Tag: hit&run

In front of a snow-drenched crowd on Boom Island, Minnesota, Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar announced her 2020 presidential intentions. “I am running for this job for every person who wants their work recognized and rewarded” and “every parent who wants a better world for their kids,” said Klobuchar. “I am running for every American.” And no matter what, “I’ll lead from the heart.”

She went on to call for a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United, for passing a law that automatically registers Americans to vote at age 18, for universal background checks for gun owners, for “sweeping” legislation addressing climate change, and for “net neutrality for all.”

“If you don’t know the difference between a hack and Slack, it’s time to get off the digital highway,” said Klobuchar in a cringe-worth line apparently meant to demonstrate her tech savvy.

The 56-year-old, three-term senator has received less national attention than fellow Democratic senators like Kamala Harris (Calif.) and Elizabeth Warren (Mass.), both of whom have already announced their 2020 candidacies. Klobuchar could benefit from that if it means she’s seen as having less baggage, too. But that reputation suffered last week with the release of several stories describing her as a terror to work for.

Klobuchar “demeaned and berated her staff almost daily, subjecting them to bouts of explosive rage and regular humiliation within the office, according to interviews and dozens of emails reviewed” by Buzzfeed. Her office had the highest staff turnover rate in the Senate between 2001-2016, according to Politico. And then there’s this, from HuffPost:

Talked to a Franken staffer who had an odd experience with a Klobuchar staffer… https://t.co/yc7giMOIFc pic.twitter.com/SG3hzQWZd2

— Amanda Terkel (@aterkel) February 8, 2019

Liberal pundits have rallied around Klobuchar anyway, with many dismissing the idea that how a senator treats subordinates should matter when assessing her fitness for office. Some suggested it was only an issue because she’s a woman.

But in general, and especially with Klobuchar campaigning as the nice Midwestern anti-Trump, her temperament behind the scenes matters. Blowing up at staff and driving them away at high rates don’t suggest “Minnesota nice,” nor someone who may handle presidential pressure well. More so than being a member of Congress even, head of state is a position that requires restraint and good people skills to do well.

Aside from the high employee-turnover distinction, Klobuchar’s tenure in Congress hasn’t been terribly unremarkable. The successful legislation she’s sponsored mostly falls in the category of completely useless, and on occasion actively bad. One of her first successful bills toughened formaldehyde emission standards for plywood, fiberboard, and particleboard. Another set up the Attorney General to micromanage the disposal of drugs at nursing homes. She’s sponsored several bills that slightly tweak the process of adopting children from abroad and one about rural call quality.

Some of Klobuchar’s worst work has been around “human trafficking.” Legislation she introduced saw that the National Human Trafficking Hotline (a federal clearinghouse for trafficking tips that provides no actual victims assistance nor investigative action but does report to federal agents) could get more funding than grants going directly to victims services. Another Klobuchar law expanded funding for the Department of Transportation to study and spread dubious propaganda about human trafficking. She’s also been an outspoken supporter of last-year’s federal ban on prostitution ads (FOSTA-SESTA) and a 2017 “anti-trafficking” measure that was full of civil liberties concerns.

In September 2017, Klobuchar joined John McCain in trying to get touch on online political advertising in order to address alleged election interference. As Scott Shackford wrote at the time, “Russian meddling is just being used as an excuse to do what politicians and federal agencies have wanted for a long time—to regulate how people campaign online.”

So far this year, Klobuchar has introduced legislation to strengthen federal law enforcement involvement in cases of stalking and domestic violence, to ban deals between pharmaceutical companies that delay generic versions of medication coming to market, and to tighten regulations on social media companies.

The future of civil asset forfeiture law in the United States now revolves around a single car: Indiana resident Tyson Timbs’ $42,000 Land Rover. It’s a nice ride. So nice, in fact, that Timbs argues his constitutional rights under the Eighth Amendment were violated when the state seized it in 2015 after Timbs was arrested for selling heroin to two undercover cops. The SUV, which Timbs did not purchase with drug money, is worth four times the maximum fine for the crime he committed, a “grossly disproportionate” penalty, a lower state court found, writes C.J. Ciaramella.

View this article.

A married couple have sued the city of Glendale, Arizona, after police officers tortured the husband, Johnny Wheatcroft, during a routine traffic stop.

Body camera footage of the encounter—released by local news station KSHB—shows cops using a taser on Wheatcroft a total of 11 times, even though the man was neither resisting arrest nor under suspicion of having done anything wrong. Even worse, while Wheatcroft was handcuffed and pinned face-first on the ground of a hotel parking lot, an officer kicked him in the groin, pulled down his gym shorts, and used a taser on his testicles.

