Tag: hit&run

The city government of Portland, Oregon, last week proposed a resolution that “condemns white supremacist and alt-right hate groups.” How the city plans to enact the condemnation was not addressed during the February 8 meeting, the resolution not yet more than an appeal for Portlanders to take ownership of their historic discrimination and hate and to pledge to do better.

“We’ve heard this resolution is mostly symbolic, we’ve heard this resolution will solve nothing,” said Mayor Ted Wheeler, continuing a do-something-ism that, last November, saw his emergency ordinance to restrict potentially violent public protests voted down.

“I have concerns about the constitutionality of the protest ordinance,” Commissioner Nick Fish said at that time.

“Arguing about the restrictions in court, when they may not even help much on the ground, is not a wise use of taxpayers’ money,” said Commissioner Amanda Fritz.

The city council was apparently more comfortable with the current call to action, its five members collectively writing the resolution: a list of seventeen “Whereas…” statements that “condemns hate groups” that fails to state how these groups will be identified (or not). The resolution does, however, contain a plan to educate “all City staff on the history and impact of white supremacy, and how to identify white supremacy,” writes Nancy Rommelmann in her latest at Reason.

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Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), who is running for the Democratic presidential nomination, is a latter-day convert to legalizing pot. As a prosecutor and California attorney general, she was opposed to legalization. Indeed, as Scott Shackford noted yesterday, in her 2014 race to become Golden State AG, her Republican opponent favored legalization, a position she literally laughed at.

In an interview yesterday with the radio show The Breakfast Club, Harris admitted to smoking weed in college (“I did inhale,” she said, laughing, “I just broke news!”) and that she listened to Snoop Dogg and Tupac Shakur while getting high. Here’s the problem: Harris graduated from Howard in 1986 and law school in 1989. Snoop Dogg, then known as Snoop Doggy Dogg, didn’t get started until 1992 and Tupac’s “career did not take off until the early 1990s when he debuted in Digital Underground’s ‘Same Song’ from the soundtrack to the 1991 film Nothing but Trouble.“

So either Harris was baked enough to time travel or she hit the bong after being in school. Not cool for a candidate whose slogan is “speaking truth, demanding justice.” Most likely, she’s just trying to curate a playlist that sends the right message. In this, she’s hardly alone. We can recall, for instance, the way in which Al Gore quickly morphed from hosting a Senate panel on “porn rock” in 1985 (which included testimony from his wife Tipper, who headed up the Parents Music Resource Center, a group committed to combating sex, drugs, and satanism in popular entertainment) to becoming the world’s most public—if unconvincing—Grateful Dead fan just a few years later. In 2008, then-candidate Barack Obama dictated an iPod playlist to Rolling Stone that was curiously inclusive of just about every possible demographic that might vote for him. Especially in an age of forced transparency, why do politicians feel a need to do this?

For a deep dive on how Kamala Harris is messaging her not-so-progressive past on a range of issues, go here. Or watch below:

We all know that leading Democrats such as Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) are explicitly against President Trump’s demand for $5.7 billion in funding for a wall or some other form of fencing or barrier on the U.S. border with Mexico. Yet Schumer, Pelosi, and other members of their party are all in favor of “border security” in the form of increasing crackdowns on employers of illegals, installing “new technology to scan cars and trucks for drugs coming into our nation,” and funding “more innovation to detect unauthorized crossings.”

As news is breaking of a possible deal to avoid another government shutdown at week’s end—one that includes $1.375 billion for “physical barriers” on the border—it’s worth asking whether the Democratic position is really that different than Trump’s. They say no to a wall but yes to the basic immigration status quo, one that harshly limits the number of legal migrants from Mexico and other Central American countries, forces employers into the role of checking papers of potential employees, and underwrites a system of internal checkpoints that routinely deports American citizens in immigration sweeps. On immigration, as on many other issues, it turns out that the differences between Republicans and Democrats is more about semantics and small details rather than contrasting principles.

In a smart New York Times op-ed, Daniel Denvir makes the case against “border security” that both Trump and the Democrats are insisting on.

