Category: reason

For at least the past decade, Republicans have positioned themselves as the defenders of what passes for laissez faire economics in modern Washington. During the Obama administration, the GOP attacked new environmental regulations as hidden taxes on American businesses, decried the stimulus as cronyism on a grand scale, and lashed out at a president for claiming that Americans “didn’t build” successful enterprises without government assistance.

Now, with President Donald Trump walking the nation to the precipice of a trade war—one that sees America pitted against not only a longtime Republican boogeyman, China, but also such major trading partners as Canada, Europe, and Mexico—congressional Republicans have a choice to make. They can embrace free markets, or they can can embrace Donald Trump.

A trade war will cause significant pain for American businesses and consumers. It will create new hidden taxes in the form of the costs tariffs impose on consumers. It will be cronyism on a grand scale, with Trump and his top advisers deciding which industries get protected and which get crushed. And it is premised on the same idea that angered so many tea partiers when Obama expressed it. Trump hasn’t said “you didn’t build that,” but his actions suggest that America can’t build much of anything—steel, cars, the list goes on and on—unless the government steps in with some protectionism.

What will Republicans in Congress do? For most of them, probably nothing.

But some of them are going to try to pull the party in a different direction. Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), who on Saturday described news coverage of Trump’s trade policies as “like something I could have read in a local Caracas newspaper last week,” says he is prepared to work “with like-minded Republican senators on ways to push back on the president using authorities in ways never intended and that are damaging to our country and our allies.”

I am working with like-minded Republican senators on ways to push back on the president using authorities in ways never intended and that are damaging to our country and our allies. Will Democrats join us?

— Senator Bob Corker (@SenBobCorker) June 2, 2018

It is, for now, unclear what that plan might look like. Still, the statement signals at least a willingness to do something. Previously, many Republicans responded to Trump’s tariff threats merely by expressing their opposition and hoping the issue would simply go away. “I’m not a fan of tariffs, and I am nervous about what appears to be a growing trend in the administration to levy tariffs,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) told the Louisville Courier-Journal in April, as if he wasn’t in a position to do anything about the administration’s bellicose trade policies.

It’s true that Congress has limited its control over trade policy. In 2015, for example, it enacted a Trade Promotion Authority (TPA) allowing the White House to negotiate trade deals with other countries without congressional interference. Congress doesn’t enter the picture until it hold a a straight up-or-down vote on the final product, essentially promising that it won’t try to alter whatever deal the president makes.

This was a deliberate abdication of the power granted by Article 1 of the U.S. Constitution, which explicitly allows Congress “to lay and collect taxes, duties,” and the like. In a previous era, this abdication felt like a pro-trade move: Congress has, traditionally, been more open to protectionist policies (just think about how defensive legislators get about anything in their home districts), while the White House has been more likely to support free trade, since the president tends to get credit (and blame) for the economy as a whole.

“They never anticipated having a protectionist president,” says Dan Ikenson, director of trade policy studies at the Cato Institute. Like so much else in the Trump presidency, the trade war is partly a consequence of a decades-long slide of power from the legislature to the executive.

Reversing that trend won’t be easy, but if Congress wants to rein in Trump, there is an important deadline looming at the end of this month.

Congress has until June 30 to reauthorize the TPA it passed in 2015. This is supposed to remain in place for six years, but there’s a catch: After three years, Congress can exercise an option to revoke that authority. While revoking Trump’s TPA would not directly block tariffs—the steel and aluminum tariffs have been issued under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, which gives the president more or less carte blanche to impose tariffs on national security grounds—it would be at least a symbolic blow, and an indication that congressional Republicans reject Trump’s trade policies.

A more dramatic option would be to pass the Global Trade Accountability Act, a bill proposed by Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah). This would require congressional approval before tariffs could go into effect. The bill would also give Congress the ultimate authority over whether to withdraw from other trade agreements, including NAFTA and the WTO. Again, this would not apply to Trump’s Section 232 tariffs, but it could limit the damage the president can cause and it may put America’s top trading partners slightly at ease.

But don’t get your hopes up. Corker, who is not running for re-election, appears to be in the minority when it comes to standing up for free trade. And he seems to know it—hence his tweet’s call for Democrats, who are also in the minority, to come to his aid.

“There is no Republican Party. There’s a Trump Party. The Republican Party is kind of taking a nap somewhere,” former Speaker of the House John Boehner said last week.

