Category: reason

One enduring image of Prohibition is that of people sipping bathtub gin—illegal booze of dubious quality and safety, cooked up to satisfy the thirst of drinkers in an America that tried to ban alcoholic beverages. Bathtub gin was the result of regulators trying to eliminate access to a popular product, inevitably inviting supply to meet demand in the black market.

But you don’t need an outright ban on alcohol to fuel the production of bathtub gin and its equivalents, notes J.D. Tuccille. A new report shows that the same result has been achieved in many countries through the imposition of excessively high taxes and overly restrictive regulations.

If you don’t want a black market in booze to develop, keep the tax man on a leash and regulators in check, argues Tuccille. And then, maybe, you can avoid repeated iterations of Prohibition and the bathtub gin it made so famous.

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An East Pittsburgh police officer was charged with criminal homicide Wednesday in the shooting death of a 17-year-old unarmed black teenager.

Michael Rosfeld, 30, represents an aberration, as most police officers involved in fatal shootings do not face criminal charges.

Rosfeld turned himself in on Wednesday morning. His bail was set at $250,000 and he will appear in court for a preliminary hearing on July 6, according to court documents.

Rosfeld, who is white, allegedly shot Antwon Rose Jr. three times on June 19 after police pulled over the car Rose and two others were in at the time.

Police believed the car matched the description of a vehicle that was involved in a drive-by shooting.

But after the car was pulled over, Rose and another male attempted to flee the scene on foot. At that point, Rosfeld allegedly opened fire.

No gun was found on Rose’s person, but police said there were two firearms in the vehicle he fled from. The driver of the vehicle was questioned and then released, while the other passenger was arrested for his alleged involvement in the drive-by shooting.

Rosfeld had years of experience as a police officer, but he was officially sworn in to the East Pittsburgh Police Department just hours before the shooting.

After the incident, he was placed on administrative leave.

Though nearly 1,000 people are shot and killed by police every year—504 so far in 2018, according to The Washington Post—it’s quite rare for officers involved in these shootings to be charged with a crime.

In fact, just 85 state and local police officers involved in on-duty fatal shootings have faced criminal charges since 2005, the Post reported in March, citing Bowling Green State University professor Phil Stinson.

Of those 85, just 32 have actually been convicted. Roughly half of those convictions resulted from guilty pleas.

Responding to the news that Rosfeld had been charged, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania indicated that it was a good first step, while noting that “the severity of the charge” has not yet been made clear.

“Too often, law enforcement use excessive or lethal force on people of color without any accountability or condemnation from the department or state prosecutors,” Reggie Shuford said. “That said, the severity of the charge is still unclear. No one is above the law and we hope the charge is commensurate with the severity of the crime.”

The shooting has led to protests in the Pittsburgh, due in part to the fact that a witness captured a video of Rose falling to the ground after being shot.

“This is a small stride toward justice but we have a very long road ahead,” Rose family attorney Lee Merritt tweeted Wednesday, referring the criminal homicide charge against Rosfeld.

He added that Rose’s “family regards the charging of Michael Rosfeld with guarded optimism. The family will settle for nothing less than a conviction and appropriate sentencing.”

Libertarian-friendly Democratic Rep. Jared Polis may end up saying goodbye to some of his Republican buddies like Rep. Justin Amash of Michigan and Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky this fall. Last night he clinched the Democratic nomination for governor of his home state of Colorado.

Polis handily beat three other Democrats, getting 45 percent of the vote. He’ll face off against Republican Walker Stapleton, the state’s treasurer (as well as several independents and Libertarian Party candidate Scott Helker). Here’s his victory speech:

Unfortunately, there wasn’t anything remotely libertarian about Polis’ campaign. While Polis may be rated as a “moderate Democrat” based on his voting history, he ran about as far left as he could manage for the primary. He’s running on universal health care under a single-payer system, universal full-day pre-K programs, and an emphasis on developing renewable energy sources and pushing for adaptation of electric vehicles. He even supports shelling out money to research high-speed rail transit for Colorado.

