Tag: hit&run

Madeira Beach, Florida, City Commissioner Nancy Oakley has resigned after an administrative judge and the state ethics commission upheld a claim by former City Manager Shane Crawford that Oakley had sexually harassed him by licking his face and groping him. The commission fined her $5,000. In addition the City Commission reprimanded Oakley. Oakley denied the claims and repeated her denial in her resignation letter.

President Donald Trump today said he’s “not happy” with a compromise reached by Democratic and Republican negotiators that would prevent another government shutdown. As was the case in the lead-up to and during the last government shutdown, it all comes down to Trump, and it remains unclear exactly what he plans to do.

News broke last night that negotiators from both chambers of Congress had reached a deal to keep the government fully funded after Friday. Republicans and Democrats have been at an impasse over border security funding since late last year. Trump and his allies in Congress want $5.7 billion to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border; Democrats don’t want to give it to them. When the president refused days before Christmas to sign seven remaining spending bills—including one that would fund the Department of Homeland Security, where the wall funds would come from—roughly one-quarter of the government shut down. More than a month later, Trump finally gave in, signing a continuing resolution that would reopen the government for three weeks.

Which brings us to the present day. The deal lawmakers reached last night does not give Trump anything close to the $5.7 billion he had demanded. While the bill’s text has yet to be released, the agreement reportedly includes $1.375 billion for physical barriers on the border, according to Politico. It also caps the number of beds (i.e. detention slots) for immigrants held by Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE) at roughly 40,500. That’s about a 17 percent decrease from the current limit of 49,000, but it’s still a win for Republicans. That’s because Democrats originally wanted to lower the cap to 34,000, The New York Times reported, citing Democratic aides. However, as USA Today notes, it wouldn’t be all that difficult for ICE to exceed the cap imposed by Congress, which it regularly does.

At a rally last night in El Paso, Texas, Trump wouldn’t weigh in on the deal until he had been briefed on the details. But speaking to reporters prior to a cabinet meeting today, he expressed his displeasure with the compromise.

“Am I happy at first glance?” he said. “I just got to see it. The answer is no, I’m not. I’m not happy.”

“It’s not going to do the trick, but I’m adding things to it and when you add whatever I have to add, it’s all going to happen where we’re going to build a beautiful big strong wall,” the president added. Trump also said he’s “using other methods” to get his wall money.

What about the possibility of another partial government shutdown? “I don’t think you’re going to see a shutdown,” Trump said.

A White House official told CNN’s Jim Acosta, meanwhile, that despite his misgivings, Trump will likely sign the compromise.

This is Trump we’re talking about, though, and as always, it’s almost impossible to predict his next move. The current situation draws some parallels to December, when Trump, after saying he’d be “proud” to shut down the government over border wall funding, appeared to temporarily shift course. Then, after the Senate approved a bill with $1.3 billion in border security funding (though none for an actual wall) that would keep the government open through February, Trump revealed he wouldn’t support it.

As was just as true then as it is now, it all comes down to Trump. If the president decides to reject any proposal that doesn’t include $5.7 billion, then the government will probably shutter again, as the chances are slim that two-thirds of both the House and the Senate could come together to override a presidential veto. Ultimately, Trump will have the final say.

However, it’s within the realm of possibility that Trump could sign the compromise legislation and still get his way. While the bill funds just 55 of the 215 miles of border wall that the administration wants, Trump could conceivably take executive action to divert Defense and/or Treasury Department funds to build the wall, according to CNN. Some of these options would require him to declare a state of emergency; others wouldn’t.

Of course, it’s important to note that building the wall would actually cost tens of billions of dollars and would involving seizing private property to provide an ineffective solution to a problem that doesn’t really exist.

California’s wasteful, expensive, and likely doomed-to-fail statewide bullet train project is getting killed. Today, Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom said he’s abandoning the plan as “too costly.”

