Brickbat: School Days

The West Virginia attorney general’s office has filed a civil lawsuit against the Berkeley County Board of Education, two administrators, two aides, and a teacher, claiming the teacher and aides verbally abused elementary school students and the administrators tried to obscure the abuse. Amber Pack became concerned when her 6-year-old daughter with autism came home with what appeared to be pressure bruises on her arms. She sent the girl to school with a hidden recording device and caught the teacher and the aides threatening to hit children and withhold food from them. Teacher Christina Lester and aides June Yurish and Kristin Douty have been charged with misdemeanor failure to report abuse or neglect.

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California Might Resurrect Redevelopment Agencies That Were Wasteful Exercises in Corporate Welfare

It’s time for your weekend trivia contest. Name one government agency that went out of business. It’s pretty tough without using Google. The Board of Tea Appeals, which mediated disputes from tea importers who were denied access to U.S. markets by federal tea tasters, was shuttered in 1996 after nearly a century-long existence.

Most agencies that dissolve are miniscule. Or they go away in name only, like when the General Accounting Office was renamed the Government Accountability Office. This brings to mind economist Milton Friedman’s quip: “Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.”

Friedman wrote that in 1984, so he couldn’t have foreseen my favorite exception. In 2011, California—which seems to specialize in expanding state bureaucracies—eliminated all 400-plus redevelopment agencies in one fell swoop. This was a major deal given that the agencies laid claim to 12 percent of the state’s general-fund revenue.

The redevelopment process was the product of 1940s-era urban-renewal policies. To revive blighted inner cities, state officials came up with a well-intentioned idea that ended up like most well-intentioned ideas that expand government power and spending. It often resulted in the opposite of its intentions. Instead of helping the poor, it hurt them. Instead of revitalizing urban cores, it promoted suburbanization. Instead of providing more housing, it discouraged new housing tracts.

Under redevelopment, city-run agencies would target a project area for renewal. They would hire consultants to produce a report that found “blight.” Blight is in quotations because virtually anything qualified as blight. A rural mountain town was deemed blighted because of excess urbanization. An upscale suburb used chipping paint on some houses as its rationale. Some agencies declared that their entire cities were blighted.

The agency would then float debt (without a vote of the people) and fund infrastructure improvements in the targeted area. Those improvements often amounted to direct subsidies for private development projects. The rise in property taxes after the project area was approved—called the “tax increment”—would pay off the bonds.

Although agencies set aside 20 percent of the tax proceeds to build subsidized housing, cities mainly used redevelopment to incentivize shopping centers and auto malls as they sought discretionary sales-tax dollars. By “fiscalizing” land use in a way that elevated retail over housing, redevelopment sowed the seeds of the current housing crisis.

Redevelopment agencies used the power of eminent domain to take properties from private owners—primarily homeowners and small businesses—and sell it on the cheap to developers. In 2005, the U.S. Supreme Court, in its notorious Kelo decision, gave its imprimatur to the use of eminent domain in this distorted way.

But former Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s dissent encapsulated the evils of the redevelopment process in a way that we should all keep in mind, as state lawmakers try to bring these agencies back to life. “Under the banner of economic development, all private property is now vulnerable to being taken and transferred to another private owner, so long as it might be upgraded,” she wrote. “The beneficiaries are likely to be those citizens with disproportionate influence and power in the political process,” while the “victims” will be those “with fewer resources.”

Unfortunately, former Gov. Jerry Brown and state lawmakers didn’t dismantle the agencies because they abused property rights and shifted development decisions to government planners. They shut them down because they needed the money during a budget crisis. For instance, the state backfilled the dollars that were diverted from public schools.

Legislators have revived different elements of redevelopment, through various programs such as “infrastructure finance districts.” These have been more limited than the original redevelopment concept, but state Assemblyman David Chiu (D-San Francisco) this year pushed a bill that would have brought back full-scale redevelopment.

Fortunately, Gov. Gavin Newsom showed little interest in Assembly Bill 11, and it was shelved. But something similar will be re-emerge. And there’s one redevelopment-related measure that’s alive as the Legislature heads toward final weeks of session. Senate Bill 5 creates a new State Affordable Housing and Community Development Investment Committee, which would spend up to $2 billion annually over 30 years.

