Category: reason

Michigan’s government installed coolers filled with purified water inside Flint’s State Office building so that state employees could drink clean water—more than a year before officials admitted to the common people of Flint that their water was unsafe.

Republican Gov. Rick Snyder did not admit that Flint’s water source was contaminated with lead until earlier this year. But government employees who complained about dirty water received aid from Michigan’s Department of Technology, Management and Budget on January 7, 2015.

A liberal activist group, Progress Michigan, discovered the state’s rank hypocrisy in a review of emails from the Department of Environmental Quality, a state regulatory agency that deserves no small amount of blame for mismanaging Flint’s water crisis. According to The Detroit Free Press:

A Jan. 7, 2015, notice from the state Department of Technology, Management and Budget, which oversees state office buildings, references a notice about a violation of drinking water standards that had recently been sent out by the City of Flint.

“While the City of Flint states that corrective actions are not necessary, DTMB is in the process of providing a water cooler on each occupied floor, positioned near the water fountain, so you can choose which water to drink,” said the notice.

The coolers will arrive today and will be provided as long as the public water does not meet treatment requirements.”

Caleb Buhs, a spokesman for DTMB, said the water coolers were provided in response to the city health notice in late December or early January, which he acknowledged was about a contamination issue the city said had already subsided. The state continued to provide the coolers of purified water, right up to today, because “there were more findings as we went along,” Buhs said.

No one can accuse state officials of failing to look out for their own, I suppose. Non-government residents of Flint, on the other hand, were left to consume toxic water for an additional year. What a powerful blow to the idea that government’s purpose is to serve the people.

In any case, Flint’s non-government class is finally drinking clean water, and they have some private corporations to thank for that.

Related: The Flint Water Crisis Is the Result of a Stimulus Project Gone Wrong

Tweets from https://twitter.com/kmanguward/lists/reason1

Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Ben Carson, Chris Christie, Jeb Bush, John Kasich and Rand Paul were all invited to the 9 p.m. main stage debate, moderated by Fox personalities Megyn Kelly, Chris Wallace, and Bret Baier, but Trump has begged off. The undercard debate, which begins at 7 p.m., includes Carly Fiorina, Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum and Jim Gilmore, and will be moderated by Bill Hemmer and Martha MacCallum.

A Utah police department has seized approximately $10,000 and 150 gaming machines from three internet cafes, but has not arrested anyone.

The Mouse Pad Cafes in Salt Lake City, Midvale, and Kearns were allegedly running “internet sweepstakes cafes,” a creative attempt at getting around the prohibition on gambling. The cafes sell internet time or phone cards and give customers free entries in a sweepstakes. Customers can use their internet time to play games like video poker to find out if they won the sweepstakes. Unlike traditional gambling, the decisions a customer makes while playing do not affect whether or not he wins. Instead, the games are considered an entertaining way of finding out if one of your “free entries” was a winner.

In past cases, the courts have universally considered internet sweepstakes cafes to be gambling, worthy of the same regulations as traditional casinos.  

According to Unified Police Department (UPD) spokesman Lt. Lex Bell, the investigation began when nearby businesses complained about the Midvale and Kearns locations. The problem was not only the illegal activity happening in the cafes themselves, but also increased illegal activity in the surrounding areas, from drug deals to violent crime.

All three locations were raided simultaneously on January 14. Authorities seized the cash and machines, and detained a combined seven employees for questioning. The UPD says the delay in arrests is because it is unclear whether this was a federal or local offense and further investigation of the machines taken will answer that question. The location in Midvale has lost its business license as a result of the raid.

While it is certainly possible and maybe even probable that authorities will arrest those responsible, the police don’t necessarily have to return property seized even if they don’t make any arrests. Utah law allows local police to keep up to 100 percent of the money taken under such circumstances, and like most states, it does not require a conviction.

In fact, the Utah state legislature unanimously voted to liberalize civil forfeiture laws in 2013. According to the Institute for Justice’s Nick Sibilla, writing in Forbes, the vote was far from transparent—sponsor Sen. Curt Bramble called it a “re-codifying of existing law.” But this “re-codification” made it optional for governments to repay the prevailing party’s legal fees when they lose a civil forfeiture case and placed a cap on how much governments are allowed to pay.

The fate of the $10,000 seized from the Mouse Pad cafes is still undetermined, but either way, citizens should be livid that the legislature acted in such a deceptive manner.

