Tag: hit&run

During his State of the Union address on Tuesday night, President Donald Trump decried socialism, claiming that the U.S. “will never be a socialist country.” Avowed democratic socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) had an interesting response.

Trump was discussing the situation in Venezuela, where his administration has recognized opposition leader Juan Guaidó as the nation’s new president, rather than Nicolás Maduro. “We stand with the Venezuelan people in their noble quest for freedom—and we condemn the brutality of the Maduro regime, whose socialist policies have turned that nation from being the wealthiest in South America into a state of abject poverty and despair,” Trump said.

“Here, in the United States, we are alarmed by new calls to adopt socialism in our country. America was founded on liberty and independence—not government coercion, domination, and control,” he added. “We are born free, and we will stay free. Tonight, we renew our resolve that America will never be a socialist country.”

As Trump was discussing socialism, the camera panned to Sanders, who seemed to have a frown on his face:

President Donald Trump slams socialism: “America was founded on liberty and Independence and not government coercion, domination, and control. We are born free and we will stay free.”

“America will never be a socialist country.”

Bernie Sanders has a massive frown on his face pic.twitter.com/dY0D2J2CKJ

— Ryan Saavedra (@RealSaavedra) February 6, 2019

Here’s a still shot:

The Vermont independent and potential 2020 presidential candidate supports a range of socialist-leaning policies, from Medicare for All to a massive expansion of the estate tax.

For more on Sanders’ policies, go here.

In his State of the Union address Tuesday evening, President Donald Trump declared a goal to completely stop the transmission of HIV in America by 2030. From his speech:

In recent years we have made remarkable progress in the fight against HIV and AIDS. Scientific breakthroughs have brought a once-distant dream within reach. My budget will ask Democrats and Republicans to make the needed commitment to eliminate the HIV epidemic in the United States within 10 years. We have made incredible strides, incredible. Together, we will defeat AIDS in America and beyond.

The idea of eliminating HIV transmission may sound completely absurd, like President Barack Obama promising a program in his final State of the Union Address in 2016 that then-Vice President Joe Biden would oversee a cure cancer.

But stopping the transmission of HIV in America is potentially achievable on the basis of the medical innovations we’ve achieved in this decades-long fight against HIV and AIDS. Medical therapies have dramatically extended the lives of people diagnosed with HIV; new treatments that have been widely distributed just this decade are able to suppress the virus in people’s bodies to the degree that HIV-positive people cannot spread the virus to others.

Here’s what the curve of HIV infections and deaths looks like around the world these days, courtesy of Our World in Data:

Not only are fewer people dying, fewer people are getting infected. In America, that’s partly attributable to suppression treatment. According to newly updated data from the Kaiser Family Foundation, half of people in the U.S. with HIV are virally suppressed, meaning the virus levels in their body are undetectable. They are not cured, but they cannot spread HIV to negative partners. Similarly, drugs like Truvada (a pre-exposure prophylactic, or PrEP), when taken by HIV-negative people in high-risk categories, keeps them from becoming infected when exposed through sexual activity.

Since only half of HIV people are virally suppressed, there’s still a significant number of new infections in the United States—the most recent data shows 38,500 new HIV cases in 2015. And according to Kaiser, 14 percent of people infected with HIV do not know they have the disease. And 6,000 people died of HIV- and AIDS-related illnesses in 2016 in the U.S. alone.

So that’s a lot of work, and folks are skeptical that the Trump administration is going to actually do much, given that they’ve previously attempted to cut domestic spending on HIV care. This shouldn’t necessarily be a warning sign—success at stopping the spread of HIV should at some point result in less federal spending—but this isn’t an administration that has shown an interest in spending less money.

Another warning sign is that the administration talks about reducing HIV transmission reduction while clinging to a prohibitionist approach to reducing opioid abuse. Trump and the Department of Justice have taken a punitive approach to the opioid crisis, blaming drug lords, going after doctors, and punishing patients for needing pain treatment, ultimately sending people to the street to get opioids of unknown origin, often contiminated with illicit fentanyl. Jacob Sullum has noted that while opioid prescriptions have fallen, opioid overdose deaths have increased. Taking a harsh approach toward those who are seeking pain prescriptions is not helping at all.

