Tag: hit&run

Just days after Maroon 5’s Adam Levine went shirtless on national television without the threat of a Janet Jackson–style “nipplegate,” a court weighed in on which nipples are acceptable in public places.

In 2016, three women were ticketed at Weirs Beach in Laconia, New Hampshire, for not covering up during the Memorial Day weekend visit. Heidi Lilley, Kia Sinclair, and Ginger Pierro were practicing yoga and sunbathing when some beachgoers asked the police to demand that the women cover their breasts. The trio refused, and the three women were then arrested for violating the city’s ordinance prohibiting public nudity.

After a motion to dismiss the charges was denied, the trio appealed the decision, aiming to overturn not just their convictions but the ordinance itself. The statute defines nudity as the “showing of the human male or female genitals, pubic area or buttocks with less than a fully opaque covering, or the showing of the female breast with less than a fully opaque covering of any part of the nipple.” The Laconia 3 believe the breast clause is a form of gender-based discrimination, since both women and men have nipples.

The New Hampshire Supreme Court has now ruled against the women. The judges acknowledge that the ordinance required “the draping of more parts of the female body than of the male,” but they argue that this was only because female bodies have more procreative functions than male bodies do.

Two judges disagreed. In their dissent, they offered the example of a man and a woman wearing the same beachwear. If that beachwear doesn’t cover their nipples, only the woman would be engaging in unlawful behavior. This, the dissenters argued, was a “gender-based classification.” The separate definitions of nudity for both women and men were also a gender-based classification, they said. Laws based on differences, they warned, can go too far in mandating behavior.

The Respect State Marijuana Laws Act, which former Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.) first introduced in 2013, consisted of a single sentence that would have made the federal ban on marijuana inapplicable to people acting in compliance with state law. The Ending Federal Marijuana Prohibition Act, introduced by former Rep. Thomas Garrett (R-Va.) in 2017, was six pages, but its essence was eliminating the national ban. By contrast, the Marijuana Revenue and Regulation Act, which Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) first unveiled in 2017 and reintroduced today, is 65 pages long.

All those extra pages do not make Wyden’s bill better. To the contrary, if his scheme were enacted, it would impose an extra layer of regulation and taxation on state-licensed marijuana businesses that are already struggling to compete with black-market suppliers who escape those burdens.

Repealing the federal ban on marijuana occupies a single page of Wyden’s bill. The rest is devoted to provisions that will raise prices for consumers and make running a marijuana business more expensive and more complicated. Pages 2 through 45 would create a system of federal marijuana taxes at escalating rates: 10 percent of the retail price for the first two years, rising to 15 percent in the third year, 20 percent in the fourth year, and 25 percent in the fifth year. Pages 51 through 65 would create a federal system to license and regulate marijuana businesses that are already licensed and regulated by state and local governments.

Just last week, California legislators proposed cutting back the burdensome taxes that are helping to keep the black market alive and well in that state. The chief Assembly sponsor of that bill estimated that combined local and state taxes on marijuana can be as high as 45 percent. Wyden’s solution: Let’s make it 55 percent and keep raising it until it hits 70 percent. Surely that will help the newly legal cannabis industry thrive, especially if we couple it with a bunch of new demands from federal regulators.

“The federal prohibition of marijuana is wrong, plain and simple,” Wyden says. “Too many lives have been wasted, and too many economic opportunities have been missed. It’s time Congress make the changes Oregonians and Americans across the country are demanding.” I’m not sure these are those changes.

“The Supreme Court just placed Roe v. Wade on life support,” says the headline at ThinkProgress. Going from that title, you might find it hard to guess that the Court just handed down a ruling in favor of abortion access.

In a 5–4 decision, the Court temporarily blocked a 2014 Louisiana law that, by instituting a strict hospital admitting privileges system, would have left the state with just one doctor allowed to perform abortions. Chief Justice John Roberts sided with more liberal justices in moving to stay the law. The case now faces a full hearing.

SCOTUS struck down a similar Texas law in 2016.

