Tag: hit&run

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D–Calif.) has announced a formal impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump, after accusations swelled that Trump leveraged his political power to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky into investigating former Vice President Joe Biden—the current Democratic frontrunner in the 2020 presidential election.

“The actions taken to date by the president have seriously violated the Constitution,” she said.

As Reason‘s Peter Suderman has pointed out, while the allegations have yet to be fully substantiated, the mounting evidence appears to be unfavorable to the president. Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer, flip-flopped on national television, initially denying, but then admitting to urging Zelensky to carry out the opposition research on Biden and his family. What’s more, Trump brought up the request eight times on a July call with the Ukranian president. And just days prior to that conversation, Acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney reportedly withheld $400 million in military aid from the Ukraine at Trump’s behest.

The president has no lawful power to refuse funds that Congress has allocated. Yet it seems that Trump may have moved to cut off support for Ukraine—illegally—in hopes that he could prompt that country to conduct political opposition research.

Trump said Monday that he withheld the funds because of “corruption” in the country. He contradicted that messaging on Tuesday, telling the United Nations that he kept the money over frustrations with Europe’s lack of monetary support.

Pelosi’s about-face on impeachment represents a major shift for the congresswoman, who up until this point has maintained that such proceedings would have disastrous political consequences for Democrats. And she isn’t the only one to have a change of heart. Many liberal lawmakers who once opposed the idea have reversed course in light of the new information, with those legislators now topping 150 out of 235. The House Speaker will move to create a special committee to investigate the matter.

Trump has leveled similar accusations against Biden. He alleges that the former vice president refused to give Ukraine funding in order to help his son, Hunter, although it’s worth noting that Trump has not yet been able to furnish proof to support that claim. In 2016, Biden threatened to withhold $1 billion in U.S. aid if a prosecutor—who had been accused of corruption by multiple international agencies—was not removed from office. Some in Trump’s circle allege that the former vice president did so in order to shield his son from investigations pertaining to his role on the board of a Ukrainian gas company that was mired in scandal.

At a press conference today, Biden criticized the president and accused him of abusing his office for personal gain. “We have a president who believes there is no limit to his power,” Biden said. “We have a president who believes he can do anything and get away with it. We have a president who believes he is above the law.”

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Media outlets, following the lead of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), continue to blame recent cases of severe respiratory illnesses among vapers on “vaping” and “e-cigarettes” in general, falsely implying a link to legal nicotine products. This misinformation is fostering public confusion that may lead to more disease and death, both from smoking and from the black-market products that have been implicated in the lung disease cases.

Based on the available information, the overwhelming majority of patients with respiratory illnesses had used black-market cannabis products. While a small percentage of patients say they vaped only nicotine, they may be reluctant to admit illegal drug use, and they may not know what they actually vaped if they purchased cartridges on the black market. If nicotine products are involved in any of these cases, it is almost certainly because of additives or contaminants in counterfeit cartridges or e-fluid, since legal e-cigarettes have been in wide use for years without reports like these.

That’s what we know. But it is not, by and large, what we are hearing from the media. Yesterday I was invited to discuss vaping on AirTalk, the long-running show produced by KPCC, the NPR station in Pasadena, California. To his credit, the host, Larry Mantle, noted the concerns that banning e-cigarettes in general, or flavored e-cigarettes in particular, will drive vapers back to smoking or encourage people to use “adulterated vape solutions” that “might be more dangerous” than commercially available e-cigarettes such as Juul. But the way he framed the segment illustrates the misleading and dangerous conflation of black-market products with the legal vaping industry:

We begin this hour with a conversation on vaping and e-cigarettes. The news from the Centers for Disease Control is that there are nearly 400 [530, according to the CDC’s latest count] confirmed and probable cases of lung disease associated with e-cigarette product use or vaping….Additionally, there have been six [now seven, per the CDC] deaths that have been confirmed….In the wake of those deaths and the CDC recommendation that Americans stop using vape products, that they stop vaping until more is understood about the causes of the lung illness and the deaths associated [with it], we have seen states consider bans on flavored vaping products.

Contrary to the implication, the official justification for those state bans, as well as the nationwide ban on flavored e-cigarettes that the FDA plans to impose, is the increase in underage vaping, not the lung disease scare. During the radio show I emphasized that the respiratory illnesses are actually associated with black-market products, and black-market THC vapes in particular. But that did not stop the other guest, San Francisco surgeon John Maa, from claiming that “e-cigarettes could be more dangerous than traditional cigarettes if you develop one of these fatal lung illnesses.”

Even when news outlets focus on the hazards of black-market vapes, they are weirdly reluctant to forthrightly state what we know about their prevalence in the lung disease cases. The Washington Post, in a story headlined “Potential Culprits in Mystery Lung Illnesses: Black-Market Vaping Products,” reports that “many sick patients said they bought vape products containing THC, the psychoactive component of marijuana, on the black market.” Not until the 22nd paragraph do readers learn that “most people used e-cigarette products containing THC, many of them illicit products” (emphasis added).

Even “most people” is an understatement. In states where the products used have been reported, the share of patients who admitted vaping THC ranges from 83 percent to 100 percent. And while “some people reported using only nicotine products,” the Post says, “Jennifer Layden, Illinois’s state epidemiologist, noted…that there is often ‘hesitancy about sharing information’ if patients used illicit products.”