This counterproductive reaction to the opioid crisis is especially relevant to any effort to fight HIV because of the risk of infection from shared needles. In a December speech at a national conference on HIV care and treatment, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar noted that the opioid crisis had direct impact on their efforts to fight HIV:

One increasing challenge since the last HIV strategy is the growth of our country’s opioid crisis.

The crisis has made injection drug use more common and helped to spread infectious diseases such as HIV and hepatitis.

Combating the opioid crisis has been one of this administration’s highest priorities.

Azar’s own Twitter feed brags about the number of people the administration has charged for distributing illegal opioids and the 22 percent drop in the number of opioids prescribed, but he does not mention that overdose deaths nevertheless continue to rise.

If the Trump administration is actually serious about ending the spread of HIV, it needs to recognize that sending opioid users into the black markets for painkillers is no way to stop a health crisis, whether we’re talking about overdoses or the spread of viruses.

President Donald Trump listed his signing of a federal “Right to Try” bill during Tuesday night’s State of the Union address. “To give critically ill patients access to life-saving cures, we passed very importantly, right to try,” he said.

To Trump’s credit, at least one person in the U.S. has been granted access to an experimental therapy under the law he signed in May 2018. Right to Try allows patients diagnosed with a “life-threatening disease” to receive directly from a pharmaceutical company an experimental drug that has begun clinical trials but has not been approved by the Food and Drug Administration.

Bloomberg News reported in January that a California man diagnosed with glioblastoma, a type of brain cancer that is generally fatal within two years of diagnosis, had been granted access in November 2018 to a therapy called Gliovac, made by the Belgian drug company Epitopoietic Research Corporation (ERC).

“The patient’s family went to ERC to request the therapy after he didn’t qualify for the experimental study of Gliovac or any other trial that was underway,” Bloomberg News reported.

One case in just under a year is not quite what Right to Try supporters imagined; in the wake of the bill’s signing, some supporters talked of hope for “millions” of patients. But it’s also not the bioethical free-for-all critics feared—right to try “opens the gate to a dangerous, uncharted pathway for accessing experimental medications that have not been shown to be safe or effective,” one group said.

Gliovac is in Stage 2 human trials, which means the anonymous California man is one of roughly two dozen or so people currently taking the drug. His therapy is being overseen by Daniela Bota, the co-director of the U.C., Irvine School of Medicine Comprehensive Brain Tumor Program, which means he’s likely receiving the best care available for someone with this disease.

ERC’s Joe Elliott told Bloomberg that there have been no side effects in the trial thus far. And despite concerns that Right to Try would lead to pharmaceutical companies charging retail prices for unapproved therapies, Elliot says the California man is paying nothing for access to Gliovac, which will conclude trials within the next 18 months. The median survival time for glioblastoma? 15 months.

The law is working for at least one person. Here are some likely reasons why it’s not working for more.

President Donald Trump recognized two formerly incarcerated people in his 2019 State of the Union speech Tuesday night, applauding the success of criminal justice reforms and the recently enacted FIRST STEP Act.

Matthew Charles and Alice Marie Johnson were two of the White House guests for the State of the Union speech. Their draconian drug sentences drew national attention (including reporting by Reason), which ultimately led to their early release from federal prison.

“Last year, I heard through friends the story of Alice Johnson,” Trump said. “I was deeply moved. In 1997, Alice was sentenced to life in prison as a first-time non-violent drug offender. Over the next two decades, she became a prison minister, inspiring others to choose a better path […] Alice’s story underscores the disparities and unfairness that can exist in criminal sentencing—and the need to remedy this injustice.”

Johnson was serving a life sentence in federal prison for a drug conspiracy offense when mega-celebrity Kim Kardashian learned of her case. During her decades in prison, Johnson became an ordained minister, wrote several plays, and was a role model to countless other inmates. Kardashian made a personal appeal to Trump to commute Johnson’s sentence.

Trump commuted Johnson’s sentence in June.

As Reason reported, Johnson gave a speech at Georgetown University after her release:

I don’t take freedom lightly, because this is a gift I have received. It’s a miracle. I try to speak from my heart. I don’t have a prepared speech. I may not have the most glowing and fancy words, but what you hear from me is straight from the heart. I don’t feel that I was denied or delayed. I was destined for this. I believe the Lord has raised up my voice for such a time as this, that this is the moment he called me into to speak out, to be not just a number, to not just be someone that they read about, but a human being. It’s an issue that should prick the conscious of every American citizen that sees what happened to me, to know that but for the grace of God, I could have been them, and they could have been me.

