Tag: hit&run

The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled in a 5–4 decision to let Alabama to move forward with an execution after state prison officials refused to allow a condemned Muslim inmate access to an imam in his last moments.

Ruling that the inmate, Dominique Ray, had waited too long to file his petition for relief, the Court’s conservative majority reversed a stay on the upcoming execution imposed by the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals. The federal appellate court halted the execution Thursday after finding that there was a substantial likelihood that Ray’s First Amendment rights had been violated when officials refused to let his imam be present in the execution chamber.

Alabama officials appealed the ruling to the Supreme Court that same day.

The Alabama prison typically allows a Christian chaplain, also a prison employee, in the execution chamber, where the chaplain may stand near inmates and pray with them. But for security reasons the prison does not allow non-employees into the chamber, and it refused to make an exception for Ray’s imam.

Justice Elena Kagan, in a dissent joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, and Sonia Sotomayor, wrote that “given the gravity of the issue presented here, I think [the majority’s] decision profoundly wrong.” She continued (citation omitted):

“The clearest command of the Establishment Clause,” this Court has held, “is that one religious denomination cannot be officially preferred over another.” But the State’s policy does just that. Under that policy, a Christian prisoner may have a minister of his own faith accompany him into the execution chamber to say his last rites. But if an inmate practices a different religion—whether Islam, Judaism, or any other—he may not die with a minister of his own faith by his side. That treatment goes against the Establishment Clause’s core principle of denominational neutrality.

Ray was sentenced to death for the 1995 rape and murder of a 15-year-old girl.

Democratic socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.) today introduced a House resolution outlining her long-awaited Green New Deal. The resolution, as Reason‘s Ron Bailey reported earlier today, cites climate change concerns as justification for a plan that would remake the U.S. economy over the next 10 years.

The resolution’s aims include “overhauling transportation systems in the United States to eliminate pollution and 19 greenhouse gas emissions from the transportation sector as much as is technologically feasible.” According to an overview of the resolution, this will be accomplished, in part, by “build[ing] out highspeed rail at a scale where air travel stops becoming necessary.”

In other words, the Green New Deal wants to make commercial air travel obsolete. Is this in any way feasible? The short answer is no. “It’s actually probably even dumber than it seems,” says Baruch Feigenbaum, assistant director of transportation policy at the Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes this website.

Paul Blair, director of strategic initiatives at Americans for Tax Reform, was even blunter. “The Green New Deal reads like word vomit from a 13-year-old child asked to scribble out their bold new thoughts for a radically different America than we have today,” Blair said in a email to Reason. “This includes the phasing out of American air travel.”

From both a financial and practical standpoint, replacing planes with high-speed rail lines makes little sense. For one thing, “high-speed rail projects cost billions and billions,” Feigenbaum says. Consider the proposed Texas line between Dallas and Houston, which could cost as much as $20 billion. Both cities, notably, are in the same state, separated by less than 300 miles. Replacing air travel with high-speed rail would mean lines connecting every major city in the country, at least. “The amount of money you’d actually need to build these lines would be so far in the trillions, I don’t see how you would possibly get it done,” Feigenbaum says.

Ocasio-Cortez, though, doesn’t seem to care about the Green New Deal’s fiscal cost. She told Business Insider last month that Modern Monetary Theory—which says the government can essentially print and spend as much money as it wants, regardless of budget deficits or national debt—should “absolutely” be “a larger part of our conversation” about paying for her plan.

Putting this dubious reasoning to the side, her goal of eliminating air travel still makes no sense. “The reason why people take air travel is generally because it’s fast,” Feigenbaum says, explaining that there are very few corridors where rail travel could realistically compete with planes. “If you’re going across the country,” he adds, then “obviously high-speed rail is not going to be compatible with air travel.”

And it certainly wouldn’t be too effective if you wanted to travel to, say, Hawaii. A high-speed rail between the West Coast and Hawaii would require underground tunneling, which would itself cost an astronomical amount. “I can’t think of a number that’s high enough,” Feigenbaum says. “You’re talking about more than trillions, I think, in order to build a line.”

