Tag: hit&run

Muscular Content Moderation Is a Really Bad Idea That’s Impossible To Implement Well

The calls for more and tougher social media content moderation—including lifetime bans against malefactors—keep getting louder and louder, especially from politicians. Here’s a new story from The Atlantic‘s Alexis C. Madrigal, who recounts how social-media providers increasingly began to call their services platforms to avoid responsibility for the content that users post while profiting off hate speech and other forms of risible expression.

That’s a very debatable history of social media, but let’s leave that aside for the time being. Madrigal’s conclusion is a good summary of what is fast becoming the new conventional wisdom among the smart set, including legislators. Put simply, the new consensus holds that no social media company should ever make money or grow its reach by allowing speech or content that we all agree is patently false, dangerous, or offensive.

Facebook drew on that sense of being “just a platform” after conservatives challenged what they saw as the company’s liberal bias in mid-2016. Zuckerberg began to use—at least in public—the line that Facebook was, “a platform for all ideas.”

But that prompted many people to ask: What about awful, hateful ideas? Why, exactly, Facebook should host them, algorithmically serve them up, or lead users to groups filled with them?

These companies are continuing to make their platform arguments, but every day brings more conflicts that they seem unprepared to resolve. The platform defense used to shut down the why questions: Why should YouTube host conspiracy content? Why should Facebook host provably false information? Facebook, YouTube, and their kin keep trying to answer, We’re platforms! But activists and legislators are now saying, So what? “I think they have proven—by not taking down something they know is false—that they were willing enablers of the Russian interference in our election,” Nancy Pelosi said in the wake of the altered-video fracas. [Facebook refused to take down a video edited to make the Speaker of the House appear drunk.]

The corollary to maximalist content moderation is that it will be easy and simple to implement because, well, aren’t these online types all super-geniuses? But implementation is proving to be extremely difficult and stupid, for all sorts of reasons and with all sorts of unintentionally comic results. Just yesterday, for instance, Twitter suspended the account of David Neiwert, a progressive journalist who is the author of Alt-Right: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump, a critical book on the topic. His crime? Festooning his Twitter homepage with an image from Alt-Right‘s cover image, which includes “Ku Klux Klan hoods atop a series of stars from the American flag.” Better yet, Twitter froze the parody account The Tweet of God for the following message:

Twitter said the tweet violated its rules against “hateful conduct.”

The account has since been restored and it’s worth noting that God is keeping the jokes coming:

Similar issues inevitably arise whenever social media platforms (that word!) try to create more robust versions of content moderation that inevitably rely on automated processes that can’t detect intent, much less irony or humor. Last week, for instance, YouTube announced that it was changing its terms of service and would now ban “videos alleging that a group is superior in order to justify discrimination, segregation or exclusion.” As Robby Soave noted, among the first batch of people blocked by YouTube was former Reason intern Ford Fischer, whose channel News2Share, documents and exposes extremism.

This way madness lies. But it’s not simply an implementation problem. While the doctrinaire libertarian in me is quick to point out that Facebook, Twitter, et al have every legal right to run their platforms however they want to, the free-speech enthusiast in me is equally quick to say not so fast. Contra The Atlantic‘s Madrigal, it’s not always easy to define “awful, hateful ideas,” or to agree on what sorts of videos present, insane conspiracies versus unconventional ideas. I suspect very few people really want Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D–Calif.) (or Pres. Donald Trump, or any politician) to decide what is false and thus censorable.

But we shouldn’t be so quick to allow private companies to take on that role either.

Is Facebook really a better place now that Alex Jones and Louis Farrakhan are gone? Probably, but given all the gray areas that come with defining who and what is ban-worthy (should, say, radical diet groups get bounced?) the superior solution is minimal content moderation, restricted to true threats and clear criminal behavior such as fraud, and improved tools that allow users to tailor what they see and experience. Certainly, Facebook is better for leaving up the altered Nancy Pelosi video while calling attention to its doctored state and allowing a “deepfake” video of Mark Zuckerberg to remain on the platform (that word again).

