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Shaun King, the writer and Black Lives Matter activist, had a surprise visitor last night. Someone, his doorman called to say, had come to watch the kids.

King replied that he was not expecting any kind of babysitter. But the visitor was insistent. She had been sent by child protective services, she explained.

As King explained in a series of tweets about the encounter, the woman, “demanded to see three of my children. She called them by name. And said that she had to see them immediately.”

King told her to get lost, but she wouldn’t take no for an answer. She explained that she worked for New York Child Services, and was responding to a formal complaint contending that King and his wife had abandoned the children and allowed them to do drugs.

This might sound crazy. It’s actually dismayingly common. Over the course of their childhood, about 37 percent of American kids will receive a visit from CPS, according to a study published in the American Journal of Public Health. And if they’re African American, the rate is 53 percent.

That’s right: more than half of all African American children will be investigated.

King insisted the investigator connect him to her supervisor, and then explained to the supervisor that somebody—an anonymous critic of King’s writings, probably—had played a “cruel prank” on him and his family. Someone was wasting everyone’s time. But the supervisor didn’t care.

Anonymous reporting is allowed in many states. But just how reliable are these anonymous calls?

Diane Redleaf, legal director of the National Center for Housing and Child Welfare and author of the upcoming book, They Took the Kids Last Night, says that about one in four calls to child protective services are substantiated, but when it comes to anonymous reports, it is only one in 20.

What kind of person would deliberately traumatize a family by calling in a false accusation? Martin Guggenheim, an NYU Law professor specializing in child welfare, could not say conclusively. But he has heard of angry exes who call CPS repeatedly, knowing that each call triggers another investigation. “I once complained to the agency for being utterly insensitive to this problem and asked them to figure out a way to get some sense of whether a caller has made multiple reports that have proven to be unfounded, so that you not only save your own resources but save the parents from the horrible experience of being investigated countless times,” he says. “And the agency said we have to do it this way. We have no choice.”

But parents put in King’s situation have more of a choice than they think. By law, Redleaf said, they do not have to let the investigator in or let them talk to the kids. (This is something the investigators are supposed to inform the parents of.)

On Twitter, King explained that he had spoken with a lawyer, which is absolutely the right thing to do. But its still a terrifying position for a parents to find himself in, and an indictment of the entire CPS system.

“An anonymous troll has weaponized New York’s Department of Child Services against my whole family by filing false reports of neglect and drug use by our children,” he wrote.

Attempt to reign in milk madness fails. Can consumers tell the difference between dairy milk and its vegan alternatives, such as almond milk, cashew milk, and hemp milk? Consumers haven’t been complaining: Sales of soy, seed, and nut milks have grown tremendously this decade. But this trend has the dairy industry worried, and it has gone crying to the government for help. Now senators and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) are backing a ban on calling non-dairy beverages milk. They even want to stop businesses from using the term to describe animal milk that doesn’t come from cows.

Democrats from Wisconsin first introduced the idea last year, with the so-called DAIRY PRIDE Act. This summer, FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb took up the cause.

Sens. Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Cory Booker (D–N.J.) tried to stop the nut-milk madness this week. They introduced an amendment to an appropriations bill that would have prohibited “the use of funds to enforce standards of identity with respect to certain food.”

“No one buys almond milk under the false illusion that it came from a cow,” Lee said on the Senate floor Wednesday. “They buy almond milk because it didn’t come from a cow.”

Lee mentioned Hamptom Creek, the company behind vegan mayonnaise Just Mayo. It “was one of hundreds of increasingly popular alternative foods developed in recent decades, marketed to vegetarians, vegans, and people with food allergies or other health concerns,” he said Lee. But then,

as soon as Just Mayo started to win confidence, it started to attract the attention of top executives in the egg industry. Unfortunately, their intent was not to improve quality or reduce prices. It was, instead, to enlist the government in a pattern that would chill competition.