Sen. Mazie Hirono (D–Hawaii) seems to realize the impracticality of ending air travel. “That would be pretty hard for Hawaii,” she said of Ocasio-Cortez’s plan, according to Fox News’ Chad Pergram.

There’s another issue. Truly replacing air travel with high-speed rail lines would require connecting all the countless cities in the U.S. that, while they wouldn’t be classified as major, still have airports. Feigenbaum pointed to Casper, Wyoming, and Provo, Utah. Both have populations under 500,000. “Are we really going to build high-speed rail to places like [these]?” wonders Feigenbaum.

In fact, there are more than 5,000 public airports in the U.S. It’s hard to imagine the planning and money that would go into connecting even half of them with high-speed rail lines, or serving the hundreds of millions of people who fly in the U.S. each year. “To suggest that it’s even remotely possible to transition our transportation system in this way, to handle not only the capacity of air travel but get near its efficiency is a pipe dream,” says Blair.

Considering that California officials have proven themselves incompetent when it comes to constructing a high-speed line through that state, a similar project on a much larger scale would probably be disastrous. The California rail is “a waste of money” that’s “ruining farms and highways, and will never work,” Blair explains.

“That’s what Democrats want to take national,” he adds, “the abysmal failure of boondoggles that shackle taxpayers to the pipe dreams of socialists with no concern for its failures right here in America.”

Ocasio-Cortez has admitted that completely eliminating air travel within the next 10 years might not be possible.

Still, Feigenbaum suggests Ocasio-Cortez and her allies in Congress have shown their ignorance in this area. “The folks who are proposing [the Green New Deal] don’t really know much about transportation,” he says. “It’s more designed for political purposes than it is for actual implementation.”

Sen. Kirsten Gillbrand (D­–N.Y.), one of several contenders for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, weighed in on the controversy surrounding Virginia Lt. Governor Justin Fairfax (D), who stands accused of sexually assaulting a woman named Vanessa Tyson in 2004. Gillibrand tweeted:

I support Dr. Tyson. She showed enormous courage in coming forward, and her very credible claims require investigation. In this country, institutional bias stacks against survivors, for the powerful. We have to support survivors first so their claims can be fully investigated.

— Kirsten Gillibrand (@SenGillibrand) February 7, 2019

Note Gillibrand’s caution: She leaves room for the possibility of doubt, or for an investigation to reach a different conclusion. She offers Tyson “support.” Not belief.

This is a bit out of character. In other tweets about various sexual misconduct accusations, Gillibrand has offered not just support for the alleged victims but a kind of faith that they are telling the truth—and an insistence that everyone else do likewise. She has repeatedly stated that we must “believe women.” Here are just a few examples:

I encourage you to keep raising your voices. Your stories matter. We will listen. We will believe you.

— Kirsten Gillibrand (@SenGillibrand) December 7, 2017

The fundamental questions we must answer right now:

Do we value women?
Do we believe women?
Do we give them the opportunity to tell their story? To be heard?
Will we ensure they get the justice they deserve?

We must fight to be a country that answers, “Yes,” every time.

— Kirsten Gillibrand (@SenGillibrand) September 20, 2018

Senate Republicans aren’t even pretending to consider Dr. Ford’s testimony. Rushing a vote sends a clear signal: They don’t value survivors. They don’t believe women. https://t.co/gwQUr9b3Ci

— Kirsten Gillibrand (@SenGillibrand) September 25, 2018

When Dr. Blasey Ford testifies, I’ll be there. I’ll have her back, and so will millions of women all across this country. America’s women are listening, we’re paying attention, and we believe her. pic.twitter.com/34NwVpI4cp

— Kirsten Gillibrand (@SenGillibrand) September 26, 2018

Women are watching as the most powerful people in this country disbelieve, distrust and minimize their experiences.

We need to answer this: Are we a country that values women? Do we believe women when they tell us about sexual trauma? Do the stories of survivors matter to us?

— Kirsten Gillibrand (@SenGillibrand) October 4, 2018

In fact, immediately following her tweet about Fairfax, Gillibrand lamented that we generally do not believe survivors:

I said this last night to @jonlovett, and here’s why: Institutions—colleges, the military, the NFL—don’t believe survivors, and shame or retaliate against survivors, to protect their own. We have to support survivors and take allegations seriously or there will never be justice.