But as a congressman, Polis frequently crossed the aisle to find common ground with libertarian Republicans. He has been a force pushing for rescheduling marijuana so that it’s no longer a Schedule 1 drug. He even helped launch a bipartisan congressional caucus focusing on marijuana policy. He’s been a strong supporter of bolstering Fourth Amendment protections against unwarranted searches and surveillance. He pushed for stronger warrant requirements before the feds can access your old emails and has consistently joined lawmakers like Amash, Massie, and Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) in efforts to rein in the surveillance state.

Polis’ intersection with libertarian ideals on privacy and personal choice (he’s a supporter of charter schools, and has even founded them—though he’s opposed to vouchers and not a Betsy DeVos fan) prompted a Reason magazine profile of Polis back in 2014. You can watch my interview with him in D.C. here. Later in 2014 he wrote a piece for Reason himself encouraging libertarians to vote for Democrats as a counterpart to a piece by Grover Norquist encouraging libertarians to vote Republican.

Polis’ strong support for due process protections (he’s a member of the congressional Fourth Amendment Caucus) came under question when he supported colleges using remarkably low evidentiary thresholds to justify tossing out students on the basis of just allegations of rape or sexual misconduct. He said in a hearing on college sexual assault, “If I was running a [private college] I might say, well, even if there is only a 20 or 30 percent chance that it happened, I would want to remove this individual.” He took it even further, adding, “If there are 10 people who have been accused, and under a reasonable likelihood standard maybe one or two did it, it seems better to get rid of all 10 people. We’re not talking about depriving them of life or liberty, we’re talking about them being transferred to another university, for crying out loud.”

He defended his position when asked about it by Reason, but then subsequently acknowledged he “went too far by implying [he] support[s] expelling innocent students from college campuses… .”

If Polis wins, he’d be the first openly gay governor to do so (there have been governors who have come out while in office). That this doesn’t seem to be a big deal to anybody is an interesting indicator of political and cultural shifts.

He may have run to to the left to win the nomination, but that didn’t stop buddy Amash from tweeting out praise for Polis’ win:

Congrats to my friend—and the lone Democratic member of the @libertycaucus—@jaredpolis on his big primary win for governor of Colorado!

— Justin Amash (@justinamash) June 27, 2018

If the federal government continues its current spending habits, the national debt is projected to reach 152 percent of the annual gross domestic product by 2048, according to the latest estimates from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO).

In a report released Tuesday, the CBO said the national debt currently represents the highest share of the GDP—78 percent—since the period right after World War II.

The national debt is projected to reach roughly 100 percent of the GDP by 2030, and it could approach 152 percent by 2048.

“That amount,” the CBO said in a summary of its report, “would be the highest in the nation’s history by far.”

The CBO cited a list of contributing factors to explain its projections.

Spending on entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security, as well as overall rising health care costs and accumulating interest on the existing national debt, are to blame for the report’s grim outlook.

“Projected deficits rise over the next three decades because spending growth—particularly for Social Security, the major health care programs, and interest on the government’s debt—is expected to outpace growth in revenues,” CBO Director Keith Hall said in a statement that accompanied the report.

Hall added that rising spending on entitlement programs is due in part to “the aging of the population.”

But rising spending isn’t the only culprit. The CBO also indicated that the tax legislation signed into law late last year by President Donald Trump could contribute to the national debt—at least in the short term—as it reduces the amount of revenue the government takes in.

According to the CBO, the tax legislation will ensure that revenue remains “roughly flat over the next few years relative to GDP.” From, there, revenue is expected to increase slowly before jumping up in 2026, when most of the individual tax cuts expire.

After 2028, the tax legislation is not expected to have a major impact on the national debt, Hall said.

However, if the tax cuts are made permanent, the national debt could rise even more.

Overall, the CBO expressed concern that the federal debt situation could “hurt the economy” and potentially even lead to a “fiscal crisis.”

“Large and growing federal debt over the coming decades would hurt the economy and constrain future budget policy,” the report summary stated. “The amount of debt that is projected under the extended baseline would reduce national saving and income in the long term; increase the government’s interest costs, putting more pressure on the rest of the budget; limit lawmakers’ ability to respond to unforeseen events; and increase the likelihood of a fiscal crisis.”