Newsom made the announcement in his State of the State address this morning. As the Associated Press reports:

Newsom said Tuesday in his State of the State address it “would cost too much and take too long” to build the line long championed by his predecessor, Jerry Brown. Latest estimates pin the cost at $77 billion and completion in 2033.

Newsom says he wants to continue construction of the high-speed link from Merced to Bakersfield in California’s Central Valley. He says building the line could bring economic transformation to the agricultural region.

And he says abandoning that portion of the project would require the state to return $3.5 billion in federal dollars.

Newsom also is replacing Brown’s head of the board that oversee the project and is pledging to hold the project’s contractors more accountable for cost overruns.

Newsom actually turned against the bullet train project years ago but then went quiet about it when he began his plans to run for governor. He declined to discuss what he saw as the train’s future on the campaign trail, but after he was elected he suggested some sort of cutback was coming, possibly eliminating the bottom half of the project, making it a train from San Francisco to the Central Valley of California.

Now it looks like he’s scaling even that back. Californians are just going to be left with a train in the middle of some of the more rural parts of the state because the Newsom administration doesn’t want to have to repay the federal funding.

Whatever may come next, this is happy news for most California citizens. Voters approved a ballot initiative in 2008 that set aside a $10 billion bond to begin the project of building a high-speed rail line from Los Angeles to San Francisco with the promise that more funding would come through from the feds or from private sources, that the train would not require subsidies to operate, and that it would help fight climate change.

But it didn’t take long for all those claims to be shown as unlikely, especially the costs. President Barack Obama’s administration did provide $3.5 billion in stimulus funding under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, but the project otherwise saw little additional outside financial support. The train’s cost ballooned from $64 to $77 billion (and it would likely end up well over $100 billion if actually completed). The construction on the first leg began in the middle of California, near Fresno, and it wouldn’t even link Los Angeles to San Francisco until 2029.

As for the other alleged benefits of the high-speed rail, the Reason Foundation (the non-profit that publishes this website) has been warning all along that the train would lose millions of dollars a year, wouldn’t be anywhere near as fast as promised, would cost too much to ride, and would not reach anywhere near the ridership estimates that the California High-Speed Rail Authority projected.

The decision to end the project after the current construction is finished is, of course, a big blow to former Gov. Jerry Brown. This train was his pet project and he undoubtedly saw it as his legacy. No matter how much evidence was presented that the whole deal was a big boondoggle that would leave taxpayers holding the bag, Brown didn’t waver.

But the announcement is also a bit of a kick in the teeth for the proposed Green New Deal by progressive Democrats in Congress. The Green New Deal, pushed by lawmakers like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), heavily leans on the idea that high-speed rail could be used to link cities and ultimately reduce the use of air travel. It was a wholly unrealistic plan for any number of logistical reasons, as Joe Setyon explained last week. Newsom killing off the project’s expansion also implicates the massive costs of the lawmakers’ proposals.

And Newsom is no fiscal conservative. In all likelihood, he wants to use the money he’ll save from not building the train on other big progressive aims, like single-payer health care coverage or propping up the state’s overextended pension system for public employees. As bad as they are, those aims are at least preferable to an absurdly overpriced makework project intended to line certain people’s pockets at the expense of the taxpayers.

Here’s ReasonTV on the problems and scandals of the project:

The land of the free manages to have some pretty congested freeways. That’s according to transportation analytics firm INRIX’s new 2018 Global Traffic Scorecard, which ranks metro areas by how much time auto commuters waste in rush hour traffic.

Topping the list are European and Latin American metros, with drivers in Bogota, Moscow, and London all losing over 200 hours a year to congestion. U.S. cities look better by comparison, but commuters here still manage to idle away an incredible amount of time behind the wheel.

INRIX’s scorecard finds Boston to be the most congested city in the country. Drivers there spend 164 hours (nearly a full week) in rush hour traffic each year. A close second is Washington, D.C., where commuters are losing 155 hours to gridlock.

Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, and Seattle fill out the rest of the top six in INRIX’s rankings—which weigh time lost to congestion against a city’s population—with drivers in these metros wasting between 128 and 138 hours a year in traffic. On average, commuters are losing 97 hours a year because of congestion.

INRIX develops these rankings by comparing travel times during peak hours to those during free flow conditions when there is no traffic. The difference between the two figures is the amount of time lost to traffic congestion.

Having congested roadways can be a huge drag on a city’s productivity, according to the INRIX report.

“[Congestion] incurs costs from time loss, increased pollution rates, and higher incidents of accidents,” reads the INRIX report, which estimates the cost of traffic congestion at $87 billion a year in lost time for drivers (roughly $1,365 for the average driver.) The freight industry loses another $74 billion a year to congestion.

In addition to the lost time is the lost opportunity that traffic congestion brings. The INRIX report cites research showing that whatever the levels of traffic congestion, people are generally only willing to spend one hour a day commuting—half an hour each way—with most people moving closer to work to cut down on travel times.

The more congestion limits where you can travel within that 30 minutes, as well as the employment and leisure opportunities you’ll be able to comfortably access—limiting the advantages of living in an urban area in the first place.

Congestion, says Baruch Feigenbaum, a transportation analyst at the Reason Foundation (the nonprofit which publishes this website) is at its core a supply and demand problem. “Congestion is when you have more people than you have road space,” Feigenbaum tells Reason, saying that the problem is a mix of adding congestion pricing to current road space and adding new lane miles.

The idea behind congestion pricing—variable tolls that rise and fall depending on the number of cars on the road—is that by charging drivers for the space they take up, they can be incentivized to take less congested routes or to travel in off-peak hours when traffic is lighter, improving road conditions for everyone.

A number of American cities are already giving this policy a hard look. In September 2018, Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan included $1 million in her proposed budget to study congestion pricing. In December of that year, Oregon asked the federal government for permission to toll interstates around Portland (current federal law prohibits states from tolling most interstates). Last month, the head of Los Angeles’ transit agency endorsed the idea as well; so too has New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

So far, Virginia is the only place in the U.S. to have implemented real congestion pricing, imposing variable tolls on parts of I-66 leading into D.C. The INRIX report notes that Singapore has managed to have both high levels of growth and low levels of congestion thanks to an aggressive policy of road pricing and high fees charged to vehicle owners.

Another option is to increase the supply of roads by adding new lane miles, which—when combined with some form of congestion pricing—can help to bring down traffic congestion, says Feigenbaum.

“Cities that have not been investing in their roadways at all, and not building any new lane capacity, are very high up on this list compared to their overall [population] size,” Feigenbaum tells Reason. Road-adverse Seattle, he notes, is the 15th largest U.S. metro area by population, but manages to have the sixth-most congested roads, and travel speeds in the inner city nearly as low as New York City.

By contrast, Houston—the fifth largest metro in the U.S. and one that has continued to add more roadways to accommodate its growing population—ranks 13th on INRIX’s scorecard.

Expanding roadways is not a cure all for congestion. More lanes can induce more driving, meaning more trips are taken but actual traffic flows stay about the same. Measures of roadway congestion can also understate urban mobility if a city has well-functioning transit options. INRIX’s gives London as an example of a place where congestion has gotten much worse, but expanding transit options may well have increased overall urban mobility.

Feigenbaum says that transit can play a role in improving mobility in some American cities, provided it’s the riders, not the taxpayers in general, that are paying for it. Improving congestion, however, he says, requires treating road space more like normal market goods, where prices rise and fall, and supply expands to meet demand.

Whether the U.S. manages to broker a peace with the Taliban or not, one legacy of the war on terror remains—the prison at Guantanamo Bay (also called Gitmo). At its height, this symbol of Bush administration power held 600 people. And as miserable as the infrastructure reportedly is down there, its commander, Navy Rear Admiral John Ring, says he could fit 200 more people if given an increase in the same number of soldiers. He’d rather have an influx of money, however.

