Don’t Panic: Amazon Burning Is Mostly Farms, Not Forests

“A picture is worth a thousand words” is one of the dumbest aphorisms ever coined. Speaking as a former television producer, I’d say a picture takes a thousand words to explain. Take this much-circulated NASA satellite photo showing vast smoke plumes over the Amazon region:

Combined with a report from the Brazilian National Institute for Space Research that says the agency had detected 39,194 fires in the region, a 77 percent jump up from the same period in 2018, that picture has launched alarmed headlines around the world.

“Amazon rainforest is burning at an unprecedented rate,” declares CNN. The Daily Beast gives us “Record Number of Wildfires Burning in Amazon Rainforest.” Here’s NBC News: “Amazon wildfires could be ‘game over’ for climate change fight.”

Interestingly, when NASA released the satellite image on August 21, it noted that “it is not unusual to see fires in Brazil at this time of year due to high temperatures and low humidity. Time will tell if this year is a record breaking or just within normal limits.”

So why are there so many fires? “Natural fires in the Amazon are rare, and the majority of these fires were set by farmers preparing Amazon-adjacent farmland for next year’s crops and pasture,” soberly explains The New York Times. “Much of the land that is burning was not old-growth rain forest, but land that had already been cleared of trees and set for agricultural use.”

It is routine for farmers and ranchers in tropical areas burn their fields to control pests and weeds and to encourage new growth in pastures.

What about deforestation trends?  Since the right-wing nationalist

Various researchers have noted a U-shaped relation between environmental degradation and economic growth. As development takes off, levels of pollution and land degradation rise, but they begin to improve once certain thresholds of per capita incomes are attained. A 2012 study found, after parsing data from 52 developing countries between 1972 and 2003, that deforestation increases until average income levels reach about $3,100 per capita. As it happens, Brazilian per capita incomes reached $3,600 per capita in 2004,which is when deforestation rates began trending decisively downward.

While problematic deforestation is still taking place in the Amazon region, a 2018 study in Nature reported that the global tree canopy cover had increased by 865,000 square miles from 1982 to 2016. As Brazilians become wealthier, the deforestation trend in the Amazon will likely turn around toward afforestation, as it already has done many other countries.

  • As it happens, this post is only about 430 words.

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Don’t Panic: Amazon Burning Is Mostly Farms, Not Forests

“A picture is worth a thousand words” is one of the dumbest aphorisms ever coined. Speaking as a former television producer, I’d say a picture takes a thousand words to explain. Take this much-circulated NASA satellite photo showing vast smoke plumes over the Amazon region:

Combined with a report from the Brazilian National Institute for Space Research that says the agency had detected 39,194 fires in the region, a 77 percent jump up from the same period in 2018, that picture has launched alarmed headlines around the world.

“Amazon rainforest is burning at an unprecedented rate,” declares CNN. The Daily Beast gives us “Record Number of Wildfires Burning in Amazon Rainforest.” Here’s NBC News: “Amazon wildfires could be ‘game over’ for climate change fight.”

Interestingly, when NASA released the satellite image on August 21, it noted that “it is not unusual to see fires in Brazil at this time of year due to high temperatures and low humidity. Time will tell if this year is a record breaking or just within normal limits.”

So why are there so many fires? “Natural fires in the Amazon are rare, and the majority of these fires were set by farmers preparing Amazon-adjacent farmland for next year’s crops and pasture,” soberly explains The New York Times. “Much of the land that is burning was not old-growth rain forest, but land that had already been cleared of trees and set for agricultural use.”

It is routine for farmers and ranchers in tropical areas burn their fields to control pests and weeds and to encourage new growth in pastures.

What about deforestation trends?  Since the right-wing nationalist

Various researchers have noted a U-shaped relation between environmental degradation and economic growth. As development takes off, levels of pollution and land degradation rise, but they begin to improve once certain thresholds of per capita incomes are attained. A 2012 study found, after parsing data from 52 developing countries between 1972 and 2003, that deforestation increases until average income levels reach about $3,100 per capita. As it happens, Brazilian per capita incomes reached $3,600 per capita in 2004,which is when deforestation rates began trending decisively downward.

