Tag: hit&run

If you see something, maybe you should stop and think before you say something. Earlier this week, we published a story about the ways sex-trafficking myths and “See Something, Say Something” rhetoric are being deployed in a dangerous mix that doesn’t stop crime but does lead to a lot of discriminatory harassment. It was awfully thoughtful of Cindy McCain to so nicely serve as a case in point. In a February 4 interview with Arizona radio station KTAR News, McCain—wife of the late Sen. John McCain—said that she was at the Phoenix airport last week when she spotted a mother who was “a different ethnicity” from her child. Apparently, that didn’t sit right with McCain.

“Something didn’t click with me,” McCain told KTAR. “I went over the police and told them what I saw and they went over and questioned her and, by God, she was trafficking that kid. She was waiting for the guy who bought the child to get off an airplane.”

McCain said the moral of the story is “If you see something, say something.” That’s the same thing Marriott’s head said about its new anti-trafficking training program, and it’s the motto of a Homeland Security program designed to get people to spy on each other and report suspicious behavior to the feds.

But what McCain saw isn’t what she thought she saw. Police say they investigated her tip and found “no evidence of criminal conduct or child endangerment.”

After police disputed McCain’s radio claims, she tweeted: “At Phoenix Sky Harbor, I reported an incident that I thought was trafficking. I commend the police officers for their diligence. I apologize if anything else I have said on this matter distracts from ‘if you see something, say something.'”

McCain has long been one of the worst perpetrators of paranoid, clueless, and unhelpful “awareness”-raising around issues of sexual exploitation. (She tells people she got involved after seeing children in the basement of a fabric shop in India—the shopkeeper said it was his family—and for some reason deciding they must be child sex slaves. Over time, the number of “sets of eyes” she supposedly saw gazing up at her has grown, and now stands at 100 pairs of eyes, up from 40 in 2014 and simply “more than a family” in earlier tellings.)

McCain made “anti–sex trafficking” efforts a main mission of the McCain Institute, and she is now co-chair of the Arizona Governor’s Council on Human Trafficking.

FREE MINDS

“Culprits are sentenced to cultural erasure,” laments Lionel Schriver, in an essay dissecting the impulse to not just prevent targets of outrage from finding future work but to hide all of their past contributions to art, entertainment, and the cultural lexicon:

For reasons that escape me, artists’ misbehavior now contaminates the fruits of their labors, like the sins of the father being visited upon the sons. So it’s not enough to punish transgressors merely by cutting off the source of their livelihoods, turning them into social outcasts, and truncating their professional futures. You have to destroy their pasts. Having discovered the worst about your fallen idols, you’re duty-­bound to demolish the best about them as well.

Read the whole thing here.

FREE MARKETS

Stormy Daniels on strip-club labor laws. In a Los Angeles Times op-ed, Stormy Daniels argues against a recent Supreme Court of California decision that effectively says dancers at strip clubs must be counted as employees—not independent contractors, as is the norm around the country—unless they perform “work that is outside the usual course of the hiring entity’s business.”

The ruling addressed independent contractors generally, but it could have big implications for adult performers in Calfornia. “The work strippers do is clearly not outside the usual course of a strip club’s business,” writes Daniels. But mandating that they all be full employees and not independent contractors could ruin the flexibility, privacy, and other perks of the current system. “Strippers seeking strong workplace protections and good benefits are sincere and legitimate, but forcing all dancers to become employees is not the answer,” Daniels concludes.

QUICK HITS

• Everything’s a national security issue!

Russia was able to influence our election because they figured out that racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, and transphobia are America’s Achilles heel. These issues aren’t only civil rights — they’re also a matter of national security. We have to deal with that.

— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) February 6, 2019

• Jill Abramson, former executive editor of The New York Times, now faces plagiarism allegations over her new book. See more from Michael Moynihan.

• New York police officers are trying to scare people out of using the app Waze to find out about DUI checkpoints.

• Can Nevada authorities regulate pre-fight trash talk?

In F.A. Hayek’s 1988 book, The Fatal Conceit, the economist explained, “The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.” Unfortunately, writes Veronique de Rugy, politicians of both parties today imagine they can design quite a lot by successfully managing the nation’s health care, trade, and energy production, among other herculean tasks.