So there were once 600 prisoners. Now there are only 40. Forty people being watched over by 1,700 soldiers. Forty people who have been held in limbo for going on two decades now. Some of them are clearly mass murderers who should still have their trial. Others linger in prison, not charged, not freed, and generally making a mockery of the whole American concept of a speedy trial, writes Antiwar.com’s Lucy Steigerwald for Reason.

View this article.

The Washington Examiner today has a piece headlined “Why Howard Schultz could go Libertarian,” in which officials from America’s third largest political party basically wave their hands in the direction of the billionaire maybe-sorta presidential candidate and say “Over here!”

“Mr. Schultz describes himself as fiscally conservative and socially liberal, so I kindly encourage Mr. Schultz to look at our platform, as that title goes hand in hand with what the Libertarian Party stands for,” Florida L.P. Chair Marcos Miralles told the Examiner. Added California L.P. Chair Mimi Robson: “He’s definitely a fiscal conservative and he appears to be generally for civil liberties and individual rights—so yeah, those are all things in line with the Libertarian Party.” (Robson also added some wait-and-see caveats.)

Both sides in this equation obviously have something the other covets—the Libertarian Party has probable 2020 ballot access in 50 states; Schultz has a personal fortune and the professed willingness to spend up to a half-billion dollars of it on a presidential campaign. (The 2016 L.P. ticket of Gary Johnson and Bill Weld, for comparison, raised $13 million; and the party’s annual budget is just a fraction of that.)

So are there wedding bells in the future for these non-duopolists? Only if party members who barely tolerated having Bill Weld represent them as a vice presidential pick will cede the top slot to a less-experienced lifelong Democrat who is far less libertarian.

Start with foreign policy. Schultz has criticized President Donald Trump’s plans to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria. Schultz adviser Steve Schmidt (the 2008 presidential campaign manager of uber-hawk John McCain, and before that an adviser to Dick Cheney) explained on the WordsMatter podcast last week that Schultz “thought that Trump’s decision announcing the decision precipitously was a mistake,” adding: “I think if you go back to his speech at the Atlantic Council, what he talked about was the importance of alliances, the connection within that alliance of free peoples, the idea that America is the indispensable nation in the world that if the U.S. steps back that vacuum will be filled with actors that are not benevolent, not benign, so I think he stayed in that speech well within the boundaries of what we would recognize as a foreign policy that James Baker would be deeply comfortable with.”

Good luck selling that foreign policy vision to the Libertarian National Convention in 2020. Bill Weld, on the other hand, was saying as recently as four months ago stuff like, “I don’t understand why there are troops in Afghanistan. I’m not sure I understand why all those troops are there in Korea.”

The Second Amendment, too, could prove an obstacle to Schultz-L.P. coupling. Whereas Weld is still (inaccurately, in my view) tarred as a “gun-grabber” (despite arguing repeatedly that “anyone who says, ‘We have to do something about gun ownership, including AR-15s,’ is just going to be dead meat, because their position doesn’t make any sense”), Schultz just goes right there: “Seventy percent of the American people want the kind of policy legislation that takes the guns of war out of the American peoples’ neighborhoods.”

As Libertarian National Chair Nicholas Sarwark diplomatically tells the Examiner, “Schultz seems to hold some libertarian positions on issues like marriage equality and reducing the national debt….On the other side, his position on gun control would probably be very unpopular with libertarians.”

Schultz, unlike most Libertarians, thinks the Affordable Care Act “was the right thing to do.” He called the Trump/Republican corporate tax cuts “wrong and irrational.” The trial balloon phase is still only now taking flight—he’ll be doing a CNN town hall tonight—but Schultz is already a significant distance away from the L.P. before fielding many questions about drug policy, or corporate welfare, or the Federal Reserve.

There is one key factor that makes such speculation mostly academic at this point: the calendar. Even though presidential campaign season is well upon us, Libertarians choose their nominee 15 months from now. Like Weld playing footsie with a GOP primary challenge to Donald Trump, Schultz has every material reason at the moment to stay indy—it maximizes Democratic nervousness, and therefore media attention. No Libertarian will be included in polls any time soon.