It’s a different take on redevelopment, but it lets politicians and bureaucrats funnel subsidies into economic development. Agencies would have to power to implement “any other act that is necessary to carry out a project.” That presumably means the use of eminent domain, given that California has refused to seriously reform its eminent-domain statutes, as other states have done following Kelo.

California thinks it can afford this nonsense now that it has a surplus (provided one ignores its massive unfunded liabilities). But redevelopment agencies should remain shuttered because it’s a bad idea to give government the power to disburse corporate welfare and run roughshod over property rights. Agencies rarely die, and even when they do they come back like those whack-a-mole arcade games. We need to keep whacking.

This column was first published by the Orange County Register.

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Reviews: Don’t Let Go and The Fanatics

Don’t Let Go is a characteristically tight, tense Blumhouse thriller that gets considerable mileage out of its modest budget, clever premise, and likeable cast (David Oyelowo, Mykelti Williamson, Brian Tyree Henry, and breakthrough teen Storm Reid, of HBO’s Euphoria). Unfortunately, the movie’s tricky structure—it’s a time-traveling police procedural—is maybe a little too clever. Or maybe it just seems that way to those not clever enough themselves to follow its knot-like narrative switchbacks. I’m sure these people exist.

Jack Radcliffe (Oyelowo) is a veteran L.A. cop who worries about his bipolar brother (Henry), a musician with a drug problem in his past. Jack happily plays a paternal role in the life of his niece, Ashley (Reid), and has given her a nice new phone to call him on whenever she needs help. One day she does this and Jack hears sounds of struggle on Ashley’s end of the call. Panicking, he rushes to his brother’s home and finds that the whole family has been slaughtered, Ashley included.

Jack is devastated. After a while, he gets another call—and it’s from Ashley again! She’s fine and she’s in her bedroom at home—the same place where Jack recently found her body. Jack asks Ashley what the date is wherever she’s calling from; she looks at a paper and says it’s June 25. It’s June 29 where Jack is. But where is that?

Turns out Jack is living four days into Ashley’s future, and she’s living four days in Jack’s past—before the bloodbath that ended her life. Can Jack save Ashley somehow? By this point, he’s acting pretty oddly, and his chief (Alfred Molina) is getting suspicious; fortunately, Jack’s longtime partner, Bobby (Williamson), has his back. But nothing is quite what it seems, and as the movie winds on, we hear talk of a mysterious character called Georgie, and a deadly conspiracy of some sort; and pretty soon, it saddens me to report, the picture devolves into an exercise in racing and chasing and predictable blam-blam-kapow. By the time we get to the part where the story’s two-different-worlds problem is supposed to be resolved, I have to confess I’d lost interest.

Storm Reid, with her lively smile and her ultra-long extensions whipping the air, is the movie’s sparkiest presence—especially since Oyelowo (also one of the film’s producers) is confined to a character as glum as Jack. The picture was shot two years ago and debuted at the Sundance Film Festival last January. After it drew an unenthusiastic response, the director, Jacob Estes, re-edited it. In vain, I’d say.

The Fanatic

I’m sorry to bring this movie to your attention, but I must. The Fanatic is a film directed by Fred Durst—it’s his third feature in 12 years, actually—and it contains a scene in which we see a father and his son driving in a car and the father, in the mood for a tune, asking the boy if he’d like to hear a little Limp Bizkit. I didn’t catch what the son said, but Dad does indeed hit the Bizkit button, and my face fell right into my hands.

Already enlivening the proceedings maximally is John Travolta, who stars in this thing—lurches through it, more accurately—as Moose, a severely autistic horror-movie fan with an elaborate assortment of tics and jitters and a mullet that might have been administered with a weed whacker. Moose has become obsessed with a horror star named Hunter Dunbar (Devon Sawa), and after the actor blows him off at a memorabilia-signing session, Moose decides to get Dunbar’s undivided attention by any means necessary.