Well, maybe; it depends on which Republican Party you mean. There have been periods when the GOP was a more protectionist party, and even seemingly pro-trade presidents like Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush erected trade barriers at times. But the Republicans discovered a strong free market message during their years as Obama’s opposition, and that message is now all but lost.

A Harvard-Harris poll released last week found that 71 percent of self-described Republicans approve of Trump’s decision to place tariffs on steel and aluminum imports, while 60 percent believe those tariffs “will mostly protect American jobs”:

The part about protecting jobs is simply not true. Even if the tariffs do protect some steel-making jobs, they will destroy more jobs in downstream industries, according to projections from both pro-trade and anti-trade groups.

But the first part is what congressional Republicans are hearing loud and clear. On Sunday, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy took to CNN to defend Trump’s tariff plans.

“We are standing up for the process of where we’re moving forward that we have fair trade,” McCarthy said.

If a majority of Republican voters are going to follow the president into a trade war of choice, then Republicans in Congress appear ready to dutifully stand aside. This year has already seen the GOP abandon its rhetorical role as the party of fiscal responsibility by passing a budget-busting omnibus bill that required the repeal of spending limits once championed by the party’s leaders.

Now, in the service of a president pursuing anti-market trade policies, Republicans are casting aside another principle that they recently treated as a clarion call. Just as Republicans seem to be stawart fiscal conservatives only when they are in the opposition, it looks like they might be ardent free traders only when they aren’t led by a president who refuses to see the benefits of trade. Republican opposition to big government doesn’t seem to have been about anything more than partisanship.

Back in September of 2017, Trump supporters held a giant rally—the Mother of All Rallies, as they called it—in Washington. Some folks from Black Lives Matter also showed up. The two groups usually get along like oil and water. And that’s about how well they were getting along on this particular day.

But then something happened. The organizer of the Trump rally, Tommy Hodges, invited the leader of the BLM group, Hawk Newsome, onto the stage to speak. “We’re gonna give you two minutes of our platform to put your message out,” Hodges said.

That moment came to mind Thursday, when social media was swarming with its usual angry-hornet mobs, who were fighting over what Samantha Bee had said. Her remark can’t be repeated here; suffice it to say that she told Ivanka Trump, on national TV, “Do something about your dad’s immigration policies, you feckless”—and then used one of the two most vile words in the English language. Liberal media outlets ate it up.

What happened next was predictable. Conservatives compared the situation to Roseanne Barr’s racist tweet and railed against liberal double standards. Liberals shot back that the two situations were completely different. More conservatives dredged up horrible things liberals had said in the past, and more liberals dredged up horrible things conservatives had said in the past, and so it went. A. Barton Hinkle looks deeper.

View this article.

Downtown Portland became something of a war zone yesterday afternoon when left- and right-wing mobs clashed in the streets.

On Sunday, Patriot Prayer—a trollish right-wing group that delights in taking its vague flag-waving message to the heart of liberal West Coast cities—held an impromptu rally in Portland’s Terry Shrunk Plaza, where they encountered violent resistance from the left-wing group Rose City Antifa.

Though it is not an alt-right group itself, Patriot Prayer’s rallies have become notorious for their tendency to attract all sorts of right-wing crazies, including Proud Boys, III Percenters, and Nazi-leaning Identity Evropa types. A few days after one of its rallies last year, one attendee—Jeremy Christian—killed two people on a Portland train when they objected Christian’s harassment of a hijab-wearing teenager.

Follow-up 2017 rallies sparked violent counter-demonstrations, street brawls, and an aggressive crackdown from riot-gear-wearing Portland police.

Yesterday played out much the same way.

Willamette Week reports that the violence started around 5 p.m., with both groups trading blows, chucking rocks, and employing liberal amounts of pepper spray.

About 300 people participated in the brawl, with the lefties in the majority. Freelance journalist Mike Bivins captured a lot of the madness on Twitter:

Breaking: Beatdowns at the Patriot Prayer and counterprotest in downtown Portland. Intense video pic.twitter.com/T2H6FveIbb

— PDX Mike Bivins (@itsmikebivins) June 3, 2018

Sunday’s brawl was relatively tame by last year’s standards, drawing fewer people than Patriot Prayer’s biggest 2017 rallies.

Law enforcement was more restrained as well. Last summer’s protests saw riot police using flash bangs and detaining demonstrators en masse (earning a lawsuit from the American Civil Liberties Union). Yesterday, by contrast, police mostly hung back as small skirmishes broke out.