• A man carrying two handguns and a copy of the Koran in his luggage was arrested at a hotel serving Disneyland Paris. It was not immediately whether he had any plans to do anything harmful.
• Undercard candidates Rick Santorum and Mike Huckabee, who have had their voting constituencies commandeered by Ted Cruz, said they’re going to join the veterans event Donald Trump is putting on in his boycott of tonight’s debate.
• The doctor that serves Congress says Bernie Sanders, 74, is in very good health. His lungs certainly seem to be quite robust.
• Notoriously corrupt (or “colorful,” as they say) ex-Providence Mayor Vincent “Buddy” Cianci is dead at 74.
• Sweden may deport from 60,000 to 80,000 asylum-seekers in the coming years given the rate by which the reject applications.
• The “affluenza” kid, Ethan Couch, has been sent back to Texas from Mexico. He will face a detention hearing on Friday after skipping out on his probation for a 2013 fatal drunken-driving crash.

Follow us on Facebook and Twitter, and don‘t forget to sign up for Reason‘s daily updates for more content.

With any luck, tonight’s GOP debate in Iowa will serve as an experiment of sorts—designed to test the question: What does the Republican primary race look like without Donald Trump?

Since entering the race last summer, Trump has overwhelmed the campaign, making it almost impossible for other candidates to get attention and airtime. Trump has focused the campaign almost entirely on his issues, pronouncements, and candidacy, drowning out substance and policy ideas, particularly on domestic economic policy, that should be part of the primary discussion. These days, when non-Trump candidates talk, they are almost always implicitly—if not explicitly—talking in relation to Trump. He is the axis on which the entire Republican race turns.

And tonight, provided he doesn’t change his mind and make a dramatic last-minute entrance (which given Trump’s flair for the spotlight, remains an outside possibility), Trump will be gone for the first time, leaving the rest of the candidates to talk amongst themselves.

In theory, that means that we could be in for a calmer, somewhat more substantive debate. Now, I’m not expecting this to turn into a think tank panel, or candidates to pass out white papers during their opening statements. But with Trump gone, the candidates have an opportunity, however brief, to show what they’re like in his absence, to demonstrate, if only for a few hours, the kinds of campaigns they wanted to run.

Trump’s absence probably represents the biggest opportunity for Jeb Bush, who has consistently come across as flustered by Trump’s stage presence, and who spent much of last year rolling out a series of interesting and sometimes reasonable economic policy proposals that almost no one paid any attention to. If Bush wants to show us the kind of campaign he had hoped to run, and the kind of candidate he’d hoped to be, tonight represents his best opportunity in months.

It’s an opportunity for candidates like Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, and Rand Paul—who will be back on the mainstage—as well, to both make their cases and to differentiate themselves from the other Republican politicians on stage without having to worry that everything they say will immediately turn to bounce off of Trump. It’s a moment that might allow all the candidates some breathing room and freedom to model what a Trump-free GOP primary would like.

Or at least, that’s what it could be, if enough of the candidates decided that’s what they wanted, and the moderators decided to play along (or not offer too much resistance). But it’s probably not what it will be. After all, Trump remains the party’s frontrunner, and his absence is the biggest story going into the debate. He won’t be on the stage, but his spirit will loom over the event anyway, and the moderators for Fox News—which has not been shy about criticizing Trump for his no-show—will probably frame many if not most of their questions around Trump anyway, implicitly asking the candidates to take shots at him, to pile on, knowing that he has no way to hit back. Even in his absence, then, his presence will still be felt.

I won’t deny that this approach could be entertaining and even satisfying in a way, but it won’t be all that instructive. Trump has dominated the GOP race so thoroughly that at this point it’s hard to imagine what it would look like without. Tonight’s debate offers an opportunity—admittedly an imperfect one—to engage in that fantasy, and even to enact it, if only for a moment.

Indeed, enacting that fantasy may ultimately be the best way to hit Trump where it hurts. His refusal to attend the debate is, like virtually everything he does, a stunt designed to make sure that he remains the center of attention. So ignoring him rather than attacking him might be the more effective approach. If Trump truly doesn’t want to take part in this debate, then so be it. Both Fox and the candidates should do their part and leave him out of it entirely. 

Check back in later this evening: Reason editors will be live-tweeting both the primetime debate and the undercard. 

We are four days out from the Iowa caucuses. The Democratic candidates made their final pitches to voters at a town hall event on Tuesday, while the Republicans (minus The Donald) will take their parting shots at this evening’s Fox News–sponsored debate.

For almost a year I’ve been advising readers not to put much stock in the polls. Among other reasons, I’ve said that people are apt to change their mind about who they’re supporting many times over the course of the weeks and months leading up to an election, as they learn more about the various candidates, observe their performances in the debates, and view ads for and against. Poor showings in the early states can also push straggling candidates to throw in the towel, thus winnowing the field and changing voters’ calculus.