There is plainly no need for more security on the border. Illegal entries to the United States (as measured by Border Patrol apprehensions, which the government has long used as a proxy) began to fall at the turn of the century, and have plummeted since 2006. They remain at historic lows today. Those who are coming to the country are often Central Americans fleeing violence that United States policy in the region helped foment.

And when it comes to drugs — a favorite justification of Mr. Trump’s for his wall — evidence shows that more “border security” does not stop trafficking. From the 1970s on, every crackdown on a drug-smuggling route, whether it was heroin via the French Connection or cocaine through the Caribbean, has only led to new innovations in the trade that have empowered murderous Mexican cartels. Some scholars even argue that the rise of fentanyl can be traced to drug interdiction.

Denvir notes that back in the 1990s, Bill Clinton and the Democratic Party campaigned hard on the supposed ills associated with illegal immigration. As Reason’s Matt Welch has pointed out, the 1996 Democratic Party platform sounds uncannily like Donald Trump today on a wide variety of law-and-order issues, none more so than immigration (“We have increased the Border Patrol by over 40 percent,” crows the document. “In El Paso, our Border Patrol agents are so close together they can see each other”).

What has happened under Trump is a wholesale reversal of attitudes toward immigrants and immigration. As I noted last fall, a record number of Americans—Republicans along with Democrats—have positive views about immigration and its effects on the country. Denvir is correct to argue that it’s time to stop talking about “border security” and to start talking about how to craft an immigration policy that is in step with how the majority of us feel about newcomers.

The border must be demilitarized, which would include demolishing the already-existing wall and dramatically downsizing the Border Patrol. Criminal sanctions on illegal entry and re-entry must be repealed. Opportunities for legal immigration, particularly from Mexico and Central America, must be expanded. The right to asylum must be honored. And citizenship for those who reside here must be a stand-alone cause, unencumbered by compromises that are not only distasteful but also politically ineffectual — and that today would provoke opposition from the nativist right and the grass-roots left.

We can quibble over some of this, but he is, I think, right that we can never get to a good point on immigration policy until the argument is reframed away from questions of “border security.” There are a number of powerful arguments in favor of opening the borders, including pragmatic ones (the U.S. economy needs more workers and immigration is the only way to make that happen), comparative ones (“America’s share of the foreign born ranks 34th among 50 wealthy countries with a per capita gross domestic product of over $20,000″), and moral ones (law-abiding individuals do not necessarily have a right to welfare but they do have a right of movement; allowing migrants to cross the border fantastically increases their well-being).

Denvir writes from the left (he hosts a podcast for the socialist magazine Jacobin) and the one place where his analysis falters is that he thinks most Democratic politicians “have for far too long let their political opponents define the terms of debate.” In fact, they’re totally willing accomplices (go read that ’96 campaign platform again), partly because they are beholden to organized labor, which has historically argued against more immigration, which is seen (incorrectly) as a threat to native workers’ wages. That’s also true of Bernie Sanders, the self-described socialist senator from Vermont, who has called open borders “a Koch brothers proposal…[that] would make everybody in America poorer… [and do away] with the concept of a nation state.”

There’s no question that Donald Trump, virtually out of sheer will, made immigration and a border wall a top policy concern when he entered presidential politics in 2015. His positions on immigration are blissfully fact-free (for instance, despite his statements that we are being overrun down Mexico way, apprehensions on the southern border are one-quarter of what they were in 2000), but they also track with longstanding gripes from fellow Republicans and partisan Democrats. We need a fundamentally different conversation about immigration, one that doesn’t see the free movement of people as a problem that must be fixed. And that’s going to take a change of heart among both the right and the left.

Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) said yesterday he’ll oppose the confirmation of William Barr, who President Donald Trump has nominated to be the next attorney general.

“I’m a no,” Paul told Politico yesterday. “He’s been the chief advocate for warrantless surveillance of U.S. citizens. I think that the Fourth Amendment should protect your phone calls and your bank information. People shouldn’t be allowed to look at it without a warrant.”