Four people were arrested, according to Portland police spokesperson Sgt. Chris Burley, who said that more may follow in the coming days.

Despite the diminished scale, yesterday’s events felt depressingly emblematic of politics in the year 2018, when performative battles can completely obscure whatever issue is supposedly being debated. Indeed, the reason for yesterday’s Patriot Prayer rally was not to take a stand for some policy or cause—it was to bid farewell to group member Tusitala “Tiny” Toese, who is leaving Portland to return to his native American Samoa. What better excuse for a street brawl?

The Supreme Court ruled 7–2 this morning that the State of Colorado erred in punishing a baker for refusing to make a wedding cake for a same-sex couple. But the approach the court took guarantees that this debate is far from over.

The court did not rule that cake-baking is a protected form of free expression. Instead it said the Colorado Civil Rights Commission (CCRC) showed open hostility to the baker’s attempt to assert his religious beliefs as a reason to reject the couple’s request, and that the state thus did not neutrally enforce its antidiscrimination law.

In Masterpiece Bakeshop Ltd. vs. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, bakery owner Jake Phillips refused to sell a wedding cake to a gay couple because he had religious objections to same-sex marriage. Colorado ruled that this counted as discrimination against gay people, which violates state law. Phillips countered that he would sell any other baked goods to gay people, but he wouldn’t make or sell goods for same-sex wedding ceremonies, because he felt as though he was being compelled to support an idea (that gay marriage is valid) that he did not believe.

The court punted on the issue of whether creating a wedding cake (or other wedding-related goods) is a form of free expression. Instead the justices ruled that the CCRC took a dismissive, hostile approach toward Phillips’ religious-based objections when compared to other kinds of cases that came before them. From the majority decision:

The Civil Rights Commission’s treatment of his case has some elements of a clear and impermissible hostility toward the sincere religious beliefs that motivated his objection. That hostility surfaced at the Commission’s formal, public hearings, as shown by the record. On May 30, 2014, the seven-member Commission convened publicly to consider Phillips’ case. At several points during its meeting, commissioners endorsed the view that religious beliefs cannot legitimately be carried into the public sphere or commercial domain, implying that religious beliefs and persons are less than fully welcome in Colorado’s business community. One commissioner suggested that Phillips can believe “what he wants to believe,” but cannot act on his religious beliefs “if he decides to do business in the state.” Tr. 23. A few moments later, the commissioner restated the same position: “[I]f a businessman wants to do business in the state and he’s got an issue with the— the law’s impacting his personal belief system, he needs to look at being able to compromise.”

The commissioner even went so far as to compare Phillips’ invocation of his sincerely held religious beliefs to defenses of slavery and the Holocaust. This sentiment is inappropriate for a Commission charged with the solemn responsibility of fair and neutral enforcement of Colorado’s antidiscrimination law—a law that protects discrimination on the basis of religion as well as sexual orientation.

Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote the opinion. Also siding with the baker were Clarence Thomas, Stephen Breyer, Neil Gorsuch, Samuel Alito, Elena Kagan, and Chief Justice John Roberts. Thomas, Gorsuch, and Kagan all wrote concurring opinions. Only Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor supported the commission.

A completely different case that trolled those who wanted to force the baker to make the cake ended up being relevant to the decision. As the Masterpiece Cakeshop controversy was playing out in 2015, a gentleman named Bill Jack went to another Colorado bakery to demand a cake that was decorated with text opposing same-sex marriage. When the bakery refused, he also filed a complaint. His was rejected, with the CRCC concluding that a bakery couldn’t be forced to write messages that it found offensive or objectionable. The CRCC appeared to treat the nature of the objections very differently. The majority concluded:

The Commission’s hostility was inconsistent with the First Amendment’s guarantee that our laws be applied in a manner that is neutral toward religion. Phillips was entitled to a neutral decisionmaker who would give full and fair consideration to his religious objection as he sought to assert it in all of the circumstances in which this case was presented, considered, and decided. In this case the adjudication concerned a context that may well be different going forward in the respects noted above. However later cases raising these or similar concerns are resolved in the future, for these reasons the rulings of the Commission and of the state court that enforced the Commission’s order must be invalidated.

In a separate concurring opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas agreed that the CCRC was not neutrally enforcing its antidiscrimination laws, but he took the argument further. He does see the creation of custom wedding cakes as expressive speech: “Behind the counter Phillips has a picture that depicts him as an artist painting on a canvas. Phillips takes exceptional care with each cake that he creates—sketching the design out on paper, choosing the color scheme, creating the frosting and decorations, baking and sculpting the cake, decorating it, and delivering it to the wedding.”