What follows makes very little sense—but then what precedes it is quite light on credibility as well. We’re asked to believe that Moose makes a living as a street entertainer, standing around on L.A. sidewalks costumed as a bobby out of foggy old London town. (Would anyone pay to witness this?) We’re asked to accept that a line like “I can’t talk long, I gotta poo” doesn’t rank extremely high on the numbskull spectrum. (The script was cowritten by Durst, who once came up with Chocolate Starfish for part of an album title.) And finally, when Moose’s desperate search for celebrity connection results in a bloody home invasion, we’re asked to nod along to the sight of a man being stabbed in the chest (with an autograph pen!), then later shot multiple times, kicked down a flight of stairs, stabbed in the eye and relieved of his right hand—and yet still being capable of shuffling along the Hollywood Walk of Fame on his way to who the fuck knows where.

There’s a twist ending, and as you’d expect, it makes not the slightest effort to add up.

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Elizabeth Warren’s ‘Economic Patriotism’ Doubles Down on Bad Policy

Perhaps the only person who dislikes foreigners and free trade more than the economic ignoramus who occupies the White House is another economic ignoramus who wants to occupy the White House.

“A lot of giant companies refer to themselves as ‘American,'” snipes Elizabeth Warren, Democratic presidential wannabe and U.S. Senator from Massachusetts, in a recent campaign advertisement. “But face it, they have no loyalty or allegiance to America.”

Warren warns that pencils are mostly made in China and Mexico (boo hiss). And, she cautions, a third of corporate shareholders are foreign investors! When it comes to doing business across national borders, Warren has set her sights on the same sort of scheme President Donald Trump threatened in 2016, when he pledged punitive taxes on a company if it “leaves our country for another country, fires its employees, builds another factory or plant in another country.”

To counter these actions, Warren proposes a scheme of “economic patriotism.” She adds, “in a Warren administration, government policy will support American workers.” I assume those are the same “American workers” to whom President Trump pledges devotion along with “great Patriot Farmers” in his trade war against China and the world beyond.

Warren’s choice of a pencil manufacturer to include among her perp walk of economic villains who dare to operate outside the United States is especially ironic, given that the humble writing implement featured in Leonard R. Read’s 1958 celebration of the free market, “I, Pencil.” The essay explores the international sourcing of the materials required to make a pencil, as well as the diverse skills and knowledge necessary for its manufacture.

“My family tree begins with what in fact is a tree, a cedar of straight grain that grows in Northern California and Oregon…The graphite is mined in Ceylon [Sri Lanka]…,” Read notes. The eraser “is a rubber-like product made by reacting rapeseed oil from the Dutch East Indies [Indonesia] with sulfur chloride.”

The voluntary organization of these inputs—”millions of tiny know-hows configurating naturally and spontaneously in response to human necessity and desire”—produces much better results than a clumsy top-down effort to organize matters ever could, Read writes.

“The lesson I have to teach is this: Leave all creative energies uninhibited. Merely organize society to act in harmony with this lesson. Let society’s legal apparatus remove all obstacles the best it can. Permit these creative know-hows freely to flow,” the famous essay concludes.

Forget tiny know-hows configurating naturally and spontaneously; Sen. Warren wants her damned No. 2 pencils made in Worcester, Massachusetts (or at some other approved domestic location) by American workers under the auspices of a program of “economic patriotism” imposed through “aggressive intervention” by the state. “We will make clear that trade policy must defend and create American jobs,” she elaborates elsewhere.

That’s exactly the sort of thinking that gets well-informed economists all lathered up, because it invariably ends poorly for American jobs, as well as for everybody’s prosperity.

“National Taxpayers Union is joined by more than 1,100 economists urging opposition to this new economic protectionism,” the Washington-based organization announced last year in response to President Trump’s nationalistic saber-rattling over trade. The missive was the same letter that over 1,000 economists sent in 1930 in opposition to the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act. “A higher level of protection would raise the cost of living and injure the great majority of our citizens… Such action would inevitably provoke other countries to pay us back in kind by levying retaliatory duties against our goods,” economists noted then and restated in 2018.