It’s valid criticism. As the American Civil Liberties Union noted last month, Barr helped oversee a secret phone surveillance program when he led the Justice Department during the George H.W. Bush administration. For years, the feds collected phone records on calls made between people in the U.S. and those in countries connected to alleged drug trafficking activities. (For more on Barr’s drug war, read Reason Senior Editor Jacob Sullum’s column from December.)

This program would serve as a sort of precursor to the National Security Agency surveillance enabled by the PATRIOT Act following the 9/11 terror attacks. And while Barr was no longer working in the federal government by the time the PATRIOT Act was implemented, he still defended the program, which civil liberties advocates believe violated the Fourth Amendment’s protections against warrantless searches. Testifying before the House Intelligence Committee in 2003, Barr even suggested the PATRIOT Act didn’t go far enough.

Paul, for his part, has always been uneasy regarding Barr’s nomination. “I’m concerned that he’s been a big supporter of the PATRIOT Act, which lowered the standard for spying on Americans,” the Kentucky Republican told Meet the Press in December. “And he even went so far as to say, you know, the PATRIOT Act was pretty good, but we should go much further.”

“I can tell you, the first things that I’ve learned about him being for more surveillance of Americans is very, very troubling, Paul added.

Ultimately, Paul’s opposition likely won’t mean very much. Republicans hold a 53-47 majority in the Senate, and it’s hard to imagine that two other GOP senators will betray their party and vote no. Also, Alabama Democratic Sen. Doug Jones has already said he will vote to confirm Barr. The full Senate will likely vote on the nomination this week, according to Politico.

Bonus link: Paul has long been one of the Senate’s most ardent critics of the PATRIOT Act. Here he is discussing that issue and others with Reason‘s Matt Welch in 2015:

3 million kids (mostly boys) are given medication that’s supposed to make them sit still and focus.

But what if schools, not kids, are the problem?

One former public school student, Cade Summers, tells John Stossel that he hated the effect of the drugs–that it was like he had been “lobotomized.”

Cade’s parents took him off the “attention deficit” drugs and sent him to other schools. But Cade hated them all. “I would come home and I would sometimes just cry,” Cade tells Stossel.

Then he heard of a new type of school in Austin, Texas. It promised to let kids discuss ideas, and to do real-world work.

But the school, the Academy of Thought and Industry, is a private school that charges tuition.

So Cade started getting up at 3 a.m. to work in a coffee shop to help pay the tuition.

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The views expressed in this video are solely those of John Stossel; his independent production company, Stossel Productions; and the people he interviews. The claims and opinions set forth in the video and accompanying text are not necessarily those of Reason.

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Some states ban all over-the-counter drugs from vending machines. For a few years now, emergency contraception has been sold from vending machines at some colleges, providing students convenient access “without stigma,” The Verge notes. Schools in California, New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia now have medicine-dispensing machines created by Vengo Labs.

“In a space that’s long been dominated by reproductive rights activists and public health advocates, it’s strange to hear an emergency contraception vendor discuss the product as though it’s no different from a candy bar or pack of dental floss,” writes The Verge’s Lux Alptraum. “Yet, it’s somewhat refreshing, too.”

Emergency contraception is basically a concentrated dose of normal hormonal birth control pills, taken after unprotected sex to prevent pregnancy. Offering it from campus vending machines is a great development and one that will hopefully catch on. But it also helps highlight the absurdity of still requiring a prescription to get non-emergency contraception.

Campus contraception vending machines are revealing other regulatory barriers, too. Yale University students pushing for one last year found that state law prohibits it. In Connecticut, all over-the-counter medications are banned from being sold via vending machine.

“Similar laws exist around the country and are currently being challenged,” notes Alptraum. “This week, a bill was introduced in Maine at the request of students at the University of Southern Maine that would allow some over-the-counter medications—including emergency contraception—to be sold in vending machines.”

Under the Maine bill, sponsored by state Rep. Maureen Terry (D-Gorham), vending machines could sell up to 10 different types of over-the-counter drugs.