But none of that likely matters in Iowa at this late stage in the game. By now, most people there know who they like. They not only have studied up on the various candidates, they’ve probably met some of them. I’ll never forget watching a focus group in Des Moines in 2014: The moderator asked how many of the 30-some participants had personally shaken hands with Barack Obama while he was running for president. Virtually everyone indicated that they had. Iowa is, in many ways, a horse of another color.

So the time remaining for voters there to change their allegiance is running low. The only real remaining question is how many people will actually turn out—but the answer can make a hell of a difference.

The race on the Democratic side is extraordinarily close. The RealClearPolitics average for the state has Hillary Clinton ahead of Bernie Sanders by just two percentage points. Anything, it seems, could happen.

Yet whether Sanders is able to squeak out a win depends entirely on whether his supporters are motivated to show up Monday night and stick it out. As I wrote here at Hit & Run a couple of weeks ago:

Bernie Sanders is doing well in the polls at the moment. But if a lot of the people who say they support you don’t show up to actually vote, those strong polling numbers mean very little.

Turnout matters, and it’s not yet clear whether the largely grassroots Sanders campaign can compete with the Clinton machine at getting warm bodies to their polling places

This is an especially important question in places like Iowa that don’t hold traditional secret-ballot primary elections. Caucusing is a far more arduous and time-consuming process, one that by its nature includes multiple rounds and can stretch late into the night. Importantly, it’s also a more public one. Supporters must literally stand under a sign or banner with their preferred candidate’s name on it, for all their neighbors to see.

GOP frontrunner Donald Trump is leading by a reasonably solid margin in Iowa right now. (He’s more than six points ahead of his closest competitor, Ted Cruz, according to the RealClearPolitics average, and nearly 20 points in front of Marco Rubio.) There are some very good reasons to be skeptical that he’ll be able to match his polling performance on caucus night, however—and the biggest one is that his get-out-the-vote operation is untested, to say the least. Per The New York Times:

Some of Mr. Trump’s Republican rivals have spent months calling and knocking on doors to identify potential supporters to draw them out to caucuses, but Mr. Trump does not appear to have invested in this crucial “voter ID” strategy until recently.

Something called social desirability bias comes into play in Iowa, as well. A December study from the Morning Consult found that better-educated voters were more likely to say they were supporting the real estate mogul in totally anonymous online surveys than they were in live-interview telephone surveys. In other words, some people like Trump but are too embarrassed to say so out loud. It seems rather unlikely that many of these individuals would be willing to venture out on a cold February night and plant themselves, in full view, next to a sign bearing a reality TV star’s name. 

As a new report from Monmouth University explains, for Trump to win Iowa, he will need the GOP caucuses to garner record-setting turnout numbers. If 170,000 Republicans show up—far surpassing the record-high 122,000 from 2012—Trump is expected to emerge victorious. But if the real number is more like 130,000—still a record, mind you—it “puts the race in a tie at 26% for Trump and 26% for Cruz, with Rubio at 15% and Carson at 12%.”

Why does lower turnout necessarily spell bad things for Trump? Because his support is disproportionately strong among groups that tend to vote in low numbers—”disaffected folks who are only marginally attached to the political process,” as The New Yorker put it, or “people on the periphery of the G.O.P. coalition,” as per The Upshot blog at The New York Times. He does well among blue-collar types, among people who call themselves Republicans but are actually registered as Democrats, and among those who have turned out only “irregularly” for past elections. To believe he’ll win is to assume these groups will buck history and show up en masse.

Despite all the reasons to be skeptical, though, I’m becoming increasingly nervous about what might lie ahead. 

I keep thinking back to the right-of-center conventional wisdom on the eve of the 2012 general. It held that, in order to win re-election, President Obama would have to repeat the miracle he achieved on Election Night 2008 by turning out unprecedented numbers of “unlikely” voters—young people, African Americans, and other demographic groups that have a track record of staying home.

Given all that had occurred in the four years intervening, that struck conservatives as thoroughly implausible. With the GOP’s strong showing in the 2010 midterms, the collective national momentum seemed to be running against the Democratic Party. Surely Obama’s base was disappointed in the candidate that ran on a platform of criminal justice reform and closing the prison at Guantanamo and then went through with none of it?

Of course, all those assumptions turned out to be wrong. Obama did repeat his GOTV miracle and won big as a result. In raw numbers, more blacks and Hispanics cast ballots in 2012 than they had four years before. Stated a report from Brookings, “Minority turnout determined the 2012 election.”