While problematic deforestation is still taking place in the Amazon region, a 2018 study in Nature reported that the global tree canopy cover had increased by 865,000 square miles from 1982 to 2016. As Brazilians become wealthier, the deforestation trend in the Amazon will likely turn around toward afforestation, as it already has done many other countries.

  • As it happens, this post is only about 430 words.

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Desperate DNC Chair Set to Hold Fundraisers … In Mexico

Authored by Rusty Weiss via The Mental Recession

With the Democratic National Committee (DNC) struggling to raise money, Chairman Tom Perez is planning to hold multiple fundraisers in Mexico City this September.

According to Bloomberg, the three fundraisers scheduled for the 28th will range from a student-centric event with a $25 minimum entry fee, to a dinner where tickets could go as high as $15,000.

Under Perez’ leadership, the DNC has consistently lagged far behind their Republican National Committee (RNC) counterparts in raising funds. In June, the DNC raised $8.5 million to the RNC’s $20.7.

Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel reports that the Republicans also broke a record in July.

“Our fundraising success is further evidence that the American people like the pro-growth agenda and economic record that the Trump Administration and Republicans continue to deliver,” McDaniel said.

Meanwhile, the Democrats have to travel to the heart of Mexico to try and raise funds.

There are currently 1.5 million American citizens residing in Mexico according to the State Department.

No Chance of Illegality

We know what you’re thinking: Is there any chance for illegal donations to filter through? It is, after all, illegal for foreigners to contribute to American political campaigns – but the DNC has it covered.

According to Bloomberg, “The registration form on the DNC website require that attendees be U.S. citizens or permanent residents and enter passport or green card numbers.”

In other words, they’re going to have to prove they’re American citizens. Hey, we’ve been told all along that asking for that kind of proof is super racist!

Hillary to the Rescue

The DNC, aside from fundraising in Mexico, is seeking other desperate alternatives to kickstart donations.

Politico notes that Hillary Clinton will be hosting an event in Washington, D.C. this October where participants can contribute at different levels ranging from $15,000 to $50,000.

Who exactly is paying that kind of money to have dinner and a conversation with Hillary?

Just this past year, a speaking tour with the Clintons saw ticket prices drop to single digits, while a Broadway play about Hillary’s election failure was canceled after seeing deplorable ticket sales.

Perez also sought support from Democrats in London in April of 2018. It’s surprising to see a party allegedly so consumed with foreign influence in American elections travel to Mexico in order to fund their campaigns.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/33QwzGZ Tyler Durden

As Trade War Escalates, Trump Has Impotently ‘Ordered’ American Businesses Out of China

President Donald Trump’s trade policies have always been, at their core, an exercise in centrally planned economics and petty authoritarianism.

Every time the president rage-tweets about “America First” economics or makes unverified promises about how his tariffs will bring jobs back to the United States, what he’s really saying is that the federal government knows how to construct international supply chains better than private businesses do. Each new round of tariffs is a way of punishing American companies for prioritizing the interests of their customers by sourcing goods in the most cost-effective way. When White House economic advisors like Peter Navarro question the patriotism of American CEOs who do businesses in China, the subtext is that private businesses should operate as the president sees fit, not as their shareholders, executives, and managers do.

If there was any doubt about those conclusions, Trump squashed it on Friday.

I mean…c’mon. “American companies are hereby ordered to immediately start looking for an alternative to China.” Even coming from the most powerful elected official on the face of the Earth, that comes off as a tantrum of petty tyranny.

It’s also a sign that even the American presidency is largely impotent in the face of the market mechanisms Trump imagines he can alter with a tweet. Indeed, if the tariffs were working the way Trump claims, there would be no need for him to “hereby order” American businesses to do the very thing the tariffs are supposed to be compelling them to do.

