Category: reason

Joe Trippi: There Will be a Libertarian President. And
Sooner Than You Think. is the latest video from
ReasonTV. Watch above or click on the link below for video, full
text, supporting links, downloadable versions, and more Reason TV
clips.

View this article.

The European Union is considering
sanctions on those responsible for the “repression” in Ukraine
amid the ongoing violence in Kiev between anti-government
protesters and security forces.

Protests began in November last year after the Ukrainian
government rejected a trade deal with the E.U. Since rejecting the
deal the Ukrainian government has received a
$15 billion bailout from Russia.

The BBC is
reporting that 26 people have been killed and hundreds have been
treated for injuries as a result of the recent violence,
the worst since Ukraine since gained independence from the
Soviet Union in 1991.

The New York Times outlined what sort of sanctions could
be imposed on those deemed responsible for the recent violence:

The imposition of so-called “smart sanctions” is a standard
foreign policy reflex of the European Union when confronted by acts
of violence. Over the years, officials have honed a system for
identifying individuals deemed responsible for repression, usually
imposing a travel ban preventing visits to the 28-nation European
Union and often freezing bank accounts.

Experts debate their effectiveness when applied to countries
such as Zimbabwe, but their likely use in this case underlines the
extent to which the bloc’s efforts to use its influence in its own
neighborhood have faltered.

Nevertheless, they appear highly likely to be introduced, José
Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Commission, the
executive arm of the 28-nation bloc, having also said he expects
targeted measures against those responsible for violence.

According to the
Chicago Tribune, Poland and Latvia have called for the
E.U. to take emergency action, and France and Germany are expected
to release a statement later today.

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• The chairman of the White House’s Council of
  Economic Advisers
  disputed the CBO’s estimate that a higher minimum wage would
  cause job loss, because, what, you expected him to be economically
  literate?
• The Department of Homeland Security is
  soliciting bids for a license-plate tracking system that would
  allow the feds to capture data collected by local law enforcement
  agencies that use license-plate readers. If it feels like you’re
  the enemy…
• Two police groups in Minnesota are
  suing the NFL over its rule banning guns from stadiums. They
  argue off-duty cops have a “right” to carry firearms. They’re no
  second class citizens after all.
• The teachers union in New York City is now
  pushing for “back pay” because it believes teachers deserved a
  raise a long time ago. What could anyone who comes up with that
  kind of logic actually teach?
• Volkswagen’s labor leader
  threatened to block any further expansions by the company into
  the south after a factory in Tennessee voted against UAW
  representation. Worker rights are only for those willing to
  subsidize the paychecks of union leaders.
• Traffic police in Somalia are
  struggling to impose rules on Somali drivers, who are used to
  roads but not governments. Who will rule the roads?

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Switzerland will soon hold a nationwide
referendum on granting a guaranteed and unconditional minimum
monthly income of $2,800 for each Swiss adult. In America, where
Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty just celebrated its 50th
anniversary of failing to achieve victory, liberals jumped on the
Swiss news to reconsider the un-American-sounding idea of a
universal basic income. Veronique de Rugy notes that surprisingly
to some, they were joined by many libertarians. The list of
intellectuals who have made cases for a guaranteed minimum income
over the years includes
such laissez-faire luminaries as Milton
Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, and Charles Murray.

View this article.

At the center
of the case against Michael Dunn is a disappearing shotgun. The
middle-aged software developer claims 17-year-old Jordan Davis
threatened to kill him with it during an argument over loud music
at a Jacksonville, Florida, gas station in November 2012. But
police never found a gun, and no witness reported seeing one. It
seems at least one juror nevertheless found Dunn’s story plausible,
since his trial ended last week without a verdict on the
murder charge related to his shooting of Davis. But Jacob Sullum
says it is hard to see how that outcome can be attributed to
Florida’s “stand your ground” self-defense law, which has been
widely blamed for hanging the jury.

View this article.

