Tag: hit&run

Misdemeanor pot offenders in Washington state could get clemency for their infractions.

Gov. Jay Inslee addressed the Cannabis Alliance’s annual conference on Friday, just a few days after The Atlantic reported that he is “laying the groundwork” for a presidential run in 2020. There, Inslee announced that his new Marijuana Justice Initiative would include pardons for pot convictions.

The proposal would not apply to all pot convictions—only those with misdemeanor convictions for possession would be eligible.

Inslee hasn’t always been so open. While running for governor in 2012, he opposed a legalization measure on the grounds that it conflicted with federal law. But now he agrees that punishment should not continue “for something that is no longer illegal in Washington state.” According to a 2012 report by the Drug Policy Alliance, 240,000 possession arrests were made in Washington state in the 25 years prior to legalization.

Even as several states legalize marijuana, some residents still face the consequences of old laws. Some governments have made efforts to avoid the problem—Canada, for example, sought to expedite record sealings for offenders after legalizing possession in 2018.

President Donald Trump says he’s willing to use “the military version of eminent domain” to build his proposed wall on the U.S.–Mexico border. It’s not exactly clear what he means by that.

Addressing reporters from the Rose Garden today, Trump kept pushing for his ill-advised border wall. But what if Congress refuses to acquiesce to his demand for $5 billion in funding? Why, he’d declare a national emergency “and build [the wall] very quickly,” he said.

Assuming, for the sake of argument, that he can do that, he’d run into another problem right away: The federal government owns less than one-third of the land on the southern border. The rest belongs to other entities, including states, Native American tribes, and private individuals. Most of the border land in Texas is private property.

Not a problem, said Trump: “You have to use eminent domain,” he declared. That’s when the government forces a property owner to sell, at a price set by the government. “If we had one person that wouldn’t sell us…then we wouldn’t be able to build proper border security because we’d have that big opening.”

“I think it’s a fair process,” he added.

And what happens if Trump can’t seize people’s land with normal eminent domain? That’s where the “military version” comes in:

Trump floats the idea of using “the military version of eminent domain” to immediately seize privately owned land along border to build the wall

— Josh Lederman (@JoshNBCNews) January 4, 2019

As explained, “[Lawsuits are] not going to hold [the wall] up because under the military version of eminent domain and under, actually, homeland security we can do it before we even start.”

Hopefully it doesn’t look anything like this:

Hey, look! It’s “the military version of eminent domain”! pic.twitter.com/JQbk4eQHml

— Jesse Walker (@notjessewalker) January 4, 2019

In all seriousness, federal law does allow for military department secretaries to “acquire any interest in land” if “the acquisition is needed in the interest of national defense.” But defining building a wall on the southern border as an issue of national defense is a stretch.

It’s also worth noting that calling for a “military version of eminent domain” may not be the best way for Trump to sell his wall to the American people. Polls already show that a majority of Americans oppose the project. Further reducing the due process available to border property holders is unlikely to increase that number.

But the president’s fondness for eminent domain in all of its forms should be no surprise. Trump has benefited from eminent domain for decades as a real estate developer. Why would he stop now?

In 1946, the novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand started writing Textbook of Americanism, a series of brief and accessible essays that she felt would define the essential ideas and character of her adopted homeland. Publishing them in a small magazine called The Vigil in the form of answers to basic questions, Rand only completed nine sections, which ranged from “What is the basic issue in the world today?” to “What is the basic principle of America?” to “What is the proper function of government?”

Over 70 years later, Rand’s dream sees its completion in A New Textbook of Americanism, a collection edited by Jonathan Hoenig, a Rand devotee who founded the investment fund Capitalist Pig and appears regularly on Fox News, where he’s one of the few guests to call out Donald Trump for his protectionism, cronyism, and anti-immigrant stances. The new volume reprints Rand’s original contributions while adding fresh new material from a host of contemporary writers associated with the Ayn Rand Institute, including Leonard Peikoff, Yaron Brook, Amy Peikoff, Andrew Bernstein, and others. The new essays are wide-ranging and provocative, answering such questions as “How to Recognize a Nazi,” “How Are Fortunes Made in a Capitalist System?,” and “What Should a Distinctively American Foreign Policy Do?”