This happened while Wheatcroft’s two sons—who are 11 and 6—watched in horror from the car.

“I have never seen anything like this before,” said Jeff Noble, a former police chief who reviewed the footage for KSHB. “This is just beyond the pale.”

The incident took place two years ago, on July 26, 2017. Wheatcroft was in the passenger seat of a car—a male friend was the driver—and his wife, Anya Chapman, and their two children were in the backseat. They had pulled into the parking lot of a Motel 6 when two Glendale police officers, Matt Schneider and Mark Lindsey, approached the car, ostensibly for failing to signal a turn. The officers asked Wheatcroft for identification; he declined to provide it, correctly reasoning that only the driver needed to do so.

Schnider then opened Wheatcroft’s door, grabbed the man’s arm, and twisted it behind his back, causing considerable wrist pain. The two officers attempted to push Wheatcroft forward, contorting his body into an even more uncomfortable position. Next, they used a taser on him, over and over again. Wheatcroft ended up on the ground outside the car, with his legs still tangled in his seatbelt. The officers then handcuffed Wheatcroft, though this did not end the torture. According to the lawsuit:

Given the temperature of the asphalt, the officers’ contorting his body, and the tasing, Plaintiff Johnny Wheatcroft was writhing in pain while his family watched and screamed for the officers to stop. Plaintiff Johnny Wheatcroft was prone and handcuffed on the ground, when Defendant Schneider pulled down Plaintiff’s shorts and tased his testicles and perineum, which was significantly and excruciatingly painful.

Defendant Glendale’s officers then rolled Plaintiff Johnny Wheatcroft onto his side and began to remove the taser prongs that were embedded into his skin. As the officers began to forcibly remove the prongs, Plaintiff Johnny Wheatcroft screamed in agony and Defendant Schneider placed his taser on Plaintiff Johnny Wheatcroft’s penis and screamed, “Keep fighting and you’re going to get it again! You want it again? Shut your mouth! I’m done fucking around with you!” At this same time, one of the officers placed a handgun to Plaintiff Johnny Wheatcroft’s head.

I would encourage anyone who doubts that this description is accurate to watch the footage. Consider yourself warned: It is extremely disturbing.

Wheatcroft and Chapman were charged with resisting arrest and assaulting an officer—Chapman evidently hit one of the officers in the head with a bag during the confusion—and spent months behind bars because they could not afford bail. Chapman eventually plead guilty to a lesser charge in order to get of jail and reclaim her children.

Prosecutors dropped all charges against Wheatcroft after they reviewed the body cam footage. (Wheatcroft is currently back in prison for committing an unrelated burglary.) The Glendale police gave Schneider a mere three-day suspension: In a statement, the department neglected to mention the use of the taser on the groin, noting only that “a review of the officers’ actions has been performed and discipline implemented regarding certain tactics used by one officer.”

KSHB’s report notes that Schneider is an award-winning police officer who “represented Glendale twice on the TV show Cops.” It is appalling that the department still employs a police officer who deliberately used a taser on a restrained man’s exposed testicles.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) is officially a contender for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. She made her intentions clear during a speech in Lawrence, Massachusetts, Saturday morning. Her campaign kicked off with an endorsement from Rep. Joseph Kennedy (D–Mass.), who introduced her.

“We are here to say enough is enough,” said Warren in her remarks. “The man in the White House is not the cause of what is broken. He is just the latest and most extreme symptom of what has gone wrong in America—a product of a rigged system that props up the rich and powerful and kicks dirt on everyone else.”

The senator accused rich people of waging class warfare against the working class for years, and vowed to fight back.

“Our fight is for big structural change,” Warren continued. “This is the fight of our lives.”

She also vowed to break up monopolies, promised to invest in education and child care, and praised the Green New Deal.

Warren, a progressive populist, is arguably the furthest-left-leaning candidate in the race—at least until Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–VT) makes his candidacy official. Sanders and Warren differ in some respects: Most notably, Sanders would like to replace the capitalist system, whereas Warren only aspires to reform it. But like Sanders, Warren is primarily fixated on wealth inequality as the most pressing problem facing Americans—and her strategy for addressing it is to take money away from wealthy people.

How much money? Warren’s proposal would tax the assets of the very wealthy at 2 percent annually, meaning they would pay it again and again every year. But if such a policy became law, most rich people would probably find ways to avoid it. The plan is best described as “a symbolic declaration of opposition to the existence of outsized wealth, irrespective of how it was obtained,” wrote Reason‘s Peter Suderman in his negative appraisal.

Warren is also a staunch opponent of school choice reform: She opposed a statewide ballot initiative that would have allowed more charter schools to open in Massachusetts. (The initiative was defeated in 2018.) Warren’s fealty to the teachers unions, a powerful group within the Democratic Party, positions her to run well to the left of rival Sen. Cory Booker (D­–NJ), who has a history of supporting education reform.