— Kirsten Gillibrand (@SenGillibrand) February 7, 2019

Gillibrand is correct about the Fairfax situation: Offering support for purported victims of sexual misconduct is the right thing to do, and should be noncontroversial. Everyone should take their claims seriously, show them respect, and refrain from ignoring or dismissing them out of hand. Many survivors’ advocacy groups are not satisfied with mere support, of course. They proceed from the flawed notion that there are virtually no false accusations of sexual assault, and insist that victims should automatically be believed. This is a far less reasonable proposition, and one that has made the adjudication of sexual misconduct—particularly on college campuses—more prone to overreach.

What I’d like to know from Gillibrand: Does she stand by her insistence that we believe every accusation, or is her position now that we support accusers while their claims are investigated? Because those are two very different things.

A federal court has ruled in favor of a Christian student group’s right to set certain parameters for leadership roles after the University of Iowa stripped the group of its credentials in response to accusations of discrimination.

The Business Leaders in Christ club seeks to provide aspiring business professionals in the Tippie College of Business with guidance on how to lead professional lives that are in keeping with their faith. Should a student decide that they wish to hold a leadership role in the group, they must agree to adhere to certain Christian principles, which include abstaining from sexual activity outside of a marriage between one man and one woman.

In 2016, a former member filed a complaint alleging that they were ineligible to become vice president because they were openly gay. The University of Iowa then revoked the club’s status as an official on-campus club pending a change to the language of their charter. Business Leaders in Christ responded by filing a lawsuit against the university, claiming violations of their constitutional rights as well as the Higher Education Act and Iowa Human Rights Act.

On Wednesday, Judge Stephanie M. Rose of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Iowa filed an injunction against the university barring it from revoking the club’s credentials.

Becket, which is a religious liberty law firm, said the university had placed 32 groups on probation for requiring certain beliefs of students in leadership roles. All of the groups placed on probation were religious. Additionally, Becket argued that other kinds of student groups were allowed to be selective. Rose’s decision also mentioned that some of the non-religious groups on campus were allowed to create selective leadership and membership requirements based on religious views, race, and gender.

Because of the unequal enforcement, Rose concluded that the university’s actions violated the First Amendment.

As left-wing populists and progressives ascend in the Democratic Party, they are laying down new dogma, none more heartfelt than the idea that billionaires are evil, rotten, and not to be tolerated. For the Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warrens, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortezes of the world, billionaires are what witches were to Salem congregationalists and kulaks were to Lenin: a threat to they system that must be eliminated.

Ocasio-Cortez’s economic policy adviser Dan Riffle has changed his Twitter name to “Every Billionaire Is a Policy Failure.” Lefty blogger Tom Scocca declares “Billionaires are bad. We should presumptively get rid of billionaires” (he graciously adds, “they may go on living…[but] they must not be allowed to possess a billion dollars”). A research director at the proggy Roosevelt Institute says simply, “We do not need billionaires.”

Then there’s former Clinton administration Labor Secretary Robert Reich, who believes that with great wealth comes great culpability.

Anyone who has a billion dollars either exploited a monopoly that should have been broken up, got inside information unavailable to other investors, bribed some politicians, or inherited the money from their parents (who did one of the above). https://t.co/pzVOxr1K7m

— Robert Reich (@RBReich) February 7, 2019

Reich links to a column by The New York Times‘ Farhad Manjoo with the eliminationist title “Abolish Billionaires: A radical idea is gaining adherents on the left. It’s the perfect way to blunt tech-driven inequality.” The column makes two large points that undergird the anti-billionaire movement. First is the idea that nobody deserves or needs a billion dollars. “Why should anyone have a billion dollars,” asks Manjoo, “why should anyone be proud to brandish their billions, when there is so much suffering in the world?” Second is the notion that “inequality is the defining economic condition of the tech age.”