“Under recent Supreme Court precedent, the law is pretty clearly unconstitutional, and Roberts doesn’t want to overturn that precedent until the court has considered the case, June Medical Services LLC v. Gee, in detail,” explains Noah Feldman at Bloomberg. It’s not clear which way Roberts will go ultimately.

Much is being made of the most recently confirmed justice, Brett Kavanaugh, voting with the minority and writing his own dissent. But even that isn’t quite the anti-abortion radicalism many are making it out to be.

Louisiana currently has three abortion clinics and four abortion doctors, only one of whom has the admitting privileges required by Louisiana’s (yet to be enforced) law. Kavanaugh’s opinion argues that if the other three doctors aren’t able to get admitting privileges, that could present an “undue burden” to abortion access (the standard set up under Roe v. Wade and recently affirmed in the Texas case, Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt). But first, suggests Kavanaugh, the doctors should try to get admitting privileges. If they can, he writes, “the Louisiana law as applied would not impose an undue burden.”

“The true issue in determining undue burden shouldn’t be whether the four doctors who currently perform abortions can keep on doing so,” writes Feldman. “Rather, the question should be whether the Louisiana law confers any benefits relative to the cost imposed on abortion. And the reality is that requiring the doctors to have admitting privileges doesn’t confer any real health benefits.”

Still, Kavanaugh could have said nothing, like the other three justices in the minority. “That would have signaled he was prepared to overrule the 2016 precedent” set in Whole Woman’s Health, writes Feldman. Instead, Kavanaugh’s opinion suggests “that he takes the precedent seriously as currently binding law.”

Somehow, from all of this, The Nation‘s headline writer concludes that “Brett Kavanaugh Is Already Done Pretending He Respects Abortion Rights” (subhed: “And Susan Collins is to blame”). Ian Millhiser of ThinkProgress thinks “the only realistic uncertainty is whether [the Court] will gut Roe in one fell swoop, or by a thousand cuts.” Another ThinkProgress headline states ominously and confusingly: “Hope is all that’s left, with Roe v. Wade in Louisiana.”

Some writers on the right are also (and more understandably) seeing dire omens in the Court’s decision this week. “When Justice Roberts joined the court’s progressives to grant the emergency stay and temporarily block Louisiana’s law while the case is pending before the Supreme Court, he did more than benignly push pause on the enforcement of the Louisiana law,” writes David French at National Review. “Emergency stays are granted only when—among other factors—’there exists a significant possibility of reversal of the lower court’s decision.'”

“Multiple pro-life activists were initially pleased that not only did Justice Kavanaugh join Justices [Neil] Gorsuch, [Clarence] Thomas, and [Samuel] Alito in voting against the stay, but Kavanaugh actually penned a short dissent,” French continues. “But if you read the dissent, it’s on the most narrow possible grounds. Essentially, he argues that there isn’t yet any evidence that the Louisiana law will have any immediate effect on abortion access.”

As with the justice’s record on birth control, while Kavanaugh is sure to make many decisions that Democrats (and others) don’t like, he probably isn’t an ideologue or inclined to be an agent of radical changes.

The Green New Deal resolution unveiled by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.), a self-described socialist, ostensibly addresses the looming problem of man-made climate change. Remarkably, the solutions to the global warming crisis somehow coincide with a wish list of previously proposed progressive policies.

Apparently, for example, tackling climate change will require “guaranteeing a job with a family-sustaining wage, adequate family and medical leave, paid vacations, and retirement security to all people of the United States.” Fortunately, progressives in Congress have already been offering legislation that would fortuitously meet the employment challenges posed by global warming.

The Job Opportunities for All Act, introduced last July by Rep. Ro Khanna (D–Calif.), would provide federally subsidized employment for any individuals who happens to be unemployed or underemployed. In May 2017, Democrats in both the House and the Senate introduced the Raise the Wage Act, which increases the federal minimum wage over time to $15 an hour; that bill was reintroduced in January. In February 2017, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D–N.Y.) introduced the Family and Medical Insurance Leave (FAMILY) Act, which aimed to provide workers with a “reasonable level of wage replacement” when they take time off work to care for a family member who is ill.