Howard Schultz has ample time to see if there’s really a market in these polarized, emotionally charged times for a centrist independent talking about debt. If that project fizzles on the launch pad, there’s still time to bone up on the Non-Aggression Principle, though internal patience for situational Libertarians might well be wearing thin.

Related Reason content:

Congressional Republicans and Democrats have apparently cut a deal on funding border enforcement. So unless President Trump—who says he’s “unhappy” with the terms—walks away and snatches defeat from the jaws of victory, a government shutdown come Friday is not in the cards. However, the question is whether after all of the drama of the last few months, did Democrats even remotely advance the cause of a sane and humane immigration enforcement policy?

Liberal commentators would have you believe that they did because Trump didn’t get the $5 billion-plus he was demanding for his border “barrier.” That may be right, but the fact of the matter is that he got something and the Democrats got nothing at all, as I note in my latest column at The Week.

The sticking point that nearly derailed the talks over the weekend concerned funding for detention beds to house unauthorized immigrants picked up at the border and rounded up from the interior. Given that Trump has illegally diverted funds for this end, one would have thought the Democrats would use the funding fight to hold the line and insist on starving the ICE beast.

Think again.

So terrified were the Democrats about being blamed for the next shutdown, that they approved pretty much the same levels of detention bed funding as the Republican-controlled Congress did last year.

Nor was it their only capitulation.

Go here to read about the Democrats’ other surrenders, including the fact that they didn’t even bring up the issue of legalizing Dreamers. They played on Trump’s turf and came away empty.

Politico is reporting that Democratic New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio is taking some of the early steps for a possible presidential run in 2020. There have been rumors that he’s been considering it for a while now. This weekend he’ll be heading to early primary state New Hampshire to make some appearances, and he’s consulting with some aides who have worked on previous national campaigns.

How crazy is this idea? Compare de Blasio’s approval ratings among New York state voters with President Donald Trump’s national numbers in recent polling by Quinnipiac University. In January, voters in the state gave de Blasio a 32 to 44 percent approval/disapproval rating (he fares better among just New York City voters). In a January poll from Quinnipiac, Trump had a 41 to 55 percent approval/disapproval rating nationally (though he polls much worse just among New York voters). So technically a much greater percentage of folks disapprove of Trump’s performance, but certainly nobody in de Blasio’s orbit is going to be quoting the mayor’s poll numbers in interviews to make him look good. In that same poll, New York voters ranked de Blasio dead last among political figures from the state they’d like to see run for president. New Yorkers would rather see former Mayor Michael Bloomberg run for president. Even freshman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez outranked him, and she’s not old enough to run for president yet.

Really, what’s to like about de Blasio? Who on earth would vote for him outside New York City (and perhaps a few other large coastal cities)? Has anybody on the progressive left been less adept at making the case for top-down governance by urban elites? He complains about income inequality, but the city cracks down hard on any company like Uber or Airbnb that lets folks work a side-hustle because it hurts the politically powerful taxi cartel and hotel industries. (How bad do you have to be at this to cause a black state assemblymember in New York to complain that city agents are following and harassing white residents in Brooklyn because they suspect they’re Airbnb customers?) He hates charter schools, even though they provide valuable education alternatives to poor minorities in the city, because it reduces the power of teachers’ unions. Meanwhile, there’s probably better than even odds that the New York City subway might actually be on fire when you read this.

He rails about the evils of the wealthy while facing regular corruption scandals at City Hall. He fired a city watchdog who wrote critical reports about some of the city’s departments. He’s alienated the local New York City press due to a record of poor transparency (don’t expect any Ocasio-Cortez-style puff pieces about him). The City Council is in the middle of passing regulations to try to stop the dramatic expansion of “placard abuse” under de Blasio, in which some 150,000 government employees park wherever they damned well please and ignore traffic laws, protected from consequences while at the same time feeding the city’s congestion issues.