We are plainly asking too much of social media right now, even as we are blaming it for problems that long predate its rise. Rather than trying to force it to respond to all our contradictory demands, it’s far better for us collectively and individually to develop new forms of media literacy that allow us to separate the wheat from the chaff. Individual definitions will vary and many heated conversations will follow, which is exactly as it should be in a complex world that resists even our best-faith attempts to regiment it to our most-deeply held beliefs.

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Shock Poll: Amash Down 16 Points in Republican Primary

When asked during a town hall meeting last month whether he fears his pro-impeachment comments could leave him vulnerable to a primary challenge by Michigan State Rep. Jim Lower, Rep. Justin Amash (R–Grand Rapids) smiled and said, “I am not concerned about it.”

It may be time to dial up the concern-o-meter.

In a June 5-9 Practical Political Consulting (PPC) and MIRS survey of just 360 likely GOP voters announced Tuesday (though not yet available online), Lower thumped Amash in a head-to-head matchup, 49 percent to 33 percent. According to MIRS News, the poll also found that if President Donald Trump campaigned in the district for Lower, “the challenger’s margin actually goes down 43 [percent] to 32 [percent].”

The poll did not include former Army National Guardsman Tom Norton, who has also filed to run. As Hot Air‘s Allahpundit notes, “That’s Amash’s best hope for a victory — draw more pro-Trump, anti-Amash candidates into the race, hope that the majority of Republican voters splinter among them, and win the nomination with a plurality.”

The news comes amid fresh reporting by Politico that Trump is considering a rare early intervention into a GOP primary against a Republican incumbent. “Trump has raised the primary challenge idea with Vice President Mike Pence and North Carolina Rep. Mark Meadows, a close Trump ally who co-founded the conservative House Freedom Caucus with Amash,” Politico reported. “Trump has also addressed the subject with Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, a former Michigan GOP leader who remains influential in the state.”

The Meadows conversation is the latest sign that Trump has effectively domesticated the House Freedom Caucus (HFC), an influential bloc co-founded by Amash and Meadows and seven others in 2015 to be a check on executive branch power and a force for cutting the size and scope of government. The president last year backed (at the last minute) a successful primary challenge against HFC member and close Amash friend Mark Sanford, whose vanquisher went on to lose the South Carolina seat to a Democrat. Meadows and Rep. Jim Jordan (R–Ohio) have become leading Trumpian attack dogs on all things related to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s recently completed investigation and were quick to rebuke their colleague when he went rogue on impeachment.

Amash resigned from the Freedom Caucus Monday, saying “I have the highest regard for them, and they’re my close friends….I didn’t want to be a further distraction for the group.”

Amash successfully fended off a GOP establishment-backed challenger in 2014. That year, the Michigan Chamber of Commerce teamed up with foreign policy/surveillance hawks such as Karl Rove and Rep. Mike Rogers (R–Mich.) to back Brian Ellis, who infamously accused Amash of being “al-Qaida’s best friend in Congress.” Not only did the libertarian beat the neoconservative by 14 percentage points, he delivered one of the more righteously angry victory speeches you’ll see in American politics, telling Ellis “You owe my family and this community an apology for your disgusting, despicable smear campaign.”

But back then Amash had one thing he can’t count on today—support from Michigan’s deep-pocketed DeVos family, which has stopped backing him. (Politico reported that “last week Jase Bolger, a DeVos confidant and former state House speaker, traveled to Washington for meetings with senior Republican officials where Amash was discussed.”) Amash’s top career contributor, The Club for Growth, was highly critical of his impeachment heresy and is giving standoffish-sounding quotes while backing challenges to insufficiently Trumpian incumbents elsewhere.