The Trump campaign is betting it can accomplish something similar. Are they right? I have honestly no idea. As savvy politicos like to say, past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior—right up until it isn’t.

A Great American Police Work story, reported at Raw Story, thanks again to the magic of cheap and widespread recording technology, involving:

Michael Picard’s encounter with the troopers last September, when he and a friend were detained while standing on a highway to warn motorists about a DUI checkpoint in Hartford, Connecticut….

One trooper, identified as Jeff Jalbert, is seen approaching Picard’s friend and saying that they were called to the scene because “somebody just said that one of you guys had a gun on them.” Picard states that he is carrying a gun, but that he has a permit allow him to do so.

Trooper First Class John Barone is later seen in the video reaching for Picard’s phone and telling him it was illegal for him to be filmed on a city street.

“Did you get any documentation that I am allowing you to take my picture?” Barone asks.

“No, but you’re on public property,” Picard replies.

“No I’m not,” the trooper responds. “I’m on state property. I’m on state property.”

Barone then seizes Picard’s camera, but does not realize it captures his discussion with Jalbert, Sergeant John Jacobi, and an unidentified trooper after noting that Picard’s gun is legal. Barone can be heard asking his colleagues, “Want me to punch a number on this? Gotta cover our ass.”

Later, Jacobi recommends to the group, “I think we do simple trespass, we do reckless use of the highway and creating a public disturbance. All three are tickets.”

“Then we claim that, um, in backup, we had multiple people, um, they didn’t want to stay and give us a statement, so we took our own course of action,” an unidentified trooper adds….

Picard says “As of now, the prosecutor has not dropped the case despite having video evidence of police misconduct.”

Raw Story picked up the story from the Free Thought Project.

The video:

For extra police recorded dark tragi-comedy this morning, Oakland cops on tape telling Hernan Jamarillo in 2013 “sir, we are not killing you” minutes before the 51-year-old man they were all on top of died. His crime? Being in his room and acting erratically after his sister (foolishly) called the cops about a ruckus in his room she thought was an intruder.

Hat tip: Gabriel Starr

Japanese agricultural company SPREAD is constructing the world’s first farm manned entirely by robots. The indoor, vertical, and LED-lit endeavor in Kyoto—which SPREAD is calling the Vegetable Factory—will exclusively grow lettuce, with robots able to harvest up to 30,000 heads of lettuce every day.  

If you’re picturing something straight out of sci-fi, though, not quite: There will be no humanoid robots roaming these faux fields. According to Tech Insider, the robots “look more like conveyor belts with arms.” But they will be able to plant seeds, water and trim crops, and harvest the heads of lettuce when they’re ready without the aid of any human beings. 

SPREAD’s current indoor farm produces 21,000 heads of lettuce per day, but it’s still staffed by some of us. For its “next-generation Vegetable Factory,” SPREAD is focusing on sustainability and keeping costs low with “full automation from seeding to harvest and the optimization of the energy used for the lighting and air conditioning.”

The company projects a labor-cost reduction of 50 percent and 30 percent less energy usage, and will recycle 98 percent of the water needed to grow the crops. 

SPREAD sells its lettuce—which is higher in beta-carotene than conventional lettuce—under the brand name Vegetus. The company will open the fully-automated plant in 2017 and aims to scale up to 500,000 heads of lettuce per day within five years, franchising out its robotic plant-factory system in Japan and internationally. 

Vincent “Buddy” Cianci Jr. has died at age 74. A fixture in Rhode Island politics since he was first elected mayor of Providence in 1975, Cianci is famous—or infamous—in the rest of the country for two incidents, which between then sum up the toupee-wearing thug’s style of personal and public corruption and brutality.

The first came in 1983, when Cianci invited a contractor named Raymond DeLeo to his home. After a cop frisked DeLeo, the mayor held the man captive for hours, hitting him, spitting on him, trying to stick a cigarette in his eye, assaulting him with an ashtray and a fireplace log, and telling him that if he hit back everyone present would swear that DeLeo struck first. Throughout the night, the mayor accused the contractor of having an affair with Cianci’s estranged wife, demanding that his prisoner “sign a confession that he had been sleeping with Sheila and an agreement that DeLeo would pay Cianci $500,000,” the Providence Journal later reported. Because of that evening, the mayor was charged with assault, kidnapping, and attempted extortion; when he went on trial in early 1984, he pled no contest and resigned from office.