The president can’t reorder global supply chains with the snap of a tweet, but his trade policies are continuing to damage global markets. The Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged 500 points after Trump’s “hereby ordered” tweet—a signal, perhaps, that the stock market understands the effectiveness of central planning. Meanwhile, China has threatened to escalate the trade war on September 1 if Trump goes ahead with plans to impose a new round of 10 percent tariffs on about $300 billion of Chinese imports. On Friday, China’s government announced new tariffs on American cars, oil, and industrial goods—expanding its retaliatory efforts beyond farm goods for the first time.

“The fact of the matter is that nobody wins a trade war, and the continued tit-for-tat escalation between the U.S. and China is putting significant strain on the U.S. economy, raising costs, undermining investment, and roiling markets,” said Myron Brilliant, head of international affairs for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, in a statement.

The president’s orders are unlikely to make it any easier for American companies to shift production out of China. In some cases, the tariffs have encouraged manufacturers to shift production to India, Vietnam, and even Mexico—but that’s merely an acceleration of shifts that were already ongoing before the trade war, according to A.T. Kearney, a manufacturing and trade consulting firm whose annual “Reshoring Index” measures domestic manufacturing of consumer goods against imports of the same products from 14 lower-cost countries in Asia. Vietnam’s exports to the United States have doubled since 2013, for example, but the rate of growth skyrocketed during the first quarter of 2019.

Those higher input costs have harmed American manufacturers who import component parts—companies like the Wisconsin-based Primex Family of Companies, which has been doing business in China for 30 years. The “indirect costs” of the trade war, such as the pressure to alter supply chains, have been “enormous,” CEO Paul Shekoski told Reason last week.

If Trump wanted to help American businesses, he would end his destructive and increasingly erratic trade war instead of rage-tweeting “orders” that would be easier to laugh at if they weren’t further a further demonstration of how little he knows about what he imagines he can design.

Even as the tariffs fail to achieve their goals—while imposing immense economic costs along the way—there can be no doubt about the fundamental authoritarianism at the center of the economic nationalism project. That mask started slipping long ago. Today, Trump yanked it off.

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As Trade War Escalates, Trump Has Impotently ‘Ordered’ American Businesses Out of China

President Donald Trump’s trade policies have always been, at their core, an exercise in centrally planned economics and petty authoritarianism.

Every time the president rage-tweets about “America First” economics or makes unverified promises about how his tariffs will bring jobs back to the United States, what he’s really saying is that the federal government knows how to construct international supply chains better than private businesses do. Each new round of tariffs is a way of punishing American companies for prioritizing the interests of their customers by sourcing goods in the most cost-effective way. When White House economic advisors like Peter Navarro question the patriotism of American CEOs who do businesses in China, the subtext is that private businesses should operate as the president sees fit, not as their shareholders, executives, and managers do.

If there was any doubt about those conclusions, Trump squashed it on Friday.

I mean…c’mon. “American companies are hereby ordered to immediately start looking for an alternative to China.” Even coming from the most powerful elected official on the face of the Earth, that comes off as a tantrum of petty tyranny.

It’s also a sign that even the American presidency is largely impotent in the face of the market mechanisms Trump imagines he can alter with a tweet. Indeed, if the tariffs were working the way Trump claims, there would be no need for him to “hereby order” American businesses to do the very thing the tariffs are supposed to be compelling them to do.

The president can’t reorder global supply chains with the snap of a tweet, but his trade policies are continuing to damage global markets. The Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged 500 points after Trump’s “hereby ordered” tweet—a signal, perhaps, that the stock market understands the effectiveness of central planning. Meanwhile, China has threatened to escalate the trade war on September 1 if Trump goes ahead with plans to impose a new round of 10 percent tariffs on about $300 billion of Chinese imports. On Friday, China’s government announced new tariffs on American cars, oil, and industrial goods—expanding its retaliatory efforts beyond farm goods for the first time.