Amash’s tenuous status within Trump’s GOP is matched by his precarious positioning vis-à-vis the 2020 Census: Michigan is expected to lose one congressional seat in 2022, and it’s hard to imagine a likelier congressional district to be euthanized than his.

All of which contributes to speculation that the Republican who prefers the word “libertarian” over the phrase “libertarian-leaning conservative” will finally bolt the GOP and compete for the 2020 presidential nomination of the Libertarian Party (a prospect even his potential competitors in the L.P. are cheering on).

There has been one poll taken with Amash as a third-party challenger, and the results may surprise you: 10 percent of the 600 likely Michigan voters surveyed May 28-30 say they’d vote for the local boy, which sounds reasonable enough, but Joe Biden’s lead over Donald Trump is just six percentage points with Amash in the race, 12 points without. If such results are repeated in subsequent polls, it won’t just be Trumpites hollering for Amash’s scalp.

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Jury Refuses to Convict Scott Warren for Showing Kindness to Immigrants

On January 14, 2018, two Central American migrants suffering from dehydration and exhaustion showed up at “the Barn,” a building used by humanitarian aid groups in the border town of Ajo, Arizona. Scott Warren—a volunteer with the advocacy group No Más Muertes/No More Deaths—gave them food and water, and allowed them to spend a few nights there while they recuperated.

Three days later, Warren was arrested by Border Patrol and charged with two counts of harboring undocumented immigrants and one count of conspiracy to harbor and transport them. If convicted, he faced up to 20 years in federal prison.

Warren’s trial began last month. Yesterday, the jury who heard the case told Judge Raner C. Collins of the Federal District Court in Tucson that they could not reach a verdict, and Collins declared a mistrial. Eight jurors wanted to acquit Warren on all charges, while four wanted to convict.

A status hearing for the case is scheduled for July 2. The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Arizona has not said if it will pursue another trial.

“In the time since I was arrested in January 2018, no fewer than 88 bodies were recovered from the Arizona desert,” Warren, a geology instructor, said immediately following the verdict. “The government’s plan in the midst of this humanitarian crisis? Policies to target undocumented people, refugees, and their families. Prosecutions to criminalize humanitarian aid, kindness, and solidarity.”

No More Deaths helps migrants as they cross the treacherous stretches of desert along the U.S.-Mexico border. As I wrote back in March:

That undocumented immigrants are negotiating precarious paths in favor of accessible ports of entry is no coincidence, according to No More Deaths. It’s tactical, they say—part of a Border Patrol strategy that concentrates enforcement resources in urban areas to divert travel to hostile, potentially fatal routes.

Known as “Prevention Through Deterrence,” Border Patrol conceived the practice in 1994. Such unsafe conditions should dissuade large swaths of immigrants from making the journey, the thinking goes. No More Deaths says the strategy is synonymous with “death as a deterrent.”

Records show a spike in migrant fatalities not long after the implementation of “Prevention Through Deterrence.” Between 1998 and 2005, the Tucson sector, where No More Deaths is stationed, saw annual deaths grow from 11 to 219.

“Since 1998, over 8,000 human remains have been recovered in Southern Arizona,” Justine Orlovsky-Schnitzler, a spokeswoman for the organization, tells Reason. “Since we know bodies break down quickly in such harsh environmental conditions, we know the true death count is much higher.”

Prosecutors in the Warren case did not issue a statement immediately after the mistrial. But over the course of the trial, they disputed that Warren, a Christian, acted out of compassion or religious conviction. The case was “not about humanitarian aid,” according to Nate Walters, an assistant U.S. attorney, but about a scheme “to shield illegal aliens from law enforcement for several days.”

Federal prosecutors tried to prove that Warren intended to shield migrants from law enforcement using two pieces of circumstantial evidence. The first piece hinged on Warren’s relationship with Mexican-American activist Irineo Mujica, who runs a migrant shelter in nearby Sonoyta, Sonora, on the Mexico side of the border. Warren visited the shelter several days before Mujica dropped two migrants—Kristian Perez Villanueva of El Salvador and Jose Sacaria Goday of Honduras—off at No More Death’s barn. The order of events suggested that Warren and Mujica coordinated to hide the two men from law enforcement once they’d reached U.S. soil, prosecutors say, rather than only help them escape the desert. Warren testified that when he visited Mujica, they spoke only about searches for human remains in the Arizona desert.

