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Today, we’ve got a special podcast: The speech that Mitch Daniels, the former two-term governor of Indiana and the current president of Purdue University, gave at Reason‘s 50th anniversary celebration, held in Los Angeles in early November.

A thinking man’s politician, Daniels’ achievements as governor included leasing the money-losing Indiana toll road for $4 billion, passing a universal school voucher program, and making Indiana one of the most economically free states in the country. At Purdue, he’s managed to keep tuition costs down while also emphatically backing free speech and academic freedom. In his remarks, he told the audience that Reason has “with nearly unique persistence and unique fidelity to principle, upheld our liberties, constantly innovating and advocating measures to guard and extend them….With you on freedom’s ramparts, America’s tomorrow’s will always dawn brightly.”

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A North Carolina police officer is on administrative leave after a video surfaced of him tackling two teenage girls, apparently because they were recording him.

Video of the incident, which occurred Monday in Harnett County, shows 17-year-old Aumbria Urban and her 14-year-old sister, Jewelianna, being taken to the ground. What had they done wrong? The Harnett County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement that two officers were responding to a report of illegal drug activity. Eventually, they found their suspect—17-year-old Tyrese Namirr Gary—sitting in the driver’s seat of a car. “When the deputy approached the vehicle, the smell of marijuana was detected coming from the passenger compartment,” the police statement said, according to WNCN.

The deputies arrested Gary, who had other active warrants as well. Police claim to have found a handgun under his seat, which they also charged him for. The Urban sisters, meanwhile, were with Gary at the time (Aumbria is his girlfriend). The deputies searched them, too, but things quickly went south. “After each of us were patted down, we both started recording and asking why (my boyfriend) was being detained,” Aumbria told WTVD.

That’s appears to be when the now-viral video, taken on Aumbria’s phone and later posted to Facebook, starts:

“You cannot take my phone,” Jewelianna can be heard telling one of the deputies about 15 seconds into the 61-second clip. The officer responds by grabbing her around the neck and struggling with her for several seconds before taking her to the ground and informing her that she’s “under arrest.” After Jewelianna is incapacitated, another deputy holds her down while the first officer places her in handcuffs.

“Yo, what are you doing right now? She didn’t do anything!” says Aumbria as her sister is arrested. “You snatched her phone from her. That is her personal property. It’s all on video and you guys have absolutely no right to tell me I can’t record this. I did nothing wrong. You searched me, I had nothing.”

By that point, Jewelianna’s phone is on the ground, but she kicks it toward Aumbria. Then, when Aumbria goes to retrieve it, the first deputy tackles her as well, explaining that her sister’s phone is “evidence.”

The sisters were ultimately released without being charged and given their phones back. But Aumbria says she was warned not to publicize the footage. “The officer told me not to post it anywhere, not to let it get out,” she told WRAL, adding that she feels she was “harassed” and assaulted.

In addition to the first deputy being placed on leave, the incident is now being investigated by the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation. “We will have additional details/information at conclusion,” the sheriff’s office said, according to WNCN.

The sisters were well within their rights to film the encounter. According to the American Civil Liberties Union of North Carolina:

You can take pictures of anything in plain view in a public space including federal buildings, transportation facilities, and the police, as long as you are not interfering with law enforcement.

Police officers may not confiscate or demand to view your digital photographs or video without a warrant, and they cannot delete your photographs or video under any circumstances.

Police frequently violate this right. In Texas, for instance, private citizens are generally allowed to record police officers in public places, as long as they’re not interfering with police work. But as Reason‘s Zuri Davis reported in July, an El Paso officer still arrested a young man who had filmed him pointing a gun at children.

Bonus link: Being able to record on-duty cops is important for police accountability. But as Radley Balko explained in a 2011 cover story for Reason, recording the police can be dangerous.

Today Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s former lawyer, got the “substantial prison term” that federal prosecutors sought as punishment for various crimes to which he admitted, including violations of federal campaign finance law in the form of hush payments to women who claimed to have had sexual relationships with his client. “As a lawyer,” U.S. District Judge William H. Pauley III observed while sentencing Cohen to three years in federal prison, “Mr. Cohen should have known better.”