But only Gorsuch joined Thomas’ opinion. The other judges were much more focused on the disparate treatment of Phillips’ religious objections. So the courts did not establish a precedent here on whether people who provide goods and services to weddings can be compelled to provide them to same-sex couples. Indeed, the decision may actually give states a map on how to enforce antidiscrimination laws in a way that would require bakers (and other businesses) serve gay weddings.

Read the ruling here.

Few investments are more famously fraught with failure than making movies. That extends especially to states and localities that attempt to lure filmmakers to their locales via sexy and economically useless subsidies that end up costing far more than they generate in new business activity and tax revenue. As the Tax Foundation reported in 2012, film subsidy programs generate between 7 cents and 30 cents in return for each dollar spent, guaranteeing a massive loss to taxpayer for every tax credit, rebate, or other handout.

In 2014, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo championed the creation of the Central New York Film Hub near Syracuse with $15 million of taxpayer money. “Who would have ever figured: Hollywood comes to Onondaga [County], right?” Cuomo said at the time, according to The New York Times. “You would have never guessed. But it has.”

Cuomo also insisted that the studio would generate at least 350 good-paying jobs related to the film industry. Instead, the facility, which was owned by the state government, was just sold for $1.

Unfortunately for local taxpayers, the buyer was Onondonga County, so the potential for continued wasting of tax dollars remains real. Syracuse.com reports that no permanent jobs have been created by the facility.

The Central New York Film Hub is something of a sequel for Gov. Cuomo, whose attempts to lure jobs to the Empire State, especially the upstate region, regularly fail. Back in 2016, for instance, it came to light that the $100 million poured into Start-Up NY, which offered tax breaks and other benefits to companies relocating to New York, had generated just 408 jobs.

When Cuomo took office in 2011, he recognized that New Yorkers already shouldered one of the highest state and local combined tax burdens in the country and boldly proclaimed that he would cut taxes, spending, and regulations to make his state friendly to business. After a few gestures in that direction, he has instead increased the burdens on job creation.

But hey, at least he got a buck back on a $15 million “investment.”

In 2011, Reason‘s Zach Weissmueller discussed the failures of film subsidies with super-producer Gavin Polone, whose projects have included Curb Your Enthusiasm, The Gilmore Girls, Panic Room, and more.

In January 2016 Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey (R) appointed the veteran libertarian lawyer and legal theorist Clint Bolick to a seat on the Arizona Supreme Court. A few days before Bolick was officially sworn in, I asked him how he planned to approach his new job. “The role of a justice is to give effect to every single word in the Constitution,” he told me. “I believe that the written Constitution reflects the social contract that people have made with each other and with their government. And just as with any contract, a judge’s role is to enforce that contract vigorously.”

In the recent case of Arizona v. Maestas, Justice Bolick had the opportunity to practice the judicial vigor that he preached.

At issue was the 2014 arrest of an Arizona State University student named Andre Lee Juwaun Maestas. Under the terms of the Arizona Medical Marijuana Act (AMMA), a voter initiative passed in 2010, Maestas was a valid medical marijuana cardholder. That meant that he was legally allowed to possess 2.5 ounces of “usable marijuana.” Yet Maestas was arrested after university police found 0.014 ounces of marijuana in his dorm room.

Why did the police arrest a valid AMMA cardholder for this seeming non-offense? They arrested him because in 2012 the state legislature amended the AMMA to forbid all medical marijuana use and possession on state college and university campuses.

Now here is where the judiciary comes in. Per the Arizona Constitution, the state legislature may only amend a voter initiative if “the amending legislation furthers the purposes of such measure.” The question before the Arizona Supreme Court in the Maestas case was whether the 2012 criminalization law was at odds with that provision from the state Constitution.

The Arizona Supreme Court held that it was. “Criminalizing AMMA-compliant marijuana possession or use on public college or university campuses plainly does not further the AMMA’s primary purpose,” the Arizona Supreme Court ruled in Arizona v. Maestas. “We hold [the 2012 law] unconstitutional as applied to the student/cardholder in this case.”

Justice Bolick joined that opinion in full. He also wrote separately in concurrence in order to address a larger legal issue raised by the dispute: Namely, just how much deference does the judiciary owe to the legislature in a case like this?