The second piece of evidence came from Border Patrol agents who said they saw Warren conversing with the two migrants while he pointed at mountains in the distance. Although the officers conceded that they could not hear the discussion, they argued that Warren was likely telling the two migrants how to avoid a security checkpoint. Warren testified that he was telling the migrants to stay aware of State Route 85—the lone paved road on their hike, which runs between two mountains—in case of emergencies.

Four volunteers with No More Deaths were sentenced in March to 15 months probation for leaving jugs of water and cans of beans in the desert for passing migrants. In the eyes of the federal government, it seems that kindness is criminal.

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1,051 Crack Sentence Reductions Illustrate Painful Progress Toward a Less Mindlessly Punitive Justice System

During his State of the Union address in February, Donald Trump introduced Matthew Charles, who in 1996 was sentenced to 35 years in federal prison for selling 216 grams of crack cocaine and illegally possessing a gun. Charles, now in his 50s and a free man, was an early beneficiary of the FIRST STEP Act, which Trump proudly signed into law last December. Among other things, that law retroactively applied crack penalty reductions that Congress approved in 2010.

According to a new report from the U.S. Sentencing Commission, more than 1,000 other federal prisoners have benefited from that provision, receiving sentence reductions of about 30 percent on average. That fact is both a heartening illustration of what can be achieved by bipartisan sentencing reform and dispiriting evidence of how hard it is to take even modest steps toward making the criminal justice system less mindlessly punitive.

This particular step is a belated attempt to implement a consensus that emerged years ago about the unjust and irrational legal distinction between two forms of cocaine. In 1986, amid a panic about the “crack epidemic,” Congress enacted mandatory minimum sentences that treated the smoked form of cocaine as if it were 100 times worse than the snorted kind.

Congress decreed that people caught with five grams or more of crack, equivalent to as few as 10 doses, would be subject to a five-year mandatory minimum. That’s the same as the penalty for 500 grams or more of cocaine powder, which amounts to thousands of doses. Likewise, Congress made the penalty for 50 or more grams of crack (100 to 500 doses) the same as the penalty for 5,000 grams of cocaine powder (25,000 to 50,000 doses): a 10-year mandatory minimum.

The racially disproportionate impact of that arbitrary distinction was soon apparent. Crack offenders in the federal system were overwhelmingly black, while cocaine powder offenders were mostly white or Hispanic. In practice, race was strongly correlated with the sentences that cocaine offenders received: The darker a defendant’s skin, the more likely he was to be hit with a mandatory minimum, and sentencing guidelines were calibrated accordingly. Given two defendants who had committed essentially the same offense (measured by doses), the one with the paler complexion tended to receive a lighter punishment.

That realization, coupled with the collapse of the pseudoscientific rationales for treating crack and cocaine powder differently, eventually led to the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010, which Congress approved nearly unanimously and President Barack Obama signed into law. The Fair Sentencing Act replaced the 100-to-1 crack/powder ratio with an 18-to-1 ratio, which was still irrational but considerably less onerous. Yet the Fair Sentencing Act did not apply retroactively, meaning that thousands of crack offenders continued to serve prison terms that almost everyone agreed were too long.

In 2013, when Sens. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) and Mike Lee (R-Utah) introduced a bill that would have applied the Fair Sentencing Act retroactively, Families Against Mandatory Minimums estimated that as many as 8,800 prisoners could benefit. By contrast, the FIRST STEP Act’s crack cocaine provision is expected to help a total of 2,600 prisoners. The difference largely reflects crack offenders who have already completed their excessively long sentences, along with some whose sentences were commuted by Obama.