Here’s a curious fact about the U.S. Supreme Court term that concluded today: Justice Neil Gorsuch racked up a more “liberal” voting record than Justice Anthony Kennedy.

Specifically, Justice Kennedy did not join the Court’s liberal bloc in a single 5–4 decision in the entire 2017–2018 term. That’s unusual for this swing-vote justice. In previous terms, Kennedy’s fifth vote has given the “liberal” side a win on such contentious issues as gay marriage and abortion regulations.

Justice Gorsuch, on the other hand, did side with the liberal bloc this term in the notable 5–4 case of Sessions v. Dimaya. That decision struck down a provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act that dealt with the power of the federal government to deport any alien, including a lawful permanent resident, convicted of an “aggravated felony.” The Dimaya majority opinion was written by Justice Elena Kagan and joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, and Sonia Sotomayor. Gorsuch, who concurred in part and joined in the judgment, provided the tie-breaking fifth vote.

The result of Dimaya is that it is now more difficult for the federal government to deport certain aliens under the Immigration and Nationality Act. Kennedy dissented.

Gorsuch’s views look even more “liberal” than Kennedy’s when you consider their respective approaches in the blockbuster case of Carpenter v. United States. In that ruling, the Supreme Court held that a warrantless government search of cellphone location data violated the Fourth Amendment. “We decline to grant the state unrestricted access to a wireless carrier’s database of physical location information,” the Court said.

Technically, Kennedy and Gorsuch both dissented from the Court’s 5–4 judgment in Carpenter. But the content of their respective dissents was entirely different. Kennedy dissented because he thought the Court should have let the warrantless searches stand. “Individuals have no Fourth Amendment interests in business records which are possessed, owned, and controlled by a third party,” Kennedy wrote. Cellphone records “are no different from the many other kinds of business records the Government has a lawful right to obtain by compulsory process.”

Gorsuch, by contrast, dissented because he favors “a more traditional Fourth Amendment approach” that asks “if a house, paper or effect was yours under law.” Cellphone records, Gorsuch observed, “could qualify as [your] papers” for Fourth Amendment purposes.

But because that approach was not raised by the litigants in the case, Gorsuch felt he had no choice but to frame his pro-Fourth Amendment position in the form of a dissent. Gorsuch then used that dissent as an opportunity to invite future litigants to make future arguments grounded in the “original understanding” of the Fourth Amendment.

Put differently, the whole point of Gorsuch’s dissent was to nudge the Court in a direction that could prove very favorable to Fourth Amendment protections and very unfavorable to the desires of law enforcement. It was the opposite of the pro-government approach favored by Kennedy.

Since joining the Supreme Court in 1987, Justice Anthony Kennedy has managed to delight and disappoint both liberals and conservatives (and libertarians) in nearly equal measure. This term it would appear that Kennedy is going to disappoint the liberal side most of all.

On Tuesday, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez pulled off a major victory over top House Democrat and 10-year-incumbent Rep. Joe Crowley (D–N.Y.). While the 28-year-old’s age, gender, and ethnicity were of much interest to those watching the 14th Congressional District race, there’s one thing about Ocasio-Cortez that particularly stands out—she’s a bona fide Socialist.

Ocasio-Cortez worked for the late Sen. Ted Kennedy (D–Mass.) and was an organizer for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) during his 2016 presidential campaign. But in a Monday interview with The Cut, Ocasio-Cortez reconfirmed that she was a member of the Democratic Socialists of America.

For Ocasio-Cortez, changing the perceptions around socialism meant focusing on policy: “You can call that whatever you want to call that. Legislatively, when I knock on a door, the way that it looks like is improved and expanded Medicare for all; it looks like housing is a human right; it looks like a federal jobs guarantee that guarantees a $15 minimum wage, paid family and sick leave, and health care. It looks like tuition-free public college, it looks like the exploration and expansion of federal student-loans forgiveness.”