According to the state of Arizona, the judiciary owed total deference to the lawmakers here. In the state’s view, the legislature alone enjoys the power to establish and maintain “a general and uniform public school system.” Criminalizing marijuana use on public campuses, the state insisted, should be immune from judicial review because it is a non-justiciable “political question.”

Also known as the “political question doctrine,” this particular argument for judicial abstinence has its origins in U.S. Supreme Court caselaw. In Baker v. Carr (1962), for example, SCOTUS said that the courts should generally stay out of those cases that involve “a textually demonstrable constitutional commitment of the issue to a coordinate political department; or a lack of judicially discoverable and manageable standards for resolving it.”

In his Maestas concurrence, Justice Bolick basically delivered a massive judicial benchslap against the political question doctrine. To avoid hearing or deciding a case because of “a lack of judicially discoverable and manageable standards for resolving it,” Bolick declared, “implies that the matter is not constitutionally entrusted to another branch, but that for prudential reasons we should not decide it anyway, leading to the inevitable consequence that another branch of government will decide the constitutional limits of its own power.”

In Bolick’s view, the courts should have no part of any doctrine that commands that sort of result. “When the judiciary fails to interpret and enforce constitutional rights and limits,” he wrote, “it shrinks from its central duty and drains the Constitution of its intended meaning.” In an appropriate future case, Bolick concluded, “I would reexamine the prudential requirement of our political question doctrine to determine whether it comports with our constitutional design.”

It’s the same thing that Bolick told me two years ago. The proper role of a judge does not involve dodging so-called political questions—it involves vigorously enforcing constitutional limits when the political branches step out of line.

Clinton says Lewinsky affair would not “be an issue” today. Talk about “alternative facts” (to pull a phrase out of the Trump-spox dustbin): Bill Clinton claimed today that his sexual relationship with then-intern Monica Lewinsky would not be viewed differently now than it was in the 1990s.

In fact, the former president suggested, #MeToo-era feminists are only lumping him in with power-abusing Harvey Weinstein types out of displaced anger at Donald Trump.

“I don’t think [the Lewinsky affair] would be an issue because people would be using the facts instead of the imagined facts,” Clinton told NBC’s Craig Melvin this morning. “If the facts were the same today, I wouldn’t [resign].” He continued:

A lot of the facts have been conveniently omitted to make the story work, I think partly because they are frustrated that they got all these serious allegations against the current occupant of the Oval Office, and his voters don’t seem to care. I think I did the right thing. I defended the Constitution.

Clinton also complained that he lost a lot of money over his affair with Lewinsky; that Melvin was only giving “one side” by pointing to his relationship with Lewinsky while failing to bring up all the good Clinton has allegedly done for womankind; and that the sexual harassment and assault allegations against President Trump have not received enough media coverage. Melvin then pressed Clinton on whether “looking back on what happened then, through the lens of Me Too now,” he now felt more responsibility.

Clinton: No, I felt terrible then, and I came to grips with it.

Melvin: Did you ever apologize to her?

Clinton: Yes. And nobody believes that I got out of that for free. I left the White House $16 million in debt. But you, typically, have ignored gaping facts in describing this and I bet you don’t even know them. This was litigated 20 years ago. Two-thirds of the American people sided with me. They were not insensitive to that.

James Patterson, who co-authored a new novel with Clinton, jumped in to add: “It was 20 years ago. Come on.”

Of course, many of the allegations against Weinstein, against other Hollywood and media men, and against Trump are descriptions of incidents that happened one, two, or even more decades ago. The whole point of Melvin’s questioning Clinton about Lewinsky now was that sometimes social and personal perceptions can shift in 20 years.

Society’s perception certainly has in this case. A better man than Clinton might at least acknowledge that, and even use it to his argumentative advantage. Instead, when asked for a modicum of self-awareness, our ex-president immediately gets defensive, lashes out in all directions, plays the Whataboutism card, and diminishes the idea that anyone could care about any of this.

In trying to distance himself from Trump and other #MeToo targets, Clinton reminds us that he wrote the playbook they’re reading from now.

FREE MARKETS

Occupational licensing win for Missouri hair braiders:

BREAKING: Missouri #Braiding Reform Bill Signed Into Law#Braiders in Missouri will no longer have to get full 1500-hour cosmetology #license. Instead, simply register & watch 4-6 hr video.

Kudos to @Dogan4Rep for his relentless advocacy for #BraidingFreedom over several years!