FREE MINDS

Is Maria Butina really who federal prosecutors say she is? “On December 13, Butina pleaded guilty to conspiracy to act as an unregistered agent of the Russian Federation. She faces a possible five-year sentence in federal prison,” notes The New Republic. More:

With anti-Russia fervor in the United States approaching levels directed at Muslims following the attacks of September 11, 2001, it was easy for prosecutors to sell the story of Butina as a spy to the public and the press. But is she really? Last February, Robert Mueller, the special counsel leading the Russia probe, indicted 13 Russian spies for interfering with the 2016 election. And in July, two days before Butina was arrested, Mueller charged twelve more Russians with hacking into email accounts and computer networks belonging to the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. It is not inconceivable that Butina is among their ranks.

Yet a close examination of Butina’s case suggests that it is not so. Butina is simply an idealistic young Russian, born in the last days of the Soviet Union, raised in the new world of capitalism, and hoping to contribute to a better understanding between two countries while pursuing a career in international relations. Fluent in English and interested in expanding gun rights in Russia, she met with Americans in Moscow and on frequent trips to the United States, forging ties with members of the National Rifle Association, important figures within the conservative movement, and aspiring politicians. “I thought it would be a good opportunity to do what I could, as an unpaid private citizen, not a government employee, to help bring our two countries together,” she told me.

FREE MARKETS

The FDA is targeting supplement makers in its latest regulatory crackdown. “The Food and Drug Administration on Monday accused 17 nutritional-supplement makers of selling more than 58 products with improper claims that they can prevent, treat or cure serious diseases, including Alzheimer’s,” reports the Wall Street Journal.

Have you seen online ads for dietary supplements claiming to cure your #Alzheimers disease or memory loss? It’s a #healthfraud scam. There is currently no cure or treatment to stop or reverse the progression of #Alzheimers. LEARN MORE: https://t.co/llaycvlUWR pic.twitter.com/VqV0dvUGBx

— U.S. FDA (@US_FDA) February 11, 2019

U.S. FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb said these enforcement efforts are part of a larger “plan for implementing one of the most significant modernizations of dietary supplement regulation and oversight in more than 25 years.”

JUSTICE REFORM

California bill would decriminalize condoms, victimhood for sex workers. “Right now, we know there are sex workers who are victimized or witness crimes and are scared to come forward because they think they are going to be arrested,” said California state Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco). “We want to create every incentive for sex workers to feel safe in reporting crimes.”

A new bill introduced by Wiener would stop cops from using condoms as probable cause in prostitution arrests or charging sex workers who come forward to report crimes.

QUICK HITS

At this point it’d be more newsworthy to find groups Kamala Harris *didn’t* want to see jailed or deported during her time as a California prosecutor https://t.co/sIRfZ3nFCZ

— Elizabeth Nolan Brown (@ENBrown) February 12, 2019

• That time Baton Rouge cops thought they could fool drug buyers with blackface.
• Sen. Rand Paul will vote against William Barr, Trump’s nominee for attorney general. “He’s been the chief advocate for warrantless surveillance of U.S. citizens,” said the Kentucky Republican in a statement. “I think that the Fourth Amendment should protect your phone calls and your bank information. People shouldn’t be allowed to look at it without a warrant.”
• U.S. border patrol agents just arrested 330 undocumented migrants around El Paso, most of them “Central American families and unaccompanied juveniles.”
• Looks like another agreement to keep funding the government beyond this Friday has been reached.
• Trump’s travel ban is back in court.

ELECTION 2020

Sen. Amy Klobuchar and President Donald Trump traded a round of childish Twitter barbs about global warming and Trump’s hair. (Isn’t campain season going to be fun?) Apparently, it’s making sparks fly between Meghan McCain and other hosts of The View, with Joy Behar accusing McCain of having a “hissy fit.” (OK, that’s kind of fun.) Behar later told audiences “we were going to talk about more politics, but we changed our minds,” so instead they talked about a sex dungeon in the basement of a suburban Philadelphia home for sale.

Science is on my side, @realDonaldTrump. Looking forward to debating you about climate change (and many other issues). And I wonder how your hair would fare in a blizzard?