Ocasio-Cortez added that her political affiliations were a “non-conversation” for voters. The election results from Tuesday night would seem to agree with her, as she led her opponent 58 percent to 42 percent. As for the legislative interests she represents, Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign website listed issues such as universal healthcare, stronger gun laws, and free college.

Alongside the issues, the campaign painted Ocasio-Cortez as a person of the people who is “running for Congress to create an America that works for all of us, not just a wealthy few.” She told Elite Daily that she is still paying off her student loans. A picture of her bartending at work less than a year ago circulated around the internet. In fact, one can still see Ocasio-Cortez on the cocktail bar’s home page.

President Donald Trump responded to the election results by suggesting that Crowley “should have been nicer” to him.

Wow! Big Trump Hater Congressman Joe Crowley, who many expected was going to take Nancy Pelosi’s place, just LOST his primary election. In other words, he’s out! That is a big one that nobody saw happening. Perhaps he should have been nicer, and more respectful, to his President!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 27, 2018

However, several others have come to a very different conclusion. Considering Crowley was predicted to succeed Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D–Calif.) as either the minority leader or speaker of the House, pundits are already calling Tuesday’s upset the Democrats’ “Eric Cantor moment,” drawing comparisons to the shocking 2014 defeat. When asked if the primary results indicated a rise in Democratic socialism in her party, Pelosi replied that it was “ascendant in that district perhaps,” adding that the Democrat Party was “big tent” and the win was about “representation.”

More than four decades after the Supreme Court ruled that public sector workers could be required to pay dues to unions even if they do not join one, a 5–4 majority on the high court overturned that precedent in a closely watched case that could have major ramifications for the future of public sector unions.

“Under Illinois law, public employees are forced to subsi­dize a union, even if they choose not to join and strongly object to the positions the union takes in collective bar­gaining and related activities,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote in the majority opinion. “We conclude that this arrangement violates the free speech rights of nonmem­bers by compelling them to subsidize private speech on matters of substantial public concern.”

In the short-term, the ruling in Janus v. American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees means that plaintiff Mark Janus was successful in his decade-long fight to prevent the union from taking $50 out of his paycheck every two weeks. Over the years, Janus estimates, he’s contributed more than $6,000 to the union.

More broadly, Wednesday’s ruling could end the automatic deduction of union dues from millions of public employees’ paychecks, forcing unions like AFSCME to convince workers to voluntarily contribute dues—something workers would do, presumably, only if they have a reason to do so.

“So many of us have been forced to pay for political speech and policy positions with which we disagree, just so we can keep our jobs. This is a victory for all of us,” said Janus in a statement. “The right to say ‘no’ to a union is just as important as the right to say ‘yes.’ Finally our rights have been restored.”

The ruling is “a landmark victory for rights of public-sector employees,” said Mark Mix, president of the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, which supported Janus’ lawsuit.

While today’s ruling certainly shifts the balance towards worker freedom, groups like the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, which represented Janus, say they are already prepared for additional rounds of litigation. In states that previously have embraced right-to-work policies, unions have often tried to make it as difficult as possible for workers to renounce their membership.

In speaking about his case, Janus has often framed the debate as one of free speech. His interest in not paying union dues was not an attempt to secure “a better deal” on his own outside the union model, he told Reason‘s Nick Gillespie in June. Rather, he said, “the question is my First Amendment rights to speech and freedom of association.”

That was a major point of contention during oral arguments in May. As Reason’s Damon Root noted at the time: “The union’s position, [Justice Anthony] Kennedy told [Illinois Solicitor General David] Frederick, involved ‘mandat[ing] people that object to certain union policies to pay for the implementation of those policies against their First Amendment interests.’ In other words, Kennedy seemed to suggest the mandatory fees at issue here are unconstitutional.”

The free speech question has divided libertarians, though. Eugene Volokh, editor of the Volokh Conspiracy blog (which is hosted by Reason.com), submitted an amicus brief to the Supreme Court arguing against the First Amendment angle to the Janus case.

