyists had won.

That may seem like a routine dispute between a state government and a disruptive new technology that doesn’t easily fit in existing boxes for tax and regulatory purposes. But Packard’s bill is just one small part of a national effort by traditional rental car companies to use their political clout against a newcomer that threatens the old business model, writes Reason‘s Eric Boehm.

View this article.

Transportation Security Administration (TSA) screeners cannot be held liable for abuse claims under the Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA), a federal court ruled Wednesday.

The 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a dismissal of a lawsuit filed against the TSA by Nadine Pellegrino and her husband. According to The Hill, Pellegrino was upset after she “was randomly selected for additional screening” at Philadelphia International Airport in July 2006.

As USA Today recounts, Pellegrino asked for a private screening, though she took issue with the way the officers treated her bags. When the officers were done searching her luggage, she took her larger bag and started to leave, but not without incident. According to USA Today:

The bag struck one of the TSA officers in the stomach, according to the officers. Pellegrino said an officer stood in her way as she tried to retrieve her smaller bag, and the bag hit him in the leg as she left, according to the officers.

Pellegrino was detained, and two TSA officers decided to press charges. Though she was acquitted in 2008, Pellegrino and her husband sued the TSA in 2009 for “false arrest, false imprisonment and malicious prosecution,” Reuters reports.

In a 2-1 ruling, the 3rd Circuit said TSA officers are immune to abuse claims from passengers like Pellegrino. The court reasoned that agency employees are not classified as “investigative or law enforcement officers” under the FTCA, which is the law that enables people to file claims against federal employees.

In his dissent, Judge Thomas Ambro argued that the FTCA’s definition of “investigative or law enforcement officers” includes people with the “legal authority” to carry out searches looking for violations of the law. Ambro also noted that it will now be very difficult for victims of TSA abuse to get the justice they deserve. “By analogizing TSA searches to routine administrative inspections, my colleagues preclude victims of TSA abuses from obtaining any meaningful remedy for a variety of intentional tort claims,” he wrote.

Writing for the majority, Judge Cheryl Ann Krause noted that the court was “sympathetic to the concerns” the ruling may raise, and recognized that “individuals harmed by the intentional torts” of TSA officers “will have very limited legal redress.”

Pellegrino, who said she’s reviewing the court’s ruling, could take several different courses of action.

“If I were the plaintiffs, I’d get new counsel with a proven track record of winning cases at the Supreme Court and appeal this decision,” Patrick Eddington, a policy analyst who studies civil liberties at the Cato Institute, told Reason. Eddington said Pellegrino and her husband could “make this an issue” in their local House race, which might put the ruling on Congress’s radar.

“There’s nothing to stop the House member representing the plaintiffs from filing impeachment articles against all involved TSA employees,” Eddington says. “Just filing the impeachment resolution might be enough to make TSA give the implicated screeners the boot.”

“They are devoting law enforcement resources to sting operations for this?” Adult film star and locus of national scandal Stormy Daniels was arrested last night at Sirens, a strip club in Columbus, Ohio. The stop was part of a tour Daniels is taking across the country, which included a visit to D.C. Monday and Tuesday nights.

Attorney Michael Avenatti, who is representing Daniels in her lawsuit against Donald Trump, tweeted early Thursday morning that Daniels was arrested while “performing the same act she has performed across the nation at nearly a hundred strip clubs. This was a setup & politically motivated. It reeks of desperation. We will fight all bogus charges.”

At the D.C. show I saw Monday night, Daniels got up close and personal with the audience, but in a clearly theatrical way. This seems to have continued in Columbus, where Daniels was arrested for allegedly allowing a customer to come in contact with her in a non-sexual manner, according to Avenatti on Twitter.

Ohio prohibits any touching—sexual or otherwise—between nude or semi-nude performers and members of the audience at “sexually oriented” establisments. According to the police report, Daniels, while “topless and wearing a G-string,” touched an undercover police officer “in a specified anatomical area.” Specifically, she is accused of putting “both hands on officers buttocks” and “then put her breast in officers face.”

“Are you kidding me?” Avenatti tweeted early this morning. “They are devoting law enforcement resources to sting operations for this? There has to be higher priorities!”

Higher priorities for local cops than getting to take in naked ladies for a few hours and then assert their authority over the most famous of them? Avenatti can’t be that naive.

Daniels was officiall charged with three misdemeanor counts of touching a patron at a sexually-oriented business. She’s slated to be arraigned in the Franklin Municipal Court Friday morning. She will plead not guilty, according to Avenatti.