At the center
of the case against Michael Dunn is a disappearing shotgun. The
middle-aged software developer claims 17-year-old Jordan Davis
threatened to kill him with it during an argument over loud music
at a Jacksonville, Florida, gas station in November 2012. But
police never found a gun, and no witness reported seeing one. It
seems at least one juror nevertheless found Dunn’s story plausible,
since his trial ended last week without a verdict on the
murder charge related to his shooting of Davis. But Jacob Sullum
says it is hard to see how that outcome can be attributed to
Florida’s “stand your ground” self-defense law, which has been
widely blamed for hanging the jury.

View this article.

Some parents of
students at Wisconsin’s Marinette Middle School aren’t happy their
children were asked to take part in a group activity requiring them
to step forward in response to various questions. The school said
the exercise was meant to build better relationships and reduce
bullying. But parents say many of the questions could
be embarrassing
to students and provoke bullying. Among other things,
students were asked to step forward if they were nervous they
wouldn’t finish high school, have parents who live in two different
houses, have thought about hurting themselves, are adopted or would
like a hug.

The world’s on fire, so The
Independents tonight (9 pm ET, 6 pm PT, repeats three
hours later) will be talking about the world. Panelists Michael C. Moynihan of The
Daily Beast (Reason archive
here) and Scottie
Nell Hughes of the Tea Party
News Network will talk about the
latest clashes between the opposition and the government in
Venezuela. Also
scheduled to be on the show on the ground from bloody,
clash-wrecked Kiev is reporter Alexander Kleimenov. Former United
Nations ambassador John Bolton will chime in to discuss the Iranian
nukes deal and the
latest horrifying reports to come out of North Korea.

Tired of the world? How about Fox News
Senior Judicial Analyst and Reason.com
columnist Andrew Napolitano talking about how Director of
National Intelligence James Clapper is a
big fat liar? Or the federal minimum wage, an increase of which
the Congressional Budget Office predicts will
reduce the net number of jobs? Or perhaps you want to hear
Kmele Foster talk about why it’s okay for Kansas to
legalize business-place discrimination against gays?

There will still be time to discuss naked dating, Edward Snowden
action figures, Jones Act salt barges, and more. BUT MOST EXCITING
is that the sexy online-only after show, streamed on the show
website at 10 pm, will include YOUR PHONE CALLS. The phone
number, which you really need to not call until then, is 1-877-249-9626. And as always, send your
tweets at #indFBN,
and some can and will be used against you.

Tampa Bay Times columnist Steve Bousquet
yesterday touches on a subject I wrote about here at
Reason last month in my article “Petty
Law Enforcement vs. the Poor“: the way enforcement of laws
relating to traffic and parking and moving on the streets, as
people or in vehicles, can be heavyhanded and damaging beyond what
the “crimes” in question should reasonably impose on most citizens,
starting from something seemingly “minor” to something pretty much
life-wrecking.

Bousquet writes on how quick his home state of Florida is to
impose the potentially crippling, to the working poor, punishment
of driver’s license suspension. He hits you upfront with what that
too-often means to the punished:

The state of Florida is in the business of driving people into
poverty.

Don’t take my word for it. Listen to House Speaker Will
Weatherford, a Republican from Wesley Chapel, who couldn’t believe
how often the state suspends drivers’ licenses: It happened to
nearly 700,000 people last year…..

“If you go look at the data, they didn’t pay a fine,”
Weatherford said. “They forgot to show up in court. They didn’t pay
their child support. There’s this snowball effect. They lose their
driver’s license. Now they can’t get to work. They get pulled over
on a suspended driver’s license. Now they go to jail. Now they owe
$4,000. It creates poverty. It holds people down.”

A total of 685,489 drivers in Florida had their licenses
suspended in the fiscal year that ended last June. The law allows
for a “business purposes only” license in some cases, but not for
people who lose their licenses because they failed to pay
fines.

And 167,000 of those suspensions had nothing to do with
driving.