“The fact of the matter is that nobody wins a trade war, and the continued tit-for-tat escalation between the U.S. and China is putting significant strain on the U.S. economy, raising costs, undermining investment, and roiling markets,” said Myron Brilliant, head of international affairs for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, in a statement.

The president’s orders are unlikely to make it any easier for American companies to shift production out of China. In some cases, the tariffs have encouraged manufacturers to shift production to India, Vietnam, and even Mexico—but that’s merely an acceleration of shifts that were already ongoing before the trade war, according to A.T. Kearney, a manufacturing and trade consulting firm whose annual “Reshoring Index” measures domestic manufacturing of consumer goods against imports of the same products from 14 lower-cost countries in Asia. Vietnam’s exports to the United States have doubled since 2013, for example, but the rate of growth skyrocketed during the first quarter of 2019.

Those higher input costs have harmed American manufacturers who import component parts—companies like the Wisconsin-based Primex Family of Companies, which has been doing business in China for 30 years. The “indirect costs” of the trade war, such as the pressure to alter supply chains, have been “enormous,” CEO Paul Shekoski told Reason last week.

If Trump wanted to help American businesses, he would end his destructive and increasingly erratic trade war instead of rage-tweeting “orders” that would be easier to laugh at if they weren’t further a further demonstration of how little he knows about what he imagines he can design.

Even as the tariffs fail to achieve their goals—while imposing immense economic costs along the way—there can be no doubt about the fundamental authoritarianism at the center of the economic nationalism project. That mask started slipping long ago. Today, Trump yanked it off.

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Stocks, Dollar, Yields Crash; Gold Explodes As Stunned Traders React To Series Of Surreal Events

Jerome Powell’s Jackson Hole speech was supposed to be the most important even of an otherwise sleepy, August day day, after which traders could quietly exit for the rest of the day and commence drinking. It did not quite work out that way.

Not only did Powell’s speech barely make the top 3 most important events, but Friday ended up being an exercise in surreal market newsflow, and one of the biggest drops of 2019 to boot.

With a few hours left before Jackson Hole, as traders were getting ready to trade Powell’s Jackson Hole speech which was a big dud, and did not reveal anything new (as even Trump figured out when he blasted the Fed chief slamming “As usual, the Fed did NOTHING!” and asking “who is our bigger enemy, Jay Powell or Chairman Xi?”), China shocked the market by unveiling that it would retaliate by slapping 10% tariffs on another $75BN in US imports, which sent stocks sharply lower at first. Then, Powell’s remarks managed to somewhat stabilize sentiment, and the S&P almost regained all losses… before all hell broke loose and in a vicious tirade, Trump first slammed Powell, effectively calling him an enemy of the state”, and then warned he would retaliate to China soon, while ordering US companies (can a US president dictate to companies what they can and can not do?) to find an “alternative” to China.

The result was a violent slam lower in risk assets, with the S&P tumbling over 70 points, the Dow plunging over 500 point, its 3rd such drop in the month of August, which has emerged as the worst month for stocks since December 2018…

… and the VIX soaring, just as dealers had exited their “negative gamma” hedges, forcing them all to load up on VIX futures all over again.

Every sector was lower on massive volume and wide breadth.

Not surprisingly, as risk tumbled, safe havens, soared, and as the 10Y yield tumbled…

… so did 2Y, which meant that the 2s10s yield was once again dipping in and out of negative territory all day.

Amid this wholesale panic out of safe havens, there were two surprises. Not the surge in gold, which exploded higher hitting a six and a half year high of $1,530…

… what was surprising was the plunge in the dollar – as traders feared that Trump would announce an outright currency market intervention to devalue the greenback – however as the yuan plunged even more…

… and even without an official statement from Trump – we are still waiting for the mystery afternoon announcement – the dollar index suffered its biggest one day drop in over a month.

There was not respite in commodities either, with oil tumbling after China announced it would apply tariffs on US oil imports, prompting traders to fear a drop in imminent collapse in global oil demand by the world’s largest oil importer.