Donald Trump is no lawyer, of course, and ignorance seems like his best defense against the charge that he “knowingly and willfully” violated the Federal Election Campaign Act (as required for a criminal conviction under that law) by directing Cohen to make those payments. The president tried out that defense on Twitter this week, saying that even if the payments amounted to illegal campaign contributions, “it is only a CIVIL CASE.” He added that if “it was done correctly by a lawyer” (i.e., Cohen), “there would not even be a fine.”

That may seem like the usual Trumpian blame shifting, but it is plausible that Trump, to the extent that he considered the matter at all, trusted his lawyer to handle the hush payments in a nonfelonious manner. It would not be surprising if it never occurred to Trump that paying off Stormy Daniels and arranging to have The National Enquirer pay off Karen McDougal could be construed as, respectively, an excessive campaign contribution by Cohen and an illegal corporate contribution by AMI, the tabloid’s publisher. Trump surely wanted to keep the payoffs quiet, but that does not mean he knew they were illegal.

In another tweet on Monday, Trump described the $130,000 payment to Daniels (and maybe also the $125,000 payment to McDougal) as “a private transaction,” implying that his motive was personal (avoiding embarrassment to himself and his wife) rather than political (winning the presidential election). Cohen, by contrast, said he arranged the payments at Trump’s direction “for the principal purpose of influencing the election.” And in its press release announcing Cohen’s sentence, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York also confirmed that it had reached a non-prosecution agreement with AMI in which the company admitted that it paid McDougal “in concert with a candidate’s presidential campaign” to “ensure that the woman did not publicize damaging allegations about the candidate before the 2016 presidential election.” AMI said “its principal purpose in making the payment was to suppress the woman’s story so as to prevent it from influencing the election.”

It is possible that 1) Cohen and AMI both simply said what they thought prosecutors wanted to hear, 2) their understanding of the payments’ purpose was different from Trump’s, or 3) Trump’s motives were a mixture of personal and political. Even assuming that the payoffs helped Trump win the election, they would still count as personal rather than campaign expenditures if they would have happened regardless of whether he was running for president. “At a minimum,” former Federal Election Commission Chairman Brad Smith observed in a Reason essay after Cohen’s guilty plea last August, “it is unclear whether paying blackmail to a mistress is ‘for the purpose of influencing an election,’ and so must be paid with campaign funds, or a ‘personal use,’ and so prohibited from being paid with campaign funds.”

The second defense is less plausible than the first, since it seems that silencing Daniels and McDougal took on a new urgency in light of the election. Still, proving that the payments would not have been made in the alternate universe where Donald Trump did not run for president, like proving that he understood the intricacies of campaign finance law, would be a tall order.

Last Friday, after a lengthy ballot count, Libertarian Jeff Hewitt was declared the winner of one of five officially nonpartisan seats on the Riverside County Board of Supervisors, giving him one of the largest constituent bases of any elected Libertarian in the party’s 47-year history. On Saturday in this space, we posted a far less upbeat assessment of the L.P.’s current electoral situation, which I wrote the day after the 2018 midterms.

So is the party zigging or zagging? As ever, it depends on who you ask, and the answer may well be “both.”

In a teleconference with party activists before the Hewitt announcement last week, Libertarian National Committee Chair Nicholas Sarwark laid out the numerical case for optimism.

“We ran 833 candidates for public office in 2018 in the November elections. We ended up with 52 [now 53] elected Libertarians….That’s an increase from the last general election year 2016, where we only elected 34 people,” said Sarwark, who finished in fourth and last place in November’s Phoenix mayoral race, receiving 10.5 percent of the vote. “In 2016, the Libertarian Party ran 593 candidates around the country….2017’s our last odd-numbered year; we ran 135 candidates for both state and local races, but of those, we ended up electing 48. So we do significantly better in these odd-year elections when the old parties aren’t paying as much attention. And it gives us a chance to further hone those skills and strategies so that when we go into 2020, we’re ready to have a record-setting number of candidates for a presidential year, and have more of them be more successful.”

In a press release Friday, the party exulted over Hewitt’s win, calling it “arguably the largest, most momentous win in Libertarian Party history.” The release went on to list the other winners from November, including four municipal officials who won partisan races in Indiana.