Read more from Reason on Warren here.

The Burton C. Gray Memorial Internship program runs year-round in the Washington, D.C., office. Interns work for 12 weeks and are paid $7,200.

The job includes reporting and writing as well as helping with research, proofreading, and other tasks. Previous interns have gone on to work at such places as The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, ABC News, and Reason itself.

To apply, send your résumé, up to five writing samples (preferably published clips), and a cover letter by March 1 to intern@reason.com. Please include “Gray Internship Application – Summer” in the subject line.

Paper applications can be sent to:

Gray Internship
Reason
1747 Connecticut Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20009

Summer internships begin in June, though precise start dates are flexible.

“Tried to resist using @ work, but ended up failing,” the forensic chemist scribbled on a diary worksheet she kept as part of her substance abuse therapy. “Going to use phentermine,” she wrote on another, “but when I went to take it, I saw how little (v. little) there is left = ended up not using.”

The chemist, Sonja Farak, worked at the state drug lab in Amherst, Massachusetts, for more than eight years. Her notes record on-the-job drug use ranging from small nips of the lab’s baseline standard stock of the stimulant phentermine to stealing crack not only from her own samples but from colleagues’ as well. On another worksheet chronicling her struggle not to use, she described 12 of the next 13 samples assigned to her for testing as “urge-ful.”

State police took these worksheets from Farak’s car in January 2013, the same day they arrested her for tampering with evidence and for cocaine possession. The lead prosecutor on Farak’s case knew about the diaries, as did supervisors at the state attorney general’s office. And yet, despite explicit requests for this kind of evidence, state prosecutors withheld Farak’s handwritten notes about her drug use, theft, and evidence tampering from defense attorneys and a judge for more than a year.

Farak’s reports were central to thousands of cases, and the fact that she ran analyses while high and regularly dipped into “urge-ful” samples casts doubt on thousands of convictions. But without access to evidence showing how long Farak had been doing this, defendants with constitutional grounds for challenging their incarceration were held for months and even years longer than necessary, writes Shawn Musgrave.

View this article.

France, it seems, has long been plagued by two towering evils. First, French farmers feel they’re underpaid for the foods they produce and sell. These farmers find different ways to protest every year. In 2016, for example, French farmers protested lower milk and pork prices by dumping manure in roadways and blocking traffic.

Second, French consumers appear to believe that a sale on Nutella, the sugary-chocolaty-nutty spread, is reason enough to act like they’re auditioning for a Black Friday sale fight in the United States or something slightly less traumatic—say, the grocery scene in Bird Box.

Enter a new French food law, cleverly dubbed Loi Alimentation (“food law”). The law, which debuted this week, is intended to help French farmers by increasing their margins without somehow also hurting the grocers who sell the foods they grow. This month, according to the European grocery site Retail Detail, the already “infamous” law is making some grocery food more expensive for consumers in the country. Calculations reported by Retail Detail suggest the price of many popular foods has risen on average by more than six percent, including more than eight percent for Nutella. That’s because the law bans many food promotions—including, for example, steep discounts on Nutella—and effectively raises the minimum prices stores may charge for many popular foods.

If common sense and early returns are any indication, writes Baylen Linnekin, the law won’t solve either problem. But it will create a whole host of new ones.

View this article.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (D–N.Y.) Green New Deal is as ambitious a policy proposal as they come, demanding a complete conversion to net-zero carbon emissions within a decade. One means of achieving that goal is the rebuilding or replacement of every single building in the country.

Through a 10-year national mobilization, Ocasio-Cortez’s plan calls for “upgrading all existing buildings in the United States and building new buildings to achieve maximum energy efficiency, water efficiency, safety, affordability, comfort, and durability, including through electrification.”

A FAQ released alongside the Green New Deal (which has since been deleted from the Congresswoman’s website) included as one of its 14 “infrastructure and industrial projects” a promise to “upgrade or replace every building in US for state-of-the-art energy efficiency.”

This, combined with a conversion to 100 percent renewable power, and massive investments in transit, is the Green New Deal’s strategy for getting us to zero net-emissions in ten years.

Replacing all the buildings in the country over 10 years is a tall order, to say the least.

The U.S. Census Bureau pins the number of housing units at 137,407,308 as of 2017. That count overstates how many residential buildings there are in the U.S. given that roughly 30 percent these units are contained in larger apartment buildings.

Nevertheless, the Green New Deal would likely require the renovation or replacement of close to 100 million residential structures. Add to that the roughly 6 million commercial buildings in the U.S., plus all the public schools, government offices, and industrial buildings in the country, and we’re talking about a lot of retrofitting.

