Category: reason

A Pennsylvania police officer tased a sitting suspect in the back, and video of the incident is going viral.

A Facebook video shows a man since identified as Sean Williams, 27, on a sidewalk as a Lancaster police officer, identified as Philip Bernot, gives him instructions to sit on the curb.

Bernot can be seen pointing his Electronic Control Device (ECD) towards Williams while he speaks. Bernot tells Williams to put his legs “straight out,” which he does. Bernot then tells Williams to cross his ankles. As Williams begins to pull his legs back, Bernot, who is standing behind the seated man, shoots his ECD into Williams’ back.

“Oh come on, bruh. You’re really going to tase him? He was sitting down,” shouts the bystander who captured the incident on camera. “That’s crazy. That’s why I record everything.”

Lancaster Mayor Danene responded to the incident after the video circulated. Sorace said in her own Facebook video that she was “upset” by the initial video. She went on to say that the use of force was taken “very seriously” and announced an investigation was underway. Sorace also mentioned communication with civil rights groups and confirmed her support for a body camera initiative.

A report from the Lancaster police offers one explanation for the events leading up to the tasing. An Officer Mazzante responded to an initial call in the area about a disturbance. The caller accused Williams of going after them on the street. Mazzante came across a group fitting the caller’s description and told Williams to sit down after he repeatedly told one of the females in the group that he wanted his Social Security card.

Mazzante repeated her instructions “several times” before Bernot took over. The subsequent events were captured on video and posted online.

Emergency medical services followed protocol by performing a check on Williams. Officers took him into custody after finding an outstanding warrant, which charges were listed as “Possession of a Controlled Substance (PCP) and Public Drunkeness.” He was later released on a $5,000 bail.

California Gov. Jerry Brown signed a bill into law Thursday that prevents cities and counties in the state from levying sales taxes on groceries, including soda and other sugary beverages, through 2030.

Sounds great, right? On the surface, yes, but Brown and other Democratic lawmakers in the state weren’t motivated by a desire to protect citizens from excess taxation. Rather, Brown signed Assembly Bill 1838 in an effort to ensure that California localities can keep on increasing other types of taxes.

The bill, which passed with overwhelming support in both houses of California’s legislature, is the result of a compromise between lawmakers and the beverage industry, which was supporting a statewide ballot measure that would have made it difficult for cities and counties to raise all local taxes. Had the ballot measure passed, local tax increases would have needed the approval of two-thirds of voters rather than just a simple majority.

In a signing statement addressed to the California State Legislature, Brown assured lawmakers he understands that soda taxes “combat the dangerous and ill effects in the diets of children,” but indicated he had no choice in the matter. Just four cities in the state are currently passing soda taxes, he wrote, while indicating that the tax initiative had the potential to affect all 482 cities in California.

He also noted that the ballot measure would have restricted “the normal regulatory capacity of the state by imposing a two-thirds legislative vote on what is now solely within the competency of state agencies.” Such a restriction, Brown believes, “would be an abomination.”

The ballot initiative, which was formally withdrawn within minutes of Brown signing AB-138 into law, would have had a significant impact on local tax increases. According to California’s nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office (LAO), about half of local tax measures approved by voters since 2012 did not receive two-thirds support. Those measures have raised hundreds of millions of dollars in tax revenue each year, the LAO said.

The initiative did have some support in the state legislature, particularly among several Republicans who weren’t happy it was withdrawn and didn’t think AB-1838 was a particularly good compromise.

“This bill tells one million people that signed this petition to make it harder to raise their taxes that their voices don’t matter,” said state Sen. Jeff Stone (R–Temecula), according to the Los Angeles Times.

Assemblyman Matthew Harper (R–Huntington Beach), blasted Democrats who voted in favor of AB-1838 even though they support soda taxes. “Don’t cry your crocodile tears at me,” Harper said.

Indeed, there were many Democrats who said publicly they didn’t like AB-1838 but ultimately voted yes on the measure.

“I think this is a terrible decision that we’re making,” said Assemblyman Kevin McCarty (D–Sacramento), who still supported the bill.

“What on Earth has happened here?” said Assemblyman Richard Bloom (D–Santa Monica), who also voted yes.

State Sen. Scott Wiener (D–San Francisco), couldn’t bring himself to support AB-1838, but said he understood many of his colleagues felt like they had to do so. He claimed the beverage “industry is aiming basically a nuclear weapon at governing in California and saying if you don’t do what we want, we’re going to pull the trigger and you are not going to be able to fund basic government services.”

“This is a pick-your-poison kind of situation, a Sophie’s choice. What the legislature is doing is perfectly reasonable,” Wiener added, according to The Sacramento Bee.