Did, say, Paul McCartney (net worth: $1.2 billion) make his pile through theft, as Robert Reich would contend? Would there be less suffering in the world if his money is expropriated and transferred to the wretched of the earth via higher taxes rather than through his own charitable donations and investments? Probably not, especially when you think about how much suffering, especially in the developing world, is the direct result of government action. More important, the creation of billionaires is a lower-order effect of a relatively free-market economy. Recall Joseph Schumpeter on this:

The capitalist engine is first and last an engine of mass production which unavoidably also means production for the masses. . . . It is the cheap cloth, the cheap cotton and rayon fabric, boots, motorcars and so on that are the typical achievements of capitalist production, and not as a rule improvements that would mean much to the rich man. Queen Elizabeth owned silk stockings. The capitalist achievement does not typically consist in providing more silk stockings for queens but in bringing them within reach of factory girls.

Schumpeter’s basic description helps to explain the ubiquity of all sorts of technology, from cell phones to pharmaceuticals, all around the world. Because of massive increases in global trade, more people have more stuff and are living longer than ever before. If one indirect consequence of this is that there are more billionaires than there used to be, so be it. It’s become fashionable to assert that inequality is back at Gilded Age levels and that the concentration of power and wealth and everything good and decent is in smaller and smaller hands. This is simply not a good description of the world. For the first time in history, report researchers at the Brookings Institution:

The majority of humankind is no longer poor or vulnerable to falling into poverty. By our calculations, as of this month, just over 50 percent of the world’s population, or some 3.8 billion people, live in households with enough discretionary expenditure to be considered “middle class” or “rich.”

About the same number of people are living in households that are poor or vulnerable to poverty. So September 2018 marks a global tipping point. After this, for the first time ever, the poor and vulnerable will no longer be a majority in the world. Barring some unfortunate global economic setback, this marks the start of a new era of a middle-class majority.

Income inequality among countries has been declining as well. The GINI coefficient, a measure of income inequality, of 146 countries that account for 95 percent of global production, declined from 67 percent in 1988 to 57 percent in 2015. Over the same time frame in the United States, it rose from 35 percent to 38 percent, an increase, to be sure, but a relatively modest one. China and India saw bigger increases, but the growth in inequality within those countries is more than overwhelmed by the absolute increases in wealth, especially among the poorest inhabitants. Click through image below for a fully functioning graph.

Within the United States, both the right and the left like to tell a story about wage stagnation, the end of upward mobility, and the death of the American Dream. Conservatives will tell you it’s all liberals’ fault and you need to roll with Trump or the Republicans if you want to make America great again. Liberals make the opposite case and push wealth taxes, Medicare for All, Free College for All, Guaranteed Jobs for All, and more. Both sides are describing a false version of reality.

As Russ Roberts has shown, mobility is alive and well in the United States. The most stunning indicator comes from a study that looks at income changes for individuals between 1980 and 2014. If you simply measure statistical averages, writes Roberts,

the average income of the top 1%…went from $189,000 to $843,000, which seems to confirm the view that most of the gains from economic growth go to the richest of the rich while people in the middle or the bottom make no progress at all. But the people in the top 1% in 2014 are not the same people in 1980. What happens when you follow the same people?… The richest people in 1980 actually ended up poorer, on average, in 2014. Like the top 20%, the top 1% in 1980 were also poorer on average 34 years later in 2014. The gloomiest picture of the American economy is not accurate. The rich don’t get all the gains. The poor and middle class are not stagnating.

As libertarian economist Steve Horwitz writes, over the past 45 years, the consumption patterns of the poor and rich have become more similar. That’s a point that gets lost if you’re fixated on people in the top 0.001 percent:

Looking at consumption rather than income enables us to see both the absolute gains of poor US households and the narrowing of the gap with the wealthy. Poor US households are more likely to have basic appliances than the average household of the 1970s, and those appliances are of much higher quality. Together these three points offer a much more optimistic view of the degree of inequality and the ability of the poor to become rich. The picture is not all rosy and a final section discusses the relevance of housing, health care, and education costs to this argument.

Neither Horwitz nor Roberts are panglossian; each details areas (particularly housing, education, and health care) in which outcomes could be vastly improved, typically by moving in a more free-market direction. As Schumpeter might put it, capitalism might make more billionaires, but it’s achievement is creating many more things that virtually everyone can afford.

