Category: reason

Following the shooting of six police officers, three of whom died, in Baton Rouge on Sunday, the president of the Cleveland Police Patrolmen’s Association called on Gov. John Kasich (R-Ohio) to suspend open-carry in Cuyahoga County for this week’s Republican National Convention.

“We are sending a letter to Gov. Kasich requesting assistance from him. He could very easily do some kind of executive order or something—I don’t care if it’s constitutional or not at this point,” Stephen Loomis, the union president, told CNN. “They can fight about it after the RNC or they can lift it after the RNC, but I want him to absolutely outlaw open-carry in Cuyahoga County until this RNC is over.”

Kasich dismissed the request, pointing out that “Ohio governors do not have the power to arbitrarily suspend federal and state constitutional rights or state laws as suggested.”

“The bonds between our communities and police must be reset and rebuilt—as we’re doing in Ohio—so our communities and officers can both be safe. Everyone has an important role to play in that renewal,” Kasich said according to CNN.

Loomis insists he was pro-Constitution. “We are constitutional law enforcement, we love the Constitution, support it and defend it, but you can’t go into a crowded theater and scream fire,” Loomis said. “And that’s exactly what they’re doing by bringing those guns down there.”

A few years ago Ken “Popehat” White called Oliver Wendell Holmes’ “fire in a crowded theater,” more or less a defense of laws limiting free speech in times of war, “the most famous and pervasive lazy cheat in American dialogue about free speech.” It has now moved on to gun rights.

It would be one thing if the union president were merely expressing his opinion or the opinion of the union—that’s not quite “fire in a crowded theater” speech—but the union president also appeared to speak as a ranking police authority, illustrating one of the many dangerous of permitting police officers to unionize in the first place.

“We are going to be looking very, very hard at anyone who has an open carry,” Loomis told CNN. “An AR-15, a shotgun, multiple handguns. It’s irresponsible of those folks—especially right now—to be coming downtown with open carry AR’s or anything else. I couldn’t care less if it’s legal or not,” the self-described Constitution-lover said.

Later, in an interview on Fox News, Loomis blamed President Obama and the governor of Minnesota for commenting on police-involved shootings last week.

“It’s absolutely insane that we have a president of the United States and a governor of Minnesota making the statements they made less than one day after the police-involved shootings,” Loomis complained. “And those police-involved shootings, make no mistake, are what absolutely have triggered this rash of senseless murders of law enforcement officers across this country. It’s reprehensible. And the president of the United States has blood on his hands that will not be able to come washed off.”

Previously, Loomis called the 5-foot-7, 191 pound 12-year-old Tamir Rice, fatally shot by a police officer who exited his vehicle just moments earlier “menacing.” Loomis is free to say what he wants, but police unions’ often antagonistic contributions to discussions of police violence and reform, coupled with their power to extract far-reaching concession from the governments their members are supposed to be employed by, offer a powerful argument against their existence. Collective bargaining privileges have been packaged as “rights” while used with few qualms to argue against yours.

In June, I attended the Free State Project’s weird and wonderful Porcfest for the first (though definitely not last) time. The past four days, I put in my seventh or so appearance at the Skousen family’s one-of-a-kind Freedom Fest event in Las Vegas. Squinted at from a certain angle, the conferences have almost nothing in common culturally—one’s a bunch of old-skewing people on the Strip who venerate Dinesh D’Souza and listen to Jeffrey Tucker sing showtunes, the other’s a bunch of wild-eyed hippie idealists in the woods doing drugs and carrying guns. Yet both are distinctly libertarian gatherings, featuring some overlapping interests (Blockchains!) and a least some of the same attendees (including Jeffrey Tucker). And at both events, casual conversations very quickly turned into referenda on James Weeks.

You may remember James Weeks—portly ginger fella letting it mostly hang out on the right, during an absolutely crucial and dramatic moment at the Libertarian Party’s National Convention in Orlando seven weeks ago. Weeks had been planning to run as the party’s national chair, but used his nominating-speech time-allotment—which came as the party was agonizingly counting up the tense and hotly contested second ballot for unloved-by-Libertarians vice-presidential nominee William Weld—to A) announce his withdrawal, and B) take a buddy’s dare to conduct a striptease while the C-SPAN cameras rolled.   