In essence, Brown and other lawmakers supported AB-1838 because they didn’t want to give taxpayers a bigger say in government. The result is passage of a bill that no one seems to actually like.

Government workers tasked with taking prohibited e-scooters off Nashville’s streets have been caught riding them instead.

Nashville’s NBC affiliate WSMV aired surveillance footage yesterday of employees from the city and county’s shared Metro Public Works department having a grand old time riding confiscated e-scooters in a Metro-owned parking lot while on duty.

Now, it’s certainly hard to fault anyone for enjoying themselves on these e-scooters, which are owned by scooter company Bird. They’re a breeze to ride. But Metro employees doing so is a bit awkward given the agency’s aggressive crackdown on these same vehicles.

In May, Bird launched in Nashville, dropping hundreds of their dockless e-scooters in and around the city’s downtown. One day later the company was hit with a cease and desist letter from Metro attorney Theresa Costonis demanding that the scooters be taken off public sidewalks until a permitting and regulatory framework could be put in place.

Costonis expressed shock and dismay at the idea that Bird hadn’t asked for permission before they littered their scooters all over town, telling the Tennessean, “This is completely new and we didn’t know this was coming. We don’t have anything in place that would allow them to have started operating right off the bat.”

What followed was a sweep of Nashville’s streets that saw Metro impound over 400 of Bird’s scooters on the grounds that they were unlawfully obstructing public rights-of-way.

Bird’s own legal counsel Sam Jackson said Metro was “grossly exceeding” its authority with these sweeps, arguing that the city’s code governing right-of-way obscurations only deals with fixed objects like signs, trees, and banners. Seizing the company’s property without a court order was “unconstitutional” said Jackson. In early June the company agreed to suspend its operations while the city drafts regulations for dockless e-scooters. Currently there are no Bird scooters on the streets of Nashville.

Metro has stressed that its employees’ joyriding was an isolated incident that would not be repeated.

“These were unanticipated and unique circumstances,” the agency said in a statement adding that “we have spoken with the employees and they have assured us that nothing like this will happen again.”

The stern warning is nice. What would be better still is if the agency would stop its crackdown and allow Nashville residents—government workers and private citizens alike—the same freedom to ride clearly irresistible e-scooters.

Back in November of 2016, President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for Treasury Secretary, Steven Mnuchin, announced that the privatization of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would be a “top 10 priority” for the new administration.

Eighteen months later, the Trump administration has finally outlined a plan to reshape the two government-backed mortgage firms. But, like other aspects of the administration’s recent proposal to overhaul the federal government, the suggested reshaping of Fannie and Freddie doesn’t go nearly far enough.

“It’s not removing government from the housing sector; it may shift government subsidies from Fannie and Freddie to other entities, but that’s it,” says John Berlau, senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

While the Trump administration’s plan does advocate terminating the conservatorship of Fannie and Freddie, the proposal would also permit new firms to apply for the same type of charter, creating an environment where many more of these corporations might proliferate, bankrolled by the government. More importantly, the proposal does little to ameliorate the “affordable housing goals” that lend themselves to dangerous lending policies.

“They’re saying they will make the implicit support for the GSEs explicit,” says Berlau. “It’s going to be something the government commits to and taxpayers are going to be on the hook for.”

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs)—that is, corporations created by an act of Congress—that purchase mortgage loans on the secondary market from banks, which they generally sell to investors in the form of mortgage-backed securities. While these GSEs don’t engage in the business of loaning themselves, they put money back into the hands of the bank to engage in more lending, often more than would be permitted under general market conditions.

They can do that because their securities are considered low-risk, like government bonds. They hold a multi-billion dollar line of credit with the U.S. Treasury, essentially guaranteeing taxpayer bailouts to these corporations in the event of another economic downturn.

By artificially boosting mortgage lending, Fannie and Freddie inflate home prices, and—largely thanks to the political pressures—encourage banks to lend to borrowers more likely to default. Those factors played a role in the mortgage crisis that triggered the 2008 financial collapse.

In the wake of that economic catastrophe, the federal government took Fannie and Freddie into conservatorship. It now backs even more mortgages than it did before the financial crisis. If another mortgage crisis hits, Fannie and Freddie might need $100 billion in new bailout money, according to a stress test conducted by the Federal Housing Finance Agency.

The solution to problems created by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac isn’t simply restructuring government programs, but instead completely eliminating them. In a recent piece for Forbes, Heritage Foundation Research Fellow Norbert Michel described the dangers of the GSEs: “The legacy of the GSEs, as it would be with any such private-public partnership, is crony capitalism, higher mortgage debt, higher home prices, taxpayer bailouts, and no appreciable expansion of homeownership.” Trump has a historic opportunity to affect real change in a sector that’s been devoid of sensible reform for a long time.