The recent push to centralize more of the economy—think about “Medicare-for-all” or “Buy American” requirements for infrastructure projects—comes even though we are still discovering all the ways in which prior efforts to direct economic activity have backfired. Consider the case of the Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act of 1978. This program within the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is still causing headaches today.

View this article.

The Kentucky State Police have charged former Raceland city clerk Rebecca Miller with fraudulent use of a credit card of $10,000 or more. Police say she ran up more than $16,000 on a city credit card for personal items, including tickets to see ventriloquist Jeff Dunham.

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio says Amazon workers should try to unionize because their employer is on the wrong side of history—although history suggests he’s the one who is out of step with the times.

“I think their stance on unionization reflects a different time,” de Blasio told reporters this week, according to The Wall Street Journal. “Now that people are more and more concerned about decent wages and benefits, I think Amazon’s gonna have to reconsider that.”

If de Blasio wanted to influence Amazon’s labor policies, he’s probably already missed his best chance to do it: while officials from New York City and New York State were negotiating to handover more than $3 billion in subsidies through a series of state-level tax credits and grants, along with city-level tax incentives.

Now that Amazon is heading to New York, though, de Blasio thinks the company can be convinced to cave to unionization—in the same way that public pressure helped convince the tech giant to up its minimum wage to $15 per hour last year. “Amazon felt a tremendous amount of pressure nationally and gave in on the $15 minimum wage before we got to this deal,” de Blasio told the Journal. “I felt strongly if they came here, the pressure to unionize deeply would win the day.”

Except, well, there’s not really a lot of evidence to support that idea.

For starters, the comparison to the $15 minimum wage is misleading. It wasn’t really public pressure that got Amazon to up what it pays its more than 250,000 American workers. It was good old supply and demand.

As New York Magazine put it in October: “With the unemployment rate sitting below 4 percent, and the holiday season on the horizon, U.S. retailers are in fierce competition for staff. Amazon plans to hire 100,000 seasonal employees—as does UPS, while FedEx is looking for 55,000. Meanwhile, Amazon’s retail competitors have been lifting their starting wages—with Target’s recently rising to $15, Costco’s to $14, and Walmart’s to $11.”

And, as Wired noted around the same time, putting more money in the pockets of Amazon workers makes a lot of sense for Amazon, since many of those employees will end up spending that extra cash on items purchased from—yep—Amazon.

If widespread public criticism of Amazon’s low pay was a factor in the company’s decision to hike wages, it’s really best to think of that as an additional factor in labor market. In other words, in a tight labor market where workers have more leverage in choosing where they want to work, negative press about Amazon might encourage some workers to choose not to work there—and, by extension, the goodwill generated by stories about higher pay (as well as the higher pay itself) gives Amazon an advantage in landing scarce labor.

When it comes to unionization at Amazon, though, de Blasio might want to take a look at the rate of unionization over the past 35 years before he goes spouting off about non-unionized workplaces being an anachronism.

There are surely many reasons for the decline in private sector unionization in America, but most of them have to do with the fact that jobs today provide better pay, shorter hours, and greater degrees of physical safety than during the peak times of unionization. Once you’ve checked those boxes, there’s fewer reasons for workers to join a union and limit their individual control over employment issues.

Instead of trying to insert his political views into the relationship between Amazon and its employees, de Blasio should have done a better job of preventing Amazon from raiding New York’s treasury.

The woman who accused Virginia Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax of sexually assaulting her at the Democratic National Convention in 2004 has now come forward. Her name is Vanessa Tyson, and she is a professor at Scripps College.

In a statement released Wednesday, Tyson said that she had gone willingly with Fairfax to his hotel room, and did not mind when he started kissing her. But then he forced her to perform oral sex on him, using his superior strength to overpower her.

“What began as consensual kissing quickly turned into a sexual assault,” she said. “I cannot believe, given my obvious distress, that Mr. Fairfax thought this forced sexual act was consensual.”

Fairfax has denied that the encounter was anything but consensual.

“I wish [Tyson] no harm or humiliation, nor do I seek to denigrate her or diminish her voice,” he said. “But I cannot agree with a description of events that I know is not true.”

Fairfax has made two claims to support his side of the story. First, he said The Washington Post had declined to print the accusation due to inconsistencies in Tyson’s statements when she first approached them a year ago. Second, he said that Tyson appeared in a video in which she discussed her past as a sexual abuse victim, but did not specifically mention this incident.