In a statement, Daniels announced that she would have to cancel her second scheduled night of Columbus performances. “I deeply apologize to my fans in Columbus,” she said.

FREE MARKETS

Presidents have been trying unsuccessfully for years to get Germany and other rich NATO Nations to pay more toward their protection from Russia. They pay only a fraction of their cost. The U.S. pays tens of Billions of Dollars too much to subsidize Europe, and loses Big on Trade!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 12, 2018

Trump continues boorish and bizarre behavior at NATO summit. The president announced that NATO allies will increase spending, as he desires, but offered little in the way of details. French President Emmanuel Macron has since denied Trump’s claim.

FREE MINDS

Kansas govenor censors campus art. The Kansas governor and secretary of state are demanding that the University of Kansas remove a work of art from the school’s “Pledge of Allegiance” exhibit, part of a nationwide public art series from New York nonprofit Creative Time. The offending flag, Josephine Meckseper’s “Untitled (Flag 2),” is “a collage of an American flag and one of my dripped paintings which resembles the contours of the United States,” said Meckseper.

Here’s a good roundup from FIRE of art censorship on college campuses.

QUICK HITS

Gawker auction today. This will be interesting. https://t.co/ZpMCLfBXzT

— Sharon Weinberger (@weinbergersa) July 12, 2018

• The feds are reopening an investigation into the murder of Emmett Till.
• Is the demise of liberalism overhyped? “Scholars and statesmen have been declaring liberalism dead or in deep crisis for at least a century and a half. A review of the many deaths of liberalism might have something to teach us about what, in fact, is happening in the world today.”
• John Schnatter, the founder of Papa John’s, has resigned as chairman of the company. Papa John’s stock fell nearly 6 percent on Wednesday, and Major League Baseball suspended a long-running Papa John’s promotion campaign, after it was reported that Schnattner used the word “niggers” during a May conference call. He allegedly noted that “Colonel Sanders called blacks niggers” but didn’t face a backlash like the one Schnattner experienced for comments made about the NFL.
• Twitter is plotting another bot purge.
• Comcast and Fox are in a bidding war over the U.K.’s Sky News.
• TSA officials “have sovereign immunity while working in their official functions as screeners and security agents under the Federal Tort Claims Act,” according to a new ruling from the Third Circuit Court of Appeals.
• England is out of the World Cup after losing 2-1 to Croatia last night.
• RIP James Wells.
• Abolishing ICE isn’t a very popular idea (yet).

President Donald Trump doubled down on his trade war Wednesday and members of Congress finally took their first tiny steps toward containing the economic damage.

Markets fell Wednesday as the White House announced a new round of 10 percent tariffs on $200 billion of Chinese products, a move that will force American consumers and businesses to pay higher taxes for imported goods including refrigerators, cotton, electronics, and fish. The Trump administration said the tariffs were a response to China’s decision last week to place tariffs on $34 billion worth of American exports, which was itself a retaliatory move aimed to strike back at the Trump administration for placing a 25 percent tariff on the same amount of Chinese goods on July 6.

As the trade war between the world’s two largest economies escalates, we still don’t know what the White House hopes to gain from the confrontation. American and Chinese trade officials told The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday that there are no negotiations scheduled between Washington and Beijing.

While the administration says the trade barriers will force China to stop stealing American intellectual property, it appears more likely that non-Chinese businesses will bear the brunt of the tariffs, according to an analysis by the Peterson Institute for International Economics. Economists say the tariffs are unlikely to force China to change its trade practices, though they could succeed in doing significant damage to the economies of both nations.

The new set of tariffs will be the subject of hearings in late August, and will not take effect until after those hearings have concluded.

Meanwhile, the Senate voted to include a provision in the Farm Bill limiting the president’s power to lay tariffs for national security reasons. An amendment co-sponsored by Sens. Bob Corker (R–Tenn.), Jeff Flake (R–Ariz.), and Pat Toomey (R–Pa.) would require congressional approval before the president could impose tariffs under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962—the authority that Trump has invoked to impose steel and aluminum tariffs, and which he has threatened to use to slap new tariffs on imported cars and car parts.

“This Section 232 provision is being misused,” Toomey said. The delegation of those powers to the presidency were meant to ensure that America’s military could obtain materials necessary for fighting a war, he explained, but Trump has seized on that authoity “as a way to impose tariffs on some of our closest allies, closest friends, and most important trading partners.”