That pressure from the American Egg Board did indeed lead the FDA to go after Hampton Creek, but the product was eventually able to keep its name with some labeling concessions. “Under a 1938 Federal law,” Lee explained, the FDA has set “rules defining what does and does not qualify as a particular food product” and “anything calling its ‘mayonnaise’ has to have eggs in it.”

The new FDA rule “would ban the use of the term ‘milk’ for nondairy products” because “the FDA says milk is ‘lacteal secretion…obtained by the complete milking of one or more healthy cows,’ and nothing else,” said Lee.

Whatever their original value, these labeling requirements are outdated and they are unnecessary. The amendment I am offering would protect consumers from these ‘standards of identity’ requirements, and they would protect them from this kind of abuse….The role of government in the market is to protect competition, not any one competitor.

The Lee-Booker amendment would have stopped federal funds from being used to enforce “rules against products simply because of their use of a common compound name—such as where a word or phrase identifies an alternative plant or animal source,” said Lee “In other words, it would protect products like ‘almond milk,’ ‘goat cheese,’ and ‘gluten-free bread’ from accusations of being illegally labeled.”

The amendment was voted down 84–14. The 14 dissidents included three Democrats and nine Republicans, including 2016 presidential hopefuls Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, and Marco Rubio.

“Must all language be literal?” asks Jibran Khan at National Review:

The FDA’s new stance would seem to suggest so. The pulpy juice of coconut has been called “coconut milk” for generations, because of its appearance. Peanut “butter” does not come from miniature cows. Gold and silver “leaf”—used for decoration in some teas, liquors, and desserts across the world—is not made of leaves at all, but from thinly hammered foils of those metals. People buy and use these items, and have for centuries, while fully understanding what it is they’re dealing with. Likewise, I don’t know of any case in which a customer has purchased soy or almond milk and then been outraged to discover it is not cow’s milk.

Wisconsin Democrat Tammy Baldwin does not agree. Speaking Wednesday, the senator called Lee’s amendment “an attack on dairy farmers across the country and in my home state of Wisconsin.” Taking federal action against non-dairy milk, she insisted, “ensures that when a consumer buys a dairy product, it will perform in recipes as expected.”

FREE MINDS

Euro-style “right to be forgotten” coming quietly to America? In Hudson County, New Jersey, “Presiding Judge Jeffrey Jablonski has issued a remarkable and unusual temporary restraining order,” writes The Volokh Conspiracy‘s Eugene Volokh. The judge says Google must “de-index [an] ‘explicit’ post-assault image from searches of ‘Greg’ and ‘Gregory Malandrucco’ and/or ‘Malandrucco” and stop permitting “the display of the subject image”:

The court papers make clear that the order is targeted largely at a Chicago Tribune blog post by columnist Eric Zorn about a police assault on Malandrucco and his friend Matthew Clark; the column contains photos of the two men with injuries to their faces. (The order was issued July 6, but I found it, with the help of the invaluable Lumen Database, only a few days ago, and just got the court documents; the order has apparently not been written about anywhere else.) Google has apparently not complied, and Malandrucco has asked Judge Jablonski to hold Google in contempt of court; the hearing on that will be held Aug. 17. Indeed, the request for the contempt sanctions, filed July 25, seems to have been accelerated by a remark by the judge at a hearing on July 24: “The concern that the court has is that there is not compliance with the [July 6] order.”

Read the whole thing here.

FREE MARKETS

Trillion-dollar deficits as far as the eye can see. The economy might be growing, but “corporate tax receipts are down for the year, while government spending is up,” notes NPR:

Even with a fast-growing economy, the Treasury Department expects to borrow more than $750 billion to pay its bills during the last six months of this year. “The federal budget deficit is ballooning, skyrocketing, soaring, whichever way you want to describe it,” said longtime fiscal watchdog Stan Collender, who blogs about federal finances as “The Budget Guy.”