For today’s podcast, I spoke with Hoenig about what Rand meant by Americanism, why that’s important, and whether he’s optimistic about a country that he himself says is growing more collectivist on both the right and the left. We also talked about the fault lines between Rand’s Objectivism and the modern libertarian movement, Rand’s argument for complete abortion rights and her thoroughgoing secularism, and what it will take to revive the sort of individualism that Hoenig, like Rand, says is the essential foundation of America.

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Photo courtesy of Jonathan Hoenig.

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Adam Kokesh, an activist seeking the Libertarian Party’s presidential nomination, was arrested this week in New Orleans and according to his Facebook page is still in jail. He is fundraising over the arrest, saying he wants to put a copy of his book Freedom in “every residential mailbox in New Orleans.”

He and friends were parked by the side of the road, in the act of washing around a stencil on a dirty concrete barrier to leave a message in the cleaned part. Police approached them for being “illegally stopped on the shoulder of the road”; Kokesh refused consent to any search or to show I.D. “I’ll just be here asserting my rights,” he said.

That didn’t do him any good, nor did observing that “Officer Friendly here doesn’t have any real criminals to catch tonight.”

Eventually the cops order Kokesh out of the car and inform him “you can’t be on the side of this road” if you are “not broken down” and “in just a minute you’ll be in handcuffs and we’ll find out who you are or you can comply and do it the right way.”

Kokesh asked what the charges would be; he was told “interfering with an investigation.” Police then cuffed and arrested him.

The Libertarian Republic has more information, including copies of his booking document, which lists “resisting arrest—refuse identity” as his crimes.

Video of the incident leading to his arrest, with the denouement where the actual arrest happens beginning at around 11:10:

In July 2016, Joshua Condiotti-Wade of Colorado participated in a public protest with signs that said “Fuck Bad Cops” and “Blue Lives Murder.” Commerce City police officer Chris Dickey approached him, accusing him of trespassing and disorderly conduct. A brief interaction led to Dickey tasing Condiotti-Wade.

The New York Post reports that Condiotti-Wade has now received $175,000 in compensation from the city.

According to a lawsuit filed last June, Condiotti-Wade was picketing with another man on a sidewalk in front of the Adams County Human Services Building. Dickey approached the pair, and they asked if they were suspected of criminal activity. Dickey told them that they were trespassing on private property and had been asked to leave. They disagreed, insisting that they were on public property. While this interaction was going on, Dickey asked the men to lower their signs out of fear that they would be brandished as weapons. The situation escalated when they refused to give Dickey identification.

When Dickey moved to arrest them, he tripped. The lawsuit states that Condiotti-Wade ran because he “observed the anger in [Dickey’s] eyes and, worried that he could become the next news story about an officer forcibly arresting and beating a citizen.” Dickey pulled out his taser during the pursuit and struck Condiotti-Wade in the arm—he would later need to go to the hospital to have a taser barb removed from his limb. Another officer, Ryan Sedgwick, also deployed his taser while chasing Condiotti-Wade.

Dickey’s body camera captured the incident dying down after his police commander, Mark Morgan, arrived on the scene. Morgan questioned Dickey’s actions in the pursuit. He informed him that Condiotti-Wade had been standing on public property and was protected by the First Amendment right to free speech. Morgan also denied that Condiotti-Wade’s actions qualified as disorderly conduct. The more Dickey justified his actions, the more Morgan pushed back.

Dickey eventually cuts the audio to his body camera.

The lawsuit alleged a history of civilian complaints against Dickey in “at least five instances between 2011 and 2014.” The alleged complaints involved the use of excessive force during an arrest or contact without any legal reasoning.

Bonus link: It took a jury all of nine minutes to decide that a Michigan man had the legal right to blast NWA’s “Fuck tha Police” near an officer. He was on trial after the angry officer ticketed him for a misdemeanor noise violation.

President Donald Trump reportedly told congressional leaders today that he’s willing to keep the partial government shutdown going for years.

Trump has been wrangling with Democrats for weeks over funding for his proposed wall on the U.S.–Mexico border. Trump wants $5 billion for the wall, but Democrats are unwilling to give it to him. This led parts of the federal government to shut down after their funding expired on December 21.