“Abolish Billionaires” is a smart slogan, but that’s all it is. Figuratively lopping the heads off of the richest of the rich will not make life easier for the poor and dispossessed, and it won’t increase economic growth and living standards. It might sate the bloodlust of left-wing populists for a while, but certainly that outcome can be purchased for lower cost.

Nearly a dozen Democrats are already running for president. The highlights so far include an interview about immigration livestreamed from a dental chair, a former Harvard professor popping a beer like jes’ plain folks on New Year’s Eve, and a draconian former prosecutor pledging her allegiance to Wakanda. Democrats are tripping over each other to pitch Medicare for All, Free College for All, Guaranteed Jobs for All, and laying taxes on wealth as well as income.

And then there’s Howard Schultz.

The former CEO of Starbucks is considering a run for president as a “centrist independent.” He says that the national debt threatens economic growth, that we shouldn’t demonize successful entrepreneurs, and that the government can’t be all things to all people.

That brought public hate, contempt, and character assassination from every conceivable angle.

It’s not just anti-globalist lefties on the attack. The New York Times’ op-ed page says he’s narcissistic, delusional, and fanatical. His potential run, his critics claim, would be nothing short of “reckless idiocy.”

But Schultz’s belief that neither major party represents America is widely shared. A plurality of Americans don’t identify with either party. And nearly three-quarters of us think the country is headed in the wrong direction, which helps to explain why neither Hillary Clinton nor Donald Trump won a majority of the popular vote in 2016.

The two-party duopoly and its supporters in the media understand how widely disliked they are, which is why they want to kneecap anyone who isn’t on Team Red or Team Blue.

You don’t have to agree with Schultz to understand that having more voices and ideas on the table at this point in the election cycle is a good thing—especially when you consider the alternatives.

Click here for full text, credits, and downloadable versions.

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An Arkansas state senator is calling for people to boycott a local concert venue after the business used an image of him feasting on an infant to promote an upcoming show.

On Tuesday evening, Christopher Farris Terry, an event promotor for Vino’s, a brew pub, pizzeria, and concert venue in Little Rock, shared a flyer on a Facebook event page promoting an upcoming May show by New Orleans metal band Eyehategod. Next to the logo of the band, and beneath information on the date and time of the show, is a poorly photoshopped image of state Sen. Jason Rapert (R–Conway) sinking large, bestial fangs into a human baby.

“My job as a promoter for any event I am hosting is to create buzz and get people excited about acts that are coming,” said Terry in written responses to Reason‘s questions. The use of Rapert’s image, he says, was satirical commentary on the senator’s recent push to restrict abortion access in Arkansas.

Rapert was apparently not amused. Several hours after the flyer was published on social media, the senator shared a Facebook post of his own denouncing the “extreme liberals” who created this “wicked and evil depiction” of him, and demanding that it be taken down.

“They use my image on an event without my permission and they depict me ‘biting a baby’ in my mouth,” wrote Rapert. “I call on Vinos in Little Rock to cancel this event and apologize for such a disrespectful image that shows the dehumanization of babies lives,” said the senator in a post that urged a wider boycott of entire pizza joint.

Rapert has long been a controversial politician. In December, he was suspended from Twitter over anti-Muslim comments he made on the site. Rapert was also instrumental in getting a Ten Commandments monument placed at the Arkansas State Capitol. Both the ACLU and the Satanic Temple—a religious organization—have sued over the statue, claiming it is a violation of the First Amendment’s religious liberty protections.

So far, it appears that Rapert has failed to win the public’s support for a boycott of Vino’s. The comments on his Tuesday Facebook post are largely from people saying they’re eager to attend the Eyehategod show or otherwise asking why Rapert, a staunch pro-life Republican, is eating a baby.

Terry tells Reason that the restaurant has received a wave of visitors expressing their support for the business.

The offending flyer has been removed from Facebook event page promoting Vino’s Eyehategod show, but other than that, Terry says that the show is going ahead as scheduled.

“Honestly, if the show were cancelled, it would just get moved to a bigger venue,” he tells Reason. “It would have to be bigger from all the publicity Rapert has caused. So, we thank him!”