Unfortunately for Fairfax, neither of these issues helps him. The Post released a story contradicting his claim—the paper didn’t run Tyson’s story because it couldn’t find any corroboration, not because she made misstatements. And the video concerns Tyson’s sexual abuse at the hands of her father, a different and very serious issue that could simply have seemed more relevant to Tyson when she decided to open up about her victimization.

This puts the people of Virginia—many of whom would like Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam to resign after it was revealed that he may have appeared in blackfack in his medical school yearbook—in quite a bind. What Northam is accused of is not nearly as bad as what Fairfax is accused of, though Fairfax has issued a more complete denial. (Northam initially apologized, then said he didn’t think it was him in the photo, and then admitted he once put on black makeup for a Michael Jackson costume.)

Many progressives, of course, take the position that we should always believe victims, which would mean that Fairfax must resign. If Democrats had gotten their way during the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, Christine Blasey Ford’s accusation of sexual assault likely would have been enough on its own to derail the judge’s nomination. Unfortunately, it seems even less likely in this case that we will discover additional information that could help the public decide who is telling the truth, since there was no one else involved in the Fairfax/Tyson incident (unlike the Ford/Kavanaugh incident).

Fairfax would be entitled to due process if he were to face charges for his behavior, but the court of public opinion does not offer similar protections. If it’s true that Fairfax committed a sexual assault for which he was never charged, he has no business serving as governor or lieutenant governor. At the same time, anyone accused of serious sexual misconduct should resign fom office, even without any additional evidence whatsoever to substantiate the accusation, does not seem like a particularly reasonable standard to which we should hold public officials. It’s a tough situation, and it’s not immediately clear to me what should happen next.

By the way, Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring—who is next in line to serve as governor, after Fairfax—has already admitted to appearing in blackface.

Insulting one’s prizefighting opponent is a tradition that reaches back to boxer Jack Johnson, was perfected by Muhammad Ali, and is now an accepted form of mental warfare in boxing and MMA fights. When Lennox Lewis called fellow black British boxer Frank Bruno an “Uncle Tom,” some invisible line of civility may have been crossed, but doing so never resulted in penalties for Lewis.

But an ugly brawl sparked by racial and religious insults after an Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) bout has Nevada regulators wondering if the time has finally come to put controls on pre-fight speech.

“I think it’s gotten to the point with certain unarmed combatants to where it’s become totally unacceptable,” said Nevada State Athletic Commission (NSAC) Executive Director Bob Bennett. “I definitely think, unequivocally, that’s something we need to take a more active role in and hold fighters accountable for their language,” writes Justin Park in his latest for Reason.

View this article.

Early adopters of new technologies are generally savvy to the fact that what they are buying is a work in progress. They are eager to try out a new technology for the fun of learning a bit about how it works and getting ahead of the curve as it is perfected. This process of social learning is apparently lost on the busybody editors of The New York Times.

On February 1, the editorial board ran an opinion piece warning the paper’s readers that the genetic screening test results provided by direct-to-consumer (DTC) genetic testing company 23andMe were not necessarily “clinically useful.” Well, whoever said that the test results were? Certainly not the company, which explicitly states, “Our tests do not diagnose any health conditions.” [Emphasis theirs]

To illustrate the alleged confusing uselessness of 23andMe’s testing, the Times editors then go through a long disquisition of how the company tests for only three variants in the BRCA1/2 genes that are associated with much higher risk of breast cancer. The editors correctly point out that there are many other mutations in the BRCA1/2 genes that increase the risk for breast cancer for which the company does not test.

Guess who else tells users of the limitations of the company’s BRCA1/2 screening tests? 23andMe. In my case, 23andMe reports:

Ronald, you do not have the three genetic variants we tested.

However, more than 1,000 variants in the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes are known to increase cancer risk, so you could still have a variant not included in this test. [Again, emphasis theirs] In addition, most cases of male breast cancer and prostate cancer are not caused by inherited variants, so men without a variant are still at risk of developing these cancers. It’s important to continue with any cancer screenings your healthcare provider recommends.