Notwithstanding that evidence, a recent Morning Consult poll found that 58 percent of respondents, based on what they had “seen, read, or heard on the news lately,” believed people had “died from lung disease” caused by “ecigs, such as Juul,” compared to 34 percent who said the cases involved “marijuana or THC e-cigs.” The CDC is fostering such confusion by continuing to issue vague warnings.

“Until we know more,” the CDC says, “if you are concerned about these specific health risks, CDC recommends that you consider refraining from using e-cigarette or vaping products.” It adds that “anyone who uses an e-cigarette or vaping product should not buy these products (e.g., e-cigarette or vaping products with THC or CBD oils) off the street, and should not modify or add any substances to these products that are not intended by the manufacturer.” But the main thrust of the CDC’s message is that vaping, no matter the product, is potentially deadly.

The impact of that message was illustrated by “Arthur in Pasadena,” a KPCC caller who had switched from smoking to vaping. “Hearing everything in the news around these mysterious deaths is not a little bit concerning,” he said. To assuage his anxiety, Arthur said, he’d like to see “more comprehensive studies with definitive findings” regarding “the black-market products that allegedly are making people die” and “the commercially available and seemingly safe products” that might “make you die in a few years.”

The relevant question for Arthur is whether e-cigarettes are a less hazardous alternative to conventional cigarettes. And on that point, as much as vaping opponents like John Maa might try to muddy the truth, there is no serious scientific dispute: Vaping, because it delivers nicotine without tobacco or combustion, is much less dangerous than smoking.

David Abrams, a professor of social and behavioral sciences at New York University, estimates that if every smoker in the United States switched to vaping, it would prevent as many as 7 million smoking-related deaths. No wonder Scott Gottlieb, former head of the Food and Drug Administration, described e-cigarettes as “a tremendous public health opportunity.” By portraying e-cigarettes as public health hazard, the CDC is doing a serious disservice to former smokers like Arthur and current smokers who might otherwise follow his example.

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• Mixed-ish. ABC. Tuesday, September 24, 9 p.m.
• Emergence. ABC. Tuesday, September 24, 10 p.m.
• Stumptown. ABC. Wednesday, September 25, 10 p.m.
• Evil. CBS. Thursday, September 26, 10 p.m.

In the onslaught of stupidity, cupidity and (to anyone who watches it long enough) hyperacidity that is the 2019 broadcast TV season, there’s a brief ceasefire for the next few days.

Four intensely watchable pilots make their debuts in mid-week. In each case, their survivability ranges from questionable to doubtful. But you might as well watch while you’ve got the chance; trust me, the season isn’t going to burst into vivid Technicolor life like The Wizard Of Oz. (And—spoiler alert—no houses get dropped onto witches’ heads, either.)

The best single hour of the fall season is ABC’s Stumptown, a hyperviolent noir which starts with a victim escaping from her kidnappers with not-doctor-recommended usages of a fire extinguisher, a seatbelt and her teeth. It only gets progressively more deranged from there.

Based on a rough-and-tumble comic book of the same name, the sly, pulpy Stumptown features Cobie Smulders (Friends from College) as Dex Parios, back in her hometown of Portland after five tours in Afghanistan.

Once a decorated military intelligence officer, Parios is a PTSD burnout who’s sardonic, drunken, and mostly at the end of her rope. Her main forms of recreation are random hookups and losing her disability check shooting craps at an Indian casino.

About the only thing tethering Parios to the real world is her need to somehow provide for a younger brother who has Down Syndrome (Cole Sibus, A&E’s Born This Way). That’s why she takes a fishy private investigator gig hunting down the missing teenage daughter of the casino owner, and immediately the fists, lead and even cars start flying.

Like any good noir detective, Parios has a past pockmarked with tragedy, a welter of withered relationships and a nasty co-dependence with the local cops, capably played by the admiring Michael Ealy (The Following) and the disdainful Camryn Manheim (The Practice).

Between the intricately staged violence and Smulders’ wonderfully wisecracking, knuckle-busting performance, the Stumptown pilot is an intense experience—so much so that it’s hard to believe the rest of the series can hold up to the same standard. How many errant teenagers are out there? Well … okay, but how many are worth driving your car off a bridge for? How often is a fire extinguisher going to be at the right place at the right time to bash somebody’s head in with it? How many guys’ shirts can Parios rip from their six-pack abs before there’s a shortage?

The problem with ABC’s otherwise entertaining Emergence is similar: How many airline catastrophes can reveal vast, cosmic and hopelessly confusing conspiracies before everybody goes back to taking the train? Count ’em up: ABC’s Lost. Fox’s Fringe. NBC’s Manifest. Airliners have become the Grassy Knoll of conspiracy TV.

Emergence follows a now-familiar pattern: In a weather-beaten seaside town on a remote Long Island promontory, there’s a short power failure, followed by a weird Northern Lights-type display and then, of course, a plane crash on the beach.

When town police chief Jo Evans (Allison Tolman of the TV version of Fargo) arrives at the crash site, she finds a little girl (Alexa Swinton, Billions) with no memory of anything, including her own name, but too unscathed to have emerged from the smoldering plane wreck.

Even more mysterious: the flock of NTSB investigators who show up within minutes of the crash demanding custody of the girl and threatening to arrest Evans’ officers when they don’t hand her over. “NTSB doesn’t have arrest authority,” replies the chief in a wintry voice. “I do.” But she has no answer to the little girl’s warning: “If I remember, I’ll have to go away.”