The amendment passed 88-12, with all “nay” votes coming from Republicans.

The nonbinding vote is, for now, mostly meaningless. Still, the bipartisan support for limiting the president’s ability to abuse the Section 232 tariff authority is the first sign that Republicans in Congress might be willing to stand up to Trump as he continues escalating an unnecessary trade war.

In a statement, Corker said he believed support for the proposal would grow as “American businesses and consumers begin to feel the damaging effects of incoherent trade policy.”

That might already be happening. Wednesday’s vote could also signal a shift on trade within the Senate’s GOP leadership: when Corker tried to offer a similar amendment back in June, his colleagues prevented him from doing so.

In the last month, Trump has followed through on the threat to impose tariffs on Chinese imports (those tariffs were not issued under Section 232, however, and would not be subject to the congressional oversight included in Corker’s proposal, which targets the broader steel and aluminum tariffs that took effect in early June). In response to the White House’s bellicose trade policies, several American businesses—including famous motorcycle manufacturer Harley-Davidson—have announced plans to close, move, or eliminate jobs

“This vote represents the strongest and most straightforward message this chamber has delivered against the administration’s abuse of trade authority,” said Flake in a statement. “Imposing tariffs on products from allies that pose no threat to our national security is just plain wrong.”

When it comes to trade, we should take President Trump at his word, writes Veronique de Rugy. This is one policy area where he’s been remarkably consistent over the years. As we embark on a trade war, let’s put this question to rest. Deep down, President Trump is not a free trader. In face, she writes, nothing in what the president has ever said suggests that he’s anything but a diehard mercantilist.

View this article.

When Sam Cygler started AllCar Rent-A-Car in 1979, New York City was home to over 100 mom-and-pop rental car companies. Cygler, who at the time was running an auto repair shop in Brooklyn far from the subway, noticed that his customers often needed loaner vehicles to get to work. So he bought a couple of cars and put them up for rent. The idea took off, eclipsing the repair business altogether. AllCar Rent-A-Car grew to have 12 locations in the Big Apple with a fleet of about 2,000 vehicles.

Chains like Hertz and Avis, with their national reach and corporate partnerships, have long dominated the car rental industry. But New York’s low rate of vehicle ownership provided plenty of market opportunities for local operators. By constantly “nipping at the heels of the majors,” says Sharon Faulkner, executive director of the American Car Rental Association (ACRA), the independents helped keep overall rates down.

Then, a decade after Cygler got started in the industry, a series of punitive state laws started wiping out New York’s mom-and-pop rental car shops, writes Jim Epstein.

View this article.

Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni says the mouth is for eating, not sex. Museveni, who has overseen a crackdown on LGBTI people, says “outsiders” are trying to corrupt Ugandans by promoting oral sex.

The press wants access to footage that might show what Broward County sheriff’s deputies were doing during the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School earlier this year. Broward County officials would rather not give it to them. After a judge ruled in the media’s favor, the school board and the state attorney appealed the ruling. Yesterday the Fourth District Court of Appeal in West Palm Beach, Florida, heard oral arguments in the case.

The battle began when the sheriff confirmed that the school’s resource officer, Scot Peterson, did not go inside of the school to confront the shooter. (Peterson eventually resigned from the department with a $8,702.35-a-month lifetime pension.) Then members of the Coral Springs Police Department claimed to CNN that three more sheriff’s deputies remained outside the school and hidden behind their vehicles when they arrived on the scene. It was not clear whether the shooter was in fact still in the building when the officers arrived, but the Coral Springs cops were upset either way that the deputies did not join them inside the school.

Hoping to explain the deputies’ behavior, several media organizations sued for the exterior footage. Officials resisted the request, claiming that releasing the footage could facilitate future attacks by revealing blind spots in the school’s surveillance system.

Attorney Dana McElroy, representing the plaintiffs, points out that Broward Superintendent Robert Runcie has promised to improve school surveillance. So even if someone somewhere really is plotting a second attack, whatever info he might glean from the video would be outdated.

“The footage is the only objective evidence of what occurred and when,” Barbara Petersen of the First Amendment Foundation, which has joined the media side of the lawsuit, tells the Miami Herald. “The whole purpose of our open government laws is oversight and accountability. Access to the video footage allows us to hold those accountable who may not have done their jobs.”

Though the sheriff’s office fought the initial lawsuit, it did not join the school board and the state attorney in the appeal. Spokesperson Veda Coleman-Wright has said the office has no objection to publicizing the footage.