Janus is the second case in recent Supreme Court history to wrestle with the underlying question of whether unions can compel the payment of dues from non-members. During 2016, the Supreme Court heard the Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association case, which similarly sought to free non-union members from paying union dues. That case ended in a 4–4 draw after Justice Antonin Scalia’s sudden death left the Court with an even number of conservative and liberal members.

Justice Neil Gorsuch, appointed to the court last year to fill Scalia’s spot, sided with the majority in Janus.

The Janus case, like Friedrichs before it, was aimed at overturning the 1977 Supreme Court ruling in Abood v. Detroit Board of Education, which upheld mandatory union fees.

In the majority opinion, Alito noted the importance of following precedent “unless there are strong reasons for not doing so.”

“But there are very strong reasons in this case. Fundamental free speech rights are at stake,” he wrote. “Abood was poorly reasoned. It has led to practical problems and abuse. It is inconsistent with other First Amendment cases and has been undermined by more recent decisions. Developments since Abood was handed down have shed new light on the issue of agency fees, and no reliance interests on the part of public-sector unions are sufficient to justify the perpetuation of the free speech violations that Abood has countenanced for the past 41 years.”

Unions had argued that overturning Abood would leave them with non-dues-paying members who would essentially become “free riders” benefitting from collective bargaining activities without contributing towards the associated costs. In a dissenting opinion, Justice Elena Kagan said the free-rider issue would be “a collective action problem of nightmarish proportions” for unions.

Whether you consider them free riders or not, unions are probably right to be worried about losing dues-paying members in the aftermath of the Janus ruling. An analysis by the Illinois Economic Policy Institute, a union-backed think tank, estimates that 726,000 workers nationally would stop paying dues if they had that choice. The loss of union members and their dues could be particularly challenging in blue states, according to the IEPI report. Public sector union membership would decrease by an estimated 189,000 members in California, 136,000 members in New York, and 49,000 members in Illinois.

“The response to Janus will be critical to the long-run survival of the U.S. labor movement,” the report warns.

“In the short run, the Janus decision may hurt some unions financially, but in the long run it will serve to make unions and their members more militant and force a stronger culture of internal organizing,” said Paul Shearon, secretary-treasurer for the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, in a statement to Reason.

Whether that’s true remains to be seen, but certainly TKDAY’s ruling ushers in a new era of union politics and shifts power back to individual workers to decide whether unions thrive or fail.

Read more Reason coverage of the Janus case.

John Stossel on the potential to extend “right to work” to public sector employees.

Damon Root on the First Amendment aspects of the case.

Scott Shackford on the Trump administration’s Department of Justice reversing it’s stance on mandatory union dues.

Eugene Volokh and Alicia Hickok debating the merits of the case.

And check out a conversation between Nick Gillespie and Mark Janus on the Reason Podcast.

Washington, D.C., just passed a steep tax hike on ridesharing services to pay for its increasingly unpopular, frequently on-fire Metro system.

On Tuesday the D.C. City Council boosted the city’s tax on trips performed by services like Uber, Lyft, and Via from the current 1 percent tax to a full 6 percent, adding 50 cents to a $10 ride.

D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser had proposed a more modest 4.75 percent tax on ridesharing trips back in March. City Councilman Jack Evans—who also chairs Metro’s board (which operates independently of the city government)—sold his colleagues on a higher tax by promising that riders wouldn’t even notice it.

“No one will notice that. No passengers will know because they have no idea what they are going to pay anyway,” said Evans in April. (Evans had previously described the prospect of taxing Uber as “very exciting.”)

The money raised from the tax will go towards fixing up the city’s ailing Metro system, which has seen ridership crater in the wake of deteriorating service levels and a series of safety scandals.

Weekday ridership on the Metro rail system averaged 598,000 for Fiscal Year 2018. That’s below the 612,000 weekday trips it was averaging in May 2017, which is lower still than the 639,000 trips it averaged in May 2016, just before Metro began a series of repairs that saw stations shut downs for months at a time. Currently the system services the same number of people it did in 2000, back when the D.C. metro-area had about 1.5 million fewer residents.