Emergence‘s pilot is a pleasantly spooky hour, with some not-all-that-faint echoes of Netflix’s Stranger Things. It’s aided immeasurably by the casting of Tolman as a size-16 protagonist who is neither a vixen or a superhero, just a good cop with decent human instincts.

But you can practically hear space aliens whispering in the background of the Emergence soundtrack of time travel and alternate universes to come. Ultimately, Emergence is likely to be an exercise in nostalgia for the Golden Age of air travel, when you worried about your luggage getting lost rather than being sucked through a hole in the time-space continuum.

There was a lot of optimism about CBS’ new crime drama Evil because its production team is led by Robert and Michelle King, who created three of this century’s most intelligent television shows—law-and-politics drama The Good Wife, its spinoff The Good Fight and BrainDead, a splendidly contemptuous vision of American politics in which Washington is taken over by brain-eating parasites. (No, not a reality show.)

Evil, unfortunately for its Nielsen points if not for viewers, takes a more cerebral approach that lacks the snap, crackle and pop of the other King shows. It’s a sort of X-Files in which investigators are troubled by metaphysical questions of morality rather than drooling bug-eyed monsters.

Katja Herbers, lately one of the naked but soulless (or maybe I’ve got that reversed) robots on Westworld, plays forensic psychologist Kristen Bouchard. A frequent prosecution witness against serial killers, she attacks their insanity defenses after administering tests that aren’t exactly subtle. (“True or false: I like the sound of a woman screaming.”)

While pursuing her latest target, a knife-wielder named Orson who has chopped up three families, Bouchard bumps into a couple of men who, she assumes, are defense witnesses coaching up the defendant. To her surprise, they turn out to be Catholic Church investigators who suspect Orson is possessed by a demon.

Many of the symptoms that the Church team associates with demons—say, shouting curses and threats in Latin—are easily faked. Other facts, though, leave Bouchard nonplused. How would Orson know details about her marriage, including her growing estrangement for her absentee husband?

At the same time, she starts having luridly detailed and sexually disturbing nightmares featuring Orson’s purported demon. And as Bouchard’s befuddlement grows, she gets a surprise: an offer to join the church team as a professional skeptic, to be matched against the true-believer investigator David Acosta (Mike Colter, who had a recurring role as a Chicago gang leader on The Good Wife), a priest in training.

“Possession looks a lot like insanity,” Acosta concedes. “And insanity looks a lot like possession. I need someone to help me distinguish between the two.”

Herbers and Colter play well off one another as Evil prowls the borders between science and religion, determinism and morality. And complicating their search is that they both believe in the existence of non-supernatural evil, of “people out there who do bad things and encourage others to do bad things, for the sheer pleasure of it,” as Acosta puts it.

Though Evil manages some truly unnerving moments, particularly the scenes with the lascivious demon, it’s more about ideas than the pea-soup-vomiting stuff audiences usually expect from stories about demons and exorcism. In post-Kardashian America, it may be too late to convince viewers that evil is more than a matter of table manners.

Like Evil, ABC’s Mixed-ish seems redolent of an earlier television time—but in this case, it was inevitable. Mixed-ish is the third franchise in the Black-ish empire that executive producer Kenya Barris launched in 2014. And perhaps Barris (or somebody; the show credits list nine executive producers) has recaptured some of the magic of his original work.

Black-ish started out as light-hearted commentary on the cultural conflicts in homes of the black bourgeoise, and most of the white characters were clueless and bumbling. But in the past couple of years, many of them have devolved to malicious racism. (The change may not be ideological. Barris’ life has been a bumpy one recently; he left his production contract with ABC behind for Netflix last year, and he recently filed for divorce from his wife Rania, upon whom Black-ish character Rainbow Johnson is based.)

Meanwhile, the second franchise—Grown-ish, in which the family’s teenage daughter goes off to college, was so insipidly derivative that ABC demoted it to its kiddie network Freeform, where the audience is too young to have seen the John Hughes films from which it was ripped off.

Mixed-ish has a much fresher feel than the other shows. It’s a prequel to Black-ish, with young stage actress Arica Himmel playing an adolescent version of Rainbow Johnson, who grew up in a racially mixed family in a rural commune.

As the show opens in the summer of 1985, the commune has just been shut down and the family has moved into to the suburban home of Rainbow’s wealthy white grandfather. It’s full of new experiences for the three siblings: Television. Flush toilets. The Second Amendment. (Grandpa, a Reagan Republican, has decreed a constitutional right to bear squirt guns.)

Not everything in Mixed-ish is high-spirited, though. The most startling thing to the kids is not consumerist technology but the rigid identity-politics concept of race, which didn’t exist on the commune. The mixed-race Johnson kids are neither white nor black, in the views of their schoolmates and even some members of their long-estranged families.

“They’re black and white,” Rainbow’s mom pleads with one particularly strident member of her family. “Don’t make them choose sides.” The kids, though, are quick to sense which way the winds are blowing. When Rainbow says the kids should remain above racial definitions, her younger sister retorts: “I think there couldn’t be a whiter thing to say.” Faintly, on the soundtrack, you can hear Cher singing, “Half-breed, how I learned to hate the word… .”