As of April 30, the sentencing commission reports, 1,051 crack offenders had received sentence reductions under the FIRST STEP Act. More than 90 percent of them were black. On average, they were originally sentenced to nearly 20 years in federal prison. The average reduction was six years, meaning they will still end up serving an average of 14 years for “crimes” that involved the voluntary exchange of a psychoactive substance for money. While six extra years of freedom is nothing to sneeze at, putting someone in a cage for 14 years based on conduct that violated no one’s rights can hardly be described as just.

In short, it took Congress 24 years to address the disparity between crack and cocaine powder, then another eight years to take the obvious step of applying its recalibrated sense of justice to people who had already been sentenced. Sadly, a 30 percent sentence reduction for something that should not be treated as a crime to begin with counts as real progress in the United States, just as the Fair Sentencing Act’s more than fivefold reduction in the crazy crack/powder ratio counted as progress. But the progress is painfully slow and maddeningly incomplete for people languishing in prison and anyone who cares about them.

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Understanding the Failure of ‘Globalism’ Is Key to Understanding Donald Trump’s Appeal

All around the globe today, voters in democratic countries are electing populist leaders rather than presidents and premiers who pledge loyalty to the international community and global institutions. In significant ways, Brexit in England, the yellow vest movement in France, the rise of Viktor Orbán in Hungary, and the election of Donald Trump in America represent the triumph of nationalism and populism over globalism. Many people in advanced economies feel as if they are falling further and further behind while people at the top of society get more and more money, prestige, and opportunity.

Donald Trump invoked these concerns as a candidate and is acting on them as president. Globalists, he says, are elitists who care more about their own well-being and international institutions such as the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, and NATO than they do about their fellow citizens who are being left behind. Globalists believe in open borders and free trade because their quality of life isn’t threatened by low-wage migrants or cheap goods produced overseas. Nationalists such as Trump say they care first and foremost about taking care of their countrymen. They show their commitment to this by pulling out of international accords they believe don’t serve American interests and limiting the type and number of people who can come to the United States. Since taking office, Trump has stuck to his nationalist guns by withdrawing from international agreements such as the Paris Climate accord, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and the Iran nuclear deal, as well as by restricting immigration and laying tariffs on Chinese goods.

Today’s guest says it’s absolutely imperative not only to understand this, but also to empathize with the concerns of nationalists and populists in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere. A political scientist by training, Ian Bremmer heads up the Eurasia Group, the world’s largest political-risk consultancy. He’s also the host of the weekly PBS show GZERO World, which investigates how economics and politics are playing out in a world in which the United States is retreating in significant ways from the global stage. His most recent book is Us vs.Them: The Failure of Globalism—a bracing, provocative analysis of why political polarization is growing and how we might best address the anger and alienation that is fueling nationalist and populist sentiments around the globe.

Audio production by Ian Keyser.

Subscribe, rate, and review our podcast at iTunes.

 

 

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How Oakland Cops Gamed the System To Earn $30 Million in Overtime Pay

When Oakland, California, police officers are needed at Golden State Warriors basketball games and other special events, Malcolm Miller is the officer in charge of making those assignments. Often, he assigns himself.

As a result, Miller has become one of the highest paid officers in the department. He’s earned nearly $2.5 million over the past five years—most of it overtime pay—according to data collected by Transparent California, a watchdog group. Is he abusing his position to cash in, or is he filling important assignments that no one else wants? The answer is unknown, a new audit of the Oakland Police Department claims, because “the special event planning and staffing process is not documented and management provides limited oversight” even though those special events account for 42 percent of overtime hours worked last year.

Miller did not return requests for comment, but he’s hardly the only officer to take advantage of poor oversight and a general lack of accountability. According to the audit, 217 officers worked roughly 520 hours of overtime last year, helping to cost the department more than $30 million in overtime pay—about twice as much as had been budgeted. Over the past four years, overtime expenditures have ranged from $28 million to $31 million.