What is most scary is that the day is not yet over, and we are now waiting with bated breath for the president to deliver on his promise of unveiling some other mystery response to China which he had not shared even with the Fed. As such, we expect that the reason for the violent flush in the last 30 minutes of trading had to do with traders wishing to be flat over a weekend, where any surreal development is now clearly possible.

Stay tuned.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2ZmDDeZ Tyler Durden

The Libertarian Life and Legacy of David Koch

David Koch, the billionaire free market philanthropist, has died at the age of 79.

Born in Wichita, Kansas, in 1940, Koch was a longtime member of the board of trustees of Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes this podcast, and a major force in the modern libertarian movement. He was also, along with his older brother Charles, one of the “Koch brothers,” who are regularly invoked on the left as a primary cause of all that is bad in American politics.

Such lazy demonization belies a life and fortune spent trying to build a better world through business, politics, and culture, one in which people are not only more prosperous and tolerant but free to run their own experiments in living.

In 1980, Koch was the vice presidential candidate of the Libertarian Party, whose platform that year endorsed the then-radical notions of legalizing drugs, ending penalties for victimless crimes, and full acceptance of gays and lesbians. The platform also called for the abolition of the CIA and FBI in the wake of the Church Commission findings of widespread abuse. In 1987, he told Reason, “Pursuing a very aggressive foreign policy…is an extremely expensive endeavor for the U.S. government. The cost of maintaining a huge military force abroad is gigantic. It’s so big it puts a severe strain on the U.S. economy, creating economic hardships here at home.” Not surprisingly, he was a critic of the Iraq War and other 21st-century interventions.

He gave widely to libertarian organizations such as Americans for Prosperity and also to cancer research and the arts. In today’s podcast, Nick Gillespie speaks with Reason Senior Editor Brian Doherty, the author of Radicals For Capitalism, a history of the libertarian movement, about the life and legacy of David Koch.

Audio production by Ian Keyser.

 

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In Unprecedented, Shocking Proposal, BOE’s Mark Carney Urges Replacing Dollar With Libra-Like Reserve Currency

After Jerome Powell’s neutral-to-slightly-dovish-but-mostly-boring speech on Friday morning, investors could be forgiven for suspecting that this year’s Fed-sponsored gathering in Jackson Hole might be disappointingly dull (especially with all that’s going on in Trump’s twitter feed, the escalating trade war and escalating geopolitical unrest).

Then along came former Goldman banker and current (outgoing) BOE governor, Mark Carney, who in his lunchtime address laid out a shocking, radical proposal – perhaps the most stunning thing to ever be unveiled at Jackson Hole – urging to replace the US Dollar with a “Libra-like” reserve currency in a dramatic revamp of the global monetary, financial and economic order.

While it was unclear if Carney was focusing on Libra as the new reserve currency, or simply was hoping to find something against which the dollar could be devalued, the proposal was clearly shocking as it suggests that the central bank quiet acceptance of cryptocurrencies (especially in Japan) has been what many have speculated all along: a “currency” against which fiat money can be devalued in hopes of sparking fiat hyperinflation that inflates away record amounts of fiat debt.

Of course, such a new system would bring about the end of US hegemony, and effectively end the dollar-based global financial system, dramatically scaling back the US’s influence in the global economy, and making rising powers like China and Russia critical players an increasingly multipolar world…. especially if they propose a gold-backed dollar alternative to the world. That this would quickly emerge as the new reserve currency – together with whatever stablecoin/crypto central bankers deign to be the dollar’s replacement – goes without saying.

Carney’s proposal comes just a few months before he’s due to step down from his position leading the Bank of England.

We note that, because it is a well known fact that central bankers tend to speak the truth once they have quit their position of power and influence. Yet it is quite shocking for Carnery to do so while still in office; the bottom line, Carney sounded like nothing less than an Austrian-school economist, who admits that the existing neo-liberal/Keynesian system has collapsed.