Bolstered by Trump’s willingness to recognize cases like Johnson’s, supporters of criminal justice reform worked for months to sway the president to support the FIRST STEP Act, a major piece of criminal justice reform then moving through Congress. Trump’s eventual support, over the objections of staunch opponents of mandatory minimum reform, helped solidify Republican support. When the bill finally made it to the Senate floor, it passed easily.

“Inspired by stories like Alice’s, my Administration worked closely with members of both parties to sign the First Step Act into law,” Trump said. “This legislation reformed sentencing laws that have wrongly and disproportionately harmed the African-American community. The First Step Act gives non-violent offenders the chance to re-enter society as productive, law-abiding citizens. Now, States across the country are following our lead. America is a Nation that believes in redemption.”

Trump also highlighted the story of Matthew Charles, one of the first people to secure an early release under the new legislation.

As Reason reported, Charles was originally released early from a 35-year federal prison sentence for a crack cocaine offense. However, a federal appeals court ruled that, because of his status as a “career offender,” he should have never been eligible for early release. As a result, he was sent back to federal prison last year after two years of freedom, during which time he had reconnected with his family, found a job and girlfriend, and volunteered every weekend at a food pantry.

Charles then became one of the first people to have his sentence reduced under the FIRST STEP Act, which made previous reductions to crack cocaine sentences apply retroactively. He was released yet again on time served in January.

“On behalf of all Americans,” Trump said to Charles during his speech, “welcome home.”

Trump’s comments were a departure from his inaugural speech, which warned of “American carnage” from out-of-control crime, as well as his criticisms of Barack Obama’s clemency initiative, which he said released dangerous criminals onto the streets.

Criminal justice advocates, who worked to convince the president to support the bill, applauded him for highlighting the cases of Johnson and Charles.

“Alice Johnson and Matthew Charles are proof that people who make mistakes can do extraordinary things if given a second chance,” Mark Holden, the general counsel of Koch Industries and a frequent visitor at the White House during the push to pass the FIRST STEP Act. “The bipartisan First Step Act is already helping people transform their lives and we applaud the president for working with both parties to pass this landmark legislation. As our country takes the next step on criminal justice reform, we’ll continue uniting with anyone who shares our goal of safer communities and fewer barriers for those who have paid their debt to society.”

Holly Harris , the executive director of the Justice Action Network, announced in a press release Tuesday night that, along with the criminal justice advocacy group FAMM, her organization would be funding a fellowship for Charles to raise awareness of the criminal justice system.

“We cannot think of a more compelling voice than that of Mr. Charles to share the positive results from the First Step Act and build on the momentum created by the passage of this landmark legislation,” she said. “Though he is a free man, Mr. Charles remains focused on the thousands of families still awaiting a homecoming for their loved ones, and we pledge to work alongside him, and with lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, toward swift implementation of the First Step Act, and more aggressive reforms in Washington and in states all across the country.”

President Donald Trump doubled down on his recent orders for withdrawing U.S. military personnel from our long-running interventions in Afghanistan and Syria during his State of the Union address Tuesday. In the same speech, he also teased the possibility of new foreign intervention in South America.

“Great nations do not fight endless wars,” said Trump. “Now, as we work with our allies to destroy the remnants of ISIS, it is time to give our brave warriors in Syria a warm welcome home.”

In December, Trump ordered the sudden withdrawal of 4,000 U.S. troops currently fighting ISIS in Syria. The president later declared that he would also be pulling some 7,000 U.S. troops out of Afghanistan, where his administration is involved in peace talks with the Taliban—something that also got a shoutout in tonight’s speech.

“In Afghanistan, my administration is holding constructive talks with a number of Afghan groups, including the Taliban. As we make progress in these negotiations, we will be able to reduce our troop presence and focus on counter-terrorism,” read a trasncript of Trump’s remarks.

The president’s troop withdrawals were met with shock and resistance from Democrats and Republicans alike, including reportedly even members of his own administration.

On Tuesday, the Senate passed a non-binding resolution condemning Trump’s plans to withdraw troops from those two conflicts, and slapped new sanctions on the Syrian government. Earlier in the month, the president’s own national security advisor, John Bolton, said in a speech that any withdrawal would be conditioned on the total defeat of ISIS and assurances from Turkey that it would not attack U.S.-allied Kurdish forces in Syria—tall orders, to put it lightly.