Proper documentation of overtime work was lacking in 83 percent of cases, the auditors found. One officer was paid for more than 2,600 hours of overtime—equal to 108 days of round-the-clock work—in just a single year.

The audit also found that the department “cannot efficiently reconcile between the scheduling and the payroll systems.” That is essential to ensuring that paid overtime is accurate, auditors note.

Having officers working that much overtime comes with an obvious cost to taxpayers, but also reduces the quality of police work.

“Workload fatigue can lead to poorer perceived health, increased chance for injury, and illnesses,” auditors wrote. “Specifically, in high-stress, unpredictable environments like police work, fatigue, in turn, can lead to a greater chance for poor decision-making, which may have health and safety consequences for officers or for the community that they serve.”

Keeping overtime hours and costs under control isn’t difficult to do. The audit notes that one police captain ensured his unit came in under budget merely by maintaining “an excel spreadsheet with the ability to track and calculate daily overtime expenditures.” Such basic documentation and accountability measures appear to be the exception rather than the rule.

Perhaps the most stunning part of the audit is the explanation of a department-wide policy that allows Oakland cops to accrue 1.5 hours of “comp time” for every hour of overtime worked. When an officer cashes in that comp time and isn’t working, other officers have to work overtime to fill the gap. That creates a cascade of additional overtime pay—10 hours of overtime creates 15 hours of comp time, which some other cop has to work, earning 22.5 hours of comp time (if they’re also working overtime), and so on.

The East Bay Times notes that overtime pay has been an ongoing issue for the Oakland Police Department. After earlier audits revealed similar problems with excessive overtime work and pay, the department hired 87 additional officers and abolished a rule requiring that officers do overtime work.

But the audit makes clear that systemic issues remain unaddressed—and cops like Miller continue to take advantage. “The City has not addressed any of the questionable compensation practices identified” in a 2015 audit, according to the new audit.

And what about that one police captain who tracked his unit’s overtime pay with a spreadsheet?

“The tool was never adopted by other organizational units,” the audit reports, “and is no longer being utilized by the captain due to time constraints.”

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City of Miami Beach Wants To Spend $100,000 on ‘Instagrammable’ Recycling Can

Miami Beach, Florida, wants to use art to inspire people to recycle, and it’s willing to use taxpayer dollars to get the job done.

In late May the city asked artists to submit bids to build a temporary public art structure that will double as a functional recycling bin on the sands of Miami Beach. The winning artist will get $100,000 to design and build their creation.

“The artwork should function as a useable recycling structure that encourages interaction from the public, by making recycling ‘fun and cool'” reads the city’s solicitation for proposals. The winning project design will “engage visitors and residents with a promotional or Instagrammable moment, while also promoting the city’s resiliency and plastic free initiatives.”

Miami Beach has been a pioneer in anti-plastic policies.

In 2012, the city passed one of the first (albeit partial) straw bans in the nation, prohibiting the distribution or use of plastic straws on beaches and at beachside businesses. In the past two years, the city has banned the sale or use of expanded polystyrene (Styrofoam) citywide, and the distribution of single-use plastic bags at sidewalk cafes. In 2018, Miami Beach expanded the scope of its straw ban to bar the use of the little suckers from marinas, parks, and other city-owned properties.

With these prohibitions in place, the city is now trying to win hearts and minds with its Instagrammable recycling bin. This is not an unprecedented tactic.

In December 2018, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) awarded a $45,000 grant to a New York nonprofit in part to build a turtle-shaped waste receptacle that would be filled with plastic straws collected along the beaches of Long Island Sound.

That at least had a rational relationship to the EPA’s goal of preventing litter from polluting the area. It’s more difficult to see how Miami Beach’s artwork/recycling structure will help the city accomplish its environmental goals.