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Robert Hunter, the main lyricist for the Grateful Dead, has died at age 78 of so-far undisclosed causes. Rolling Stone has a decent summation of his life and career.

Hunter’s words were unusual and revelatory for “pop music” and formed a folk philosophy for a large generation of Deadheads who didn’t merely enjoy the band’s music, but made traveling around with them a modern way to emulate America’s grand and troubled tradition of traveling frontier seekers, sometimes helping themselves and the places they traveled, sometimes harming them.

But a certain patriotic vision animated it all. As quoted in a book review on a history of the Dead from Reason back in 2003:

Hunter….found distasteful the fealty to Moscow and Peking (as it was called back then) widespread among prominent ’60s revolutionaries. That fealty, he thought, was why that aspect of the ’60s faded away while the Dead kept on truckin’. “We honor American culture, and what we find good in it,” Hunter said of the Dead. And he knew American culture from many perspectives. As a member of the National Guard, Hunter had been called up to keep order during the 1965 Watts riots.

As Jerry Garcia, Hunter’s old friend and the man who composed music to and sang his lyrics, added, “Our trip was never to go out and change the world. I mean, what would we change it to? Whatever we did would probably be worse than the way it is now.” Why, Garcia asked, “enter this closed society and make an effort to liberalize it when that’s never been its function? Why not leave and go somewhere else?” Hunter was able to take a bemused delight in the country that, as he personified it, “shook the hand of P.T. Barnum and Charlie Chan” and that “lived in a silver mine, but called it Beggar’s Tomb.”

The psychedelic experience that helped launch the Dead as a worldwide phenomenon, was, in an irony Hunter pointed out, pushed along by the U.S. government itself. Hunter once said that the U.S. government “created me…and [Ken] Kesey and the Acid Tests,” since Hunter and Kesey were first exposed to powerful psychedelics as volunteers in government military research in the early ’60s.

In one of their most iconic songs, Hunter wrote of the mysteriously inspirational “Uncle John’s Band” that “their walls are built of cannonballs/their motto is ‘don’t tread on me.'”

The America summed up by that image−rugged, ornery, jealous of its liberty−shows what made Hunter’s songs of enduring interest to those fascinated by the meaning and accomplishments of the American experiment in liberty, in the vices and virtues of an anarchistic American frontier. Despite what the cliched image of a doped-out Deadhead might suggest, Hunter dealt with vice and dissolution with a reasonably brutal honesty—anything that felt like a joyous celebration of decadence is rare in his writing. “Casey Jones, you better watch your speed.”

Hunter’s work, unusual for a career writer of popular song, was also not very heavily focused on romantic love, and his most indelible essaying of the topic, “Scarlet Begonias,” is mostly about how men should realize that the endless quest for new women to win might not be serving those men well. Rather, by Hunter’s constant references to an imagined and mythical old frontier in general, his technique of making modern tall tales and fables out of sometimes warped versions of his, the band’s, or his generation’s own experiences and attitudes, his lyrics became a genuine continuation of the American folklore he drew on.

The historical streams of pre-existing folklore and musical style that fed into his songs such as “Cumberland Blues,” “Casey Jones,” “Jack Straw,” and “Dire Wolf” reveal Hunter and the Dead’s role in the eternal chain of folk music in a modern context. For American kids of the past 50 years for whom talk of “balling the jack” or “a buck dancer’s choice” don’t mark the music as arisen from their own intimate and folksy experience but as something exotic, strange, alien—Hunter’s vivid, complicated, character-filled lyrics sold back to a certain generation of weird Americans a lost and mysterious version of their own country.

His songs will undoubtedly continue to be sung for a long, long time to come, and to impart means of understanding and coping with the exigencies of many of his themes—many uncommon in pop lyrics—of work, responsibility, fate, death, nature, and music itself. Hunter, in combination with his composing partner Garcia and the machinery of touring and recording the band built around their songs, created a semi-coherent artistic universe where the same characters might meet and interact, helping and cheating each other back and forth, a world that’s all difficult and ornery frontier as seen with a God’s-eye view, of what seems a largely Godless universe.

It’s a place for stoic men to struggle with necessity and destiny and the entrapping bonds of character—a world, as Garcia once described it, “where the laws are falling apart and every person is the sheriff and the outlaw.” It’s an America that is rough, challenging, but exciting, adventurous, and well worth living in, and Hunter and the band that sang his songs helped made it all those things.

Hunter wrote in one of his most dazzling lyrics, “Terrapin Station,” that, “The storyteller makes no choice/Soon you will not hear his voice/His job is to shed light and not to master,” a gorgeous and wise summation of his own contributions, and that of the band that sang his songs. We no longer hear his voice. But of course we still do, and always will.

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Does it matter whether President Donald Trump actually supports criminal justice reform as long as he signs the relevant bills into law?

That’s the focus of an insidery Politico piece by Gabby Orr and Daniel Lippman, which features anonymous people connected to Trump saying that the president thinks the important reforms of the FIRST STEP Act are a “dud” because it doesn’t motivate his voters and the Democrats want credit for the bill.

The FIRST STEP Act was a bipartisan affair, signed into law by Trump, but hammered out by reform-minded members of Congress and pushed by Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner and celebrity Kim Kardashian. The FIRST STEP Act reduced some federal mandatory minimum sentences, including some retroactively, and increased the amount of “good time” credits inmates can earn to get out of prison earlier (the federal prison system does not offer parole).