“You’ve got a kind of perfect storm here,” Collender said. “You’ve got more spending. You’ve got less revenue. And the deficit is just getting bigger and bigger, to the point where it will be at least a trillion dollars every year during the Trump administration and beyond.”

QUICK HITS

Officers in Louisiana tell a man to get off tractor, saying he has a warrant. After the man refuses & asks to see the warrant (which the officers don’t produce) one of them steps into his tractor, puts him in a chokehold & kills him. https://t.co/DFskIFVHOc

— Maya Lau (@mayalau) August 3, 2018

• Immigrations and Customs Enforcement has said it will not detain pregnant women in their third trimester “absent extraordinary circumstances.” But “the agency appears to be violating that policy, over and over again,” reports The Daily Beast.

• The unemployment right is down to 3.9 percent.

It’s okay, @RobertGehrke, I don’t think you’re crazy. Siding with the Constitution is always the best way to go! #utpol https://t.co/hdxeA1X7Rn

— Mike Lee (@SenMikeLee) August 2, 2018

While weathering criticism from Republican lawmakers and traditionally Republican special interests over his anti-trade policies, President Donald Trump has one somewhat unlikely ally: the head of America’s largest union.

Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO, told Inside Trade his union and its members are “generally supportive” of the president’s approach so far, including the prospect of additional tariffs on Chinese imports. “Sometimes what’s good for the country may be bad for Joe or Jane in the short term,” he said, “but in the long term if it’s good for the country it’s good for everyone.”

Even if that were true, it might be a tough sell to Joe or Jane. But the consequences of the tariffs are more significant than Trumka suggests, sounding a lot like Trump administration officials who have likened reports of tariff-inflicted economic pain to “hiccups.” Trumka seems to realize that. Otherwise he would not have told Inside Trade that the federal government should commit to subsidizing industries that stand to lose as a result of Trump’s trade policy.

The White House has already outlined plans to spend $12 billion through a New Deal-era crop insurance program to subsidize the losses of farmers who may see lower prices for products such as soy beans because of the retaliatory tariffs China has imposed on American farm products. Covering all the losses—not just those affecting farms, but those affecting all industries, as Trumka suggests—could require as much as $39 billion, according to an analysis that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce published this week.

“Offering a bailout to any single industry is a slippery—and costly—slope,” the report warns. “The best way to protect American industries from the damaging consequences of a trade war is to avoid entering into a trade war in the first place.”

Trumka’s some-pain-now-for-gain-later argument would carry more weight if Trump had clear, achievable goals. So far all Trump has to show for his trade war is a handshake deal with Europe promising not to escalate things farther. There are no planned negotiations with China, and Chinese officials recently told Politico they don’t even know what Trump’s goals are. The two sides are now getting farther apart, not closer, on trade. Canada is refusing to participate in this week’s conference on the North American Free Trade Agreement, and talks with Mexico don’t seem to be going well.

But at least Trump can claim he’s following through on his promise to shake up Washington. How many other Republican presidents would have Richard Trumka applauding?

The recent announcement that a now-defunct law firm will pay $600,000 to a former Costa Mesa mayor, and a current councilman and his wife puts to bed an ugly chapter in that Orange County city’s recent history.

Nevertheless, it would be wrong to ignore the deeper statewide lessons from that controversy, which also spotlights the aggressive “playbook” that some police officials had used to muscle political opponents into submission.

The settlement came in a lawsuit filed in 2013 by former Mayor Steve Mensinger and Councilman Jim Righeimer and his wife, Lene, against Lackie, Dammeier, McGill & Ethir, an Upland firm that once represented 120 police unions across California and, according to prosecutors, was hired by the Costa Mesa Police Officers Association to do “candidate research,” which included intimidating and tracking Mensinger and Righeimer as the campaign turned nasty.

Punishing bad behavior is great, but shouldn’t these broader political tactics be subject to closer scrutiny, asks Steven Greenhut.

View this article.