An Arizona border city has officially condemned the federal government’s unwanted implementation of razor wire on the border fence separating the town from Mexico.

According to the resolution unanimously passed yesterday by the seven members of the Nogales, Arizona, City Council, “placing coiled concertina wire strands on the ground is typically only found in a war, battlefield, or prison setting, and not in an urban setting.” Such wire, in addition to generally being banned by the city code, is “designed to inflict serious bodily injury or death,” the resolution claims. Putting it “in the immediate proximity” of Nogales residents is “inhuman.” As a result, Nogales is telling the federal government to immediately remove the razor wire that’s currently within its city limits.

The wire started going up in November, after President Donald Trump sent troops to the border to aid Customs and Border Protection (CPB) agents. Sending the military to secure the border with razor wire didn’t make a whole lot of sense at the time, as Reason‘s Eric Boehm explained.

That apparently didn’t stop the military from putting up even more razor wire in Nogales on Saturday. Photos published by Nogales International and other outlets show that in some areas, there are now as many as six rows of wire covering the border fence:

The Nogales City Council unanimously approves Mayor Garino’s resolution to tell the federal government to take down the razor wire. Catch our story tonight at 10. #News4Tucson pic.twitter.com/QEsXWYKXQY

— Eric Fink (@EricMillerFink) February 7, 2019

Some locals were not pleased. “I don’t know what to say, I don’t think it’s good,” José Corralez, a 54-year-old taxi driver, told Nogales International. “In Nogales we are used to seeing the federal government make decisions about our surroundings,” added Evan Kory, whose family owns several stores in the area, to the Arizona Daily Star. “But the razor wire was way more aggressive than anything we had seen, which scared me. It felt like it was out of our hands as a border community. You feel powerless, like your voices aren’t heard,” Kory said.

Yesenea Leal, who owns a store right next to the fence, suggested the wire isn’t even working. “It’s all the same,” she told Nogales International. “They’re going to jump,” Leal added , showing the outlet a photo of a carpet that someone had thrown over the border fence to avoid the wire.

“This is overkill,” Nogales Mayor Arturo Garino told the Washington Post, suggesting that the fence itself should be enough. “It’s way over the top.”

Garino has perhaps been the town’s most outspoken advocate against the razor wire. “Aesthetically pleasing—it’s not. It’s very bad. It’s not good for business, it’s not good for what we’re trying to create, a business-friendly community here in Nogales,” he explained to the Associated Press.

Garino met with three CBP agents yesterday to discuss the matter. He claims they defended the razor wire by referencing the “rapists, murderers and drug dealers” who are supposedly trying to cross the border. “But that was strange, because the police chief, assistant chief and deputy city manager were there, and we don’t know of those things happening,” Garino told the Post. “I don’t know where they’re getting their stats.”

So why the extra wire? CBP said in a statement to the AP that an unidentified party requested “additional support in high-risk urban areas commonly exploited by criminal smuggling organizations.”

Councilman Marcelino Varona, Jr. has a different theory. The wire was installed “just to make a point at our expense,” he said at the city council meeting yesterday, according to Nogales International.

Garino, meanwhile, claims that of the feds don’t comply with the resolution, the city might file a lawsuit, reported the AP.

Progressive firebrand Naomi Klein once declared that climate change has given the world “the most powerful argument against unfettered capitalism” ever. She added that progressive values and policies are “currently being vindicated, rather than refuted, by the laws of nature.”

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.) has taken that message to heart. Today the democratic socialist released the text of a resolution “recognizing the duty of the Federal Government to create a Green New Deal.” It invokes climate concerns to urge Congress to adopt a sweeping plan to totally remake the American economy.

There’s a lot to consider in this resolution, but let’s for the time being focus on the goal of “meeting 100 percent of the power demand in the United States through clean, renewable, and zero-emission energy sources” by 2030. The resolution is light on fiscal details, so let’s consider the question of how achieving this goal would cost.