Speaking to fellow policy makers and academics at Jackson Hole, Wyoming, he said that in the short term central bankers must deal with the situation as it is. But he also warned that “blithe acceptance of the status quo is misguided,” and dramatic steps will ultimately be needed. It’s what he said next that was stunning:

“In the longer term, we need to change the game,” Carney said. “When change comes, it shouldn’t be to swap one currency hegemon for another.”

This is where, if Carney indeed speaks for his central banking peers, one can say “game over” for the fiat system, which now even establishment members admit will need to devalue against something outside of the fiat system, such as Gold (as Pimco’s Harley Bassman suggested back in 2016), or cryptocurrency/stable coins, like Libra.

There has hardly been a more appropriate time for such a proposal. Trade wars and now the threat of currency wars are upending multilateral cooperation. Central bankers are trapped in a low interest-rate world, and the threat of Modern Monetary Theory has reared its ugly head. Yet, the establishment has so far been unable to come up with its own alternative to combat MMT.

“The combination of heightened economic policy uncertainty, outright protectionism and concerns that further, negative shocks could not be adequately offset because of limited policy space is exacerbating the disinflationary bias in the global economy,” Carney said. “What then must be done?”

Well, the creation of a virtual non-fiat currency, against which all other central-bank backed fiat currencies could be devalued, is certainly one solution.

But if the notion that the economic establishment which Carney represents might some day accept these ideas sounds like a fantasy, that’s because it is.

Which means that the only practical alternative is a central bank endorsed cryptocurrency, or – wait for it – gold.

In light of this shocking capitulation by a member of the central bank establishment, we leave you with some levity, as the alternative is simply dire, and what happens next as the fiat world unwinds – or devalues against some non-fiat construct – will be very unpleasant for all those who are unprepared and had believed that central bankers actually know what they are doing. Luckily, none of our readers fall into that category.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2Z9Pldv Tyler Durden

The Libertarian Life and Legacy of David Koch

David Koch, the billionaire free market philanthropist, has died at the age of 79.

Born in Wichita, Kansas, in 1940, Koch was a longtime member of the board of trustees of Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes this podcast, and a major force in the modern libertarian movement. He was also, along with his older brother Charles, one of the “Koch brothers,” who are regularly invoked on the left as a primary cause of all that is bad in American politics.

Such lazy demonization belies a life and fortune spent trying to build a better world through business, politics, and culture, one in which people are not only more prosperous and tolerant but free to run their own experiments in living.

In 1980, Koch was the vice presidential candidate of the Libertarian Party, whose platform that year endorsed the then-radical notions of legalizing drugs, ending penalties for victimless crimes, and full acceptance of gays and lesbians. The platform also called for the abolition of the CIA and FBI in the wake of the Church Commission findings of widespread abuse. In 1987, he told Reason, “Pursuing a very aggressive foreign policy…is an extremely expensive endeavor for the U.S. government. The cost of maintaining a huge military force abroad is gigantic. It’s so big it puts a severe strain on the U.S. economy, creating economic hardships here at home.” Not surprisingly, he was a critic of the Iraq War and other 21st-century interventions.

He gave widely to libertarian organizations such as Americans for Prosperity and also to cancer research and the arts. In today’s podcast, Nick Gillespie speaks with Reason Senior Editor Brian Doherty, the author of Radicals For Capitalism, a history of the libertarian movement, about the life and legacy of David Koch.

Audio production by Ian Keyser.

 

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Short Circuit: A Roundup of Recent Federal Court Decisions

Please enjoy the latest edition of Short Circuit, a weekly feature from the Institute for Justice.

New on the Bound By Oath podcast: Why oh why did the Supreme Court decline to incorporate the Fourteenth Amendment against the states? That and more from Professors Michael McConnell of Stanford Law and Gerard Magliocca of the Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law.