But even as Trump has talked about winding down our involvement in the Middle East, members of his administration have teased an escalation in Venezuela. After that country’s opposition leader, Juan Guaidó, declared himself president (reportedly at the urging of Vice President Mike Pence), the Trump administration quickly recognized him as the legitimate head of state, withdrawing its recognition of the embattled, increasingly authoritarian regime of Nicolas Maduro.

Trump reiterated this hardline stance against Maduro in Tuesday night’s address.

“We stand with the Venezuelan people in their noble quest for freedom—and we condemn the brutality of the Maduro regime, whose socialist policies have turned that nation from being the wealthiest in South America into a state of abject poverty and despair,” said Trump.

He also undercut whatever transpartisan appeal his nods to a less aggressive foreign policy might have by equating support for a non-interventionist foreign policy with a need to end the ongoing investigation of Robert Muller.

“We have to be united at home to defeat our adversaries abroad,” said Trump, adding that “if there is going to be peace and legislation there can’t be war and investigation.”

That is hardly a way to secure Democratic support for a more humble U.S. foreign policy.

Delivering Facebook Live remarks Tuesday prior to President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address, Sen. Kamala Harris (D–Calif.) criticized the Trump administration for implementing regulatory reforms.

“When you hear claims about rewriting the rules and cutting red tape, don’t forget that means workers will have fewer workplace safety protections,” the California Democrat and 2020 presidential candidate said. “Pregnant women will have fewer clinics to turn to for care. Children will have drinking water that’s less safe.”

In her remarks, Harris didn’t pinpoint specific initiatives. However, she was likely referring to the Trump administration efforts in three areas. As Politico reported in September, the administration has cut safety regulations in the mining, oil rigging, and meat processing industries, among others.

In July, the administration proposed refocusing “the Title X program on its statutory mission—the provision of voluntary, preventive family planning services specifically designed to enable individuals to determine the number and spacing of their children.” As a result, Title X money would not go toward clinic staff who give women information about abortion, according to PBS.

Finally, the administration proposed in December rewriting a clean-water regulation implemented by President Obama’s Environmental Agency (EPA), The New York Times reported. Critics claimed Trump’s move would threaten public health. Trump’s EPA disagreed. “The previous administration’s 2015 rule wasn’t about water quality,” read an agency memo obtained by the Times. “It was about power—power in the hands of the federal government over farmers, developers and landowners.

Harris, meanwhile, claimed “those rules are being rewritten to help big corporations and powerful interests.”

In all of these cases, Harris conflated the mere existence of regulations with the provision of safety equipment, services, or results—something we can expect to see more of as the 2020 race develops.

When former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz announced that he was thinking about running for president as a “centrist independent,” he was immediately and vituperatively denounced as a billionaire jagoff riddled with narcissistic delusions of grandeur who nobody would vote for anyway so why is he even running in the first place and if he insists on running who does he think he is not to run as a Democrat in the Democratic primaries or work himself up to the job by running for Congress or something lower than president but of course as a Democrat because he must obviously be a Democrat because he believes in climate change and abortion and immigration but wait he’s against Medicare for All and raising taxes to 70 percent and demonizing rich bastards like him who grew up in housing projects which proves that he’s not a self-made success AT ALL because public housing is paid for by tax dollars so really if he’s anything he’s proof that the state really should be in charge of everything but I guess he should just STFU already about the national debt, which doesn’t really matter because it’s just money we owe ourselves and Starbucks is shit coffee anyways and always has been, right?

For Republicans and Democrats, the discourse around any independent candidate (even one who hasn’t decided to run) immediately degenerates into the verbal equivalent of an evil pitching machine that becomes sentient and starts chucking everything it has at the batter, faster and faster and faster until the poor schmo is just a pile of bruises. That’s because we currently have more types of hepatitis than we do viable major parties in the United States and the duopoly is committed to keeping it that way, thank you very much.

Schultz took a ton of fire from Democrats, liberals, and progressives because they assume he would steal votes from whomever their candidate ends up being and thus potentially help to re-elect Donald Trump. One independent poll of 1,338 likely voters conducted from January 31-February 1 found that “Schultz’s presence in the race makes Trump’s margins between 2 and 4 points better than they would be without him in the race.”