The National Taxpayers Union should send a copy of the letter over to the Warren campaign, not that she and her cronies are likely to listen. As they do today, politicians ignored economists’ warnings in 1930, and the world suffered the consequences.

“The tariff and retaliations against it destroyed the world trade system and demolished the integrated world financial structure,” George Mason University’s Prof. Thomas C. Rustici wrote for the Foundation for Economic Education in 2012. “The tariff dramatically lowered U.S. exports, from $7 billion in 1929 to $2.4 billion in 1932…U.S. iron and steel exports decreased 85.5 percent by 1932 due to retaliation by Canada.”

President Trump’s protectionist fulminating has already sparked retaliation by China, which cut off imports of American agricultural products. Tough luck for those “great Patriot Farmers.”

The European Union also threatens more tit-for-tat tariffs against American goods in its continuing battle with the U.S. government.

The ultimate outcome of the current trade war depends on how nasty it gets, but we’re already suffering the consequences.

“We find that the full incidence of the tariff falls on domestic consumers, with a reduction in U.S. real income of $1.4 billion per month by the end of 2018,” cautions a paper issued earlier this year. “We also see similar patterns for foreign countries who have retaliated against the U.S., which indicates that the trade war also reduced real income for other countries.”

And yes, it can get worse.

“If all tariffs announced thus far were fully imposed, U.S. GDP would fall by 0.68 percent ($170.83 billion) in the long run, effectively offsetting about 40 percent of the long-run impact of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Wages would fall by 0.43 percent and employment would fall 529,544.” the Tax Foundation predicts.

There’s no reason to believe other countries will be more receptive to a hypothetical President Warren’s foreigner-bashing and trade-tinkering just because she sticks a different brand name on bad policy. Protectionism and nationalism would still draw retaliation. Warren could potentially spark an even nastier international conflict than the current president because of her militant hostility to free trade.

“Elizabeth Warren’s trade policy is even more protectionist and unilateralist than Donald Trump’s,” marvels Tufts University’s Daniel W. Drezner, a professor of international politics.

Perhaps a Trump/Warren or Warren/Trump ticket for 2020 makes good sense. That way, we could shovel most of the terrible economic ideas onto one ballot line and, just maybe, get an economically literate candidate to run against them.

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Federal Health Agency Engages in Baseless Scaremongering by Linking ‘Severe Lung Illness’ to ‘E-Cigarette Aerosol’

What happens when public health officials tell people to be on the lookout for respiratory conditions that might be related to “vaping”? They get a lot more cases, less clarity about what is going on, and a handy propaganda weapon to deploy against potentially lifesaving products they irrationally dislike.

Since early last week, when a couple dozen cases of breathing problems following vaping had been reported in Illinois, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, the number has climbed into the triple digits. According to an August 23 update from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), “193 potential cases of severe lung illness associated with e-cigarette product use had been reported by 22 states.” Those cases include the first reported fatality, which happened in Illinois.

“The Illinois patient’s death was disclosed during a news conference held by officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration and the state of Illinois,” The New York Times reports. “They did not provide details about the patient’s identity, saying only that the person was an adult who had vaped recently and then succumbed to a severe respiratory illness. Health officials did not say what product the patient had used, whether an e-cigarette or other vaping device; nor did they specify what substance was vaped.”

We likewise do not know exactly what the other patients were vaping, or even whether it was actually the cause of their symptoms. We do know that many of these patients, in Illinois and elsewhere, were vaping black-market cannabis extracts, which may have been contaminated by dangerous chemicals or may have contained synthetic cannabinoids rather than the real thing. We also know that many patients were using refillable vaping systems rather than disposable e-cigarettes or pod-loaded products like Juul. But we don’t know whether they were filled with store-bought e-liquid, DIY mixtures, or mysterious fluids purchased on the black market. In this context, it is more than a little misleading to say these cases involve “e-cigarettes” or “vaping”—terms that most people will understand as referring to commercially produced nicotine delivery devices.