He’s openly disdainful of the very idea of property rights, believing that government should decide what gets built. But he at this very moment is alienating other progressives in New York by insisting that Amazon needs its tax incentives and special government deals to build a second headquarters in Queens, inadvertently making the case that when the government decides what gets to be built, it’s those who have the most power and influence who will dominate the discussion, not the actual members of the community. He complains about slumlords and says he’s going to seize their properties, but it turns out the city’s own housing authority is actually the worst landlord in the Big Apple.

Were de Blasio to actually enter the race, it would be a huge boon for anybody looking to attack the legitimacy of this effort to try drag the Democratic Party leftward toward socialistic ideation. He has flat out said that the wealth in New York is in the “wrong hands,” but watch him tap dance through an interview with Jake Tapper where he does not answer the question of who the “right hands” are and who gets to decide who those “wrong” people are. The answer, of course, is people like de Blasio, who complains about how the game is rigged in favor of the rich and powerful while promoting policies that keep it that way.

De Blasio treats the citizens of New York like they’re subjects under government care, not free people, and a national campaign from him, if it gets anywhere at all, will involve anecdote after anecdote of the many people whose livelihoods have been harmed from his rule by all-powerful bureaucracy.

A recent New York Times article argued that helicopter parenting, unfortunately, is the best strategy for raising successful kids. The piece was provocatively titled, “The Bad News About Helicopter Parenting: It Works.“

But the article seemed to define helicopter parents as those who are neither total slackers, nor old-fashioned father-knows-best-so-shut-up-ers (so-called “authoritarian parents”). That leaves a lot of middle ground. How do helicopter parents operate, according to the piece?

Instead of strict obedience, they emphasize adaptability, problem-solving and independence — skills that will help their offspring in future workplaces that we can’t even imagine yet.

To some of us (okay, me) that sounds exactly like how we raised our kids—and we don’t consider ourselves helicopter parents. As Sara Zaske, author of Achtung Baby points out, Free-Range/Let Grow parenting “does not mean being permissive. That’s a big misconception: it’s not about just letting kids do whatever they want. It’s about fostering independence and ultimately responsibility. For me, that means preparing them to take on new challenges and having consequences if they break rules.”

Agreed.

In the Times piece, which is mostly about a new book, Love, Money & Parenting by Mattias Doepke and Fabrizio Zilibotti (admittedly, extremely cool names), the argument that supposedly proves “helicoptering” works is this:

…when [the authors] analyzed the 2012 PISA, an academic test of 15-year-olds around the world, along with reports from the teenagers and their parents about how they interact, they found that an “intensive parenting style” correlated with higher scores on the test.

But are kids who scored well on academic tests necessarily more successful—in the near and long term—than kids who likes building tree houses with their brother? And is a parent who practices “an intensive style” the same thing as a helicopter parent?

Naturally, economic fears will always play a role in what we value and what we teach our kids. The article sympathizes with parents who are afraid their kids will fall off the road to riches, or even the road to a decent job. But many of the actual skills kids are going to need as functioning, open-minded adults are not the ones they get in adult-supervised resume-building activities. When they’re just plain old playing, for instance, they’re learning compromise, leadership, focus, and empathy. When they run an errand they’re learning responsibility, efficiency, and problem-solving. These will serve them well, too.

When we deprive kids of independence, we raise Excellent Sheep: kids who are great on paper, but are also anxious and lacking an internal locus of control.

Just last week I was talking to a high school teacher from an affluent suburb where the catchphrase is Yale or jail. The teacher was hoping to figure out how to give younger kids some less helicoptered time—time for kids to just do what interests them, without someone coaching or grading them, precisely so they can spend sometime outside the Yale/Jail rat race—because, she said, “By high school, it’s too late. Their anxiety is off the charts.”