They might want to rethink those fears, especially if Schultz actually sticks around and builds his profile around the idea of being socially liberal and fiscally conservative. Over at FiveThirtyEight, Nate Silver ran the numbers for the 2016 campaign and found that socially liberal, fiscally conservative (SLFC) voters, who make up about 16 percent of the electorate, actually went for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton. Using data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, Silver created a way to compare SLFC voters’ reactions to various issues. What he found:

When choosing between the major-party candidates, these voters were more likely to go for Trump than Clinton. Among the 25 combinations of socially liberal and fiscally conservative views, Trump won the most votes 19 times, Clinton did so five times, and there was one draw. And on average between the 25 combinations, Trump won 52 percent of the vote to Clinton’s 40 percent. That’s not a huge margin: a 12-point edge among 16 percent of the electorate. But it adds up to enough voters that, if all of them had gone for a third party instead, Clinton would have won Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Florida, and therefore the Electoral College.

Read the whole thing here. Silver stresses this isn’t anything like a “comprehensive analysis of whether a Schultz-like candidate is more likely to help or hurt President Trump’s re-election chances,” which will also depend on what sort of candidate the Dems end up fielding.

But the counterintuitiveness of his take squares with deeper reads on how recent major independent candidates have impacted presidential elections. The conventional wisdom is almost always wrong. For instance, it’s typically a given that John Anderson, a liberal Republican, cost Jimmy Carter re-election in 1980 by splitting the anti-Reagan vote. It’s also routinely asserted that Ross Perot drained votes from George H.W. Bush in 1992, allowing Bill Clinton to win with just 43 percent of the vote. As Steve Kornacki wrote for Salon in 2011, that’s just wrong. Among other things, both Anderson and Perot voters were split on who their second choice would be, suggesting that they drew votes away from all of their rivals.

Assuming Schultz or someone like him actually runs, it’s likely that he will draw votes from both the Republican (presumptively Donald Trump) and the Democrat, if only because people really are sick of the major parties. Currently just 25 percent of Americans identify as Republican and 34 percent as Democratic. The largest bloc, at 39 percent, call themselves independent. In 2016, neither major-party candidate managed to get anywhere near 50 percent of the vote, and that was without a strong independent candidate (the Libertarian Party ticket pulled a record-high 3.28 percent of the vote, another sign of dissatisfaction). There’s every reason to think the Dems and GOP will end up with repugnant candidates once again. Republicans and conservatives were mostly soft on or approving of Schultz when he emerged a week or so ago. If he is still around in a year’s time, expect them to start bitching like crazy about him, as his threat to their position becomes clearer.

Related: Paul Krugman, Nobel laureate, misreads recent polling data about Schultz and concludes that SLFC voters make up a tiny fraction of the electorate:

One is the absence of socially liberal, economically conservative voters. These were the people Schultz thought he could appeal to; but basically they don’t exist, accounting for only around, yes, 4 percent of the electorate.

This is simply wrong. As Silver notes, this group makes up about 15 percent of the vote. At times, Krugman conflates SLFC voters with libertarians, which is not unreasonable (if still imperfect), and declares us non-existent. That’s wrong too, and simply a variation on the anxiety that duopolists exude whenever even the possibility of a different sort of politician is conjured. From Emily Ekins of the Cato Institute:

The overwhelming body of literature, however, using a variety of different methods and different definitions, suggests that libertarians comprise about 10-20% of the population, but may range from 7-22%.

More here.

Aaron Peskin, a member of San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors, has proposed a new ordinance that could severely limit city agencies’ use of enhanced surveillance of the city, including a ban on facial recognition technology. “I have yet to be persuaded that there is any beneficial use of this technology that outweighs the potential for government actors to use it for coercive and oppressive ends,” Peskin said.

Peskin is not alone in worrying about how government agents can abuse the technology. Woodrow Hartzog, a professor of law and computer science at Northeastern University, and his colleague, Rochester Institute of Technology philosopher Evan Selinger, make a strongly persuasive case that “facial recognition is the perfect tool for oppression.” As a consequence of the technology being “such a grave threat to privacy and civil liberties,” they argue that “measured regulation should be abandoned in favor of an outright ban.”