“In at least some of the cases,” Boston University public health professor Michael Siegel notes in a recent National Review piece, “the use of a THC oil, such as butane hash oil, has been implicated. In January of this year, there was a published case report of a severe, acute respiratory illness attributable to the use of butane hash oil. All 21 cases reported in California were apparently attributed to vaping marijuana, with all the THC e-liquids being purchased on the street.”

Last week, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) warned cannabis consumers to be wary of black-market products. “Unregulated illicit market cannabis products, like products in any unregulated marketplace, are of variable quality and may put some consumers at risk,” said Paul Armentano, NORML’s deputy director. “These incidents linked to the use of unregulated, illicit market vapor cartridges reinforce the need for greater market regulation, standardization, and oversight—principles which NORML has consistently called for in the cannabis space. Consumers must also be aware that not all products are created equal; quality control testing is critical and only exists in the legally regulated marketplace.”

That problem has nothing to do with legally produced e-cigarettes that deliver nicotine. But journalists are still drawing a connection to products like Juul, and public health officials are using this vaping scare as an opportunity to warn the public that “e-cigarettes do not emit a harmless aerosol” and “can include a variety of potential[ly] harmful ingredients,” as the CDC’s Brian King put it during a press briefing last Friday. Although “we haven’t specifically linked any of those specific ingredients to the current cases,” King said, “we know that e-cigarette aerosol is not harmless.”

This is blatant, baseless scaremongering. Because black-market cannabis products may pose unknown hazards, King seems to think, people should stay away from legal nicotine delivery devices, even though they are a much less dangerous alternative to conventional cigarettes. Siegel argues that the CDC’s vague, blanket warnings about “e-cigarettes” and “vaping” are “irresponsible and a potential hazard to public health,” driven by “a categorical anti-vaping stance that has become commonplace and threatens to undermine decades of anti-smoking efforts.”

Yesterday, USA Today reported that the CDC, the Food and Drug Administration, and state health departments “say they are completing the painstaking work of tracing common factors that may have triggered the spate of vaping-related lung illnesses.” But given the way these cases were identified, there may be no “common factors.”

Doctors noticed that some patients with respiratory problems were vapers, leading to a post hoc, ergo propter hoc presumption that has colored all subsequent judgments about the causes of those symptoms. Public health officials invited reports about people who 1) vaped and 2) had breathing problems. They got a bunch of them, seemingly confirming the initial hypothesis. But some of these cases may have nothing to do with vaping, while those that do may involve a variety of specific agents. In fact, that is almost bound to be the case, since we know the patients used different products, delivering different drugs, purchased in different places.

What does this all have to do with a smoker who is considering a switch to a different source of nicotine that could save his life by eliminating the tobacco combustion products he is currently inhaling? Absolutely nothing. Officials who claim to be interested in promoting public health should stop pretending otherwise.

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Report: James Comey Broke FBI Rules By Leaking Trump Memos, But He Didn’t Reveal Classified Info to the Press

Former FBI Director James Comey broke FBI rules and improperly shared classified information with his attorneys in his efforts to keep track of—and alert the public about—President Donald Trump’s alleged attempts to influence the investigations against his administration. But Comey did not leak classified information to the media.

Those are the conclusions of a report released today by the Department of Justice Office of Inspector General (OIG), which is the department’s independent watchdog.

Comey believed that Trump’s attempts to discourage the investigation of former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn were inappropriate, and he kept a series of memos documenting his encounters and conversations with the president. When Trump fired Comey in May 2017, the ex-FBI director kept the memos believing they were his own personal recollections and not the property of the FBI. He also arranged for some of the contents to be passed along to the press.

A massive media blitz followed, with Comey’s observations playing an influential role in the debate over whether Trump’s actions were worthy of impeachment. The OIG has determined that some of Comey’s behavior here was improper.