Everyone else can join my team and contribute at https://t.co/Hz91NGE8hB https://t.co/Xjjz9I2Fw7

— Amy Klobuchar (@amyklobuchar) February 10, 2019

In December 2018, New York’s Taxi and Limousine Commission (TLC) imposed a minimum wage on drivers working with services like Lyft and Uber. The new rules set a formula for driver compensation that raises the typical gross wage to $27.86 per hour, which the commission says works out to $17 per hour of take-home pay after expenses.

The wage hike comes just a few short months after the New York City Council passed a law freezing the number of ride-share drivers allowed on city streets. The same law gives the TLC power to impose an even lower cap in the years to come, writes Christian Britschgi.

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San Juan County, Washington, Superior Court Judge Donald Eaton dismissed assault and trespassing charges against a man after finding Sheriff Ron Krebs manipulated a courtroom camera to view a defense attorney’s notes as well as a juror’s notebook. A court official had noticed courtroom cameras, which are normally stationary, tilting towards attorneys’ tables. Krebs said the manipulation of the cameras was inadvertent and that it was related to security concerns about the defendant.

Is it kind of missing the point to talk about what Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (D–N.Y.) Green New Deal (GND) actually contains? That’s the meta-question lurking just under the surface of the new Editors’ Roundtable version of the Reason Podcast, featuring Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, Matt Welch, and Peter Suderman.

The Reason editors talk about the GND’s contents, its role in Democratic Party ideological positioning, and how it reflects an increasingly utopian, fact-untethered age of political discourse. Along the way, they also assess recent exertions by possible 2020 presidential candidates Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D–Minn.), Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.), Sen. Kamala Harris (D–Calif.), Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D–Texas), and former Libertarian Party vice presidential candidate Bill Weld. You can listen to the whole thing here:

Audio production by Mark McDaniel.

Drop of Water In the Ocean by Broke For Free is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License.

Relevant links from the show:

“Green New Deal—Same Old Progressive Policies,” by Ronald Bailey

“How Much Will the Green New Deal Cost?,” by Ronald Bailey

“Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal Aims to Eliminate Air Travel,” by Joe Setyon

“Zoning Makes the Green New Deal Impossible,” by Christian Britschgi

“Think the Green New Deal Is Crazy? Blame Intersectionality.” By Robby Soave

“Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Calls Climate Change ‘Our World War II,’” by Nick Gillespie

“Green New Deal Will Try Anything Except Nukes, Hydro, Markets…,” by Ronald Bailey

“Kamala Harris Says Her Opposition to Marijuana Legalization Is ‘Not True.’ We Have the Receipts!” by Scott Shackford

“Kamala Harris Hopes You’ll Forget Her Record as a Drug Warrior and Draconian Prosecutor,” by Justin Monticello & Katherine Mangu-Ward

“Scandal-Plagued Sen. Amy Klobuchar Announces 2020 Presidential Run,” by Elizabeth Nolan Brown

“Bill Weld So Far Getting Chilly Northeast Reception to Possible GOP Primary Bid,” by Matt Welch

Senator Elizabeth Warren, announcing her campaign for president here over the weekend, used the word “rich” or a variation on it—”richer,” “richest”—at least nine times in a single 45-minute stump speech.

She called President Donald Trump “the product of a rigged system that props up the rich and powerful and kicks dirt on everyone else.”

She said “America’s middle class has been deliberately hollowed out” by “the richest families in America.” Warren said those richest families, “wanted to be even richer, and they didn’t care who got hurt.”

She spoke of “too little accountability for the rich, too little opportunity for everyone else.”

One of the innovations of Donald Trump’s winning 2016 campaign was that a candidate could get pretty far by blaming a lot of America’s problems on a group without enough votes to influence the outcome. In Trump’s case, the scapegoats were illegal immigrants. Warren appears determined to follow in Trump’s footsteps by providing a single visible villainous category of people to blame for our nation’s problems. She is betting that these wealthy people, for all her talk about their supposed influence, are a small enough minority that they lack the votes in a one-person, one-vote system to protect themselves.

The more traction Warren’s campaign gains, though, the more it undermines her claim that “the rich and powerful have rigged our political system,” writes Ira Stoll.

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