The law has benefited thousands of federal prisoners, according to stats released in July by the Department of Justice. Trump has made note of the FIRST STEP Act in some speeches. But according to Politico, he doesn’t actually care that much about it and is not happy that he might not benefit politically from its passage, while Democrats might. As Politico notes:

Kushner, whose own father spent more than a year in federal prison, worked closely with Democratic and Republican senators to get the criminal justice reform bill over the finish line last year—often telling his tough-on-crime boss it was worth expending political capital to seize a rare opportunity to overcome the deeply partisan divide on Capitol Hill and solidify his image as a pragmatic dealmaker.

But now, Trump “is telling people he’s mad” at how criminal justice reform has panned out, according to a person close to the president. “He’s really mad that he did it. He’s saying that he’s furious at Jared because Jared is telling him he’s going to get all these votes of all these felons.”

Color me less than outraged. Trump is only saying the kind of thing out loud that other politicians would have the good sense to keep to themselves, even though their motivations would not be that different. Trump is an openly transactional politician—he wants to benefit in some way from his political decisions. Certainly, the members of Congress who actually hammered out the FIRST STEP Act are also hoping to get credit from voters when re-election time comes around. And Democratic challengers to Trump are wheeling out their own criminal justice reform packages in the hopes of winning over voters.

CNN pundit and criminal justice reform activist Van Jones sees these anonymous whispers as coming from folks in Trump’s orbit who never supported the FIRST STEP Act in the first place and are happy to put out the message that these types of bills are not in Trump’s interest. Here’s what he told Politico:

“There’s always been a bunch of people in the building, they didn’t like it before, during or after, and they’ve always been able to leak out anonymous bullshit quotes that then very quickly have egg on their faces because Trump does something else positive in this direction of throws in another line in a speech,” said Jones, who confirmed that Trump has been frustrated with the lack of credit he’s received.

It may be true that Trump is unhappy that his signing of the FIRST STEP Act doesn’t give him political ownership of criminal justice reform, and it may well mean that we’ll see no more such reforms under Trump. But the FIRST STEP Act did, in fact, get signed, and it has made life better for thousands. That’s what matters. Let’s not clutch our collective pearls that a president’s support for a law is significantly influenced by the political advantages he hopes to gain from signing it.

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A San Francisco Superior Court judge has tentatively sided with tech company Salesforce in a civil lawsuit brought by 90 women who claim they were sexually exploited. The suit is the first of its kind since last year’s passage of a federal law called FOSTA, which widened punishments for web companies that promote or facilitate prostitution.

The case highlights both the limits of FOSTA and the importance of another federal law—known as Section 230—that is currently under siege from both left and right.

As a large business-to-business software company, Salesforce counted Backpage among its clients. Plaintiffs in the lawsuit against Salesforce allege that Backpage—a classified-advertising platform popular with sex workers—enabled them to be trafficked for sex.

But Backpage was seized by the U.S. government last year, making it a moot point for purposes of seeking civil court damages. And, hence, lawyers got to work targeting Salesforce.

They should have known better. With respect for the plight of victim-plaintiffs in this suit, their lawyers have led them astray, big time, while marking a new low in attempts to assign legal liability to internet companies for their users’ actions and words.

See, this lawsuit—as with many similar cases before it—hinges on Section 230 of federal communication law, which specifically shields internet companies from being treated as legally one with every user. And under a large body of legal precedent, Salesforce would be unequivocally shielded by Section 230 in this case.

Section 230 does not apply where federal criminal prosecutions are concerned. And it doesn’t apply when websites and tech companies are directly implicated in crimes themselves. But this isn’t a criminal prosecution, and no one is claiming that Salesforce directly participated in illegal activity, conspired with Backpage users who committed sex trafficking, or had direct knowledge of any specific crimes that may have occurred. Salesforce simply provided software to Backpage. And other courts have repeatedly said that Section 230 shielded Backpage from legal liability in similar circumstances.

Yet FOSTA, signed into law last April, poked a hole in Section 230. It created an exception to its protection for digital actors where allegations of forced or underage prostitution (i.e. sex trafficking) are concerned.

FOSTA was “enacted to ensure that courts would no longer rule that claims like Jane Does’ were barred by Section 230,” argue the plaintiffs’ lawyers in the Salesforce suit.

They’re half right. The trouble is that these Jane Does’ claims are based on alleged violations by Salesforce of California state law. And FOSTA does not actually apply to private civil lawsuits based on alleged violations of state law.

Under FOSTA, Congress carved out a Section-230 exception for three kinds of actions: 1) state criminal cases, 2) civil enforcement actions brought by state attorneys general, and 3) private civil lawsuits alleging a federal cause of action. None of these three exceptions applies in the suit against Salesforce.

“Even apart from Section 230, Plaintiffs have not pled any viable claim against Salesforce,” the company’s lawyers argued to the court—and they are probably right. However, due to Section 230, this point is likely already moot.

Section 230 bars the claims in this case, Judge Ethan P. Schulman said in his tentative ruling.

None of this is too terribly heartening; after all, the damage was done by FOSTA’s very passage, which seems to have frightened many online actors into more censorship and driven sex-related industries further underground. But at least this preliminary ruling shows there may be some limits to the ludicrous actions that will be permitted under FOSTA’s name.