Failure to pay child support is grounds for suspension. So is a
drug-related conviction, failure to appear in court on a worthless
check charge and truancy by a minor. There are hundreds of kids
under age 16 in Florida whose future licenses have been suspended
because they habitually skip school, even though their licenses
don’t yet exist.

A new report by the Legislature’s research unit, the Office of
Program Policy Analysis and Government Accountability, found that
more people received nondriving-related suspensions in the past
year for failure to pay court costs than for any other
reason….

As I wrote in my piece, it’s a steady pattern of severe damage
to the lives of the least well off in America that strangely gets
little attention from most poverty activists and academics, perhaps
because the solution is for the state to do less rather than do
more.

Violence between Ukraine’s opposition
(known as Euromaidan) and the government’s SWAT-style police force
(Berkut), has boiled over today. Fires are raging across
protester’s tent-towns and police headquarters in what is being

described as “open warfare.” Estimates
indicate that over 20 people are dead and over 1,000 are
injured. The BBC reports that
officers are using rubber bullets and stun grenades, while The
Daily Beast
says machine guns are their weapon of choice. Protesters are
armed with an array of weapons, from bricks and molotov cocktails
to firearms of their own.

Euromaidan participant Lesya Orobets writes: 

The war is here. A real fierce war. It is impossible to grasp
this emotionally, although the mind is working precisely and
quickly quite apart from emotions. We are being exterminated
because of our desire to have dignity and decide our lives
independently. This simply makes no sense. My fellow Ukrainians are
being killed by the creatures that not only resemble us
biologically, but also carry Ukrainian passports.

Russian news website Slon.ru
explains that mayhem was sparked because police blocked
opposition members and their representatives from entering
Ukraine’s parliamentary building, where they planned on introducing
constitutional reforms to limit the authority of President
Yanukovych, who has been consolidating power.

The Kyiv Post has a comprehensive timeline of events.
Here are some
highlights:

Feb. 18, 8 p.m. — Acting Security Services of
Ukraine head Oleksandr Yakymenko and acting Interior Minister
Vitaliy Zakharchenko issued a public warning at 4 p.m. to
protesters to clear the streets within two hours: “If by 6 p.m. the
lawlessness doesn’t cease, we shall be forced to used all legal
means to bring order.”

[…]

Police continued to amass in the evening… Protesters tore up
paving stones on Khreshchatyk Street, stood guard at barricades and
stockpiled Molotov cocktails as if bracing for an attack by police
overnight.

[…]

Feb. 18, 8:55 p.m. — Police had encircled
Kyiv’s Independence Square. Tent cities housing protesters were on fire. Officers had deployed a
water cannon and an armored personnel carrier. But a protester on
the main square said that police had not penetrated the barricaded
perimeter and were merely encircling the protesters there.

[…]

Feb. 18, 9:28 p.m. — Channel 5 is
reporting that President Viktor Yanukovych and opposition leader
Arseniy Yatseniuk are meeting tonight in a bid to end the
violence 

Shortly after midnight, one politician
asserted, “I am confident that today Maidan will be
stripped.”

[…]

Feb. 18, 10:18 p.m. There are unconfirmed
reports of 300-500 “titushki” — government-hired thugs — walking
on Volodymyrska Street towards Sofiyivska Square

[…]

Feb. 18, 10:22 p.m. — Several news media
outlets report that protesters in western Ukraine have taken over
police headquarters in two oblasts, Lviv and Ivano-Frankivsk, and
are trying to storm the headquarters in Ternopil Oblast.

[…]

Feb. 18, 11:30 p.m. — About 20,000 people
remain on Kyiv’s Independence Square late on Feb. 18. A lot of the
square is on fire from burning tires and debris.

So far, no resolution has been reached between Yanukovych and
opposition leaders. Whether or not they even met is still
unclear. 

Read Reason’s previous coverage of the Ukrainian revolution

here.