At least 19 agents working for an investigative division within Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) are asking for separation from the agency. In a letter first reported by The Texas Observer, agents from the Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) division informed Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen M. Nielsen that their affiliation with ICE’s immigration enforcement tactics have jeopardized their ability to conduct investigations unrelated to immigration.

The four-page letter explains that HSI’s mission and that of ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) are fundamentally different. HSI, referred to as the “U.S. Government’s ‘Transnational Investigative’ agency,” specializes in drug trafficking, human trafficking, and trade fraud investigations. The division has played a major role, for instance, in prosecutions of dark web drug vendors operating in the United States.

However, the fact that HSI resides under the same bureaucratic umbrella as ERO has negatively impacted the division’s ability to investigate matters unrelated to immigration. From their letter:

The disparate functions performed by ERO and HSI often cause confusion among the public, the press, other law enforcement agencies and lawmakers because the two missions are not well understood and are erroneously combined. ERO’s administrative actions have been mistaken for illegal investigations and warrantless searches. HSl’s investigations have been perceived as targeting undocumented aliens, instead of the transnational criminal organizations that facilitate cross border crimes impacting our communities and national security. Furthermore, the perception of HSI’s investigative independence is unnecessarily impacted by the political nature of ERO’s civil immigration enforcement. Many jurisdictions continue to refuse to work with HSI because of a perceived linkage to the politics of civil immigration. Other jurisdictions agree to partner with HSI as long as the “ICE” name is excluded from any public facing information. HSI is constantly expending resources to explain the organizational differences to state and local partners, as well as to Congressional staff, and even within our own department—DHS.

We’ve seen before how aggressive immigration enforcement can compromise other types of investigations. The East Valley Tribune based in Tempe, Arizona, published a five-part series documenting the ways former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s emphasis on immigration enforcement affected law enforcement resources. In fact, the “Reasonable Doubt” series explained that the overemphasis led to “slower response times on emergency calls, a dropping arrest rate and, for a time, excessive overtime costs.” That series earned the Tribune a Pulitzer Prize in 2009. As the Pulitzer committee noted, the report exposed “how a popular sheriff’s focus on immigration enforcement endangered investigation of violent crimes and other aspects of public safety.”

President Donald Trump lamenting Canadian shoe smuggling during a recent speech to a small-business group sounds like the plot of the farcical 1995 movie called “Canadian Bacon.” Its premise wasn’t much stranger than Trump’s complaint that Canadians cross the border, shop for shoes, then “they wear them” and “scuff ’em up” as they head back home to Saskatoon or Halifax. It’s a common way to avoid duties on foreign purchases.

In the movie, a U.S. president was battling low popularity. America had run out of genuine enemies, so the president ginned up a phony conflict with our neighbors to the north. One of the movie’s rare funny scenes was when actor John Candy insulted Canadian beer during a hockey game, thus starting a riot that gave the president the cold-war idea.

It would all be so politically incorrect, except the whole joke was based on an obvious point: Canada is one of the most peaceful nations in history. Even Trump has to realize that if the biggest problem we have with another country is that its citizens come and—gasp!—spend money at U.S. shopping malls, then it’s not a particularly big problem, eh?

Sure, it’s hard to grasp the president’s rude remarks toward Canada as he praises a guy who runs the world’s largest concentration camp (North Korea’s Kim Jong Un). But few Americans get too upset because we know there won’t be any serious repercussions at the northern border. But, of course, most of the president’s ire has been directed at the other border, and problems in our less-developed and more troubled (but still friendly) southern neighbor continue to spill over, writes Steven Greenhut.

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In an effort to promote national pride and “social cohesion,” French President Emmanuel Macron is reinstating a mandatory national service program for all 16-year-olds.

Back in 2017, when he was running for president, Macron said he wanted all young adults in the country to experience military life. France conscripted young people into the military until the late 1990s, when it got rid of the draft.

Macron’s new program, which officially begins in 2019, does not bring back the draft. Rather, the only mandatory part of the program is a month-long placement focused on civic culture, during which 16-year-olds have the option of doing teaching or charity work, or military, police, or fire service training. Aside from that mandatory one month, participants can spend an optional three months to a year either volunteering or working in the defense or security fields.

The main goal of the program seems to be the promotion of nationalistic ideals. Macron apparently wants young French citizens, both boys and girls, to “value” their citizenship and feel like they are truly part of the French community.