Another goal of the Green New Deal is “strengthening and protecting the right of all workers to organize, unionize, and collectively bargain free of coercion, intimidation, and harassment.” Last year Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) reintroduced the Workplace Democracy Act, which would sanction “card check,” a process that allows employees at a company to bypass secret-ballot elections and declare their intent to unionize by simply signing cards. (By undermining worker solidarity, secret ballots apparently contribute to climate change.) Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) introduced in September 2017 the Protecting Workers and Improving Labor Standards Act, which would have repealed all right-to-work laws. And in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Janus decision last year, which held that a public sector union cannot force workers to pay dues if those same workers decline to join the union, congressional Democrats rolled out the Public Service Freedom to Negotiate Act to overturn the decision.

By another happy coincidence, beating climate change requires that the federal government be put in charge of “providing all people of the United States with high-quality health care.”

The Expanded and Improved Medicare for All Act, introduced in January 2017 by Rep. John Conyers (D–Mich.), would “provide all individuals residing in the United States and U.S. territories with…all medically necessary care, such as primary care and prevention, dietary and nutritional therapies, prescription drugs, emergency care, long-term care, mental health services, dental services, and vision care.” Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D–Wash.) is expected to introduce an even more comprehensive version of Medicare for All later this year. Maybe it could tackle climate change.

Since no American should be left out in the heat, the Green New Deal calls for the federal government to provide all people of the United States with affordable, safe, and adequate housing. Again a number of progressive legislators have, for other no doubt good reasons, been making a variety of Housing for All proposals. Most recently, Sen. Kamala Harris (D–Calif.) introduced in July 2018 the Rent Relief Act, which would provide refundable tax credits for tenants who spend more than 30 percent of their income on rent.

In order to make sure that Americans know enough to combat climate change, the Green New Deal asks the federal government to “provide resources, training, and high-quality education, including higher education, to all people of the United States.” Providentially, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) introduced in 2017 the College for All Act, which would eliminate tuition and fees at four-year public colleges and universities for families making up to $125,000.

The GND would also “ensure a commercial environment where every businessperson is free from unfair competition and domination by domestic or international monopolies.” By chance, progressive legislators on Capitol Hill have been advancing the fight against global warming by proposing antitrust legislation. For instance, in September 2017 Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D–Minn.) introduced the Consolidation Prevention and Competition Promotion Act, which prohibits mergers that materially lessen competition. Last August, Sen. Elizabeth Warren introduced the Accountable Capitalism Act, which would require large corporations to set aside the mere pursuit of profit and instead focus on creating a “general public benefit,” defined as “a material positive impact on society resulting from the business and operations of a United States corporation, when taken as a whole.” Material positive impacts like…combating climate change!

In her 2014 book This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, Naomi Klein declared that progressive values and policies are “currently being vindicated, rather than refuted, by the laws of nature.” Who knew just how right she was?

Deadline has broken the news that Netflix is paying $10 million for the rights to distribute Knock Down the House, a documentary that follows the campaigns of four women running against incumbents. One of the women is Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.).

The film was apparently the darling of this year’s Sundance Film Festival, which wrapped up last weekend. It won the Festival Favorite Award, beating out more than 100 other candidates. Deadline says this appears to be the biggest documentary deal ever hammered out at a film festival.

There will, no doubt, be all sorts of jokes about how a documentary partly about a socialist is benefitting immensely from a massive capitalist company. But keep in mind that the deal isn’t with her; it’s with the filmmakers. And she’s not the only person the movie’s about, even if she’s the only one who has become a household name.

What I do want to point out that Deadline‘s coverage of this documentary about four progressive candidates does not include the phrase “Citizens United.” But it’s the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. FEC makes it clear that no government forces can censor Netflix from showing the documentary however and whenever it wants.

Ocasio-Cortez hates the Citizens United decision and wants a constitutional amendment overturning it. This has been a pretty steadfast position among Democrats: They believe the Citizens United decision has ushered in an era of “dark money” and of massive, manipulative mega-corporations buying elections.

All of that fundamentally ignores what the Citizens United case actually involved—an attempt, just before the 2008 Democratic Party primaries, to censor advertisements for a documentary critical of Hillary Clinton. It was a case about censoring the media.