The price tag for all this would be astronomical. It’s also somewhat beside the point. Even if the money were available (I suppose we could always print it), local and state land use policies would stop any such green development bonanza in its tracks.

“Current zoning absolutely stands in the way of allowing more people to live in high cost areas that are already close to transit,” says Emily Hamilton, a scholar at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center.

Most major American cities have imposed single-family zoning—which allows for a single dwelling per property to be built—on a majority of urban residential land, says Hamilton. This puts an artificial cap on the number of new homes that can be built.

It forces people to live farther away from each other than they might otherwise want to, making it harder to service all of them effectively by transit. That presents a problem when one’s vision is so dependent on people giving up their carbon-spewing cars.

This restrictive zoning presents more problems still when one considers that the federal government is not going to be able to force people to rebuild or retrofit their homes—there’s going to have to be some buy-in from the property owners themselves.

Yet if a property owner is prohibited by zoning codes from adding new units or more space to a building they own, then there’re less likely to go in for the kind of retrofitting called for by the Green New Deal.

“In most cases it’s not going to make sense to knock down a single-family home and replace it with a newer, energy efficient single-family home because you’re not getting much more space,” says Hamilton.

If a property owner is able to knock down said home to make room for a new energy efficient fourplex which the owner could then sell off or operate for profit, they’re much more likely to put up with the cost and disruption, Hamilton tells Reason.

In addition to single-family zoning, a host of historic preservation laws would make any attempt at even modest, energy-saving renovations either difficult or impossible.

Historic preservation districts across the country come with an incredible number of rules designed to preserve the original aesthetic and architectural features of older buildings. That means everything from energy-saving doors and windows, to a more efficient HVAC system could be prohibited.

Depending on the locality, more major renovations could require discretionary permits from a local planning board, slowing things down, and potentially even stopping them in their tracks.

To be clear, I’m not saying that a massive federal plan to encourage or even force people to live in dense apartment buildings is appropriate. But some of the things it calls for—more density, more energy efficiency—are things that many free marketeers and property owners also want, but can’t have due to government regulations.

That Ocasio-Cortez’s proposal doesn’t mention these impediments at all, while also proposing some pretty outlandish goals, undercuts the seriousness of her proposal, and is yet another example her plan’s inability to grapple with the practial hurdles it will inevitably face.

Former Reason TV staffer (and continuing contributor) Andrew Heaton now hosts Something’s Off for The Blaze. He had me on to talk about postmernism and what I argue is its affinity with libertarian ideas about knowledge, society, and culture. It’s fun, wide-ranging conversation. Here’s his writeup:

What is Postmodernism and why do so many people loathe it? Reason‘s Nick Gillespie joins Heaton to explain what postmodernism is, where it’s useful and when it’s asinine, and the many instances where postmodernism has spread through American culture.

Subscribe to Heaton’s podcast here.

The Green New Deal, released earlier this week by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–NY), has drawn plenty of criticism from conservatives, libertarians, and even some centrist liberals: New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait advised Democrats to scrap it and start over.

Many of these articles—including ones penned by Reason‘s Ronald Bailey and Joe Setyon—have pointed how ludicrously broad the Green New Deal is. Notably, it does not confine itself to environmental policy: the proposal also asks for more education funding, more health care funding, the enforcement of “workplace health and safety, antidiscrimination, and wage and hour standards across all employers, industries, and sectors,” enforcement of “trade rules,” and, according to the Green New Deal’s FAQ sheet, “economic security for all those who are unable or unwilling to work.”

Why would the left include a provision about subsidizing the lifestyle of lazy people in its climate change manifesto? Because that’s what intersectionality requires.

As I explain my forthcoming book, PANIC ATTACK: Young Radicals in the Age of Trump (pre-order it here), intersectionality is a philosophical framework that has come to completely dominate progressive activist thinking in the 30 years since the sociologist Kimberle Crenshaw first coined it. An intersectional progressive recognizes that racism, and sexism, and homophobia, and transphobia, and age-ism, and classism, and so on, are separate-but-related phenomena. To ignore just one of these sources of oppression is to fail intersectionality; the seriously social-justice minded must treat all of these issues as equally important and confront them en masse.

The original concept isn’t entirely without merit, and there are many cases where it would be worth it for social change agents to consider their blind spots (see: the Women’s March and anti-Semitism). But a lot of the time, adding more and more demands is a surefire way to make sure none of them get taken seriously. It’s very hard to form an ideologically diverse coalition around a single issue—like, say, climate change—if you expect your coalition to also agree on a bunch of other fringe issues—like, say, “unwilling to work” subsidies.