Their list of the harms to privacy and civil liberties entailed by the widespread use of this technology by government agencies is chilling. They point out that people who think that they are being watched behave differently. In addition, they cite a host of other abuses and corrosive activities entailed by the technology:

Disproportionate impact on people of color and other minority and vulnerable populations.

Due process harms, which might include shifting the ideal from “presumed innocent” to “people who have not been found guilty of a crime, yet.”

Facilitation of harassment and violence.

Denial of fundamental rights and opportunities, such as protection against “arbitrary government tracking of one’s movements, habits, relationships, interests, and thoughts.”

The suffocating restraint of the relentless, perfect enforcement of law. The normalized elimination of practical obscurity.

The amplification of surveillance capitalism.

Why ban rather than regulate this surveillance technology and not others such as geolocation data and social media searches? Hartzog and Selinger argue that systems using face prints differ in important ways that justify banning them. Given the spread of CCTVs and police body cameras, faces are hard to hide and can be inexpensively and secretly captured and stored. All-seeing cameras and never forgetful digital databases will put an end to obscurity zones that secure the possibility of privacy for us all.

In addition, existing databases, such as those for driver’s licenses, make facial recognition tech easy to plug in and play. In fact, it’s already been done by the FBI. In their 2016 report, The Perpetual Line-Up, Georgetown University researchers found that 16 states had let the FBI use facial recognition technology to compare the faces of suspected criminals to the states’ driver’s license and ID photos, creating a virtual line-up of each state’s residents. “If you build it, they will surveil,” assert Hartzog and Selinger.

China’s social credit system is already taking advantage of facial recognition technology. According to Fortune, the Chinese government is deploying facial recognition tied to millions of public cameras to not only “identify any of its 1.4 billion citizens within a matter of seconds but also having the ability to record an individual’s behavior to predict who might become a threat—a real-world version of the ‘precrime’ in Philip K. Dick’s Minority Report.”

“The future of human flourishing depends upon facial recognition technology being banned before the systems become too entrenched in our lives,” conclude Hartzog and Selinger. “Otherwise, people won’t know what it’s like to be in public without being automatically identified, profiled, and potentially exploited. In such a world, critics of facial recognition technology will be disempowered, silenced, or cease to exist.”

Perhaps that’s too ominous. Widespread use of facial recognition technology can certainly make our lives easier to navigate. But it doesn’t take a cynic to worry that governments will demand the right to plunder private face print databases. It’s not too soon to consider if the tradeoffs between convenience and not-implausible government abuses of the technology are worth it.

The proposed ordinance in San Francisco requires agencies to gain the Board of Supervisors’ approval before buying new surveillance technology and puts the burden on city agencies to publicly explain why they want the tools as well as to evaluate their potential harms. That’s at least a step in the right direction.

For more on how we are already constructing a pervasive surveillance state, see my January feature article, “Can Algorithms Run Things Better Than Humans?” The answer depends on what you mean by “better.”

Today, the Senate is expected to pass a major piece of foreign policy legislation that awards billions in military assistance to our allies in the Middle East, imposes new sanctions on rivals, and condemns President Donald Trump’s plans to start pulling troops out of the region.

Last night, the Senate voted 72-24 to end debate on the Strengthening America’s Security in the Middle East Act of 2019 or simply S.1, and move it to the Senate floor for a final vote.

The bill, originally introduced by Sen. Marco Rubio (R–Fla.), is a grab bag of Middle East-related policies, including stepped-up sanctions on the Syrian government, authorization for $38 billion in military assistance to Israel, and federal authorization for states and localities to refuse to contract with businesses that boycott Israel.

There is wide bipartisan support for S.1, as demonstrated by yesterday’s lopsided vote to advance the bill. Critics include liberal Democrats, and the libertarian-leaning Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.), who took particular issue with the language condemning Trump’s plans for a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan and Syria.

“I’m tired of America always doing everybody else’s fighting. I’m tired of America always paying for everybody else’s war,” said Paul in an impassioned floor speech yesterday. “What is the one thing that brings Republicans and Democrats together? War! They love it. The more the better,” said the visibly exasperated Paul.

The Kentucky senator suggested that the Senate strip out S. 1’s condemnation of the troop withdrawals and replace it with a resolution lauding the president’s decision to bring military personnel home.