In 1990, Cianci was elected mayor again. That paved the way for the second infamous incident: In 2001, he was indicted on a host of corruption charges.

Here’s how the Boston Globe‘s obit describes his second term as mayor:

The second coming of Cianci coincided with “Providence renaissance.”

Rivers that had run through underground culverts were reclaimed. Ornate walkways and bridges graced the rivers. Providence landed the largest mall in the region. People flocked to a downtown that just decades ago had been a dangerous, seamy zone. The hugely popular WaterFire display lighted up the rivers with floating braziers of crackling, burning cedar.

Cianci soaked up the notoriety. He marketed his own line of pasta sauce and became a fixture on the national “Imus in the Morning” radio show.

But beneath the glitter, the city was rotting. Buddy’s Providence was a town for sale, federal prosecutors said, where even routine dealings with City Hall—such as applying for jobs or bidding on contracts—meant greasing a few palms.

This time Cianci insisted he was innocent. He was eventually convicted on one count of racketeering conspiracy, resigned again, and served half a decade behind bars. He made another run at the mayor’s office after he got out of jail, but this time the voters said no.

The Globe goes on to quote a line from Cianci’s 2011 memoir, Politics and Pasta: How I Prosecuted Mobsters, Rebuilt a Dying City, Dined with Sinatra, Spent Five Years in a Federally Funded Gated Community, and Lived to Tell the Tale. “I used my public power for personal reasons,” he wrote. “I admit it. It probably wasn’t the right thing to do, but it certainly felt good.” He was talking about the petty favors he used his office to extract from people, but the line applies to a lot more of his career than just that. They should put it on his tombstone.

Two teenagers in a single county in Tennessee have died and—while the autopsy results are not yet in—their deaths may have been caused by drinking a combination of racing fuel and Mountain Dew.

These are the first such cases reported in the state, and state health officials say that they are not aware of any cases outside the state. 

Naturally, it’s time for everybody to panic!

Valley News Live reports:

Racing fuel, used for drag racing, can be easily purchased online and at some convenience stores.

“A lot of people refer to it as ‘moonshine on steroids.’ A lot of people call it ‘Dewshine,'” Greenbrier Police Chief K.D. Smith told NBC News of the Mountain Dew and racing fuel mixture.

Fox News is covering the story of “two teenage friends are dead after drinking a lethal concoction of racing fuel and Mt. Dew” as part of the national cable news rotation.

The clickbait site Heavy hustled out “Dewshine: Five Fast Facts You Need to Know” to tell readers what they need to know about “this deadly drink.”

Plus much, much more media frenzy.

Drinkers have long made the connection between ethyl alcohol, or ethanol, (which gets you drunk) and methanol (which powers automobiles and can kill you), though it is typically bootleggers who wind up adulterating moonshine with the substance.

In 2012, there were a spate of deaths in the Czech that were attributed to methanol consumption, as well as deaths from India to Cambodia in recent years. During Prohibition, many Americans died looking for substitutes to banned alcoholic beverages elsewhere in the same chemical family—or through concerted federal efforts to taint forbidden beverages. The initial effects of methanol are similar to ethanol, but too much methanol quickly results in seizures, blindness, and death.

The fact that methanol poisoning is nothing new and also that there is no evidence that this particular combination is popular or in widespread use hasn’t stopped the scare story cycle, and it likely won’t stop politicians and regulators looking to score points with new safety measures if the story has some staying power.

PepsiCo already took some flack last year for releasing a pseudo-artisanal non-alcoholic beverage of the same name in longneck bottles. At the very least, expect this perfectly safe form of Dewshine to come up in the discussion as law enforcement and politicians scramble to “do something.” (Or is that “dew something?”)

The family of one of the dead teens, 16-year-old Logan Stephenson, is talking about an awareness campaign with their son’s school, which is actually a rather sensible response in this particular county where the problem appears to be completely contained.

The Stephenson family is collecting funds in Logan’s memory.

“The family will be meeting with the school to discuss how to disburse these funds,” the obituary reads. “Their desire is that it will be used to educate children of the many dangers which they face which parents are not aware of and therefore not able to warn them.”

Some local law enforcement is also being very reasonable, with the Robertson County Sheriff’s office releasing a statement saying:

The investigation continues into factors surrounding the deaths of these two boys, and the sheriff’s office is awaiting toxicology results. There are many rumors floating around social media websites by members of the community. The sheriff’s office asks that everyone please refrain from posting or spreading these rumors.

Good advice for journalists as well.

For another one of Reason’s greatest drug panic hits, don’t forget “beezin” where kids rub mentholated lip balm on their eyelids.