Prior to the Citizens United ruling, it still would have been perfectly fine for Sundance to have shown Knock Down the House. The law that was being challenged banned certain types of political communications close to elections. The ruling guaranteed that Netflix can air this documentary whenever it wants, even close to Ocasio-Cortez’s next election race.

And that’s good! Prior to this Supreme Court decision, the law was being used to censor what the media could and could not do. That makes anger at the decision, particularly from challengers facing uphill battles, all the more confusing. Laws that limit campaign spending and the ability to get support from outside the political parties ultimately benefit entrenched incumbents, who have legislative history and lots of simple political inertia on their sides. It’s the challengers who desperately need of financial support and avenues to increase the reach of their messages. It’s really, really hard to beat incumbents. Challengers like the ones in Knock Down the House.

Ocasio-Cortez has benefited greatly from press coverage—both positive and negative—and that coverage most certainly played a role in her win. Tellingly, when people on the left talk about the money that comes in to help candidates in getting their message across, they bring up “big oil” and “big pharma” but tend to leave out Hollywood and the media. (Conservatives do bring it up, of course. They yell it from the rooftops.)

Should Netflix be allowed to air this documentary come 2020 when Ocasio-Cortez is looking to get re-elected? Yes, absolutely. Does the information in the documentary magically become more sinister and a threat to democracy now that $10 million is changing hands to make sure people can view it? Absolutely not. That money doesn’t magically transform into votes. The candidate still needs to make her case. It’s just that enough people like her message that they’re willing to spend lots of money to provide the megaphone. That’s known as the marketplace of ideas, and we need it for a functioning democracy.

If there’s a silver lining in Frontline: Predator on the Reservation, it’s that we’re apparently through the era of “I believe the children”: the time in the 1980s when any accusation of child abuse, no matter how fantastic (molestation accompanied by devil worship, animal sacrifice, murder) was instantly credible because little kids were regarded as unimpeachable witnesses.

Predator tells a story that’s exactly the opposite—the refusal of officials at the federal Indian Health Service, for nearly two decades, to acknowledge evidence that a serial child molester was loose in reservation hospitals.

Produced in cooperation with the Wall Street Journal, which covered the case extensively, Predator follows the trail of childhood destruction left by pediatrician Stanley Patrick Weber, who only a few weeks ago was sentenced to 18 years in federal prison for molestation of six reservation kids. A trial on 12 more charges is expected to start soon. Television critic Glenn Garvin takes a look at what happened.

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The Austin, Texas-based nonprofit Defense Distributed, which defends and facilitiates the homemade firearm movement, has had a wild seven months: It reached a settlement in a longstanding federal lawsuit, reposted all of its downloadable gun files on the internet, was sued by 25 states, and then had to pull all those files back down. It also just launched a new product: the Polymer80 kit for finishing a Glock-style handgun on the company’s Ghost Gunner milling machine in about half an hour.

But the most consequential event for the company was the arrest and indictment of its charismatic founder, Cody Wilson, on a sex crime charge. In September 2018, Austin police announced a warrant for Wilson’s arrest for the crime of allegedly paying for sex with a 16-year-old female he met through an app called SugarDaddyMeet in a state where the age of consent is 17. Police discovered Wilson was in Taiwan, and he was detained and sent home. Wilson is currently out on bail awaiting trial.

Stepping up as Defense Distributed‘s new director was Paloma Heindorff, who had little experience on the public stage, and hadn’t even fired a gun prior to 2015.

So where does Wilson’s arrest and resignation leave Defense Distributed, a company oriented around Wilson’s brash public persona and vision of all-out war between the state and the individual? And what’s the future of its legal battle to protect the right to distribute gun files on First Ammendment grounds? Reason’s Zach Weissmueller went behind the scenes at America’s most controversial gun company.

Produced by Zach Weissmueller. Camera by Jim Epstein, Mark McDaniel, and Weissmueller. Additional graphics by Epstein.

“Dancing on the Edge” by Kai Engel is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution NC 3.0 license. Engel’s music is available for purchase and download at his Bandcamp page.