The results soon became infamous in the non-libertarian world…and very polarizing among Libertarians. Weeks got suspended from the party. Maverick third-place presidential finisher John McAfee wrote a stirring defense of letting freak flags fly:

there were widespread [boos] and general disapproval of Mr. [Weeks’] exuberance. Rather than enjoying a respite from the grey blandness of the convention, people were muttering that the world would think that Libertarians were fools. Well, if we care about such [trivialities], then we are indeed fools. 

For me, I was far more ashamed of those who turned their heads in disgust than by anything Mr. Weeks did.

Yet the lines of reaction are not always predictable. Radical Caucus stalwart Caryn Ann Harlos (no stranger herself to odd-for-boring-politics costumes) declared herself no fan of the dance. Late-breaking LP fundraiser Matt Kibbe, long of GOP politics, basically shrugged it off; while others who’ve been writing checks to the party for decades pronounced themselves mortified. It’s a fascinating if ultimately small-beer conundrum, one that touches on all sorts of questions about tolerance, messaging, and what happens when a marginalized political bloc starts stepping out into the sunlight.

Cato Unbound, which exists for these types of debates, is holding one now on precisely this topic. Gary Chartier, the anarchistic professor of law and business ethics, gets the ball rolling with a full-throated celebration of valuing “not just political freedom but also social, cultural, and psychic freedom.” Daniel Bier, an editor at the Foundation for Economic Education, counters, pretty sensibly, that

The purpose of a political party is, ostensibly, to get votes and drag the window of political possibilities in a certain direction. It’s not meant to function as a social club for geeks, strippers, and oddballs, even if we its members are geeks, strippers, and oddballs.

And I, as the house squish and Marc Allan Feldman fan, argue that any Big Tent worth its salt should also exhibit a certain amount of tolerance for the Normals. Excerpt:

I was disappointed that James Weeks got suspended from the LP. The action carried not a small whiff of insecurity that all the party’s measurable momentum is fragile and susceptible to sudden reversal. I have witnessed over the years other moments of we-blew-it despair, from the controversies over Ron Paul’s old newsletters, to his son’s failure to launch in the 2016 campaign, to Gary Johnson’s awkward performance on CNN (“I fear we shall not have our moment,” a prominent Libertarian supporter texted me after the town hall. “The road has just become longer”). And as Darryl Perry demonstrates, the temptation toward apocalyptic doom is not limited to the “adults.”

Libertarians should have more confidence in the long-term prospects for their ideas, and resist the temptation to see any particular moment or political campaign as some kind of make-or-break hinge point. The ideas will survive man-boobs—in fact, some of the best ideas will be hatched precisely from the freakiest quarters.

But the tolerance works both ways. Having “telegenic” libertarians present themselves professionally in national political discussions is a good thing, not something to dismiss or resent. Any culture of freedom and tolerance that doesn’t also include freedom and tolerance for the squares and the squishes is failing to live up to its promise.

The good news is that both libertarianism and the LP have roughly arrived at places where that kind of two-way tolerance is the rule, not the exception.

Read the whole exchange here. Can’t wait to see what Timothy P. Carney adds!

Three national presidential polls came out over the weekend, and all three contain historically good news for Libertarian Party nominee Gary Johnson.

A four-candidate CNN/ORC survey conducted July 13-16 delivered the highest number Johnson has ever received in national poll: 13 percent (compared to Hillary Clinton’s 42 percent, Donald Trump’s 37, and Jill Stein’s 5). And there is tangible Garymentum: Compared to the same outfit’s poll one month ago, Clinton/Trump are virtually unchanged, the presumptive Green Party nominee Stein is down two percentage points, and Johnson is up four. It’s also worth noting that this is the first presidential poll to be conducted after Bernie Sanders endorsed Hillary Clinton.

I don’t have all the historical data at my fingertips, but it’s a safe bet that 13 percent is the highest number a Libertarian Party presidential candidate has ever registered. It nudges out the 12 percent that Johnson has twice received in three-way polls that have excluded Stein, including as recently as last week’s July 8-12 CBS News/New York Times survey, which had Clinton and Trump tied at 36 percent.