Believe it not, the Earth is still spinning on its axis. That’s a good thing, because according to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D–N.Y.), Trump says the shutdown might last a while. “We told the president we needed the government open,” Schumer told reporters after a meeting with Trump. “He resisted. In fact, he said he’d keep the government closed for a very long period of time—months or even years.”

Set aside for a moment the fact that shutting down the government over funding for a pointless, stupid border wall is, well, pointless and stupid. And set aside the fact that Trump is almost certainly not, in fact, going to let the shutdown continue for years. The truth is that an elongated shutdown wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world.

As Reason‘s Scott Shackford noted late last month, media coverage of government shutdowns always seems to focus on federal workers not getting paid and national parks being closed. This time around has been no different. Of course, no one wants workers to go without pay, though it’s worth pointing out that the bloated bureaucracies that make up many federal agencies are a problem as well.

So life goes on. Many Americans, in fact, wouldn’t see a big change in their daily routine whether the shutdown ended today or a year from now. Heck, if the shutdown lasts a while, maybe we’ll even get airport security privatization after all the unpaid Transportation Security Administration employees walk off the job.

Some of the actual problems the shutdown has caused could be solved by less government. Reason‘s Zuri Davis wrote yesterday about how the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) can collect taxes but not process refunds during the shutdown. Solution: Get rid of the IRS.

And yes, the shutdown hurts private businesses. But that’s largely because there are so many hoops the government makes companies jump through that when a shutdown happens, some businesses have to stop what they’re doing until federal offices reopen. Solution: Stop making businesses jump through those hoops in the first place.

The government shutdown poses problems, sure. But many of them can be solved by taking the government out of our lives. So go ahead, keep it shut down. I’m sure Americans will adapt.

For most Americans, trade policy has a tendency to seem abstract, even invisible. Price tags on store shelves don’t break out the cost of tariffs. When a company affected by tariffs sheds staff or fails to expand, there are often additional factors at play. Trade agreements themselves tend to be mind-numbing in their complexity, the sort of legalistic documents that only experts ever really read, and arguments about free trade are often heavy on theory or built around dull statistics. Economic policy counterfactuals are inherently speculative; with different trade policies in place, who’s to say what would have happened?

And yet it’s clear that the trade war Trump started with Europe is having a measurable impact—on, among other things, domestic craft liquor.

After the Trump administration erected tariffs on imported steel and aluminum, the European Union responded by creating new tariffs on goods produced in America, such as bourbon and rye whiskey. As a result, some domestic liquor producers have largely been cut off from the European market. Among those affected is Catoctin Creek, a small Virginia distiller that makes rye, gin, and high-quality fruit brandy.

As The Washington Post reports, Catoctin Creek was set to expand in Europe, where the market for American whiskey has grown considerably over the last 15 years. Instead, the tariffs have killed off nearly all of the company’s European sales opportunities. The company has instituted a hiring freeze, delayed plans to buy new distilling equipment, and slowed orders from the farmers who supply the grains required for making whiskey. “It’s essentially decimated our European business, and it’s put our expansion on hold,” Scott Harris, one of Catoctin Creek’s co-founders, tells the Post.

Catoctin Creek’s story shows how the trade war harms everyone involved in the process. It’s the entire trouble with the trade war in miniature. It’s bad for the owners, who have lost access to a market with a lot of potential for growth. It’s bad for consumers in Europe, who lose access to the product. It’s bad for for consumers in the U.S., who are likely to face higher prices—on top of already high prices caused by recent increases in demand for whiskey—as Catoctin looks up to make for the loss of expected revenue from European sales. It’s bad for people who drink and design cocktails, because it makes interesting ingredients more difficult to obtain.

It’s bad for the manufacturer that makes the stills Catoctin Creek might have purchased to help increase production for the global market. It’s bad for the farmers who grow the rye and other grains the company uses to make its product. And just as the people and companies who do business with Catoctin Creek were affected, so will the people and companies who do business with those companies, and so on and so forth, in an ever-expanding spiral of economic decline. A trade war drags down everything it touches. It produces no winners.

On a day-to-day basis, these effects are hard for most people to see: Even if you’re a regular consumer of Catoctin Creek liquor,* you probably won’t notice a huge price difference unless you buy in bulk. If you live in Europe, it’s likely you never had regular access to their product in the first place. And the company doesn’t appear to be laying anyone off, so it’s hard to count the jobs that simply were never created.