Despite the repairs, maintenance issues continue to plague the system. Track fires continue unabated, as do months-long station shutdowns. Metro has had its fair share of recent scandals too.

In April it was revealed that 1,700 concrete panels installed on the system’s under-construction Silver Line were defective. In May, a report from Metro’s inspector general found that inspectors at its Rhode Island Avenue station had copied text verbatim from previous years’ structural integrity inspections into their reports and failed to inspect hard-to-reach portions of the station. (The Rhode Island stop is being closed for over a month for repairs this summer.)

Frustrated with this state of affairs, former Metro riders have increasingly opted for ride sharing services like Uber and Lyft. Tuesday’s tax hike—which was part of the city’s 2019 budget—is an attempt to recapture some of the dollars fleeing along with these riders.

Ride-sharing companies had lobbied for a lower tax that excluded trips taken on their carpooling services. Tuesday’s vote has left them a bit miffed.

“While we’re disappointed that City Council voted to increase taxes across the board without providing measures to incentivize the use of shared rides, Lyft remains focused on providing the best transportation experience possible,” said a Lyft spokesperson in a statement.

In essence D.C. has opted to tax the transportation services people actually use in an attempt to shore up one that people don’t. Given that Metro has done such a poor job improving its service with past infusions of cash, it’s unlikely that this will be what sends riders back into the system. Instead they will simply shell out more for Ubers that will get them to their destinations on-time and unscathed.

Preliminary injunction on ICE family separation policy. A federal court says the Trump administration’s policy of separating migrant children from parents caught crossing the U.S.-Mexico border must stop, and that families who have already been separated must be reunited within one month.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials have 10 days to put detained immigrant parents in phone contract with their children, ruled Judge Dana Sabraw of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California on Tuesday.

• Within 14 days, all children under the age of 5 must be reunified with parents (unless the parent is determined to be unfit or declines reunification).
• Within 30 days, and all minors ages five and above must be reunited with their parents.

“Plaintiffs have demonstrated a likelihood of success on the merits, irreparable harm, and that the balance of equities and the public interest weigh in their favor, thus warranting issuance of a preliminary injunction,” wrote Sabraw. More from his ruling:

This Order does not implicate the Government’s discretionary authority to enforce immigration or other criminal laws, including its decisions to release or detain class members. Rather, the Order addresses only the circumstances under which the Government may separate class members from their children, as well as the reunification of class members who are returned to immigration custody upon completion of any criminal proceedings….

The practice of separating these families was implemented without any effective system or procedure for (1) tracking the children after they were separated from their parents, (2) enabling communication between the parents and their children after separation, and (3) reuniting the parents and children after the parents are returned to immigration custody following completion of their criminal sentence. This is a startling reality.

The government readily keeps track of personal property of detainees in criminal and immigration proceedings. Money, important documents, and automobiles, to name a few, are routinely catalogued, stored, tracked and produced upon a detainees’ release, at all levels—state and federal, citizen and alien. Yet, the government has no system in place to keep track of, provide effective communication with, and promptly produce alien children. The unfortunate reality is that under the present system migrant children are not accounted for with the same efficiency and accuracy as property. Certainly, that cannot satisfy the requirements of due process.

The case was brought by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in February on behalf of a Congolese woman whom ICE separated from her 7-year-old child and the “hundreds of other parents whom the government has forcibly separated.” The suit asserted that ICE was engaging in the “forcible separation of parents from their young children for no legitimate reason,” in violation of the Fourth Amendment.

“Whether or not the Trump administration wants to call this a ‘policy,’ it certainly is engaged in a widespread practice of tearing children away from their parents,” Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, told CNN about the case last March.

In his Tuesday order, Judge Sabraw described the situation as a case of “reactive governance—responses to address a chaotic circumstance of the Government’s own making” that “belie measured and ordered governance, which is central to the concept of due process enshrined in our Constitution.”

FREE MINDS

Oklahoma passes very permissive medical pot bill.