Folks who pony up $169 to companies like 23andMe are curious about how genetic testing works and what they might learn. Way back in 2011, the Times itself reported the results of a New England Journal of Medicine study that “found that people are not exactly desperate to be protected from information about their own bodies. Most people say they’ll pay for genetic tests even if the predictions are sometimes wrong, and most people don’t seem to be traumatized even when they receive bad news.” Later research bolsters the conclusion that users of genetic testing understand and handle what the tests tell them.

In a letter to the editor, 23andMe CEO Anne Wojcicki strikes back against the Times’ condescension. She points out that many customers who would otherwise not qualify for or afford BRCA screening tests have benefited through finding out their status.

But more importantly, Wojcicki argues, “We believe that consumers can learn about genetic information without the help of a medical professional, and we have the data to support that claim—specifically, user comprehension studies showing greater than 90 percent understanding of the concepts in our reports, including that a 0 variant or ‘negative’ result does not mean forgoing other recommended screenings.” She adds, “There are significant opportunities for all of us to have better health care, prevent disease and live better lives—but that comes from individuals actually being empowered to take more control of their health.”

Early adopters of DTC genetic testing are somewhat like the purchasers of Apple IIs who bored their friends by extolling the glories of Usenet newsgroups. By jumping into new technology markets early on, neophytes help companies refine and improve their products so that they become cheaper and more user friendly over time. That is exactly what is happening in genetics testing now. For example, I am awaiting the results of a whole genome sequencing I purchased on sale for $200 from Veritas Genetics.

So back off Times editors! Leave us amateur genetics nerds alone!

Disclosure: Just in case it’s not clear, I am a long time happy 23andMe customer.

For the first two years of President Donald Trump’s tenure, his administration has been the sole driver of federal trade policy. Whether setting tariffs or negotiating trade deals—like the rewrite of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) last year—Trump has been the one doing things and Congress has been mostly content to let it happen, with a few performative grumbles here and there.

Now, for a variety of reasons, Congress is set to play a bigger role on the trade front, whether it wants to or not. Doing so likely will expose a deep divide within the Republican Party—where one faction is trying to claw back congressional control in the trade sphere, while another seeks to hand yet more authority to the chief executive to write the rules for how America participates in the global economy.

Trump asked for the latter during Tuesday’s State of the Union address, calling specifically for Congress to pass the United States Reciprocal Trade Act. “If another country places an unfair tariff on an American product, we can charge them the exact same tariff on the exact same product that they sell to us,” Trump said.

As that explanation suggests, the bill would effectively give the president more excuses to raise trade barriers and impose tariffs, which are really just taxes paid by American importers. For example, the European Union currently charges 10 percent tariffs on cars imported from America but America charges only 2.5 percent on car imports from Europe. If the Reciprocal Trade Act were to become law, Trump could circumvent Congress and raise car tariffs to 10 percent—something that he’s already threatened to do via a different mechanism, and something that would be disastrous for American auto dealers and car-buyers.

The bill has other shortcomings too. It grants authority for the president to respond to “significantly higher tariffs” imposed by other countries, but does not define exactly how high those foreign tariffs must be—which would effectively give Trump and future presidents a blank check to crank up protectionism.

“You could drive a Mack truck through that loophole,” says Scott Lincicome, a trade lawyer and a scholar for the libertarian Cato Institute. “It seems pretty unlikely that, given recent events, the president wouldn’t exploit that authority if it was given to him.”

Indeed, Trump has already made use of the massive loophole in Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962. That law gave presidents the authority to impose tariffs for national security purposes but, importantly, did not define what counts as a matter of national security. Trump has used Section 232 to impose tariffs on steel and aluminum imports—including imports from close U.S. allies like Canada and Europe—under the gossamer-thin rationale that national security is served by increasing the price of imported metals.

Restricting Trump’s ability to continue abusing Section 232 is the aim of the other trade bill now circulating in Congress. As I detailed last week, a bipartisan group of lawmakers from the House and Senate have joined together to sponsor the Bicameral Congressional Trade Authority Act, which would give Congress the ability to block future Section 232 tariff proposals and would limit the definition of “national security” in the law.

The dueling bills are a telling representation of the Republican Party’s Janus-like stance on free trade at the moment. Aside from the “R” that appears next to their name, there is no overlap between the 18 Republicans who have sponsored the Reciprocal Trade Act, sponsored by Rep. Matt Duffy (R–Wis.), and the free-traders, like Sen. Pat Toomey (R–Pa.), backing the Bicameral Congressional Trade Authority Act.