On the surface, the trade war may not look like it’s doing much damage. But it is, and even if its effects are hard to see, we shouldn’t forget what it’s costing us.

*If you like good booze, you should be. I especially recommend their line of fruit brandies, which are produced the old-fashioned way, using fresh fruit that is juiced, fermented into a wine, and then distilled into an unsweet spirit, somewhat like Cognac. Try their peach brandy in a classic Philadelphia Fish House Punch. I promise your life will be better for it.

No, New York City officials cannot just order the room rental platform Airbnb to vomit up all of its private data about its hosts and listings every month so the government can monitor them.

That ruling by a federal judge Thursday puts a temporary block on the implementation of an ordinance that had been set to launch in February. As part of the city’s hotel-industry-pushed war on homesharing, officials had passed a law in July that ordered online listing platforms such as Airbnb and HomeAway to provide monthly reports to a city agency. The reports were supposed to document the name and physical address of every property being rented through their services, the number of days each listing was rented, the amount of money being paid in fees, and more. All of this information was being demanded so the city could monitor the residences to make sure they’re not violating New York’s law against short-term rentals for some types of properties.

Airbnb and HomeAway challenged the new law as violations of their Fourth Amendment rights. They noted that thre was no due process involved in the system, and no administrative recourse to challenge an order. The city did not have to suspect any sort of wrongdoing in order to demand somebody’s personal records about their homes or properties.

Judge Paul Englemayer of the U.S. District Court, Southern District Court of New York, agreed. He put in place a temporary injunction keeping New York City from demanding these records as the case moved forward. Englemayer notes that the sheer breadth of information being demanded by the city is a problem:

[T]he Ordinance applies across-the-board to all short-term listings in New York City. It does so regardless whether there is any factual basis whatsoever to suspect that any particular listing, or user, or building, or complex, at issue is in violation of the Multiple Dwelling Laws.

This untailored demand for mass amounts of records every single month, the judge decided, is not what would fall under a “reasonable” search of records.

An interesting detail about this ruling: Despite the occasional stabs of explanation that these room rentals are gobbling up available rental housing, it’s increasingly obvious that city leaders are fighting Airbnb at the bidding of the hotel industry, which is chafing at the effects of competition. It’s stated so very bluntly in Englemayer’s ruling, and it’s impossible to ignore the direct involvement of representatives from the hotel industry in the crafting of these laws.

That matters because one Supreme Court precedent that Englemayer invoked is Los Angeles v. Patel. This 5–4 decision from 2015 determined that cities cannot simply demand a hotel’s guest records without giving the hotel owner a legal avenue to challenge it. In Los Angeles, a city ordinance allowed law enforcement to look at a hotel’s guest registries without having to get a warrant or subpoena. If hotel owners or staff attempted to resist the order, they faced immediate arrest. Because there was no due process here, the court held that the law was unconstitutional.

For the same reasons, Englemayer ruled that New York City cannot demand a constant flow of records to a city agency without any sort of mechanism by which a company can challenge the orders. So that means this ordinance in New York City, crafted with the participation of hotel industry lobbies, has run afoul of a precedent that protects the Fourth Amendment rights of hotel owners and operators.

And yet, The New York Times notes, the hotel union backs the law. Fourth Amendment protections for me, but not for thee.

Unfortunately, there’s nothing about the ruling that protects the right of property owners to rent out their rooms or homes. Fundamentally, it doesn’t even say the city cannot demand data from these companies about the properties participating in room-sharing. But it does say the city cannot simply demand that these services provide all their data without any sort of legal recourse to challenge it.

Read the judge’s decision here.

Researchers at the University of Illinois report in Science that they have engineered crops that are 40 percent more productive than conventional crops.

Green plants containing the protein rubisco use sunlight to convert water and atmospheric carbon dioxide into life-sustaining organic compounds, such as glucose. Photosynthesis is also responsible for almost all of the oxygen in the atmosphere. There is, however, a glitch in the process. About 20 percent of the time, rubisco grabs oxygen molecules instead of carbon dioxide, resulting in the creation of a plant-toxic compound that must be eliminated through the process of photorespiration. Photorespiration uses up resources that could have been devoted to producing more growth and yield.