To summarize the 83-page report:

  • The eight memos that Comey wrote about his interactions with Trump were FBI records, not personal recollections, as Comey claimed. The OIG notes that the statutory definition of FBI records includes any “creating and recording information by agency personnel in the course of their official duties, regardless of the method(s) or the medium involved.”
  • Comey violated FBI policies in how he handled these memos and by keeping four of them locked in a safe at home after he had been fired. Under Comey’s employment agreement with the FBI, those memos should have been returned.
  • He improperly disclosed the contents of a memo by asking his lawyer to share it with a New York Times reporter without authorization, thus making public some sensitive details of an ongoing investigation. He reportedly did so for the expressed purpose of forcing the Justice Department to appoint a special counsel to investigate Trump’s campaign (Robert Mueller was appointed to do so two weeks after Comey was fired).
  • Comey improperly disclosed the contents of the four memos he had brought home with him by sharing them with his attorneys without FBI authorization. He also failed to tell the FBI he had shared the memos with his attorneys, even after the FBI reviewed the memos and determined that one of them contained a small amount of classified information pertaining to Flynn’s interactions with representatives of other countries.
  • Though Comey handled these memos improperly and disclosed the contents without FBI authorization, the OIG did not find any evidence that Comey or his lawyers shared any classified information with media.

In the end, the OIG concludes that:

In a country built on the rule of law, it is of utmost importance that all FBI employees adhere to Department and FBI policies, particularly when confronted by what appear to be extraordinary circumstances or compelling personal convictions. Comey had several other lawful options available to him to advocate for the appointment of a Special Counsel, which he told us was his goal in making the disclosure. What was not permitted was the unauthorized disclosure of sensitive investigative information, obtained during the course of FBI employment, in order to achieve a personally desired outcome.

While the report is very critical of Comey, the former FBI director believes he has been vindicated:

Trump insisted that Comey leaked classified information to the press, but it is now clear that the OIG found no evidence to support that allegation. Trump is unlikely to apologize, just as Comey defenders are unlikely to walk back their support based on his actual missteps. Jennifer Rubin of The Washington Post has already dismissed the problems the OIG did find as procedural complaints.

As an unabashed supporter of government whistleblowers and leakers, I am glad Comey leaked his own memos. He was a lousy FBI director who seems to have convinced himself that he’s a hero, but I believe we have a right to know about and judge both his behavior and Trump’s.

That Comey insists he’s been vindicated and remained a free man throughout this entire affair should serve as a reminder that other whistleblowers much lower in the federal food chain—like Reality Winner (who exposed a report showing Russia’s attempts to hack into American voting systems) and Daniel Everette Hale (who exposed serious flaws with the CIA’s drone assassinations overseas)—received much different treatment. Winner is in prison and Hale has been arrested and charged.

If Comey’s looking for another way to stay relevant now that he’s been somewhat absolved, he should consider helping his fellow whistleblowers.

Read the OIG report for yourself here.

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Free Speech Defenders Warn Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez That She Is Violating the Constitution by Blocking Critics on Twitter

On the same day last month that a federal appeals court ruled that Donald Trump’s blocking of irksome critics on Twitter violated the First Amendment, former New York state legislator Dov Hikind sued Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.), arguing that she had committed the same constitutional sin by blocking him. Yesterday, Columbia University’s Knight First Amendment Institute, which filed the lawsuit that led to the ruling against Trump, asked Ocasio-Cortez to cut it out.

“We understand from news reports that you may be blocking some Twitter users from your @AOC account because of the views they have expressed,” Jameel Jaffer, the institute’s executive director, writes in a letter to Ocasio-Cortez. “This practice is unconstitutional, and we are writing in the hope of dissuading you from engaging in it.”

In addition to the ruling against Trump by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit (which includes New York), Jaffer cites a January ruling against Phyllis Randall, chair of the Loudoun County, Virginia, Board of Supervisors. In that case, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit held that, because Loudon used her “Chair Phyllis J. Randall” Facebook page for official purposes and opened it to comments by the general public, the “interactive component” of the page qualified as a “public forum” under the First Amendment. The court upheld a federal judge’s decision in favor of a local gadfly whom Randall had blocked after he posted a comment suggesting that members of the Loudon County School Board had taken official actions that benefited their relatives.