“Universe in Hands” by Kai Engel is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution NC 3.0 license. Engel’s music is available for purchase and download at his Bandcamp page.

“Aveu” by Kai Engel is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution NC 3.0 license. Engel’s music is available for purchase and download at his Bandcamp page.

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“Fryeri” by Kai Engel is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution NC 3.0 license. Engel’s music is available for purchase and download at his Bandcamp page.

“Back to Lighted Streets” by Kai Engel is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution NC 3.0 license. Engel’s music is available for purchase and download at his Bandcamp page.

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An undercover narcotics officer who was involved in the the bungled drug raid that killed a middle-aged couple in their Houston home last week “has been relieved of duty due to ongoing questions that cannot be answered until the case agent is interviewed,” the local police union revealed in a statement yesterday. A Houston Police Department spokesperson “confirmed that the senior police officer, who joined the department in 1996, must temporarily surrender his badge pending the outcome of an internal affairs investigation,” reports KHOU, the CBS station in Houston.

The officer in charge of the investigation that led to the raid, which triggered a shootout in which Dennis Tuttle and Rhogena Nicholas were killed and five officers were injured, has not been interviewed yet because “his gunshot wound has resulted in him being incapacitated while surgeries continue,” the union said. Citing “three law enforcement sources,” KHOU says the “ongoing questions” are related to the suspended officer’s role in obtaining the no-knock search warrant authorizing the raid, which was based on a confidential informant’s claim that he had bought heroin from a man in the house, where he reported seeing a 9mm handgun and “a large quantity of plastic baggies” containing heroin. Police found neither of those things when they searched the house the next day, even though the house supposedly was being watched in the interim.

KHOU says detectives plan to interview the C.I. to see if his account matches the information in the warrant affidavit. The author of the affidavit, whose name is blacked out in the publicly released copy, swore that he searched the C.I. before sending him to make a “controlled buy,” that the C.I. emerged from the house with “a quantity of brown powder” later identified as black-tar heroin, that he was watching the C.I. the whole time, and that afterward “surveillance was placed on the above location in question by the narcotics officers.” Since the alleged heroin and 9mm pistol had disappeared by the time police broke into the house the following evening, it seems likely that one or more of those details was not accurate.

The police union’s statement decried “rumors” that the narcotics officers had raided the wrong house by mistake. “To be clear,” it said, “officers were not on the wrong street and entry at that location was not made at random. We would refer you to the call slip from that location on January 8, over two weeks prior to the shooting.” That record relates to a call from an anonymous woman who complained that her daughter was using drugs inside the house at 7815 Harding Street. Police Chief Art Acevedo likewise has criticized “conspiracy theorists” who speculated that the target was supposed to be 7815 Hardy Street, which is 12 miles from the house where Tuttle and Nicholas lived.

Acevedo himself is largely responsible for that speculation, because on the night of the raid he repeatedly gave “Hardy Street” as the location of the house and seemed to be reading the address from a sheet of paper. The idea that the cops had gotten confused seemed plausible in light of the disappearing heroin and the testimony of neighbors who said they had never observed any suspicious activity at the house and described Tuttle and Nicholas, who had no criminal convictions and had lived on the block for more than two decades, as perfectly nice people who never caused trouble. Those comments seemed inconsistent with Acevedo’s claim that the house was so notorious as a drug den that “the neighborhood thanked our officers” for raiding it.

The “wrong house” theory took a serious blow when it turned out that at least some of the officers who had participated in the raid also had participated in the investigation that led to it, meaning they surely would have noticed if they were 12 miles from where they were supposed to be. The description and address in the warrant affidavit make it clear that no such screwup occurred. But it is obvious from the outcome that other kinds of screwups did occur, possibly coupled with deliberate dishonesty.

“When an officer-involved shooting (OIS) occurs at HPD,” Acevedo said in a statement yesterday, “we consider it a legal and moral obligation to conduct a thorough and impartial investigation into the circumstances leading up to and resulting in the OIS. As I said last Thursday to our community, we will leave no stone unturned to determine the good, the bad and the ugly….I know that in addition to the OIS itself, many have questions regarding the circumstances surrounding the search warrant. All of these questions are part of our ongoing criminal and administrative investigations. Rather than releasing piecemeal information, consistent with our commitment to transparency, we will report our findings at the conclusion of our investigations.”