The Illinois researchers have engineered new detoxifying pathways that save enough resources to boost plant growth by 40 percent. They report that these engineered plants developed faster, grew taller, and produced about 40 percent more biomass, most of which was found in 50-percent-larger stems. Because higher temperatures result in less efficient photosynthesis and greater levels of photorespiration, the researchers believe that this bioengineering feat will help farmers maintain and increase yields in the face of future climate change.

The researchers tested their hypotheses in tobacco, but the team is now seeking to use their techniques to boost the yield of soybean, cowpea, rice, potato, tomato, and eggplant.

Thus do Malthusian predictions of global famines continue to recede. “In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate,” declared the Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich in his 1968 book The Population Bomb. Needless to say, he was wrong. Thanks to crop breeders like Norman Borlaug, the amount of cereals per capita has increased from about 600 pounds in 1968 to more than 840 pounds now.

A 2017 study calculated that food production will need to increase between 25 to 70 percent to meet global demand in 2050. If the current global rising trend in crop yields is simply maintained at 1.4 percent annually for the next 32 years, that implies a 56 percent increase by 2050. Breakthroughs like this will make achieving that goal even easier, and in the process will enable humanity to spare and restore more land to nature.

State-licensed sales of recreational marijuana began a year ago in California, and so far things are not turning out quite the way officials expected.

While “state officials estimated there would be as many as 6,000 cannabis shops licensed in the first few years,” the Los Angeles Times reported last week, “the state Bureau of Cannabis Control has issued just 547 temporary and annual licenses to marijuana retail stores and dispensaries.” The New York Times notes that legal cannabis sales totaled $2.5 billion in 2018, which is about $500 million less than in 2017, before the first recreational shops opened. Marijuana tax collections amounted to $234 million at the end of September, which suggests the total for 2018 will be less than half what officials predicted and less than a third of the $1 billion annual haul they were expecting within a few years.

What went wrong? Nothing really surprising. California is regulating and taxing the hell out of cannabis, which makes it hard for legal suppliers to compete with the state’s longstanding, extensive, and highly developed black market.

To begin with, marijuana businesses need local as well as state approval. Retailing is allowed in just 89 of California’s 482 cities and just six of the 88 municipalities in Los Angeles County. State law permits home delivery, which should provide a way around local bans, but the Bureau of Cannabis Control has yet to finalize a proposed rule that says deliveries are allowed in towns where storefronts are prohibited.

Even when there is no local ban, would-be marijuana merchants need permission from the local government as well as the state, a dual licensing system that doubles the regulatory headaches. Licensees are subject to the Medicinal and Adult-Use Cannabis Regulation and Safety Act, the Bureau of Cannabis Control’s regulations, and whatever additional rules the local government imposes.

“The cannabis industry is being choked by California’s penchant for over-regulation,” Dale Gieringer, director of California NORML, told the L.A. Times. “It’s impossible to solve all of the problems without a drastic rewrite of the law, which is not in the cards for the foreseeable future.” Cannabusinesses are also hampered by a shortage of banking services, since financial institutions remain leery of serving customers who deal in products that are banned by federal law.

If they manage to get licensed, comply with all the relevant regulations, and find ways to pay expenses and process sales, marijuana merchants still must contend with black-market competitors who are not subject to those regulations or to state and local taxes, which can add 40 percent or so to the retail price. Among states that have legalized recreational use, California has the second highest taxes, bested only by Washington, where the total rate can be as high as 47 percent. By contrast, Alaska collects $50 per ounce from growers, while Michigan’s legalization initiative calls for a 10 percent retail tax.

“Because we are up against high taxes and the proliferation of illegal shops, it is difficult right now,” the owner of a pot shop in Wilmington told the L.A. Times. “We expected lines out of our doors, but unfortunately the underground market was already conducting commercial cannabis activity and [is] continuing to do so.”

Despite their avowed desire to displace the black market, legislators and regulators acted as if it did not exist. “There’s always been a robust illicit market in California, and it’s still there,” industry analyst Tom Adams told The New York Times. “Regulators ignored that and thought they could go straight into an incredibly strict and high-tax environment.”