“Senate Republicans are overwhelmingly in favor of free trade,” Toomey said last week. “I am very doubtful that [Duffy’s bill] will work, and fundamentally I think it’s a mistake to just grant this authority to the president. That’s the central problem.”

There’s plenty of other internal disagreements over policy within the Republican Party, on everything from fiscal policy to immigration, and from entitlements to foreign interventions. On trade, however, Republicans are faced with a difference of kind—not of degree. There is effectively no middle ground to be had between those who want to give the president greater power to levy tariffs and those who want to claw back the power he already has. Nor could there be, as the two opinions are not merely opposite policy prescriptions but are based on diametrically opposed views about how the power in Washington should be shared.

“You’ve got the principled, practical guys on the one side who want to limit tariff authority, and then on the other side it’s a group of hardcore Trump supporters who may be looking at this a matter of politics and not policy,” Lincicome says.

This deep division within the Republican Party will likely come to a head not over the tariff bills themselves, but in the upcoming debate over ratifying the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), the new NAFTA.

Though Trump often talks about the USMCA as if it is a done deal, it must be approved by Congress before taking effect. Its chances to pass have already been complicated by Democrats’ takeover of the House, but there is no indication that even a Republican-controlled Congress would pass the USMCA in its current form. Toomey, for example, is on the record as a “no” vote unless changes are made to do away with some of the deal’s protectionist elements, like the stringent barriers for importing automobiles built in Mexico.

Whichever trade bill emerges victorious is likely to be attached to the USMCA, assuming that the trade deal manages to get through Congress. And if either is going to pass this year, one half the GOP will have to prevail over the other.

Asked Wednesday what it would take for pro-trade Republicans to support Trump’s call for the passage of the Reciprocal Trade Act, Sen. Ron Johnson (R–Wisc.) tried to find the largely nonexistent middle ground.

“I certainly would like to see these things approved by Congress,” he said.

Told that the bill Trump wants passed seems designed specifically to circumvent Congress, he paused.

“Well,” Johnson said, “then I’d have a problem with that.”

President Donald Trump said in his State of the Union Address last night that he wants to stop the spread of HIV and AIDS in America within 10 years.

This morning, a Justice Department attorney announced he would try to stop a supervised injection site planned for Philadelphia that would help reduce both the spread of HIV among intravenous drug users and overdose deaths.

U.S. Attorney William McSwain of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania held a press conference Wednesday morning to announce he would be seeking a judicial review that might prevent a local nonprofit named Safehouse from moving forward with plans to build a center funded by private donations.

This nonprofit group is not attempting to force this building and program into the city. Philadelphia officials, including the city’s mayor, police commissioner, and district attorney, are all supportive of a supervised injection center, where intravenous drug users can be supervised by health workers and counseled about treatment options. Philadelphia has a serious problem with drug overdoses and public use, having seen more than 1,200 overdose deaths in 2017.

Other communities with high rates of overdose deaths and outdoor use, like Seattle and San Francisco, are also considering injection facilities. But the Justice Department says such facilities are illegal under federal law, and federal prosecutors have threatened legal actions if these cities move forward.

McSwain’s lawsuit is the first to issue more than just a warning. He’s filing a civil suit and seeking a declaration from the judge that operating an injection center would violate federal drug laws.

McSwain tells the Philadelphia Inquirer that the point here is to essentially scare Safehouse into dropping its plans so that he doesn’t have to prosecute those involved:

“We want to take an incremental, reasonable approach,” McSwain said in the interview. “We’re not interested in some sort of criminal confrontation or drama or trying to be heavy-handed. We think it serves everyone’s interests for the federal court to issue a declaration as to whether this proposed site is illegal or not.”

It is likely that a 1986 federal law will prove central to the case ahead. Known colloquially as the “crack-house statute,” the law makes it a felony punishable by up to 20 years in prison to knowingly open or maintain any place for the purpose of manufacturing, distributing or using controlled substances.