  • “Because they share a progenitor, a reliable approach to understanding a James Baldwin novel is to compare it, according to a set of criteria, to another work in his oeuvre. Indeed, a thematic reading of Giovanni’s Room is sure to inform such a reading of The Fire Next Time, and vice versa. Not so, however, with respect to the broad set of phenomena we categorize as agency action.” So writes Judge Wilkins of the D.C. Circuit, ruminating on the difficulties of adjudicating admin law in a case where the court’s jurisdiction hinges on the finality of a challenged agency action.
  • Sachse, Tex. officers fire on teen who was holding a gun to his head, which the teen then discharged, severely disabling himself. Fifth Circuit (2015): No qualified immunity. SCOTUS (2016): Vacated in light of a decision in a different case we just released. Fifth Circuit (2018): We had it right. Fifth Circuit, sitting en banc, over five separate dissents: Indeed, no qualified immunity.
  • Allegation: San Antonio police arrest man who is sleeping in his car that is parked on private property, file false report so that he is charged with DWI. He spends 16 months in pretrial detention before charges are dismissed for lack of probable cause. Fifth Circuit: He filed his false arrest claim too late; the deadline started running at the time of the arrest. But he can sue over the 16-month detention; that deadline started running when the charges were resolved in his favor.
  • To prevent the unwarranted removal of Indian children from their families and tribes, Congress passed a law in 1978 permitting a child’s parents, a child’s custodian, and tribal authorities to intervene in state adoption proceedings, in some cases up to two years after a final adoption decree has been entered. The law also establishes placement preferences for foster care and adoptive proceedings that prioritize Indian families over non-Indian families. Non-Indian families: It violates equal protection to impose special adoption rules based on the race of a child. District court: Race-based classifications get strict scrutiny, and the gov’t hasn’t shown the law is sufficiently narrowly tailored. Fifth Circuit: The law relies on a political classification, not a racial one, and thus gets rational basis review, which it satisfies.
  • Citing a “mountain of inculpatory evidence,” the Fifth Circuit declined to stay the execution of Texas man for the murder of a college student. He was executed Wednesday.
  • Garland, Tex. vocational school is forced to shut down after the feds seize its funds. School: Which violated our constitutional rights; the feds didn’t give adequate notice, among other things, and we are entitled to damages. Feds: Sovereign immunity bars constitutional claims for damages against us. Fifth Circuit: That’s so. While the Federal Tort Claims Act generally waives immunity for tort claims against the federal government, constitutional tort claims are specifically exempted.
  • Louisiana prisoner has his skull bashed in with a combination lock, the third attack in two months in which one inmate attacked another with a lock. The inmate’s mother sues but later substitutes the inmate’s two children, whom she’d just learned of. Prison officials: Too late. The children were the proper parties to file suit under Louisiana law, but they were substituted after the statute of limitations had expired. District court: That’s so. Fifth Circuit: Reversed. The case can proceed.
  • After her two brothers are convicted of dealing heroin, a Steubenville, Ohio woman takes to Facebook and shares pictures of and derogatory comments about the “bitch ass snitch” who testified against her kin. Which, the Sixth Circuit affirms, is a federal crime, since it’s illegal to retaliate against government witnesses. (Prof. Volokh suspects the law violates the First Amendment, but the woman abandoned that claim.)
  • Allegation: While eating dinner, a frail septuagenarian gentleman learns that his girlfriend’s store is ablaze. He rushes to the scene, sees firefighters struggling to open locked door, and approaches a Baxter, Tenn. police officer to give her the keys. The officer throws him to the ground, and a nearby paramedic beats him for good measure. Wait … what? Sixth Circuit: The paramedic is not entitled to qualified immunity.
  • Allegation: Teen driver crosses median, causes accident. As he exits the car, the other driver orders him and his two teen passengers to the ground at gunpoint. Yikes! The other driver is an off-duty reserve police officer with the city of Maryville, Tenn. And any reasonable officer would have known not to point guns at people’s heads in these circumstances, holds the Sixth Circuit. No qualified immunity.