In its solicitation for bids, the city offers a couple of reasons why it is discouraging the use of single-use plastics: reducing demand for natural resources, reducing greenhouse gases, and preventing litter and debris from damaging wildlife, beaches, and clogging up the city’s drainage system.

But cutting down on plastic use won’t really accomplish the first two of the city’s goals, given that substitutes for single-use plastics—be they paper straws or cloth tote bags—also consume natural resources, while leading to more greenhouse gas emissions.

Encouraging more people to recycle does nothing to prevent litter. So long as a discarded item makes it into a bin, it really doesn’t matter whether that item is then recycled or sent to a landfill. Both prevent trash from polluting natural environments.

Perhaps instead of spending $100,000 on a single (albeit pretty) recycling can, Miami Beach could spend that money on multiple new public trash cans. That might not inspire people quite as much, but it would make it more convenient for them to put their garbage in a bin as opposed to throwing it on the ground.

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Scott Daniel Warren Is Free (for Now) After Jury Can’t Reach Verdict on Charges for Aiding Migrants

Criminalizing kindness? An Arizona man on trial for giving food, water, and shelter to migrants is free for now after jury members could not agree on a verdict and were dismissed by the federal judge presiding over the case.

College instructor Scott Daniel Warren had been charged with conspiracy to transport and harbor undocumented immigrants, a felony that could come with 20 years of prison time. His attorneys argued that he was just providing “basic human kindness” to people on a perilous journey across the Arizona desert. From the Associated Press:

Outside the courthouse, Warren thanked his supporters and criticized the government’s efforts to crack down on the number of immigrants coming to the U.S.

“Today it remains as necessary as ever for local residents and humanitarian aid volunteers to stand in solidarity with migrants and refugees, and we must also stand for our families, friends and neighbors in the very land itself most threatened by the militarization of our borderland communities,” Warren said.

Glenn McCormick, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office in Arizona, declined to comment on whether Warren will face another trial. The judge set a July 2 status hearing for the defense and prosecution.

AP goes on to note that “border activists say they worry about what they see as the gradual criminalization of humanitarian action.” Migrant deaths in “Arizona’s scorching deserts” number in the thousands since the mid-1990s, AP says.

Warren is part of a group called “No Más Muertes,” or No More Deaths. Since his arrest in January 2018, “at least 88 bodies were recovered from the Ajo corridor of the Arizona desert,” he told reporters outside the courthouse yesterday, accusing the feds of targeting “prosecutions to criminalize humanitarian aid, kindness and solidarity.”

ELECTION 2020

Wonkette pushes the Harris campaign line that people hate her merely because she was a prosecutor (and that she shouldn’t have to explain herself about it). Others kindly point out that it’s not what she was but what she did in that position that matters. At National Review, Jim Geraghty elaborates on this theme:

What is interesting here is the adamant insistence that somehow Harris is being wronged by having her record as a prosecutor challenged, and that questioning that record is somehow inherently unjust or out of bounds, that something has gone terribly wrong with our political and journalism worlds when Harris feels the need to defend her past decisions and actions.

Meanwhile, at the polls:

AROUND REASON

Peter Suderman writes about the recent riff between Rep. Justin Amash (R–Mich.) and other members of the House Freedom Caucus, of which Amash was a founding member:

You can certainly read Rep. Justin Amash’s recent criticisms of President Trump and the vast majority of elected Republicans who back him as attacks against a president that Amash believes has failed the nation and the office—or on the GOP for its willingness to go along with the same—and you wouldn’t be wrong to do so.

But it would be a mistake to assume that’s all Amash is doing, or even that is it necessarily the most important aspect of his critique. Amash isn’t just a NeverTrump pundit with a congressional office; his target is larger than Trump and the party stalwarts who back him. Rather, he is taking aim at the binary choices offered by the Republican/Democrat duopoly, the unthinking partisanship it seems to require, and the ways that partisanship has made Congress less willing to exercise its constitutional duties as a co-equal branch of government. Amash isn’t just taking on Trump; he’s making a systemic critique of the two-party system.