The newly released NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll from July 9-13 also represents progress for Johnson, if on the milder side:

HC 41% DT 35% GJ 11% JS 6% July

HC 39% DT 38% GJ 10% JS 6% June

And even the ABC News/Washington Post poll from July 11-14, in which Johnson doesn’t quite make it to double digits, nevertheless shows an increase over the previous month:

HC 42% DT 38% GJ 8% JS 5% July 11-14

HC 47% DT 37% GJ 7% JS 3% June 20-23

In addition to the headline numbers, there are some fascinating tidbits in the cross-tabs of the CNN/ORC poll.

For instance, Johnson is within shouting distance of Trump among all voters under the age of 45—20 percent to 24 percent (Clinton is at 41 percent, Stein 8 percent). He is also doing almost as well as Trump among nonwhites: 14 percent to 17 percent (Clinton has 57 percent, Stein 7 percent). Johnson is beating both Trump and Stein among Democrats (6%-5%-2%), and among liberals (13%-4%-6%), but Clinton is still topping him among conservatives, 15%-9%. He is also competitive among independents, trailing Clinton and Trump 33%-30%-21%. I have written here and here about how Johnson’s best two audiences continue to be independents and Millennials.

The campaign’s mono-focus continues to be on getting into the nationally televised presidential debates, for which Johnson would have to average 15 percent across a set of polls that have yet to be identified by the Democratic/Republican-controlled Commission on Presidential Debates. This remains an uphill climb for a variety reasons, some of which I’ll write about in the coming hours. But inching steadily toward the 15 percent threshold is an essential first step.

Police officials in Baton Rouge, Louisiana have confirmed that at least three police officers were killed, and several more injured, in a shooting this morning. The city’s mayor has described the shooting as an “ambush.” 

The shooting took place near a convenience store, after officers responded to reports of shots fired around 9 a.m. this morning. It’s unclear how many shooters were involved, but police say they believe there is more than one suspect. Reports indicate that one suspect is dead. Local news outlet WAFB reports that area police says the scene is now “contained.” 

Tensions have run high in Baton Rouge since the fatal police shooting of Alton Sterling, 37, on July 5, outside a convenience store. The shooting was caught on video.

Black Lives Matter activists have organized multiple protests in the city, and police have arrested both activist leaders and journalists at the rallies. 

This story is developing. 
 

It’s not unusual for libertarians to have a hard time backing either major party’s presidential candidate, but the dispiriting choice between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump has even the most Republican-friendly members of the movement holding their noses. So Reason decided to ask some prominent libertarian and libertarian-leaning figures, including Penn Jillette, Radley Balko, and Virginia Postrel, which candidate offends them more. The people we surveyed are not making endorsements here—many will be voting for a third-party candidate or staying home. They’re answering a simpler question: not Who will you vote for? but Which one of these two is worse?

View this article.

Every year, typically during the summer months, many state laws that were passed during earlier state legislative sessions take effect. Some repeal bad old laws. Others add to the mix.

Baylen Linnekin has written about the impact of these state laws on beer brewers, sellers, and consumers, noting that a new crop of laws demonstrated progress but showed just “how far we have to go to make sure brewers, restaurants, other sellers, and consumers alike have all the choices they want.”

This summer, with many changes on the books, seems as good a time as any for an update.

View this article.

Former National Security Agency Director Michael Hayden makes the case for the expansive power of the American security state. In a review of Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror, from the August/September issue of Reason magazine, Brett Max Kaufman finds Hayden’s justifications and metaphors less than compelling:

Playing to the Edge is Hayden’s grand statement, the case for himself as a mover and shaker, a humble but aggressive visionary, a team player, an honorable man, and, most of all, right about everything. If we disagree with him, it’s only because we don’t know what he knows—and this is a problem. He’s concerned, he says, that “critics, observers, and just average citizens don’t know as much about intelligence as they want or should.” (Intelligence, in this context, means just about everything the NSA and CIA do.) If the public misunderstands what intelligence does, we might not want intelligence to keep doing it. He wants to show us that we should.

But it is not a good sign when your memoir’s central metaphor breaks down in the foreword. Hayden’s conceit is that those who run intelligence have a duty to “us[e] all the tools and all the authorities available, much like how a good athlete takes advantage of the entire playing field right up to the sideline markers and endlines”—the edge. As he’s said elsewhere (he’s been on this kick for nearly a decade), “Playing back from the line protected me but didn’t protect America. I made it clear I would always play in fair territory, but that there would be chalk dust on my cleats.”