  • Can Minnesota force videographers to make wedding videos portraying same-sex marriages in a “positive” light despite the videographers’ asserted beliefs to the contrary? Two-thirds of this Eighth Circuit panel think the First Amendment might stand in the way.
  • Mexican national is arrested on drug charges, testifies against two co-conspirators, both of whom are members of the notorious Knights Templar cartel. Fearing he will be tortured and killed if sent back to Mexico, he asks to be allowed to stay. Immigration judge: Request denied. Ninth Circuit: Not so fast—he should have been allowed to have his lawyer at the hearing with the immigration judge. Try again.
  • In July, the Trump administration announced a new rule, under which aliens who traveled to the United States from their home country are ineligible for asylum if, on the way here, they passed through a third country and failed to seek asylum there. District Court: The new rule violates administrative law; nationwide injunction. Ninth Circuit: It probably does violate administrative law, but we’ve gotta stop throwing these nationwide injunctions around.
  • In which the Ninth Circuit reminds us that land can be deemed Indian country regardless of who holds title to it. So, after digging through 166 years of history, we learn that a one-square-mile plot of land known as Section 36 is within the Chemehuevi Reservation and thus San Bernardino, Calif. police cannot enforce California’s traffic laws against tribal members in it.
  • Man is arrested at the border with 30 lbs. of cocaine hidden in a spare tire. But did the feds need to get a warrant before searching his phone “forensically”—that is, using software to download call logs and messages from the phone? The Ninth Circuit says yes; they needed (and lacked) reasonable suspicion that the phone would contain digital contraband. Conviction vacated.
  • Allegation: Without announcing himself or giving high school student a chance to drop the gun in his hand, a plainclothes LAPD officer fires into a group of students who were making their way to school. He hits one who wasn’t holding the gun. (He lives.) Turns out it was a toy gun with an orange tip. District Court: No qualified immunity. Ninth Circuit: A jury could find the shooting shocks the conscience, but the officer is entitled to qualified immunity because there’s no case on point putting the officer on notice not to accidentally shoot a bystander. The students can sue the officer over being handcuffed and interrogated for five hours, however.
  • “MURDER in the second-degree is NOT a crime of violence??? … ‘I feel like I am taking crazy pills.'” So writes Judge N.R. Smith of the Ninth Circuit, dissenting from his colleagues’ interpretation of a federal law that authorizes heightened penalties for using, carrying, or possessing a firearm in connection with any federal “crime of violence.”
  • Allegation: Despite a confession and a mountain of evidence linking man to rape/murder of a 14-year old-girl, Jefferson County, Kan. prosecutors convince him to implicate his younger brother, who is convicted and sentenced to life in prison. Fifteen years later, DNA evidence confirms the original confession, and the younger brother is exonerated. (The older brother, racked with guilt, commits suicide, leaving a note in which he again confesses.) Prosecutor: Even if I fabricated evidence, I have absolute immunity for anything I presented at trial. Tenth Circuit: Ah, but the fabrication did not happen at trial. The case proceeds.
  • In 2016, a Colorado presidential elector breaks faith and votes for John Kasich instead of the winner of the statewide popular vote (as required by state law). Colorado removes the elector and nullifies his vote. Did that violate the elector’s constitutional rights? It did, says two-thirds of a Tenth Circuit panel. The Constitution provides presidential electors with the right to vote using their discretion, and states do not have the power to remove an elector or nullify an already-cast vote.
  • West Valley City, Utah undercover officer shoots, kills woman. The police dep’t determines the shooting was unjustified and discovers that the officer took cash and a “white powdery substance” out of the evidence room and didn’t return it. He’s fired, appeals, is reinstated, and then voluntarily resigns in exchange for $120k payout. Manslaughter charges against him are dismissed for lack of probable cause. Former officer: I was retaliated against because, during the investigation into the shooting, I told internal affairs that misconduct in the undercover unit was endemic. I’m a whistleblower. Tenth Circuit: Not so.
  • Extending one’s middle finger in the general direction of a police officer (at about the distance of a football field) gives the officer reasonable suspicion to conduct a traffic stop, says the Court of Appeals of North Carolina (over a dissent).

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