In addition to the anti-withdrawal language, the bill also makes good on a 2016 Obama administration promise to provide Israel with $38 billion in military assistance and missile defense funding over the next 10 years.

This money is “the largest single pledge of military assistance ever and a reiteration of the seven-decade, unshakeable, bipartisan commitment of the United States to Israel’s security,” reads the text of the bill.

Versions of this military assistance were passed by both the House and Senate during the last Congress, but had been blocked in the Senate by Paul, who demanded that any increase in foreign aid to Israel be offset by ending financial support to other foreign governments, including Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Paul introduced an amendment to that effect yesterday, which was rejected.

Also included in S.B. 1 were enhanced sanctions against the Syrian government and those doing business with it. The bill gives the president the authority to sanction any foreign person who “provides significant financial, material, or technological support,” to the Syrian government, senior Syrian government officials, or the country’s oil and gas sector.

Selling military aircraft parts to the country is expressly forbidden as well, as is providing construction or engineering services to the Syrian government.

Also incorporated into S.1 is legislation that gives a federal green light for states and localities to refuse to contract with businesses that boycott Israel.

Laws and executive orders forbidding local and state governments from contracting with companies that participate in the movement to boycott, divest, and sanction (BDS) Israel have passed everywhere from New York to Texas, much to the chagrin of free speech advocates. The ACLU, for example, is currently suing Texas over its anti-BDS law.

Aside from its domestically controversial anti-BDS provisions, S. 1 is largely a continuation of long-running U.S. policy towards the Middle East, says Emma Ashford, a foreign policy scholar at the Cato Institute.

“The bill itself is largely status quo. It maintains an active U.S. military presence in the region, and bolsters funding for allies,” Ashford tells Reason, saying that it “does nothing to change or alter America’s Middle East strategy.”

Significant sanctions have been in place against the government of Bashar al-Assad in Syria for years now, she notes. There’s obviously nothing new about military assistance to Israel.

Still, says Ashford, there is some specific causes for concern in the bill.

The new Syrian sanctions could end up penalizing organizations trying to aid in reconstruction efforts in the country. The Senate’s condemnation of the president’s decision to pull troops out of a conflict that was never authorized by Congress to begin with, while non-binding, is nevertheless “another step towards abdicating their responsibilities on questions of war and peace,” says Ashford.

In short, while the bill that the Senate will likely pass today does not do much to escalate America’s role in the Middle East, it also does absolutely nothing to scale it back. That alone makes it a major disappointment for critics of our seemingly endless involvement in the region.

The Senate is expected to vote on S.1 sometime this afternoon, after which it will go to the House for a vote.

Would you believe that Connecticut is the only state in America that doesn’t force nail tech and skincare workers to get hours and hours of training and pay for occupational licensing to do their jobs?

Unfortunately, that might be about to change, and you can thank overheated human trafficking panics and the typical fears of some sort of “public health” menace if nail salon workers in Connecticut end up unemployed.

Democratic state Rep. Jillian Gilchrest (West Hartford) has introduced legislation, co-sponsored by Republican Rep. Fred Camillo (Greenwich), to force workers at nail salons, estheticians (skin care therapists), and eyelash technicians to get a minimum level of education and licenses in order to work. (Unrelated, but an indicator of Gilchrest’s mentality, she’s getting a lot of attention now for another bill that would increase the taxes on ammunition by 50 percent with a rather absurd “How much ammunition does someone really need?” argument)

The way the Connecticut Post has been reporting the bill is both a fascinating and somewhat infuriating window into how unwilling people are to acknowledge how much occupational licensing harms poorer workers. The Post notes that many salon owners are calling for the regulation but seems rather incurious about deeper motives:

Those in favor—some lawmakers, lobbyists on behalf of industry associations, health inspectors and many salon owners—argue that a lack of licensure makes nail salons and spas unsafe for workers and their clients, both of which are mostly women.

They point to examples like New Haven resident Maggie Todd who alleges she received second degree burns on her left hand while receiving a gel manicure at Nail Studio in Hamden in 2016. She is suing Nail Studio in New Haven Superior Court.