The first problem is that if you get chalk on your cleats, it means you’re out of bounds. (Or at least you are in football, Hayden’s obvious inspiration.) That this has apparently gone unremarked to Hayden over the years—even by Dan Rooney, the owner of Hayden’s hometown Pittsburgh Steelers and Hayden’s high school football coach, with whom he watches too many Super Bowls in this book to count—is notable in itself. That it goes entirely unexamined in the book’s numerous invocations of the image is, alas, characteristic.

Worse still is that “taking advantage of the entire playing field” is a pretty odd way to describe the main thing that good athletes do. Of course, spraying one down the right-field line or throwing it deep and wide can sometimes help the team. But they are hardly required to win the game. Hayden never bothers to explain why pushing it to the edge is a main point of his duty as a public servant. Like so much in the book, it is simply assumed that people of good faith will agree.

View this article.

On Tuesday a white police officer in Baton Rogue, Louisiana, shot and killed a black man named Alton Sterling. One day later a white police officer in Falcon Heights, Minnesota, shot and killed a black man named Philando Castile. According to critics of the criminal justice system, police shootings like these can be stopped only if meaningful reforms have been put in place. But according to Heather Mac Donald, author of the new book The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe, those critics have it wrong.

While some pundits use the phrase “war on cops” almost literally, with false claims that violence against cops has been surging, Mac Donald mostly leaves this idea alone, aside from one assertion that anti-cop rhetoric has “spawned riots, ‘die-ins,’ and the assassination of police officers.” Instead she aims to push back against the critics of the criminal justice system, defending intrusive policing practices such as stop-and-frisk and calling it a “dangerous lie” that the system treats whites and blacks differently. She says we need more proactive policing and stricter incarceration practices to protect our cities from “mass destruction.” But as Tim Lynch observes in his review of the book, Mac Donald doesn’t make a very convincing case.

View this article.

The president of Turkey, Recep Erdogan, returned to Ankara from the seaside province of Marmaris to declare the coup launched against him by a “portion of the military” had failed. The hotel he was staying at was also reportedly bombed after he left, according to CNN.

Erdogan addressed Turkey during an interview on CNN Turk conducted via Facetime. “Those who are responsible, we will give them the necessary punishment,” Erdogan said, calling on his supporters to demonstrate in the streets. Erdogan also reportedly appeared at a rally in Ankara.

Erdogan has accused the imam Fethullah Gulen, who lives in self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania, and his followersm of orchestrating the coup attempt. Gullen has a loose network of charitable organizations, professional associations and other ventures, including 150 charter schools in the U.S, as the Associated Press reported in February.

The Turkish president said the coup plotters were guilty of treason and would be treated the same way as terrorists. More than 40 people have reportedly died in clashes in Ankara. Gulen is already on Turkey’s most wanted list for terrorism, although the U.S. has declined to extradite him and has not previously commented on his status. President Obama called for “restraint” in Turkey and support for the “democratically-elected government.”

Opposition parties in the Turkish parliament have all officially condemned the attempted coup.

President Obama did not make a public statement about the coup in progress in Turkey, but the White House did release a readout of a phone call with Secretary of State John Kerry, according to which the two “agreed that all parties in Turkey should support the democratically-elected Government of Turkey, show restraint, and avoid any violence or bloodshed.”

Kerry also released a statement:

The United States views with gravest concern events unfolding in Turkey. We are monitoring a very fluid situation.

I spoke this evening to Foreign Minister Cavusoglu and emphasized the United States’ absolute support for Turkey’s democratically-elected, civilian government and democratic institutions.

We urge all parties to ensure the safety and well-being of diplomatic missions and personnel and civilians throughout Turkey.

Our Embassy and Consulates in Turkey continue to provide updates to U.S. citizens in Turkey. U.S. citizens should shelter in place and stay indoors; and update family and friends of status when possible.

The European Union’s foreign policy representative, Federica Mogherini, meanwhile, called for “restraint and respect for democratic institutions”.

Officials from the Turkish military reportedly insist they have taken control of the country while President Recep Erdogan, who has spent much of his time in power limiting the right to protest, called on citizens to demonstrate against the coup, with pro-government demonstrations breaking out overnight despite reports of a military-imposed curfew.