— Dan Alban (@Frimp13) June 1, 2018

FREE MINDS

“International Whore’s Day” highlights. Here are a few photos and missives from an international roster of rallies for sex worker rights that went down last Saturday. The demonstrations commemorated International Whore’s Day, protested new federal legislation criminalizing sex ads, and called for the decriminalization of prostitution.

My favorite sign from today! #IWD #InternationalWhoresDay #InternationalSexWorkersDay pic.twitter.com/h3De6ZWYny

— Representative Elizabeth Edwards (@RepEEdwards) June 2, 2018

Butch Barbie reporting for duty #InternationalWhoresDay shirt by @AndreShakti pic.twitter.com/5TTRIawz3t

— Jacq the Stripper (@JacqTheStripper) June 3, 2018

Today during the International Whores Day direct action in Chicago. More photos / write up by @dykediscourse forthcoming via Hooligan. All photos by Cody Corrall // #InternationalWhoresDay #IWD18 pic.twitter.com/117MqPuNNF

— HOOLIGAN MAG (@thehooliganmag) June 2, 2018

Celebrating #InternationalSexWorkersDay w @cmdgrosso & advocates at #SexWorkers Rights Rally in #DC (Thanks Kholi @SweatTweets for T-shirt!) #DecrimNow pic.twitter.com/aqO28ZazIM

— Serra Sippel (@SerraSippel) June 2, 2018

#IWD18 #StopTheWarOnWhores #InternationalWhoresDay#InternationalSexWorkersDay #sexworkisrealwork #someoneiloveisasexworker #sexworkersolidarity #endthestigma #sexwork #workhealthsafety #sexworkiswork #sexworkisrealwork #tokyorainbowpride2018 #TRP2018 #東京レインボープライド pic.twitter.com/OHQ14h3qRb

— ===KAREN=== (@xgreenkarenx) June 4, 2018

Yesterday was so incredible, I don’t have words. Hundreds of sex workers and allies overflowed Christopher Park and marched to Washington Square. We stood out in the sun and screamed and screamed and screamed. We screamed our rage and our grief and our n… https://t.co/artY4slWvI pic.twitter.com/vKYWEb8Wep

— Lorelei Lee (@MissLoreleiLee) June 3, 2018

So inspired by all the speakers & performers at today’s #InternationalWhoresDay rally in DC #rightsnotrescue #NoFOSTA #IWD2018 #SexWorkIsWork pic.twitter.com/aT0UM8fnnK

— Feminists for Liberty (@FeministLiberty) June 2, 2018

QUICK HITS

• Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani says the president probably has the power to pardon himself but Trump will oh-so-graciously choose not to use it should he be indicted.
• Protecting and serving, one dance-floor back-flip gun-discharge at a time.
• “California isn’t our most progressive state—it’s our most racist one,” writes Michael Shellenberger at Forbes.
• Introducing the era of “mutually nonconsensual sex.”
• Denmark considers a ban on circumcision.

Today’s cars feature innovations that even the Jetsons could not have imagined—backup cameras, navigation devices, air bags, collision avoidance systems, TVs, and much more. Anything people desire, it’s safe to say, automakers are either providing or figuring out how to provide.

But as Steve Chapman observes, it appears drivers are about to be banished from this asphalt Eden. The Trump administration has begun an investigation to determine whether imported passenger vehicles undermine national security. It argues that when Toyota or Volkswagen sells you a car that was built abroad, it puts Americans at risk.

Wrong. In the first place, writes Chapman, we don’t require a domestic supply of RAV4s to fight the next wars. In the second, we don’t go begging our enemies for shipments of passenger sedans and crossovers. We buy them from our allies, who have a stake in our well-being.

View this article.

Heading off to see a summer blockbuster? Thank the early 20th century movie hero who kicked off the phenomenon. Not Superman. Not Captain America. Not even Rin Tin Tin.

William Carrier.

In 1902, the young engineer was working for a heating outfit called Buffalo Forge. That company was approached by Sackett & Wilhelms, a print shop in Brooklyn that was facing a dilemma. Four-color printing meant paper had to be inked four separate times, with each run laying down a different hue. Thanks to humidity, sheets would often shrink or expand in the interim between inkings, making the finished image a mess. What could be done?

Carrier came up with a way of “conditioning” the air in order to keep the temperature and moisture level steady. You can probably guess what he called his invention, writes Lenore Skenazy.

View this article.

The federal Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau ordered California’s Black Hammer Brewing to stop production of its popular beers containing cannabidiol, a compound derived from hemp also known as CBD. CDB won’t get you high, but it’s not on the approved list of ingredients for beers.