Mark Rutherford, a longtime activist in the comparatively successful Indiana L.P., and former vice chair of the national party (2010-12), says there has a been a sea change in approach to nuts-and-bolts campaigning. “I’ve never seen canvassing taken so serious by Libertarians since I first started paying serious attention to the LP in 1994,” Rutherford wrote in an email to me this week.

“More and more insider meetings and discussions center around running for office locally, especially smaller districts with 2000 or fewer voters,” Rutherford continued. “In 1998 it was hard to get LP’ers to talk about anything other than Presidential candidates and Congressional candidates….Too many discussion[s] were akin to philosophical debates over whether Hayek, Nock, or Rand were the most holy.”

Bottom line: “Right now, change is happening in the LP as I see it becoming a party that finds libertarians and gets them elected or appointed to office. I hope it continues.”

But other Libertarians look at the same data and discern drastically different meaning. Arvin Vohra, the rhetorical bomb-thrower and former national vice chair (2012-16) who is running for the party’s 2020 presidential nomination, wrote a withering assessment right after the election arguing that the disappointing results, especially of New York gubernatorial candidate Larry Sharpe, show that the L.P. can only go so far playing it safe.

“I get why many Libertarians like Larry, Nick Sarwark, and other nice Libertarians,” Vohra wrote. “Many people used to like me for the same reason, back when I used to play nice. You can bring Larry or Nick home to meet your statist mom, or your statist friends. That’s something I like about Larry and Nick—I can bring them home to my statist friends. I get why some big-L insiders don’t like me. You can’t bring me home to meet your statist mom. If you come home with me, you’re getting disowned.”

Vohra’s solution? Fight directly and conspicuously for those who are net contributors to, instead of recipients from, government, and also to those whose power is diminished by the state.

“Winning will come from fighting for the reality we want, and emboldening those who will benefit from that Libertarian reality immediately. We have to fight for our people before we pander to our enemies,” he concluded. “If you add the number of current homeschoolers, private schoolers, and Men’s Rights Activists, it’s far more than the 4 million [votes 2016 presidential candidate Gary Johnson] got. Add in those who pay more in taxes than they receive in services, and it’s many, many times that. Even if I get 10 percent of the net losers from government, it will shatter Gary Johnson’s record.”

Vohra’s approach did not translate into votes last month in Maryland, where he finished in a distant fourth place with just 1.0 percent of the vote running for U.S. Senate.

Vohra will be among what promises to be a crowded field vying for the party’s prized plum: access to ballots in the 2020 presidential race. Those who have officially announced their intentions to compete include confrontational activist Adam Kokesh, political performance artist Vermin Supreme, and L.P. Radical Caucus Vice Chair Kim Ruff. Also openly laying the groundwork is controversial 2016 vice presidential candidate Bill Weld. Overstock.com founder and blockchain enthusiast Patrick Byrne has engaged in some discussions, though told me in October that he’s “almost definitely” not going to run.

“And then there are a few more people who have contacted me privately to ask questions about what would one do and how do you do it,” Sarwark said in his conference call. Party insiders have presumed that among such names to eventually go public will be current or recent elected officials from one of the two major parties, though such hopes have failed to materialize in the past.

How tantalizing is the L.P. ballot prize? “As far as how we came out of the 2018 election, ballot access-wise,” Sarwark said, “we are on in 34 states for 2020 for a presidential candidate. That is the best situation we have ever been in after a non-presidential general election, and it’s actually the best situation that any third party has been in in history.” The party maintains its expectation to be on the ballot in all 50 states plus the District of Columbia, “which would be one of the first times, maybe the first time, that anyone’s done that back to back as a non-Republican-or-Democratic party.”

The biggest nut to crack—not just for Libertarians, but for Greens and independents as well—may well be how to navigate electoral politics when the winds of polarization are blowing so strong. Voters who perceive elections as life-or-death contests tend to shun the margins.

Still, as the L.P. celebrates its 47^th anniversary this week, there are measurable signs of progress, if not quite the whole free-society-in-our-lifetimes thing, or even a member of Congress.