The program’s official aim, according to a statement from the Elysee Palace, is to “encourage the participation and commitment of every young person in the life of the nation, to value citizenship and the feeling of belonging to a community gathered around its values, to strengthen social cohesion and boost the republican melting pot.”

“The [program] will be a time to meet others that will be useful and profitable for every young person, and a special opportunity to learn and receive, but also to give and engage, regardless of social background,” the statement continued.

However, the idea of this national service program has garnered mixed reviews from the French people.

A YouGov poll conducted in March revealed that 60 percent of French citizens support a mandatory national service program. But when the opinions of young people themselves were taken into account, the idea received less than 50 percent support. Moreover, even before the plan was announced, 14 youth organizations said they were unhappy that young people are not being given any choice in the matter.

It appears the opinions of those affected the most don’t seem to matter all that much.

The same line of thinking the late famed economist Milton Friedman used to argue against the draft and in favor of a volunteer army applies here. In Friedman’s book Two Lucky People: Memoirs, which he co-wrote with his wife Rose, he recalled a conversation he had with U.S. Army Gen. William Westmoreland about the draft.

“In the course of his [Westmoreland’s] testimony, he made the statement that he did not want to command an army of mercenaries. I [Milton Friedman] stopped him and said, ‘General, would you rather command an army of slaves?'” the passage reads.

France isn’t forcing young people into military service, but it is forcing nationalism down their throats. And the people whose lives will be affected by this program have no say in the matter.

In May 2017, President Donald Trump visited Saudi Arabia to finalize a massive $110 billion sale of “American-made” weapons. The deal was part of his America First initiative. “That was a tremendous day,” Trump said. “Hundreds of billions of dollars of investments into the United States and jobs, jobs, jobs.”

The Trump administration hopes to expand this effort via arms export deregulation. “We want to see those guys, the commercial and military attachés, unfettered to be salesmen for this stuff, to be promoters,” a senior administration official told Reuters, writes Veronique de Rugy.

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Yesterday’s “targeted attack” on the Capital Gazette newspaper in Annapolis, Md., left five people dead and two others injured. The shooter was arrested and charged with five counts of first-degree murder. He was identified via facial recognition software as 38-year-old Jarrod W. Ramos.

His motive doesn’t seem related to any of the political agendas offered up in the immediate aftermath by hacks and provocateurs. The Gazette describes Ramos, of Laurel, Md., as a man “with a long-standing grudge against the paper.” He had sued the paper in 2012 for defamation for its coverage of a criminal harassment case against him, and a Twitter page in his name featured the columnist who had written about him as Ramos’ avatar. The account’s bio:

Dear reader: I created this page to defend myself. Now I’m suing the s— out of half of AA County and making corpses of corrupt careers and corporate entities.

From the earliest reports of the shooting on Thursday afternoon, people were quick to assign blame to their pet peeves du jour. Sean Hannity seemed to blame Maxine Waters’ recent calls to confront Trump officials. Many media and Twitter types credited Milo Yiannopoulos with inspiring the attack, after he said last week that he couldn’t “wait for the vigilante squads to start gunning journalists down on sight.”

On his radio show yesterday, Hannity commented: “I’ve been saying now for days that something horrible was going to happen because of the rhetoric. Really Maxine? You want people to create—Call your friends, get in their faces,’ and Obama said that, too. ‘Get in their faces, call them out, call your friends, get protesters, follow them into restaurants and shopping malls,’ and wherever else she said.”

Hannity later denied that these comments were meant to link Waters’ rhetoric to the shooting.

Baltimore Sun media critic David Zurawik condemned “the hypocrisy, the dishonesty, the willingness by Hannity to try and score partisan political points on the bodies of five dead journalists.”

“I would give anything for time to truly process my feelings before writing about the shooting that left five dead Thursday at The Sun‘s sister publication, the Capital Gazette,” wrote Zurawik at the Sun yesterday. “But Sean Hannity made that impossible with another one of his partisan culture-war, bomb-tossing comments.”

Yiannopolous responded with comparably more humanity than Hannity, although after noting that “like any normal person I am saddened to hear of needless death,” the bulk of his response was devoted to decrying the blame he was assigned in the first place:

You’re about to see a raft of news stories claiming that I am responsible for inspiring the deaths of journalists. The bodies are barely cold and left-wing journalists are already exploiting these deaths to score political points against me. It’s disgusting. … I made a private, offhand troll to two hostile reporters, who breathlessly publicized it and like vermin their fellow journalists swarmed to remind the world how much they hate Milo.