As it happens, a team of Stanford engineers led by Mark Jacobson outlined just such a plan back in 2015. Jacobson’s repowering plan would involve installing 335,000 onshore wind turbines; 154,000 offshore wind turbines; 75 million residential photovoltaic systems; 2.75 commercial photovoltaic systems; 46,000 utility-scale photovoltaic facilities; 3,600 concentrated solar power facilities with onsite heat storage; and an extensive array of underground thermal storage facilities.

Assuming steep declines in the costs of each form of renewable electric power generation, just running the electrical grid using only renewable power would still cost roughly $7 trillion by 2030. The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation calculated that the total cost of an earlier version of Jacobson’s scheme would amount to $13 trillion. And based on how fast it has taken to install energy generation infrastructure in the past, Jacobson’s repowering plan would require a sustained installation rate that is more than 14 times the U.S. average over the last 55 years and more than six times the peak rate.

Where is the money to pay for this massive transformation going to come from? The headline over at The Week sums it up pretty well: “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wants to pay for her Green New Deal by essentially printing more money.”

More on the Green New Deal proposal later.

The New York City Police Department (NYPD) wants Google to trash a feature on one of its apps that lets users report drunk-driving checkpoints. Not so fast, responds Google.

The application in question is Waze, a community-based navigation app that allows users to report car accidents, traffic jams, and police activity. While there isn’t a specific feature that lets people report checkpoints meant to catch intoxicated offenders, users can leave comments specifying the type of police activity, according to The New York Times.

“Individuals who post the locations of DWI checkpoints may be engaging in criminal conduct since such actions could be intentional attempts to prevent and/or impair the administration of the DWI laws and other relevant criminal and traffic laws,” reads a February 2, 2019 cease-and-desist letter to Google from Ann Prunty, the NYPD’s acting deputy commissioner in charge of legal matters. “The posting of such information for public consumption is irresponsible since it only serves to aid impaired and intoxicated drivers to evade checkpoints and encourage reckless driving. Revealing the location of checkpoints puts those drivers, their passengers, and the general public at risk,” Prunty adds in the letter, which was first reported by StreetsBlog NYC.

I shouldn’t have to point this out, but posting that information does not “only” aid intoxicated drivers. It’s a help to any sober driver who wants to avoid the delays and hassle that these Fourth Amendment–shredding checkpoints impose. Indeed, there’s a good chance that most of the people using the information are sober. “If you are impaired, you are not going to pay attention to that information,” Helen Witty, national president of Mothers Against Drunk Driving, tells the Times.

The NYPD’s concerns are shared by the National Sheriff’s Association, which emphasizes on its website: “There is NO legitimate reason for Waze to have the police locator feature!” In addition to the drunk-driving aspect of the app, the organization says Waze tracks users’ movements (though that’s sort of the point of navigation apps). The site adds that this information “can be shared with anyone including gang members and terrorist!” (Just the one terrorist, apparently.)

In regard to drunk-driving checkpoints, the NYPD claims it “will pursue all legal remedies to prevent the continued posting of this irresponsible and dangerous information,” though Prunty does not detail how. The department also doesn’t say how posting DWI checkpoint information is illegal. That might be because it’s not. “Much as the police may not like it, the public has a First Amendment right to warn others about police activity,” the American Civil Liberties Union tells the New York Post.

Google, for its part, seems to have zero interest in complying with the NYPD’s demand, which the Post notes could also apply Waze’s speed camera-reporting feature. “Safety is a top priority when developing navigation features at Google,” the company said in a statement, according to WPIX. “We believe that informing drivers about upcoming speed traps allows them to be more careful and make safer decisions when they’re on the road.”

Google is not likely to change its stance, reports The Verge. While pressure from the Senate prompted Apple to remove some drunk-driving checkpoint apps in 2011, Google refused to fold. “Chances are, the NYPD’s letter will not be the thing that makes the company change its mind,” The Verge points out.

Bonus links: Some local governments really don’t like it when their traffic authority gets challenged. In 2017, Reason‘s Eric Boehm wrote about an Oregon man who researched the effectiveness of red light cameras after his wife got a ticket. The Oregon State Board of Examiners for Engineering and Land Surveying responded by fining him $500 for practicing engineering without a license. After he sued, he got a refund.