In any event, the plaintiffs may still contest the tentative ruling, and their lawyers told Bloomberg that they plan to do so. In that case, Judge Schulman will be forced to go ahead with oral arguments. But even so, a ruling in the plaintiffs’ favor seems unlikely based on the plain facts of the case.

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A House subcommittee hearing on the allegedly harmful effects of e-cigarettes took a bizarre turn when Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D–Mich.) asked the panel’s only pro-vaping witness, Vicki Porter, whether she was a conspiracy theorist.

Tlaib had apparently noticed Porter winking at one of the Republican participants, and thought this was possibly indicative of something nefarious. Porter patiently explained that she knew this man personally, and was just saying hello.

Tlaib’s larger concern, of course, was that Porter had directly and quite pointedly challenged the tortured logic of the Oversight and Reform subcommittee hearing. Contrary to the other participant’s assertions that vaping was bad, full stop, Porter thanked e-cigarettes for helping her to quit smoking—and reminded Congress that there were millions of other adults just like her.

“Vaping is a health miracle to me,” said Porter. “Not safe, but less harmful.”

Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Shultz (D–Fla.) dismissed Porter’s comments, saying, “I want to confirm the testimony of Ms. Porter is anecdotal, related specifically to her opinion, and she is not a public health expert.”

Tlaib celebrated the anti-vaping witnesses for “speaking truth about this, because the long-term effects are very dangerous” before attempting to discredit Porter with the conspiracy-theorist-smear.

.@RashidaTlaib attacks conservative vaping advocate Vicki Porter: “Are you a conspiracy theorist?” pic.twitter.com/Czf5cALRks

— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) September 24, 2019

Moments before, Tlaib had asserted secondhand smoking was “worse than directly smoking cigarettes.” This, of course, is not true—indeed, it’s utterly ludicrous. Who is the conspiracy theorist, again?

For more on Tlaib’s fact-free anti-vape agenda, read the Reason Foundation’s Guy Bentley.

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If President Donald Trump’s tariffs were supposed to resurrect American steelmakers, there is no doubt they have failed to accomplish that goal.

This week’s bad news comes from Rothbury, Michigan, where the Barber Steel Foundry will close at the end of the year, leaving 61 people unemployed. A spokesman for the company, which is owned by the Pennsylvania-based Wabtec Corporation, told Michigan Live that the closure is due to “declining business conditions.”

It’s the latest in a long run of bad news for U.S. steelmakers. In July, NLMK Pennsylvania, a subsidiary of a Russian-owned steel company, announced that it would layoff 80 workers amid slowing production. Plant president Bob Miller said the plant’s inability to win exemptions from tariffs were to blame for the lost jobs.

That followed the June 19 announcement by U.S. Steel that it would shut down two blast furnaces at its flagship plant in Gary, Indiana. The company has also laid off workers and slowed production at a plant in Michigan.

If the problems were contained to layoffs at a few steel mills, they could be explained away by other factors—or written off as mere anecdotes. But as you zoom out from those small-scale problems to look at the industry as a whole, it becomes even more obvious that there is no steel resurrection taking place, despite what Trump has promised would happen.

In one year Tariffs have rebuilt our Steel Industry – it is booming! We placed a 25% Tariff on “dumped” steel from China & other countries, and we now have a big and growing industry. We had to save Steel for our defense and auto industries, both of which are coming back strong!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 14, 2019

The forgotten voters of the 2016 Election are now doing great. The Steel Industry is rebuilding and expanding at a pace that it hasn’t seen in decades. Our Country has one of the best Economies in many years, perhaps ever. Unemployment numbers best in 51 years. Wow!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 15, 2019

That’s…not happening.

Domestic steel prices spiked in the months after Trump imposed his tariffs on imported steel, but the higher prices (and larger issues, including the uncertainty created by Trump’s trade war) slackened demand for steel and prices have now fallen below pre-tariff levels. Lower prices have translated into less revenue for steelmakers, and the jolt once provided by the tariffs is now gone. The three biggest U.S. steelmakers—Nucor, Steel Dynamics, and U.S. Steel—are all expected to fall short of their third quarter projections.

U.S. Steel seems to be in particularly bad shape. In a warning to shareholders issued last week, the Pittsburgh-based company said it expects to lose 35 cents per share during the third quarter, after previously projecting losses of just 6 cents per share. Since the steel tariffs took effect in March 2018, U.S. Steel’s stock has fallen by a whopping 75 percent—from a high of $45 in the days after the steel tariffs were announced to a value of just $10.50 per share on Tuesday morning. Nucor stock is down about 25 percent since March 2018, while Steel Dynamics has seen a 30 percent drop.

As Clark Packard, a trade policy expert with the R Street Institute, a free market think tank, said in June: “Tariffs are a really ineffective tool to revitalize a domestic industry.”

Indeed, it’s not only steel that’s taken a hit when it was supposed to be getting saved. Trump’s tariffs on imported aluminum created an estimated 300 jobs during 2018 at a cost of $690 million. Two solar panel manufacturers that successfully pushed for new tariffs on Chinese-made solar panels last year are now bankrupt and out of business. And when Whirlpool lobbied the administration to tax imported washing machines, consumers wound up having to pay $1.2 billion more—and higher prices have reduced demand, punishing Whirlpool as well.