If parents and educators can just embrace the idea that not every moment has to be oriented toward an external goal, maybe everybody will be able to relax a bit.

While I have many disagreements with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), I’m genuinely pleased to see a former bartender with an interest in craft cocktails find a seat in Congress. Partly because I frequently associate politics with the desire to drink, and partly because it means that the second-largest Twitter account in American politics can now be found tweeting out cleverly-named cocktail recipes first thing Monday morning. (It’s always the right time to think, or tweet, about cocktails.)

Cocktails for the Revolution:

– World w/o a #GreenNewDeal: a Bitter Dark n’ Stormy
– Clean transport: an Aviation, but hold the crème de violette
– Bridges, Not Walls: a Mezcal Greyhound
– Paid Parental Leave: Mocktail margarita
– Policy Failure: anything w/ Goldschläger
https://t.co/WGlUSc8BXK

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) February 11, 2019

I look forward to trying all of these, especially World Without a Green New Deal. I am rather fond of both ginger beer drinks and bitter liqueurs, so a combination of the two sounds amazing. (Although, as is sometimes the case with her ideas, it will probably take a bit of workshopping since she doesn’t specify precisely what’s in it.)

Cocktail menus have long played a role in politics—”the fiscal agent” appeared on drink menus prior to Prohibition—so in the interest of furthering this particular form of political conversation, here are a few additional cocktail ideas to drink while waiting for the revolution to come.

Remember the Senate
An old fashioned with Filibuster rye.

Dating back to the early 1800s, the old fashioned is the original cocktail, and the template on which many of today’s drinks are built. Although it fell out of favor in its classic form for many decades following Prohibition, it has seen a surge in popularity over the last 15 years—a reminder that some things that seem new and exciting are based on ideas that have been with us for a long time. In this version, I recommend Filibuster rye, a subtle whiskey with notes of vanilla and pepper that has a way of unexpectedly asserting itself in a drink.

1.5 tsp rich Demerara syrup
1 dash Bitter Truth Orange bitters
1 dash Bitter Truth Jerry Thomas bitters
1 dash Angostura aromatic bitters
2 oz Filibuster dual cask rye

Combine all elements in a chilled rocks glass. Add one large ice cube, stir, garnish with an orange peel.

MMT G&T
A perfectly made gin and tonic.

You might be wondering: Why do you need a recipe for a gin and tonic? It’s right there in the name. There’s nothing to it. Yet with a little bit of salesmanship, even the most obvious two-ingredient cocktail, or obscure economic theory, can be elevated into something extraordinarily powerful and semi-mystical. Anyone who has had a truly excellent gin & tonic knows they can’t really be explained or understood except by trying them; properly made, a good one is practically a religious experience.

1 juiced lime, cut into strips
2 oz Tanqueray
6 oz Fever Tree tonic water

The real trick to a gin and tonic is to muddle the gin with lime strips in a separate bowl, then pour the gin-lime mix on top of the tonic in a tall glass filled with tonic and ice.

Legislative Record
A Penicillin.

Like so much legislation, this apparently simple drink is somewhat harder to make than it looks. Essentially a honey-ginger scotch sour, the best way to make it involves juicing ginger root and then combining the root juice with sugar to make ginger syrup, an admittedly arduous process that is nevertheless rewarding in the end. It also helps to have accumulated the right tools, including an atomizer for misting smoky scotch on top.

2 oz blended scotch (Famous Grouse or Pig’s Nose)
¾ oz fresh lemon juice
⅜ oz 3:1 honey syrup*
⅜ oz ginger syrup**

Shake over ice until well chilled, then strain over a single large piece of ice in a rocks glass. Using an atomizer, mist the top of the drink with a smoky scotch, such as Laphroiag 10.

*Heat three parts honey, one part water over low heat until integrated. Chill and store for up to a week.

**Peel a batch of ginger roots, then blend them into a fine paste. Run the paste through a chinois sieve to extract the juice. Heat the juice on the stove with two parts sugar to one part ginger juice.