“The original Libertarian Party had only 70 members, but today exceeds 130,000,” the L.P. noted yesterday in a birthday press release. “The membership of the Libertarian Party has increased by 92 percent during the past 10 years. The presidential ticket of Gov. Gary Johnson and Gov. William Weld in 2016 received a record number of votes for the Libertarian Party. Perhaps most importantly, the Libertarians are the only party on the political spectrum defending both economic responsibility and social acceptance.”

Bonus video: Todd Krainin captures the final days of Gary Johnson’s final campaign.

In some ways, Medicare for All is on a roll. Polls show increasing public support for the idea, if not a clear sense of what it means, and Democrats in Congress—especially the expected presidential frontrunners—are increasingly willing to endorse the idea. It’s likely that it will figure prominently into the 2020 presidential campaign. As one recent article in Health Affairs, a kind of Bible for health policy wonks, stated, “Medicare for All, though difficult, is now within the realm of political possibility.”

I wouldn’t be quite so sure, at least not in the very near future, because despite surging enthusiasm for the slogan, the practical and political problems with single-payer health care haven’t changed. It’s expensive, but there’s no agreement among proponents about how, or even whether, to finance it. Transitioning millions of Americans from employer plans to a government-run system would be, at best, a massive administrative challenge, and more likely a bureaucratic nightmare—think Brexit, but for health care. Well-funded industry groups would vehemently oppose it. And even Democrats in Congress aren’t all on board.

As Politico reported earlier this week, Medicare for All is an issue that divides congressional Democrats, and some of the same advocacy groups that funded defenses of Obamacare, some of which employ or have close ties with Democratic political operatives, are now pushing back on single-payer. And part of the reason, it turns out, is Obamacare.

That’s because Obamacare funneled a signficant amount of money to hospitals and insurers, while a single-payer system like the one proposed by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-V.T.) would cut provider payments and largely put private health insurers out of business. Taxing the rich won’t provide nearly enough money to fund $32 trillion in new government spending, and the most straightforward potential financing mechanism—requiring employers to fund Medicare for All—would still be a difficult political lift.

So it’s not exactly a surprise that even single-payer proponents like Rep. Frank Pallone (D-N.J.), the incoming chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, have been upfront about the fact that, at the moment, the votes simply don’t exist.

That’s why I basically agree with The Washington Examiner‘s Philip Klein when he warns single-payer opponents against focusing too much on the phantom threat of Medicare for All. Putting too much energy into fighting an idea that has little chance of becoming reality, he argues, is likely to make less drastic (but still substantial) expansions of government into the health care sector come across as more politically palatable.

The Medicare for All push may not be realistic in the short term, but it’s not too hard to imagine Democrats coalescing around something like a Medicare buy-in program or a public option, in which government would offer an insurance plan alongside regulated private coverage. In this scenario, Medicare for All would play the too-radical, too-progressive foil to some sort of still-significant expansion of the health care state, allowing it to appear to be a middle-ground compromise.

The problem, at least for Republicans and their backers, is that opposing Medicare for All and its various congressional apostles makes for easy politics, and, just as crucially, it allows GOP lawmakers to pretend they have something that they don’t — a health care policy vision of their own.

Ask a typical Republican about health policy right now, and you’re likely to hear essentially empty catchphrases like “patient-centered” and “preserving the doctor-patient relationship” that have little in the way of policy substance behind them, and certainly don’t contain a holistic vision for how American health care should be financed and regulated. Behind the scenes, meanwhile, conservative health care wonks spend a lot of time squabbling amongst themselves over both policy particulars and messaging; yes, there are real points of agreement, but they are united most strongly by what they are against. It doesn’t help that President Trump has effectively declared Medicare, the nation’s largest health care entitlement, off limits to reform.

Which means that the fight will inevitably come down to the forces on the left that support single-payer, or something closer to it, and forces on the right that basically support doing more or less what we are doing now, with all the frustrations and follies that entails.

Maybe that’s a sustainable political equilibrium, in which the health policy status quo remains widely disliked but wins by virtue of being too big and too complex to overhaul. But more likely, I think, is that the single-payer forces win a game of inches, not in a year or two or even four, but perhaps in 10 or 20, when less-divided Democrats have either worked through their issues or just collectively agreed to ignore them—and Republicans are as clueless and flat-footed as ever. Medicare for All’s moment has (probably) not arrived. But if its opponents don’t offer an alternative, it might well be on its way.