Echoing Trump and Randall, Ocasio-Cortez argues that her @AOC Twitter account is personal, not official. But in light of the principle established by the 2nd Circuit and 4th Circuit cases, Jaffer says, that argument does not hold water. “Based on the facts as we understand them, the @AOC account is a ‘public forum’ within the meaning of the First Amendment,” he writes. “You use the account as an extension of your office—to share information about congressional hearings, to explain policy proposals, to advocate legislation, and to solicit public comment about issues relating to government.”

The parallels between the president’s @realDonaldTrump account and Ocasio-Cortez’s @AOC account are pretty clear. Although both of them also have nominally official Twitter accounts (@POTUS and @RepAOC, respectively), their ostensibly personal accounts are much more popular as forums for discussing policy and politics (with 64 million vs. 27 million followers in Trump’s case and 5.3 million vs. 188,000 in Ocasio-Cortez’s). And Ocasio-Cortez, like Trump, uses her “personal” account for purposes related to her public office.

“Recently, for example,” Jaffer says, “you used the account to discuss new ‘policy approaches we should consider wrt immigration,’ and to ask the public, ‘[w]hat commissions would you want to see Congress establish?’ The account is a digital forum in which you share your thoughts and decisions as a member of Congress, and in which members of the public directly engage with you and with one another about matters of public policy….Many of your tweets staking out positions on issues such as immigration, the environment, and impeachment have made headline news. The @AOC account is important to you as a legislator, to your constituents, and to others who seek to understand and influence your legislative decisions and priorities.”

The 2nd Circuit ruled that “the First Amendment does not permit a public official who utilizes a social media account for all manner of official purposes to exclude persons from an otherwise open online dialogue because they expressed views with which the official disagrees.” But Like Trump, Ocasio-Cortez is under no obligation to engage with her critics on Twitter or even to read what they say. In fact, she could, consistent with that decision, mute detractors such as Dov Hikind, so that she would never have to see their comments, as long as she allowed them to participate in the “interactive space” associated with her account.

“We urge you to unblock any Twitter users whom you or your staff have blocked from the @AOC account because of the viewpoints they have expressed,” Jaffer says, while noting that Ocasio-Cortez still may block Twitter users “for reasons that are both reasonable and constitutionally legitimate,” such as threats of violence. “We would welcome the chance to work with you to develop a social media policy that both complies with the First Amendment and helps you address threats, abuse, and harassment.”

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“A Narrative Summary Describing How the … Taxpayer … Shares California’s Values with Regard to Women’s Reproductive Rights”

Jon Healey, L.A. Times Deputy Editorial Page Editor, flags this today:

The bill … would offer an additional $50 million in tax credits to film and TV producers who locate their productions in California at least in part because of the restrictive abortion laws in other states. Subsidy applicants would have to submit “a narrative summary describing how the qualified taxpayer, and any relevant activities during the production period, shares California’s values with regard to women’s reproductive rights,” which would be a factor in the California Film Commission’s decisions about whom to fund.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but the bill’s title is the “Share Our Values Tax Credit.”

Healey condemns this, and I agree: Denying a grant or other benefit (including a tax credit) to a person or group based on its ideology is a clear First Amendment violation.

The Court reaffirmed that just in 2013, in U.S. Agency for International Development v. Alliance for Open Society International, when it struck down a policy that denied HIV-prevention grants to any organization “that does not have a policy explicitly opposing prostitution and sex trafficking.” “[T]he Government,” the Court held “may not deny a benefit to a person on a basis that infringes his constitutionally protected … freedom of speech even if he has no entitlement to that benefit.”  And this of course applies just as much to tax rules—”a discriminatory denial of a tax exemption for engaging in speech is a limitation on free speech” (Speiser v. Randall (1958)).

Now, unlike the law in USAID v. AOSI, this law merely requires people to describe how the applicant “shares California’s values with regard to women’s reproductive rights.” But why would it ask for such a description if it didn’t plan on giving an advantage to people and organizations who have certain “values” on this subject, and discriminating against those who have the opposite values? And indeed the very process of asking about this can deter applicants from expressing “values” contrary to the government’s.

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TSA Bans Coke Bottles That Resemble Fictional Star Wars Explosives

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has banned passengers from bringing special bottles of Coca-Cola sold at Disney theme parks onto planes because the containers resemble the fictional “thermal detonator” devices in the Star Wars universe.