Whole thing here. And on cue from Amash:

QUICK HITS

  • Must-read of the day:

  • Facebook will leave up a “deepfake” video of Mark Zuckerberg.
  • Yujing Zhang, the Chinese woman arrested for entering Mar-a-Lago on false pretenses, will serve as her own lawyer, despite having “struggled with legal concepts and spoken English” during proceedings, as the New York Post described it.
  • The drug war never dies, it just takes new forms.
  • When even @TheTweetOfGod gets suspended…

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Someone Yet Again Trying to Vanish Post Criticizing New Britain (Conn.) Volunteer Commissioner Ken Haas

In 2017, I wrote about an attempt to use a forged court order to deindex New Britain Independent articles critical of New Britain (Connecticut) volunteer Conservation Commissioner Ken Haas (a mayoral appointee). Then someone tried to get Google to deindex my post about the forgery and a Techdirt post about the same forgery, arguing:

In 1979, the U.S. Supreme Court recognized an individual interest in the “practical obscurity” of certain personal information. The case was DOJ v. Reporters Committee for a Free Press. As well, this information is harmful to me as it concerns unfounded information which never resulted in prosecution. Not only has the dissemination of this information never been legitimate, but its internet referencing is clearly harmful to my reputation as my professional and personal surroundings can access it by typing my first and last names on the Internet.

A few months ago, it turns out, there was another attempt to deindex one of the original New Britain Independent articles, this time on a copyright infringement theory:

Copyright claim #1
KIND OF WORK: Unspecified
DESCRIPTION Text from a post that was on a private and personal Facebook profile stating, “You do know I have access to ALL city records. Including criminal and civil, right???”.
ORIGINAL URLS: No copyrighted URLs were submitted.
ALLEGEDLY INFRINGING URLS:
http://bit.ly/2X6CQh5

The article had said, among other things,

At 9:21 PM Monday September 19th, 2016 Mr. Haas, in an exchange on Facebook, on a thread in which he was not originally included, tagged in, or involved with, injected himself.  Members of the community were having a conversation about the Tilcon deal that the Stewart Administration is pushing, regardless of community sentiment.  Hass interjected in this facebook conversation, threatening to embarrass one of the participants, who is a member of New Britain’s community, using government resource’s.  Hass said, “You do know I have access to ALL city records. Including criminal and civil, right???”.

And of course that’s “fair use” under copyright law, and not an infringement at all; criticizing a government official (even a volunteer) for this kind of short public comment, by quoting the comment, is fully legal—indeed, newspapers do it all the time. Google naturally didn’t act on the deindexing request; but I though it worth noting that 08someone seems to be pretty insistent about trying to vanish criticism of Commissioner Haas.

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Texas Legalizes Lemonade Stands Run by Children

Texas kids of the entrepreneurial variety are now free to legally peddle lemonade. Gov. Greg Abbott (R) signed a law on Monday that will allow children to set up lemonade stands without a permit.

Rep. Matt Krause (R–Fort Worth) introduced the legislation in order to eliminate licensing requirements for kids under 18 who seek to sell lemonade and other non-alcoholic beverages. Texas isn’t the only state to attract attention for its hardline policies on lemonade. As I wrote back in March:

A similar law recently passed in Colorado after the police shut down a kid’s lemonade stand over licensing woes. The makeshift business was operating next to a festival where adults were selling the same beverage.

The Dallas Morning News highlights that several young lemonade vendors across Texas have met the same fate. Unaware that their business endeavors were in violation of state law, sisters Andria, 8, and Zoey Green, 7, had their stand shuttered in 2015 by police who noted that they were operating without a permit.

The law goes into effect September 1. Abbott tweeted a video of him signing the bill, calling it a “commonsense” law.

“Cheers!” he said, holding a tall glass of lemonade.

from Latest – Reason.com http://bit.ly/2XLOqvi
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