You know what would be a more reasonable approach? Allow Philadelphia to experiment and see if this actually helps. Cities outside the U.S. have had considerable success operating supervised injection facilities, which serve as key hubs for referring drug users into treatment (if they want it), reducing the spread of communicable disease, and otherwise helping city residents manage their addictions in a safe environment.

Last night, after Trump declared he wanted to eliminate the spread of HIV in 10 years, I noted that the administration’s punitive approach to the opioid crisis is a barrier to achieving such a goal. This is a perfect example. A supervised injection site would not only prevent overdose deaths—it would also reduce the spread of HIV and hepatitis by providing clean needles, and it would allow users who have those diseases but don’t know it to get treatment and take preventative measures. A supervised injection facility might not solve Philadelphia’s decades-long heroin crisis, but it’s highly unlikely to make it worse.

Embattled Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam has signed a huge incentive package aimed at online retailer Amazon that could see the company get millions in taxpayer-funded grants.

On Tuesday, the Richmond-Times Dispatch reported that Northam signed Senate Bill 1255, which creates a new “Major Headquarters Workforce Grant Fund” that will make available $550 million in grants to any “qualified e-commerce company” that invests at least $2 billion in an Arlington County, Virginia headquarters, and adds a minimum of 25,000 jobs paying an average of $150,000 a year.

Should this “qualified e-commerce company” add up to 37,580 jobs at its new Arlington headquarters, it could receive an additional $200 million in subsidies, bringing the grand total of taxpayer assistance authorized by the bill to $750 million.

The intended recipient of the bill is obviously Amazon, which announced plans to add 25,000 jobs at a new Arlington headquarters complex in November of last year.

That same month, Northam publicly released a “Memorandum of Understanding” between the Virginia state government and the e-commerce giant, promising the company an identical deal to what the governor signed today. That memorandum also included a promise of $295 million in state infrastructure investments in and around Amazon’s new headquarters.

Offering massive subsidies to companies as a way of luring jobs and investment is hardly a practice unique to Virginia, although this specific proposal to award Amazon nearly a $1 billion in cash payments—as opposed to tax credits or abatements—is somewhat unusual.

The $3 billion in government incentives offered to Amazon to set up another 25,000-person headquarters in New York City, for instance, were mostly city and state tax breaks.

A bill ratifying Northam’s Memorandum of Understanding with the online retailer flew through the state legislature. The state senate passed the bill in a lopsided 35-to-5 vote. The state’s House of Delegates approved the bill with an equally uneven 83-to-16 vote.

No one was more pleased with the signing of the bill today than its sole recipient.

“This is an investment in the growth of Virginia. It will help diversify the economy and serve as a catalyst for drawing in other businesses and sought-after jobs,” said Amazon spokesperson Jill Kerr to the Times-Dispatch.

The subsidy bill signed into law by Northam today, while sizable, is far less than some of the other subsidy deals offered by other states and municipalities in their desperate bid to lure Amazon to town.

One of the last acts of Chris Christie’s tenure as governor of New Jersey was to sign a bill greenlighting $5 billion in incentives should Amazon set up shop in the Garden State. Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan floated a similarly sized $5 billion incentive package in January 2018.

The fact that Amazon passed on these more generous bids suggests that the subsidies signed by Northam today were not all that necessary.

“At the end of the day, it suggests that even New York City and Virginia and Nashville didn’t really need to offer those subsidies, because Amazon is chasing other factors,” Michael Farren, a research fellow at the Mercatus Center, a free market think tank housed at George Mason University, told Reason‘s Eric Boehm back in November 2018.

(Amazon was awarded $102 million in state and local incentives for adding a smaller, 5,000-person headquarters in Nashville, Tennessee.)

Certainly, one would think that a company capable of hiring 25,000 people at an average salary of $150,000 would be the last entity to need taxpayer support. The money Virginia taxpayers will be spending on Amazon either means fewer dollars for genuine public services, or higher taxes for the state’s residents.

Northam is receiving a lot of heat right now for a photo in his medical school yearbook showing a person in blackface standing next to a person in a KKK costume. Northam has forcefully denied being in that picture, but has admitted to wearing blackface during a 1984 dance competition.

These revelations have spurred calls for Northam to resign, something the governor has so far resisted.

His signing over of as much as $750 million in taxpayer subsidies to one of the most successful private companies in the world is a reminder of how terrible politicians can be even when going about the normal business of policy-making.