The jobs that have been created by Trump’s tariffs have come at a heavy cost. According to the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a pro-trade think tank, U.S. consumers and businesses paid about $900,000 for every steel job created or saved by Trump’s tariffs.

It is well past time to stop believing that tariffs are going to resurrect or save the American steel industry. Trump has given little more than false hope and faulty economics to the steelworkers and other blue collar employees for whom he’s promised a return to the good old days. The slow decline of American steelmaking cannot be halted or reversed by executive order or presidential tweet.

Unfortunately, most of the Democrats running to unseat Trump in 2020 are promising the same sort of protectionism. The beatings, it seems, will have to continue until morale improves.

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Footage of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement is essentially nowhere to be found on the globally popular social media app TikTok. Instead, protesters are getting the word out on Twitter and Facebook. With roughly 1 billion global users, what could explain TikTok’s Hong Kong blackout?

While it might be that TikTok’s core demographic is teens and young adults, or that the app’s most popular content categories are viral video clips of lip-syncing and physical stunts, the more likely explanation is that TikTok is owned by a Chinese company which has historically tried to curry favor with the Communist Party of China (CCP).

Many of TikTok’s users are unaware of its Chinese roots. The app is owned by ByteDance, which also owns Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok. Douyin, like all other social media companies in mainland China, must comply with the “Great Firewall,” which blocks any political content that the CCP finds objectionable. Political dissent is banned, though social media users tend to find shortlived ways to circumvent the firewall: Tiananmen Square is famously referred to as “May 35th,” since references to the actual date of the massacre—June 4—are scrubbed from social media by the CCP’s censors.

The Washington Post reports that “It’s impossible to know what videos are censored on TikTok: ByteDance’s decisions about the content it surfaces or censors are largely opaque,” but that “popular hashtags used by Hong Kong protesters that have spread widely across other social media barely exist on TikTok.”

“The #antielab hashtag, a central organizing post named for protesters’ resistance to an extradition bill seen as weakening Hong Kong sovereignty, has more than 34,000 posts on Instagram but only 11 posts on TikTok, totaling about 3,000 views. The hashtags for #HongKongProtests and #HongKongProtestors, some of the biggest rallying points on Twitter, return either a single video or an error message: ‘Couldn’t find this hashtag: Check out trending videos.’ The #HongKongProtest hashtag showed six videos, totaling about 5,000 views.”

Other youth-dominated visual mediums, like Instagram, are rich with Hong Kong content. The #HongKong hashtag returns 33.3 million posts on Instagram; #HongKongProtest turns up nearly 43,000 posts, and #HongKongAirport, where many of the protests have taken place, turns up more than 97,000 posts. Part of the reason TikTok might not be used to spread Hong Kong protest content might be due to low interest among the app’s predominately teen users. Or it might be the case that many Americans simply aren’t interested in Hongkongers’ ongoing fight for democracy.

But it’s not as if TikTok and Douyin are devoid of other types of political content. Douyin is used semi-cryptically by Uighurs in China’s western Xinjiang province to communicate with the rest of China that they have missing, dead, or separated relatives. This month, Nevada high schoolers used TikTok to organize a strike in solidarity with their teachers to get them better pay and working conditions. TikTok users have also used clips of art and body makeup to spread awareness of climate change, in addition to streaming coverage of climate-related protests (the #climatechange hashtag has nearly 30 million views and an endless stream of posts).

In the past, ByteDance has showed a strong degree of deference to the CCP. The Post notes:

“ByteDance last year was forced to dismantle its popular comedy app Neihan Duanzi (roughly translated, ‘implied jokes’) following a government purge, during which Chinese regulators said the app’s ‘vulgar and improper content’ had violated social morals and ’caused strong disgust.’

ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming, one of China’s richest men, issued a public, self-effacing apology for content he called ‘in deviation of socialist core values’ and pledged the company would work to ensure party ‘voices are broadcast to strength.'”

In a statement, ByteDance said that the content moderation team for TikTok is based in the U.S. and held to wholly different standards than Douyin. And in terms of content, images that have caused a stir on Douyin (such as a cartoon pig named Peppa Pig, which Chinese state-owned media claim is antithetical to Party values) are allowed on TikTok.

Still, a video-centric app would seemingly be a natural fit for those who want to spread footage of the Hong Kong protests, which are now in their 16th week.

The protests, which were sparked by a proposed extradition treaty that would have allowed suspected criminals to be extradited from Hong Kong to Taiwan and mainland China, has turned into a larger demonstration against China’s power creep. Since 1997, Hong Kong and China have used the “one country, two systems” policy, under which Hongkongers are allowed significant political freedoms. Hong Kong could lose these freedoms and be fully absorbed by China in 2047, when the policy agreement is set to expire. Proposals like the extradition treaty have many Hongkongers worried that China is speeding up the timeline and attempting to prematurely winnow away at their freedoms.

More Reason coverage of Hong Kong protests—in video form—here.

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The Democrats’ latest drive to impeachment rests on a single, relatively straightforward accusation: that in a July phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, President Donald Trump improperly urged the foreign leader to investigate Trump’s domestic political rival, Joe Biden, and Biden’s family—perhaps holding up foreign aid in an attempt to pressure a foreign government into creating a scandal in hopes of gaining a political advantage in advance of the 2020 election.

It increasingly appears that this allegation is true. 