BIG win for my conservative state of Oklahoma. LEGALIZED MEDICAL MARIJUANA!!! cc @nickgillespie @MattWelch

— Mary #FlyTheW (@mchastain81) June 27, 2018

In yesterday’s primary elections, Oklahoma voters approved an initiative legalizing medical marijuana. This makes Oklahoma the 30th U.S. state to decriminalize marijuana use by people who get a doctor’s permission. And though Oklahoma tends to be a conservative state, its medical marijuana measure is one of the most expansive in the country. “The measure,” notes The Washington Post,

… is notable for reflecting one of the most permissive medical cannabis policies in the country. While most states specify a narrow list of medical conditions for which doctors can recommend the plant, in Oklahoma doctors will be able to recommend it for any condition.

FREE MARKETS

BREAKING: Canada is now preparing steel quotas and tariffs on China and others to prevent producers there from dumping the goods that they can’t sell to the US https://t.co/5QL6kcRBBQ

— Joe Weisenthal (@TheStalwart) June 26, 2018

RUSSIA WATCH

Bolton in Moscow and Trump look-alikes in Russian pop video. National security adviser John Bolton will powwow with Vladimir Putin in Moscow today. “The president will receive Bolton at the Kremlin,” spokesman Dmitry Peskov said. The two men are prepping for a meeting between Putin and President Trump that is supposed to take place in mid-July. “The Trump-Putin summit would be the first meeting of the two presidents not taking place on the sidelines of a broader international gathering,” notes The Washington Post.

Meanwhile, Emin Agalavor—the Russian trust-fund kid and pseudo-pop star who helped arrange Donald Trump’s Jr.’s infamous Trump Town meeting with Russians during the 2016 election—just released a new music video in which Agalarov appears alongside lookalikes of Trump, Stormy Daniels, Hillary Clinton, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

“The video’s political message is not entirely clear,” asserts NBC News. “Julia Ioffe, a correspondent for GQ who has written extensively about Russia under President Vladimir Putin, raised one possibility, tweeting that American viewers were being ‘trolled and made fun of by Emin Agalarov.'”

QUICK HITS

• 10-term U.S. Rep. Joseph Crowley (D–N.Y.)—described roundly as “the Queens Democratic party boss” and floated as the Democrats next House speaker if the party can take back Congress—lost in Tuesday’s primary elections to 28-year-old Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) candidate and political newcomer Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
• Libertarians in New Mexico failed to get enough votes in yesterday’s primary to qualify for spots on the general election ballot.
• Congress just passed a bill to investigate “the full extent of how virtual currencies are being used to facilitate drug and sex trafficking.”
• Uber can once-again operate legally in London, at least for now.
• “In a survey of more than 8,000 employees” of the FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration, U.S. Marshals Service, and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, “22 percent of women and 43 percent of female criminal investigators at the agencies reported some form of gender discrimination in the past five years,” according to a new inspector general’s report.

“Does Godwin’s Law need to be updated? Suspended? Repealed? I get asked this question from time to time because I’m the guy who came up with the law more than a quarter century ago.” https://t.co/AkBPT9BavV @sfmnemonic

— R Street Institute (@RSI) June 27, 2018

• “Supporters of the referendum to ban brothels argue that this will prevent sex trafficking and help [exploited] women,” writes Allison Schrader at Qz. But “I interviewed dozens of women who work in [legal Nevada] brothels. All claimed that they felt safe at work. … Meanwhile, all the women I spoke with who’d done sex work illegally had encountered clients who would not pay or were violent.…Banning brothels only eliminates another safe refuge to do the work.”

Learn how to make your own super bacteria with Ron Bailey’s DIY guide to biohacking. A sampling:

Using the handy tools sent in the kit, I was set to re-engineer some nonpathogenic E. coli in my kitchen. That might sound terrifying; surely journalists shouldn’t be trusted to build superbugs. Relax. The lab-created strain provided in the kit was developed to be easy to engineer and does not live in the wild. While CRISPR holds incredible potential for in-lab and at-home genetic modification and experimentation, my efforts were strictly school science fair stuff—my modified bacteria posed no civilizational risk, and the process of creating them was fun, fascinating, and empowering.

View this article.