In her blockbuster exposé “Are You a Woman Traveling Alone?,” Reason‘s Elizabeth Nolan Brown does a deep dive on the Department of Homeland Security “Blue Campaign.” This campaign pushes the hospitality industry, air travel companies, and other businesses to call the feds if they suspect customers are involved in “trafficking”—an increasingly loose term that covers everything from slavery to traditional prostitution. The Marriott hotel chain, for instance, recently tweeted that all of its 750,000 employees worldwide are “being trained to help spot sex trafficking in our hotels.”

For today’s Reason Podcast, I talked with Brown about her story. More often than not, she writes, crackdowns on trafficking translate into rousting women sitting alone in bars and other common areas, snooping on fathers traveling with teenage daughters, or calling federally funded tip lines on guests who have “too many” condoms. In several recent high-profile cases involving airlines, “staff trained to ‘spot traffickers’ have harassed interracial couples and families. When people are asked to use gut instinct to stop real but rare horrors, relying on racial stereotypes and other biases tends to rule.” Brown also documents the role of Polaris Project and ECPAT-USA, nonprofits that operate tip lines and provide training on spotting trafficking, in promoting these fears.

Whatever the intentions behind the Blue Campaign, and despite Donald Trump’s promise in his State of the Union address to crack down on traffickers smuggling women across “wide-open areas” on the U.S.-Mexico border, there is no evidence that sexual slavery is on the rise in the United States. The result, Brown argues, is that consensual sex work is being redefined as trafficking and the privacy of all Americans is taking another hit.

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This week a North Carolina mom told the Raleigh City Council that police “terrorized” her parents and her 6-year-old special-needs son.

A Selective Enforcement Unit (SEU) team—Raleigh’s version of SWAT—had a warrant to search Michael and Wanda Clark’s home last November. Michael’s nephew, Brian Clark, was a suspect in a recent armed robbery. Police found a box Brian had left at the scene of the crime with his uncle’s name and address on it, Indy Week reports. So they paid a visit to the Clark home, where Michael and Wanda’s daughter LaDonna had dropped off her son, who has autism and cerebral palsy, before going to work.

Brian Clark did not live at his uncle’s house and was not there at the time. Nonetheless, police forced Michael, Wanda, and their grandson to walk out of the house and sit on the ground. “On a 35-degree and rainy night, my son with autism was forced out of the home with military-style rifles aimed at him and made to sit on the cold, wet ground for over an hour by RPD SWAT,” LaDonna told the city council Tuesday:

“You can sit down there, or I will handcuff you,” an officer told her father, according to a complaint Michael Clark later filed with the department.

“Having guns pointed at a six-year-old was extremely frightening and completely unnecessary,” Wanda Clark wrote in a complaint of her own. “Even now, I still have nightmares about those guns being pointed at me and my grandson.”

“Not only was I not allowed to see the footage of my son being terrorized,” LaDonna told the city council, but the police wouldn’t give her an internal affairs complaint number unless she specifically stated which department policies had been broken and agreed to an in-person interview. At this point, the police already had three written complaints describing the incident.

Clark says that in December, police finally let her see a single picture captured from body-camera footage of her father walking out of the house. She told the city council that police eventually offered to give her an internal affairs case number—after she signed up to tell her story to the council.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is looking into both the incident itself and thepolice’s alleged attempts to quell an internal investigation. Raleigh Police Chief Cassandra Deck-Brown tells WTVD that the incident is “being reviewed by the Raleigh Police Department Office of Professional Standards.”

Complicating matters are North Carolina laws that prevent the specific results of internal investigations from being made public. “The internal affairs process remains completely opaque and unavailable to average community members who have a complaint,” ACLU attorney Susanna Birdsong tells Indy Week. Moreover, North Carolina generally exempts police recordings from public records laws. So even if there is full body-camera footage of the incident in question, the Clarks might never get to see it.