In the midst of all this, Gazette reporters have been trying to keep the focus on their experience and their fallen colleagues:

• Rob Hiaasen
• Rebecca Smith
• Gerald Fischman
• John McNamara
• Wendi Winters

FREE MINDS

Conservatives perceive more social media censorship. A new poll from the Pew Research Center found 70 percent of Americans think popular social media platforms are actively censoring certain political views. Republicans and conservatives are more likely than liberal-leaning counterparts to believe they’re being censored.

“Eighty-five percent of Republicans and those who labeled themselves conservative independents said it’s likely that social media platforms censor political speech,” notes Bloomberg. “And 64 percent of Republicans think technology companies support the views of liberals over conservatives.”

Overall, 43 percent of Pew survey respondents said tech companies “support the views of liberals over conservatives.” Around a third of those surveyed said tech firms “support the views of men over women.”

QUICK HITS

• Around 575 people, mostly women, were arrested yesterday at a Washington, D.C., sit-in protesting President Trump’s immigration policies.

• The Senate has passed a farm bill that does not include the controversial food stamp provisions passed by the House.

• ICE agents call for the abolition of ICE.

In the most inoffensive possible way, US Steel confirms to @GlennKesslerWP that Trump is wrong about the company opening “six” (or, last night, “seven”) plants. Trump keeps saying the company CEO called to tell him about these fictional openings. https://t.co/45NJA2j3qE pic.twitter.com/5aEDjCvlYr

— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) June 28, 2018

• “New Jersey is just days away from a government shutdown,” reports The Washington Post. “Unlike shutdowns of the federal government over partisan fights between the political parties in Congress, the fight in new Jersey pits Democrats against each other.”

• The more you know: “The Earliest Mammals Kept Their Cool With Descended Testicles.”

Plastic straw bans won’t help the environment, but that’s no reason not to pass them.

Or so argue straw prohibitionists who want the little suckers outlawed in the hope of provoking environmentally friendly soul searching among inconvenienced consumers. “Straw bans aren’t going to save the ocean, but they could jumpstart much-needed conversations about the level of non-biodegradable trash in them,” writes Vox‘s Radhika Viswanathan, who gets all the facts about straws and their minimal effect on the environment right but still manages to come out in favor of a ban.

Viswanathan is joined by Dune Ives, executive director of the Lonely Whale Foundation, whose organization has targeted straws as a “gateway plastic.” With “plastic water bottles too endemic, plastic bags already somewhat politicized, and no viable alternative for the plastic cup in ALL markets,” Ives wrote in an October 2017 blog post, her organization had to find something to ban.

Straws, Ives says, made the perfect target: too inconsequential to really be missed but so ubiquitous that their absence would be noticed. “To us, it was the ‘gateway plastic’ to the larger, more serious plastic pollution conversation,” says Ives, whose organization was instrumental in getting Seattle to ban straws with its “Strawless in Seattle” campaign.

Does it make sense to support ineffectual bans in the hope that they might, through the power of conversation, spark an attitudinal change? Petty restrictions on people’s behavior usually makes them less sympathetic, not more, to the cause the rules are supposed to serve. And whatever benefits they might produce must be weighed against the very real costs they impose on those forced to comply with them.

Consider Caroline Lee, the owner of Young Tea, a bubble tea shop in downtown Seattle. She has been rushing to replace her stock of plastic straws with the now-mandated biodegradable type by July 1, when the city’s ban goes into effect. “I would say that it’s six to seven times more expensive than the regular plastic straw,” Lee says.

These compostable straws are also less durable, which increases shipping and storage costs. “It cannot endure high heat,” Lee says. “When we ship it over sea, we use an insulation blanket to cover the cartons. It’s pretty expensive.” She adds that the new straws last only 16 months before becoming stale and unusable.

These costs, says Lee, are forcing her to impose some new austerity measures on her customers. “Some of the customers would grab two straws,” she says. “We have been generous about that. Now we just give one straw per drink, and we are thinking of raising up the price a little bit to compensate for the costs.”

Lee says she shares the concerns animating the straw banners but is nevertheless conflicted about the policy. “As a business owner it is hard,” she says. “It’s more costs for us, but I too am concerned about so many plastics…so for me it’s complicated.” Lee suggests the city should compensate businesses affected by the straw ban by lowering their taxes.

No such plans are in the works. Instead the city will fine Lee $250 for any violations of the new straw policy.

The burdens placed on Lee and business owners like her seem to be pretty far from the minds of straw banners. Viswanathan’s Vox article spends not a word on how bans affect businesses. Neither did Ives’ Lonely Whale Foundation when it was pimping paper straws during its “Strawless in Seattle” blitz last September.

Activists instead are choosing to focus on the magical, planet-saving conversations that will spring from diners, drinkers, and coffee sippers who are told they can’t grab an extra straw on the go.