Similarly, in a short video explaining why she introduced the bill, Gilchrest says salon owners have told her that they need to “professionalize” the industry and are “struggling” to find properly trained workers and that this is a burden on their business. Here’s her video:

Bill update! We have a public health issue on our hands… CT doesn’t require any training or licensing for nail salons, nail technicians & estheticians. I’ve introduced a bill to change that! #publichealth #humantrafficking pic.twitter.com/4qwEHpawfa

— Jillian Gilchrest (@Jilchrest) January 30, 2019

This explanation doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Training and government licensing are just completely separate issues. A nail salon can decide to hire only trained workers and could even arrange for workers to get training, if that’s what the salon’s owner wanted.

But, of course, that’s all probably a smokescreen. The likely issue is that there are competitors out there who won’t go through that effort and will therefore offer their services more cheaply than those who bankroll training for staff or hire staff who can demand better wages due to their skills.

“It’s not unusual for folks asking for licensing to do so to eliminate competition or to raise the status of their own occupations,” explains Lisa Knepper, director of strategic research for the Institute for Justice. She and the Institute for Justice put together a state-by-state report in 2012 documenting the extensive burdens that result from occupational licensing. They’ve also researched the overall costs to the economy.

For skin care specialists, that burden is fairly high, ranking among the Institute for Justice report’s top 10 occupations for the amount of work involved in order to legally get permission to wax somebody’s bikini line. The average fees amount to $120, but the average education demand is 149 days of training. That’s more than what’s demanded of a truck driver or an emergency medical technician. The average manicurist must get 87 hours of training before getting a license.

We don’t know how burdensome these proposed regulations will be as yet. The bill (HB 5754) that’s been introduced doesn’t actually say what education requirements will be mandated. The text is just a paragraph calling for education and licensing.

These licensing requirements keep people from getting work, but do they actually protect consumers from health risks? A federal report put together in 2015 by the Barack Obama administration, the Department of Labor, and the Department of the Treasury questioned this wisdom. The report examined 12 studies, and only two of them indicated that licensing actually reduced public safety and health risks.

Connecticut nail salons are not some Wild West where government regulators fear to tread. Knepper notes that state law requires nail salons to be regularly inspected. The lack of a licensing regime for individual workers does not mean that the state has no way to crack down on unsanitary conditions. The state’s Department of Public Health doesn’t even want the new licensing regulations because it says it lacks the manpower to monitor compliance. Gilchrist says she thinks the licensing will bring in revenue, but the Department of Public Health doesn’t actually get to keep the money it collects.

The lack of inspection manpower might explain any health problems with Connecticut nail salons rather than a lack of a licensing program. Connecticut actually previously had a licensing program for manicurists that required a whopping 500 hours of education. That regulation sunsetted in 1980 and efforts since then to reinstate the regime have failed.

So you would think then that there would be some ability to document the harms that have come from abandoning licensing, but what we get are anecdotes of women getting burns or infections from poor care. What we don’t get is any data indicating whether consumers are more or less likely to be injured getting their nails done in Connecticut than in other states.

What has changed since those bygone days of licensing is that we now have a moral panic over human trafficking being used to justify all sorts of regulations and surveillance, and Gilchrist invokes it in her justification for this new licensing scheme. She even hashtags “humantrafficking” in her tweet. She explains:

As the former chair of our state’s Trafficking in Persons Council, I saw firsthand how Connecticut’s unregulated nail salon industry makes us a hotbed for human trafficking. By licensing nail salons and estheticians we enact much needed work protections for employees, protect the public health of consumers, and professionalize a booming industry.

There’s little data to back up her claim that the nail salon industry (which is not “unregulated”) is a hotbed for human trafficking in Connecticut. Federal data on human trafficking from 2015 shows very few cases (less than 15) being referred to the feds for prosecution from Connecticut. That’s in total, not just in these businesses. Data from the National Human Trafficking Hotline shows less than three calls per year originating from Connecticut claiming human trafficking is taking place in “health and beauty service” businesses.

Knepper observes that there are better, less intrusive ways of trying to combat human trafficking in the industry than forcing all workers to get hundreds of hours of education.

“It’s hard to see how this addresses the problem [of human trafficking], especially when it comes to substantive education requirements,” Knepper says. A better, less intrusive approach would simply be a program of inspecting these salons, something Connecticut law already provides for.

“Is this a solution in search of a problem?” Knepper asks. “It may already be that Connecticut has already found the right regulatory system.”

For more occupational licensing craziness, Eric Boehm recently took a look at some of the even more absurd bills being proposed across the country for 2019.