The bottles are being sold at the newly opened Galaxy’s Edge, a Star Wars–themed attraction at Disneyland in California and at Disney’s Hollywood Studios in Florida. It’s a clever bit of marketing, but any parkgoers who want to take their Coke bottles home as soveigners will be out of luck if they plan to fly.

“It could create concern that it’s the real thing,” TSA spokesperson Jim Gregory told the Orange County Register, which first reported on the ban.

Really? Let’s think through this. Anyone familiar enough with Star Wars to recognize a Coke bottle made to resemble a thermal detonator is also going to be aware of the fact that thermal detonators are fictional. Anyone else is just going to think, “Wow, that’s an odd-looking Coke bottle.”

Even a lot of casual Star Wars fans might not know what the bottle is supposed to mimic, since the thermal detonator isn’t a well-known weapon. It’s mostly just a minor plot device. Introduced in 1983’s Return of the Jedi, the thermal detonator is a baseball-sized explosive that is implied to be very powerful. One is brandished menacingly by a disguised Princess Leia in the movie, but it never actually explodes on-screen. (Anton Chekov would be disappointed.)

But you know what does get used pretty often in Star Wars movies to kill and maim a lot of people and aliens? Lightsabers. And do you know what the TSA’s policy regarding lightsabers is? They’re perfectly fine—even in carry-on luggage!

That’s because plastic reproductions of laser swords carried by fictional space warriors are obviously not actual weapons. No one worries about confusing a lightsaber with “the real thing,” because that’s ridiculous. But plastic Coke bottles shaped like a fictional explosive device that never actually explodes? Those are so dangerous that they can’t even be packed in checked bags.

“The issue concerning Star Wars Galaxy’s Edge-themed soda bottles has recently been brought to our attention by the general public, as these items could reasonably be seen by some as replica hand grenades,” the TSA said in a statement Wednesday. “While we continue to review this issue, TSA officers will maintain the discretion to prohibit any item through the screening checkpoint if they believe it poses a security threat.”

Sadly, the TSA has a long and inglorious history of making arbitrary decisions about what counts as a “security threat.” The “thermal detonator” Coke bottles are forbidden under the same broad ban on replica weapons and explosives—except for lightsabers, I guess?—that has previously led TSA agents to seize items as innocuous as whiskey stones shaped like bullets.

This nonsensical prohibition is another good reminder that, nearly two decades after it was created, the TSA is not the last line of defense against terrorism. It’s a bloated, wasteful bureaucracy that treats innocent Americans like criminals and then shares those stories for laughs on social media. It kills bunniesgropes grandmothersdetains kids, and still can’t find most of the actual weapons that get smuggled onto planes.

Are airline passengers safer travelling without Coke bottles shaped like fictional Star Wars bombs? No, they are exactly as safe as they would have been otherwise.

 

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Feds Kick Incoming Harvard Freshman Out of the Country Because of His Friend’s Social Media Posts

Ismail Ajjawi flew to the U.S. from his native Lebanon last week. He had gained admission to Harvard University, and was excited to begin classes.

When he arrived at Logan Airport in Boston, a U.S. Customs and Border Protect agent detained him for eight hours.

“She called me into a room, and she started screaming at me,” Ajjawi later told The Harvard Crimson. “She said that she found people posting political points of view that oppose the US on my friend[s] list.”

Ajjawi protested that he was not responsible for his friends’ political opinions—and noted that he had not liked or shared them.

“I have no single post on my timeline discussing politics,” he said.

The officer was unmoved. She canceled Ajjawi’s visa and put him on a plane back to Lebanon.

Harvard’s administration is justifiably outraged, and it is working with Ajjawi and a team of lawyers to remedy the situation. They hope to have him back in the U.S. by September 3, the first day of fall classes.

It’s a terrible situation, and it at least partly reflects the Trump administration’s warped immigration priorities. In 2018, the State Department issued just 362,929 student visas, a 43 percent drop since 2015, according to Fox News.

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