For starters, we know that Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, pressured Ukraine to investigate the Biden family, because Giuliani—shortly after denying the charge—admitted to doing so on national television.  

The Wall Street Journal, meanwhile, reported that in the July call, Trump himself pressured the Ukrainian leader to investigate the Biden family’s dealings in the country, raising the issue eight separate times. 

Over the weekend, Trump appeared to admit he had raised the issue, linking the conversation, which he says was about “corruption,” to Biden and his son, saying, “The conversation I had was largely congratulatory, was largely corruption, all of the corruption taking place, was largely the fact that we don’t want our people, like Vice President Biden and his son, creating to the corruption already in the Ukraine.”

Trump further insisted that “there was no quid pro quo, there was nothing.” But this morning, The Washington Post reported that nearly $400 million in military aid for Ukraine had been withheld just days before the call occurred. Trump had personally ordered his chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, to hold up the funds. 

This, in turn, raises two questions: Why would Trump put a hold on the funds? And did he have the authority to do so? 

The money had been authorized by Congress earlier in the year, and under the Constitution, Congress has the sole power of the purse. This is why the Obama administration’s decision to spend Obamacare funds that Congress had not authorized was illegal. A president can neither spend unauthorized funds, nor decline to spend funds that Congress has authorized. 

Yet Trump not only paused the payments, but he gave no clear reason why, instructing administration officials “to tell lawmakers that the delays were part of an ‘interagency process’ but to give them no additional information,” according to the Post. The payments weren’t made until mid-September. 

So Trump personally pressured a foreign government to work with his personal lawyer to gin up what he hoped would be a politically beneficial scandal. Simply making that request, with no strings attached, would be inappropriate. But shortly before that, he personally held up federal funds that were set to go to that country—possibly in violation of the Constitution—and told his subordinates not to explain why. 

Zelensky, however, appears to have understood the reason. Sen. Chris Murphy (D–Conn.) said this week that in an early September conversation, Zelensky expressed direct concerns that “the aid that was being cut off to Ukraine by the president was a consequence” of his refusal to investigate the Bidens. 

One might be skeptical of Murphy’s story. He is, after all, a Democratic senator. But I am inclined to believe him, for two reasons. First, if it were not true, Zelensky could publicly dispute it. And second, it’s simply not surprising that Zelensky would understand the funding delay to be tied to Trump’s request for an investigation into the Bidens; when the president of the United States calls a foreign leader and asks for a personal favor at precisely the same time that funding for that leader’s country has been put on hold, the obvious conclusion would be that the two events are linked.  

So no, there may not have been an explicit quid pro quo. Trump may not have expressly said the disbursement of the funds was conditioned on the launch of a Ukrainian investigation into the Bidens. But even if there was no explicit threat, there was still presidential pressure coming at a time when money was on the line—and when Trump had personally delayed the funds.

This paints a disturbing picture. It very much looks like Trump used the power of his office—the most powerful political office in the country and the world—in an attempt to boost his personal political fortunes. The evidence so far, in other words, suggests that Trump did the thing he is being accused of doing, or something very much like it. 

There may still be more we don’t know. The whistleblower complaint that launched this story has not yet been made public, and it appears to have been based on indirect information rather than firsthand knowledge. Trump has said that the transcript of the call would show no quid pro quo; we have not yet seen the transcript. It would be useful to have all of this information on the record. 

But we already know enough to draw some tentative conclusions. And presuming the events unfolded roughly as has been reported so far, then Trump has done something that no president should do. 

Indeed, if the reports are accurate, he attempted to do something that he spent the last three years insisting he didn’t do in 2016—work directly (one might even say “collude”) with a foreign government to influence an American election to his own benefit. And he did it from the perch of elected office. This was, by all indications, an abuse of presidential power for personal gain. 

Whether this constitutes an impeachable offense is a question that House Democrats will now have to decide. It is worth remembering, however, that impeachment is not necessarily a conclusion; it is a process, the vehicle set forth by the Constitution for determining whether a president has committed acts that might justify removal from office. And those acts do not necessarily have to be criminal in nature. As Rep. Justin Amash (I–Mich) tweeted earlier this year in a thread making the case that the Mueller report justified action, “Impeachment, which is a special form of indictment, does not even require probable cause that a crime (e.g., obstruction of justice) has been committed; it simply requires a finding that an official has engaged in careless, abusive, corrupt, or otherwise dishonorable conduct.” Judge Andrew Napolitano, a Fox News legal analyst who has sometimes tangled with Trump, recently made the case that Trump’s attempts to influence Ukraine constitute an “act of corruption” worse than anything uncovered during the Mueller investigation. 

Impeachment proceedings would almost certainly drown out discussion of other issues. There is a risk impeachment could backfire politically, which is probably why Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D–Calif.) has resisted it so far. Democrats, many of whom have been itching to impeach since Trump took office, run a real risk of looking like they have merely latched onto the latest controversy in order to justify a partisan action they already wanted to pursue. And should the process result in an impeachment trial, it would be held on Trump-friendly turf, in the GOP-controlled Senate. It’s hard to imagine that the final result would be his removal. 

All of which is to say that the question of impeachment is, unavoidably, a political question, and it will be resolved by political actors based on political considerations. But the question of what Trump did, and whether it was appropriate, is one that we can answer with reasonable confidence. And the answer does not make Trump look good. 

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